Green Day’s bold experiment was overshadowed and derailed by an infamous public meltdown, as Billie Joe Armstrong’s issues and addictions came to a head…
In 2012, Green Day’s next steps as a band were met with a curious raised eyebrow. After the stunning impact that 21st Century Breakdown had, they’d now be attempting to replicate their creative success… threefold. “Ok. Here’s the deal,” tweeted Billie Joe Armstrong on April 11. “We’re making a 3 album trilogy. Not 1. Not 2. But 3 albums. Called ¡UNO! ¡DOS! ¡TRE! Coming September November January.”
This came as a total shock, not least because their frontman had recently pointed towards one new album on Valentine’s Day. “Officially started recording the new record today!” Billie Joe posted excitedly, before the band revealed a 20-second clip of footage from the studio. Sneaky.
And not only would this triple-release – all 37 songs and 126 minutes of it – sound totally unlike its predecessor, its inception was something new, too. ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! were conceived spontaneously, demoed on tour and then blasted out without any overthinking (2013 documentary ¡Cuatro! offers a fantastic fly-on-the-wall look at the process). Bonus: the band regrouped once more with producer Rob Cavallo. Essentially, they opted for a simple, back-to-basics approach. Given that the Green Day machine had performed 171 shows since 21st Century Breakdown’s release, you couldn’t blame them for wanting to blow off some steam in the rawest way possible.
“What we wanted to do with these albums was to go back to being a band again,” Billie Joe said in July 2012. “It’s been a while since we’ve done that, and to hear the results played back to us has been pretty amazing. It’s been like, ‘Really, we fucking rock.’”
It was all sounding very positive. In fact, he even stated, “The band is in a better place now than at any point since we first got together.”
Less than two months later, however, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Though an electrifying visit to the UK – including an intimate headline show at London’s O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and a ‘secret’ set at Reading Festival – kept up appearances, Billie Joe would later confess that his manager had urged him to scrap these plans and check into rehab to help him combat his private battle with addiction.
A not-so-perfect storm followed for the frontman: a family bereavement, and then a pummelling press schedule. Couple that with hundreds of tour dates rapidly filling up the band’s calendar, prescription drugs to help with his ongoing anxiety and lack of sleep, and a bout of excessive alcohol consumption, and it all culminated in a disastrous onstage meltdown, just three days before ¡Uno!’s release.
Having seen a teleprompter at Las Vegas’ iHeartRadio Festival unexpectedly tick down during their already-short set time, he fumed, “I’ve been around since fucking 1988, and you’re gonna give me one fucking minute?” before adding – among many other profanities – the now-infamous line: “I’m not fucking Justin Bieber, you motherfuckers.” It was then that the trilogy instantly became tainted with the image of Billie Joe smashing up his guitar in a wine-induced rage.
After video footage of the incident went viral, rehab beckoned. “We regretfully must postpone some of our upcoming promotional appearances,” wrote Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool in a statement on Facebook. ¡Uno! arrived the following day, while ¡Tré!’s release date was brought forward from January to December 11, with its namesake thoughtfully saying: “If we couldn’t be there to play it for you live, the least we could do was give you the next best thing.”
In its debut week, ¡Uno! was met with a less-than-ideal opening uptake, notching a Green Day-meagre 139,000 sales (compared to initial interest on previous albums anyway). ¡Dos! fared worse, debuting with just 69,000 copies sold; ¡Tré! then lost a further 11,000 sales in its first week. Even a slot on The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 soundtrack, with beautiful piano ballad The Forgotten, couldn’t rescue figures. Arguably this was down to Green Day’s much-needed healing time away from the limelight. General fan response to the garage style of ¡Dos! and the epic spirit of ¡Tré! wasn’t encouraging.
Still, the one-two-three punch of each record provided enough to cling on to – from the infectious Stray Heart, to the classic melodies of 99 Revolutions, a song its creator believes is one of the best he’s ever penned. “True, we get a couple of duff songs, but mostly we get Green Day as we (used to) know and love them,” Kerrang! wrote in a 4K review of ¡Dos!, unaware that those words would hold true against the trilogy as a whole.
“I honestly love the fact that I have no idea what the future holds,” Billie Joe had said ahead of this music’s unveiling to the wider world. “No [band] has tried this kind of thing before. It could be a great success, or a massive failure. But this band exists in a state of chaos, and I love that.”
Of course, watching the results of this grand undertaking unfold while in the withdrawal phase likely diverted his attention. But it was still hard to argue with the incredible ambition at the heart of it all.
The following March, Green Day strode victoriously into view once more, with their excellent 99 Revolutions run. Treatment was completed; Billie Joe was sober. At the tour’s first night in Pomona, the frontman launched into a solo rendition of 2004 smash Boulevard Of Broken Dreams. Standing onstage at the Fox Theater he cut a strikingly different figure than that of the man who had destroyed his instrument in anger just seven months prior. Pausing to signal Mike and Tré’s parts coming in for the second verse, he said two words that not only fit the moment perfectly, but that of his journey as a whole.
“Welcome back…”
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