Today marks 25 years of Green Day's commercial breakthrough album, Dookie.
Released on February 1st 1994, it produced five hit singles for Green Day; "Longview", "When I Come Around", "Basket Case", "Welcome to Paradise" and "She". All certified pop-punk anthems of the mid-90s and staples for skate kids and pot heads who could relate to Billie Joe's lyrics.
The name of the album is a reference to the guys in the band often suffering from diarrhea, which they referred to as "liquid dookie", as a result of eating awful food while on the road. Initially the band wanted to name the album Liquid Dookie; however, this was deemed "too gross", and so they settled on Dookie.
Fellow East Bay punk, Richie Bucher, designed the artwork. It caused controversy depicting bombs being dropped on people and buildings on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue.
Billie Joe Armstrong has explained the artwork -
"I wanted the art work to look really different. I wanted it to represent the East Bay and where we come from, because there's a lot of artists in the East Bay scene that are just as important as the music. So we talked to Richie Bucher. He did a 7-inch cover for this band called Raooul that I really liked. He's also been playing in bands in the East Bay for years. There's pieces of us buried on the album cover. There's one guy with his camera up in the air taking a picture with a beard. He took pictures of bands every weekend at Gilman's. The robed character that looks like the Mona Lisa is the woman on the cover of the first Black Sabbath album. AC/DC guitarist Angus Young is in there somewhere too. The graffiti reading "Twisted Dog Sisters" refers to these two girls from Berkeley. I think the guy saying "The fritter, fat boy" was a reference to a local cop."
The back cover on early prints of the CD featured a plush toy of Ernie from Sesame Street, which was airbrushed out of later prints for fear of being sued; however, Canadian and European prints still feature Ernie on the back cover.
Dookie has garnered considerable acclaim, from its release to present day, winning a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 1995 and being ranked No. 193 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
Great album, crank it!
Get official Green Day merch, including Dookie on vinyl, here.
