Bay Area band Green Day joins Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Childhood friends Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt formed the Grammy Award-winning pop-punk trio Green Day in the late 1980s. On Saturday, the two, along with drummer Tre Cool, who joined the band in 1990, will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Other inductees include Ringo Starr, Lou Reed, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and others.

Back in 1995, the year after their second album "Dookie" launched them toward stardom — and on the heels of being named Rolling Stone's band of the year — The Press Democrat's Gaye LeBaron explored Cool's Mendocino County roots.

Below is an excerpt from that Jan. 25, 1995 column:

His childhood friends from Laytonville and his Willits High classmates may know him as Tre Wright. But now he's Tre Cool. Together he and Billy Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt are a punk-rock band called Green Day...

The photo on the cover of the Jan. 26 issue of Rolling Stone (Tre is the one with the studiedly dumb look and the green and yellow hair) honors Green Day as the best new band of the year.

Tre's parents Linda and Frank Wright and his sister Lori still live in Willits. I think it's fair to say that his parents are in mild shock over the notion of their son as a musical phenom. Since Green Day's performance at Woodstock '94, in which Armstrong pulled down his pants and Dirnt lost his front teeth in the resulting melee, it's been a wild ride. The most recent stopover has been the birth of Tre's daughter, Ramona Isabella, to his girlfriend Lisea, and a fancy new house in the East Bay hills.

Here is Rolling Stone writer Chris Mundy's assessment of this latest 'hometown hero.' 'The youngest of two children, Tre lived in the Mendocino mountains (a location notable for its high concentration of hippies and marijuana farms), where his father — a helicopter pilot in Vietnam — moved the family in order to insulate them upon his return to the States. The nearest neighbor was more than a mile away.

' ... Luckily the closest neighbor was Lawrence Livermore, leader of the punk-rock band the Lookouts and founder of Lookout! Records. When his band needed a drummer, Livermore turned to 12-year-old Wright ...'

It's kind of a folksy story Mundy tells. There's Tre, the sophomore class president at Willits High (and teen-age disc jockey at the radio station) giving up on formal education. He passed the equivalency test and hit out for Berkeley, where Armstrong and Dirnt were looking for a drummer.

The Wrights are a supportive family. Frank, who owns a trucking company in Willits, fixed up a used bookmobile and served as driver for the band on early tours. He shared some of those adventures with writer Mundy:

'On our first tour or two, it was more of a party than anything else. I still scratch my head and say, 'How in the hell did they make it?' They used to practice in my living room here. ... You hear it coming together ... but when it does, you just say, 'Wow, that's so cool.''

Which is his son's new name.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony takes place Saturday in Cleveland. It will be aired on HBO May 30.