Tre Cool

Frank Edwin Wright III was born December 9 1972 in Frankfurt, West Germany, making him the youngest member of Green Day. He lived in Willits, California with his father and his two older siblings. His father, a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War, decided to move the family there to insulate them upon his return to the United States.

Wright’s closest neighbor was future Lookout! Records owner Larry Livermore, who at the time was the singer of the punk band The Lookouts. At age 12, Livermore recruited Wright to join The Lookouts and gave him the name of Tre Cool [2] relying on both the French word très (meaning very)[3] and the Italian word tre[4] (meaning three and root of Trey), combined with the word cool.

When Green Day’s drummer Al Sobrante left the band they recruited Cool to play drums. Cool decided to drop out of high school in his sophomore year. However, he passed an equivalency test and earned his GED, and began taking classes at a nearby community college. He had to drop out of college however, when the demands of Green Day’s touring intensified.

Cool’s father who owned a small company overhauled a used bookmobile and even served as the driver on three separate tours. «I watched them go from a bunch of kids to a group of musicians with work ethic. On their first tour or two it was more of a party than anything else. I still scratch my head and say, ‘how in the hell did they make it?’ They used to practice in my living room here - a lot of the songs they did on Dookie. You hear it coming together and you don’t expect people are going to go out and buy it. But when it does you just say ‘wow that’s so cool’.»