The Alternative Number Ones: Green Day’s “J.A.R.”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it’s for members only. Thank you to everyone who’s helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Did you ever hear "American Girls"? Not "American Girl." I'm not talking about Tom Petty here. "American Girls," plural. It's the only song ever recorded by an extremely short-lived Weezer side project called Homie. Rivers Cuomo wrote that song in 1997, when Weezer were in a state of total uncertainty. All four Weezer members were involved in recording the track in one way or another, along with people from bands like Soul Coughing and Cake. It's fucking awesome, and it represents an alternate-reality version of what Weezer could've become after Pinkerton if that was what they wanted. It's grander and sleeker than anything on Pinkerton, and it's got keyboards and breakbeats and pianos, but it never sounds like an overproduced latter-day Weezer song. It's got a blissed-out gang-chant hook that still gets stuck in my head all the time.

"American Girls" technically isn't a Weezer song, and it definitely never appeared on a Weezer album. It's still my favorite Weezer song, by a pretty significant margin. Here's where "American Girls" did end up: On the soundtrack of Meet The Deedles, a 1998 grossout comedy that nobody bothered to remember. I have never seen Meet The Deedles, so maybe it's some undiscovered cinematic gem, but it sure looks like the stupidest thing that anyone ever imagined. So here we've got this absolute one-off miracle of a song buried on the soundtrack to a piece of cursed and forgotten cinema. I only know "American Girls" because one of my college roommates found the track on Napster and became an evangelist for it, putting it on mix CDs for all his friends. If you aren't acquainted with "American Girls," you should acquaint yourself. (Weezer will eventually appear in this column, but Homie sadly will not.)

In the 1990s, this kind of thing happened all the time. This was the peak of Hollywood studios using soundtrack albums to try to market movies. Sometimes, it worked. Sometimes, the film and the soundtrack matched up perfectly, reinforcing one another and helping to create a moment in time. That's what happened with The Crow. That one should've been a cursed movie, considering that the leading man got literally killed during production, but it stands as a spooky and evocative minor classic anyway, thanks in large part to the soundtrack. But plenty of bad or forgettable movies got great soundtracks, too. A couple of weeks ago, this column considered the strange case of "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me," the glorious little one-off that U2 contributed to the Batman Forever soundtrack. That's a bad movie, but it was a big movie, so you can see why U2 and so many other important artists would want to get involved. The case of Angus, another cinematic relic from 1995, is a little harder to figure out.

Angus is a movie for kids. I was 15 when it came out, and it's about characters who are basically the same age as me. Ariana Richards, the female lead, is exactly one day younger than me. (She's the girl from Jurassic Park who hacks into the mainframe or whatever.) But I had zero interest in seeing Angus. It wasn't pitched at me. It was pitched at children. It's the underdog story of a lovable chunky kid who gets picked on by the popular kids at his school and who ultimately triumphs over them by making a big speech at a school dance. I just watched about half of it for the first time because I am a hardworking and dedicated critic, but I was on my phone the whole time. It seemed fine, but it didn't compel me. It's for kids, you know?

Angus was not some indie filmmaker's passion project. It was journeyman director Patrick Read Johnson's follow-up to Baby's Day Out. The main kid in the film does not have a Wikipedia page. The cast does have three Oscar winners: Kathy Bates, Rita Moreno, and top-billed George C. Scott, in one of his final film performances. They're the adults. James Van Der Beek makes his film debut as the evil quarterback, and E from Entourage is in there as one of his henchmen. The main kid's weird little best friend is the future Shermanator from American Pie. People use the word "boner" multiple times, and a blow-up doll plays an important role in the plot, but the humor is all dink-doink slapstick. It's a kids' movie dressed up as a teen movie. Angus came out in the summer of Clueless, and it could not compete. As far as I can tell, it didn't even try.

But Angus, even more than Clueless, has an absolute motherfucking no-skips monster of a soundtrack. The entire record sits at the point where the Venn diagram circles of snotty pop-punk and sleek, new-wavey major-label crunch-pop overlap. This was fertile ground in 1995. It was Green Day territory. In that moment, Green Day were only a few months away from releasing Insomniac, their all-important Dookie follow-up, but the world couldn't wait for that. Dookie was still in the zeitgeist in 1995. The previous year, that record reshaped the alt-rock landscape, sent three songs to the top of the Modern Rock chart, and sold millions. And so it was that a Dookie outtake made its way onto the Angus soundtrack and gave Green Day their fourth #1 hit, possibly against the wishes of the band.

Green Day did not write "J.A.R." for the movie Angus. Instead, it's the rare Green Day song written entirely by bassist Mike Dirnt, and he wrote it about his friend Jason Andrew Relva. Dirnt and Relva grew up together, and they had matching tattoos -- the word "brother," written on a snake that's wrapped around a knife. Relva died in a car crash in 1992. He was 19. Later on, Dirnt told SPIN, "He was going 95. I think he committed suicide." So: Not a song for a kids' movie.

Mike Dirnt wrote "J.A.R." in the immediate aftermath of his friend's passing, and Green Day played it live for the first time in 1992, long before kids' movies were interested in grabbing their songs for soundtracks. It's honestly one of the great Green Day songs. "J.A.R." opens with Dirnt going absolutely crazy on his bass, playing a ringing, chiming intro that leaves the song feeling dreamlike even after the sugar-rush buzzsaw guitars come in. When I played "J.A.R." in the car last night, my daughter said that it "sounds like Peanuts music," and I have to tell you, it's truly humbling to watch your kids follow in your footsteps. Yes. Exactly. The "J.A.R." intro sounds like Peanuts music. Maybe my kid can take over this column before I have to start forming opinions about Shinedown and whatnot.

That intro doesn't last long. It's literally just five seconds before the sugar-rush buzzsaw guitar arrives. From then on, Green Day remain in attack mode until the very end. That's fine with me. Green Day's attack mode is a beautiful thing. Mike Dirnt's bass stays melodically busy throughout, and Tre Cool goes bucknuts on the drum fills whenever it's appropriate for him to go bucknuts on the drum-fills. But those guys know their place on the song, and they never distract from its hammering simplicity. Billie Joe Armstrong's guitar hits like a candy-coated locomotive, and his vocals land with a forceful splat even if he's not the one who wrote them. Dirnt gives himself little moments to shine -- the gorgeous descending bass on the pre-chorus, the even more gorgeous vocal harmonies -- but he keeps himself in a supporting role. He writes about one friend while backing up another. That's beautiful.

Like so many Green Day tracks, "J.A.R." is an absolutely perfect pogo anthem. It's catchy and straightforward in all the most obvious ways, and its sheer downhill-sprint energy makes it stand out. You can practically hear the hormones popping off of it. The hooks on "J.A.R." aren't quite as explosive as they are on plenty of other Green Day tracks, but a relatively restrained Green Day is still a fireworks display compared to what most bands can do. "J.A.R." is a whole lot of Green Day fans' favorite Green Day song. Some of that is because it's such a random little one-off from a forgotten movie, so it feels a bit like a shared secret. Part of it is also because it's just a fantastic song. It's also about the heaviest thing that a song can be about.

"J.A.R." is a song about death -- processing it, reckoning with it, figuring out what to do with yourself before it comes for you: "Now I see I'm mortal, too, and I can't live my life like you." The bridge -- "you know that I know that you're watching me" -- can be awfully moving if it catches you at the right moment. Billie Joe Armstrong hollers that he's going to live his life the way that he wants and give all that he can give. He can do that. He's still alive. Maybe Mike Dirnt's lyrics are a little inarticulate, but they're the right kind of inarticulate. "If you could see inside my head, then you would start to understand the things I value in my heart" -- that's not what you write when you have everything figured out. It's something that you say when your head is whirling and you're reckoning with whether you are, in fact, living the life you want to live. Can anybody ever really answer that question?

I could've died last month. I was driving just outside of Charlottesville with my family, and a dead tree fell on our minivan and smashed it all to shit. This was in the middle of a sunny day. It wasn't storming outside. It wasn't even windy. This fucking thing just came down out of nowhere. We didn't see the tree before it hit. There wasn't any ominous music beforehand, any chance to brace ourselves for what was about to happen. I just heard the boom, felt the jolt, and saw that the windshield was shattered. I didn't see that part of the roof was caved in until after I pulled over. My daughter, the one who said that the "J.A.R." intro sounds like Peanuts music, thought we'd been struck by lightning. The tree basically hit my wife in the head. She has a bad concussion, and she's still recovering. But the roof of the car, blessedly, took most of the punch. I'm taller than her. If I'd been in the passenger seat and she'd been driving, that might have been it for me, right? That's one thing that I keep thinking about.

We all walked away. That's the amazing thing. My wife is hurt, but she's getting better every day. Everyone else was OK. The minivan was completely totaled. The possibility of a tree landing on a moving car was simply not something that concerned me before the crash. It wasn't something I ever thought about. Now, I don't like driving through the woods anymore, which is kind of tough because there are woods all around me. I look at every tree like "you better not, motherfucker," and I keep reading and hearing stories about people who did die when trees fell on their cars. Apparently, that's not quite as uncommon as I would've expected. Somebody needs to do something about all these fucking dead trees.

It's all dumb luck -- not just the fact that I was in the driver's seat, but all of it. If the tree had fallen a split-second earlier or later, maybe we would've all died. The car behind us was a convertible; that guy definitely would've died if it hit him. This shit is flying around in my head all the time, and I don't know what to do with it. That particular near-death experience did not grant me some new sense of clarity. If anything, things are more confusing now. Am I supposed to sue the county where it happened? Just call up a lawyer from a personal-injury billboard? I don't know anything about that shit. My life has not changed, not really. We got the car towed and got a ride to the emergency room, and the very next day, I was back to blogging about music again. But it's been about a month now, and I still feel like I'm living in a strange and uncomfortable dream.

It seems that Jason Andrew Relva did not die in a random freak accident, and Mike Dirnt did not write "J.A.R." while experiencing the state of mind that I'm in right now. "J.A.R." is also about wanting to run around and do the shit that you want while you're young and able, and I'm like twice as old as Dirnt was when he wrote the song, so that doesn't apply, either. But "J.A.R." still captures my current headspace beautifully.

The best part is the very end of the song, where the sugar-rush buzzsaw guitars disappear and that chiming bass from the intro comes back. Over just that bass, Armstrong and Dirnt join in motormouthed harmony, like double-time Simon & Garfunkel: "Gotta make a plan, gotta do what's right/ Can't run around in circles if you wanna build a life/ But I don't wanna make a plan for a day far away/ While I'm young and while I'm able, all I wanna do is..." They never finish the sentence. They just trail off, as if they've lost their train of thought, or as if a tree has just fallen and smacked both of them in the head. You have to fill in the blank yourself: "Play"? "Pray"? "Slay"? There's no single word that would be quite as profound as the way that trail-off leaves indecision hovering in the air. (In the demo version, Armstrong apparently did sing "play," but give me the trail-off anytime.)

"J.A.R." doesn't sound like a sad song. It's fast and catchy and intense, and the final moment is remarkably pretty. When you encounter that song, you don't necessarily think about death. That's probably why "J.A.R." worked so well on alt-rock radio, and that's also why it did just fine when soundtracking the montage where Angus tries to learn to dance. So here's where we get into the part of the column about how "J.A.R." ended up in the movie. The Angus soundtrack was assembled by Elliot Cahn and Jeff Saltzman, two entertainment lawyers who'd been Green Day's managers since just after their Kerplunk album came out in 1991. (Before he was a lawyer, Cahn was a guitarist for Sha Na Na, which is fun.) In the wake of Dookie, Cahn and Saltzman launched an MCA imprint called (510) Records. According to rumors that later made their way into a Rolling Stone cover story on Green Day, Cahn and Saltzman leaked "J.A.R." to the LA station KROQ weeks ahead of time, hoping to get more airplay for the bands on their label. Soon afterward, Green Day fired Cahn and Saltzman, becoming their own managers, a crazy thing for a band on their level to do. It sure seems like they weren't happy with the way that "J.A.R." entered the world.

Green Day's "J.A.R." recording came from their Dookie sessions, and it sure looks like they weren't interested in putting it out into the world as part of the Angus soundtrack. But I tell you what: Cahn and Saltzman did a hell of a job putting that soundtrack together. Perhaps because of Green Day's input, the soundtrack includes some of their former Lookout! Records peers -- Pansy Division, Tilt, Screeching Weasel offshoot the Riverdales. It's also got catchy, pummeling guitar-pop bangers from bands like the Dance Hall Crashers, the Smoking Popes, and the Goo Goo Dolls, the latter of whom will eventually appear in this column. The Muffs chip in with a really great song called "Funny Face." The Belfast band Ash have a couple of tracks on there, and I'm a little surprised to learn that they never had a Modern Rock hit. I definitely heard "Jack Names The Planets," one of their Angus songs, on the radio a bunch of times.

Rivers Cuomo apparently loved having songs on the soundtracks of random-ass '90s movies, since he actually wrote a number called "Wanda (You're My Only Love)" specifically for the Angus soundtrack, putting in direct references to characters and plot points and everything. That one was rejected for being too literal, but another Weezer song called "You Gave Your Love To Me Softly" made the cut.

All those songs are actually in the movie, too, which creates the weird sense that the characters live in a pop-punk reality. A Green Day radio-station ticket giveaway is a running joke in the film, and the best-friend character rocks a Rancid shirt at one point, though none of the kids seem to identify with any particular subculture. They just live in a world where random pop-punk songs get played at all the school dances. Must be nice. The weirdly hypnotic opening credits are set to a marching-band version of "Am I Wrong," the 1994 single from Richard Butler's post-Psychedelic Furs band Love Spit Love. I didn't watch the whole movie, but that was probably my favorite part. ("Am I Wrong" reached #3 on the Modern Rock chart. It's an 8.)

The Angus soundtrack fucking rules, but it did not help sell the film to teenage America. Angus came out in September, not exactly the busiest time at the box office, and it promptly vanished. The weekend that it opened, I went to see Hackers instead, and I remain certain that I made the right decision. Green Day's Insomniac album came out just a month later, and it made way less of a splash than Dookie. Maybe the turnaround was too fast. Maybe Reprise flooded the zone with too many Dookie-era singles, "J.A.R." included. Or maybe that's just how quickly the alt-rock world was moving.

Green Day probably didn't want Insomniac to be as big as Dookie. The album, which they once again co-produced with Rob Cavallo, doesn't have the same sense of exhilaration. It's angrier and uglier, but it's still full of hooks and energy. It also kicks ass. I remember one friend talking about how much he liked Insomniac because it was so short that he could listen to the whole tape while driving to Best Buy. (They'd just opened a Best Buy up one suburb over from us.) Radio didn't take to Insomniac anywhere near as hard as Dookie. The album's two big singles, "Geek Stink Breath" and "Brain Stew," both peaked at #3. ("Geek Stink Breath" is a 10, and "Brain Stew" is an 8, except when it's got "Jaded" attached, in which case it's another 10. I'm just now discovering that I might like Insomniac better than Dookie.)

Insomniac went double platinum, a great success for most bands but a real step down for post-Dookie Green Day. Their next album, 1997's Nimrod, had a whole bunch of sonic experimentation but still sounded exactly like a Green Day record. They could mess around with ska and hardcore and spaghetti western instrumentals, and they still somehow sounded just like themselves. Lead single "Hitchin' A Ride" had violin and marching-band drums, and it peaked at #5. (It's a 9.) Green Day scored a much bigger hit, on both alt-rock and pop radio, with the string-laden acoustic ballad "Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life)." That was their bittersweet farewell to the punk scene that raised them, but it's since been repurposed as a graduation anthem. These things happen. ("Good Riddance" peaked at #2. It's a 7.)

It only reached #31 on the Modern Rock charts, but I feel compelled to mention that Nimrod also had "Nice Guys Finish Last," a great song that eventually found its way onto the Varsity Blues soundtrack. If you had James Van Der Beek playing a high school quarterback in a movie, then that movie needed a Green Day song on its soundtrack. This was non-negotiable.

Nimrod, like Insomniac before it, went double platinum. Green Day were cruising along, but they had serious competition by the late '90s. Major labels started signing any band that sounded like Green Day and wasn't too punk to take a meeting, and a bunch of those bands broke through to alt-rock radio. Plenty of those bands acknowledged Green Day as a primary influence. The biggest act to come out of the post-Dookie gold rush was almost unquestionably Blink-182, a group that toured with Green Day as soon as they possibly could. Mark Hoppus started writing Blink's 1999 hit "What's My Age Again?" when he tried to learn the bassline from "J.A.R." He couldn't figure it out, but the attempt led him to write another riff, and that riff powered Blink's first top-10 Modern Rock hit. ("What's My Age Again?" peaked at #2. It's a 9. Blink-182 will eventually appear in this column.)

Green Day's rookie-year run on the Modern Rock charts is the stuff of legend. In just over one calendar year, they cranked out four chart-toppers and a few other hits. All of those singles have endured, including the one random-ass soundtrack song. That's a real achievement. Their next couple of albums had hits, but Green Day took five years to return to the #1 spot. We'll see them in this column again; it'll just take a little longer than you might expect.

GRADE: 10/10

BONUS BEATS: People don't cover "J.A.R." very often, probably because it's just really hard to play that bassline. The bass player from New Found Glory can do it, though. Here's paleolithic cell phone footage of New Found Glory covering "J.A.R." in 2009:

(New Found Glory's highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 2002's "My Friends Over You," peaked at #5. It's a 7.)