“Basket Case” was Green Day’s turning point

In February 1994, “Dookie”, Green Day’s third album, was released. That was the record that made the band led by Billie Joe Armstrong make a leap in quality, taking them out of the punk music circuits and leading them to big festivals and huge arenas. . It was recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley with Rob Cavallo producing. In hindsight, knowing the entire unfolding of the story, everything seems to have been easy, it seems that it could only have gone that way. How could “Basket Case” not be a success? In reality it wasn’t that obvious.

“Basket Case” was not an immediate success. Upon its release, on 29 November 1994, thirty years ago, the single stopped at number 55 in the UK charts, before quickly dropping back down, while the album “Dookie”, at first, did not go beyond the number position 141 on the US charts. What changed the game was Green Day’s incendiary performance for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Woodstock in August 1994 which led to massive programming of the “Basket Case” video on MTV. The single was reissued in Britain and reached number thirteen in the chart in February 1995. Billie Joe Armstrong told VH1 of “Basket Case”: “It got to the point where I wasn’t singing the words anymore. People were doing it themselves. .”

The frontman of the Californian band said of the song: “”Basket Case” is about anxiety attacks and the feeling of going crazy. At times, I probably was just going crazy. I’ve suffered from panic disorders my whole life. I thought I was freaking out. The only way I knew what the hell was going on was to write a song about it. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I had panic disorder.” The singer further stated, “I write a lot of my lyrics in the first person, even if they’re not about me. I’d rather write shit about myself than write shit about someone else.”

Until “Basket Case”, Green Day was a modestly successful band and played, as mentioned, in the Californian punk circuits. From that point on they found themselves playing arena tours with a totally different audience that many times was only interested in the “Basket Case”. Recalls Green Day drummer Tré Cool: “When it came out, we had no control over who liked it. We had a bunch of marines telling us, ‘Yeah, great, you’re my favorite fucking band, bro!’ You’re not in control, so you’re like, ‘Oh, great, whatever.’ We were playing too many Coliseum-style shows. All these rinks in Europe and the US and Canada. After a while, it gets really impersonal it turned into, ‘Okay, let’s play “Basket Case” again.

The song was bringing Green Day a much wider audience, but it was raising more than a few doubts about their most genuinely punk foundation from their beginnings. So much so that at Gilman Street, the Berkeley club they considered home, an anonymous person scratched a particularly eloquent message on the bathroom wall: “Billie Joe Must Die.” Green Day reacted violently against the legacy of “Dookie”, so much so that Billie Joe declared: “We’re not going to try to write ‘Basket Case’ twelve times in a row on one album.”

So in October 1995 Green Day released their fourth album “Insomniac”, much darker and less accessible than the previous one. Nowadays the band has come to terms with “Basket Case” and says they’re enjoying playing it again. The singles following the release, in 2004, of their other highly successful album, “American Idiot” (read the review here), helped overcome the ‘discomfort’ generated by their hit. Billie Joe Armstrong has finally accepted the fact that “Basket Case” is an incredible song and that after all this time we can make peace with it.