Green Day re-releases early albums

Green Day's early independent albums were re-released on Tuesday, January 9th, by the band's current label, Reprise Records. 1991's 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and 1992's Kerplunk! were originally released by Lookout! Records and re-issued in deluxe editions by that label in 2004. The new version of 1,039/Smoothed Out contains bonus material found on the 2004 edition, including live material, handwritten lyrics, early show flyers and a 1991 radio interview. Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told us a while back that he finds it difficult to reflect on the group's past: "It's hard to look back when you're thinking about the future so much. We've done a lot of things. Like, when we started playing punk rock music, it was already a proven fact that you couldn't be famous or get big or be a millionaire off of being in a punk rock band, and we've definitely broken those rules. But we've tried to take it in and just move on, you know. It's just crazy. It's been a pretty strange journey indeed."

1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours is a compilation of the band's first full-length album and two EPs.

Both albums have previously sold around 600,000 copies apiece. They preceded the band's first Reprise effort, 1994's Dookie, which became the trio's commercial breakthrough and sold nearly eight million copies.

Green Day removed its early records from the Lookout! catalog in 2005 after the San Francisco indie failed to pay royalties.

The punk trio is currently working on the follow-up to its award-winning, multi-platinum 2004 "punk rock opera," American Idiot.
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