Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry, episode 45: Green Day’s Cigarettes and Valentines “stolen” album

July 25, 2025 Alan Cross 0 Comments 3 min read

Theft is something that happens all the time in the music industry. Mostly, it involves stealing equipment. Someone breaks into a van and makes off with a bunch of gear. A guitar mysteriously goes missing from the side of the stage. There’s a break-in at a rehearsal space.

Artists suffer fraud, embezzlement, and loss of income through shady managerial or accounting practices. Identity theft can be a problem. One of the big problems in the 21st century is streaming fraud, where royalties are siphoned away from the artist in various nefarious ways.

And if we want to be a little more ephemeral, there are plenty of instances where someone has illegally acquired the song credits or the copyright to a song. Plagiarism is a form of theft. So is music piracy, whether it be illegal file-sharing or someone working in a CD manufacturing plant who walks out with a still-unreleased album. Or you can just wander into a record store and do a little shoplifting.

But what about stealing a record at the source, specifically the recording studio where the album is being made?

Today, almost every album is recorded digitally, so everything exists on a hard drive. It may be possible to hack into the studio’s network and download all the files WikiLeaks-style, but I’ve never heard of that happening. More likely, it’s someone on the inside who fills up a thumb drive when no one is looking and smuggles it out.

It’s even more difficult if we go back to the days when albums were made on reels of magnetic recording tape. These are big, bulky things bigger than a dinner plate and up to two inches thick.

To get at an album in its raw state on tape means that you have to break into the studio, bypass all the security, know exactly where to look, and then make off with this heavy, awkward booty without anyone finding out. This is Oceans Eleven and Mission Impossible-level stuff.

And even if you do pull it off, what do you do with the tapes? You can’t exactly fence the goods. More likely, you’d hold them for ransom.

The only time I’ve heard of that is when Billy Idol made off with the master tapes for his 1983 album, Rebel Yell. He was unhappy with the proposed cover artwork and was fighting with his record label.

To get his way, he went down to Electric Lady Studios in New York in the middle of the night, walked away with the tapes, and gave them to his heroin dealer. He phoned the label and said, “This guy will bootleg this album in a couple of days if you don’t do what I say about the artwork.”

The label gave in, the dealer returned the tapes, and the album was released on schedule that November—with a cover approved by Billy.

So when Green Day claimed that someone managed to steal a mostly completed album from a studio in Oakland, California, leaving with basically nothing, it felt suspicious. What is the real story behind the “stolen” and “lost” Green Day album?

I’m AC. This is episode 45 of “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.” And this time, it’s Green Day’s great Cigarettes and Valentines caper.

In addition to the podcasts, you can hear Uncharted on these Corus radio stationsll times local):