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between_time_and_42Finally have the time to post more about adapting the concept albums for SF: ALS! Here are some thoughts on Green Day’s American Idiot.
With American Idiot, I’m pretty much taking canon solely from the album, although a few characters from the musical version make a brief appearance. The biggest difference between the album and the musical is that the album follows just one protagonist- on the album, he’s referred to as the Jesus of Suburbia, but in the musical, he’s given the name of Johnny. In the musical, Johnny is joined by two friends, Tunny and Will, who are both introduced in the second song. The main plot of the album kicks off when Johnny, tired of his dead-end slacker life in the suburbs, moves to the big city to find a purpose. This is an arc that he undertakes solely by himself on the album, but in the musical, Tunny joins him initially in moving to the city. When city life turns out to be not all that it’s cracked up to be, Tunny decides to join the army instead, whereupon he gets injured in combat and falls in love with the nurse who tends to him. Meanwhile, Will stays in the suburbs to support his pregnant girlfriend Heather. Already, the album and the musical plots are significantly different, as songs that apply solely to Johnny’s arc are repurposed to apply to Will and Tunny, such as the song “Extraordinary Girl” being sung by Tunny to the nurse he’s in love with, while on the album it refers to Johnny’s girlfriend, Whatsername. (Little sidenote here- Whatsername doesn’t have a canonical name because Johnny is telling the story of American Idiot as a retrospective, and he has forgotten his girlfriend’s name by that point. I realized, since I had to write from her perspective a few times in CAE/SF: ALS, and because she shows up again as a major character in WTC?, that I had to give her a name, and so I chose to call her Haushinka based on an obscure Green Day song about a girl named Haushinka, who the protagonist reminisces about and regrets that they never had a chance at a proper relationship, which I felt could relate to how Johnny feels about Whatsername.) I decided not to use Tunny and Will’s storylines in SF: ALS, because 1. the US wasn’t involved in combat in 1980 (the year the story takes place), so Tunny wouldn’t be sent to fight in a war, and 2. Will’s story felt irrelevant and unnecessary, when SF: ALS already has so many characters to juggle. However, Tunny and Will do make a brief cameo in the First Interlude, when Johnny is introduced. Will mentions that his girlfriend wanted to have a talk with him that night, and from there, although we never return to his story, it can be inferred that his storyline with Heather happens offscreen/off-page. The First Interlude also ends with Johnny asking Tunny if he wants to leave town, and when we return to Johnny’s story, Johnny will mention that Tunny did split town with him but eventually left him to look for other prospects. The last Johnny hears of Tunny will be when he sends him a postcard towards the end of his plot arc, which consists of the lyrics from the “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” section of the penultimate song on the album, “Homecoming.” “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit the theme of the rest of the song, which is Johnny trying to stick it out in the city after Whatsername has left him by joining the corporate world, but “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” basically goes like this: “I got a rock and roll band, I got a rock and roll life, I got a rock and roll girlfriend, and another ex-wife! I got a kid in New York, I got a kid in the Bay! I ain’t drank or smoked nothing in over 22 days, so get off my case!” As much as this sounds like a non-sequitur, if I recall correctly, this part is written in the liner notes to the album as if it’s on the back of a postcard, so I think it’s supposed to be a friend of Johnny’s bragging to him about how good his life is, and that kind of wakes Johnny up and makes him realize that he’s getting nowhere in life and he needs to give it up and go back home. So, in my version of the story, it’s Tunny who sends this postcard. (I actually need to find a copy of the album- my sibling is the one who had it on CD, and I’m not sure what they did with it- and see if the liner notes say who’s supposed to have written the postcard. I’m going to be so amused if it really was Tunny.)
The next biggest change is going to be the matter of the timeline. The musical gives a specific timeline of events, but I couldn’t fit it in evenly with the timeline of SF: ALS, so I’m just ignoring that. Again, I need to check the liner notes because they could contradict me, but I’m pretty sure there was no specific timeline given for the events of the album (except that “Homecoming” implies that Johnny has been trying to make it in the city for a good year or more, which I can fit into my timeline). This also means that the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends” won’t actually take place in September, but a few months after September. However, I find this forgivable because the song is based on Billie Joe Armstrong’s real-life experience of losing his father in September, and I’m going to have Johnny share that background, so when he thinks “wake me up when September ends,” he’s relating how devastated he currently feels with how he felt when his father died, not that it’s actually September when he feels that way. (This reminds me… I should probably make a post sometime about how most of the concept albums are based on the songwriters’ real-life experiences- at least, I know this goes for American Idiot and The Wall, and Peter Gabriel said that parts of The Lamb are based on his life but he’s never mentioned what parts specifically so I don’t know if I could include that in my post, but I guess it’s worth a shot at writing about. Anyway, this occurred to me recently and I started getting really disturbed about it…)
The other major difference in how I’m adapting American Idiot is how I’ve chosen to handle the character of St. Jimmy. This is actually something that my sibling and I originally differed in opinion about regarding the album’s story. They said when describing the story that it’s about “a drug dealer named Jimmy who moves from the suburbs to the city,” and I was like.. wait… you think Jimmy and Johnny are the same person?! St. Jimmy is, in fact, a drug dealer who lives in the city, but I always used to think that Jimmy was a person that Johnny met in the city who became his friend/bad influence, and introduced him to a new way of life. The musical has Jimmy and Johnny played by two different people. However, towards the end of the album, there’s this line: “Jimmy died today. He blew his brains out into the Bay. In my state of mind, it’s my own private suicide.” A lot of fans point to this line as meaning that Jimmy is Johnny’s alter ego, and they’re the same person. In the original version of CAE, I took that theory and ran with it, writing a Fight Club-style relationship between Johnny and Jimmy (with Johnny being the Fight Club protagonist and Jimmy being Tyler Durden. Come to think of it, this was probably the inspiration for the Jimmy/Johnny relationship…). In SF: ALS, however, Johnny is simply going to take on the name of Jimmy once he moves to the city. Because no one knows him there, he’s able to construct new a persona for himself, which is what initially attracts Whatsername. But once she realizes that he’s not the type of person she thought he was, she leaves him, and that heartbreak causes Johnny to give up the St. Jimmy persona, quit dealing drugs, and try to get a corporate job. Hence Jimmy’s death being his own suicide, according to Johnny- it’s a metaphorical one, in that he killed that part of him. (Interesting how both American Idiot and The Lamb deal with the protagonist having some sort of identity crisis- though it’s much more overt in American Idiot, as Jimmy is a persona that Johnny takes on, while in The Lamb, Rael and John become one at the end because Rael has achieved enlightenment and accepted this part of himself that he never could before.) The decision to have Johnny be referred to as Jimmy also comes from the "Jesus of Suburbia" music video, which clearly stars Johnny but he's referred to as Jimmy by his girlfriend at the beginning of the video.
There are two specific things from the musical that I do want to include. Firstly, in the musical, the first date that Whatsername and Johnny go on is a concert, and the concert that they’re going to see in SF: ALS is Ziggy’s return after he and Pink were stuck with Mylo and Xyloto’s gang for a month. Also, in the musical, it’s made explicit that Johnny and Whatsername both become addicted to drugs, with Johnny having gotten Whatsername hooked, and that’s going to hold true in SF: ALS- in fact, it’s at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that Whatsername realizes she’s pregnant (at first believing it to be Johnny’s, and later realizing that it’s Ziggy’s). There will be one change to how I originally portrayed the drug addiction, though- back when I thought Jimmy and Johnny were two different people, I interpreted the song “Give Me Novocaine” as Johnny enjoying… whatever drug it is that he gets hooked on and thinking “Tell me, Jimmy, I won’t feel a thing, so give me novocaine.” But now that Jimmy is more explicitly going to be Johnny’s alter ego, I imagine it to be from the perspective of the people he sells to.
One last thing that I’m changing is the location of the story. On the album, references to “the Bay” and the line “the representative from California has the floor” from the song “Holiday” imply that the events take place in California. In the musical, the small town that Johnny comes from is named Jingletown, and the line in “Holiday” is changed to “the representative from Jingletown has the floor.” The Bay Area references are kept, however. In SF: ALS, all the action takes place on the East Coast, so I changed the location of Jingletown to be in Florida. The big city is now Suffragette City, an entirely made up city inspired by the song “Suffragette City” from the Ziggy Stardust album.
Aaaand, I think that’s everything… next time, I’ll make the final post in this series about Coldplay’s concept album, Mylo Xyloto!
With American Idiot, I’m pretty much taking canon solely from the album, although a few characters from the musical version make a brief appearance. The biggest difference between the album and the musical is that the album follows just one protagonist- on the album, he’s referred to as the Jesus of Suburbia, but in the musical, he’s given the name of Johnny. In the musical, Johnny is joined by two friends, Tunny and Will, who are both introduced in the second song. The main plot of the album kicks off when Johnny, tired of his dead-end slacker life in the suburbs, moves to the big city to find a purpose. This is an arc that he undertakes solely by himself on the album, but in the musical, Tunny joins him initially in moving to the city. When city life turns out to be not all that it’s cracked up to be, Tunny decides to join the army instead, whereupon he gets injured in combat and falls in love with the nurse who tends to him. Meanwhile, Will stays in the suburbs to support his pregnant girlfriend Heather. Already, the album and the musical plots are significantly different, as songs that apply solely to Johnny’s arc are repurposed to apply to Will and Tunny, such as the song “Extraordinary Girl” being sung by Tunny to the nurse he’s in love with, while on the album it refers to Johnny’s girlfriend, Whatsername. (Little sidenote here- Whatsername doesn’t have a canonical name because Johnny is telling the story of American Idiot as a retrospective, and he has forgotten his girlfriend’s name by that point. I realized, since I had to write from her perspective a few times in CAE/SF: ALS, and because she shows up again as a major character in WTC?, that I had to give her a name, and so I chose to call her Haushinka based on an obscure Green Day song about a girl named Haushinka, who the protagonist reminisces about and regrets that they never had a chance at a proper relationship, which I felt could relate to how Johnny feels about Whatsername.) I decided not to use Tunny and Will’s storylines in SF: ALS, because 1. the US wasn’t involved in combat in 1980 (the year the story takes place), so Tunny wouldn’t be sent to fight in a war, and 2. Will’s story felt irrelevant and unnecessary, when SF: ALS already has so many characters to juggle. However, Tunny and Will do make a brief cameo in the First Interlude, when Johnny is introduced. Will mentions that his girlfriend wanted to have a talk with him that night, and from there, although we never return to his story, it can be inferred that his storyline with Heather happens offscreen/off-page. The First Interlude also ends with Johnny asking Tunny if he wants to leave town, and when we return to Johnny’s story, Johnny will mention that Tunny did split town with him but eventually left him to look for other prospects. The last Johnny hears of Tunny will be when he sends him a postcard towards the end of his plot arc, which consists of the lyrics from the “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” section of the penultimate song on the album, “Homecoming.” “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” comes out of nowhere and doesn’t fit the theme of the rest of the song, which is Johnny trying to stick it out in the city after Whatsername has left him by joining the corporate world, but “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” basically goes like this: “I got a rock and roll band, I got a rock and roll life, I got a rock and roll girlfriend, and another ex-wife! I got a kid in New York, I got a kid in the Bay! I ain’t drank or smoked nothing in over 22 days, so get off my case!” As much as this sounds like a non-sequitur, if I recall correctly, this part is written in the liner notes to the album as if it’s on the back of a postcard, so I think it’s supposed to be a friend of Johnny’s bragging to him about how good his life is, and that kind of wakes Johnny up and makes him realize that he’s getting nowhere in life and he needs to give it up and go back home. So, in my version of the story, it’s Tunny who sends this postcard. (I actually need to find a copy of the album- my sibling is the one who had it on CD, and I’m not sure what they did with it- and see if the liner notes say who’s supposed to have written the postcard. I’m going to be so amused if it really was Tunny.)
The next biggest change is going to be the matter of the timeline. The musical gives a specific timeline of events, but I couldn’t fit it in evenly with the timeline of SF: ALS, so I’m just ignoring that. Again, I need to check the liner notes because they could contradict me, but I’m pretty sure there was no specific timeline given for the events of the album (except that “Homecoming” implies that Johnny has been trying to make it in the city for a good year or more, which I can fit into my timeline). This also means that the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends” won’t actually take place in September, but a few months after September. However, I find this forgivable because the song is based on Billie Joe Armstrong’s real-life experience of losing his father in September, and I’m going to have Johnny share that background, so when he thinks “wake me up when September ends,” he’s relating how devastated he currently feels with how he felt when his father died, not that it’s actually September when he feels that way. (This reminds me… I should probably make a post sometime about how most of the concept albums are based on the songwriters’ real-life experiences- at least, I know this goes for American Idiot and The Wall, and Peter Gabriel said that parts of The Lamb are based on his life but he’s never mentioned what parts specifically so I don’t know if I could include that in my post, but I guess it’s worth a shot at writing about. Anyway, this occurred to me recently and I started getting really disturbed about it…)
The other major difference in how I’m adapting American Idiot is how I’ve chosen to handle the character of St. Jimmy. This is actually something that my sibling and I originally differed in opinion about regarding the album’s story. They said when describing the story that it’s about “a drug dealer named Jimmy who moves from the suburbs to the city,” and I was like.. wait… you think Jimmy and Johnny are the same person?! St. Jimmy is, in fact, a drug dealer who lives in the city, but I always used to think that Jimmy was a person that Johnny met in the city who became his friend/bad influence, and introduced him to a new way of life. The musical has Jimmy and Johnny played by two different people. However, towards the end of the album, there’s this line: “Jimmy died today. He blew his brains out into the Bay. In my state of mind, it’s my own private suicide.” A lot of fans point to this line as meaning that Jimmy is Johnny’s alter ego, and they’re the same person. In the original version of CAE, I took that theory and ran with it, writing a Fight Club-style relationship between Johnny and Jimmy (with Johnny being the Fight Club protagonist and Jimmy being Tyler Durden. Come to think of it, this was probably the inspiration for the Jimmy/Johnny relationship…). In SF: ALS, however, Johnny is simply going to take on the name of Jimmy once he moves to the city. Because no one knows him there, he’s able to construct new a persona for himself, which is what initially attracts Whatsername. But once she realizes that he’s not the type of person she thought he was, she leaves him, and that heartbreak causes Johnny to give up the St. Jimmy persona, quit dealing drugs, and try to get a corporate job. Hence Jimmy’s death being his own suicide, according to Johnny- it’s a metaphorical one, in that he killed that part of him. (Interesting how both American Idiot and The Lamb deal with the protagonist having some sort of identity crisis- though it’s much more overt in American Idiot, as Jimmy is a persona that Johnny takes on, while in The Lamb, Rael and John become one at the end because Rael has achieved enlightenment and accepted this part of himself that he never could before.) The decision to have Johnny be referred to as Jimmy also comes from the "Jesus of Suburbia" music video, which clearly stars Johnny but he's referred to as Jimmy by his girlfriend at the beginning of the video.
There are two specific things from the musical that I do want to include. Firstly, in the musical, the first date that Whatsername and Johnny go on is a concert, and the concert that they’re going to see in SF: ALS is Ziggy’s return after he and Pink were stuck with Mylo and Xyloto’s gang for a month. Also, in the musical, it’s made explicit that Johnny and Whatsername both become addicted to drugs, with Johnny having gotten Whatsername hooked, and that’s going to hold true in SF: ALS- in fact, it’s at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that Whatsername realizes she’s pregnant (at first believing it to be Johnny’s, and later realizing that it’s Ziggy’s). There will be one change to how I originally portrayed the drug addiction, though- back when I thought Jimmy and Johnny were two different people, I interpreted the song “Give Me Novocaine” as Johnny enjoying… whatever drug it is that he gets hooked on and thinking “Tell me, Jimmy, I won’t feel a thing, so give me novocaine.” But now that Jimmy is more explicitly going to be Johnny’s alter ego, I imagine it to be from the perspective of the people he sells to.
One last thing that I’m changing is the location of the story. On the album, references to “the Bay” and the line “the representative from California has the floor” from the song “Holiday” imply that the events take place in California. In the musical, the small town that Johnny comes from is named Jingletown, and the line in “Holiday” is changed to “the representative from Jingletown has the floor.” The Bay Area references are kept, however. In SF: ALS, all the action takes place on the East Coast, so I changed the location of Jingletown to be in Florida. The big city is now Suffragette City, an entirely made up city inspired by the song “Suffragette City” from the Ziggy Stardust album.
Aaaand, I think that’s everything… next time, I’ll make the final post in this series about Coldplay’s concept album, Mylo Xyloto!
