By Zachary Lipez
Welcome to Green Day Week at Radio.com, a series of essays in celebration of the band ahead of their induction this weekend at the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Today we lionize the pre-natal albums before their huge break, 1990’s 39/Smooth and 1992’s Kerplunk.
Green Day put out two albums, 39/Smooth (1990) and Kerplunk (1992) on Lookout! Records before becoming the biggest band since Nirvana. In this rare instance, the clichéd ideal of the record store clerk would be correct: The early stuff is the best. And despite what the purists might claim, Green Day never got bad per se, for anyone of a certain age, even those who don’t believe in objective judgment of aesthetics. To pretend one actually prefers later Green day is to indulge in almost Huey Long-levels of populist chicanery.
A blend of early Kinks melodies and Chuck Berry riffs played by a perpetually in-the-red stepchild, the first two Green Day albums existed in a reality where the high school angst of grunge had no pretense of being anything more than, well, high school angst. There was no Stain or Sliver fixated existentialism within Green Day unless you count the existence of a boner that lasts through one’s early twenties and beyond. Heroin may have been on the periphery, as it was for everyone not entirely square or straight edge in the 1990s, but it came a distant second to the drug of boredom and low-grade sexual discontent.
Related: American Idiot: Green Day’s Second Act
Like their hard rock and power pop precedents (Ian Hunter, The Undertones, etc.), cheap thrills, the cheaper the better, was the end and the means. This was coupled with a distrust of/lust for girls that luckily never had much malice or, more importantly, power behind it to be considered misogynistic. Or at least not in any way that would induce more than an eye-roll in your average spikey haired Valerie or Veronica. Green Day had a strong female fanbase perhaps because of their essential Ducky-in-Pretty In Pink vibe; they were vaguely stalker-ish but, at the end of the day, dopey and true-blue best friends to a thrift coat outcast. That they’d lose the girl to the rich jock was understood from the outset. But they were funny and cute, and just sharp enough, in their affected embrace of being the willfully scruffy underdogs. This is not to excuse Green Day’s laddish self-pity. I wouldn’t date them either. But this was (arguably) before the notion of every sex mate is a potential enemy became the trope for boys with guitars and unkempt hair…so it’s (largely) endearing. Easy for me to say as I’ve (as of this writing) never broken up with a member of Green Day.
39/Smooth is the better of the two albums because it’s faster and because I heard it first. “At The Library,” Green Day’s declaration of unrequited purpose, was on every other mix tape, sandwiched between Jawbreaker’s “Want” and, depending on your older friends predilections, Crimpshrine’s “Summertime” or Bikini Kill’s “Carnival.” “Library” combined with the two-three punch of the record “Don’t leave Me” and “I Was There” make a trilogy that would be the Lord Of The Rings for lovelorn bike messengers for the next, I dunno, let’s say five years —at least until the Angus soundtrack.
Besides having better songs, 39/Smooth, is also notable as the only Green Day full-length without Tré Cool on drums. Tré Cool, the universe’s answer to “what if Ringo was kind of a jerk?” would become an essential member of the band once the production values went up and the rhythm section became somewhat more about, you know, rhythm. But in 1990, the drums were just to there to provide the boppity-bop behind Billie Joe Armstrong’s endlessly catchy songs of Bay Area teen trauma, so John Kiffmeyer did just fine. The bass playing, as it would be for the twenty-five years, is perfectly lovely, with a tone a cat could look at a king with.
