Bay pays tribute to Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ at 924 Gilman benefit
Since 1989, Jesse Townley has played in numerous East Bay punk bands, such as Blatz, The Gr'ups, The Criminals, and The Frisk. The first time that Townley — known to many in the 924 Gilman Street scene as Jesse Luscious — and Blatz played in Southern California, at a pizza parlor, they were accompanied by their frequent tour mates Green Day. Townley, a longtime Gilman volunteer and fundraising committee member, has remained friends with Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool — despite the infamous dust-up between the collective punk club and the world-famous East Bay rock band. In [...]
A Wasteland I Like to Call My Home: Discovering Dookie a Decade Late
I was nine when I heard my first curse word in music. I had kept a mental catalogue of all the words my mom castigated my dad for saying in front of me as I was growing up, and had built a highly effective radar that caught any uses of said words in the world around me. Through my sister’s then new Sony headphones (the kind with the removable fuzz pads for the ears and the highly-bendable-but-easily-breakable headband) launched a slingshotting guitar riff that was to give way to the oncoming profanity, as my older sibling stared at me and [...]