## Metadata - Author: [[Dan Ozzi]] - Full Title: Sellout - Published: - Category: #books ## Highlights ### Chapter 1 Green Day Dookie - Green Day were the reason why the major-label ban was put into effect,” says Luscious, who pushed for the new rule’s instatement. “They were our friends, they grew up there, they played there all the time. But we didn’t want Gilman to be the farm league for the majors. Fuck that.” Luscious remembers Green Day reacting to the ban with a mix of emotions. “On one hand, they were really pissed off and upset,” he says. “But on the other, they were from the scene: they understood exactly why. We’d already seen Nirvana blow up, and that was jaw-dropping. We’d seen the Seattle scene go crazy. We didn’t want to see that happen to punk rock.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126299) ^rw315126299 - Early one morning in April when Kohr was preparing for a day of filming with Green Day, a somber mood descended on the set. News had started to spread that the body of Kurt Cobain had been found in his Seattle home with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head. “Billie came into the room and said, ‘Oh my God, did you hear?’” remembers Kohr. The director watched the members of Green Day process the news that the world’s most famous rock star had taken his own life. Through the shock and grief, a strange sense of clarity came to Kohr then, and for a brief moment he saw the future. “Talking to Billie, I had this weird notion in my head,” he says, “where I thought, Oh my God. I wonder if the universe is making space for these three guys right in front of me.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126300) ^rw315126300 - Somebody rushed us into a white van with windows. We thought, Oh, good, we made it to the van. But even though it was in an area where other people couldn’t get to, suddenly a thousand fucking kids were now smashing their hands on the windows and shaking the van and trying to get in. I remember looking at Mike and Tré and their eyes were bugging out.” A swarm of crazed mud people hopped fences and surrounded the van from every direction, pounding their fists against the glass. The driver threw the van into neutral and hit the gas, scaring some people away with engine noises just long enough to inch forward and then speed off. “We got to this other safety area where they opened a gate that had barbed wire on it, like they had it for just such emergencies,” says Cavallo. “They took us in there and Mike got first aid treatment. He really cracked his elbow and his tooth. He was fucked up. Then they got us into a different kind of van with no windows.” From there, the band and their crew were ushered to a helicopter to transport them away. As the[…] [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126301) ^rw315126301 - After the set, he talked to the band and offered to release their first EP on Lookout Records, which they accepted on the spot. Whether or not anyone would buy a record by three teenagers from a shithole town was irrelevant. There was clearly something special about Sweet Children that Livermore found worthy of documenting. “The very first time I saw them,” he recalls, “within minutes I thought they could be the next Beatles.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126302) ^rw315126302 - Note: Green Day - To distinguish themselves from another Gilman band, Sweet Baby Jesus, they decided on a new name, Green Day, a reference to an afternoon spent smoking pot. Livermore protested, partly because people were starting to recognize the name Sweet Children and partly, he says, because “Green Day was just about the dumbest name I’d ever heard [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126303) ^rw315126303 - Livermore noticed something distinct about the crowds Green Day attracted that set them apart from the other bands on his label. They were larger, sure, but they were also predominantly female. “There’d be a lot of girls up front, dancing. That was not the case with most punk bands, where it was 80 percent boys running around in circles, banging into each other. Based on my experience, I thought that was a pretty good sign they were gonna be popular. Half [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126304) ^rw315126304 - When it became obvious that Green Day couldn’t be convinced to stay with Lookout, Livermore asked the band to sign a retroactive contract to keep 39/Smooth and Kerplunk on the label permanently. “They didn’t have any hesitation. They said, ‘Sure, write it up,’” he remembers. “They made it clear they had no desire to take the old records from Lookout. I didn’t have any reason to doubt that, but I did feel like it should be written down, because I’d already seen other independent labels destroyed.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126305) ^rw315126305 - With a mouthful of burrito, Armstrong joked to an interviewer a few weeks later that “it was either Geffen and heroin or Warner Brothers and cocaine. So we chose the coke.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126313) ^rw315126313 - Green Day played at Gilman Street on September 3, 1993, under the name Blair Hess, their final show there before their major-label affiliation got them eighty-sixed. Livermore remembers it being a “bittersweet occasion”—joyous because everyone in attendance had a blast singing along to every song, but sad because it would be the last time they’d all get to do so there. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126314) ^rw315126314 ### Chapter 2 Jawbreaker Dear You - Do you want to meet with Jawbreaker? They’re a really cool band. They’re one of Kurt Cobain’s favorite bands and they opened for Nirvana on a leg of their tour,’” remembers Cavallo. “I heard their demos and thought to myself, Oh jeez, this is a whole new kind of rock. I don’t even know what the fuck to call this! I don’t know if they’d called it emo yet, but that was part of the birth of emo right there.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126316) ^rw315126316 - Two weeks later, the band swung through Emo’s, the Austin venue where Schwarzenbach had forcefully assured fans the year prior that Jawbreaker wasn’t interested in signing to a major label. The frontman no longer had a leg to stand on when introducing “Indictment,” so he instead said nothing. Immediately after the song, the audience started to get rowdy. People called out song requests over one another until it blended into a singular, boisterous roar. Schwarzenbach pleaded a request into the microphone that seemed more metaphoric than literal: “Don’t yell at us. We’re under bright lights and we’re liable to explode.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126317) ^rw315126317 ### Chapter 6 The Donnas Spend the Night - The two bands owed the most money were Operation Ivy and Green Day, whose three combined releases were the label’s top sellers. Green Day was cautiously patient with Lookout, in hopes that sales and licensing of their two records would help keep their former home afloat. But as the amount the band was owed neared half a million dollars, they had no choice but to pull their catalog. “I feel we’ve more than honored our handshake agreement with Lookout. I think that’s really fair,” bassist Mike Dirnt said to the Express. “There comes a time where you’re like, ‘Okay, how long do you want to support your record label?’” Lookout not only had failed to uphold their end of their financial deal with Green Day but had broken the promise Livermore had written into their arrangement—that “the truest contract is one based out of trust and friendship.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126319) ^rw315126319 - In fact, the year the Donnas had signed to Lookout, Green Day released their fifth album, Nimrod, which took aim at Maximum Rocknroll founder Tim Yohannan. The raging “Platypus (I Hate You)” was a two-and-a-half-minute score-settler with Yohannan, a smoker who was ill with lymphatic cancer. “Shit out of luck, and now your time is up / It brings me pleasure just to know you’re going to die,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong snarled. Six months later, Yohannan was dead and Armstrong expressed no remorse. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126320) ^rw315126320 - As Lookout continued to be short on the income necessary to cover royalty payments, even the label’s most loyal stalwarts started to pull their catalogs or depart for other labels. AVAIL, Pansy Division, Blatz, Filth, Enemy You, Neurosis, and others jumped ship. “Nobody really wants to fuck Lookout over, but they don’t want to sit there and let Lookout fuck them over, either,” Lookout accountant Bill Michalski told the East Bay Express. “So a lot of bands have waited a really long time before they took any action. People gave [Lookout] a lot of slack.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126321) ^rw315126321 ### Chapter 7 Thursday War All the Time - We’ll be loyal. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126323) ^rw315126323 - Note: Grim - The deal even stipulated that Victory’s bulldog logo would appear on the back of Thursday’s next two albums with Island. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126324) ^rw315126324 - Signing to a major label had never been on the road map for Thursday, but this was the corner into which they were backed. Unless they ended the band completely—a solution they considered in their bleakest moments—they had no choice but to sign to a major. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126325) ^rw315126325 - The two watched three thousand people screaming along to “Signals Over the Air” and other songs from an underperforming War All the Time. That was when it dawned on them that their business was on the precipice of a seismic shift. “I remember Lyor going, ‘Every fucking kid downloaded this record, I know it! Everyone knows every single fucking word.’ That audience was ground zero for downloading,” he says. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126326) ^rw315126326 ### Chapter 8 The Distillers Coral Fang - Rancid had famously brushed off the opportunity to jump to a major label at the height of their breakout success during the mid-nineties punk explosion, a time when they could have joined their Bay Area brethren Green Day in superstardom. The offers were there, but Armstrong and company snubbed their noses at them. A 1996 feature in the New York Times Magazine documented the music industry’s intense courting of the band: “Madonna started coming to Rancid shows, and sent a naked photograph of herself, pleading with the band to sign with her label instead of Epic, which offered a deal worth $1.5 million. At the peak of the bidding war, Rancid turned them both down.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126328) ^rw315126328 ### Chapter 9 My Chemical Romance Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge - But for every respectable band like Thursday who’d earned their way into a record contract through sweat and sincerity, a dozen Diesel-jean clones were handed lucrative opportunities. A casual fan might not immediately spot the sonic or sartorial differences between these acts and My Chem, but a number of them represented the complete opposite of what Way stood for. Many of the prevalent ex-girlfriend-bashing lyrics traded at best in mopey misogyny and at worst in murder fantasy, frequently inflicting their macabre wrist-slitting or chainsaw imagery on the “whores” at the wrong end of the male singers’ ire. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126330) ^rw315126330 ### Chapter 11 Against Me! New Wave - They played with bravado, like a band hell-bent on leaving a decimated stage in their wake. They’d all taken to wearing black, which made them seem like a menacing wrecking crew, and every second of their set was spent making sure any band that had the misfortune of following them cursed their name. “We had twenty minutes,” remembers Seward. “It was just: ‘Go! Go hard! Don’t talk between songs! Don’t even say the name of the band!’” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126332) ^rw315126332 - Grace still has her ticket stub from that show in Orlando. The words GREEN DAY have faded away over the years, but they’ve been replaced by autographs from the three band members, who signed it on a 2017 tour that saw Against Me! warming up their crowds every night. Armstrong took up the most space, writing: “To Laura Jane, double names 4ever, Billie Joe.” [◊](https://readwise.io/open/315126333) ^rw315126333