Titles

Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day

Marc Spitz
Hyperion
November 7, 2006
ISBN: 1401302742

It’s hard to believe that in early 2004 Green Day was considered over. The band was still together, but they were dismissed as a strictly ’90s phenomenon, incapable of re-creating the success of their groundbreaking album Dookie. Then American Idiot debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, stayed on the charts for nearly 18 months, and went on to sell more than four million records and to win Record of the Year (for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”) at the 2006 Grammy’s.

Combining unique access to Green Day with a seasoned rock journalist’s nose for a great story, Marc Spitz gives the complete account of the band, from their earliest days to their most recent explosion of popularity and critical acclaim. Foremost, Nobody Likes You is a story of friendship and the transporting power of playing very loud music. It is the story of how high school dropout Billie Joe Armstrong came to write song lyrics that inflamed the political conscience of fans in a way that two Yale graduates couldn’t. This is Green Day’s story—from rise, to fall, to rise again—has never before been fully told.

Author Bio

Marc Spitz is a former Senior Writer at Spin magazine, the author of the novels Too Much, Too Late, and How Soon Is Never, and the co-author of the oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of LA Punk (with Brendan Mullen). His writing on music has also appeared in Nylon, the New York Post, the Washington Post, and GQ. Spitz lives in New York City. His favorite Green Day song is “The Grouch.”