30th anniversary review: Green Day – “Dookie”

This review is part of a series looking back at significant albums on their anniversaries. Through the benefit of hindsight we will be viewing the album not just as it was released, but how it stands the test of time, as well as its place in the band’s discography and the genre in general.

Reprise Records – 01 Feb 1994

The beginning of the end, and the end of the beginning

Oooof… there’s a lot to unpack here. I mean, who hasn’t heard Dookie, right?

We all loved Green Day. They were fun and peppy. Kerplunk! was spending a lot of time winding through the tape decks in our cars. Their 1992 and 1993 shows at McGregors were some of the biggest draws for punks of all stripes in the greater Chicagoland area. Here was a band that played fun and enjoyable punk music. Nov 1993 was the last show I saw them before Dookie dropped, and they were the second best band on the bill. Opener Seaweed had the best set (sorry everyone else, including ALL and Bad Religion).

Grunge was waning and major labels were looking for a new genre to pin their chances on, with punk being a strong contender, and they were searching in earnest for bands to sign. Bands with a solid book of work, and definitely an “it” factor. Green Day was already beloved just two(ish) albums into their career, and they were extremely charismatic on stage. 1994 was the year the punk broke (check out the officially unreleased One Nine Nine Four documentary), and we know now that Green Day is the clear king of that burst dam. Enough so that, as rising tides lift all boats, many bands with albums out that year saw some of their greatest monetary successes. Many bands signed in the ensuing rush to capitalize on the surge would be chewed up and spit out, for sure, but Green Day soldiers on. Their cultural significance cannot be denied. But, before we go into that, let’s take a quick look at Dookie as an album first.

For pre-existing Green Day fans, the very first thing we noticed was that this album sounded good. Major label production values can often pay off in this respect and, no offense to their previous releases, but Dookie just sounded better. The bass and kick drum are full-bodied, and the guitars have a lot of power behind them. On the album the band began to settle into their version of pop-punk (Billie Joe may hate that moniker, but it is what it is) with songs being more churners rather than the upbeat, high tempo caffeine hits that we were used to.

However with this fuller production came an unexpected side effect: these newer songs didn’t really feel as sincere, at least to me. Gone was the quirky improbable romance of “2,000 Light Years Away,” or the specific tribute to teenage disaffection of “Christie Road.” Ostensibly older and wiser, I’d expected the song-writing to match. Instead the tunes were more generically “edgy” songs like “Longview” and “Basket Case.” Were Green Day evolving as songwriters? Sure. I mean they were sampling some of these tracks live at previous gigs but, listening back, Dookie feels to me like quite a departure from their previous work, and a lot of the album speaks to an attempt at a more broader appeal rather than “from the heart” tunes.

Remember, at the time, this was just their third significant release, and it truly did feel different thematically, and not in the sonic way previously mentioned. Green Day didn’t really sound like a generic rebellious band before, but Dookie certainly had the hallmarks of it. Nowadays it’s just the first in a string of Green Day albums of the type, so we know now that it was more of an inflection point for what Green Day would do moving forward. With the exception of the creepily hilarious hidden track “All by Myself,” a lot of the album has a slight taste of board-approved rebellion.

As a side note, and this is a minor thing really, but another label trend when signing a band was taking a popular song from a previous album and re-recording it, in this case “Welcome to Paradise.” This rarely goes over well with existing fans, as the original is already so ingrained in our heads that it just sounds off (see Bad Religion’s re-recording of “20th Century Digital Boy” and Face to Face‘s “Disconnect” from Big Choice [itself a rare occurrence when the major label release actually sounds worse than the release the song originally appeared on]). Does “Welcome…” on Dookie sound better? Heck yeah. But does it also feel like it has had the soul stripped from it? Yeah… that, too.

In March 1994, soon after Dookie‘s release but kinda before they really blew up they came through and played The Vic in Chicago, and it was a good lineup with hometown heroes Smoking Popes (another band that was gobbled up and then spit out by a major label) and Tilt opening. The band was obviously excited to be playing to their new album, and it was a solid set. Yet I walked out of there wondering if I’d go see them again, given the chance. For some reason I was the one burning out, and it was Green Day I was getting burnt out on.

I listened to Dookie a lot when it first came out because it was new and novel, but as time wore on, and with increasing regularity, I began to find myself opting instead for Kerplunk! whenever I was in the car driving somewhere. Sure, the production in’t as good, but there was (and is) a more honest appeal to that previous album. When the “Longview” video released, and as Green Day’s star continued to rise and rise and rise, their gigs began to fall out of my budget, or interest. Dookie is the last Green Day album I purchased. They were firmly established by the end of 1994 and have been ever since.

Flash-forward and here I was in 2000, not paying much attention or caring about Green Day anymore, when a couple of buddies invited me up to Minneapolis for the Warped Tour (I was living in Madison, WI at the time), and it was one of the stops that Green Day was on the bill. They played a couple songs I knew, songs from Insomniac and Nimrod that I didn’t recognize as well (or at all), and maybe even some songs from the upcoming Warning. I kind of stood to the side, though, and watched the crowd. Six years ago these guys broke and they broke big. A lot of the Warped Tour attendees got into punk because of Green Day, and the crowd were positively eating from Billy Joe’s hand. He did that thing where he picks some random person out of the crowd and teaches them the chords to a song right there on stage. Still as charismatic as ever. Their stage presence and rapport with the fans was so palpable you could feel it in the air, and thousands of punks who probably wouldn’t have gotten into the genre at all if Dookie had never happened were in a state of bliss.

And for that, yeah… I get it.

For me, just like Metallica and Blink-182, there is a clear dividing line between their earlier music that I love (now literally decades in the past), and their later music that I didn’t really get into (or in Metallica’s case, actively dislike… world’s biggest generic hard rock band). In the case of Green Day, Dookie was that dividing line. Maybe my halcyon days of Green Day were behind me, and with each post-Dookie release I, personally, am not very impressed or entertained. Green Day may have grown into their new sound, but it was an evolution I simply didn’t find myself wanting to follow along with.

There is a staying power that few bands possess and, along with those two previously mentioned bands, and the Foo Fighters, they may likely be one of the biggest rock acts of the past fifty years. Quite literally generations of music lovers and musicians can call Green Day a major influence. Regardless of my opinions on their career, with such an outsized presence and influence, you can’t deny that Green Day are a part of the fabric of punk specifically, and the broader field of rock music as a whole. They’re selling out arenas left and right. Fireworks accompany their set. The whole shebang. When you get that big the shows are more of an event than a gig. Maybe that’s also part of the turn off for me: I find giant concerts to be sterile, impersonal events? Maybe….

While a lot of gatekeepers to this day still rail on Green Day, like it or not they are an entrenched part of modern music history, and Dookie was 100% the trigger for that. Albums since are considered mostly successes in the mainstream, if not in the scene where they came from. The best thing I can say now about Green Day, aside from their popularity and wealth (more power to them), is that they have inspired so many musicians that have come since. That, in itself, is good enough for me.