Just Consider Yourselves Forewarned

Don’t look for a “Time of Your Life, Part II” on Green Day’s next album.

Band leader Billie Joe Armstrong says he would be “kidding myself” in trying to repeat the atypical acoustic number that served as a sentimental soundtrack for everything from the “Seinfeld” finale to high school graduations to network news millennium montages--new territory for the Bay Area punk trio.

It would be kidding the world as well, says Armstrong, sitting with bassist Mike Dirnt at a Hollywood recording studio where they and drummer Tre Cool are mixing the band’s next album, “Warning.” Due Oct. 3, it will be the follow-up to 1997’s “Nimrod,” which contained the anomalous hit.

The song generally known as “Time of Your Life,” Armstrong notes, was actually titled “Good Riddance” and was anything but a sentimental send-off. And many of the people who embraced it, misinterpreting it as they did, are not really part of the band’s main fan base.

“The thing that happened with that song, that many people getting into it, that’s just an accident,” Armstrong says. “I’m not going to try to do that again.”

Actually, the song’s vast exposure didn’t even boost album sales significantly. At 1.6 million copies sold in the U.S. in SoundScan’s figures, “Nimrod” is not dramatically more than the 1.2 million of 1995’s “Insomniac”--both far behind “Dookie,” the band’s 1994 major-label debut, which sold 6.6 million copies on the wave of a new punk explosion and such attention-getting appearances as Woodstock ’94.

The band--which will headline the Warped Tour this summer (in the Southland for three days this week) before the album’s release--did use the song’s breakthrough into new sonic territories as a launching point for more stylistic exploration.

“It probably freed us up to where we can just experiment more with different rhythms and styles and play a lot more acoustic guitar--not the way I play on that song, but more the hard, Pete Townshend playing,” Armstrong says.

Townshend and other British Invasion figures are clearly reference points in three songs they’ve finished mixing with industry veteran Jack Joseph Puig. “Sex, Blood and Booze” has strong echoes of the early Who in its guitar sound and garage-rock construction.

“Minority,” a broadside call to stand apart from the “moral majority,” evokes the Kinks’ Ray Davies in his “Village Green Preservation Society” period. And “Hold On,” a personal affirmation of perseverance, is built around a guitar and harmonica bit that sounds patterned on the Beatles’ “I Should Have Known Better.”

The musical and lyrical maturity is no accident, Armstrong and Dirnt say, with both of them now 28.

“I’m not 19, and I’m glad I’m not 19,” Armstrong, the father of two children, says. “Our last records had a theme of sort of a downer, talking about drugs or loneliness or hate, a lot of angry stuff.

“There’s more sense of hope to this record. For me it was important for this record to get up at 7 every day with my kids, take them to school, go home and work with the band and maybe enjoy standing out in front of a grocery store or something, just being me. I have a lot more lust for life than I had.”

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NO HABLA ESPANOL: Adult alternative radio stations routinely play Santana’s “Oye Como Va” and several other tracks sung in Spanish. But they apparently won’t play “Cumbia Raza,” a song with Spanish lyrics on Los Lobos’ most recent album, “High Time.”

So after finding that the song got tremendous response in concert performances, the band decided to record a new, English-language version for radio.

“Radio programmers loved the song and said they would play it, but only if we gave them an English version,” says Lobos manager Tim Bernett.

Ironically, L.A. adult alternative station KACD/KBCD-FM (103.1) might have considered playing the Spanish version but for bad timing, given that the station has been sold and will be switching to a Spanish format soon.

“We would have thought about it,” says program director and afternoon DJ Nicole Sandler. “But with people knowing that we’ve been sold and will be changing, we get frantic calls and e-mails just from the world music show we have on Sundays with people going, ‘Oh my God! The format change has happened!’ If there wasn’t that in our future, we would definitely look at it, because there are certainly people in our audience who would want to hear the Spanish version. But right now we can’t do it.”

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PEPPER DOWNER: Is the Hollywood Walk of Fame biased against rock and rap? That’s the claim of a woman who organized an aggressive campaign to get the Red Hot Chili Peppers--Hollywood hometown heroes--a sidewalk star, after learning that it was not to be, at least this year.

Christi Love--who filed an official nomination to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, marshaled fans into a letter-writing effort and says she has arranged for funding for the $15,000 induction ceremony--believes the band’s 20-year history and Hollywood roots more than merit the honor.

Chamber publicity director Ana Martinez-Holler doesn’t dispute the band’s credentials. But she says that there were nearly 200 nominees this year, and among those selected were rocker Alice Cooper and late reggae king Bob Marley. Rarely does anyone get picked after just one year in consideration. Additionally, she lists Aerosmith, the Who, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna among those in the pop and rock world who have been picked in the past--though none of them has made themselves available for an installation ceremony, so their stars are currently in storage.

The Peppers, though, would probably come out for an event honoring them, says Gayle Fine, publicist for the band.

“That recognition would mean a lot to Anthony [Kiedis] and Flea,” she says.