Mike Dirnt on Green Day's Dark, Drunken Path to Rock & Roll Glory

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

Fifteen years ago, Dookie turned the scrappy punks in Green Day into international superstars — now they're America's most ambitious rockers. For our new cover, David Fricke visits the trio at home in Oakland to get the story behind their epic new punk opera 21st Century Breakdown. In the second of three exclusive Q&As with each bandmember, Fricke speaks with bassist Mike Dirnt about the band's near-breakup and tapping into his inner child.

I'll be blunt. I think the new album is better than American Idiot.
We thought it was taboo to say it, but we think we beat it. We know we worked hard enough to beat it. I know Billie did, for sure. It was a test of our patience with one another.

You've made a record about young people at a crucial juncture in their lives — at a time when you are all parents, with kids who will be facing those same issues.
There is an inner child in all of us in the band, especially Billie. Those emotions are reflected in the way you see your own kids. The album is a saturation of their childhood with what we grew up in and where we're at now.

We grew up in an era that was a lot more fucked up on the surface. But things are way more fucked up right now. We have hope with the new president, but he's got a lot of work to do — we've all got a lot of work to do. The kind of things we grew up with was literally the first half of the song "21st Century Breakdown." We grew up in refinery towns, kids going out and getting drunk to all hours of the night. Big-time fighting in the house. Our kids aren't seeing that. But as a kid, I didn't look ahead and think, "There's a mountain of shit I'm going to inherit, severe problems that I'm gonna have to fix.

Those are heavy things. People can police the Internet all they want with their kids, but they can't stop the front page from saying we're at war. Kids see that. They're not stupid, even if they're not talking about it all the time. This record — it's not telling people how it should be. We're telling them how we see it.

Because you started so young as a band, a lot of your mistakes and wrong turns were made in public. What was it like after Dookie, when your albums were not selling so well? Was it hard to accept that, to figure out what was wrong?
With Nimrod and Warning, we were more creative as a band, but we were seeing some of the lowest crowds we'd had since Dookie. We'd go to Europe and play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. It was frustrating. We always said, "If we're packing 500 people in a club, we should be thankful." But we had been packing hockey arenas. It's a blow to your ego.