Hey, welcome to watchmojo.com. This is Perna and I am going to be talking to you a little bit about Green Day. They are from California and the group formed back in 1989. Armstrong and Dirnt were 14 years old. They were part of a band called 'Sweet Children.' On the other side, there was a band called Isocracy which fell apart in the same year. Now, one of the members called John Kiffmeyer went out, found Armstrong and Dirnt and together they formed a band called Green Day.
On the other side, there was also Tré Cool who was a part of the band called 'The Lookouts.' Now, one of the other members called Larry Livermore also ran an independent label called Lookout Records. He heard Green Day play and decided to sign them immediately. In 1990, John Kiffmeyer decided, he wanted to go back to college. Now, he was supposed to leave temporarily which is where Tré Cool came into the picture. Because he had the connections, Tré Cool replaced them and apparently John Kiffmeyer or stage name 'Al Sobrante' never came back even to this very day.
In 1994 they decided to move on to Reprise Records. This is where Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool gained a lot of popularity and mainstream music success. They released an album called 'Dookie' and everyone in the mainstream music industry was completely blown away. They were really exited about the music. It was really different than anything else out there at the time, but the underground Punk Community were really upset. They thought that the guys have sold themselves out.
Nonetheless, they found themselves a lot of success and Armstrong still to this very day, claims that he would never go back to the Indie labels. The album 'Dookie' reached the diamond status and since June 2005, it has been one of the bestselling albums in the US anyway and in North America. Now, this album did pave the way for them and they got a Grammy Award. Now later on in 1994, the guys played out Woodstock. Now, many of you may not know that they actually caused a huge mud fight to start. A whole bunch of fans were covered in mud, they were on stage and things got really out of control. Security guards even mistook Dirnt as one of the crazy out of control fans and knocked out his teeth by accident.
By 1995, they released an album called 'Insomniac' and although, it was relatively successful, it didn't live up to the standards of Dookie's success and later on in 1996, they also went on to release 'Nimrod' which featured the really popular acoustic single, Good Riddance and this song was featured for the PGA Golf World Tour in 1998 as well as the song was used for the series finale on Seinfeld. In 2000, they released a single called Minority which did hit the number one spot on Billboard Charts and then they also released another single called Warning from the album of the same name.
Now, this album only went gold, which in reality is quite successful, but in the music industry it's considered as almost a failure; especially for a band who has had so much popularity in the past with an album like Dookie. They went on to release a compilation of their B sides and tracks that hadn't been used as well as greatest hits album. Now, when this started happening, fans, family members, friends, people in the record industry, the media, public and even the members themselves started questioning if they could really hold on to this and if they had a future together as a band.
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