Songoftheday 3/6/21 - Another turning point a fork stuck in the road, time grabs you by the wrist directs you where to go...

 

 

"Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" - Green Day

from the album Nimrod (1997)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: ineligible to chart

Billboard Hot 100 Airplay peak: 11 (three weeks)

Weeks in the Airplay Top-40: 39

 

Today's song of the day comes from the punk band gone mainstream Green Day, whose fourth studio album Insomniac had spun off a pair of big pop radio hits with "Geek Stink Breath" and "Brain Stew/Jaded".  In 1997, the trio of Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool, and Mike Dirnt returned with their next record Nimrod. The lead track promoted to rock radio, "Hitchin' A Ride", wasn't a remake of the 1970 psychedelic pop song from the Vanity Fare, but rather an original written by the group that sounded like a resurrected Stray Cats. Unreleased commercially in the U.S., nevertheless the song reached the top ten on both the Mainstream (#9) and Alternative (#5) rock radio chart, and #59 on Billboard magazine's pop Hot 100 Airplay list. But it would be the second offering from the record that would surprise a lot of people and put their career on a whole new level. "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)" was credited to the band but mostly written by Armstrong years back to commemorate an ex-girlfriend who moved away and left him obviously bitter. Not a fit for their boisterous breakthough album Dookie or follow-up Insomniac, the song finally saw itself placed on Nimrod, with producer Rob Cavallo going the whole ballad route, with a string section and a strummed acoustic guitar replacing any percussion section or electric instrument. Unlike say Alanis, Billie Joe doesn't openly wear his anger, but lets his resentment seethe underneath the contrite and cloudy lyrics, which gives the song an even greater sense of gravitas, to the point where kids were using it for their graduation and sitcoms co-opting it for their "special episodes"...

Since "Good Riddance" wasn't released commercially, it wasn't able to place on Billboard's official Hot 100 pop chart. However, the song got enough radio love to just miss the top ten on the airplay component of that tally starting on Valentine's Day of 1998. The song was a huge success at rock radio, spending thirteen weeks at #2 on the Alternative Rock chart, and reaching #7 on the Mainstream Rock list. It even became the band's first charting hit at the older-skewing Adult Top-40 format, cresting at #11. Internationally, the single reached #2 in Australia (paired with another track "Redundant"), and made the top-40 in Canada (#5), Iceland (#5), the UK (#11), Ireland (#30), and New Zealand (#40). The Nimrod album, released in October of 1997, went to #10 on the Billboard 200 sales chart in America, going on to sell over two million copies.

The next track from Nimrod promoted to radio was "Redundant", which rose to #16 on Billboard's Alternative Rock chart, while as a single overseas went to #2 in Australia (as previously mentioned), and #27 in Britain. That was followed by "Nice Guys Finish Last", which was used in the movie Varsity Blues, and got to #31 on the Alternative Rock list.

(10/10)

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Here's Billie Joe (with Joe and Mike looking on) performing "Good Riddance" on Letterman...

Next up, live at Woodstock in 1997...

 

and lastly in concert in Japan in 2010...

 

Up tomorrow: A British popster questions his identity.