Garbage Days Revisited #61: Green Day - "Insomniac" (1995)

 

"I must insist on being a pessimist/I'm a loner in a catastrophic mind" - Green Day - Armitage Shanks

To be honest, this album could easily have gone into one of our early Sounds From The Junkshop columns as it was a regular listen of mine during my teenage years. I was 15 years old when Green Day broke through into the big time with the Dookie album and the attendant Top 10 hit Basket Case so it's safe to say I was pretty much exactly their target audience. It's easy to laugh at Green Day nowadays on the other side of the fact that they pretty much abdicated their frat-punk throne (understandably) to go political in the early noughties and have kind of blundered around seemingly perpetually unsure of what they are these days ever since (it always used to amuse me when I heard people referring to them as an emo band just because they'd started wearing eyeliner - I mean had any of these people even heard their stuff from the pre-millennium years? Anyway, I digress)

It's easy to laugh at Dookie for being silly and immature 25 years later but the truth is that I was at the age where songs like Burnout, Chump, Longview and F.O.D. really did seem to sum up a lot of my teenage frustration just the same way as These Animal Men were at the same time (there's definitely an argument that Green Day were an American TAM except relocated from a Safeways car park at the rough end of Brighton to a condo somewhere in L.A. as the songs dealt with very similar subjects except in a much more obvious American way. And even if Basket Case was supposed to be a piss take of Nirvana ("Do you have the time to listen to me whine about nothing and everything all at once?"), for kids my age it did seem to sum up a lot of our frustrated inarticulation at the world in general ("Sometimes I give myself the creeps/Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me")

It's also easy to forget that Dookie was actually Green Day's second album (or even their third if you want to count the EP collection 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours) and in the space of a couple of short years they'd gone from being another minor label US punk band playing at the Duchess and other toilet venues on US punk package tours with groups like the Offspring and Rancid who’d also move up to the majors around this time to suddenly being actual proper stars and the pressure being on them to come up with a follow-up to match Dookie's sales. And unsurprisingly, Insomniac is kind of regarded by a lot of people as the point where the wheels fell off, chart positions dropped from Top 10 to Top 30 and the band wouldn't really recover until American Idiot some eight years later.

If we're talking sales then that's almost certainly true - Insomniac was a Top 10 album but it only sold a third of what Dookie did and didn't produce a hit anywhere near as big as Basket Case. However, I'd argue it's probably Green Day's most "punk" album, written out of the sheer panic of "oh shit, we're megastars...erm, we weren't really planning for this!" realisation. And again, a lot of the songs very much tapped into my teenage insecurities just as much as the ones that Dookie had like Armatage Shanks, Stuck With Me ("Destroyed, giving up the fight/I know I'm not alright") which was arguably a bit of a test run for American Idiot with lyrics like "I'm not part of your elite, I'm just alright/Class structures bleeding colours dripping down my throat" or the insomnia ode of Brain Stew. Walking Contradiction meanwhile just seemed to sum up my confusion perfectly - I mean I know they probably pinched the phrase from somewhere else but it was the first time I'd heard it used. I can imagine the look of terror on the record execs' faces when Billie Joe, Mike and Tre dropped this album off at Warners - there certainly isn't an obvious single on here and it's a confused and angry album, barrelling through 14 tracks in just 32 minutes. But that's exactly why I loved it - it summed up my confused and angry teenage state up perfectly.

Unfortunately Green Day would never really reach these heights again in my opinion. 1997's Nimrod was overlong at 18 tracks - it had a few great numbers in there like Nice Guys Finish Last, Prosthetic Head and Hitchin' A Ride but unsurprisingly there was a lot of filler while 2000's Warning was just a bit dull for the most part. And then of course came American Idiot which saw the band revitalised commercially but...I dunno, it just didn't quite sit right with me despite a few decent songs like Boulevard of Broken Dreams (not to be confused with the equally excellent Hanoi Rocks or Brian Setzer songs of the same name). I totally understand why they decided to change direction and abandon the odious frat-punk bandwagon they'd kickstarted a decade earlier (I still remember an interview with Billie Joe at the time where he came up with the immortal quote "If we are in any way responsible for Blink-182 then I am truly sorry" which made me chuckle a bit) but if I wanted angry political rock 'n' roll, I'd listen to Carter USM or the Manics, y'know? For me, this sounded more akin to the hollow chest-beating of U2 plus it just felt like Green Day were a bit too far gone down the road of gleefully stupid to really sound convincing and this would be where my fandom of them ended up being severed.

I don't begrudge Green Day their megadome level success in subsequent years but for me, their best albums will always be Dookie and Insomniac even though they've kind of been put in the shade a bit commercially by the group's 21st century output. It may seem silly looking back but those two albums genuinely did articulate a lot of my teenage anger and frustration better than about 90% of the other stuff that was around at the time and I still listen to 'em now. Certainly I think those who only know Billie Joe and co from their preaching from the sermon 21st century guise could do a lot worse than backtracking and giving them a spin to see where the whole thing started.