MIKE DIRNT
Mike is Green Day's bass player and backup vocalist.
Mike was born Michael Ryan Pritchard on May 4th, 1972, in Berkeley, California. Because his mother was a heroin addict, she gave him up for adoption. His adoptive parents were a Native American mother and a Caucasian father. When he was seven years old his adoptive parents divorced. For a while he lived with his father but conflict sent him back to his mother, where he lived on the borderline of poverty. He had one stepsister who left home at the age of 13.
About his home life, Mike has said, "When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mom stayed out all night, came home the next day with a guy, and he moved in. I'd never met the guy before, and all of sudden he's my stepdad. We didn't get along for years. Later on, when I hit high school, my mom moved away from us, and me and my stepdad got real close. He instilled a lot in me. The one thing my family did give me is blue-collar morals. But then he died when I was 17."
Mike left home when he was 15 and lived out of a truck. Later on he rented a room in Billie's house and later he lived in a punk-squatter building.
Mike supported himself by working as a cook and he continued to go to school.
Mike's mother refused to sign one of his mandatory-attendance forms so he almost didn't graduate from high school.
"I took my mom aside," Mike said. "I said, 'This is how it is. You have so much stuff going on in your life so if once every semester you ask me if I've done my homework and jump all over my case, that's not right. Have I failed yet? No. And I'm going to graduate if you stay off my back. The one time in your life you chose to have morals and it's going to stuff me up. Don't play mom once a year. It doesn't cut it.'" [Editor's note: Expletives have been removed]. Mike eventually graduated from high school and even went on to do a year's worth of community college.
Billie and Mike then moved into a squat in Oakland. This living space was the inspiration for the song "Welcome to Paradise".
In 1996 Mike married his long-time girlfriend, Anastasia, and in April 1997 they had a daughter, Estella Desirée. The two have since separated but they remain very good friends. Mike remarried in 2004 but his second wife left fairly soon after the marriage because Mike was spending so much time recording American Idiot.
