Linda Perry calls Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong “a little pussy”

In a recent NME interview, Linda Perry didn’t mince words when it came to Green Day breaking an agreement to have the 4 Non Blondes leader produce their planned follow-up to American Idiot. “That was fucked up,” she said. “All because Billie Joe’s a little pussy and got all this backlash from his fans and didn’t like it.” American Idiot, Green Day’s seventh album, dropped in September 2004 and netted the band a Grammy award for Record of the Year (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams”). Before Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool made that project’s actual follow-up, 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown, the plan was to do something with Perry, who’d worked on records by The Waiting, P!nk, Faith Hill, Christina Aguilera, Solange, Sugababes, and Gwen Stefani. “[Armstrong] was having his own meltdown, and I think life was getting to him,” she added. “Like every artist, I think he had gotten to a point where you feel like I have nothing to say and need help. There’s a therapy aspect to producing too.” 

Perry allegedly cleared her calendar for six months to work with Green Day, who’d been recording parts separately. But those plans stalled after Courtney Love “blabbed her mouth that I was producing,” Perry claimed. “Suddenly [Green Day] started getting backlash from their fans, upset they were ‘bringing in Linda Perry who produced P!nk and Christina Aguilera.’ And then those guys just stopped calling me. I would reach out to figure out what was going on. Nobody called. I lost six months of scheduled work.” Perry eventually moved on, working with the Chicks, Cheap Trick, Joan Jett, Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Celine Dion, and Hole in the ensuing years, but she was candid about how badly Green Day burned her. “It was harsh and rude to do that. Just call me and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go a different way. I’m not digging this backlash we’re getting.’ Just balls up, man. Not returning my calls was such a pussy move, and I lost a lot of respect for Billie Joe.” 

But Perry also thinks she was nixed from the project “because I was a woman, and I’d written pop songs,” on top of Love sharing information with the wrong people (how the band felt about Perry’s uniquely tall hats remains unconfirmed). “If she would have just shut up, we would have made the record, and it would have come out, and it would have spoken for itself,” Perry added. “I had a vision and knew I was going to kill that record.” Green Day asked Butch Vig to produce 21st Century Breakdown, and the album went #1 in the United States, sold 4 million copies globally, and won a Grammy for Best Rock Album, despite diminishing returns from critics. Jess Harvell wrote in Pitchfork, “Without some sort of attitude-correcting flop, the band will probably continue to abuse your tolerance for ego-driven padding. And if the CD format finally expires between now and the next one, watch out when Billie Joe convinces Reprise to disseminate his next Economist-meets-Vegas horrorshow on snappily branded external hard drives.”

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