Sometimes, taking an underground punk rock band, turning them into global superstars and allowing them to mix with 'proper' A-listers is like pouring oil into water. You might be able to take the band out of punk rock, but can you ever truly take the punk rock out of the band? Well, for one Oscar-winning actress, her run-in with Green Day, very soon after their transition from underground misfits into international pop success story, was...ah...a bit of a crappy experience.
By early 1997, Green Day’s 1994 album Dookie was well on its way to going twice diamond in the US alone (that’s 20 million albums sold). They had also won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album and received nine nominations at the 1995 MTV Awards. They were hot shit, basically.
But for a band brought up on Gilman Street House shows and Bad Religion and Dickies records, it was a difficult transition. Cracks started appearing when Dookie was followed up a year later by Green Day’s next album, Insomniac: a faster, angrier, weirder collection of songs that seemed to be inspired purely by self-loathing, revulsion and lots and lots of drugs.
Insomniac sold far less than its predecessor, and Green Day appeared to be heading off the rails when they cancelled a European tour due to exhaustion. After taking the majority of 1996 off, the trio regrouped with producer Rob Cavallo to record what would be their next album, 1997's Nimrod.
During recording, the band checked into the Sunset Marquis Hotel in LA. The four months of recording Nimrod would be a frustrating time for the band, with long days dominated by heavy drinking and, according to frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, spending “a little too much time” playing pool and foosball instead of working.
The schedule sent the already frazzled members a little stir-crazy; bassist Mike Dirnt recalled drunkenly “walking down the halls, knocking on people’s doors while naked.”
But no incident could compare to that of March 24 1997, the evening of the sixty-ninth Academy Awards. Being the night of the Oscars, plenty of big-name stars were staying at the Sunset Marquis, and one of them was French actress Juliette Binoche, who would win the award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The English Patient that evening.
It wouldn’t be the only memorable moment for her that night. While she was attending the ceremony, Mike Dirnt, for reasons best known to himself, decided to pop his bare bottom out of Green Day's hotel window and plop out a stinker out into the LA night. Yep: he literally pooed out of the window of one of the most elite hotels in LA.
Little did he know, however, that Binoche’s room was directly below Green Day's, meaning her balcony was directly below their window. Three years after Dookie peaked at number two on the US Billboard chart, Mike Dirnt’s number two dookie parked on Binoche’s property.
Needless to say, the actress was livid. “She was so pissed off that she tried to get us chucked out of the hotel,” drummer Tre Cool later told Kerrang!. “But they let us stay, which was a big mistake.”
Indeed, it was. Green Day went on to steal the hotel's guest register, call Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards before, of course, throwing a TV out of the window. Dirnt initially denied the 'poo incident' was anything to do with him, but eventually fessed up, noting: “Okay, maybe it was me, but as they say, shit happens.”
Still, it all worked out in the end. Nimrod was seen as something of a return to form for Green Day, containing the massive Good Riddance (Time of your Life), and they are still filling stadiums to this day.
Binoche has never won another Oscar, although she was nominated once again in the year 2000. It was for a film named Chocolat.
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