Good Charlotte's had a pretty big last couple years.

But despite selling more than a million copies of their second album "The Young and the Hopeless" and headlining their first world tour, the highlight for the band so far was getting punked on national television at MTV's annual Video Music Awards last month.

As the band left the stage after performing their most recent hit, "The Anthem," comedian and VMA host Chris Rock said, "Good Charlotte? More like a mediocre Green Day," referring to the obvious similarities between the two bands.

"That was awesome," said singer Joel Madden, who, along with his twin brother and guitarist Benji, formed Good Charlotte nine years ago while still in high school. "We thought it was great that he even mentioned us. I think we would've been more bummed if he hadn't said anything. He only makes fun of the really famous people!"

The Maddens and the rest of Good Charlotte, guitarist Billy Martin and bassist Paul Thomas, will continue what has been a whirlwind year on Monday when their tour, with opening act Mest, comes to Northwest Ohio for a performance at the Toledo Sports Arena.

"It's been pretty much non-stop since the album came out," Madden, 24, said in a telephone interview before a show in Kalamazoo, Mich., last week. "We've just been going and going like crazy, but we keep setting goals for ourselves. We're not done. It's all part of a plan."

The "plan" started in Waldorf, Maryland in 1994 when, while attending La Plata High School, the 15-year-old Madden brothers decided they wanted to become rock stars. The two took it so seriously that it became the most important part of their lives, spending countless hours learning their instruments, reading as much as they could on the music business, agents and how to get signed to a record label.

Finally, after a couple of years of reading "A Musician's Guide to Touring and Promotion," they were ready to form their own band. Brought together by a love of '90s bands like Nirvana and Silverchair, as well as classic punk, the brothers hooked up with Martin and Thomas and soon after, Good Charlotte was born.

"We just knew we wanted to start a band, but we really didn't know how," Joel said. "We learned to play our instruments, how to write songs and stuff like that, then once we found Paul and Billy, we kind of grew from there."

Learning to write songs was never really a problem for the Madden brothers, who write most of the band's songs. Drawing from their own troubled childhoods -- their father walked out on the family on Christmas Eve in 1995 and both brothers admit to being tormented at school for not fitting in -- Joel and Benji learned to write from a very personal perspective, filling their songs with angst, sadness and self-depricating humor.

"Everything we write is pretty personal," Joel said. "It's always our take on what's happened to us. A lot has happened to us and we try to focus on our personal view. I really don't know how to write any other way."

While Good Charlotte certainly looks the part of a punk band with their tattoos and piercings, the one criticism that has continued to hound them is that they're not "punk" enough. None of the members have drug problems, they're affable and easy going, and they favor catchy melodies and Rolling Stone magazine cover stories to three-chord noise and staying "underground."

Joel said he and his bandmates have never tried to be anything but what they are, whether it's punk or not.

"I don't really see us as a punk band at all," he said. "We're certainly influenced by a lot of punk music, and we look a certain way, but I think of us more as just a rock band. I can see why we get classified as punk, but I don't necessarily think that's what we are, and not all people understand that."

The band has always dismissed critics who attack their music, and most recently, their image, as "soft." They're often called "the nice guys of punk" and have been criticized for being -- of all things -- too polite to be rock stars.

"I don't think we're owed anything because we're a rock band," Joel said. "Just because we say 'please' and 'thank you' and have manners there's this perception that we're really nice guys. Well, hell yeah. We are really nice guys. We work hard, we appreciate what we get and we care about our fans. If people don't like us because of that, that's fine. That's their problem."

Although there are still two months remaining on their tour, and they've already written "about 12" songs for their next album, which they'll start recording in February, Joel said the only thing the band is thinking about right now is January -- their first month off in a long, long time.

"It's going to be really nice," he said. "We'll get to spend some time at home, maybe go on a real vacation ... just do whatever it is we want to do. It's an entire month off.

"That hasn't happened for years."

- Published October 2, 2003

- By: Jack Buehrer