The Group

Green Day

Billie Joe Armstrong

Billie Joe Armstrong (born February 17, 1972) is an American rock musician and occasional actor, best known as the lead vocalist, main songwriter and lead guitarist for the American punk rock band Green Day. He is also a guitarist and vocalist for the punk rock band Pinhead Gunpowder and provides lead vocals for garage rock band Foxboro Hot Tubs when not working with Green Day.

Raised in Rodeo, California, Armstrong developed an interest in music at a young age, and recorded his first song at the age of five. He met Mike Dirnt while attending elementary school, and the two instantly bonded over their mutual interest in music, forming the band Sweet Children when the two were fifteen years old. The band changed its name to Green Day, and would later achieve massive commercial success. Armstrong has also pursued musical projects outside of Green Day's work, including numerous collaborations with other musicians as well as serving as the primary vocalist for the bands Pinhead Gunpowder and Foxboro Hot Tubs.

Mike Dirnt

Dirnt was born and raised in California. Mike's mother was a heroin addict. He was given up for adoption when he was a baby to a Native American mother and a white father. He has one sister, Myla. When he was 7, his adoptive parents got a divorce. Mike lived with his father for a while, but confrontations sent him back to his mother. He lived there on the borderline of poverty, his sister left home at the age of 13. "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. The one thing my family did give me is blue-collar morals. But then he died when I was 17."

Dirnt had left home when he was 17 to live out of his truck, but later rented a room in Billie Joe Armstrong's house. He attended Salesian High School (where he briefly played with the band Helder and the Heldernauts), John Swett High School, and ended up graduating from Pinole Valley High School in 1990; Green Day went on its first tour the day after graduation.

Tre Cool

Frank Edwin Wright III was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He lived in Willits, California with his father and his older sister, Lori. His father was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. Wright's closest neighbor was Larry Livermore, who at the time was the singer of the punk band The Lookouts. When Wright was 12, Livermore recruited him to join The Lookouts and gave him the name of Tre Cool, relying on both the French word très (meaning very) combined with the word cool. However, the silent "s" has been dropped in the spelling, as a play on the "third" in his name. A common misconception is that Larry Livermore gave Tre Cool his full nickname; however, Cool was known as Tre long before he was a part of The Lookouts.

Cool's father was supportive and overhauled a bookmobile to transport the band. He would later say: "I watched them go from a bunch of kids to a group of musicians with work ethic," also adding: "On their first tour or two, it was more of a party than anything else. I still scratch my head and say, 'How in the hell did they make it?' They used to practice in my living room here - a lot of the songs they did on Dookie. You hear it coming together, and you don't expect people are going to go out and buy it. But when it does, you just say, 'Wow that's so cool.'"

When Green Day's drummer, John Kiffmeyer, left the band they recruited Cool to play drums. In his sophomore year, Cool dropped out of high school and opted to earn a GED. He began taking classes at a local community college but would later drop out as well as the band became a more time consuming priority.

In 1998, after Green Day won a "Moon Man" Trophy at the MTV Music Awards, Tre Cool famously scaled the Universal globe at Universal studios, but escaped with no punishment - only compliments and cheers. Cool has been the only person to ever do so.