Rock and Hard Places (13 page)

“I know what you’re saying,” nods Mike. “When I was growing up, I didn’t really think bands had backgrounds. They weren’t real. But we
have ideals that we carry with us, and they matter. I’m a momma’s boy, totally, and that instilled good morals in me, I think. I’m not saying our backgrounds were completely fucked, but they weren’t great. We’ve been through as much shit as anyone, but we keep reading that we’re rich college kids.”

Let’s drop the college thing. That leaves “rich”—and you must have made a few bob by now—and “kids.” Your average age is around twenty-three. So “rich kids” is hard one to refute, surely.

“I bought my mom a house, yeah,” says Mike. Mike stares at his shoes. He seems a bit frail, and will later tell me that he suffers from a heart condition that gets exacerbated by stress. “But we don’t have high standards of living. People think that once you gain money you suddenly have no feelings and no problems. We all have a life to live, and monetary stability brings another list of problems that comes with it. I can’t expect people to understand or relate to that—they’ll just say ‘You’re a rich rock star, what are you bitching about?’ Well, I’m bitching because I’ve been gone from my fiancee for a year and a half. That still hurts.”

Go and see her, then. That’s the whole point of being rich. You don’t have to do this (Green Day all have other concerns—Billie Joe is married with a young son, Joey).

“When we stop having fun, we will stop,” says Billie. “I’m still having a total ball playing gigs. I don’t know if you noticed the other night in Halifax, but I was having fun.”

People don’t usually come on naked for the encore when they’re feeling a bit downbeat, no.

“If people pay to see us play—and we are entertainers—we have to put out as much as we possibly can. We can’t go, ‘Duh, I’m a rock star, this sucks, the people who are paying to see me now are the kind who used to beat me up in high school, I want my mummy.”

Billie Joe is starting to lighten up a bit.

“I don’t want to sit here and complain about being a rock star. I don’t want to be whining and moaning. Fuck that, you know. I’m not gonna take for granted the fact that I have the ability to play music for the rest of my life if I want to. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. For one or two or a few people to understand what the hell I’m talking about in my songs, that’s more than I’ve ever asked for, for people to fuckin’ get it.”

WHICH BEGS THE question of what people are getting when they get Green Day. You don’t shift ten million records without hitting a fairly significant seam in the cultural firmament. Nirvana’s astonishing, and astonishingly sudden, success demonstrated that America was crying out for a punk-influenced rock trio articulating a large and hitherto unrecognised undertow of alienation, but it all got a bit messy and ugly for comfortable consumption when Kurt Cobain reacted to the fame, acclaim and wealth visited upon him by shooting himself.

Enter Green Day with their cute, catchy songs about television and school and masturbation, their pop-eyed cartoon of a singer, their funny videos, their implicit assurance that it’s all just a lark, The Ramones all over again, and here’s your licence to print money.

“Mmm,” nods Billie. “That’s the bleakest analysis I can come up with. It’s what kids are talking about in their high schools, or their grammar schools, for that matter. I don’t like to belittle people, though, because they happen to be liking my music at the same time. There again, kids are some of the most brutally honest critics there are.”

If I could just play devil’s advocate for a second, do you ever wonder—as a parent, even—what effect your relentlessly bleak lyrical view has on the kids buying your records?

“Maybe people take it the wrong way,” says Billie. “I don’t think I complain that much. A lot of our songs, I guess, are kind of about other people that whine. ‘Brat’ is about waiting for your parents to die so you can get your inheritance. That’s where everyone starts saying, ‘Oh, you’re rich kids.’ But that song’s not about me, it’s about fucking college kids. I mean, I don’t know if you’re a college kid . . .”

No, I’m not. Or at least wasn’t. Or at least not for long enough to deserve the name. But we’ve done this bit.

“Well, we’re not coming out with some tits-and-ass beerfest. We say obnoxious things and stuff, but I’d rather have my kid go to see Offspring than Poison, because at least I’d know there was some kind of sensibility associated with the band. Because . . .”

Billie Joe takes a deep breath and goes into rant mode.

“In America in the early part of the 90s, mainstream music was starting to get more interesting, Nirvana breaking big, Pearl Jam—who I don’t like that much, but they’re still more interesting than Bon Jovi—taking off and punk rock starting to get everywhere. Lots
of cool stuff. Then, suddenly, in 1995, you get a bunch of fucking golf-playing fraternity boys putting out music. I mean, have you heard Hootie & The Blowfish?”

I have. While having no objection in principle to golf-playing fraternity boys releasing records, the appeal of Hootie & The Blowfish eludes me. In a sane world, they would play to modest audiences whose average age and IQ coincided somewhere in the high forties. In reality, there’s hardly a venue in America they can’t fill.

“Regular guy rock. Jesus. And Jay Leno is beating out David Letterman for ratings. Can you believe that? Things really are going backwards.”

Green Day, presumably, see themselves on the side of the angels.

“There’s more to us than people think,” says Mike. “We do more than whine. There are a lot of subjects on the new record if people want to decipher them. ‘Westbound Sign’ is about the time Billie’s wife moved out. ‘Tightwad Hill’ is about where we come from. ‘No Pride’ is like the anti-anthem, it’s an anti-nationalism kind of song.”

Ah, Green Day whining about nationalism.

Billie Joe gives me the look this last remark deserves, but decides to let it go.

“Listen,” he says. “We’ve got to go and play, but come and have a beer afterwards, huh?”

This seems a reasonable offer.

 

WE STAY UP pretty late afterwards, while Green Day’s crew pack crates, roll cables and give the buses the sort of meticulous clean you give buses when you’re about to drive them across the border into America and you don’t fancy becoming an extra in some lonely customs post’s remake of
Midnight Express
. Tre helps the process along by smoking what remains of Green Day’s stash, and entertains himself by smashing empty beer bottles against the dressing room wall. Mike shuffles quietly about, chatting to passing crew, and Billie Joe and I get into a frankly embarrassingly detailed argument about whether or not
All Shook Down
is a better Replacements album than
Let It Be
.

The Replacements were one of those bands whose commercial success was directly inversely proportional to their musical merit, which is to say they had almost none of the former and a lavish wealth
of the latter. Bands like this have a way of turning their fans into crusaders, passionate bores who will seize at the slightest opportunity to make a convert. Woe betide the stranger in the seat next to me who makes a passing reference to The Go-Betweens or The Fatima Mansions at the beginning of a Heathrow-Los Angeles flight. Where The Replacements are concerned, Billie Joe and I have met our matches in each other. A glazed look begins to descend on everyone else in the room (Tre had one already, but for different reasons).

While I’m just delighted to have met someone else who can quote the line “Anywhere you hang yourself is home” from “Someone Take The Wheel” (The Replacements’ peerless lament of the touring life), Billie Joe is trying to make a point. Green Day are in this for the long haul, he says. Earlier, he’d drawn a comparison with The Beastie Boys, who started out with multi-platinum success as a puerile novelty act, and went on to achieve genuine respect and the cult-level fame that Billie says he’d be more comfortable with. A shame that The Beastie Boys accomplished this transition by ceasing to make such splendidly cretinous records as “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party)” and “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and turning into a bunch of smug, self-righteous hippies in silly jumpsuits, but that’s not relevant to Billie’s argument.

The Replacements, Billie Joe reminds me, filled their first couple of albums with songs called “Gary’s Got A Boner,” “Dope Smokin’ Moron” and “Fuck School.” They made Green Day sound like Soren Kierkegaard. They went on to make some of the most haunted and glorious music in the rock’n’roll canon.

“That,” says this determined, and brighter than expected, young man, “is what we’re here for.”

 

 

 

O
NE OF THE joys of travelling as a reporter is the opportunity to work with great photographers, and I’ve been unusually blessed in that respect—as I was on this trip, travelling with
Melody Maker
’s Stephen Sweet. And one of the frustrations of working as a writer is realising how little impact thousands of your words might have in comparison to a single frame snapped by a great photographer, which was what happened when this story originally ran. I’d mumbled something to Sweet about maybe focusing on the odd relationship between The Cure’s Robert Smith and his mascara-smeared legions of look-alike fans, and Sweet nailed it the first night, outside the band’s hotel in Chicago.The scene is described, and done insufficient justice, below Sweet’s shot of Smith’s encounter with an especially ardent adherent from behind the singer’s shoulder, deftly capturing the worshipper’s supplicant gawp and Smith’s wincing, forehead-rubbing awkwardness. I still think it’s one of the best illustrations of the dysfunctional relationship between celebrity and celebrator I’ve ever seen, and its potence is diluted not even slightly by the knowledge that the anguish discernible in Smith’s expression was due principally to the fact that he was just plain sloshed. The camera, in those pre-Photoshop times, may not have lied, but it didn’t always declare the whole truth.

What is lacking in the story that follows is much in the way of any meaningful
attempt to understand the cult of Robert Smith from the perspective of its adherents. This was partially due to constraints of time, but mostly down to your correspondent’s pathological aversion to boring nutters. I could understand being a fan of The Cure, because I was—and am—one: indeed, a little over two years before I did this trip, I was living, back in Sydney, in a room dominated by the black-and-white
Boys Don’t Cry
poster, and I would still doubt the sanity of anyone prepared to argue that
The Head On The Door
wasn’t one of the dozen best albums of the 1980s. I just don’t understand the urge to appropriate your favourite singer’s haircut and taste in misshapen jumpers, and regard his every pronouncement as freighted with Delphic sagacity. Which is to say that I don’t understand uncritical reverence for anything, which is, I suppose, to say that I don’t understand quite a lot of the rest of my species terribly well. However, I believe that the analysis of his own flock that Smith delivers later in this piece is both astute and compassionate, or at least blessed with more of both those qualities than anything I might have come up with on my own.

Fame is a phenomenon that generally conspires to make both the admired and the admirer look ridiculous: I suspect that this is what I was trying to demonstrate with the random observations of The Cure’s celebrity inserted throughout the narrative. The best that all concerned can do with any variety of notoriety is refuse to take it seriously, and I’ve rarely since seen anyone cleave to that attitude quite so splendidly as The Cure.

“HERE, LOOK. NO, over here. See, I’ve invented this game for you. And I’d like you to play it.”

The face—that great grinning shambles of lipstick, pancake and hair gel that I’ve only previously seen on magazine covers, television screens and, I’ll admit, the walls of the bedrooms I occupied during my teens—is inches from mine. We’re in a dressing room backstage at The World, a modestly-named arena an hour and a half’s drive from Chicago, where The Cure have just played a superb show in front of 15,000 people. I’m sandwiched between Robert Smith and long-serving Cure bass player Simon Gallup on a black leather couch that might conceivably seat one in any kind of comfort.

“Look. On the table.”

While Gallup has been asking me about a couple of friends of his back at the
Melody Maker
office, Smith has been arranging the contents of a bowl of M&Ms on the polished black table in front of us. From where I’m sitting, there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to what Smith’s doing, but as we’ve only just met and I’ve got to get a cover story out of this, I figure it’s as well to humour him. I nod, and smile, and wish I wasn’t quite so sober.

“Right,” Smith continues. “Now what you have to do—and pay careful attention to this, right—is move that red one there at the bottom up to the top without,” he pauses for effect, “touching any of the others.”