It was dark in the middle of the southern Minnesota countryside, somewhere by St. Peter in the summer of 1992.

On a farm with a barn and not much else, there was one light pole casting a shallow glow on three guys standing atop 6-foot wide, 5-foot tall wire spools — a makeshift stage to gain high ground over 200 or so people watching. Next to them was a big, old, beat-up beast of a car pulled up by the owner so 15 or so people could stand on top and gain a better view. One of them had a video camera.

Ben Gruber, then a sophomore at Loyola High School, was there. In fact, he and a buddy had helped haul equipment for the band, and even gave the drummer, Tré Cool, a ride before the show in Mankato. The music was good, he said. A lot more polished than other punk bands he’d seen in Mankato.

He was aware of the five-year-old band, born in Berkeley, Calif., he said. They’d put out a couple of smaller recordings, including their full-length debut “39/Smooth” on Lookout! Records. But they were two years from their breakthrough record, “Dookie,” which would have pretty much everyone at the show that night in awe of what they had experienced — maybe one of the last stripped down, small-scale punk shows Green Day would ever perform.

Mankato punk
The Libido Boyz are often considered the anchor of the Mankato punk scene in the late 1980s/early 1990s. It was a time when the city was rich with garage and basement punk bands, drummer Chad Sabin said before a reunion show in 2007. PSD and Plain Truth were a couple of other bands that got a lot of attention at the time.

Marti’s All Ages Music, located where the Vietnamese restaurant Tonn is now on Front Street, was an open building with a bathroom and a couple of booths where kids could put on shows. A couple of bands went on to the big time after playing there. The Offspring was one of them.

Many claimed having heard of friends who had seen Green Day play at Marti’s. According to a former talent booker, the closest Green Day ever came to playing the venue was when frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and his girlfriend, Adrienne Nesser, walked in and left right after The Offspring’s set in 1994. Marti’s tried to get Green Day to play the venue numerous times, but it was way too small for even the moderate level of fame they’d already gained pre-“Dookie.” Marti’s had the same trouble with the punk band Fugazi.

“It was pretty much no frills,” Gruber said. “There wasn’t much to do there.”

The bulk of the punk scene was made up of high school and college-age punk-rockers who would play anywhere, Sabin said. Like a lot of kids at the time, the Libido Boyz just wanted to play loud, chaotic music, which also is what people seemed to want to hear. Kids would cram into basements for concerts or listen outside garages.

“On any given week or weekend, there would be a show with anywhere from two to 10 bands playing,” Gruber said. “There was a really good crop of musician-age kids who were into (punk) for a while (before) grunge became very popular.”

During the next few years, the Libido Boyz got big. They played in the Cities and toured the state and eventually started playing shows across the country, including New York and San Francisco. Out West is where they met Green Day, who would become the biggest punk band to come through Mankato.

“They were just dirty punks like us,” Sabin said.