There’s a place that’s on 7th Street and Peralta in West Oakland, just by the BART railway station, where Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist Mike Dirnt lived in 1989.
To describe this warehouse spot as palatial and well-appointed would be stretching the truth just a little bit. The abandoned building was dilapidated as fuck, to put it kindly, and a place where these two teenagers – then in a band called Sweet Children – and a gang of “punks, runaways and artists” called home. It was certainly different to the Armstrong family home located some 20 miles away in Rodeo, California.“It was rat-infested and in a really fucked-up neighbourhood, with a lot of crazy punks and friends,” Armstrong told Rolling Stone Australia. “I was paying $50 a month for rent, which was great, because, being in a band, you got paid a couple hundred bucks here and there — so it was easy to pay for rent, eat Top Ramen, and buy weed. It was an eye-opening experience.”
“Suddenly, I was on my own, out in one of the gnarliest neighbourhoods in Oakland,” he added. “You look around and you see cracked streets and broken homes and ghetto neighbourhoods, and you’re in the middle of it. You’re scared, thinking, “How do I get out of here?” Then suddenly it starts to feel like home. There is a sort of empathy that you have for your surroundings when you’re around junkies and homelessness and gang warfare.”The riff itself came from drummer Tré Cool, while Armstrong provided the drum patterns. The lyrics to Welcome to Paradise was written from Armstrong’s viewpoint and addressed to his mother, Ollie. Gunshots, violence and death? These were real life situations which took place in his neighbourhood and not dressed up to give the song some grit. “It was not the safest neighbourhood in the world,” Armstrong would later tell the Library of Congress’ Roswell M. Encina, “but it sort of was something that, like, I felt it was an ode to Oakland, and sort of how I sort of fell in love with being a kid that grew up in the East Bay and just experiencing real life in Oakland.”
The song originally appeared on the band’s 1991 album, Kerplunk! – their second –and later appeared on the band’s breakthrough album Dookiesome three years later. Feeling the pressure of a big studio and their label’s expectations, the band took their major label debut seriously and put hours in to prepare for their time with producer Rob Cavallo at Berkeley’s Fantasy studio and Los Angeles’ Music Grinder…