The Only Green Day I Own

Green Day : American Idiot / Dean Gray : American Edit 

 

 

It all started on a Friday afternoon in October 2004. 'Party Ben' Gill was scrambling to get ready for his weekly Sixx Mixx mashup radio show on San Francisco station Live 105. Green Day's George W. Bush-skewing punkrawk opera American Idiot had just come out. Gill had been noticing the similarities between the Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" & Oasis' "Wonderwall". Light bulb flash...he decided to combine the two. He wanted to finish the mix with Aerosmith's "Dream On," but he couldn't find the band's 1973 power ballad in the station's library so he grabbed Eminem's Steven Tyler-sampling 2003 single "Sing for the Moment" instead. Little could he have anticipated the lightning-in-a-bottle response that his Frankensteinian creation would receive. 

 

The beauty of "Boulevard of Broken Songs" lies in its universality. Most everyone would recognize the chord progression of American Idiot's second single as well as the Gallagher brothers' biggest hit, now a staple of karaoke joints, sporting events, & that annoying guy who always brings his acoustic guitar to every party. Throw in the rousing MNM "Sing for the Moment," & a snippet of post-Britpop Travis' saccharine "Writing to Reach You". Bam, you've got a recipe for musical alchemy. 

 

Inspired by the song's success, Gill next considered doing something with American Idiot in the vein of Danger Mouse's 2004 Beatles-meets-Jay-Z copyright law-challenging opus The Grey Album. He even had a name for the project...Dean Gray (a spoonerism of "Green Day") - American Edit. Enter the story one Neil Mason, who by day was a manager at the University of Western Australia's classically-minded School of Music in Perth who made mashups under the alias Team9 in his spare time. Gill messaged him after hearing "Greenday Massacre," which combined "Wake Me up When September Ends" with the Eagles' "Lyin' Eyes," on Get Your Bootleg On.

In November 2005, they released American Edit, which Gill describes tongue-in-cheek as an "eclectic circus of nonsense".

Even though the duo gave American Edit away for free, ten days later they received a cease & desist notice from Green Day's label, Warner Records. While Gill was no stranger to receiving takedown notices for his mashups, it was a fellow Get Your Bootleg On member in Portland by the name of Noisehead who set up AmericanEdit.org & helped organize "Dean Gray Tuesday" (an intended evocation of 2004s The Grey Album's "Grey Tuesday" which saw more than 170 sites post the album for download after EMI served Danger Mouse with a cease & desist). 

 

 

Dean Gray Tuesday took place on December 13, 2005. The album was hosted on a number of participating websites as torrents, direct MP3 downloads or ZIP archives.  It was incredibly successful thanks to the online bootlegger community. Despite only sending out 200 CD promo copies, the stunt brought Dean Gray plenty of press attention, with American Edit receiving favorable reviews from MTV, SPIN, the San Francisco Chronicle, & others. 

 

 

Dean Gray - American Edit (enhanced), Homemade Records, 2006.
decryption code in comments

American Jesus
     1.1 - American Edit
     1.2 - Jesus' Tears
     1.3 - Summer of the Damned
     1.4 - Suburban Ring
     1.5 - It's Like That
Dr. Who on Holiday
Boulevard of Broken Songs
The Bad Homecoming
St. Jimmy the Prankster
Novocaine Rhapsody
Impossible Rebel
Ashanti's Letterbomb
Greenday Massacre
Whatsername (Susanna Hoffs)

bonus track
Boulevard of Broken Songs (dance mix '05)

Enjoy,
NØ