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Green Day is most unlikely punk band in history

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Musician Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day

Billie Joe Armstrong and his bandmates in Green Day have always been contrarians.

Appearing March 25 at the Petersen Events Center in Oakland, Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool have rarely followed conventions. From Grammy Awards to Broadway, Green Day is the most unlikely punk band in the history of the genre.

Here's a short history of how Green Day carved its own path to success.

When Armstrong and Dirnt formed the first incarnation of Green Day, Sweet Children, in 1986, they were 14 years old. By the time the band released its first album in 1991, “1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hour,” it had developed a loyal fan base that adhered to the punk ethos of raw, often abrasive music as the perfect distillation of youthful angst.

A second album, “Kerplunk,” in 1992, cemented Green Day's status as avatars of the Northern California punk scene.

Then came “Dookie.” Released on Reprise Records in 1994, it vaulted Green Day from the underground to widespread exposure via videos on MTV. Suburban kids across the country became diehard fans, attracted by the adolescent views expressed in songs such as “Longview,” “Basket Case” and “When I Come Around.”

The review in Rolling Stone magazine was succinct: “If Pearl Jam were too epic for you, Nirvana too oblique, if your suburban teen inertia sprang from tedium not trauma — well, these nagging brats were here to spill hair dye on your living room carpet.”

“Dookie” paved the way for bands such as Fall Out Boy, New Found Glory, the Offspring and Sum 41 in the same way that Nirvana's “Nevermind” opened the gates for grunge bands. And in the process, Green Day became … mainstream. A segment of its fan base that flocked to the Alternative Music Foundation, a DIY club on Gilman Street in Berkeley, disavowed the band's success as antithetical to punk. But when the Pandoran box of success opens there's no turning back.

The band's next album, 1995's “Insomniac,” cemented Green Day's standing as populist punks, yielding the hits “J.A.R.” and “Brain Stew/Jaded.” After “Nimrod” was released in 1997, Green Day's pop culture status was further cemented by way of the inclusion of the song “Time of Your Life” on the last “Seinfeld” show and two episodes of “E.R.”

“American Idiot,” released in 2004, was Green Day's most celebrated album, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard album charts and eventually winning the Grammy Award for best rock album and record of the year for the song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” Reviews of the album were mixed. Pitchfork called it “the political concept album you didn't know they had in them. While never very lyrically insightful or poetic, ‘American Idiot' is certainly the band's most ambitious record to date, with a consistent narrative spun throughout its 13 tracks.”

The BBC was more effusive, calling the album “truly inventive and emotive stuff, and arguably Green Day's best work to date. Champions, indeed.”

Another Grammy Award for best rock album was earned in 2010 for “21st Century Breakdown.” But perhaps the most controversial Green Day experiment was the transformation of “American Idiot” for the stage. The play opened in April 2010 at the St. James Theatre on Broadway and ran for 427 performances. The cast recording album won a Grammy for best musical show album, and reviews were generally good, and sometimes effusive.

Writing in the New York Times, Charles Isherwood called it, “a pulsating portrait of wasted youth that invokes all the standard genre conventions — bring on the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, please! — only to transcend them through the power of its music and the artistry of its execution, the show is as invigorating and ultimately as moving as anything I've seen on Broadway this season.”

The play has since been performed in Canada, the U.K. and Sweden, and is scheduled to debut in Rio de Janeiro and Queensland, Australia, later this year.

Rege Behe is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.