Like most reissues from former get-in-the-van types who went on to interplanetary success, it’s weird hearing these records cursed with the knowledge of Billie Joe Armstrong’s future-present as America’s anti-Republican youth ambassador for colorfast eyeliner. But each Green Day album has found the trio slowly growing up, even if until American Idiot all that meant was accordion and ripping off the Kinks. We can chalk up the half-assed politicking and the downer vibe of stinkers like “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to the depressing madness of the 2004 election. (We Americans all went a little nutty that year.) But a character-driven concept album was probably your typical aging rock star inevitability.
So what makes these moldy oldies either charming or frustrating (or both) is your opinion on where Green Day has wound up. When they hit the mainstream in 1994, the band’s too-slothful-to-wank ’tude initially landed them in detention with the rest of the era’s slack motherfuckers. But until the full horror of the coming wave of obnoxiously peppy Goldfingers and Suicide Machines and fourth-wave ska crashed down on us, Green Day were a godsend. And if you were 16 and a budding music nerd, you looked back in the wake of their success and discovered that throughout the 1980s California pop-punk had been speaking your secret language all along, rough and tumble and hooky enough to offset the fact that not every indie rock band kept things as speedy as Superchunk.
1989’s 1,000 Hours EP was recorded when the band was a baby-fattened 16 years of age, and Green Day debuted its three platonic songs: fast and punky, wistful and mid-tempo, and throwaway jokey. Their songs were almost entirely about girls—mostly about how hard they are to get or keep—an honorable pop-punk tradition. But compared to the locker-room explicit sex chat of mod pop-punkers like Say Anything—whose singer Max Bemis can somehow drain all the fun out of phone-sexing your significant other—the lyrics are never gross or grossly sexist, the quality that rightfully makes so many haters screw up their noses in 2007. (What can you do? You can say “balls” on TV now, apparently.) People beefed that BJ’s vocals were biting the Brits, which is debatable. They also continue to gripe that his puppy yelps spawned a million adenoidal pop-emo bands, and sadly that’s a lot harder to argue with.
1,000 Hours, 1990’s Slappy EP, and 1991’s 39/Smooth LP were bundled together on CD as (duh) 1991’s 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours. It’s raw stuff, but even at this point Green Day’s records were at least halfway decently recorded, unlike most of their peers’ tin-can-and-twine set-ups. And songs like “At the Library” were downright hummable, always important when you’re trying to make pop music—especially out of only a few chords in a formally restrictive setting. Of course, on a label that at the time included household names Plaid Retina and Sewer Trout, early Green Day were bound to shine, but if they had broken up after 1,039, they’d be remembered—if at all—as perhaps the slightly less emo cousin to early Jawbreaker, or maybe the musically less accomplished Crimpshrine.
Every post-facto review of 1992’s Kerplunk mentions that it’s what got the band eventually signed to a major, and it’s not hard to hear why: Producer Rob Cavallo breaking out the compressors may have helped Dookie become a hit, but the songwriting was pretty much already there. As with many of the best punk records, the bass is often pushed up higher in the mix than the guitar, and here Mike Dirnt has begun to perfect those pop-punk walking b-lines that, slowed down on “Longview,” would become the band’s great hook-machine. The group also realized that, if you slow down on the bridge and strip things back to just Dirnt and new drummer Tré Cool, it makes the push of the final chorus that much more exciting. There are fewer jokey throwaways, like barely-a-gag teenage S&M country-swing of “Dominated Love Slave,” and tunes like “Christie Road” slow things down without spilling over into the band’s later, occasionally mawkish ballad territory. All in all, it’s a magnitude better than its predecessor and only a hair behind the follow up.
It’s weird to think that, in the immediate aftermath of Dookie, Green Day’s success was perceived as some kind of a threat. Former compatriots took swipes in songs and I remember many a zine rant by friends in bands that sounded quite a bit like Green Day. Hard to imagine such ire now that Billie Joe hobnobs with humanitarian aid folks in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and keeps major label execs from losing their jobs while Jermaine Dupri gets shit-canned ’cause Janet Jackson no longer goes platinum. If these records aren’t quite as listenable as the band’s major label-era greatest hits collection, the scrappy tunes and fresh-faced songwriting naïveté—which by accident or design lack that arched brow and knowing wink that sink so many modern pop-punk bands—at least help you forget that these formerly lazy goofs have turned messianic on us.
