Artist

Green Day

Formed in East Bay, California, 1987 14 studio albums 2 dives so far

Green Day formed in the East Bay of California in 1987, when Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt were still teenagers playing the all-ages punk scene around the 924 Gilman Street club in Berkeley. They started out as Sweet Children, cut their first records for the tiny local label Lookout!, and built a following the slow way, one sweaty room at a time.

Then Dookie arrived in 1994 and changed the scale of everything. With Tre Cool now on drums, the trio went from a Bay Area punk band to one of the biggest rock acts on the planet almost overnight, selling tens of millions of records and making bratty, fast, melodic punk a mainstream language again.

A decade later they did it a second time. American Idiot reinvented them as a rock-opera band with something to say, and the run since, from 21st Century Breakdown through Saviors, has kept the same three people swinging between snot-nosed punk and widescreen ambition. Start anywhere; they are always reaching past the room they are in.

Worth knowing

The name is a drug joke. The band started as Sweet Children and changed it around 1989, partly to avoid confusion with a local act called Sweet Baby. "Green Day" was their own slang for a day spent doing nothing but smoking pot. The biggest punk band in the world is named after getting high.