2 - Kerplunk!

Hello, Tre Cool. Welcome to Green Day. We've just jumped 10,000 light years away from our first album, and we're gonna do it again after this one, so good thing you hopped on the bus now. Kerplunk! Here's our second album. Lookout, we're gonna sell 10,000 copies on the first day, drive all across the country and stress your limited production budget by quintupling that figure in a couple months, and move to a major label where we belong.

I told a similar story with Godsmack and Offspring. This band was going to be gigantic. I could save this story for later, but it's relevant now. Green Day were in it to win it from day one. You can get all pissy about them moving to Reprise (aka Warner), but Lookout couldn't support them after Kerplunk! "Sellout" is factually wrong.

Imagine you are a company. Let's pick an arbitrary number, say 2 million. That's your credit limit, period, no negotiation. This next album is going to sell an astronomical number of copies. It's going to cost 7 million to produce enough copies to get through the first week, and that's like half the people who already planned to buy it. You can't publish it. End of story.

Not the end of the story, because that band is going to keep selling records so fast that you can't even retain the rights to their first two albums. If you shut your entire business down, let go of every other band in your catalogue and did nothing but produce the first 2 Green Day albums, you still couldn't meet the demand. The royalty checks to Billie Joe alone are more than your entire payroll. Anyone you might borrow money from would take one look at the projections and say "why the hell would i loan you money when i could just publish it myself for a jillion times the profit?" That's the ugly reality of business.

Is Kerplunk! Really that good? Yeah, it is. Green Day isn't a joke, no matter how much you wish you could hate them. They are that good, and we're still climbing the mountain. They won't plateau until Warning, and my friends and i stood out in the rain in Tulsa for more than an hour just to get into that show so we could get a little closer than 90 miles from the stage.

Obviously, i'm biased because i like them, but so did 100-million other people. They weren't an underground band. They weren't a gimmick band either. They earned their popularity by being good.

But back to this final indie hurrah. They don't sound so much like teenagers anymore, because Billie Joe is one long nap away from turning 20. The cool part of Green Day is that their albums happen in real time (for me, i got to grow up listening to them grow up). They break out early, make some great stuff in their 20s, weather the doldrums of actually turning into adults, and emerge out the other side a fine band i don't care about anymore. They don't need me to care anymore. We haven't reached my favorite yet, but Kerplunk! has pummeled my eardrums a few thousand times. If you've never heard it, you definitely should.

3 - Dookie

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