Green Day’s Dookie is a triumph. And the beauty of this perfect album is that it’s just the natural progression of the NoCal punk trio’s career up to that point. While the cover art for Dookie, especially when compared to their two prior studio records, 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours (1988-90) and Kerplunk (1991), appears to insinuate the band exploding into the mainstream, the music on it stays consistent with their recordings going back six years before. That being said, as a reflection of the changes occurring in popular musical tastes in the early 1990s, Green Day poured all their efforts into their first major label album so as to best represent their genre for a candid world.

Dookie is the product of an entire world that existed under the radar of popular culture for most of the 1980s. Punk rock and its gentler cousin, New Wave, got plenty of press in the late 70s but as far as mainstream America was concerned, it went into hibernation for most of the 80s, only to be “rediscovered” by Gen Xers in the 90s. The reality is that punk rock gladly sank under the waves for that time as artists perfected their sound, which was fragmenting into several subgenres of punk in local scenes all over the country.

Green Day was a tight-knit organization from the start, with childhood friends Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt being the core of the band from the beginning all the way through to the present. They shared a love of early rock n roll and the punk groups of the 70s and 80s who made it their mission to keep that straightforward sound alive. Not only does this refute the idea that punk as a genre was stumbled upon and revived by kids coming of age in the early 90s, it’s also an explanation of why Green Day is so solid on Dookie.

Green Day benefitted from a robust DIY Berkley California punk scene that centered around the 924 Gilman Street Alternative Music Project. “Gilman” was attracting bands and fans at the same time as, and perhaps with some coordination with Larry Livermore’s Lookout Records. Green Day recorded and distributed their first two records through Lookout. You can hear the meeting of punk’s past and future in Livermore’s band, the Lookouts’ music; the driving drums (courtesy of future Green Day drummer Tre Cool) and buzzsaw guitar is from the hardcore bands, but the melodic singing and harmony in backing vocals was pulling from early rock n roll, and would return in the form of pop punk very soon.

Dookie is a prime example of the “pop punk” subgenre. That being said, several acts that fit the mold with their loud-fast guitars but radio-friendly melodies had been popping up all over the country in the same time period as the East Bay trio. The “Mass” that Dave references in the podcast is Mass Giorgini, owner of Sonic Iguana Studios in Lafayette, Indiana and frontman for pop punk group Squirtgun. Sonic Iguana was the breeding ground for pop punk albums and plenty of Lookout bands, including The Queers from New Hampshire and Chicago’s Screeching Weasel. But the term pop punk implies that at some level each of the groups hoped for success with a wide audience. In 1994 this was unlikely to happen by working with independent record labels. Green Day may have violated an underground music code of ethics by signing with Reprise to make Dookie, but the decision to do so is, in itself, a sign of the times. Unlike a decade or so later, reaching national and worldwide recognition still relied on signing with a major distributor in the early 90s. The success of the Pacific Northwest’s version of underground rock, grunge, typified by Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, made room in pop music for “new” sounds and messages. Record companies with larger reach were more willing than ever before to take risks with groups that would be cast aside just a few years earlier.

With the help of college radio stations and late night MTV, “alternative” acts ordered a messy execution of hair “metal” bands and created space for even more alternatives to Cinderella, Motley Crue and their peers. This all sends the message that this era was ripe with not just music likers, but music lovers and even some aficionados. College campuses were not thinning out as the 90s dawned, quite the contrary, and college town independent record stores were trading in CDs and tapes with teens and twenty-somethings who could debate the merits of artists in every category represented in the store.

The Do-it-yourself attitude ran deep in the Lookout/Sonic Iguana world, and the access to the means to follow through on that ethic was becoming more and more common in the early 1990s, and not just in music. That is the era of “Indie” everything—filmmakers, artists, writers, businesses—it was a trait that still sticks with Gen Xers and their ventures. Although it is on a major label, Dookie is a reflection of years of hard work on behalf of the trio, perfecting their sound so that it could find its way to the surface.

As mentioned, punk never disappeared, it evolved. The Ramones, who inadvertently invented the sound in the mid 70s when they just wanted to steer rock back to its roots, had done their job inspiring groups throughout the 80s, but were on their way to retirement when punk came back to pop culture in 1994. Green Day, Rancid, the Offspring (all Gilman Street fixtures) and a few others who received national attention gladly took the baton from the Queens, NY godfathers. Dookie is the signal that they were ready for the responsibility.

It’s funny that the band named this album Dookie and features a pile of it on the cover when the content is anything but. Perhaps it was done as a way to say “See? We warned you,” in case it wasn’t embraced by a wide audience, and since they had already been marked as “sellouts” by the underground faithful. But the opposite happened. Dookie is not only one of the greatest rock n roll albums of all time, but a wonderful document of its era.

-Eric Salmonsen, EPS