A piece of Green Day lore nearly two decades old has been dragged back into the light, with legendary producer Linda Perry confirming a long-standing rumour that she was set to produce the Green Day follow-up to American Idiot before the project was unceremoniously scrapped.
As reported by Rolling Stone, the 4 Non Blondes frontwoman didn’t hold back in a new interview with NME, detailing how she was hired – and then completely ghosted – by the band. Perry explained she had cleared her calendar for six months and met with frontman Billie Joe Armstrong to map out a vision for the record. But it all fell apart after Courtney Love, whose solo album America’s Sweetheart Perry had worked on, let the news slip in an interview.
“Suddenly they started getting backlash from their fans, upset they were ‘bringing in Linda Perry, who produced Pink and Christina Aguilera,’” Perry explained. “And then those guys just stopped calling me. I would reach out to figure out what was going on. Nobody called. I lost six months of scheduled work. That was fucked-up – all because Billie Joe’s a little pussy and got all this backlash from his fans and didn’t like it.”
At the time, Green Day’s management quickly shot down the rumour to a fan site, but Perry’s account paints a very different picture. She claims the band completely cut contact. “It happened because I was a woman and I’d written pop songs,” she said.
“I was disappointed in those guys, and then I was mad at Courtney because if she would have just shut up, we would have made the record, and it would have come out and it would have spoken for itself. I had a vision and knew I was going to kill that record.”
Perry even shared a glimpse of that vision, revealing she wanted the band to record in a ’60s style, set up in a circle and playing together live, inspired by the likes of rock band Love. Coincidentally, Green Day later released a ’60s-inspired garage rock album in 2008 under the name Foxboro Hot Tubs. The record, Stop Drop and Roll!!!, was a raw, lo-fi departure from their stadium punk sound and leaned heavily into the very influences Perry had suggested, making its release a strange postscript to their abandoned collaboration.
While Perry says she’s ultimately “good with” how things turned out, she called the band’s behaviour “harsh and rude”.
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“Just call me and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go a different way. I’m not digging this backlash we’re getting’. Just balls-up, man. Not returning my calls was such a pussy move, and I lost a lot of respect for Billie Joe.”
