Warning (Green Day Album) - Promotion and Aftermath

Promotion and Aftermath

While Green Day was nearing completion of Warning, the band announced it would be performing on the 2000 Vans Warped Tour during the summer before the album's October release. Although the group had been invited to perform on the tour before, the band was unable to do so due to scheduling conflicts. Because of Green Day's new stylistic change displayed on Warning, the band was considered an unconventional choice for the tour. Jason White, guitarist for Armstrong's side project Pinhead Gunpowder, was recruited to perform with the band to add "more power" to the group's sound; White observed that "Even I was like, 'Why are Green Day on the Warped Tour?'". Fat Mike of NOFX recalled, "They were the biggest band on the tour but it wasn't by far. Green Day weren't super popular at that time. I think they did the Warped tour because they wanted to get popular again." He also went on to call Warning "probably their worst album, I think. It's what happens, the ups and downs." However, Joel Madden of Good Charlotte, whose 2001 release The Young and the Hopeless outsold Warning, opined that "I was definitely aware that our record at the time sold more maybe than their record but I think we idolized them so much that it didn't matter. We thought Warning was one of their best records."

In January 2001, Colin Merry of the English rock band Other Garden filed a breach of copyright lawsuit against Green Day, claiming that the album's title track is a "reworked" version of his band's 1992 song "Never Got the Chance". Merry noted that despite both songs' similarity to the riff of "Picture Book" by The Kinks, the similarity between "Warning" and "Never Got the Chance" was more "striking". Green Day denied the accusations, and although Merry requested to halt all royalties from "Warning", the lawsuit was later dropped.

Green Day also co-headlined a "shared bill" with fellow Californian pop-punk band Blink-182 on the Pop Disaster Tour from April to June 2002. The two bands traded off headlining positions throughout the tour, as Blink-182 was experiencing higher record sales at the time, while Green Day had experienced mainstream success for a longer period of time. Armstrong explained Green Day's desire to perform on the tour by stating, "We really wanted to by part of an event. We figured putting the two biggest pop punk bands on the planet together was definitely going to be an event." In his book Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times and Music of Green Day, author Marc Spitz likened Blink-182 headlining a tour with Green Day to "Frank Sinatra, Jr. headlining over Frank Sinatra."