Nobody Likes You - Inside the turbulent life, time and music of Green Day by Marc Spitz
Friday, 17 Nov 2006 17:44
Green Day – from the wilderness to stadium-filling tours
Published by Sphere, out now, hardback, 206 pages, £16.99
In a nutshell....
Snot-nosed Californian pop-punk trio sells millions, sells less... and sells millions again.
What's it all about?
Marc Spitz tells the story of the rise of Green Day, from Bay Area punk wannabes to chart dominating political activists, often struggling to prove their creditials to a harder-edged scene which immediately rejected them when they achieved success.
Theirs is the the story of a high-school drop-out, his neurotic best friend, the prodigious son of a Vietnam helicopter pilot and the three minute burst of stoned pop-punk. The band's career takes in the second Woodstock festival, the despair of the critical and commercial wilderness of the late 90s and a failed attempt to unseat an incumbent president.
Drawing on a depth of insider-knowledge, new interiews with the band, their peers and their families, the book reveals Green Day's surprising progression from pot-inspired adolescent MTV stars to politically-charged stadium rockers.
Who's it by?
Veteran rock journalist and former senior writer at Spin, Marc Spitz also contributes to GQ, The New York Post and the Washington Post.
He is also the author of a number of books, including Too Much, Too Late, and How Soon Is Never.
As an example...
"In March 2005, Corey George, a nine-year-old fan from Wales, awakened from an auto accident-induced coma after his mother played him the American Idiot album for an hour, proving, perhaps in the most literal of ways, what the band themselves had been proving for nearly two decades: Really good punk rock can indeed save one from a life of pain and suffering."
Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster
Although the band suggest that there may one day be a film inspired by the characters from their 2003 punk rock-opera, American Idiot, it's unlikely that they themselves will become the subject of a movie bio-pic.
So is it any good?
Although Spitz often succeeds in conveying the frustrations of a band attempting to reconcile the communal spirit and ideology of the Bay Area punk scene with their meteoric rise to fame, he rarely offers much insight into the band's musical direction or drive and chooses to gloss over their less successful period in the late 90s.
He occasionally borders on the sycophantic when casting the band's lead singer and creative force, Billie Joe Armstrong, as some kind of guitar down-by-his-knees McCartney figure, whose fragile heart breaks while all those around him mosh.
Admittedly, despite their tattoos and safety pins, Green Day have never really been that punk - they've always been far too preoccupied with the kind of pop melodies and harmonies remeniscent of an earlier generation of musicians for that - and sadly, this makes their story somewhat toothless.
Nobody Likes You hardly makes for essential reading for even the most dedicated of Green Day fans, particularly as a good few of those now have other things to worry about, like mortgages and kids.
4/10
Simon Liddle
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