Albums That Should Exist: Green Day - VH-1 Storytellers, MTV-VH-1 Studios, Santa Monica, CA, 2-15-2005

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Green Day - VH-1 Storytellers, MTV-VH-1 Studios, Santa Monica, CA, 2-15-2005

Here we go again - yet another episode of "VH-1 Storytellers." This time, it's the band Green Day.

This is a unique episode. Virtually all music acts on the TV show were promoting a new studio album and played some songs from it. But Green Day took that a step further. They played every song from their latest album, in order, without playing any other songs.

Luckily for everyone, it turned out to be probably their most acclaimed album, "American Idiot," released in late 2004. Their commercial fortunes had been declining, but this album turned that around. It went to Number One in the U.S., and sold over 23 million copies worldwide. It's kind of a rock opera, with political themes that especially targeted George W. Bush, Jr., who was the U.S. president at the time. It had a fantastic critical reception. For instance, it won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album, and Rolling Stone Magazine has it on their list of the top 500 albums of all time.

I had a lot of trouble putting this together. For one thing, this was one of those rare albums where voiceovers were added on top of the music to most of the songs. This was somewhat countered by the fact that four of the performances were released as B-sides without the voiceovers ("Give Me Novacaine," "Homecoming," "Are We the Waiting," and "St. Jimmy"). But still, three of them had that problem, and "St. Jimmy" had another problem. I fixed them using the UVR5 audio editing program, but that's why those songs have "[Edit]" in their titles.

I had another problem. I was able to find the songs here easily enough, since this is a fairly popular bootleg. However, virtually all copies didn't have the banter between songs. I couldn't find any videos of the concert to help with this either. Eventually, I was able to find some talking tracks. But I suspect there are more that I missed.

This album is an hour and three minutes long.

01 talk (Green Day)
02 American Idiot (Green Day)
03 talk (Green Day)
04 Jesus of Suburbia [Edit] (Green Day)
06 Holiday [Edit] (Green Day)
07 talk (Green Day)
08 Boulevard of Broken Dreams [Edit] (Green Day)
09 Are We the Waiting (Green Day)
10 St. Jimmy (Green Day)
11 talk (Green Day)
12 Give Me Novacaine [Edit] (Green Day)
13 She's a Rebel (Green Day)
14 talk (Green Day)
15 Extraordinary Girl (Green Day)
16 Letterbomb (Green Day)
17 talk (Green Day)
18 Wake Me Up When September Ends (Green Day)
19 talk (Green Day)
20 Homecoming (Green Day)
21 talk (Green Day)
22 Whatsername (Green Day)