Billie Joe Armstrong On the Fire and Freedom Behind "21st Century Breakdown"

For David Fricke's feature "Green Day Fights On" check out our new issue, on stands now.

The scrappy punks who became superstars 15 years ago with Dookie are now America's most ambitious rock band. For our new cover, David Fricke visits Green Day at home in Oakland to get the story behind their epic new punk opera 21st Century Breakdown. In the first of three exclusive Q&As with each bandmember, Fricke speaks with singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong about the group's darkest days and leaving it all onstage.

Last night, I saw you perform all of your new record and an entire second set of hits. How have you changed as a performer from the band's early days — when the sets were shorter and the songs more simple?
It's developed over time. When Tré first got in the band, we thought we were pretty tight. But we weren't communicating fully. There was a self-consciousness onstage. We ended up going to Europe for the first time in '91, and there was a language barrier. We're playing in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain. We played in Poland. And there was no communication at all. We played 64 shows in three months, all on borrowed gear. At that point, we started getting good. Because it became, how do you communicate with the crowd without talking to them? We started going up there, wearing dresses, anything to get a reaction out of people, get them engaged.

You do your best under wartime conditions?
Yeah. By the time we got back from that tour, playing for 300 to a thousand people, we had mastered that. We got really ambitious around Dookie. Things were starting to happen. But then this guilt complex came in, around Insomniac. I didn't know what our ambitions were. Or we felt like we weren't allowed to have ambitions. That period, '94, '95, was all about the introverted rock star struggling with his demons. I couldn't relate to that, but somehow I got caught up in it, and it didn't work for us at all.

Then around Nimrod, we started playing festivals more. As a performer, as a lead singer, I wanted to project. That goes back to the Gilman Street days [the legendary Berkeley punk club and co-op]. There was a lot of rock theater going on there: people heckling, street theater, trying to get worlds to meet.