"Sometimes you take a gamble and luck’s on your side": Listen to raw demos from Green Day's 30th anniversary reissue of their 20 million-selling masterpiece Dookie

Green Day on MTV in 1994
(Image credit: MTV)

Green Day will release a celebratory 30th anniversary reissue of their 20 million-selling third album Dookie next month.

"Sometimes you take a gamble and luck’s on your side," a statement on the band's social media channels announcing the reissue begins. "Back in the summer of ‘93 Green Day went into the studio to record Dookie and had no idea what their destiny would be. They were young, rebellious, and absolutely scared shitless. There was no telling if they were about to prove everyone wrong or make the biggest mistake of their lives..."

Set for release on September 29, the Californian trio's Dookie (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) will be available as a limited-edition six LP vinyl box set, a four-CD box set, and digitally. The expansive collection will include two live sets from Billie Joe Armstrong's band - Live At Woodstock (1994) and the previously unreleased Live In Barcelona (June 5, 1994) - plus 10 demos for the original album, which was released on February 1, 1994, and unreleased outtakes. 

You can hear those demos below:


Upon its original 1994 release, Dookie entered the Billboard 200 chart at number 141, an impressive debut:  by the end of January 1995, it was sitting at number 2 on the same chart.

The group began 1994 with a gig in the kitchen of a friend's house, and ended it with a headline show at the 16,000-capacity Nassau Coliseum. In between came the show that made their career, a televised appearance at the Woodstock II festival  which saw them pelted with mud, and was, for Billie Joe Armstrong, "the closest thing to total chaos I'ver ever seen in my life": Green Day's frontman returned home to Berkeley to discover a letter from his mother calling his TV appearance "disrespectful" and 'Indecent".

Paul Brannigan
Contributing Editor, Louder

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.