Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt is said to have got his stage name from his habit of playing air bass with a pick and muttering ‘dirnt, dirnt, dirnt’. Once up and running in the renowned power trio, he found a superb, scooped tone that cut clearly through guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong’s riffs.
Shedding the rock-opera theatrics and dramatic orchestration of their albums of the 2000s, Dirnt, alongside Armstrong and drummer Tré Cool, took it back to their punk-rock roots as a trio in 2016 and effectively created the band's best album since – dare we say it – 1994's Dookie.
“For Revolution Radio it was simple,” Dirnt told Bass Player back in 2016. “Use the right bass and design the right amp, and Fender delivered on both counts.
“I knew the sound I wanted, I had it in my head, and I worked with Fender until we got it. In that sense, I guess it wasn't simple. The amp part took a lot of work.”
“I wanted a distortion that would go anywhere from Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky to Metallica’s Anesthesia Pulling Teeth, but I didn't want to use pedals because I'm sick of losing my signal through the chain. Fender built in vintage overdrive and preamp channels, and problem solved!
“The amp has a LOW pull-knob that drops my sound to a whole other world. It also has a clean top end that never gets muddy and enables you to hear the click from my pick. The results were so good I ended up using only the Bassman 800 and my signature Precision for that whole record.”
Some of your tone must come from your heavy picking style.
Absolutely; a lot of my sound comes from my wrists. It also has to do with Billie and I picking the same way together for so many years. He's a master of downstrokes, but I've come to be able to mimic his downstrokes perfectly using alternating up- and downstrokes. It prevents me from having pain in my wrists.
I see a lot of bass players trying to play our stuff using all downstrokes, and I think to myself, ‘You're going to ruin your arm.’
That actually happened to the first bass player in American Idiot on Broadway, He was playing all downstrokes because he thought I did, and he hurt his arm. I told him, ‘Naw, man, that's Dee Dee Ramone, not me!’
How is your bass playing different on Revolution Radio?
I caught myself wandering more and ending up somewhere new, from riff to riff. I deviated a lot throughout the album – more than ever before. I was taking a sort of John Entwistle approach – not that I could ever play like him.
At this point I don't question myself. When your arm and your wrist are bouncing along and you're not thinking about it, that's when the magic happens.
You went back to recording as a trio. Did that give you more freedom?
Playing in a trio is great for a lot of reasons, but mainly because it's easier to call band practices! What I like most about it is the opportunity to carry a full load and to be able to play a part that picks up the slack rhythmically and harmonically.
It doesn't matter if I'm playing an intricate run, or even the little eyebrow-raise I do on When I Come Around. Those are just my personal touches. And if those touches are hooks, that's all the better. Good songwriting to me is like sticking your hand into a tackle box: just hooks everywhere.
One of the most ambitious tracks is the near-seven-minute Forever Now.
That song comes from us knowing an album should have a journey. A lot of our favorite records throw the kitchen sink out of the bedroom window, and we wanted that. Recording a song like that in the studio, you have to let out the little kid in you and picture yourself doing cartwheels onstage.
It takes the band back to your early punk roots. Was that intentional?
It wasn't a conscious decision; I think getting together when we were inspired led to everything falling into place naturally, and the results were explosive.
It's the picking style; it's Tré riding on top of the beat, and all of us driving at full speed. We just plugged in and let it rip, which is what gives the album a punk-roots feel.
