In a House With Unlocked Doors… Part Seventeen
Oddments
By Sharon Mitchell
One thing that can be hard to find, but great for discovering new bands, is the compilation album. Green Day appeared on a few of these early on in their career. Skene, the Minnesota – based label which released Sweet Children, produced an album called Can You Break Through? in 1990, and it featured Best Thing In Town. Another compilation, this time on Flipside records, was called The Big One and this featured bands from north and south California on each respective side. As with a lot of the early vinyl albums, there was a booklet inside that had adverts for each of the bands featured.
Green Day (still with Al Sobrante as drummer) contributed I Want to be Alone to this album, and get a half page to themselves. It’s odd that most of the bands that merited a whole page advert no longer exist, whilst all these years later, Green Day are one of the biggest acts in the world.
As well as these compilations, there is a ton of bootleg material on the market. Some of them have become so common that they are almost regarded as official releases! Built To Blast features Christie Road (although it is spelled wrong on the record sleeve), and I also have the Berkeley Block Buster and Live at Gilman Street EPs, and the Pick a Winner 7 inch which is a recording of an early radio session.
On top of that are the cds and dvds of various radio and stage shows, with lovely names such as ‘Spitting’ and ‘Snotheads’. There are so many live performances that havebeen turned into albums, both on cd and on vinyl, and some of my favourites include Listen to me Whine, Live in Italy, and the Christmas gig from 1995.
It’s probably impossible to collect them all, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because some of them are very rare.
If I had to choose, my absolute favourite has to be the crudely- filmed concert at Pinole Valley High School, recorded on 10th May, 1990 – Billie plugs the newly-released 39/Smooth which they are selling for $5. I wish you could buy it for that price today!
At their current level of fame, it is rarer to find their music featuring on these compilations. The band have appeared on a few movie soundtrack albums, such as JAR which featured in the film “Angus’, and ‘The Jerky Boys’, which featured 2000 Light Years Away.
More recently, they have appeared in ‘Transformers’ (21 Guns) and in ‘Twilight – Breaking Dawn’ (The Forgotten).
They also recorded the Simpsons theme for the movie back in 2007, although their interpretation of the Elfman music does not appear on the soundtrack album. The best moment of the film is the sequence of the band playing, with Billie reading from an autocue the immortal lyrics, “Na, na na na na na nananana …”
