In a House With Unlocked Doors… Part Sixteen

In a House With Unlocked Doors… Part Sixteen

The Dawn of Green Day

By Sharon Mitchell

1000 hours with two different addresses

The band may have started out calling themselves Sweet Children, but there were two other EPs and a complete album issued before that seven inch record was released late in the summer of 1990.

The first EP was called 1000 hours, recorded around April 1989, by which time the band had already settled on their new name and I got the first of my two copies in a load of singles from a man in Chicago who was selling his collection to pay for him to go to college.

At the time, I had no clue how many different versions there were of all of those first three EPs. I was just glad to have one! This particular one turned out to be the Berkeley address – a later issue – but it was in very good condition, and I was quite happy. Being in a job lot with other records, it proved to be very reasonably priced, too.

Slappy

When we went to California in 2011, I managed to find the first pressing in Amoeba Records in Berkeley. The only problem with that was that I had to get it home in one piece in my hand luggage!

The band’s first full length album was released, on 12 inch vinyl only, in April 1990 and was called 39/Smooth. It only got its longer name when the two EPs were added as bonus tracks for the cd release in July 1991. Billie wanted to call the album 39, because his oldest brother, Alan, had his 39th birthday on the day that they started recording it. Mike wanted it to be called Smooth (“a stoner thing”, Billie sort of explained) and so they compromised, and 39/Smooth was born.The second EP, Slappy, was a little easier to find. Again, there are loads of different colours, covers and subtle differences to collect, but I have just three. Two are from a later Lookout issue, but there is one green one from the cherished Laytonville address.

Sweet Children on Skene

Some collectors have bought much later copies of these first two EPs, believing them to be the originals. When Reprise reissued all of the band’s back catalogue in 2009, they produced 39/Smooth with replicas of the two EPs as a bonus inside.

All three EPS were also included in the limited edition vinyl box set of singles (I’ve not counted any of those singles here, because they were issued as a set and I shall share photos of that later). They can be identified because they have the Reprise logo on the covers, and on the records themselves. Watch out if you buy these from eBay!!! And a random fact – the dog’s name was Mickey.

39/Smooth was originally on Lookout, too, but before Warners bought the rights to the band’s back catalogue and renamed it to include the two EPs, a cd was put on sale through Epitaph. This one seems to be the rarest, as it was only on sale for a very short time. There are also digipack versions (Reprise, again) with bonus dvd material which has loads of really good stuff on it.

Sweet Children on Reprise

Finally, we get to Sweet Children! This EP has four tracks – the title song, Strangeland, Best Thing in Town (the very first song ever credited as written by Billie and Mike together) and a cover of The Who’s ‘My Generation”. I have two of these, one from the release on Skene Records, the other is a demo copy of the Reprise re-issue. The tracks from this record were included on Kerplunk!, the band’s last appearance on the Lookout label in January 1992.

The LP sold out on its first day, and it was then that Larry Livermore realised that the band were getting too big for Lookout to handle and needed to find a new record deal. Green Day signed with Reprise in 1993, and recorded Dookie, which was expected to sell around 100,000 copies.

By 2007, it had sold over 16 million.