Billie Joe Armstrong is the lead vocalist and guitarist for the band Green Day. He also sings lead for another punk rock band called Pinhead Gunpowder.
On February 17th, 1972, Billie Joe Armstrong was born in Oakland, California. However he was raised in Rodeo, California as the youngest out of his six siblings. When Billie was just ten years old his father passed away from esophageal cancer. The song “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Billie’s band Green Day is a memorial to his father.
Billie Joe Armstrong’s interest in music has began at a very young age and he has been singing since he was merely five years old. When Billie was young, he would go around hospitals and he would sing little songs to sick patients to make them feel better. One of his teachers encouraged him to record his first song call “Look For Love” at a local recording studio and company Flat Records. A few years later, at age eleven, Armstrong got his very first electric guitar from his mother and Billie still uses it to this day. Another thing that inspired Billie with music was his stepfather that his mother remarried two years after his father died. No one out of the six children liked their stepfather.
In 1982, Billie Joe Armstrong was just ten years old he met Mike Dirnt who would eventually be his best friend and the other co-founder of their band Green Day. Whenever they had sleepovers together at each other’s houses, they would play songs by old heavy-metal artists or bands like Ozzy Osbourne, Def Leppard, and Van Halen. Other influences they listened to would be the Bay Area’s “thrash and drang” alternative music culture that passed throughout the eighties. When Billie was just 14 years old he wrote his first song called “Why Do You Want Him” and it was definitely about his mother and new stepfather. A year later Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and the drummer John Kiffmeyer formed a punk rock band called Sweet Children. Their first gig was at Rod’s Hickory Pit which was...