Billie Joe Armstrong: Green Day is first band actually from the Bay Area to headline Outside Lands sfchronicle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sfchronicle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Oakland record store and label 1-2-3-4 Go! Records owner Steve Stevenson on how the long-gestating project, featuring members of Green Day, finally became reality.
Murray Bowles
Operation Ivy only existed for two years, from May 1987 through May 1989, but in that time, the Berkeley, California, band forever altered the future of both punk and ska. They weren’t the first to mix these genres, but the band made up of singer Jesse Michaels, drummer Dave Mello, and future Rancid members Tim “Lint” Armstrong and Matt “McCall” Freeman, on guitar and bass, respectively completely changed the rules for what was possible in each, inspiring thousands of others to follow their lead.
The band didn’t exist in a vacuum: The late-Eighties East Bay punk scene they sprung from was fertile ground for creativity. At the heart of it was 924 Gilman St., an all-ages, all-volunteer-run venue that held its first show on December 31st, 1986. Founder Tim Yohannan, who also launched influential zine Maximum Rocknroll,
Welcome to paradise: A British Green Day superfan s punk pilgrimage to the East Bay
Charlotte Bailey
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Writer Charlotte Bailey on her rented Dodge Charger.Charlotte Baile
Cruising down Interstate 580, I swung my rented Dodge Charger off the exit ramp to Berkeley and downtown Oakland, Green Day’s 1994 album Dookie blaring from the stereo. One track in particular seemed poignant for the pilgrimage I was undertaking:
“Pay attention to the cracked streets and the broken homes
Some call it slums, some call it nice
I want to take you through a wasteland I like to call my home
Welcome to Paradise”