Getty Image / Timothy Hiatt
Green Day‘s ‘Basket Case’ appeared on their 1994 album ‘Dookie’ and it is widely considered to be one of the greatest songs of all-time.
‘Basket Case’ has nearly 1 billion streams (Green Day‘s most-streamed song). It was named as the 150th greatest song ever written by Rolling Stone. And BBC Radio 1 listeners voted it as the ‘Greatest Punk Song of All-Time’ back in 2006. It’s iconic.
Appearing on the Song Exploder podcast, Green Day founder and frontman Billie Joe Armstrong spoke about how ‘Basket Case’ came to exist as a tune in his head with very, very different lyrics than the ones we all know today. Armstrong says he wrote the song in 1992, two years before the ‘Dookie’ album was released.
Billie Joe Armstrong told Song Exploder “When I got home from the tour, I had a little bit of money. So I spent it on a new amp and a four-track. And I was like, I’ll teach myself how to record demos.”
He says “I had this melody in my head for a while. And I wanted to have this sort of grand song about a love story.” It’s at this point that he starts singing the original lyrics for ‘Basket Case’ on the pod.
Those lyrics are:
“I really don’t know where this story began / My friend Houston had got himself a girl / Swank is her name, she’s got the best of him / And he’s got the best of her in the palm of their hands / And they could care less what’s coming up / Sometimes the future doesn’t have much luck / This wigged-out thing called love / It may get kinda rough / And they don’t really mind / They’re on their own”
He says at the time he was beat boxing to create the drum sound because he didn’t have a drummer for the demo. Armstrong also revealed why he ditched those original lyrics, saying:
“The true confession is I was on crystal meth when I wrote the lyrics to it. And I thought I was writing the greatest song ever… As you know, with drugs, they wear off. And then, I felt like I’d written the worst song ever. I thought that the lyrics were just embarrassingly bad. I had a few songs before that I’d written on drugs, but this one was the most pitiful I felt after.”
Of course, we know the lyrics turned out vastly different:
Do you have the time to listen to me whine/ About nothing and everything all at once? / I am one of those
Melodramatic fools / Neurotic to the bone No doubt about it / Sometimes I give myself the creeps / Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me / It all keeps adding up / I think I’m cracking up / Am I just paranoid? / Or am I just stoned?
The full episode can be streamed here:
Hearing Billie Joe Armstrong talk about the origin of such an iconic song as ‘Basket Case’ begs the question, why haven’t we heard this story until now? It’s a rock anthem.