Mike Dirnt: Fists In The Wind

Mike Dirnt has a lot to reflect on right now. Green Day just released its 14th album to global acclaim, while also celebrating the 30th and 20th anniversaries of the mega-albums Dookie (1994) and American Idiot (2014). Green Day’s latest offering, Saviors, found the band reuniting with producer Rob Cavallo in a full-circle journey where Dirnt found his favorite sound yet. The 51-year-old punk rocker is nearing four decades in the band, after a chance meeting with Billie Joe Armstrong in his early teens, and later drummer Tré Cool, led to rock stardom for most of his life. He thinks a lot about these things while he joyrides his motorcycles up the Bay Area coast, catches waves atop his surfboard, and tends to the coffee company he co-founded, Oakland Coffee Works. But the thing he’s thinking about today, as he does a lot of the time, is bass.   

Since the first moment he played one, he knew the instrument would be his path, as his turbulent childhood sculpted him at a young age into the hard-working, earnest, and deeply reflective person he is now. These principles come out in his playing today more than ever. As he recalls, “Something just clicked, and it all made sense — melodically, rhythmically, physically, and in finding my voice as a musician. I knew once I picked it up that I’d never put it down, and I still haven’t.” Dirnt and his bandmates have also remained relentless with their work ethic, rehearsing four to six days a week when not on the road or locked in the studio, to which he attributes much of their lasting success. “So much of our writing as a band is instinctive now, but you’ll never get to that place if you’re not putting in the work. We’ve always been a working band, and it seems to keep working for us.”

Through the course of 14 albums, Dirnt has been able to maintain his distinct and recognizable sound based around catchy riffs, memorable hooks, and hard picking without ever growing overly derivative of himself. Saviors proves this once again, as his playing seems hungrier than ever — especially on tracks like “1981,” “One Eyed Bastard,” and “Coma City” [see our transcription here]. Inspired by a new Fender mahogany P-Bass he added to his arsenal, and with the help of Cavallo, he’s able to cut through Tré Cool’s massive floor toms and Armstrong’s low end-heavy riffs. But like Dookie and all of the subsequent albums, he had no problem slugging to the forefront. 

With a global tour ahead of him and the flurry and chaos of TV performances and album promotion at his feet, his time for reflection is soon to be overcome by a rigorous schedule. But in this moment, Dirnt can still ponder what got him to where he is now. “We’re still those 14-year-olds in a garage playing when we get together. It’s just as exciting now as it was back then. We’ve somehow never lost that feeling, and it’s what drives us and keeps us together. We’ve never known anything else.”  

Congratulations on the success of Saviors. I understand this process was a long one. 

With lots of twists and bends. The seeds started back when we dropped Father of All to mixed reviews back in 2020. We knew that it probably wasn’t going to be for everybody, but I loved that album. I feel like as a band, we can be ten steps in front of the listener sometimes. We always want to evolve, because that’s our job — to push those boundaries and move forward — and it’s their job to hold these things dear to them once they marinate in it and catch up. Also, 2020 stopped that record in its tracks, and it halted our tour plans and everything around it. So we kept sending demos back and forth and would play on our own and keep our ears to the ground, but it felt singular because we weren’t in a room together. A year and half ago we had about five songs in the bag that we were happy with, with “Saviors” being the first one that really wowed us. We knew that it would be the first song on the record. Billie and I got to talking and realized that we were halfway to having a really good album, and we decided to focus on it and not spend the whole year touring. My take is that a good tour lasts a summer, and a good album is eternal. Billie agreed, and we put our heads down to write an essential album. When we got in a room together, our desire to play together was so strong that we weren’t even talking much. We were just doing the right things at the right time. We did the structuring for the songs really quick, and all of our parts fell into place. Our hearts and our minds were aligned — it felt like this album wrote itself. 

How happy are you with the album’s sound?

Oh, man, I’m just thrilled with it. My bass is right where it should be, and everything is just booming. Every time we record, I have to make some concessions because we share a lot of low-end space in this band. It can be a fight to be heard in our trio. Tré has a massive kick drum, and now his kit has two huge floor toms. I absolutely love the way he plays — for the song “Dilemma,” when the drums kick in, those toms sound monstrous. It’s great, but as a bass player I have to find my space within that. Billie’s guitar sound also has a ton of low end, so it’s like they’re all storing their shit in my room [laughs]. Nobody has ever gone into a car dealership and been told, “This car really delivers the treble…you’re going to love this treble.” 

Nobody has ever gone into a car dealership and been told, “This car really delivers the treble…you’re going to love this treble.” 

How did you end up tracking it in both London and Los Angeles? 

We wanted to get out of America and out of our headspace, and so much rock & roll history passes through the U.K., so it was in the air there. Billie had gone out to England to do some demoing, and he wanted us to get in a studio out there and wondered which studio Liam Gallagher used last time. We wanted a good place, but Abbey Road is too much pressure. He found a really nice place called Rak Studios, and we went out there and knocked out half of the record over two trips. I would wake up in the morning and get jacked up on coffee and then walk two miles to the studio and dive right in. Then we got back and went to United Studio, where we recorded American Idiot, for the second half of the album. The sound of both of those rooms really aligned. We record live in the room together so we can feel the instruments and the energy, and a lot of ideas are written on the spot. Then I’ll go in and re-record the bass to the drum track from the group recording, and that gives me a chance to shape my parts even more.

Your tone has a lot of body and cuts right through the mix. How did you achieve that this time? 

I’ll tell you the secret of my bass sound on this album. Gill Snider has been with us forever — he started as my bass tech, and now he works all across the board for us. He’s a bass player, and he called and told me that Fender is making all-rosewood necks, and I said, you’re kidding me. I told him, let’s make some. I ordered an Antigua one, and this bass just has it. It’s fucking amazing. It has the warmest low end, with the bite of a maple neck, and it’s punchy at the same time. I’m still using the [Bassman] amps I helped Fender with, and I use the DI out of the back of that. It’s a really simple rig. Less is more. 

Obviously, I get a lot of attack from using a pick — although usually I get attacked for using a pick [laughs]. But go try to play “Panic Song” with your fingers and see how it goes. They’re going to fall off. Eddie Van Halen used to say that it doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you get there. I totally agree with that. I ride motorcycles and I tell people: It doesn’t matter what kind of bike you’re riding, just get your fists in the wind. But I love the attack from a pick. Even Paul McCartney got a lot of the character of his sound from it. 

Speaking of which, you have a very animated attack onstage. Tell us about your picking technique. 

It’s in my wrist more than my arm, but live I use my arm a lot for dynamic movement onstage. It’s a show, and I want to do windmills. In a stadium it’s not my job to entertain people by being efficient. There are bass players who can play circles around me who are the most efficient; I’m busy trying to get from one end of the stage to the other and while I’m singing. Some of it is theater, but most of it is my wrist. I mute, I pick up and down, and I hit the string differently for different parts. Despite picking up and down, I make it all sound like downstrokes, which there’s a nuance to; not everyone can do that. I do pull-offs and roll-ins to a lot of notes, and a lot of that can get lost. I watch people play my bass lines on YouTube and I’m like, you’re so close, but you’re really far. But that’s what makes my sound mine, and that’s cool. In the grand scheme of things, speed kills, and I don’t have all the speed, but I’m a creative. But I’ll take catchy over speed every day of the week.

You’ve always had the ability to write catchy and memorable lines. What’s your approach to writing? 

Some of it is reacting, and some of it is having to write the shit out of it — like, on the song “Adeline,” they were banging the shit out of it and I went to this melodic part that’s unfortunately a little buried, but it flipped the rhythm. On “1981” I flipped the rhythm [hums part], and that keeps it way more interesting. Then there are times when I know to hang back and let the lyrics and melody and song shine. There have been times in my life when I want to just make a sound with the band. It has to be unified, not three distinct individuals; we’ve been down that road. All three of our personalities are really shining on this record. Billie’s guitar playing is the best he’s ever played, and Tré’s drumming is the most unique he’s ever played. I played off Tré a lot on this record; we’re in a place where we make each other play things unknowingly. 

I’m sure that’s pretty natural as you approach four decades of playing together as a rhythm section. 

We’re like one machine at this point. Tré doesn’t get credit for all of the things he does. One thing is that he plays a ton of cymbals on everything, but they don’t always get noticed because he does it so musically. It adds so much depth to our songs, and it can be a subconscious thing for our listeners. And the other thing is that he really plays the shit out of those floor toms, and that’s a hard thing to do. And they’re tuned super low. It’s the difference between playing on a table top and playing on a pillow. 

As much as you serve as the propulsion for this music, you always have a strong focus on melody, which isn’t always the case with punk bass. Has that always been a part of you?

Melody is so important to me in my writing, and it’s a very natural thing to me. I always hear counter melodies and polyrhythms in everything. You can control so much with it. Sometimes we’ll have a really happy song and I’ll want to put some sadness into it — or, I could want to put more anger into a part. My first instinct is to actually think melodically, because the rhythm usually comes naturally. It started back from the time when I first picked up a bass. When I was around 14, I was playing guitar in the band, and my friend Sean [Hughes] was playing bass for us, and he had a dentist appointment during one of our rehearsals. It was the rest of us jamming in a backyard, and Billie looked over at me and said, “Why don’t you grab that bass for a second?” I picked it up and we ran through a couple of songs, and it was like, yeah, I’m a bass player now. I felt like I could write my own songs within our songs, and that all came from my melodic choices. 

How do you and Billie write together to intertwine your riffs without stepping on each other’s toes? 

At this point, we just know, but we’ve always known. When I was 14 I fell in love with The Replacements and Hüsker Dü, and Hüsker Dü paired their bass and guitar so well. Greg Norton, who is a great bass player, had such a huge influence on me. He does a lot of stopping within his playing with a big dirty wall of sound, and it was so impactful. It’s like lo-fi/hi-fi explosion and you can hear everything in it. I’ve always loved the bouncing melodies in the background and little moves that do a lot. It can be one note and it can be so damn effective. Anyways, I don’t step on Billie’s toes and he doesn’t step on mine. Same with Tré — we recognize when either of the other people are onto something, and we let them shine. If you’re not building tension or emotion or breaking it down, then you’re not being effective. And if you’re just waiting for the chorus to come, then you need to be focusing on the part before the chorus. They say, “Don’t bore us — just get to the chorus,” but every part of a song is important, and you should never just go through the motions. 

They say, “Don’t bore us — just get to the chorus,” but every part of a song is important, and you should never just go through the motions. 

The album’s first single, “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” instantly blew up. That was one of the later songs recorded for the album, wasn’t it? 

It was one of the last two that we recorded. Billie had that song kicking around for about four years. He changed up some lyrics, and we got in a room and spent a day structuring it out, and it was there. He had the “American dream is killing me” line from the start, but four years ago wasn’t the right time for that song because Trump was in office and everyone was tired of it and it was low-hanging fruit. It’s a statement based around how the American dream doesn’t work for everybody. When he was born, his mom was a waitress and his dad was a truck driver, and somehow on two modest salaries they were able to afford a home. That is impossible now.

In “1981” you infuse some countermelody lines and a bunch of runs throughout the song. How did that come about? 

Billie had sent a demo and I played around with it a little, and then I sent back a demo of my bass, but I wasn’t fully happy with it. The hard part wasn’t the runs and stuff, it was figuring out how to pump along with Tré in the verses, and which parts to emphasize and which not to. And then I did the little flip-rhythm countermelody, and I sent it back to Billie, and he was like, what the fuck? This is fun.

You do some epic transition runs on “One Eyed Bastard.” 

That one is funny because it was inspired by The Sopranos. We found out that James Gandolfini’s favorite record was Dookie, and he used to listen to it constantly on vinyl in his trailer. That was corroborated to Billie by [Sopranos actor] Michael Imperioli, so he started heavily watching the show again. Then Billie started writing this song, and it has an aggressive feel, so I wanted to attack it like that. That’s where those runs come from. When he showed me the song, I got a Gangs of New York vibe from it. That’s why I play an almost Irish jig part in it; I don’t know what led me to that, but it just happened. The same thing happened in the song “Minority.” I don’t know where my Irish influence comes from. I’m adopted — maybe I have some Irish in me, I don’t know. 

You’re celebrating 30 years of Dookie. What is it like looking back on that album now? 

Man, I’m just happy that we were able to record a record that we still want to play today — and also, that the record sonically didn’t get dated. We really just wanted to take what we were doing and record it in a bigger way. I remember Rob [Cavallo] had recorded the band The Muffs, and we loved the sound of their records. We wanted those guitar sounds and the big tones. Dookie was simply recorded correctly, for a lack of a better description. That’s exactly how we wanted it, and it still holds up. 

How do you view yourself as a bass player back then? You were definitely playing your ass off. 

It’s funny because it’s all woodshed stuff. We were jamming in a room for four to six days a week, which we still tend to do. We never looked back. I grew up in the East Bay punk scene with some of the best bass players in the world around me. When I was ten years old, I met Cliff Burton [Metallica], and it was a trip. We had guys like Matt Freeman, Les Claypool, and all the funk guys. There’s a weird stigma that’s like, if you’re not the best, why are you even doing it? I want to inspire players to know that you don’t have to be the faster player on the team to be the most effective. There will always be exceptional players, but you don’t have to be the absolute best to make something meaningful and good. The key is to find your identity and your personality and emote it. You’ll have a moment when things click and you go, whoa. It took me forever to get to the top speed I ever got to. There are always things that I hear that I have to figure out how the hell I’m going to play it, and that’s where you have to get creative. You just have to make it happen. And there’s always a way. That’s how you find your style. 

Why do you think you’re more successful than ever after 37 years? 

I think that musically, we have short attention spans and we want everything to be catchy and interesting all the way through a song. That’s one thing — we’re not afraid to go for it and be catchy and try new things. But most important, I think the kids can smell a rat, and they know the truth when they hear it. And what they’re hearing has a lot of truth in it, and it’s honest and it’s coming from a real place. The strongest thing a songwriter can do is be honest with themselves, and that takes vulnerability. In a world where people judge you by the blink of an eye, that’s a hard thing to do. You’ve got to encourage that. Shine light on the truth and show your truth, because it’s going to inspire somebody else. –BM

Hear Him On

Green Day, Saviors [2024]

Mike’s Gear

Bass Custom Fender Mike Dirt Signature Precisions, Vintage Fender Precisions, Vintage Gibson G3s 

Rig Two Fender Super Bassman 300 tube amps using the DI from the head and a 4×10 fender cab, Radial JX42 Line Selector, Shure AD4Q Axcient digital wireless

Picks Dunlop Custom .60 

Strings Ernie Ball Slinky cobalt strings, .045–.105

Straps Richter

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