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This section of the site is dedicated to Mike Dirnt of course the bassist to Green Day.			<about mike:>
			Mike Dirnt was born Michael Pritchard on May 4, 1972. His natural mother was a heroin addict who gave him up for adoption. The couple who took him were a native American woman and her white husband, but differences between them led them to split up when Mike was only seven. At first he lived with his father, later with his mother. "There were all sorts of things happening, " says Mike. "When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mom stayed out all night, came home the next day with a guy, and he moved in. I'd never met the guy before, and all of a sudden he's my stepdad." "We didn't get along for years. Later on, when I hit high school, my mom moved away from us, and me and my stepdad got real close. He instilled a lot in me. But he died when I was 17. The one thing my family did give me is blue-collar morals." When he was ten, Mike met Billie Joe in their school cafeteria one day in 1982. And have been friends ever since. "If you wanted to hear music in our town, you had to play it," said Mike in Rip Magazine. "We didn't have a recrd store in town. We were little kids, and we had no way to get money--our parents were counting every dime, you know--but we saved up ourselves and Billie got a guitar and played stuff. Then I started savin' like crazy. It took me a while, but I learned to play guitar, and then I finally got one... it was the funniest thing we ever could do. Me and Billie jammed together and with other people. We tried different bands and played in, like, talent shows and stuff at school". When they were both in high school, Mike got a bass and left the guitar playing to Billie. Using the name Sweet Children, Mike and Billie played their first gig together in the lounge of Rod's Hickory Pit, a roadside cafe in Vallejo, where Billie's mom was working. They were 15 years old. After that they played anywhere they could, although seldom with any money changing hands. around 1987 Mike's mother moved out of town to Santa Rosa, about 50 miles away. Instead of going with her, Mike asked Billie's mother if he could rent the room on the side of their house. She agreed, so Mike paid her $250 a month for rent. "Then all of a sudden we got introduced to punk music and it was the coolest thing," recalls Mike. "I mean, here we are playing loud music on junky amps and everything and that's exactly what they were doing. It wasn't so much how they influenced us, it just kept us energized." In their sophomore year, Mike and Billie Joe left Rodeo and moved into a squat in West Oakland--a move which was to become the inspiration for 'Welcome To Paradise'. Mike and Billie Joe were jamming with other bands, individually and together, and even played a few gigs with local covers bands. Mike joined up with the Crummy Musicians as a vocalist, and Billie played guitar with the Corrupted Morals. But despite these distractions, they began to take Green Day very seriously. They hooked up with a drummer called John Kiftmeyer and decided to go after a recod contract. There was only one obvious choice--Berkeley's foremost punk lanel, Lookout! This sudden interest in their music put new pressure on Billie Joe and Mike, who were still in school. "Everybody I've ever known in any position of authority was tellin' me 'Dude, your band's failing--you need to go to fuckin' college'," Mike recalled. "They never stopped. They never listened." Mike found it tough to cope with studying and working, especially when his mother wasn't around to authorize his work-related adsentee slips and term reports. Two unexcused absences lost him a full grade point and at the end of the senior year he was down to C's, D's, and F's instead of the A's and B's he had worked hard to achieve. "I took my mom aside," he recalls. "I said 'This is how it is. You have so much shit going on in your life, so if once every semester you ask me if I've done my homework and jump all over my case, that's not right. Have I failed yet? No. And I'm going to graduate if you stay off my back. The one time in your life you choose to have morals, and it's going to fuck me up. Don't play mom once a year. It doesn't fucking cut it.' " but While John and Mike continued at school, Billie Joe concentrated on booking a summer 1990 tour for the band, and the day after Mike's graduation from Pinole Valley they set off together to play 45 dates across the country. However, the tour was too much for John, who wanted to go to college. Mike later went on to take more than a years worth of courses at a community college. Billie Joe did not. He just wanted to keep the band together. As a temporary measure, former Sweet Childrens Al Sobrante was drafted in on drums (Sobrante was later credited as Executive Producer for his work on Kerplunk! arrangement). However, Billie Joe and Mike were in search of a permanent drummer. They didn't have to look far to find their current drummer, Tre' Cool. "Some of the old stuff really shreds," boasts Mike Today. "I mean, any of those albums could have done just as good on Warners, but when you're recording on punk budgets--$600 was our budget for the first album--You can't use a very high-budget studio, so it's not as listener-friendly." The band's approach to selfpromotion had a personal touch, too, as Mike explains: "We used to go out and print merchandise over our guitar cases," he said. "People would bring along their own shirts, and we'd just charge them for the print. That's what kept us out on the road and sold us a lot of independent albums. That was the whole cool thing about our first two albums. No one else would tell us how to make them sound." At the end of 1991 the trio made their first tour of Europe, driving around Spain with another band and their crew--All ten men and instruments squeezed into one undersized van. In all they played 64 shows in three months, sleeping in the van or on people's floors. In Denmark, they played in a Copenhagen squat with armed guards and barbed wire to keep police out and 500 drunken fans inside. After that, they had to beg and borrow equipment every night, since the gallons of beer sprayed all over them had finished off Mike's bass and a couple of amps besides. "In Denmark, if they like you, they throw beer at you," was Mike's conclusion. "So that was pretty much it. Our instruments were toast." "For people on earth," supposes Mike, "it's probably the closest thing there is to religious heaven. I've had acid trips where I thought I was in heaven. I'm swaying there, I've left my body and my mind is just floating around. I don't have a problem in the world. And then my girlfriend walks in and that's heaven. I'm not just talking about shagging, either; just hanging out." Mike controversially told Rolling Stone: "I think drinking and doing drugs are very important. When Billie gave me a shuffle beat for 'Longview', I was flying on acid so hard. I was laying up against the wall with my bass lying on my lap. It just came to me. I said, 'Bill, check this out. Isn't this the wackiest thing you've ever heard?' Later, it took me a long time to be able to play it, but it made sense when I was on drugs. To me, everybody should drop acid at least once. Well, some people don't have the right personality for it. But it is important." After about 3 years with lookout, Mike joined forces with old friend and Chicago hard-core stalwart Ben Weasel's band Screeching Weasel, adding his "bassmaster" activities to their parting shot How To Make Enemies & Irritate People. With a strictly speed-punk sound, Screeching Weasel recalled the greatest moments of the Ramones with flippant song titles like 'Planet Of The Apes', 'I Hate Your Guts On Sunday', and 'Johnny Are U Weird?' ending with an answer to Green Day's question: 'Who Wrote Holden Caulfield.' "If you can say the word 'dookie'," Mike claims, about their album, Dookie "you can keep in touch with the child within. I've always thought that's part of our success--we're immature." Equipment Info