from Dookie (1994)

Of course.

Today, we go back to when it all began. My Definitive Top Ten 2010 was introduced the Tuesday after Labor Day, in the spirit of a New York-area Labor Day Countdown. It’s sort of fitting that this last entry begins on Labor Day itself: September 5, 1994.

I was at my friend Jason’s house – this was the same friend who showed me the “Buddy Holly” video for the first time. Our friend Matt was there, too, and it so happens that these were the same guys with whom I co-hosted our 5th grade graduation party, at the same house. We were hanging out in Jason’s living room, full of sunlight and pastel shades, possibly in advance of some Labor Day cookout out back. We briefly talked about school, but only briefly, mostly just to remind ourselves that it was starting tomorrow, and that that was terrible. Two months seemed like a long time then, so it was all the harder to return even though we’d be seniors – in middle school.

Jason turned on the TV, and clicked over to MTV. On came this strange looking video with people who weren’t talking and just shuffling around and Jason and Matt immediately knew it as “the one where his eyes are green.” So they left it on and it was as if I’d been struck by lightning.

I hadn’t paid much attention – intentionally or not – to what was going on in the world of music in the couple of years leading up to that day. I knew of Nirvana, that Weird Al lampooned one of their songs by that same 5th grade graduation. I knew that another friend of mine was, among many, shocked and especially upset when Kurt Cobain died. I remember that same friend wore a Downward Spiral t-shirt, and that it was for a band, but I didn’t know what that all sounded like. I was beyond sheltered, but I chalk a lot of that (and some good things) up to not growing up with cable TV. Anyway, many kids of my generation would have been similarly struck by any of these other bands, but for me it had been Green Day, and the song had been “Basket Case.”

Somewhere along the way my sister got a copy of the album. I can still see it on the same rack as Enigma and Richard Marx and Janet Jackson and Michael Bolton, though despite celebrating only a sliver of his catalog, my sister grew up to have good taste in general. I asked her to make a copy of Dookie for me – onto cassette – and took it from there. I vividly remember singing “Basket Case” traveling down Half Hollow Road on the bus to middle school. I played the whole tape over and over again, and among the other songs of the time, it was a great year to get into music.

Belying my wholehearted appreciation of them, I fell away from and returned to Green Day from time to time over the years. I didn’t own Nimrod right out; it was my friend Joe who provided the earbuds so I could hear strings on a Green Day song for the first time, the song that would commemorate ours and so many proms. I got Warning in college, but it was buried among too many other interests; its not just being more of the same threw me and Green Day were one more thing that seemed altogether different at that time. American Idiot was new but old, and brought me to the Best Show I’ll Ever See.

It also brought me to a second special Green Day concert, about a year after that, in 2005. September 1, 2005, almost 11 years after we were first introduced. A strange day altogether: I had moved out of the East Village and drove in from Long Island. I picked up Red, this girl I barely knew, for our first date, you might say – predating the real one by more than a year and a half. In the interest of time, I picked her up two avenues south of where she lived at the time (30th Avenue, where I’d soon get an apartment) – on the very avenue where I would live for the two years after that, in the apartment that housed about a quarter of our time and memories. We tore up to the GWB, inched across, and made it to Giants Stadium in a huff. We drank out of a flask in the car. We hurried along the fence, all the time hearing Jimmy Eat World opening, and made it inside. Standing room on the floor. We stood just to the left of the audio setup at about the 50 yard line. It would itself be the first of a couple of shows I’d see at Giants Stadium over the next couple of years, including a Muse/U2 show that bookended our time just days before Red left for home. That September 1, I wore Converse shoes and a Texas Shakespeare Festival t-shirt, I believe, and I remember our waiting on line for beer, and looking at her, and looking up and around at all the people, and thinking what a great time this was all about to be. Green Day put on a terrific show, made all the more terrific for my hearing “Basket Case” live for the first time. Past and future met that evening, as they always do, yet hardly ever so sweetly.

1. Green Day, “Basket Case”
2. Melissa Etheridge, “I’m The Only One”
3. Weezer, “Buddy Holly”
4. The Offspring, “Come Out and Play”
5. Bush, “Machinehead”
6. Foo Fighters, “Monkey Wrench”
7. Muse, “Unintended”
8. Radiohead, “Everything In Its Right Place”
9. Stage, “Live Happy, Live With Anorexia”
10. Ludo, “Save Our City”
Dan’s Definitive Top Ten 2010: Introduction