Green Day’s Mike Dirnt and Billie Joe Armstrong have revealed that they got into a backstage tussle after Armstrong’s infamous meltdown at the iHeartRadio Festival in Las Vegas in September.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the duo spoke about the internal dramas within the band last year, which peaked with the September incident.
Armstrong entered rehab for substance abuse issues soon after the meltdown, putting Green Day’s touring plans on hold for the trilogy of albums they released last year – !Uno!, !Dos! and !Tre!.
“I remember tiny things,” Armstrong said of the Vegas incident.
“The next morning, I woke up. I asked (my wife) Adrienne, ‘How bad was it?’ She said, ‘It’s bad.’
“I called my manager. He said, ‘You’re getting on a plane, going back to Oakland and going into rehab immediately’.”
Dirnt said his concerns for his bandmate ultimately ended in a not-so-great outcome.
“It was very tense back there… I felt like a rat in a cage.
“It was a confined space with a lot of weird people around, people we didn’t know wandering in and out.
“When Billie showed up, it was, ‘You’re not right. What’s going on?’ I kept an eye on things, and it just went progressively downhill.
“Somehow, we ended up wrestling backstage. I thought, ‘If I can just get some of this out of him…’
“But with the mood depressants and alcohol, it doesn’t end up in a jovial party.”
Armstrong has since left rehab and Green Day are set to return to the stage next weekend with a show at the Fox Theater in California. They’ve then got several dates scheduled in North America and Europe through to July. There’s no word on an Australian visit just yet.
