A Cassette and a Bootleg DVD

When I was about 8 years old, I liked to go through my brother and sister’s stuff to play around. This was when I discovered a black cassette with an illustration of a hand holding a grenade. It read “American Idiot” which sounded so strange to me.

I put it on our family’s orange portable radio tape player, and it hit me. A loud power chord followed by a blast of drum cymbals. It was truly powerful. “Don’t wanna be an American idiot” and the rest of the lyrics sounded strange to me. But in what felt like a bleep, I arrived at “Whatsername.”

I thought to myself, this is my favorite music album. And I’ve never listened to a full album before.

Rummaging through my brother’s stuff again, I saw a bootleg DVD with a red cover and a black silhouette of a man (I didn’t even know who Billie Joe Armstrong was at the time). I put it on the DVD player and there it is: the sun rising in Milton Keynes, the band enters the stage and just goes with it.

I was hooked! I was fully invested. Then I discovered that my older brother had this complete collection of cassettes from the first album all the way to American Idiot. This was 2004/05 so the album was still fresh out of the oven. I would spend my time after school just watching the DVD over and over again. Watching the in-between segments of Billie, Mike, and Tre talking about the huge gig, the album, and the band.

Starting a Band and Stuff

Fast forward to 2008 when I entered middle school. I asked my parents to buy me an electric guitar. I wanted to learn how to play so bad. I started a band with my childhood best friend Bobby. It sounded very cool since Billie Joe and Mike Dirnt were also schoolmates. I tried to write quirky and edgy punk songs in English. Even tried to come up with a 9-minute song like Jesus of Suburbia.

Then 2010 came around and I started a band with Lefawigi (still playing, writing, and performing music to this day). That single moment of discovering American Idiot made me who I am today (in terms of being an amateur musician and songwriter).

The rest is growing up. I went to high school and loved (most of) the trilogy album. I went to college loving Revolution Radio. Then just after getting my degree, Bobby and I had a chat full of excitement about the Hella Mega Tour which will come to Bangkok in 2020.

2020 Sucks

We even created a spreadsheet to plan our budget and itinerary when we get to Thailand and watch Green Day for the first time.

But then Covid-19 happened, which made Green Day cancel their Asia tour at that time. So life just goes on. We became adults with responsibilities, jobs, and bills to pay. It never occurred to me that I would watch Green Day as a married man lol.

Finally

Time flew super fast and it’s 2024. Suddenly there were the Saviors tour all across Europe and North America. Some of the people I know were studying/working in Europe and got to watch Green Day. I never felt so envious.

So when Green Day announced their comeback to Indonesia since their last time in 1996, I was stoked. I purchased the tickets with my band and Bobby and we got to experience the one thing we could only watch on YouTube. It felt surreal until they finally showed up to the stage, kicking ass and rocking out to the album that got me hooked in the first place.

The show’s experience was admittedly not much. I was on the far back side of the stage so there was not much to see directly. I even sprained my ankle in a moshpit during St. Jimmy. But it was all worth it.

I know it’s kinda cheesy writing a whole blog post about a band that I loved from my childhood. But hey, this is why I started this thing in the first place so I can yap about anything I want on my own terms. See you in the next posts.