Warning signs

Green Day's grown-up punk

by Sean Richardson

It's been a long, strange trip to canonization for Green Day, the Offspring, and Rancid, the three bands who spearheaded the post-Kurt pop-punk explosion of 1994. Green Day and the Offspring were all too eager to become radio whores: the releases that followed their respective breakthroughs, Dookie (Reprise) and Smash (Epitaph), were mostly successful but seemed designed to blend in with -- not stand out from -- the crowded alterna-rock/alterna-metal field. The Offspring started cranking out novelty tunes and became the biggest sellers of the three, though they've managed to slip a few old-fashioned hardcore tracks onto each of their two follow-up albums. Rancid released a near-AOR masterpiece of their own, . . . And Out Come the Wolves, then headed back to the streets for the wild post-dub explorations of Life Won't Wait and the savage hardcore of this year's Rancid (all Epitaph).

As for Green Day, they took commercial accessibility to its logical conclusion with the magical "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)," an Indigo Girlish acoustic ballad from their last disc that cracked the Top 40 and purred its way onto the final episode of Seinfeld, not to mention a tear-jerking installment of ER. The mellowing out continues on the new Warning (Reprise), Green Day's fourth major-label album and sixth overall. Billie Joe Armstrong plays more acoustic guitar than ever; the tempos rarely even venture into Bad Religion territory, let alone come close to NOFX. It's a disc that will appeal to fans who dig the band's quick 'n' easy pop songs more than their hair dye or loud guitars -- in other words, most of the people who bought Dookie when it came out six years ago, not the kids currently rocking to Blink-182.

That said, Warning does rock, with nary a "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" sequel in sight. "Minority," the first single, is as cogent a loser's manifesto as Armstrong's ever written, complete with chord-bashing guitar interlude and harmonica solo. Armstrong will still take a simple rhyme over a thoughtful lyric any day; on the title track, he settles for a laundry list of warning-label slogans and comes up with a killer stream-of-consciousness dialogue along the lines of R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." "Warning/Live without warning," goes the song's casually anti-authoritarian chorus. Sure, he and bassist Mike Dirnt have been family men since Dookie came out, but Armstrong clearly hasn't grown out of his dissatisfaction with society or himself.

What he has grown out of is the super-saturated heavy guitar that powered Dookie and was milked to perfection on "Brain Stew," the Godzilla-sized, up-all-night new-father's lament he wrote for 1995's Insomniac (Reprise). In its place is a fuzzy electric blare that slashes like early Pete Townshend on upbeat, hook-filled songs like "Castaway" and "Church on Sunday." Complemented by Tre Cool's decidedly less manic drumming and lots of acoustic backing parts, it's the key element in Warning's subtle reconfiguration of the classic pop-punk sound.

"Church on Sunday" is also notable for a rollicking organ line courtesy of Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench. Green Day have gone surprisingly rootsy on their first self-produced album, offering up a full-blown polka ("Misery") and punctuating the Slade-ish "Jackass" with a sprightly sax solo. But the most exciting thing about "Church on Sunday" is that it's the album's one sweet love song, the kind Armstrong built his reputation on and then pretty much abandoned around the time of Dookie. (Blink-182 fans and emo kids are hereby directed to the Lookout! CD 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, a compilation of unrequited love songs and Van Halen-ish guitar riffs that includes the band's first full-length along with two early EPs.) "If you live with me, I'll die for you and this compromise," he sings, looking happily over his shoulder at the love-struck folly of his youth.

They may have stopped writing lots of love songs, but Green Day have remained committed to the simple joys of stripped-down pop punk. Maybe they aren't capable of coming up with anything more than silly three-minute pop songs, but that's not the point. For them, the idea is to stretch the basic form to suit their changing interests, to keep things short and catchy like the early Beatles and Who instead of attempting anything as ambitious and potentially disastrous as their own version of a Sgt. Pepper or a Tommy. And they've succeeded at that goal over the last 10 years, creating a fun, stupid, angry, neurotic, poignant catalogue of tunes that, for my money, puts them up there with the Ramones and the Misfits as the Beatles of pop punk.

So it's appropriate that Green Day throw a loose-knit A Hard Day's Night trilogy into the middle of Warning -- especially since they're sounding more and more like the Fab Four circa 1964 these days. First there's "Misery," its title lifted from one of John and Paul's earliest collaborations; then "Deadbeat," which nicks a guitar melody from the opening bars of "I Feel Fine"; and finally the harmonica hook that begins "Hold On," which sounds so much like "I Should Have Known Better" that you half-expect to see Green Day stumbling onto the screen in black-and-white at your local multiplex, drunk and wearing matching outfits. Come to think of it, that wouldn't be such a bad idea -- certainly better than that horrific Offspring cover of "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da."