Green Day - Basket Case

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This episode has some explicit language, including a mention of drug use.

Green Day is a punk band from the East Bay in California.

Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Dern, and Trey Cool have been playing music together since 1987. They've sold over 90 million records.
They've won four Grammys, including twice for Best Rock Album.

They put out their first album in 1990 and their second album, Her Plunk, in 1991. And then they moved to a major label, and in 1994, they put out their third album, Dookie, which was huge.

It helped bring punk into the mainstream. And this month is its 30th anniversary.

So for this episode, I talked to Billy Joe Armstrong about the making of one of Green Day's biggest hits of all time, Basket Case.

Coming up, you'll also hear from Rob Cavallo, who produced the album. Plus, you'll hear two different demo versions of Basket Case.
The first of which is basically a totally different song.

Billy Joe Armstrong traces the history of Basket Case from its origins as a cassette recording in a punk basement all the way to becoming a song that helped define an era of music.

I think I'm like it

am I just paranoid by the son.

My name is Billy Joe Armstrong, and I'm in the band Green Day.

The other fellas that are in the band are Mike Dernt, who's the bass player, and Trey Cool is the world's most dangerous drummer.

After Kerplunk came out, I think our confidence as a band like really got better. We went on tour.

The shows were packed and clubs and basements and vets halls and wherever we could do all ag shows at the time. We all practically lived together.

Trey was living with this other band called East Bay Weed Company. And I started kind of crashing on the couch over there.

There was a set of college kids that were on the first floor and on the top floor, but the punks were living in the basement. When I got home from the tour, I had a little bit of money.

So I spent it on a new amp and a four track. And I was like, I'll teach myself how to record demos.

I had this melody in my head for a while,

and I wanted to have this sort of grand song about a love story.

Swank is her name.

She's got the best of him.

And he's got the best of her. The bomb of bands.

I think it was around 1992, early 93, when the song was first written.

And they could care less what's coming up.

Sometimes the future

I thought the song could have this intro that would be like a ballad that would blast into the full band coming in, making it like a rocker.

I did a beatbox effect with my mouth to create the drum sound.

But the true confession is, I was on Crystal Meth when I wrote the lyrics to it,

and I thought I was writing the greatest song ever.

As you know, with drugs, they wear off. And then I felt like I written the worst song ever.
I thought that the lyrics were just embarrassingly bad.

I had a few songs before that I'd written on drugs, but this one was the most pitiful I felt after.

And so I just kind of let the song go for a while because I felt so gross about it.

But,

you know, I was like, maybe it'll come back.

You know, I was 19, 20, 21 years old when this song started to be written.

Starting the writing of Dookie, I think we were leaning less about like love songs and trying to make more of a statement of like everyday life and feelings and emotions that you go through that people can identify with.

And so I think I just got the courage to get into it again, trying to write the lyrics. And it was the best decision I've ever made, probably as a songwriter.

The approach sort of changed where now the song was about panic attacks. I am one of those

melodramatic fools

running to the bone, no doubt about it.

And I think I just went from there.

Sometimes I give myself a cruise and just started to kind of piece it together. Sometimes my mind plays six on me.

Here I'll keep setting up.

I think I'm cracking up.

Am I just paranoid? Am I just sad?

I had had panic attacks since I was about 10 or 11 years years old, but that was in the 80s and no one really knew what those things were.

I guess they would call it mental health now, but back then it was just like you're having a panic attack, wait till it's over,

breathe into this paper bag. So there were times that I would wake up in the middle of the night with panic attacks and I would ride my bike through the streets to kind of let it wear off.

And so that was one way of dealing with it for me was, you know, writing lyrics about you feel like you're going crazy, but you write it out and you're not. grasping to control

and then me Trey and Mike we started to put it together so I better hold out

we went to Andy Ernst's studio Art of Ears in San Francisco we demoed it with like a few other songs but the parts that Mike wanted to play on bass he had already written all of the drum fills even to that point were written You can really hear it on the demo.

At the time, we were talking about doing something maybe on a major label because we just felt like, you know, there are so many other bands that were getting signed that, you know, I think for us, comparing ourselves to them, we felt like we were better.

And so we went and met with Elliot Kahn and Jeff Saltzman. They became our managers.

And they said, we have your old records, but it would be great for people here your demo. So they made a bunch of copies of it and they started sending it around.

The first time I ever heard Green Day, I was sitting there mixing a self-title album called The Muffs.

And, you know, when you're sitting there and it's like two in the morning and your eyeballs are falling out and the manager of Green Day comes in and he gives you a cassette tape and he says, you got to listen to this band.

It's great, right? And I'm like, dude, I'm mixing this record.

I'm dying over here. I'm trying to make, you know, beat the deadline.
I'm tired. My first instinct was to take the cassette and throw it in the garbage.

And then this little voice inside of my head said, don't be an asshole. It could be the next big thing.

I'm Rob Cavallo, and I was both the A ⁇ R guy and the producer of Green Day's album Dookie.

Elliot Kahn and Jeff Saltzman knew him because they represented the Muffs and Rob produced their first album that we all really loved. And so he came over to listen to us rehearse.

I was listening to every

Beatles record at the time. And there was a rumor out there, which is true, that I could play all the Beatles songs.
And then Billy handed me a guitar and they were like, Can you play this?

Can you play that? You know, play the ticket to ride or something. And I was like, oh, yeah, it's just like this.

And then I think we started jamming with him because he was a really good musician, a really good guitar player. And I signed up to reprise Warner Brothers Records.

We recorded the album at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley.

Definitely the fanciest recording studio I'd ever been in. Seeing all that technical gear was like, wow.

The managers came to me and they said, you know, the band doesn't really know what it's like to do what you're about to do.

But having seen them play in their rehearsal, I knew how great they were. And I said to them something like, you know, just play it like you're on stage.

You know, we told him we don't want to sort of make a record where it's overproduced, but we want this, the sound bigger. You know, we want the drums to be large,

the guitars to be large,

and you can hear everything more so than you could hear on our last records.

When I heard the drums for the first time, we had different room mics around the rooms, like they all captured a different sound. Some sounded more distant,

some sounded closer up,

some we purposely made them more nasty sounding.

It makes the drum set just all of a sudden feel like it's got extra fangs and just comes at you, you know.

You know, Mike's bass lines felt so musical, whereas almost like he was playing the lead as a bass player.

But he would play so hard just to make every note shine through. And I remember Rob going, God, he's got these like gorilla hands.

Then Billy also, who plays like a madman so hard.

The way he's chugging on that guitar, I mean, it just defined a whole style for like a whole generation generation of music right there.

Trey would sort of try to match the rhythm of my vocal with his kick drum.

Sometimes I give myself the creeps.

And then Mike would lock in with Trey, and then he would play these bass lines that would also do the same thing.

It was actually one of the reasons why I signed him. Each guy has a personality on their own instrument.

I went to a shrink

to analyze my dreams. She says it's lack of sex that's bringing me down.

I think that Basket Case, the title, just came immediately. I've always been self-deprecating.
Maybe it's like a defense mechanism.

You know, it's like that thing, take yourself down before someone takes you down.

So calling myself a basket case, it was empowering to be able to show people all the zits and imperfections that you have.

I went to a whore.

He said my lesson boy.

Show quit my white head cuz and sprang in her

I changed that lyric from I went to a whore, she said my life's a bore. That's what you hear on the demo.

I think at some point during rehearsals, I just gender switched the whole thing. And I think I just wanted to get people to think in terms of what they think shrinks shrinks and whores are.

It got me thinking differently about how to approach gender and their roles. And so, yeah, I think that's a big moment on that song was the decision to switch that from what you hear on the demo.

It all keeps setting up.

I think I'm dragging up.

They're much as paranoid. A ya-yo-yo.

I didn't really know what to say in the part that says a yo-yo-yo. It always was sort of a mystery to people.
They're like, what are you saying right there? What are you saying right there?

I'm like, I'm literally saying nothing. It's just something that kind of rhymed with they're on their own.

What I felt back then was that we had a good song, but I felt uncertainties. Is this song going to make the record? Is it going to be, you know, everything else? felt really good and fluid.

But that song was like one of the more odd songs. Like, I never thought that was going to end up being a favorite song at all.
Jeffrey Weiss was our product manager from Warner Brothers Records.

After he heard the first few songs, he took me into the hallway and he says, I can't believe it. This album's going to be fucking huge.
I mean, dude, I am not kidding you.

You have no idea what you just did. This fucking album is ginormous.
It's going to outsell everything.

Around late spring of 1994, when it came out, it was just going crazy on alternative radio and we were just sort of blown away by it. But we

weren't playing it live. I felt like it was too hard to play live and we had our set list and we were just going to stick to it.
And then I think we were on Lola Palooza.

Then the management called us and they were like, you have to play the song live. You have to play the song.
And we're like, okay.

I think we just started feeding off the energy of the crowd because people just have this kind of connection to it as this kind of an anthem, which I didn't know I was writing.

It's so gratifying when you can write something that you feel so vulnerable and deeply about and people can connect with. It's like you shared something about yourself that was a private moment.

And then it helps you know that there's other people that, you know, have the same feelings and emotions

and are willing to celebrate our dysfunction.

Coming up, you'll hear how all of these ideas and elements came together in the final song.

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And now, here's Basket Case by Green Day in its entirety.

Sometimes I give myself the creeps.

Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me.

It all keeps adding up.

I think I'm dragging up.

And I just paragoined a watch

up.

I went to a drink.

Do I not like my dreams?

She says it's like obsessed bringing me down.

I went to a hoard.

He said my life's a board.

Joke with my wife and buttons, bringing her down.

Sometimes I give myself the drips.

Sometimes my mind blights rips on me.

It all keeps adding up.

I face I'm drugging up.

Bear my chest marino. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Grasping to control.

It's all I better hold on.

Sometimes I give myself the creeps.

Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me.

It all keeps any

help.

They are much as paranoid by the son.

To learn more, visit songexploder.net. You'll find links to buy or stream Basket Case, and you can watch the music video.

If you like this episode, you might also like the episode with Cheap Trick from 2021. It's about the song Surrender, which Green Day covers sometimes.

You'll find that and all the other episodes of the show at songexploder.net.

This episode was produced by Craig Ely, Theo Balcom, Kathleen Smith, Mary Dolan, and myself. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I I made the show's theme music and logo.

Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about all of our shows at radiotopia.fm.

You can follow me on social media at Rishi Hirway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/slash shirt.
I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

Thanks for listening.

Radiotopia

from PRX.

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