Linda Perry calls Billie Joe Armstrong a “pussy” over lost Green Day production gig

Linda Perry has accused Billie Joe Armstrong of killing a production deal because he couldn’t handle fan reaction. In an interview with NME, the songwriter says she was lined up to produce the album that became Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown, the 2009 follow-up to American Idiot. She cleared her calendar, canceling six months of scheduled work for the project.

“I met with Billie Joe and we talked for three hours,” Perry says. “Like every artist, I think he had got to a point where you feel like I have nothing to say and need help.”

Then Courtney Love told the press Perry was on board. Angry fans pushed back against the idea of a pop hitmaker behind Green Day’s next record. Perry’s credits include massive singles for Pink, Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera, though she first broke through as frontwoman of alt-rock band 4 Non Blondes. The fan response was enough, Perry says, for Armstrong to stop communicating entirely.

“Suddenly they started getting backlash… And then those guys just stopped calling me,” she explains. “I would reach out to figure out what was going on. Nobody called. I lost six months of scheduled work. That was fucked-up, all because Billie Joe’s a little pussy and got all this backlash from his fans and didn’t like it.”

Green Day publicly denied Perry was ever in the mix, saying they were sticking with longtime producer Rob Cavallo. Butch Vig ultimately produced the album. The decision still stings. “Just call me and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to go a different way…’ Just balls-up, man,” Perry says. “It happened because I was a woman and I’d written pop songs. I was disappointed in those guys, and then I was mad at Courtney because if she would have just shut up, we would have made the record and it would have spoken for itself.”