Punk was already on the radar of suburban kids by the time 1994 rolled around. Nirvana was the biggest band running for three years, after all, bringing their infectious blend of Black Sabbath and Black Flag into the unsuspecting homes of adolescents across the globe. The California skate punk sound was still the domain of small groups of weirdos in your town, though. Green Day’s second album, 1991’s Kerplunk, briefly broke containment though, selling 50,000 records in the U.S. on a wave of critical support and frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s tireless grind. They’d made their name in the scene as being an up-and-coming band at Berkeley’s famed 924 Gilman club, and then came a wave of major label speculation (or, as Rancid would put it not long after, “and out come the wolves”). To the band’s credit, they treated most of these as label men as the mindlessly probing blood funnels that they were, but they found something different in Rob Cavallo from Reprise Records. Part of it was that he’d produced The Muffs’ self-titled debut album, but it was a big step for them either way.

They were in their very early twenties, money and fame was being waved in their face, and the grind was paying off. On the other hand, signing to a major label was a death sentence in the punk scene. Punk bands simply don’t go major label – they still shouldn’t. Most of the time it produces awkward work, a distortion of a band’s sound in the pursuit of recouping the large amounts of money that have been dropped on them to record it in the first place. Once in a while, though, something beautiful comes out of it. The band’s acute anxiety was likely palpable. They were make-or-break; they had been banned from even setting foot in 924 Gilman for their crimes, and they couldn’t even go home if they failed to go big.

But they did. They went huge. It’s hard to overstate exactly how ubiquitous Dookie was in the Nineties. The band tapped into something as feral and alive as Black Sabbath had at the dawn of the Seventies. Gen X picked up on it because it spoke to the burnout apathy that had drawn them to Kurt Cobain three years earlier, but it was shinier, bouncier, more full of life and excitement. The dude with the spiky hair was singing goofy songs about jerking off and going nuts and being bored and blowing shit up. Elder Millenials were just as disaffected as Gen X. It was the Clinton era, things seemed like they were sort of going okay for once, which made us all antsy, bored, and horny. We all felt like outcasts even in our crowds, and the band made paranoid anxiety seem like honest-to-god fun. Consider the bassline that Mike Dirnt bops out at the beginning of “Longview”, the classic ode to masturbation that was mainstream America’s introduction to the band. It’s playful; it’s the circus we all felt our lives were at the time, little did we all know. Dirnt wrote it tripping balls on acid. The slashing chords Armstrong plays in the chorus were like having your head slammed into a wall. Under all that gloss was someone trying to tell us that things really weren’t okay, but that we all felt like that, so it was okay. It would all be okay.

Everyone had a copy of this album, regardless of their musical tastes. Someone bought it for them, they bought it themselves, some unsuspecting grandmother bought a copy of it for you because Elmo was on the back cover and the store had a lot of copies of it. My high school band probably covered every song on it at one time or another, memorably once a take on “When I Come Around” where the roar of the crowd upon hearing the bass line made the singer go white with fright and I had to step in to take over. If you’ve ever heard me sing, you will have some sympathy with that gymnasium audience. A lot of shitty three chord high school punk bands, as Pat the Bunny says, have covered large chunks of Dookie over the years of course, because it is first and foremost fun as hell to play. It is not difficult – any 14 year old with a beater guitar and a starter amp can crank it out – but it requires a lot of energy and whole-band buy-in. Plus you could even play the hidden track while you were drunk.

Those fabled kids would have a lot of other stuff to bang out in garages and community centers the world over, mostly because of Dookie. It seemed like the tipping point for the culture; we’d gotten sad and angry between 1989 and 1993. In 1994 we went punk and we never went back. The Offspring and Rancid would follow, the Vans Warped Tour, the soundtracks to various Tony Hawk skateboarding games, and Blink-182. Punk houses proliferating; by 2000 I was practically living in one, a constant blur of Bad Religion and NOFX. Pop punk is a consistent major label output because Dookie has gone Diamond in the thirty years since its release. Maybe I should be more pissed off at them for that – leave punk in the underground where it sounds better – but I can’t be. It’s the sound of youth, plain and simple.

Maybe it’s because I finally am getting old (not really but still) but Dookie turning thirty feels bigger than a lot of other anniversaries. I guess if it’s true that the bands that were big when you were 12 are the bands that will always sound young and fresh, then it’s an admission that a whole lot of time has passed since those days. I still think it sounds fresh, even in the wake of a billion imitators and mutations that have come chasing it’s peaks since. I probably always will.