Welcome to Paradise: The 20th Anniversary of Green Day’s Kerplunk! and the End of Lookout! Records

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of Green Day’s Kerplunk!, I’ve been asked by our writer Matt Kelly to reflect on an album that changed my entire life. I remember exactly where, how and why it did, but it didn’t start with the actual album or the songs, and it didn’t start 20 years ago. It started almost an entire year later, as I was standing on Sunday the 3rd of January, 1993 in front of Sound Exchange on Austin’s The Drag, the hip (I don’t know if it’s hip anymore) stretch of shops across from the University of Texas campus.

On weekends, my stepmom and I would walk The Drag, play some games at Einstein’s Arcade and have hamburgers at Mad Dog and Beans. None of these places have existed for at least a decade but in 1993 they were religious institutions to me, places where I could go that didn’t have the social highschool baggage of the mall, where you could discover independent treasures to spend your unspent Christmas money on (friend and Austinite George Hickman has corrected me that they lasted a little longer: Sound Exchange closed in 2003 and Einstein’s in 2006). So of course I was in front of Sound Exchange, with its Daniel Johnston “Hi, How Are You?” frog mural painted on its outside wall and its front window full of show flyers and musicians looking to form bands. Burned out on endless replays of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Mother’s Milk” this was the place where I could go to dig a little deeper for something to listen to to wile away the hours before school started up again.

So there I was,  staring at a flyer for a concert that coming Wednesday at Austin’s “The Back Room” on East Riverside. A concert I was too young to even go to. The band was called Green Day and they just looked crazy. Their lead singer had dreads and the Kerplunk! album art with a cute punk rock girl and a smiling flower looked just enough like a comic book and Japanese manga to make me want to check it out. And she was holding a smoking gun. Maybe it was just a lighter. And would I have loved to go the show? Honestly, I’d have murdered to go the show.

But, the album would have to be enough (and proved to be more than enough). I couldn’t believe my ears when I listened to it on Sound Exchange’s lone preview station. For the first time in my life it felt like someone had written songs specifically for me. Still a few years from having my first girlfriend or getting a license or having a job or even being acknowledged for being more than a kid, all of the loneliness, impatience, angst and frustration I felt in those days spilled into my ears. The musicianship and production of the songs were equally raw and exhilarating and it was the first time I remember being okay with being happy and angry in equal measure.

What kid hasn’t felt the feelings that 20,000 Lightyears Away sings about? I couldn’t count the hours I spent bored in my room reading fantasy novels just to keep my mind off of girls who completely ignored me in school. Sure, The Ramones sang about these things but they sounded like they were part of a different generation. They dressed and talked like they were a part of a different age. They weren’t mine.

As dangerous, irresponsible and reckless as the thoughts that Welcome to Paradise urges you to think, as a bored kid finding your place in the world why wouldn’t you believe that the abandonment of all your safe surroundings wouldn’t lead to paradise? You just wanted something to change so someone would notice you standing on your own two feet, out from under the protective cage your parents had built for you.

Kerplunk! is steeped in feelings of boredom, frustration and suburban malaise. It was everything I was feeling. It seemed as if Who Wrote Holden Caufield was written about me. Did I know that some of the songs, like Christie Road, were about getting high? Probably. Did I care? No. Why would I? I finally felt a kinship with music, a desire to wrap myself in something and keep it secret. My friends weren’t allowed to be a part of it and neither were my parents until they discovered it for themselves. You had to feel like this in order for it to be appreciated.

The album was 40 minutes of complete release for me and I’ve never been transformed like that since. Even a song like Dominated Love Slave perfectly skewered my developing pubescent feelings of sexuality. And especially being as lovesick as I was at 14 over probably 20 girls at the same time? I’d have done anything and Green Day was making my feelings silly instead of painful. I bought Kerplunk! that day and 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours a week later and worshipped those albums for the next year.

Was I upset when Dookie was released and suddenly everyone knew about my secret band? I don’t even remember. I might have been but I don’t think so. I think I was happy. It was cool to finally be accepted or on the cutting edge of a trend. How could I be upset? I’d have to have been the biggest hypocrite to turn my back on something that had been so cathartic to me and had led me to so many other things. I got my first speeding ticket listening to Green Day’s Insomniac. Nimrod was my freshman year in college. Warning was my summer before grad school. American Idiot was my first year living in Los Angeles and working in the film industry and 21st Century Breakdown was what I was listening to the month that I asked my wife to marry me. In two months, I’ll spend $200 so my wife and I can see the stage version of American Idiot performed here in Los Angeles. Whether you still like Green Day, outgrew them or never really did, I can’t name a band that has effected my life in that same way and it started 19 years ago standing outside of a record store. If I’d discovered Kerplunk! a year later or a year earlier, would my life have turned out the same? I don’t think it could have.

As if 9 paragraphs aren’t enough, let me elaborate a bit more. Feel free to jump off or continue (because this is a pretty good spot for either), but I think that what I’m about to say really illustrates just how profoundly these moments of discovery can be to someone’s life. This is my website so I get to do these things (plus, this website and community probably wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t discovered Kerplunk! at 14 so I think it’s important for me to write down if only for myself). Why don’t you find something from 20 years ago in your past and see if you can do the personal paleontology necessary to see how things somehow led to where they are now. Your life can be changed just as much by positive discovery than the benchmarks of pain that we sometimes choose to mark the years.

The discovery of Kerplunk! wasn’t just the beginnings of my life with a band, it was the beginnings of an entire world of music that would shape my life. Like many people, through Kerplunk! I discovered Lookout! Records, the East Bay record label that released many of the Gilman Street bands of the early 90s. Immediately I was exposed to bands like Operation Ivy, The Mr. T Experience, The Queers, Pansy Division, The Hi-Fives, Screeching Weasel and The Groovie Ghoulies. Mr. T Experience’s song Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend and later album Love Is Dead was as important to me in the last few years of highschool as Kerplunk! Operation Ivy led to the first self titled Rancid record which led to Epitaph Records bands like Lagwagon, No Use For a Name, NOFX and Propagandhi. These weren’t bands that you had to go to a giant auditorium to see perform. These were bands that you could actually meet, which I did, when I went to see Rancid play the McBeth Recreation Center in Zilker Park in 2005, a show put on by… kids like me?!? I couldn’t believe that someone just a few years older than me had put on a concert with bands that had CDs out in stores. It blew my mind. I couldn’t believe that there were local bands like The Impossibles (Fueled by Ramen’s first signing), Fourth Grade Nothing (the first band I knew to be on a Hollywood movie soundtrack) and Dynamite Boy (the band that did the end credit song to my short Gay by Dawn) who represented an entire community of musicians and friends (and continue to be both).

That’s where I discovered Maximum Rock N Roll and Book Your Own Fucking Life, where you could find punk rock bands on tour and book them in basement shows or at rec halls. The entire world of DIY opened up to me and shaped my mindset. That year my friend Antonio and I booked The Bouncing Souls to play in a Bingo hall that my mother’s boyfriend owned. A window was broken in a fight and we could only pay the band $37 so we could fix the window but everyone seemed to have a good time (unless you were in the fight). I remember my older brother showed up and was impressed. At 16, I will never forget it. My older brother, the school skipping skater who a nerdy kid like me didn’t have much in common with except for this loud style of music, was enjoying something that I was responsible for. After years of fights and misunderstandings (because that’s what brothers do), this music had given me something to relate with him about. Six months later, when he was killed by a drunk driver, I had stayed up so that he could return a NOFX CD that he had borrowed to me. I remember the song Bob playing at 1:40am when the phone rang from across the room. Nothing in the room even moved. I was hit with a feeling in my gut that you only get in those moments, where everything is frozen but what’s running through your ears and the things running through my ears were the ringing of that phone and a NOFX song about an alcoholic. I can still see the phone frozen from across the room, waiting to be picked up so that my life could be changed again.

Two months later the Austin punk community helped me raise well over a thousand dollars (in $5 dollar tickets) for M.A.D.D. at an all day concert I had organized in my brother’s name. The following year at college the first band I interviewed for my college radio show was Lookout! Records band The Mr. T Experience. A month later the Mr. T Experience mercy girl Paige introduced my friend Kevin and I to my friend Scott Klopfenstein of Reel Big Fish. I would direct their music video 8 years later and Scott would perform during my wedding ceremony (and appear on a recent episode of Geekscape). Kevin and I wouldn’t have become friends and gone into college radio had we not both been huge Mr. T Experience and Green Day fans and I still remember watching the dial-up live stream of Green Day performing all of Nimrod live to commemorate the release of that album, sitting there with Kevin trying to guess which would become our favorite songs.

I think I’m 18 in this picture, taken in 1997

after interviewing Dr. Frank and Joel of The Mr. T Experience.

Over the course of the next few years we had bands come and record live for our radio show. Bands like Midtown, the Groovie Ghoulies, Saves the Day, New Found Glory, Dynamite Boy, The Bouncing Souls (who remembered the $37 dollar Bingo night and laughed about it), The Stereo, Limp and early Adeline Records (Billie Joe from Green Day’s label) band The Criminals. We interviewed bands like Blink 182 and Weezer.Doing that radio show and telling stories on the air late at night led me to pick up a camera and start telling stories through film. I got to meet artists like The Get Up Kids who I would go on to shoot videos for. And of course my addiction to telling stories and talking to guests led to the site you are currently on and the podcast that it grew out of.

I took this November 1999 polaroid of Kevin (dressed as a Mexican wrestler)

with Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge.

The news circulating the past few days (that originated on Ted Leo’s blog) of Lookout Records! ceasing operation is a little sad to me but not a surprise. It had been years since I purchased anything from the label (2004’s Yesterday Rules by The Mr. T Experience) and Lookout! stopped putting out albums in 2005 when Green Day reclaimed the publishing rights on Kerplunk! and 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours (justifiably so, as the label wasn’t paying sales royalties). Most of those musicians from the label are still making music today, have reclaimed the rights to their catalogues and I couldn’t ask for more than I’ve received in the last 20 years. 

It’s mind boggling to look at what I’ve written here and to see how the dominoes have fallen. Even more astounding is how quickly it seems to have all happened. But I’m thankful to still have the music that has given me a roadmap to look back at some of the most important moments in my life and the person I’ve become, and how much of it started with an album called Kerplunk! by a band named Green Day put out on a record label called Lookout!

Funny addendum: Last weekend, I flew my wife and I to Austin to see a reunion show for Dynamite Boy, a band that owes a lot to Green Day. The reunion show was held at Emo’s East, the building formerly known as The Back Room on East Riverside, where I was too young to see Green Day play on January 6th, 1993.

Dynamite Boy’s “Satellite” video that I compiled in film school in 2003