The 500 - #193 - Dookie - Green Day

 I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: #193

Album Title: Dookie

Artist: Green Day

Genre: Punk Rock, Pop Punk, Skate Punk

Recorded: Fantasy Studios, Berkley, California; and Music Grinder Studios, Los Angeles

Released: February, 1994

My age at release: 28

How familiar was I with it before this week: Very

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at position #375, dropping 182 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Longview

I once bought a birthday card for a friend that read: "Don't you wish you were as old as the first time you thought you were old?" It is a sentiment that lodged in my head and has stuck with me for many years.

The first time I felt old, I was turning 25 in 1990 – certainly the result of life choices. Foolishly, I had left my university studies to take a job as a restaurant manager. I presumed a career in the service industry would lead to financial and emotional satisfaction. That was dead wrong. Instead, I found myself living in a boring townhouse in Mississauga, Ontario, commuting through heavy highway traffic to Toronto six days a week so I could work long, frustrating hours earning less money than I'd made as a bartender and server. The only plus was that I worked with fantastic people who regularly made me laugh. Our softball team even made it to the finals of the North Toronto restaurant league and I fondly remember those warm, summer nights on the schoolyard diamonds of Thornhill, Willowdale and North York.

Tucker's Tornados - I'm #17 on the right.

Fast forward three years and I'd left the management world to return to university. By then, I had completed my baccalaureate degree but was still working in restaurants, slinging cocktails in my hometown of London, Ontario. However, I was making buckets of money and continuing to  play  restaurant league softball with a different group of fantastic people. I was in the best shape of my life. It was a great situation -- but I knew it was unsustainable. I knew I needed to figure out a permanent career and, with the big 3-0 looming, that had to be sooner than later.

Sidelines of a London, Ontario Restaurant League game with the
Kelsey's South crew. (I'm behind the camera on this shot).

Then, in 1994, Green Day came along with their third studio record, Dookie, and triggered my age anxiety. The album marked the start of a pop-punk revival and I was around for the original wave of this melodic, up-tempo sub-genre of music. To me, the reprise felt like it should have been the music of the next generation -- and I was working alongside them at the restaurant. With each passing year, more of my contemporary co-workers moved on with their chosen paths, while the cooks, servers and support staff got younger. I started to feel ancient.

Bussing a table at Kelsey's restaurant in September, 1994.
The song Basket Case from Dookie was charting in the Top 10.

However, feeling old didn't stop me from purchasing the Dookie album on CD. I made a cassette copy and it accompanied me to the gym throughout the summer of 1994. It, along with the Rage Against The Machine debut record and Soundgarden's BadMotorFinger, got me through many cardio workouts. However, the lyrics on Dookie weren't doing my mindset any favours. The songs address themes that include anxiety, apathy, panic attacks and failed relationships. At the time, my future wife and I were working our way through a rough patch that threatened to end our relationship. The lyrics to the Dookie's tenth track, When I Come Around, seemed custom made to reinforce my insecurities and amplify my melancholy.

Album cover for the single When I Come Around. 

Time passed and life sorted itself out. By 1995 I was in Teachers College and working toward a fulfilling career that I have now loved for nearly 30 years. My wife and I navigated the choppy waters of our late-twenties and, for a little while, I stopped feeling old. When I re-listened to Dookie ahead of this post, the emotional effect it had on me  in 1994 simply wasn’t there. It's just a record of catchy, up-tempo pop-punk that, it turns out, was part of my generation after all.

Addendum:

Former guest blogger, Steve "Lumpy" Sullivan, was also one of those terrific people I worked with in 1993 at Kelsey's Restaurant. In fact, he hired me. He recently attended the Green Day show in which they played Dookie in its entirety. He shared one of his trademark "Big Head" shots with me and I think this post is made better because of it.

The 500 - #225 - American Idiot - Green Day

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: #225
Album Title: American Idiot
Artist: Green Day
Genre: Punk Rock, Pop Rock, Concept Rock
Recorded: Three Studios in California

Released: September, 2004
My age at release: 39
How familiar was I with it before this week: Very

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #248, dropping 23 places since the 2012 list.
Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: Jesus of Suburbia

Like many people of my vintage who did not have older siblings, my first record collection belonged to my parents. Nestled among the Nana Mouskouri, Elvis Presley and Mario Lanza records were a small assortment of soundtracks from movies and musicals. Some came from films I had seen -- The Sound Of Music, Oliver and Mary Poppins. Others were from unfamiliar sources -- Saturday Night Fever, Fiddler On The Roof and My Fair Lady.  Regardless, I loved them all and spent many Saturday afternoons doing school work or sorting hockey cards while listening to Chaim Topol as Tevye the Milkman sing If I Were A Rich Man.

Fiddler On The Roof album cover depicting Tevye the Milkman.

It's a bit of pop-psychology on my part, but I think this is where my love of concept albums, particularly those composed in the 1970s, was born. There is no consensus from music critics on the definition, but a "concept album" typically refers to a record that, much like the songs on a soundtrack to a musical, contains individual tracks that hold a larger meaning collectively than they do on their own. Generally, the meaning is communicated through a theme or central narrative.

An assortment of concept records, including a few of my favourites.

In 1979, as I was starting to develop my teenage taste in music, I discovered two records that supercharged my passion for the concept album and made me a fan for life of the respective creators. The first was 2112, a 1977 release from the Canadian progressive-rock trio Rush. Side one features a 20-minute, seven-part rock suite about a dystopian, collectivist future ruled by a cabal of virulent priests who outlawed individualism and creativity. It was the kind of content my 14-year-old brain craved.

Album cover for 2112 by Rush.

The other record was The Wall from British progressive-rock group Pink Floyd (#87 on The 500). At the time, this two-record epic meditation on war, loss, addiction, isolation, celebrity and fascism was almost too much for me to comprehend. In fact, I spent many hours throughout high school trying to understand all its subtleties. In retrospect, that time might have been better spent on my studies but I regret nothing.

Album cover for Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s, concept albums remained an important part of my audio diet. Others released before 1980 could be found in used record bins, such as The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (Genesis, 1975), Thick As A Brick (Jethro Tull, 1972) or Tommy (The Who, 1969, at #96 on The 500). More were released as I hit my 20s, including Misplaced Childhood (Marillion, 1985) and Operation: Mindcrime (Queensryche, 1988). The complex musicianship and clever, political, emotional and socially charged lyrical content synced with my disaffected, socially-critical early-twenties mindset.

Album cover for Operation: Mindcrime, Queensryche.

Then, around 1990 and in my mid-20s my interest in concept albums waned. My appetite for themes of rebellion, unrequited romance, tragedy and social commentary, so robust in my youth, began to shift as my taste in music broadened and perspective matured. By 2004, when Green Day's American Idiot was released, I believed the concept album was a relic of the past. Moreover, with the release of the iPod and a variety of other digital music players, it seemed the "album" itself was dead as a standard packaging of tracks.

2nd Generation Nano iPod playing Jesus Of Suburbia,
from Green Day's American Idiot (2004)

Indeed, in 2004-05, I was teaching Grade 8 students, many of whom owned one of the small, digital music players on the market. Their focus was on individual songs rather than albums. These 13-year-old music fans regarded vinyl records and compact discs as prehistoric media of their parents' generation. Then along came American Idiot, the seventh studio record from California pop-punk trio Green Day, and changed everything for them...and me.

Green Day are (l-r) Mike Dirnt, Billie-Joe Armstrong & Tre Cool. 

Seemingly overnight, the fashion in my classroom shifted. Sure, there were many still sporting a hip-hop look, with closely cropped Eminem-styled haircuts, oversized baggy pants that hung below their boxer short waistbands and flat-brimmed baseball hats turned comically sideways on their heads. However, some (particularly the girls) began sporting skinny jeans, untucked black button-down shirts, beanie hats, studded chokers, red ties and Converse sneakers. And, of course, Green Day concert T-shirts -- especially after May, 2005, when the band performed at the John Labatt Centre in my hometown of London, Ontario.

Green Day Fashion for teens (circa 2005)

Rest assured, this then-39-year-old teacher did not adopt the punk-rock ensemble...mid-life crisis aside. However, like many of my students, I obtained a copy of the entire record, not just a few tracks, and for the first time in more than 15 years, I was emotionally invested in a concept record. In 2005, I even bought the CD and DVD, Bullet In A Bible,  featuring a live performance from their American Idiot U.K. tour.

The punk-rock opera features a narrative set in the shadow of 9/11, the Iraq War and the presidency of George W. Bush. The protagonist is a disillusioned teenage slacker, dubbed the Jesus of Suburbia. This anti-hero describes himself as "a son of rage and love", surviving on a "steady diet of soda pop and Ritalin", looking for meaning in a world where he feels he cannot trust the media or government.

In many ways, the themes on the record line-up nicely with those concept records I loved in my teens/early twenties -- 2112, The Wall, Misplaced Childhood, The Lamb and Operation:Mindcrime. However, listening to American Idiot when I was 39 failed to inspire the same revolutionary, nihilistic energy of my youth. The angry, romantic outsider that I used to be had been replaced by a calm, professional adult staring down his 40s. Regardless, I embraced the record and enjoyed seeing my young students connect  with its message of moral, political and social outrage. Most of all, I enjoyed watching them head toward their high-school years, inspired by art the same way I had been two decades earlier. That time when fascination with Fiddler On The Roof turned passe I discovered that music and lyrics could be complex narratives, shaping and lasting a lifetime.