Mike Dirnt
Boulevard of Broken Dreams |right]]
Michael Ryan Pritchard (born May 4, 1972) is the bassist for the punk band Green Day. While at school, he would pretend to play the bass when unable to practice, making a noise of someone playing single notes, resulting in the onomotopoeia that he later adopted as his stage name.Pritchard met Billie Joe Armstrong in 1982, a few months before Armstrong's father died. He first founded Sweet Children with Armstrong, and then Green Day in 1988. Some years before, Pritchard moved in with Armstrong because his adopted mother and sister moved away from Rodeo. Pritchard did not want to move away from his new found best friend and love for music. Pritchard went to Salesian High School as a freshman but graduated from Pinole Valley High in 1990. Green Day's 1994 Woodstock gig was one for the history books: a huge mud fight ensued between the band and the audience; so many mud-covered fans wound up onstage by the end of the set that one of the security guards mistook Dirnt for a marauding fan and broke several of his teeth while attempting to haul him off the stage. He used to play an old Gibson G-3 bass, but during Nimrod, Armstrong got Pritchard his first Fender Precision Bass. He later asked Fender if they could make him a custom P-Bass, and the result is a bass modeled after the 55' P-Bass with a split-coil pickup in the middle. It was released in early 2004. Pritchard is also bassist in another band called The Frustrators. He was the bassist for Chicago punk band (and Lookout Records labelmates) Screeching Weasel on the album ''How to Make Enemies and Irritate People'', and also appeared as a guest vocalist on the debut album by Squirtgun (yet another Lookout Records recording artist).
Marriages and children
Pritchard married his girlfriend Anastasia in 1996, and had a daughter named Estelle-Desiree (b. April 1997). They divorced in 1999 because of the pressures of Pritchard being in Green Day. Pritchard was engaged in 2004 but it was called off because of the pressure of recording American Idiot. He is now dating and rumoured to be engaged.