Green Day’s Mike Dirnt always wanted a signature instrument. He calls his new line of Grabber G-3 basses with Epiphone “manifest destiny.”
“I’ve been willing this to happen forever,” Dirnt tells Guitar Player. “I thought it was never gonna happen. And now, here we are.”
Then again, there was a time — albeit decades ago now — when Dirnt would not have expected to be playing bass, period.
Born in Oakland, California, and raised in El Sobrante, he started out playing guitar alongside future Green Day mate Billie Joe Armstrong, who he met at Carquinez Middle School when they were 10 years old. They would hang at Armstrong’s house learning to play punk rock and metal songs, with some Who and Lynyrd Skynyrd thrown in for good measure. They started Green Day precursor Sweet Children as a two-guitar outfit, playing Berkeley’s famed 924 Gilman Street club in its formative years.
“It’s one of those things. You gotta start somewhere,” Dirnt (né Pritchard) says with a laugh. “I wasn’t a great guitarist; I was a good rhythm player.”
He made the change when bassist Sean Hughes quit the band, making Sweet Children and, subsequently Green Day, a trio.
“When I jumped on bass, I felt like that opened the melodies I was hearing in my head, and I could do more stuff,” explains Dirnt, who still likes to play guitar and favors Matons at home. “I don’t have a lot of finesse; I muscle the instrument. I have finesse, but not like a really shreddy or great guitar player who has the dexterity to play gingerly and with speed. I just like picking around my bass like a guitar. That’s how I describe it.”
“I feel like I’m playing rhythm guitar but I’m looking for the melodies within (the patterns) and figuring out different ways to play it. There’s a lot of pull with my left hand, or rolling into notes a lot. It’s not traditional, for sure.
“First and foremost, me and Billie have similar picking styles in our wrists. A lot of people think I do all downstrokes, but I’m up and down all day long. My arm would catch fire if I did all downstrokes. The Ramones were amazing with that, but I don’t do it. Lately I’ve been building off the melody. I’ve been chasing (Armstrong’s) melodies right behind him, which is fun. I’ll play for countermelodies. I’ll play for rhythms of what he’s doing.”
Dirnt acquired his first Grabber bass, a Gibson model, in Minneapolis, during one of Green Day’s very early national tours. The strap had broken on his Peavey Patriot, which he used on 1990’s 39/Smooth, causing irreparable damage.
Me and Billie have similar picking styles in our wrists. A lot of people think I do all downstrokes, but I’m up and down all day long.”
— Mike Dirnt
“We had a day off, and I picked it up out of the case,” he recalls. “And the only thing holding it together was the pick guard. I thought, Oh boy, this is a bigger problem than I know how to fix. And I don’t want to play a glued bass.”
Another musician on the tour, Scott Cook, had a new Gibson Grabber that he hadn’t even played yet and agreed to sell to Dirnt on installments.
“I plugged it in at sound check and hit it with my thumb and was like, ‘I’ll take it!’” Dirnt remembers. “The look on his face was, ‘Shit!’
“But he was very cool. I’m trying to chase him down now, ’cause I owe him a bass, to say the least.”
Dirnt says discussions with Epiphone about his signature Grabber G-3 began a couple of years ago, as Green Day were gearing up for the 2024 anniversary celebrations of their Dookie and American Idiot albums.
“I said, ‘If we’re serious about it, let’s go!’” he recalls. “‘I’ll send you my bass; you can really look at the specs on it and take it apart and see what makes it tick.’”
The Dirnt Epiphone Grabber G-3 comes in both Silverburst and natural finishes, with a double-cutaway maple body and a 34-inch scale three-piece neck with black abalone dot inlays. The guitar has three Gibson G-3 pickups with a three-way toggle switch for neck, middle and bridge, as well as open-gear bass tuners on its V-shaped headstock, a bone nut and Leo Quan Badass II bridge.
“They really hit it out of the park, man. They really did,” says Dirnt, who road-tested the prototypes during Green Day’s most recent tour, in support of its Saviors album. “This quality is ridiculous. If I play my original Gibson at the same show I played the new ones, I don’t see any difference. Honestly, these new models play a little better ’cause the Gibson has been broken a few times. It still plays great, but these play, man. They really do.”
Dirnt and the Grabbers have been off the road since September, when Green Day wrapped the Saviors tour. (A viral moment occurred on the road when a fan brought onstage to perform “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” began playing the Oasis hit “Wonderwall” instead. ) The band’s current focus is on New Year’s Rev, a feature film that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, with wider release pending.
Subtitled A Green Day Story and directed and written by Lee Kirk — who worked with Armstrong on Ordinary World, the 2016 comedy-drama in which he starred as an aging punk — the film depicts a band of teenagers on a cross-country quest to open for Green Day on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. Dirnt, Armstrong and Cool co-produced and appear in the film as themselves.
There’s a lot going on in the world right now; this is probably our time to listen for a minute and see what’s going on, and then decide what we want to say.”
— Mike Dirnt
“We’ve always wanted to do something like this,” Dirnt says. “It’s another band’s journey to get to us. They’re hilarious, and a lot of their hijinks and things that happen sort of shadow things that have actually happened to us in the past, when we were touring in vans. There’s so many Easter eggs in there that have to do with specific stories our fans will know about from throughout the years. We can’t wait for it to get out there so everyone can see it.”
Green Day also released a 25th anniversary deluxe edition of its sixth studio album, Warning, this fall, but Dirnt says it may be a minute before there’s new music from the band.
“We just kind of came home,” he notes, “so we need some family time, a little bit of life time, living life in order to collect ourselves before we go out and make another statement. We need to sort of sit and listen and marinate, play our guitars at home and then get together and talk about music and stuff.
“There’s a lot going on in the world right now; this is probably our time to listen for a minute and see what’s going on, and then decide what we want to say. But I know we’ll get there. We always do.”
