In A House With Unlocked Doors… Part twenty-six

In a House With Unlocked Doors… Part twenty-six

The Masterpiece – Act Two

By Sharon Mitchell
Before its release, Billie had feared that American Idiot was going to alienate their fan base and finish their career. The album represented two genres of music that had not been popular for decades – the rock opera and the protest song, but the band agreed that they had to release it.

In September, 2004, Idiot hit the stores and Green Day waited for the reaction of its fans.

It was a worldwide hit. The album made the charts in 27 countries, reaching the number one spot in 19 of those, and has today sold nearly 20,000,000 copies.

The album caught the attention of those dissatisfied with the leadership of George Bush, and the songs, particularly the title track and Holiday, were used by Billie as a rallying call to make his listeners more politically aware.

Suddenly, the iconic ‘heart-handgrenade’ image was everywhere, licenced by the record label to be used on merchandise such as shot glasses, t-shirts, air fresheners, bracelets, notebooks, keyrings and cigarette lighters.

The music earned the band a whole new legion of fans, although there were also those who thought that American Idiot was a move too far away from the band’s roots, too commercial to ever be considered punk, and the fact that their images were everywhere added fuel to that argument, but the fact is that punk is breaking rules – and American Idiot broke every rule there was to become the anthem of the year, 2005. The only way Green Day sold out was at the box office.

This year saw the two historic gigs at Milton Keynes, filmed and released as Bullet In A Bible, Saturday and Sunday 18th and 19th June, with a capacity crowd of 65,000 on both days. I was there, and I will never forget the atmosphere, and the way that Billie commanded the crowd from the very first second he stepped on that stage.

The basic album was soon followed by a special edition release with a bonus dvd, and a gorgeous book version, which contained a short narrative linking the songs together. This commentary would later be used and expanded to form the dialogue for the Broadway show. Adeline Records released a double-fold vinyl shortly after the release date, and it was included in the 2009 reissue of the entire back catalogue by Reprise.

More recently, Hot Topic produced a beautiful marbled vinyl, and I have the album on cassette tape, the last of their records to be issued in this format. I also have an in-house award from Warners to celebrate 1,000,000 sales in the UK. Furthermore, there are many ‘special’ versions, with added pin badges, pens or bonus tracks, and all of the singles were available on picture-printed 7 inch vinyl.

American Idiot is, in my opinion, simply a masterpiece. The musical brings it to life, shows you how it was written in several ‘voices’, and yet it still works when sung by just one man – but that deserves a chapter all to itself later.