The Drum Fill That Ruined My Life

Reflections on 30 years of Green Day’s Dookie, the album that changed everything.

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FILE UNDER: Nostalgic Reminiscences

DUCKA-DUCK, DUCKA-DUCK. I declare I don’t care no more… I’m burnin’ up and out and growing bored…

I try not to traffic in the easy hyperbole into which so much culture writing naturally falls, but I don’t think it’s too much to say that those 1.5 seconds of the song “Burnout,” the opening track on Green Day’s Dookie album, altered my life forever. What kind of person would I even be had I never heard them? It’s hard to even imagine, and it’s not for lack of trying.

I take it back, 1.5 seconds actually is hyperbolic. In truth, it was those 1.5 seconds at the beginning, combined with the extended drum fill/drum solo sort of thing that starts at one minute 23 of the same song. The part that sounds like an octopus in full skateboard pads fell down about three flights worth of really steep stairs.

dumpdidldumpdiddlumpbump-*CRASH* / (*the whole fucking band kicks back in*)

I just about shit my pants the first time I heard that. That’s how amped I was. I tended towards easy excitement in those days, but even now as a 40+-years-old-man, the same drum fill makes me feel like I could flatten a brick wall with a shoulder charge. It gets me fucking PUMPED.

In that moment, I knew, this is how I want to feel EVERY time I listen to music.

The older me feels compelled to chide the younger me. To say “you were only 13, you hadn’t done anything yet! Firsts are a dime a dozen when you’re a little kid!”

But at that stage, and even now looking back on it, “I didn’t know it could be like this” was a profound realization.

It almost goes without saying, but as a kid growing up in boring town no one had heard of in a dirthole in the middle of the Central Valley, I did not know what “punk rock” was before Green Day. Even when the drum fill kicked in, I didn’t have a word for it. I just knew it was something different, and that I liked it. It was the most powerful gateway drug I’d ever experienced up until that point of life, and probably still is. The drum fill on “Burnout” and the uncontrollable laughter escaping my body when I first heard Adam Sandler’s “The Buffoon and the Dean of Admissions” while sitting on the floor of Clint Melville’s tree house are the two seminal moments of my childhood.

“Dookie” wasn’t the first album I jammed out to. It wasn’t even the first CD I ever bought. I brought George Harrison’s “I Got My Mind Set On You” for Show And Tell in kindergarten (still slaps, didn’t know it was a cover until like a year ago). When I was 8 or 9, I bought my first recorded music, when Jon Prince convinced me to pay him eight dollars in piggy bank change for the privilege of recording my own copy of his Vanilla Ice “To The Extreme” cassette tape. Which we accomplished by putting a tape recorder next to a boombox speaker. It sounded terrible, and not just because it was Vanilla Ice. My parents begrudgingly bought me the non-bootlegged version for the following birthday, though by then, I had nearly lost interest.

I’d been to rock concerts before — Tom Petty, Pearl Jam — and been intimately familiar with other bands’ insert art. My Aerosmith “Get A Grip” CD had little cut outs of nipples on it. I’m pretty sure I bought “Dookie” because I saw the “Basketcase” video on MTV, which was still at the peak of its cultural power.

I had an inkling that it was something different, and not just because they were the first band I’d seen that didn’t have long hair. Long hair was part of the essential rock star uniform then. Even the grunge bands that famously destroyed “hair metal” were still objectively hairy. Green Day (and what an odd, arcane moniker that was, a band named after a “day?” Huh?) looked like weird little human tadpoles by comparison. Everyone reflexively just assumed they were British. Who was this turbo gremlin with the junk yard guitar? It seemed worth checking out. I bought the CD from Tower Records on Bullard.

The initial inkling crystallized with that drum fill. And then, boom, that was it. Much like when you buy a new shirt and you love it so much that all your older shirts become relegated to second best, all my hair band CDs instantly moved a step back on the music shelf. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that a 20-year-old Billy Joe Armstrong’s syrupy odes to incel rage and jacking off would mean more to a 13 year old rural white kid than Steven Tyler’s hillbilly scatting about statutory rape. Which isn’t to say that Aerosmith doesn’t rock, most of the Get A Grip album still slaps. But with Green Day, it was like I somehow understood it all at a cellular level, even without being able to make out 60% of the words.

Certainly I liked the ones I could make out — “bored,” “fucking,” “masturbation” “shit town” — but it wasn’t really the lyrics that I responded to. It was more the general sense of condensing all your complicated feelings into a white hot ball and letting it spew out at a million miles per hour. Hey ho, let’s go. That was easier to relate to than a grunge guy mumbling about heroin withdrawals or Steven Tyler doing backflips and screeching something about trying to fuck his sister. This thing was called “punk?” Well then, I guessed, I was a punk.

I didn’t instantly go out and dye my hair green or grow a mohawk. I was still mostly way too much of a pussy for that. But in some not-insignificant way that’s impossible to imagine in the current era, I became a punk. I quickly sought out and adopted more, even punker bands than Green Day. NOFX, Rancid, Bad Religion, Propaghandi. And then all the older bands the music magazines told me had “influenced” them. My friendship with the guy who would one day go on to officiate my wedding was cemented when I stalled my manual transmission, hand-me-down 1985 Honda Accord three times in the middle of the street on the way to waterpolo practice while blasting “God Save the Queen.”

You like the Sex Pistols too? Wow, weird. Uncanny. It must be fate. Did we just become best friends?

What the fuck did we know about a queen? Absolutely nothing, but the language of “fuck you” is universal. Music writers mostly seemed to hate this stuff, or say it was stupid and juvenile and derivative. Not having a punk phase almost seemed a prerequisite for being a music critic. “Oh, you like ‘punk,’ do you? Check out this band Sonic Youth, they’ll blow your mind.”

My Sex Pistols friend and I rented some concert DVD that had Sonic Youth on it. I remember distinctly a concert scene of one of them banging on his guitar with two pieces of metal, producing a wall of shrieking feedback. We both looked at each other and thought, “is this the worst dogshit you’ve ever heard or is it just me?”

To be a punk was to know that all those supposedly erudite opinions didn’t matter. You like this? Why? Fuck you, that’s why.

That most people didn’t seem to understand made it that much better. When Francisco, a beanpole of a Mexican dude on my basketball team, who was always rocking Buffalo Bills apparel for inexplicable reasons, asked for my headphones that were playing “Insomniac” in the back of the team van, he listened for a few seconds, and then handed them back to me. “You’re a faggot,” he said calmly.

I don’t think he meant it hatefully. In fact he was kind of chuckling when he said it, and I didn’t take any special offense. I kind of chuckled at it myself. I didn’t quite understand the connection. The song “Coming Clean” is supposedly Billy Joe’s sonic admission of bisexuality, but that part of it went over my head for a full 30 years before The Ringer’s Oral History of Dookie and the advent of LyricsGenius.com.

In retrospect, most of the most vocal, earliest adopting “punks” at my high school turned out later to be bi or queer in some way, and in fact the very name for the genre supposedly comes from a term for guys who trade sex for cigarettes in prison. But again, file under things I was oblivious to at the time. I just sort of knew that being a punk meant not caring if people called you gay or lame for liking it (adult me knows that those two things are not synonymous, but they basically were to teenagers in the early nineties). I had no idea at the time that the band were all suburban white kids from crappy California towns just like me — El Sobrante, Pinole, Willits — that the drummer who sounded like a tumbling octopus even went to the same high school as my cousin. But I didn’t need to; it already made perfect sense.

As a grown adult with children, I would love to pretend this was all just a phase, the natural snotty rebellious feeling-too-much-ness that all early teenagers go through before they discover intoxicants and getting laid. Deep down though, I know that’s not quite true. There’s a big “fuck you” fused to my soul that I can never quite shake, even when I try. I wonder how much it has affected me as a person.

One of the biggest sticking points for me as a working adult has always been my bone-deep intolerance of corporate speak and polite euphemism. I think I discovered writing mostly as a tool for cutting through bullshit, a tool that was immediately coopted to produce more and better bullshit in the job market. I wrote ad and web copy, for plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists, lawyers. I edited brochures for college loan servicers. I conceived banner ads for a porny early social network. Before my insolent movie blog became a career, I had never managed to keep a job for more than nine months. When I got laid off 16 years later, it felt in some sense like a reversion to the mean.

I’m not naive or narcissistic enough to think that I’m the only person in the world who hates bullshit and selling things and being lied to by powerful people or pretending that the boss’s ideas are good, actually. I’m fairly certain that the main thing that separates me from people who are able to obtain and keep jobs in the professional and managerial sectors is that they can just pretend more convincingly. Gee, boss, great idea! Golly, this business model sure sounds great when you put it like that!

I’ve said all these things. I know that swallowing your genuine self in order to get along is just the tradeoff for being able to earn the money to buy yourself the freedom to do what you really want. When bosses showed me their glossy pitch decks for the products they were pretending what I did were to sell to investors and advertisers, my brain told me to force myself to smile along. To pretend to be thrilled. To try to project the attitude that I knew was expected of me. Did my body listen?

The trouble is that when I fake it, no one ever entirely believes it. I can never quite muster the guile required to disguise the internal revulsion I feel. The “fuck you” is etched too deep. Even when I pretend, the bosses see it. “Not brand friendly,” they think. “Not a team player.” “Not sure he’s a culture fit.”

How many times have I lost out on an opportunity or been passed over because of it? Sure, maybe I came by this attitude naturally, and I just happened to find the ADHD music that most matched my ADHD and oppositionally defiant personality when I was first coming into adulthood, as people do. As Rob, Nick Hornby’s music-obsessed protagonist in High Fidelity asks himself, “Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

I don’t pretend to know the answer to that question, which is sort of a modern Zen unanswerable in any case. But when I think back to what made me the way that I am, I truly, honestly can’t think of a better answer, or a more seminal moment, than the first time I heard that drum fill. That goddamned drum fill. Thump diddleumpdiddyump dump CLANG.

I’m not growin’ up, I’m just burrrrnniiiin out…

It’s as true today as it was 30 years ago.