Jason White on the Peer Pleasure podcast

Jason White guests on the Peer Pleasure podcast

Green Day touring guitarist Jason White has been with the band since the Warning tour and was even featured in the ‘When I Come Around’ music video years prior to ever getting on stage with the band. While Jason did record in the studio with Green Day for the ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tre! trilogy of albums, he’s rarely done any media and seems to prefer his side stage role just outside of the spotlight.

It was, therefore, a welcome surprise to see that he was a guest on the Peer Pleasure podcast where he discussed his life prior to first meeting Green Day when they were on tour in 1990, joining Pinhead Gunpowder, working at Adeline Records and how he ended up as a staple of the Green Day live show.

I’ll break down some of the more Green Day focused highlights below but I encourage you to listen to the whole episode as it provides great insight into Jason’s life and career.

Interview Highlights

  • He went to high school with Bill Schneider who has also long worked with Green Day’s road crew and is also a member of Pinhead Gunpowder with him and Billie Joe. The two weren’t friends in high school but had crossed paths at times.
  • He first met Green Day when they were scheduled to play at the Antenna Club in Memphis on July 30, 1990, and his band was scheduled to open for them. Green Day didn’t end up making it to the show in time to play but they did attend a party that evening where they would hang out with Jason for the first time.
  • After moving to California, the first show he attended happened to be an early Rancid show at 924 Gilman which featured Billie Joe guesting on guitar.
  • A common misconception among fans is that Jason was made a full-time member of Green Day when he joined the band in the studio to record the Uno/Dos/Tre trilogy of albums. Many fans have speculated that he then dropped back down to a touring member because he didn’t enjoy the increased attention. Jason clears this up stating that he joined the studio recordings because the band wanted more of a live sound on those records and that he has never been a full-time member and Green Day will always just be Billie, Mike and Tre. Jason says he’s always been comfortable with his role in the band and the anonymity is nice.
  • He discusses working for Billie Joe’s now defunct record label Adeline Records as the first, and at times only, employee. Jason discusses the challenges of running the day-to-day of a small DIY label with no prior experience. While it’s not mentioned in the interview, I can attest to just how small the label was in the beginning. Billie Joe asked me to create an official webpage for the label on this fansite which was at GreenDay.net at the time. The original Adeline website started as just a sub-page of a Green Day fansite which is a bit crazy to think about now.
  • On a day off in Toronto during the American Idiot tour, Green Day was able to meet up with the Rolling Stones at their rehearsal space and Jason describes meeting and hanging out with them which he says is the coolest thing he’s ever done.

There’s a lot of other great stuff in the interview and I think Green Day fans will really enjoy getting to know a little about one of the more private members of the Green Day team. Search up Peer Pleasure on your favourite Podcast source to check out the whole interview.