

Green Day haven’t always been the stars we know them to be today. Before American Idiot, there was Dookie, the trio’s major label debut; before Dookie, there was Kerplunk, their second full-length effort, and the collection of songs that showed them the first glimpse of success and got them on the radar of the major labels. But getting the band to record the album wasn’t easy, as Larry Livermore, the founder of the Bay Area DIY staple Lookout Records, recalls in his (excellent) book How To Ru(i)n A Record Label:

I’d been bugging Billie, Mike, and Tre about coming up with something new since the spring of 1991, when I all but ordered them into the studio to record some demos. It turned out they had only enough material for half an album, and while the songs were good, they were less than fully formed. Summer rolled by with no sign of further progress. I didn’t understand what the holdup was. The way I saw it, Green Day were so talented that they could crank out an album anytime they wanted to. Luckily, I didn’t get a chance to hound them about it — they were not a band that responded well to that kind of pressure — because they spent most of the year on the road. Then in the fall of 1991, almost without warning, I was handed a finished 12-song tape. “It’s called Kerplunk,” they told me.

Buzz around Green Day was spreading rapidly around the local community, and slowly across the country as they embarked on tours playing basements and dive bars across the continental U.S.. To compensate for the band’s growing popularity, Lookout doubled their typical vinyl numbers, pressing an initial run of 10,000 copies of Kerplunk for release the same week that Nirvana would overtake Michael Jackson to hit Number 1 on the charts with Nevermind. To nearly everyone’s surprise, the 10,000 copies weren’t enough, as Lookout “sold every one of them the day it came out,” writes Livermore.

The numbers would continue to grow in exponential numbers, and 25 years later, Kerplunk has moved more than 4 million copies worldwide, and Green Day remains one of the biggest rock bands in the world, as their recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame proves. To celebrate 25 years of Kerplunk, I interviewed Livermore about the making of the album, Green Day’s growth since then, and whether they’re still the same three kids he met in the early 90’s.

Do you consider yourself an instrumental figure in the rise of Green Day? You should.

Instrumental? You mean like a tool? I don’t know, I don’t want to overplay my role; after all, I didn’t write or play the songs, or give the guys their inbuilt [sic] charisma. My only contribution, really, was to give them a chance to get their music heard at a time when no one else was likely to be paying attention. If anything, I think that makes me more of a catalyst than an instrument.

Can you tell me a little about the musical and social atmosphere that birthed Kerplunk?

By the time Green Day got started on Kerplunk, they had already been playing as a band for three years, and the scene they were part of, centered around Berkeley’s Gilman Street, and Lookout Records, which was more or less the Gilman house label, was already fairly well established, though still quite small. Green Day were considered rising “stars” within that scene, but to put that in context, it meant that a couple hundred people might turn out for their shows, as opposed to 50 or 100 for some of our other bands. But they still were greatly overshadowed by our biggest band, Operation Ivy, who, even though they’d already been broken up for a couple of years, were still selling at least twice as many records as Green Day.

25 years ago, when Lookout released Kerplunk, what was your expectation for the record’s initial success?

I thought it would do well. But again, you need to put “well” into context. For us at that time, it meant selling in the neighborhood of 3,000 to 5,000 records. There was quite a buzz developing — still mostly within the underground, though — around Green Day, but at the same time, there was also a question of this being their first recording with a new lineup, as their original drummer was replaced by Tre Cool the year before. Both as a result of that lineup change and given the band had a couple more years experience playing and touring, the new record sounded significantly different from their first album. So there was some question about how people would react to that, too. As it turned out, though, Kerplunk sold out its first pressing of 10,000 copies the same day it was released. At the time it was by far our biggest launch ever. By far.

Does Kerplunk hold up 25 years later?

I think so. More than a few people have cited it as their favorite Green Day album. For me, personally, though, it’s a tossup between 39/Smooth and American Idiot.