Let me try to describe a very specific feeling to you.
The year is 2004. You’re eight years old. You know there’s a lot happening out in the world because you hear adults talking about it all the time. Some man that is disliked by every adult you know is trying to be the President again. You have a vague idea of what a President is, but the town you live in seems huge and it’s hard to fathom the idea of someone being in charge of the whole country. Every adult you know dislikes him. “If they all dislike him”, you think “why is he the president”? It doesn’t make sense. They dislike him, so you vaguely do too.
You’re not unhappy. Sure, some kids have parents that live together or have fancier toys than you, but your life is still pretty good. Even knowing that, through osmosis you feel like something is wrong. You don’t know what it is, but something is just making you grumpy. You feel off, but your brain isn’t developed enough to know why.
Your musical diet so far in life has been what your parents and grandparents listen to; Alanis Morrissette, Tower of Power (specifically Soul Vaccination: Live), Michael Brecker, Rusted Root, and the Beatles. You don’t get the hype. Sure, you like the music, you want to play music even, but you don’t get how it can make you feel the way your parents describe it.
Then one day, speeding down the road with your dad, you hear a song and it clicks. It sounds the way your chest feels when you’re angry. A tightness: chaotic and wild. You’re hooked.
You ask your dad what it is called and he tells you. “American Idiot”. Your family by no means are extreme patriots, but that title doesn’t feel right. American Idiot? It just feels so rebellious to your little eight year old brain to call something that. You love how wrong it seems. You beg him to buy it for you. He says no. You beg your mom. Your mom is more understanding when it comes to letting you listen to more risque music, so she says yes. She turns on the computer, navigates the iTunes store, and pulls up the page for Green Day. Then she asks “do you want the whole album, or just the song?”
There’s a whole album?
So you (and your mom) decide the full thing is the only option. You and your mom load it onto an old iPod and off you go. You listen to the album all the way through. Then you do it again. And again. And again. It is all you listen to. Over and over, the songs eventually sear their way into your memory. When you feel frustrated or grumpy or like no one is listening to you, there it is. When the other kids are mean at school, there it is. It just makes sense. The greater political messages go right over your head. You love it because you feel like it was made for you.
A year and change passes and for Christmas you and your sister receive a live Green Day CD/DVD album called Bullet in a Bible. It features most of the songs on this album you’ve spent the better part of a year looping, but there’s also more songs on it. Now nine, you feel stupid that you didn’t realize there were other albums. You get them all and soon the entire Green Day discography has worn out its welcome in your house.
Through the internet, you discover other bands and other music that make you feel like Green Day’s music makes you feel. You buy Panic at the Disco’s A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”, My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, The Pink Spiders’ Teenage Graffiti, and Searching for A Former Clarity by Against Me!
Time passes, you still always come back to American Idiot. It is the first. Your first.
But then by the time you’re thirteen, it’s time for Green Day to put out another record. You’re extremely excited. The first single comes out, and it doesn’t spark the same emotion. You remain hopeful, but the second song also doesn’t do it for you. By the time you listen to the full album, it just feels wrong. The songs aren’t bad, but they don’t feel the same.
At this point, your interest have opened. You like what your grandfather derogatorily refers to as “showtunes”. Rocky Horror and the Nightmare Before Christmas are your favorites. You hear rumors of a Green Day musical, but at this point you’ve moved on. You still love American Idiot, but the memory of it sits in your head like a trophy and you feel like you’ve moved on.
Years go by, and at the insistence of one of your best friends, you give the original cast recording of American Idiot the Musical a listen. Then you do it again. Then you do it again. You feel like an idiot for ignoring it for so long. It feels like the original did when you were so young, but its added so much of the flare that you’ve come to love over time.
This is all to say that I love both versions of the album, and on this ten year anniversary of the shows final broadway performance, I think it bears a retrospective.
“It doesn’t make any sense”
Announced in March 2009 as a collaboration between the band and director Michael Mayer, the musical seemed destined to exist. The conceptual flair and loose story of the original album seemed ripe for an adaptation. Known for his previous work on helming Spring Awakening, a gritty, loud, and dramatic story about pubescent Nineteenth Century German teenagers — Mayer had clearly shown that he was at home navigating a plot full of angst and distortion and loved the original 2004 record. “The 13 songs on ‘American Idiot’ contain a complete emotional journey,” Mayer told the New York Times. Familiarizing himself with the record throughout the course of long drives, Mayer was shocked to find that nobody had yet taken advantage of the prospects the album would have as a stage adaption. Through Tom Holce, Mayer was able to get into contact with the band and approached them about adapting their record to the stage. The outfit was interested, and Billie Joe and members of the management team flew out to New York to see Spring Awakening.
After a night of drinking and conversation, Mayer came forward with some ideas that he had for the stage version. He wanted to do more than just directly adapt American Idiot to the stage and he had big ideas around opening up the world and characters that the record had created. Recalling this interaction with Billie Joe in a 2010 interview with Playbill, Mayer asked the of the lead singer:
“Give me some time to put that together, and if in six months, I have something and you like it, we’ll go forward and we’ll do a reading, and then if you like that, we’ll go forward and we’ll do a staged workshop, and if you like that — if you and the band like that — then we’ll go forward into a production. And the only thing I would request is that I have exclusivity, that you don’t let anyone else use this material for any narrative purposes in the meantime.”
The lead singer agreed, and the duo exchanged contact information so the director could keep the singer up to date on his progress. With the band’s seal of approval, Mayer decided to form a team; Tom Kitt handled the arrangements, sound design was done by Brian Ronan, Carmel Dean was tasked with conducting the garage band orchestra, and twelve singer-actors were hired to perform, with Spring Awakening star John Gallagher taking on the lead role. In June of 2008, the band was invited to a recording studio to see a full sung through run of the show. The aim of this performance was to recreate the frenzied and chaotic nature of a punk show in the recording studio and on the stage. Through further workshopping in New York and California, the show eventually became stage ready. Initially, the format was kept originally to the 13 songs that appear on the original version of American Idiot. However, this changed throughout production. The band had been working on a new album and had been sending Mayer new songs that they were working on. Hearing these songs, he singled out four that would fit into the show. Mayer decided to add these four songs as well as two American Idiot B-sides and the smash hit “Time Of Your Life” to the show, feeling those additions were more beneficial to the story he was telling.
The show is sung-through meaning that there’s very little dialogue from start to finish. “I didn’t want to have any extraneous words” Mayer told the New York Times in 2010. He wanted the show to retain a singular voice and perspective and believed that adding dialogue would muddy the voice of the show. The plot of the original is a little muddy and loose. Generally it follows the lead character, the Jesus of Suburbia, through the turmoil of loss, addiction, inner conflict, love, and angst. Along the way he meets Whatsername and Saint Jimmy, who represent morality and indulgence respectively. Mayer widens the scope considerably, centering the plot onto three characters’ journeys to self-discovery inside and outside of their hometowns.
“We’re coming home again”
I’m not going to summarize the plot any further as the purpose of this piece is a retrospective on the cast album as a stand alone piece of art and how it compares as a straight ahead adaption of the 2004 album. My biggest fear when this project was announced way back when (and later on during my first time familiarizing myself with the cast album) was that it would just be Green Day karaoke. To an extent there’s surely some of that. It is impossible for me to separate the nostalgia that I have for the original album from my feelings towards its overall quality. I love the original dearly as I have stressed throughout this article and believed that the angst driven energy of it would be difficult for the band to recreate. Bullet in a Bible, a concert film from shortly after the release of the album was able to capture that mania in a way that I feel subsequent live recordings of Green Day’s live performance have been unable to. What I mean by that is this: I was afraid that this would be Kidz Bop for adults, a retread of a seminal album that would be a hollow attempt to sell the same material to the same group that previously bought it.
I was wrong. Very wrong, even. What I didn’t realize going into this was that this was an attempt for Green Day to do American Idiot over again. That sense of urgency is somehow still there all those years later, but this time there is an incredible amount of polish on each song. One would assume that this is due to a combination of the band’s familiarity with the songs after all of these years as well as the incredible arrangements of Tom Kitt. From the jump, the album separates itself by using a different guitar tone for that iconic opening riff. It is striking how much John Gallagher sounds like Billie Joe Armstrong, and his performance, as well as the performance of the rest of the cast is incredible. By widening the focus from a single perspective to multiple, Kitt, Mayer, and the band do a better job at creating the sense of disaffection. This isn’t an upset and angsty teenager cursing his lot in life, this is an entire generation of a town lamenting the direction of their lives.
One of the most delightful things about Green Day is the inherent simplicity in their songwriting. The guitar riffs are not complex but they stay stuck in your head. The same can be said about the song’s melodies. It’s catchy punk rock: consistently in your face with a cranked amp and an attitude. Their songwriting (particularly on American Idiot) rarely deviates from an established format of guitar, drums, and bass. The net is cast a little wider on this album to include acoustic guitar, the occasional piano, and a cameo from a saxophone on the track Homecoming, a considerable step away from their previous effort, 2000’s very ambitious Warning. The 2010 version of American Idiot widens the scope even more by reinforcing the core band with a string section, more prominent piano, and even the occasional accordion. I have a deep affinity for the piano especially as it pertains to punk music, so I am very happy to hear it here. The strings on the other hand sometimes seem needlessly superfluous and dramatic, as on the extended opening of Last Night On Earth. Other times however, I couldn’t imagine them not being there. Their appearance at the end of the breakdown of St. Jimmy has consistently been one of my favorite moments on the album.
The 2004 album is pretty constant. Even when it slows down for ballads, it still maintains a frenetic energy that doesn’t really lay bare. Nothing feels exposed. Even in moments of a single instrument standing out and shining, it feels like an entrance by another band member is imminent. Sure, there are some great drum fills, bass lines, and guitar riffs that are spotlighted throughout the record, but they don’t last very long. This is not at all a criticism. The 2004 album works so well because everything feels like a well oiled machine, individual parts all working together to accomplish a greater goal. The 2010 edition, however, uses silence as an instrument as much as it uses any other. Over the course of the 2010 adaptation, the band chooses to strip itself out and leave the vocals bare over a single instrument, choosing to emphasize the lyrics and vocal performance. This is one of the strongest examples of the differences between the original and its adaptation. The two simply have opposite goals. The 2010 edition of American Idiot is trying to ebb and flow. It has the responsibility of captivating an audience for its entire run time, whereas the original sets out to light a fire under the listener. I love being able to hear and appreciate the brilliance of Tre Cool’s drumming or Mike Durnt’s bass playing. One of my favorite parts of this reinterpretation is the choice to move the Holiday bassline to the beginning of the song. It’s a tiny thing, but that bassline leading into the fill followed by the guitar riff is absolutely brilliant, in that song each member of the band makes a unique and individual entrance that bolsters the song as a whole. .
As much as I love that entrance, this version of Holiday is what I was worried that the musical would be when I first heard the announcement. All of these criticisms are purely from the cast album, so they may not have been entirely accurate to the staging of the show. That being said, this version of Holiday feels like halfhearted karaoke: a touch toothless in its toughness while nearly descending into self parody. If the original is a full throated “fuck you” to the Bush Administration, this version is a camp wink-and-a-nod. This isn’t a horrible choice necessarily, but it is tonally inconsistent with the rest of the show. Whether it was unintentional, a director’s choice, or a performers choice, the dissonance between this song and the rest of the show isn’t inherently bad, but it just feels weird. It feels like a pastiche of a punk rock attitude and lacks sincerity in a way that the rest of the album just doesn’t.
American Idiot (2010) is exactly what it needed to be. The compositions of the record capture the tenor of the original, with the above example being the outlier. The energy is there and the songs show clear demarcations of evolution. It’s not a clear 1:1 adaptation of the original but allows for growth and new exploration of the themes present within it. A soulless retread would have been a failure as would a shallow excuse for karaoke. Evolving the original to a new medium is exactly what was needed to keep this from feeling like an ego trip or a cash grab. Is it better than the original? Even with the attempt to weave the songs together in a more coherent story — narrative consistency is something I feel is lacking from the original — I still say no. At the same time, there are moments that almost recreate that feeling from 17 years ago. For that alone, I would say that it’s worth another go round and more attention than it gets ten years since closure. Maybe other bands from that era will follow suit and turn their high concept mid 2000s albums into stage shows as well.
Looking at you there specifically, My Chemical Romance.
