Mike Dirnt

A picture I drew of Mike Dirnt

My hero is Mike Dirnt. Mike Dirnt overcame a difficult childhood and became the bassist for one of the most known punk/rock bands in the world. That band is Green Day. Mike lives in California but tours throughout the world with the rest of Green Day’s members: Billie Joe Armstrong and Tre Cool. Mike is my hero because he has showed me that you can do anything you set your mind to. Mike Dirnt has made a difference in my life because I know that even someone who was living in the worst conditions can do something great.

When Michael Ryan Pritchard was born on May 4th, 1972, his mother was a heroin addict. As a result of this, he was put up for adoption and was soon later adopted by a white man and a Native American woman. In school, Mike was always the one getting bullied and picked on; the one with no friends. To make things worse, his sister ran away from home at age thirteen. When Mike was seven years old, his adopted parents got a divorce. Mike stayed with his dad at first, but in the end, stayed with his mom. After a few years, his mom remarried a man that Mike didn’t even know. Mike and his stepdad fought for years and never really got along until Mike’s mom left him and his stepdad, which brought them closer together.

Nothing was going right until Mike befriended Billie Joe Armstrong in fifth grade. When Mike was fifteen, he left home and lived in his car. He earned his money by working as a cook at Rod’s Hickory Pit. Eventually, he rented a room at Billie Joe’s mom’s house. Things were finally going okay as Mike got more involved in music and started a band called the Sweet Children until his stepdad died when Mike was seventeen. These were the last of Mike’s many problems for awhile. Mike and his band got more popular when they changed their band name to Green Day and released their first record. The band wasn’t the only thing to change its name, though, because Mike changed his last name from Pritchard to Dirnt; his stepdad’s last name.

Green Day got more and more popular when they released their album Dookie and songs like Longview and Welcome to Paradise went shooting up the charts. In 1996, Mike and his girlfriend, Anastacia, got married. One year later, Anastacia gave birth to Mike’s daughter, Estella-Desiree. When Green Day became too much for Anastacia, they got a divorce leaving Mike with Green Day as his last bit of family. Mike did find love again in 2004 when he got married to a woman named Sarah. But Mike had to be in the studios a lot recording Green Day’s most popular album, American Idiot, and Sarah got fed up and left him, leaving Mike once again, without a family.

In 2009, he found a woman named Brittney that would stay with him and also would be the stepmother of his daughter and the birth mother of his son, Brixton Michael. Michael Ryan Pritchard, also known as Mike Dirnt has overcome poverty, suffering, and distress, still finding the strength to have a successful career in the music industry. That is why my hero is Mike Dirnt.