Green Day have been around since the late ’80s, but the friendship between founding members Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt goes back even further than that. In fact, the two musicians began talking about songwriting upon meeting each other as 10-year-olds.
Get a Mike Dirnt Epiphone Grabber G-3 Bass via Reverb
Heavy Consequence recently caught up with Dirnt to discuss his new signature Epiphone Grabber G-3 bass, among other topics, and he shared a cool story about first meeting Armstrong as grade-school kids.
“We were 10 years old, first time I met [Billie],” recalled Dirnt. “Within a few minutes, one of the first conversations we ever had was about songwriting. We were just pointed into something that we thought was cool, ’cause at the time we were each struggling to mitigate our own home lives and things like that.”
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He added, “We became fast friends, and playing guitar back in the day was such a cool thing. Then it was like, ‘How do you get a gig?’ That was the biggest struggle was just how to get a gig that wasn’t us playing at like our friend’s older brother’s keg party.”
Green Day would eventually become mainstays at the now-legendary venue 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, California, but it took a while for them to grace the stage.
As Dirnt explained, “We were quote-unquote ‘too poppy’ to play Gilman Street for a long time. I mean, what do you want us to write about? All we knew [then] was, ‘I wanna meet a girl and I have a guitar. I’m frigging 13, 14… leave me alone!’”
Drummer Tré Cool joined Green Day in 1990, solidifying a lineup that’s remained intact ever since. In 2015, the punk band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, something Dirnt and Armstrong likely could have never imagined as 10-year-olds.
Read our full interview with Dirnt here, and pick up an Epiphone Grabber G-3 bass via Reverb or Gibson
