Green Day was still just a snide, snotty punk band when they made Dookie. But that doesn't mean Green Day wasn't good -- or grand. "A free lunchtime concert in Boston was cut short when roughly 40,000 more fans than expected showed up," wrote SPIN's Craig Marks, in a 1995 cover story about the band's surprising rise. And much of that rise came on the strength of Dookie, which ranted and bounced with the kind of spirit that Billie Joe Armstrong displayed in his SPIN interview: "Billie Joe doesn't say anything. He just grabs my glass mug, takes one more deep gulp, and then spits the whole thing out high up the window.

The punks that once sang about the joys of masturbation decided to get serious in Dubya's America. "It's about the confusion of where we're at right now," Billie Joe Armstrong told SPIN in a November 2004 cover story. "My education was punk rock -- what the Dead Kennedys said, what Operation Ivy said. It was attacking America, but it was American at the same time." The album took on an unexpected form. "It started out as a joke," Armstrong said in an earlier Q&A. "All of a sudden it started taking on the characteristics of a rock opera." And -- how American can a punk-rocker get? -- it's even ended up on Broadway.