Green Day - "Dookie" with Rob Cavallo - Major Label Debut

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Major Label Debut. This is the podcast about
major label debuts. My name is Graham Wright. When we
were first putting this podcast together, we really struggled to
explain what the podcast is about. I think there's a
certain type of person, which all of us here are
and probably many of you are as well, who just

(00:28):
hears the phrase major label debut and sort of intuitively
understands what that means and why that's interesting. And that's
lucky because I have found it really difficult to succinctly
explain what a major label debut is, not just literally,
but like what the stakes are around it, why it's
a thing you can talk about at an angle you
can take. Fortunately, today you have an object lesson a

(00:51):
major label debut that, in my opinion, embodies everything implied
by the phrase that major label debut is dookieeteen ninety
four Reprise Records debut by Green Day. The story goes thustly.
Green Day is a punk band. They start in high school.
They find success as part of a thriving punk scene.
They put out music independently and they do a pretty

(01:13):
good job. They get kind of big, putting out records
and touring. They have something right, people connect with them
with the songs, with the show, with the whole vibe,
and of course the music business people recognize this, and
green Day signs to a major label, alienating a lot
of their early fans and supporters who saw it as
selling out. Green Day famously was banned, permanently banned, prohibited

(01:37):
from entering, let alone playing the diy community venue where
they came up, or they cut their teeth. People took
this stuff seriously, especially in green Day's world. Anyway, the
band hits the studio, they make a record that's a
little more polished, a little more direct. Maybe the record
comes out and not only is it a success, it's
a sensation. It yields four indelible hit song and Green

(02:00):
Day goes on to become one of the biggest rock
bands of their generation period. Like to the point where
most of you, if not many of you, if not
all of you, already know everything I just said. When
people talk about making it as a band, I think
that is pretty much exactly the narrative they're imagining. And
it all started with Dookie. Now, that album was produced

(02:24):
by the same man who signed the band to Reprise
in the first place, and that man is my guest
today on the show. Rob Cavallo has a staggeringly impressive resume.

(02:51):
He has produced records for Dave Matthew's band, My Chemical
Romance Paramore. This is just pulling names from the sublist
of records he produced that went platinum. He produced Dizzy
Up the Girl, the Goo Goo Dolls record with Iris
and Slide and Black Bloom, honestly one of my all
time favorite records. And not only did he produce Dukie,

(03:11):
it was only the second record he ever produced. Impressive.
As far as I'm concerned, Dukie is the superlative major
label debut. It's perfect as an act of creative collaboration.
It's nothing short of miraculous. It communicates everything you need
to know so clearly, not just the songs, the music,

(03:32):
which obviously is incredibly good, but also the attitude of
the entire Green Day project, which maybe seems quaint now
to think of Green Day as like brash outsiders with
a scary tude, but that was a big part of
their appeal when they were first coming out, and it's
all baked into the recordings. It's a perfect marriage of
form and function. It's also like pretty much every record

(03:56):
the result of a group of young people going into
a studio and trying to make some music that excited them,
trying to capture what it was about the songs that
made them feel great about the songs. And I was
really excited to go back to that, to the moment
of creation, like to try and get a sense of
what it was like to make this record before it

(04:17):
was green Day's Dukie, when it was just green Day's
major label debut, which could suck and flop and leave
them without old fans or new ones. So to say
it was a thrill to talk to Rob about being there,
about doing it is a huge understatement. This is a
man who knows just a limitless amount about music, about

(04:38):
making records, and even after all these years, he's so
happy to talk about the music and the making of
the records and just share the stories and the truth
of the thing. And it's just a great conversation. I
had so much fun talking to Rob. So here it
is Green Day's Dukie with Rob Cavalla. Thank you so

(05:02):
much for doing this. I'm really excited to talk to you.
I have many thoughts, many questions, and I wanted to
start by asking if you remember the song or the
record that first made you realize that production was a
factor in making it, that someone had captured the sounds,
made the decisions that that was a role that a
person could fulfill.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
What was the first time I understood about like that production.
Well that's a tricky question, actually, because in my earlier
life of becoming a musician and a producer, I was
producing all the time, but I didn't even know what
it was. I basically found a stack when I was
like twelve or thirteen. I found a stack of Beatles
records in my dad's closet. I put them on, I
realized I knew all the songs, made jump around the room.

(05:46):
I thought, this is the most fun you can have.
And then immediately it was like how did they do that?
Like what? How is that possible? So I guess it
was the Beatles because I was like, where are they
putting their fingers on it to get those guitars to
do that? And what was the drums? And like what
kind of amplifiers were they using? And then what kind
of microphones? So I started, like really early actually dissecting

(06:09):
a lot of people are usually when they're I realized
that I was an anomaly. Most people are like, oh,
how do you write that song? I want to write
songs like that. That's the majority of people when they
when they jump into the music business or they jump
into being an artist or what kind of I strangely
was like, how did they produce that? Although I didn't
ask the question that way. That was just more like,
wait a minute. If you're going to hear day Tripper

(06:31):
down down D D D, you know, I would be like,
that is the coolest guitar sound I ever heard? What
the hell is that? You know? And then wait a minute.
The second time it plays it, the bass comes in
and it makes it sound fuller and richer, but cooler
in a different way, like it's expanding. And that's where
my mind was going. It was sort of like an

(06:52):
investigative process. I was also like, why is it that
you can take this melody with this lyric and marriage
and marry it with this kind of a song or
this kind of arrangement, Like, oh, well, this is a harder,
Like you know, if you're taking a helter skelter you're
going to make, You're gonna bash and you're going to
get louder and crazier, right, and if you're playing Michelle,

(07:13):
let's say from the Beatles, we're using a Beatles theme today,
you're going to play it on acoustics. Why because that's
the nature of the emotion of that melody and lyric.
Because people realize that maybe they will realize, but like
a song just sort of like can exist on paper,
or it can exist sort of like as the Beatles

(07:33):
used to say, in the air, but a record has
to be the embodiment of that song. And I was
so into records first. I was like, why do you
make the record of that song? Making those choices? To me,
it was so interesting, So yeah, I started, I'm kind
of a producer of Brain.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
Well, it's wonderful to talk to a producer Brain, because
you know, I was listening to Dookie last night, and
then I thrown Dizzy Up the Girl as well, because
that's really you know, Dookie's the cooler record that we're
here to talk about, maybe in a punk rock sense,
but I grew up Dizzy Up the Girls like the
second record I ever bought, and just closing my eyes
and going into the the sum of all those sonic

(08:13):
decisions builds this world that the song and that the
whole album lives within and I was fascinated by that
before I knew what it was as well. I know
what you mean when you say that the production is Like,
it's interesting how production's just like an element of making
a record necessarily, regardless of who's doing and what you
call them.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
Oh, it's a huge factor. I mean, honestly, the wrong
production can ruin a record. I mean, you know, if
you really think about it, you could. I'm not gonna
say that these were wrong productions, but like if you
look at a lot of the songs like why did
Peter Prampton not really break until Frampton comes alive those

(08:53):
songs were released, yeah, Or like you could look at
like Cheap Trick live at Buddhakan and you listen to
Surrender and it's a different version when it came out
on record than when it came out on live at Budacon,
live at Boudicon. It sounded like a big rock thing
and then all of a sudden it was a ginormous hit,
but it was not a ginormous hit before, right, So
you can there are examples of when production actually, in

(09:16):
my opinion, possibly held back a song or wasn't necessarily
the right production to make the song be a hit. Now,
I will say this, the band has a lot to
do with that because the producer's job is actually to
make the band really happy. Like my thing is, I'm
not done until the band loves the record. The band

(09:37):
has to live with that record. It's like, you know,
records are kind of like in a certain way, like
that forever, like you know they're out there, yeah, and
you know, let's see, let's put it this way. Dukie
came out in nineteen ninety four and that's now thirty
years and it's kind of amazing to hear that's the
second record I ever produced, and I was just you know,
the idea that it's still around and it's gone double die.

(10:00):
I'm into North America, which is like twenty million. Then
the idea that you know, you can put on in
La you can put on k Loos, the rock radio station,
and you can hear a Green Day song, and then
you could hear a Led Zeppelin song and then a
song by the Eagles or somebody, and like we're I'm
going like I can't believe, or I'm like I can't believe.
It's amazing to I'm pinching myself still to this day
that like, I can't believe I have records that are

(10:22):
played next to these amazing artists and productions. Kind of
blows my fricking mind, honestly. But I also realized that,
like in terms of like the theme of this is
like we're talking about, you know, camp production. Help. Yeah,
it's definitely like, I think it's okay for me to
say that the production was correct. That's all I could say,
you know, one of thirteen double diamonds were okay.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, every possible metric of success, it has achieved success.
I think at this point we can safely say the
production is good. How did you first encounter Green Day?
Was it a gig? Was it on tape?

Speaker 2 (10:55):
It? It was on tape, And it's kind of a
funny story. I was. We had this band that we
me and my partner Dave kat Snelson had signed called
the Muffs, who were a pop punk band from Orange
County Welcome Back Up. And I was really it was

(11:22):
really late at night and we were finishing the record
and we were mixing it, and it was like two
in the morning, and the attorney slash manager guy says, hey, Rob,
I don't want to bug you. I know you're tired.
My eyeballs are falling on my head. He goes, but
here's this tape of this new band that we just
were able to sign for management. You know, out of
the East Bay. They're called Green Day, and they think
they want to be on a major you know. Just

(11:44):
take a listen to it when you when you can.
And I remember looking at the tape going like I
was so tired, Like you're giving me a in our
job right now I'm trying to make I was like,
I was so dead. My instinct was actually to take
the take the tape and throw the trash can. I
was like, I was like, ah, I was just up
to here there, you know. And then this little voice
in my head said, don't don't do that. Don't be

(12:04):
a whimp, Like, don't be tired. He's offering you something
to listen to. It could be great, you never know.
So I mixed for another half an hour, and I'll
never forget. I got on the Venture Freeway heading home
to Woodland Hills and I popped the tape in and
then all of a sudden, was like she she screams
in silence. She she screeps in silence, a sullen riot

(12:31):
banded trading through her.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
Mind, wait hitting for a sign.

Speaker 2 (12:40):
To smash the silence with the brick up self control.
And I was like, oh my god, what the hell's this?
And I think basket Case was on there, Long View
was on there, and I all of a sudden I
wasn't tired anymore. I was like, oh my god, this
band is it, This is it. I love these guys
because it did sound like the Beatles and the Buzzcocks

(13:01):
and the Ramones, and you know, Billy's voice was like
so musical and like powerful but beautiful sounding, and the
way each guy attacked their instruments, I was like, this
is too magical. So the next day I called Jeff
and I was like, oh my god, I love this.
And then then the then the signing wars ensued and

(13:22):
luckily I won. Actually, part of the reason why I
won is because the Muffs album that I was making
that was, you know, make my eyeballs fall out of
my head turned out to be one of the big
reasons why the band chose me Green Day not only
to sign with, but also to produce them, because they
were kind of like so you're you signed the Muffs

(13:42):
and you put it on a major label and you
produced it. They were like, we're looking to be understood.
So if you like, like we could sign with the
guy that did Nirvana or whoever, Right, but that's grunge
and that's this And they were like, oh, and you
can play all those Beatles songs on the guitar. And

(14:04):
they were like, we should sign with you because we
think you know who we are better because basically you
were or you were the only guy at that point
that had signed a pop punk band to a major
And that's how smart they were that they were looking
for that.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
I'm so struck by the way you said they wanted
to be understood. And I have a lot of curiosity
in questions about, you know, how you worked both in
an A and R capacity and a producing capacity and
how those things informed each other. And it seems maybe
the common denominator essentially is just like do you understand
the band and then can you communicate the essential thing

(14:40):
of the band to a wide audience? And then that's
everything about the making of the record and the selling
of the record.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yeah, I mean, what it was really is a lot,
to be honest, A lot of it was just luck.
I was maybe the right guy at the right time,
right because if you were to listen to the demos
that I was making in my little home studio when
I was sixteen, like you know, for the five years
before for that, it kind of sounded like pop punk.
I mean, that's just naturally what I was doing. I
liked harder, faster tempos and stuff. And the other trick

(15:09):
I had was possibly because you know, I remember I
was saying, I would try to figure out how bands
made the magic. I became a guy that was sort
of obsessed with learning like all the guitar parts of
just about every band on every instrument. So like I
basically learned how to play every Beatles song, all the
guitar parts, all the bass parts, all the drum parts,
you know. And then I did it to led Zeppelin

(15:30):
as much as I could do, you know, because some
of that shits above me, especially on the drums. And
then I did it to the Stones on the Who,
and then you know, then did it to as much
as I could Stevie Wonder or Earth Wind and Fire
or you name it. I mean, Prince, you name it.
I was like kind of a walking encyclopedia of arrangements
and songs. So what I could do then, because I

(15:51):
had practiced in doing all that, when I would sit
in front of a band and I really like their demos,
I would learn how to play their demos their songs,
and I would play their songs back to them if
if what it felt natural and right, and I'd say,
you know, when you go to that B minor on
the you know, in the in the bridge, that's really awesome.
I love the way that sounds, and it would be
like their eyeb also be like, you know, really yeah,

(16:12):
And so that's kind of one of the things is
actually starting with just relating to the band. Then in
terms of relating to the larger audience. For me, what
I do is is I try to make the production
be if you start. But first of all, you start
with picking a good band. That's really the trick. Yeah,
no producers, the artist, you know, especially if you're going

(16:34):
to sign a rock band, you got to there's there's
twenty there were twenty other pop punk bands out there
that I was looking at. It was to me it
was Green Day was the one to fight for. So
then once you once you think that that's the one
because they're writing the best songs in the combination of
elements and the scene that they're in, you know, all
that kind of stuff. Uh, then what you do is
is you said about making a record that's going to

(16:55):
service their music the best. Right. So when I was
thinking about how to use the studio to make it
so that they would sound correct, I thought, well, on Doochie,
which was the second record ever produced, but I did
think you got to be able to hear Mike and Tray,
you got to be able to hear them clearly because
Billy's doing up and down with the right hand like fast, right, yeah,

(17:17):
and all the counter melodies were coming from the bass
and the drums. And also there was a there was
a thing in punk rock music I thought anyways, the
way I interpreted, which was that even though it's meant
to be aggressive and loud and noisy, it's also kind
of I don't want to say just necessarily clear. But
I do think it's like you can hear everything. You

(17:38):
can hear the individual performances of each guy, because punk
rock is almost like the drummer's going listen to me,
and the bass ward's going listen to me, no, listen
to me, listen to me, and everyone's out there in front.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
I thought, well, this music is going to be served
by that, not just historically, but also because of the
way the band functions. So when I went into the studio,
I had that idea and I went back and I
was like, what are bands that had this history like
sort of outfront thing where you could hear everything? And
then I had worked with a little bit with Black
Sabbath as an A and R guy, and I was like,
Black Sabbath is an amazing band where you can literally

(18:09):
hear everything and the base is loud, yep. And so
I was kind of like, let's put a Black Sabbath
slash punk rock spin. That's more of a way of
thinking of it. Technically. I know it doesn't necessarily sound
that way, and it's not supposed to sound like Black Sabbath.
It's more of a producer speak for how and why
and where you place microphones, what mike pres you use. Again,

(18:32):
this goes back to my whole producer thinking, where it
was like, you have to make these decisions. So it's like,
why am I putting a mic here? Why am I
doing it there? How am I recording, you know, and
I have a lot of tricks for that, and then
that's how you serve it up to the larger audience.
It's because you're doing what's right for the actual music itself,
for how the band functions. I don't want the band

(18:52):
to sound like me at all. I want the band
to sound like them. So therefore I change how I
produce every record I ever do. Green Day does not
sound like sh and Shine Doown does not sound like
Dave Matthews Band, and Dave Matthews Band does not sound
like kid Rock or the Goo Goo Dolls or whoever,
or Fleetwood Mac or somebody that I've done.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
You know, what was the band looking for? You said
they were they wanted to sign to a major label.
They were looking for one. What do you think they
were after?

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Oh they were the guys were the Green Day guys
are so like brilliant, really they were. They would just
tell you it wasn't even a secret. And here's what
I'll never forget what they said to me. They go,
you know, we're on an indie. We've sold like ten
thousand records out of the back of a truck or

(19:37):
the back of a Cadillac, you know, on Lookout Records,
which had two employees. But we think our music can
actually reach a wider audience. And I'll never forget how
they said it. They go, we know that we're going
to achieve this, we're just wondering what you think you
can do to help us do it. That's how they
said it. It's fucking brilliant. I was like, I was
like immediate, like, oh my god, I want to sign

(19:58):
these guys because that is such a healthy attitude.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
And it's amazing to me that Dookie came out when
I was seventy eight years old and I didn't really
know the predecessors. I didn't know the lineage they were in.
I just knew this was like music that older kids
at school were into, and I had the impression of
it as slacker music and as sort of as fuck
you music, as I don't care music. But it's pretty

(20:22):
clear from listening to the record, and pretty clear from
even just that story that these guys were they knew
what they were talking about, and they were serious about
their craft and their career.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Very serious. I mean, they really, all three of them,
very very much respect where their musical lineages are the
people that came before them, and just the craft of
music in general. They know it's a powerful art form
and you know, they've devoted their lives to it. So yeah,

(20:54):
when we're in the studio, which would now have been
now for you know, for most of the part of
thirty years, Yeah, we have a good time. It's a blast.
It's fun. But we don't fuck around, right, We're grinding, like,
we're making decisions and we're getting performances.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
You're there to work. Yeah, I think. You know, I
was such a fan of music, and then the first
time I got to the studio I had to adjust
my mindset that, oh, I'm not at a This isn't
like a visit for me to experience studio. You know,
I didn't win a contest. I'm here to make a record,
and I have to stop being dazzled and start work.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
There is that. I've been dazzled a few times. I
can tell you one time I was in the studio
with Phil Collins and he was playing the drums and
I got dazzled.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
If that doesn't dazzle you, then you know, you know
that you've lost something integral in your heart.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
I think, yeah, I mean that guy is so brilliant.
I mean, he can just he can make a drum
set sing in a way that's just so powerful and musical.
It's amazing. And he can write, and he can and
his voice is also unbelievable. Yeah, and actually this is
a wild thing. I actually made the mistake once of
getting dazzled in front of him, and he was like, no, no,

(22:02):
no time for that, right amazing. I actually really appreciated
that because he was like, we already won an Oscar
on the song you produced. What are you fambling? Why
are you? I said, because what you just did.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
He's like, no, no, no, no, I love that.

Speaker 2 (22:16):
Yeah, And I was like, I'm like, okay, cool.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
I'm sorry, Okay, back to work.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Upper Lip.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Hey Graham, here different Graham Graham from after the podcast
was recorded from outside, from beyond the interview. This is
the voice of authority speaking to you to tell you
that this is the point in the conversation where Rob
had what we in showbiz call a hard out. So
we took a break and we reconnected the next day
to continue our conversation. Here is now the rest of

(22:46):
our conversation. Please like and subscribe, Thank you. I want
to start off Today. I was just talking to another
musician friend of mine, and we were both comparing notes
on our expectations versus the reality of literally getting signed.

(23:10):
Like we sort of both envisioned in our starstruck youth
that you'd get a contract, it would be in an envelope,
or it would be you'd be at a nice table,
maybe in the back of a limousine, and with a
very nice pen you would sign it and it would
be this big moment, this clear you know, narrative beat
that now you have a deal, you have made it,
so to speak. And for neither of us did that

(23:33):
turn out to be the case. You know, the deals
got signed sort of when when you could and your
lawyer would sign them. You know what. It's like, how
anti climac days these things can be. But I was wondering,
if you recall the moment of literally signing on the
dotted line for the Green Day Boys.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah. So there was the band, Mike Drey and Billy,
and there was Jeff Saltzman and Eliot con and I
think we brought the contract to some place in Emeryville,
which is sort of closer to the water, sort of
a little bit west of the town of Berkeley, and

(24:12):
I think there was like some kind of seafood steakhouse
kind of a dinner, and I just the only thing
I really remember from it was that we all had fun.
Everyone was kind of laughing around and being silly, and
I remember it just struck me the way Trey ate
the crab, he ate crab where he took literally the
little fork and everything and he literally meeted the or

(24:32):
declawed the crab. I don't know whatder the right word is,
but he shucked the crab right and made this beautiful
pile of crab meat and then proceeded to eat all
of it. But he had the patience to get every
last little bit of that crab out and he enjoyed it.
I don't know why that stuck stuck with me as
the one story, but I think we did have a dinner,

(24:53):
and I will say that that, you know, the mood
and was very jovial, like, like everyone was really happy
and joking around and you know, having drinks and toasts
and all that kind of jazz, yeah, you know, and
talking shit.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
That's I'm glad that for someone there was that sort
of you know, that beautiful movie scene moment in the restaurant,
with the pile of crab, with the contract, with the
right mood. It really was a perfect I.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Hope I'm remembering that. I'm pretty sure I'm remembering that right.
And I do remember that. I believe like I was
the person from the label, but I was the only
person from the outside, right. I mean, I can't remember
if there were wives and girlfriends there or not. There
might have been, but I do remember that it was
the core of the band, the management and the A
and R guy.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
So how did you, as music lover burgeoning producer A
and our guy negotiate the you know, A and R
status versus the production status versus the you know did you?
Did you feel not conflicted? But did having one foot
in both worlds make it more complicated for you?

Speaker 2 (25:56):
Oh? Yeah, Well, this is actually a pretty sort of
intense story for me because of what I had to
go through. But I really appreciate what my bosses made
me go through because it was it was very difficult.
So to be fair, one of the reasons why I
got hired at Warner Brothers Records originally was because they
were like, you know, I think Lenny and Ted and

(26:16):
Ted Templeman Lenny Warnker and Michael Ossa were like, Hey,
this fucking guy you can produce over here. Look at
this guy. You know, they heard some of my fucking records.
And there was this one moment where I had a
young band and I brought it in and I had
taken it to the complex, which is George Massenberg's Slash
Earthrone Fires studio, where I was working as a grunt,
you know, I was a third engineer basically, and they

(26:38):
gave me a free weekend because it was a holiday.
And I brought the tape back to Lenny and Ted
and Michael and they were like, you know, this tape
is pretty good. We actually think it could get signed.
It's not actually good enough to be on Warners, but
it's good enough to get signed. What are you going
to do because you own the tape, you paid for
the tape. That's like an implied production deal, right, And

(26:59):
I thought, I said, you know, oh, honestly, I agree
with you. I think it's good, but I don't think
it's great. So you know what I'm going to do.
Let me go find another band and I'll come back
to you with another band. And as soon as I
said that, they were whispering. They look at me and
they go, you want to be on the A and
AR staff? Will pay five hundred a week. Now, many
years later I talked to Lenny about that, and I

(27:21):
asked them, like, what was going through your guys' mind?
Like what were you guys saying? Well, basically they were impressed.
Like most of the time, like almost ninety nine point
nine percent of the people that wanted to be on
the A and AR staff at Warner Brothers Records, we're
trying to get on the ANAR staff at Warner Brothers
Records because that was the best place you could work
if you were going to be an AAR. The highest
loftiest place was Warner's A and R you know, Atlantic

(27:44):
and Columbia. Sure, Warners was like the King. They said
to me. The idea that you were looking to work
harder and that you recognized that the band was good
but not quite up to your own standards meant that
you were like one of us, and you were trying
to like force us to do anything. You weren't trying
to say you you guys are wrong. You know a

(28:05):
lot of people a lot A and our guys were like,
you're you're wrong. This band's gonna do stuff like and
fight for something. Because what I did was is I
did give the tape back to the band. The band
went and shopped it and they got and they did
get signed and that and the album soldwo hundred fifty
thousand records on a subsidiary of Pasha CBS. You know,
it was like the band did okay, you know, So
now now here I am signing Green Day and I

(28:27):
had just produced for just finished producing my first album
for Warners called The Muffs, which is the pop punk band,
and Green Day had said to me, you know, we're
part of the reason why we signed with you, Rob
is because not just because you can play the Beatles
songs and we know you can play our songs, but
it's also because you signed and produced the Muffs, and
you did that on a major label. That's amazing to

(28:49):
us because that means that, like, you understand who we are,
because no one had really signed at that point a
pop punk band, yeah, you know, in nineteen ninety one,
ninety two to a major label. At that point it
was all great and before that it was hairbands. So
they said we want you to produce. So I went
to my bosses, and they said, well, we just made
an investment in this band, and while we do believe

(29:13):
that you're a producer, you're like basically an unknown baby producer.
You've only produced one artist that it's barely even come
out yet you, as the A and R guy, have
to find them the right producer. So we are basically
going to insist that the band meet with other people.
So they met with Butch Vig, who had just produced Nirvana.

(29:35):
They met with Rick Parisher I think his name is.
Rick was the guy who produced Pearl Jam's ten Okay.
So I, as the A and R guy from Warners,
had to call the managers of these big producers right
when I'm dying to do the record myself. Of course
I want to do the record. Oh my god, I
want to do the record, and set up these meetings.
I think there was three or four producers. I had

(29:57):
to set the band up with the meet and every
time I would just be waiting, Oh my god. I mean,
and I learned to be really valuable lesson, which is
that I'm the A and R guy. First. If I
happened to be the right guy to be the producer,
then so be it. But I have to be true
to the label and the band and the money and
everything else, which is that I'm their ain and R guy,

(30:19):
and I have to facilitate that. So after they came
out of these meetings, I would get the call and
I'd be like, oh my god, would you guys think,
are you guys gonna you know, are you going to
work with Butchwig? Are you going to work with the
guy who produced Pearl Jam or whatever. The first two
times they were super nice. They were like, no, you know,
we didn't get the right vibe from that guy. You
don't got to worry. You don't got to worry. And

(30:39):
then on the third or fourth time when they met,
they were like, oh my god, that meeting went so great.
Oh my god, wasn't that great? Mike? Oh yeah, that
guy is amazing, he said, I were just fucking with you.
And then I believe that there was probably a meeting
that was done without me where my boss has probably
talked to the manager and it was probably one of

(31:01):
these kind of calls, Well, you know, Lenny and Michael
and Ted the band really wants to go with Kamala,
and then Lenny Mike and to go really, are you
sure no, I'm making that shit up. I don't know
what the fuck they said, but there was probably that
conversation like, should we let this fucking kid produce this album?

Speaker 1 (31:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (31:21):
Is it real? Is it really real that the band
wants to use them? And then of course the answer was, yeah,
it's real, we want to They feel understood by him,
So the next thing, you know, I got a call
to go down to my boss's office at one point
and he was like, you know, we're gonna let you
produce the record, don't fuck it up.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
I was like, yes, sir, were you scared that you
were going to suck it up? It's your second record,
you know, it's pretty high stakes. It's Green Day's first
major label record. You obviously loved the band. They obviously
like you. Were you losing sleep thinking like, oh god,
what if I with this?

Speaker 2 (31:54):
You know, I know this is going to sound crazy,
But no, I more felt excitement and it's like, oh man,
you know they put me in the game. Yeah, you know,
I was so ready for my chance at bat At
that point, I felt like I had earned it to
a certain degree because I had done a lot of
hardcore A and R and a lot of gruntwork for many,
many years, you know. And I also watched a lot

(32:16):
of other producers do stuff, and I've learned everything and
watched things that go on, and I thought to myself,
you know, it's okay for you to feel good about
having this shot. And I also was a person that
only thought about really like how am I going to
interpret I think I spoke about it earlier, like how
am I going to interpret this? Like how am I

(32:37):
going to use the studio? Like I had answers to
the to the pertinent questions of what I thought was
the right things to do with the band as in
the producer role. That's what kept me up at night,
not oh my god, what am I doing? What am
I going to do? I'm freaking out. No, it wasn't
that at all. It was more I'm excited to try
these things and I think they're going to work. So

(32:59):
I didn't have that, But I'll tell you what did
happen so that when I did get scared at one point,
which was so we're all new in the studio and
we we didn't have like super expensive equipment always available
to us and all kinds of things. And I had
also never really I mean, I'd produced some punk rock
in my life, but I'd never seen people hit their
instruments so fricking hard. So we got the drums, and

(33:21):
the drums sounded great and that I was very confident in.
And then it came time to record the bass. And
we recorded the bass, and that sounded great to me.
Then we went to go and start recording guitars. I
tune up the guitar with Billy. He starts playing guitar
and he tries playing the guitar to the bass and drums,
and it sounded horrendous. It sounded awful, and we couldn't

(33:44):
figure out why, and I just it just sounded out
of tune. Really quickly, I realized, wait a minute, Mike
hits the bass so hard it's ridiculous. He also liked
having the strings high off that he liked, you know,
the action be kind of high. So when you hit
the bass super hard and the action is high, what
happens is everything gets pulled sharp. And I couldn't tell

(34:07):
how sharp it was getting pulled. And for two or
three days, I needed to get a Strobe tuner, which
in the Bay Area at that time, I could not
for the life of me find when I think I
finally rented one or someone loaded me wow, and quickly
discovered that the bass was nineteen you know, anywhere between
fifteen to twenty cents sharp, and it depends on the

(34:28):
song and depends on where in the song that it
was happening. So then I literally was tuning guitars. I
mean Billy, remember, like my fingers were fucking bleating because
I was the guitar tech. There was no other people,
you know, helping, it was just us. Also, Billy played
super hard, so I also had to compensate for that

(34:49):
with the tuning. So if Mike was let's say, eighteen
cent sharp, I would usually probably tune Billy because the
strings are smaller, they don't go quite as sharp. Somewhere
between twelve and fourteen cents and that was the sweet spot.
But it took three days to get well, it took
me four hours to figure it out once I got
the stroke turmer, but it took me three or four days.
And that's when I was freaking out because I was like,

(35:11):
we couldn't do it by ear. It wasn't working.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
And that's a tough beat to have to call the label.
If you know, if it's your second record, You're in
day three and you're like, hey, we can't get the
guitars in tune. That's not going to come across as
a professional situation.

Speaker 2 (35:25):
Oh man, I would be so fired. It would It
would have been terrible. But fortunately I knew a lot
about this stuff, just because I went to school at
this great school called Dick Grove School of Music, and
I learned about the physics of strings, believe it or not,
and you know, I knew all kinds of esoteric things
like like so, for example, you know when you do

(35:46):
a let's say you're going to tune the E string
and the A string on a guitar together, right, a
lot of people will hit the harmonic on the fifth
threat and then on the E, and then the harmonic
on the seventh threat on the A. If the E
is at zero sense sharper flat, and then you tune
the A to that E. When it sounds right to
your ear and there's no more pulsing, that a string

(36:06):
will be three cents sharp. If you now do the
A to the D, your D string is now six
cent sharp off of a temperate scale, sharper than it
should be.

Speaker 1 (36:16):
Right, You're creating an exponential curve of dissonance.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
Right, And then what happens is and that's why I
on a guitar for other reasons too, which is what
we won't get into here. It's like it's really esoteric,
but that's why, all of a sudden, why does your
g and your B string sounds sharp a lot of times?
And you're like, damn it when I then then you
go and you hit a D chord on the on
the fifth thread, like the D power chord on the
fifth and seven frets that looks like the shape of

(36:40):
an open A chord. You're like, well, that fucking f
sharp on the B string is sharp? Well, of course
it's sharp, yep. I then graduated to tuning a guitar. Actually,
once I get a few strings incorrectly and I use
a stroke tuner all the time, I will then do
I'll to the guitar the way the orchestra is tunes themselves.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
You know, you really.

Speaker 2 (37:06):
That is actually a better way of doing it. It's
better to do it with the open strings and then
hitting octaves, so octaves and fifths and fourth and then
you balance the guitar out that way, and then you're
basically compensating for any stuff that's going on if the
intonation is at right or there might be imbalances in
the guitar itself, and then you can get a more
tempered feel that actually works across most of the keys.

(37:28):
Do the listeners care about that? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (37:31):
I care about it, and I think, well, I mean
this is because this stuff is like increasingly esoteric knowledge,
because now you can just like dump the bass in
Melodine and fix all of it, and you don't have
to worry about how the guitar is tuned to match it,
or you can do computer will fix it, or the
tuning pedal will prevent it from happening in the first place.
And you know, if you're twenty now, you probably don't

(37:53):
have to learn all that shit.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
You know, it's true that Melodine does a good job
actually with the bass, but I would still argue that
once you've Melodie the base, there's no way in chance
that it's as punchy and it's sort of juicy sounding
as the original signal. But you're right, it'll be. It'll
be in tune, you know, there's no doubt about it.
It'll be in tune.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
If nothing else, it will be in tune. It might
not sound as good, it might not feel as good.
You might have lost some important thing, but that's it.
And that's what's like. All those things are in.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
The record, you lose some nuance for sure.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yeah, And I mean I think the computer can make
everything perfect. And then I mean it's not a novel
observation to say that if everything's perfect, then there's barely
any music there. It's just this like mathematically accurate construction.
So back to green day, can you situate me basically
in the studio in terms of like which studio it was,
what the room set up was like, and where it's

(38:43):
sort of where the gear was, where you guys were
hanging out, just like you walk in in the morning
and what do you see.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
We walked into the morning and it was Fantasy Records,
which is basically sort of a corporate office building. From
the outside, I mean, it looks like the same kind
of building that would house your dentist. Okay, but there's
a nice parking lot in a nice little area around there.
You know, walking on the ground floor, get to the
studio area, walk in, there was like a row of

(39:08):
office desks or something that was sort of like that
housed people behind it. It was like they were behind
a bar or something, but it was it was more
like an office bar or something. And there was a counter,
and there was a great gal i darn I can't
remember her name, but she was the studio manager. She
was absolutely lovely, and there were a couple offices there.
She was the studio manager. And then continuing past and

(39:30):
on your left would be Studio D, which was the
modern room, and you go to the right and that
was the section of what was the classic rooms, the
older wing, which was Studio A, B, and C. And
we went into the big room, which was Studio A,
which was kind of like I think one of the
great rooms of all time. It was built I think
in the sixties or seventies. I'm not sure, but I

(39:52):
think they did some Credence Clearwater Revival there, and they
did a lot of jazz records because Fantasy was a
jazz label, and they had a little leave in there
and some good mics, and but what was really great
about it is the room was just maybe about a
third of a basketball court in the shape of a
shoe box or something, and it had pretty high ceilings,

(40:12):
and the room was primarily wood and when you listened
to Dookie you can hear the snare drum lighting up
the room and bouncing off the wood. The kicking the
drum kit was. You got a really nice punchy room
sound in there. You know. We had our forty eight
track tape machine and i'm sorry, twenty four track tape machine,
and we hit tape and just Ampex four five six,

(40:35):
which was sort of the standard of the day. Nine
nine six hadn't come out yet. All the crazy noise
gate thinging Dolby. We couldn't avoid all that stuff. It
was just a regular rock recording. Then when it came
time to do the guitar and bassoverdubs, we moved to
Studio B, which had a had a really crappy board.

(40:56):
I don't even remember what it was, but it was
basically only the old. Only thing it could do would
be to sort of poorly send your your signal through,
not not to record. I had a couple of nave
micrease and a couple of good mics, probably used the
four fifty one and fifty seven sort of combo on
the on the on the guitar, I think I put

(41:17):
an s M seven on the bass, you know, and
some other tricks. I had this thing called an Evil
Twin that we've used as if it's two base direct
thing you.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
Can turn the highs up with there right exactly.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
It has a like sixty like at three or two
or three K or something out of I could go, look,
it's in the other room. I still have it. I
actually have two of them. Yeah, three K you could
do like a you know, like a shelf at ten
dB plus like plus ten dB shelf it from three
k up, which is crazy, but that was perfect. That's

(41:49):
why I bought the damn thing was because I thought, well,
I really want to be able to hear mics based
at any moment during this record, and so I needed
that extra cut. Yeah, so the Evil Twin gave me that.
Of course a regular good amp sound as well, you know,
And so we used those naves for that kind of thing,
and the Evil Twin didn't use the board that was

(42:10):
there for a recording and just use it for playback.
We also did the vocals in there, and I was
able to get Billy the Beatles vocal mic, which is
the Telefunken two fifty one again running it through a nivet.
It wasn't even a ten seventy three was or not
even a ten eighty one. It was something later. It
was one of the ones with the smaller dials that
had little colors on them like orange and red and

(42:32):
yellow and green. Oh yeah, with the smaller dials. It
was that series, which I don't even remember what it
was called. Yeah, and then we just did the bass,
guitar and vocals there. That was pretty much it.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
So this is like a tracked record. You laid down drums,
then you laid down bass, then you lay down guitars,
then you sang it.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yep. But everyone played together.

Speaker 1 (42:51):
Okay, that was my next question.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, well we got the takes. It was like, guys,
we're gonna play not really to a click. We might
start you on a click, so we start the same
every time. But then hm, you guys are gonna be
you gonna We're gonna get a good take of you.
But the energy was there because they all had headphones
and they were all in the room playing to each
other as a trio, and we had rehearsed the song,

(43:13):
so they knew the songs really well. I Billy might
have had a vocal mic or a talkback mic that
he could have maybe said something like a vocal cue
of what have you. But I think everybody knew the
record cold and we just got performances.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
And the performances are I know, you know this really
really excellent. I mean, I think Longview is the one
where you can really hear their feel the groove that
that song is in from the jump, it's like half
the hook is just how he's playing the bassline, like
you could play that bassline as a million teenagers have

(43:49):
with less of that, like slink in that just like that.
I don't know what you'd call it technically, but it's
the Longview feel, and every song is exactly right. I mean,
this sounds like a band who knows their shit hold.
Was that something that you worked on with them or
did they just have that?

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Honestly, they just have it. I mean, certainly I worked
on getting good takes for them, and we recognize when
we had a good take as opposed to not a
good take that really wasn't necessarily the hard part was
identifying the takes or even getting them, and we just
did them until we got them. We got everybody in
the mood and we played them. I actually think that

(44:25):
for me. You know, you're right, two standout grooves. Trey
comes out a chump and then turns that sort of
chaos kind of winds down and then it falls into
the groove of long view and then he's playing that tricky, overhanded,
underhanded thing that he's doing, and then Mike SLINKs in
with the base and it's kind of amazing.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
So that transition is they did that. You didn't put
that together afterwards with tape that's performed.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Oh yeah, that's performed.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
That's awesome, man, it sounds so good. That's on my
list of questions to get to a five times. Oh yeah,
we got to it.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
Oh they that's them playing hell yeah. And I also
think that Basketcase. The beginning of basket Case with Billy
on the guitar, Trey coming in with his high hat,
and then and Billy's vocal and then the explosion because
we have one guitar smaller than the high head comes
in and then it explodes into the because I think
I'm cracking, and everything opens. We burst into glorious stereo

(45:48):
with everything.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
You all keep setting it up. Time stop.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Yeah. I was always proud of her of just how
well they played the intro to that, and also if
you listen to the song she and it's just Mike
and Trey in the beginning, and Mike's just playing an
open g string and Trey has got his drum kit

(46:21):
tuned so perfectly, the way that snare drum is so
tight and cutting against that face and that and the
kick drum that he has. And then Billy comes in
and sings in perfect tension and harmony with them, screamless silence,

(46:45):
and then again there's a build and then bam into
into glorious stereo guitar rooms everything else, you know, So
we were there there is certainly, I would say a

(47:05):
little bit of studio just the just the right amount
of studio production to enhance what the band was doing.
It wasn't trying to certainly, the production wasn't getting ahead
of the performances. The production was there to basically serve
up the performances so that you could really hear them
and feel it.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Yeah, And to my ears, it seems like, aside from
a few second electric guitars, there's not a lot of overdubs.
There's not a lot of sauce on the record.

Speaker 2 (47:33):
You know that. Yeah, that was that was me remember
going back and thinking about like Black Sabbath and like
how you wanted to be able to hear everything, and
it was just an idea of like, you know, what
is true to this band. It isn't a lot of
extra stuff. It's just serving up the rock the way
you know, in a you know, sort of like a
dirty but clean plate. Hard to explain, you know what

(47:55):
I mean.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
I think that was the perfect explanation. And they play,
they all eat, each of them play with such personality.
I mean, you were saying it was important that the
bass be audible, and I feel like it's like, yeah,
because if you just if you put on one of
those songs and say to yourself, I'm just going to
listen to the bass through this whole song and follow that.

Speaker 2 (48:10):
Around, it would keep your interest.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
You're like, Oh, that's like a guy that's like a personality,
and it's you know, the drums have that, and the
singing obviously has it, the guitar playing has it. It's like,
I mean, it's like the Beatles. It's like every great
rock combo. Every guy is bringing something that's really their thing,
and then they're working together in this glorious harmony.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Yeah, it's a good record. And I also thought that
the thing that was overlooked about Duki the most, although
I can't really say it's overlooked because we've got a
freaking double diamond a word over here, But those lyrics,
they took an unbelievable picture or a snapshot of what
it would be like. I think could be eighteen or
nineteen years old getting out of high school in nineteen
ninety three or four and going like how the fuck

(48:49):
am I going to enter this world? That's why Welcome
to Paradise is so descriptive or long view is so
descriptive about like what a guy's going to or coming
clean a guy who's in the closet, or you know,
or she is, you know from the female point of view,
you know, or having a blast. Even it's like, you know,
it really is descriptive and relatable. To me. He just

(49:12):
wrote like masterclass observations of what it was like to
be a teenager in that time.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
And in this direct way and speaking to it so honestly,
you know, no metaphor no adornment. That's what really struck me.
As I gorged myself on the record getting ready for
this conversation was like, man, they weren't doing that in
the sixties. You know, the Beatles were singing to teenagers,
and they were obviously hitting a nerve with teenagers, but
the are you living in a world? You know, the

(49:39):
sort of straight like rallying cry almost feels like something
that was, at least to a band as big as
Green Day pretty new in that moment.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
You know, the great thing about rock is that it's
a combination of physical elation because it's so much fun
to bang your head to this great music. Yeah, and
at the same time, it's also kind of like a
psychological salve, you know, in the sense that you're able
to relate. You're knowing that this person that you might
be idolizing is actually relating to you on the deepest level.

(50:13):
So I had this crazy thing that happened to me.
I was early to get a computer, Like I actually
got an Apple Mac or whatever. It was like ninety
three to ninety four, and I had Rob Cavallo at
America Online or Aol dot com right, and I went
away that summer and I came back and I turned
on the computer and you got and then now you're

(50:34):
online with a dial up right to and then you
open up the thing and that says you've got mail.
I'm thinking I'll have three or four, maybe ten pieces
of mail. No, I had one hundred plus thousand pieces
of mail, and basically they all read the same thing,
a version of is this the Rob Cavalo? That did
you produce Dookie? Because you're it's the only person I

(50:56):
can find online. And I just wanted to say that
thank you so much for making this record, because it
saved my life, it got me through high school. Or
I just wanted to tell you that, like how much
this meant to me. And I was just like reading
these things and I was just like, and I know
it's like fan mail, you know, and of course the
band got actual male of course, and et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, I was fucking blown away.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Yeah, I mean it is. I can only imagine how
blown away you would be. And yet also now in retrospect,
it seems like, well, of course, I mean it's Dookie
you made, Duchi, that's you deserve more than hundreds of
thousands of emails because it fucking just hit people right
right in the sweet spot, right in the spot where
music that really matters. I mean, it's I know you
know this, but that's how you get a double diamond

(51:40):
record is you do something that catches that. This is
maybe a little VH one, but that zeitgeist and it
just means something to people on an elemental level. And
I think I was listening to the reissue with all
the expanded stuff that you guys put out, and there's
a demo on there of basket Case, the early version
of basket Case with different lyrics.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
I really don't know. Sorry, begin my bred godamnsell.

Speaker 1 (52:16):
I wanted to ask if you worked with Billy on
the lyrics at all, because do you have the time
to listen to me? Whin is like the perfect opening
lyric for a Green Day song. If you're gonna like it,
you know right away. If it's gonna alienate you, you're scared
of it right away. Like it's just it's all there
in that line, in that vocal delivery. And it was
amazing to go back and listen to a version of

(52:37):
the song that's the same melody, same basic arrangement, totally
different words.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
Well, it's interesting, I would actually argue it's not the
same basic arrangement because the difference was is that it
was a lot slower and it was done with a
different intent. We did have a conversation about it. Originally
it was, for lack of a better description, it was
much more of a pop song. And the listeners can
certainly go and check it out and listen, and you'll
know what I'm saying as soon as you hear that demo,

(53:05):
because it was the story of a guy and a
girl and a breakup or whatever it was they were doing.
I remember, oh barely. I remember it the way it felt,
and Billy and I had a conversation about it, and
I go, listen, this song is actually really really good.
He goes, yeah, I know, it's a little light. He goes,
I want to retool it, and I went, okay, great,
go for it. That's how quick the conversation was. We

(53:26):
both knew that wasn't the ultimate version of this thing.
I merely brought it up to him. He was already
fucking light years ahead of me, like he was already
I'm rewriting it. I have a better idea for this thing.
And then he brought it in and we were like,
oh my god, this is fucking great. And then we
did change the tempo, you know, it became a different
song obviously.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
Well that's such a good point, though the intent is different,
and from that intent, the entire thing just manifests itself differently.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
One thing that's missing on that demo and then the
later demo that's more similar to the way the song
would come out is the Thurdham at the beginning that
baseleck that happens, which to my ears is the song stars.
You like, oh shit, and then when that happens, you're like,
oh shit. Do you remember the moment when he dropped
that in there for the first time? Did everyone go
oh shit?

Speaker 2 (54:13):
I might not even have been there when he first
started doing it, but I do remember hearing it in
the rehearsal.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
One thing that's very interesting is that Green Day's rehearsal
space and where they practice. Is that apartment that you
see in longview that video. Oh, that is the underground
apartment that had a few bedrooms and what have you
in a little sitting room or whatever in the kitchen.
That is where Billy lived and I think maybe Trail

(54:40):
lived or I can't remember who lived there, but one
or two of the guys lived there and that one
of those bedrooms was set up for the rehearsal room.
And the only difference when I first saw them and
when we rehearsed, I believe we were in the room
that they're playing in. One wall's red, roll mall's blue.
And the only difference between what you're seeing as a
listener or watcher of the long view video is exactly

(55:02):
what I saw when we were because I sat and
there was no other place to sit. I mean, I
think that room was eight feet by eight feet. It
was so tiny, and that's where I first saw them,
and I remember there was not even a chair. I
sat on a bucket that was turned upside down, watching
them from the exact same angle. And I actually really
appreciate for me, you know, being able to look at

(55:22):
the long view video, I go right back to nineteen
ninety three, you know, signing them and rehearsing.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
Standing on the precipice of history as it were.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Yeah, and that kitchen and by the way, that crazy
you know, when Billy's on the couch and he's losing
his mind and there's a coffee table in front of
him that's covered in all kinds of paraphernalia and what
have you. Yep, that's the truth. That's where they lived.
And the guy who's swirling the butter in the pan
on that old school stove, it's one hundred percent real.
Everything about that video is one hundred percent the origins.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
And that's kind of I was getting at this a
bit earlier, trying to this the way that the whole
package was so perfect, like, and I guess the fact
that it was real is why it was so natural,
why it feels like, oh, this that lyric is the
perfect opening lyric for a band that has this image,
which is the perfect image for a band that has

(56:14):
this sound, which is the right sound for a band
that has these music videos which so and so farth like.
If you were to manufacture it, you couldn't make it
that good.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
I mean, the music business every day since before that
and and to now is still trying to figure out
how to get it right. I mean, if it was
easy to get it right, everyone would have a hit
record every time. And the real truth is that I
have no idea how all those elements came together for
us to get it right, other than that we it

(56:43):
was a group of people that were trying their their
hardest the band was trying to their hardest. I was
trying my hardest, The engineer was trying the hardest. The
video director was trying their hardest, the label was trying
their heart. Everyone was trying to do the right shit.
How often do we get it right? Not at all.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
It's a lot of elements. Yeah, speaking of trying, what
was the hardest song on the record to get right?

Speaker 2 (57:06):
Well, I would say Chump Longview, because the real truth
is is that the version that you hear on the
record was not cut at Fantasy.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
He'd just written the song and we're about to go
in the studio. Two things happened. One was actually my fault. Well,
it can be all my fault, it's fine. But remember
I said I didn't have Dolby and the fancy stuff,
and I wanted to make the record sound a little
thicker if I could, So I know, you can record

(57:38):
that the tape machines can be at thirty three inches
per second, or it can be at like sixteen or whatever,
sixteen and a half inches per second. Yeah, And I thought, well,
I might get more low end if I use the
slower speed. But when you have a slower speed, you
have more noise. So when we came out of Chump
into Longview and it was just the drums, the band

(58:00):
hadn't played it very much, and so what happened was
the band and then hadn't played it live. So one
thing was the band was like, God, you know, this
is just the right tempo, you know. And then the
other thing that happened was is that there was too
much noise on the track and I couldn't get You'd
hear the dude and there was so much noise. I

(58:21):
was like, damn it, I couldn't. I should have turned
the tape up to thirty three to get rid of
the noise, or rented Doby or something. Well, they went
on tour and they came back and they were like,
we've been playing this song live and we now know
that we want to play it faster, we play it
differently and better now, So okay, let's go book two
days in the studio in La went to music grinder,

(58:41):
put the tape machine to thirty three, recut jump long View,
and then took that to mixing, and that was I
would say no song was necessarily hard to do. It's
just that that one was the one where we didn't
get it right the first time.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
So Trump and Longview were composed as one song, like
Billy brought those into the brought those in is.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
You know, I actually don't know if he wrote them
both together or not. I know it was to us
they were like conjoined songs. You know, they were conjoined.
But it just felt right, well, well here's something that
will really blow your mind. So we actually had some
The original concept was that, and we actually did this.
We were gonna we called the professor of psychology because

(59:22):
we were by the Berkeley School, Right, So we said,
during this transition out of the chaos of Chunk and
into his being impotent, right, is feeling I've got no motivation.
I don't know, I'm smoking my inspiration. I just there's
nothing to do this place that he ends up in, right,

(59:42):
It's like it's, if you really think about it, he
starts out as a chump and he loses the girl
whatever the story is like that, and then he turns
into the character that is long View. We actually thought
during that transition we would get almost like something from
maybe the Pink dark side of the Moon, where we
actually found this professor of psychology, and we said we

(01:00:05):
want you to say into the microphone all the all
the words that describe the different you know, diagnosis that
you could have if you were going crazy, and what
you would have and how you would say it. So
he's going like neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, paranoid, delusional, you know, disassociation, breakdown,

(01:00:28):
you know, all this stuff. Right, he was saying all
these words, and we took them and we just sort
of took those words and sort of threw them up
into a tape salad and had them sort of randomly
being said over the drum break. If you can believe.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
That, how far did that make it into the mixing process?

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Didn't? We abandoned it because we were like, does this work?
Is this working? Why do we have this old guy
in the song? You know, it just didn't sound right
because the transition from jump into long View, it's really
about the drum morphing out of the chaos and into
this sort of groovy swing beat that's sort of like

(01:01:06):
a heartbeat, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
Yeah, and it's so cool musically and rhythmically that you
don't really need a tape salad on top of it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
We didn't need that. We didn't need the old guy
saying the words, but it was an interesting concept that
just didn't make it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
The reason I fixated on the on the Trump longview
thing is because green Day and you, obviously later on
would do stuff that was a little more The word
epic comes to mind, although I know that's not probably
the word that everyone wants to use, but stuff that's
a little more expansive and goes off in directions that
are a little beyond your standard pop song thing, you know,
the American idiot stuff and rock operatic stuff. And it's

(01:01:39):
cool to know that even back then they were still
thinking in those sort of bigger terms and more more
ambitious musically terms.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Maybe I just think it says I think the writing
is just so good that it is it ends up
being ambitious. But I think the ambition was to make
a great punk rock record, which in itself is ambitious
but also not right. It's also like we're just making.

Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
Well some some might say ambitious punk rock is almost
an oxymoron, but I guess Dookie really puts the light
of that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
Yeah, exactly, I mean that's exactly it's it's almost an oxymoron,
but it also is because we all know that that
like at its core, you know, punk rock is political
and is the underbelly scratching at the proletariat. I'm telling
them to go fuck themselves for real reasons. You know

(01:02:29):
that that part is real and it is ambitious, and
it's also real and ambitious that we're not going to
shy away from any hardship or anything, but we're going
to look at our troubles head on and we're going
to describe them, and we're going to talk about them.
And that's why I always thought that the lyrics on
Douchie itself were I'm not going to say overlooked, but
I would say maybe under written about, like like under

(01:02:52):
publicized to a degree. How good they were, well, I think.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Yeah, if you're a man, I have this really vivid
memory of it. Must have been right when the record came out.
I was too young to really get it, and I
was driving in the car with my dad and Longview
came on the radio, and as soon as the word
masturbation came out of his mouth, he lunged for the
dial and changed the channel and I didn't get to
hear the rest of the song until later. Obviously, it
made me much more interested in it but I think

(01:03:17):
that if you were you know, a square at that point,
or just you know, if you had different criteria for
like what counted as good lyrics in that moment, it
would be easy to write off some of those lyrics
as being immature or unseerious in some way. And I
think one of the amazing side effects of the record

(01:03:38):
doing so well is that it forces everyone to consider
it seriously. You have to look at those lyrics as
real rock lyrics, not bullshit, not a joke, not some
kids fucking around, deliberate choices made by artists, and they really,
you know, they stand up to that kind of analysis,
And I'm glad that people have, you know, learned to

(01:04:00):
reconsider You mixed the record twice, Am I right about that?

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
Yeah? It was just you know, this story might have
been publicized or not. But the idea is we went
from the Studio A at Fantasy to Studio B and
maybe a little bit of Studio C at one point,
and then we took it to Studio D. And Studio
D was not a room that was made in the sixties.
It was or seventies, early seventies. It was a room

(01:04:24):
that was built in the eighties. And there was this thing.
At that point there was there was a concept for
a control room that was called a base compression ceiling,
and that was very foreign to us based on the
rooms that we had been working on before. And we
were using the house engineer Neil King. This was fantastic.
He worked at Fantasy and he was like the house engineer,

(01:04:47):
so we used him because I thought he was great.
So let's go in and mix the record, and a
weird thing happened. So a base compression ceiling, it's kind
of maybe difficult to describe, but basically the ceiling over
your head while you're sitting at the desk has like
a drop down angle, so that the lowest point is

(01:05:08):
directly over your head, and then it's almost like it
veers up higher both behind you and forward right. So
the idea is the energy that's coming out of the
speakers is going to build up and then be shot
down towards towards your ears. So any little move you
make with an EQ or a reverb or anything you're
adding sounds like, oh my god, you did so much,

(01:05:31):
because it's like putting a microscope. So then we were
doing things to the record, and then we would make mixes,
take it to the car and go, what the hell,
that's not what it sounds like. That doesn't sound like
what we want our record to sound like. And we
finished the mixes and we were like, maybe we're just
I don't know. We couldn't figure it out. So a
week or two later, I was like, oh my god,

(01:05:52):
these mixes aren't happening. They're not good. I know the
record's good, the mixes aren't happening. And I went to
Warners and I went to and I said, we got
to mix it, and they were like, where should we
mix it? And I said, well, I know you guys
liked the mixes of the muffs, which was I think
it was called Studio four, a little tiny room with
a little need desk in it at Devonshire Studios in
North Hollywood. That room rang true to me. And I

(01:06:15):
also said, why don't we get this guy, Jerry Finn
to be our second engineer because I thought he was
really cool and I was able to get Jerry. He
was making like, you know, three bucks an hour, and
he was running getting coffee and stuff. I just thought
he was a cool dude and he was learning there
because see Devonshire studios, even though we were in the
worst room in Devonshire. We were in like a basically

(01:06:38):
equivalent of a closet with a little knave in there.
Next Door to us was Mick Azowski on a big
SSL some other you know, Mick Iszowski, a guy who's mixed,
you know, one of the great mixers of all time,
you know, mixed Earth Went and Fire and Whitney Houston
and you know fucking Bruce Springsy, I don't know, all
kinds of stuff, brilliant, brilliant mixer. And Jerry had been

(01:06:59):
picking up tricks from Mick and all these other guys,
and I was picking up tricks from Mick two. But
I would say, Jerry, what do you think of this
kick drum sound? He goes, you know, why don't you
strap this across it little API with the sliders, which
is notoriously very hard to use. He goes, let me try,
and I go, yo, go ahead, do it. And then
I'm like, oh Jesus Christ, I stay to it. This
guy's a fucking better mixer than us. This guy's fucking great.

(01:07:22):
I was like, Jerry, why don't we just mix this
thing together? Well? Hi, are you so at the end,
we gave him the credit it says mixed by Jerry
Finnrob Kallo and Green Day, because we all we all
had our hands on it, we were all doing it.
But he obviously, you know, his history has proven he
turned out to be a genius mixer, producer guy. He
ended up producing Blink one, eighty two and some forty

(01:07:44):
one or whatever it was that other some other things
that he's done. You know, he stayed mixing for me
for the next like three or four years, and then
I was like, dude, you should just branch out. You
know you can do this too. You should just branch out,
just become a producer in your own right, because I
think you'll be able to do it. You were right,
And I was really proud of him, and and also

(01:08:04):
just I felt proud of myself also that like I
helped this kid get to a place where he was
buying million dollar houses. Fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
And I mean he made Enema of the State, which
is a real formative record in my life and sounds amazing.
And the more I listened to it, I still hear
little touches, little choices, little additions that are just all
such sonic candy and we have you to thank for that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
He was great, you know, I will thank you. I
you know, we we definitely rubbed off on each other.
There was there was a good mix of tricks and
things that you know, I brought to the table, he
brought to the table, and it was a perfect storm
at the right time. And we also I had him mix.
I went back up shortly thereafter. I made a record
with a Jawbreaker called Dear You, which was which is

(01:08:51):
now sort of you know, in the halls of you know,
maybe it's lesser known, but it's one of the great
formative email records. A lot of people when they when
they go what's the greatest email records of all time,
deer U is usually in the top three or five
or whatever. Yeah, And that was the same team that
was Neil King engineering me at Fantasy and then me
coming down to mix with Jerry Finn.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):
Great shit, great team.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
Yeah, that's a good one. I missed Jerry desperately because
he was His mixes were still to this day, I
still absolutely love listening to them, and I sometimes wish
that he you know, I mean I often wish that
he was around, you know, he died premature you know,
he had a brain aneurysm or something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
Yeah, one of those really tragic out of nowhere things.

Speaker 2 (01:09:37):
Yeah, just out of nowhere, just you know, And it
really sucked because he was such a talent behind the board.

Speaker 1 (01:09:44):
But anyway, well, God bless Jerry Finn and God our soul.
At least we have the records and at least we
have you know that we do a document of his brilliance.
And they wouldn't have happened like that without him.

Speaker 2 (01:09:55):
Yeah, for sure, he made his mark. We were struggling
without him, for sure, and he but we recognize this
talent really quick on Doochie.

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
Soon thereafter, So did the world? What did it? How quickly?
From the inside? Did it feel like like when you
had the finished record in hand and you walked into
the warners to show everyone that you had signed this band,
you'd produced this record. I mean, you might not have
known it was going double diamond, but did you know
it was a real hell of a thing.

Speaker 2 (01:10:21):
Two things happened that one was really great and one
was at the beginning not great, but then it turned
out to be great. So one was there's this great
gal Wendy Griffiths. She was the Warner Brothers promotion person
for videos. She was the video promotion and she said
she came to me. She goes, you know, grunge has

(01:10:41):
been going for a long time and the music is
very slow paced, and all of the videos are very
gray and white and black, and they're all about these
very serious things. And the channel is basically looking to say, like,
can we get something with a little bit of a
sense of humor and a little color and maybe a
little pace. And I was like, oh my god, I

(01:11:02):
think I have that right here. That's exactly what Green
Day is. Faster pace, a little more color, a sense
of humor, doesn't take itself so seriously even though it
is serious. The second thing was I delivered the record
to the because back then the only way people really
found out about records for real was on radio. Radio
was the only place you could find it unless you
went to a record store and you were just you know,

(01:11:23):
looking in the bins and someone would It was basically
word of mouth, or you could see a show, but
to really get the masses, you had to have radio.
So I played the record for the radio department and
the guy says, to me, it sounds so small sounds
like you mixed it on a Fisher price board. I
was like, okay, a Fisher price were Oh my god,

(01:11:45):
you know and I said, no, it's mix. He goes,
is it mixed? And I said no, it's mixed. And
I said, but listen, you know, there's a precedent for
this kind of music. It's new. It's actually the president
comes from punk rock, and the beats per minute are
much faster, so there's no way it's going to sound
as thick and heavy as the slower grooves of grunge.
But I do think that this is the way that
this music is supposed to sound, and I think it'll

(01:12:07):
sound fresh. You know. You tell me what you think,
you know. And the guy was so great. His name
is Steve Tipp. He was such a great guy that
he went, oh, yeah, you know what, You're right. This
is punk rock music and it is faster and I
get it, which is amazing, right if you think about
how great that is that your promotion guy would start
by saying it's not a Fisher price board and then

(01:12:29):
coming back to you and saying, I get it. You know,
God bless him. He's amazing for that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:35):
Yeah, for a radio guy, especially they're not always famous
for changing their mind about stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
He's gold in my book. I mean, he you know,
he did the right shit. And so then we went
to work and Longview was the first single, and long
story short nine months. It took nine months to climb
the charts. Nine months of working.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
It one full human gestation.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
Yeah, and it came on the ninth month it was
at number one, and then you're off. But there were
many times it was touch and go, you know, because
you had to like, you know, maybe in Cincinnati or something. Oh,
people like it in Cincinnati. The phone, you know, we
got seven calls overnight play that Green Day song. Sometimes
I would call KA Rok myself and disguise my voice
and I'd call from different numbers. Can you play that
Green Days only? Oh? You know, I was listening to that.

(01:13:22):
You have a song called long View. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):
I was in K Rock once and they had like
up on the wall they had like, do not take
calls from the following people because people call in and
say any old thing or get you know, do pervy
shit or whatever, And maybe maybe you were on that
wall is like do not accept calls from men with
this voice?

Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
Yeah, I definitely was not on that call because on
the list, because they never found out it was. And
I didn't call that much. And the only thing I
ever did, and I even felt guilty about doing it,
was maybe ten or twelve times I called and requested,
can I hear Longview? Well?

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
Who doesn't want to hear Longview?

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
Yeah? Exactly, And so what if I disguise my voice
a little?

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
It's all rock and roll? Listen.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Yeah, you know. And that was the only thing that
was the only thing I could do to chip in
to do promotion, you know, I mean, what else I
can't do anything?

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
Well, you did a lot as far as making the record,
what the record became, So I think that you can
rest easy that you put in your share. Well, listen, Rob,
you have been more than generous with your time over
two days to boot, so I will not take too
much more of it. We always wrap up our episodes
of major label debut by asking what we consider to

(01:14:32):
be sort of the most vital question when it comes
to understanding a piece of music, or really any art,
which is of course in the studio while you were
recording Dookie, what were you eating?

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
Oh my god, that's a funny question, because we were
talking about this just the other day. So you got
to remember that we were all broke. We like, you know,
I made five hundred bucks a week. I didn't have anything.
No one had anything. They might have given us a
little bit of a an allowance, like twenty bucks a
day or something, you know, maybe fifteen, I don't know,

(01:15:03):
but I had the same thing pretty much every day
until every once in a while it was okay for
me to use the Warner's credit card and I would
take people out to dinner, you know. I was allowed
every once in a while.

Speaker 1 (01:15:15):
To t and e, you know, use the old expense account.

Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
But I got in my car or I would walk
to what at the time was a brand new place
called Noah's Bagels. There was only a few of them
in the world at this time, and I could get
a bagel cream geese with tomato and cubrumber or whatever
the hell it was. They were big, and a snapple
and that was breakfast and lunch. Oh yeah, that's it.

(01:15:39):
Then right around you know, we would probably get to
the studio at eleven or twelve and probably go till
about eight or nine, right doing a ten eleven hour
day and then where I remember going to the most
was this place called in It's still there. It was
called Gordo's Taqueria, which is right close to like College

(01:16:02):
or Nashby or something. It's like right there. I would
get the Burrito Supreme. I would get the carnitas burrito,
which was like almost as big as like like half
of football. And I remember just getting to that place
and being so freaking hungry because we had ne eaton
in nine ten hours, so we were pretty happy. The

(01:16:24):
other the other interesting thing that we that I never
at that point, I was not a coffee drinker. I
didn't even know that, you know, sort of like designer
coffees or whatever, because you got to remember this as
like ninety three. So also on that same corner of
Ashby in College or wherever it was, but there was
the very first I think maybe the one of the
original Petee coffees, which was like having a Starbucks. Right

(01:16:48):
this is before that whole trend it started, I think,
you know, because northern California had this stuff going maybe
before La. I was coming from La so I didn't
so ayways, I went into Pete's with the guys in
school coffee and we would get, you know, a large whatever,
and the caffeine for a person that was not caffeine
tolerant at all. As a matter of fact, that caffeine

(01:17:09):
was like a foreign substance to me. I would have
one coffee and I thought my frickin' head was going
to explode, and I wouldn't shut up for four hours
a little bit, talking, talking, talking, doll because I think
I was like twenty nine years old or whatever when
I was making this record, so I'm still pretty young.
Caffeine was like just an explosion of goodness, Like, oh

(01:17:30):
my god, this is the most amazing thing ever.

Speaker 1 (01:17:33):
Green Day's Doochie, fueled by Noah's Bagels, Pete's Coffee, and
Carneis burritos.

Speaker 2 (01:17:39):
And yeah, from Gordo's, which is still there.

Speaker 1 (01:17:42):
I'm going to visit next time in town.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
I think the Noah's is still there too. I think
that actually still there.

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
Thanks so much, Rob. I mean, it's just so cool
to talk to you about this record. It is, to
my ears, it is the perfect major label debut. It
exactly embodies the best case scenario when you take a
band and you match them with the resources of a
bigger label. It's just like, that's it. This is what
you want. You want something that is dis much a

(01:18:10):
realization of like the band's whole thing and an elevation
of the band's whole thing. And as I keep saying
that the proof isn't the pudding, the record went on
to great things. The band went on to great things.
They're one of the bands that will live forever. And
it's a record that will live forever. So you've heard
congratulations on it a few times in your life, I suspect,
but allow me to add my voice to the chorus

(01:18:30):
and thank you for it. It kicks ass.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
What a gift. Thank you so much. This has been
a pleasure, And I appreciate you guys reaching out about
Dookie because it is certainly an amazing, giant milestone in
my life and basically started what became my actual real career,
which is a huge thing. You know that if you
say you have your health and your family and your work,
pretty good work, it's a pretty good one. Yeah, thank

(01:18:52):
you so much. I appreciate you guys.

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
That's what I'm talking about. Rob Cavallo, producer of Green Days,
Doochie talking about it. I don't know if you could
tell from the eagerness with which I trampled on every
one of Rob's answers and brief pauses. But I was
just over the moon to be talking to that guy
about that record. What a treat for me, and as always,

(01:19:22):
just even better than I expected it to be. Like,
I was listening back, and I kept hearing myself teeing
him up to tell rock stories. You know, the way
you'll watch like a VH one documentary about making an album,
and they'll have all these tight little anecdotes that are
just impossibly perfect about the moment when the most famous

(01:19:42):
thing from the record got recorded, and how you know
how they just they knew right then. I knew the
song needed one more thing, and I said to the drummer,
you got to do something that's like and then I'll
say some weird esoteric brand of things, and somehow the
drummer will understand perfectly and execute the famous drum fill,
and the rest, as they say, is history. I didn't
even intend to get those stories out of Rob, but

(01:20:04):
I was obviously jonesing for them on some subconscious level. However,
Rob is too wise for that. He wasn't myth making
at all. He was telling what really sounded like the truth,
even when the truth was mundane, like oh I wasn't
there when they did that, or oh I don't really
remember how that got decided, or oh no, I had
nothing to do with that. That was all Billy Joe

(01:20:25):
or whatever. And that is so refreshing to me as
a sentimental guy and a guy who's who's looking for
those tight, you know, satisfying little nuggets of story that
you would get in Rolling Stone magazine or whatever. Rob,
like many producers, is not given to that kind of sentimentality.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
He is.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
Focusing on the music. He's focusing on making the songs good.
And wouldn't you know it, When you do that, it
seems to yield pretty positive results, or at least it
most certainly did in the case of green Day's Doochy,
a record which you've probably heard recently. You've probably at
least heard a song from Dukie on the radio or
in the mall or any old place.

Speaker 2 (01:21:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
It's so famous. The music is everywhere. But when something
gets that famous, it's easy to stop hearing it. You
just hear Longview and your brain goes, yes, that's Longview.
We can just shortcut to what we know about longview,
and so if this conversation with Rob got your interest
up in the record, let me just really encourage you
to sit down with headphones or good loud speakers, or

(01:21:30):
even in your car with no distractions where you can
really focus in on the music and dial in on
the individual instruments and the choices that are made. Try
if you can to listen to Dukie with fresh ears,
because beyond its iconic legendary boundaryless brilliance, it is just
like a really really well written, well produced, all around

(01:21:55):
brilliantly conceived, an executed piece of art piece of music,
and it rewards deep listening just as much as it
rewards hearing from the pool party for backyards down there
you go. I loved talking to Rob Cavallo about making
that record. I love getting to listen to that record
a bunch, and really, you know, listen hard to that
record a bunch. It's one of the great things about

(01:22:16):
doing this podcast is it forces me to do some
real deep listening, and deep listening turns out to be
one of my favorite things, and that's why I'm always
trying to push it on you as well. However, that's
probably enough for the episode today. Thank you so much
to Rob Cavallo for his extremely generous appearance on the show.
I mean, he gave us two afternoons of his time,

(01:22:37):
and he was just so great to talk to. Just
a truly wonderful guy and a straight up genius of
record production as well. So truly an honor and an experience.
I will never forget to get to talk to him.
Thanks to Alan Siegel as well. Alan linked us up
with Rob and so facilitated all of the stuff that
I am gushing about. Alan also recently published a book

(01:22:59):
called Stupid TV, Be More Funny, a book all about
the Simpsons, and I'm going to try and get Alan
on the show. I'll find a music cook so that
we can talk about the Simpsons, because honestly, that's all
I really want to talk about. This record stuff's pretty
cool in all, but let's talk about America's favorite family.
So keep your eye out for that one in the meantime.
Major Label Debut is produced by John Paul Bullook and

(01:23:22):
Josh Hook. Guys, thank you so much for your wonderful
work and your beautiful friendship, which I value so much.
Our theme music is by Greg Allsop. Greg we salute you.
We celebrate you today and every day. We salute and
celebrate all of you who are listening, and all of
you have yet to discover the podcast. If you are listening, please,
you know, share it around. Someone's got to be interested

(01:23:44):
in this. Everybody loves Green Day and we need listeners.
I would like to do the podcast for a long time,
and I would like to get cooler and cooler and
cooler guests like Rob Cavallo and I feel like they
pick up the phone more readily if your podcast is
big and successful, So please help us make the podcast
big and successful. It's not for my ego. It's not

(01:24:05):
because now I'm not in a band anymore, and I'm
desperate to replace the adulation and validation that I got
from that with a new source of those things as
quickly as possible, like a starving drowning man, drowning man,
a man dying of thirst in the desert, so that
I'm doing still bits like this at the end of
the podcast, even as I stop making any sense. But
for now, that's the end of the episode of the podcast.

(01:24:27):
Major Label Debut will be back with more tales from
the intersection of art and commerce. Stay tuned,

All Episodes

Green Day - "Dookie" with Rob Cavallo

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Green Day - "Dookie" with Rob Cavallo