In a House With Unlocked Doors… Part Twenty-two
Warning
By Sharon Mitchell
Another two years pass before the next studio album emerges from Green Day, and it is a world apart from Nimrod, although it sees them continue to experiment and explore new sounds.
Not only that, but after a trial with a different producer didn’t work out the way that the band wanted, they handled that aspect of this album themselves, with old friend Rob Cavallo acting as Executive Producer.
Warning hit the shops in October 2000, and has been described as their ‘folk’ album. There are a lot more acoustic guitars on it, for sure, but like Nimrod, it has a range of styles incorporated into its 12 tracks.
Hold On is back to that early Beatles/Bob Dylan sound, thanks to Billie’s use of harmonica (an instrument he learned to play for Walking Alone on the previous album), and Misery is like nothing they have ever recorded before or since. On that track, the band branch out from their regular instruments, with Mike on keyboards, Tre playing the accordion, whilst Billie plays a mandolin as well as guitar.
And as if that wasn’t enough, there’s even a mariachi band thrown in for good measure.
It shouldn’t work, but it does, and I still grin to myself when I remember the awesome day that I heard them play this live – well, three quarters of it, anyway!
There were four singles released from this album, although Macy’s Day Parade has so far proved totally impossible to find. The videos for Minority, Warning and Waiting are very entertaining – I have watched Warning loads of times and still I can see things I have missed before – and Billie has been quoted as saying that Waiting is his favourite of all their videos.
This song was apparently written as an ‘answer’ to the old Petula Clark hit Downtown. I recommend listening to both tracks to see how well they fit together.
There are lots of versions of the Minority single, some ‘clean’ radio-friendly edits, some the same as the album track complete with parental advisory language. It was also issued on vinyl, and in the past three or four years it has been issued on several different coloured vinyls. each one limited to just a few hundred.
But by far my favourite Warning collectable has to be the special edition album which came in a green plastic wallet with a thick booklet of mostly-unique photographs and inside a small black fabric bag.
I had the wallet with the cd and book in my collection, but had never found the bag, which has a plastic ‘WARNING’ logo badge on it, but one of my friends let me know that they had spotted one on eBay, as a ‘buy now’ item, and I finally got my hands on one.
I also own a very rare item – apparently, the only one of its kind in existence. When the marketing of the album was being discussed, four posters were produced – one in red, one green, one yellow and one blue. The band went for the green, but I have the blue version of this poster.
Billie was once asked in a TV interview during the American Idiot era which of their logos or elements of album art was his favourite, and he picked the little Warning “shock guy”. It is one of my favourite images too, and
I want to somehow incorporate him in my growing GD tattoo, which already references 21st Century Breakdown, American Idiot (both the album and the musical), 39/Smooth and Kerplunk.
