With 1994’s Dookie, Green Day demonstrated what the Ramones would have sounded like if they had preferred smoking pot to sniffing glue. That minor refinement propelled the Berkeley, California, trio to multiplatinum status, sparking a major punk resurgence. Before Dookie, however, Green Day were understandably obscure — you can see why here. Their early tunes, released on two EPs and an album in 1989 and 1990, were punchy but indistinct is-she-really-going-out-with-him? laments. Those 18 songs (plus one) were compiled on 1,039/ Smoothed Out Slappy Hours, a 1991 collection now remastered and reissued. Ironically, it’s the cover of fellow Cali-punkers Operation Ivy’s “Knowledge” — whose sing-along chorus is “All I know/Is that I don’t know” — that establishes the philosophical premise for Green Day’s subsequent career.

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