Mike Dirnt
Green Day
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Michael Ryan Pritchard, now known as Mike Dirnt, was born on May 4, 1972.
Dirnt met Billie Joe Armstrong in 1982 at age 10 in the Rodeo Elementary School cafeteria, a few months before Armstrong’s father died of esophageal cancer. He and Armstrong first founded Sweet Children in 1987 at age 15, and they then started their current band Green Day with former Isocracy drummer John Kiffmeyer (a.k.a. Al Sobrante) and then switched to their present drummer, Tre Cool. Some years before, Dirnt moved in with Armstrong because his mother and sister moved away from Rodeo. Dirnt did not want to move away from his new-found best friend and love for music.
Green Day’s Woodstock ’94 gig was one for the history books: a huge mud fight ensued between the band and the audience. So many mud-covered fans got up on stage by the end of the set that one of the security guards mistook Dirnt for a marauding fan, tackled him, and broke several of his teeth while attempting to haul him off the stage.
He used to play a Gibson G3 bass, but during Nimrod, Tre Cool accidentally broke it on stage trying to show fan Brendan Taylor how to spin a bass around his back. Armstrong then sent Dirnt’s bass tech out to get him a new bass. It resulted in a ’69 Fender Precision Bass. He later asked Fender to make him a custom P-Bass, and the result is modeled after the ’51 P-Bass with a ’59 Custom Shop “Hot Rod” Split-Coil Pickup, a BadAss II bridge and a thinner neck. It was released in early 2004.
Armstrong credits Dirnt as “The best bass player in the history of punk rock” in Bullet in a Bible.