COI007: While you're counting your sheep, I'll count my lucky stars
You were the last good thing I ever saw
I have a complicated relationship with Blink-182. I’ve been a fan of the band ever since I first heard “M+M’s” on the now-legendary Punk Sucks compilation, which was also responsible for turning me (and probably thousands of others) onto Sublime, the Bouncing Souls, No Use For A Name, Unwritten Law, Boris The Sprinkler and many more iconic ’90s punk bands.
I remember trying to see them at Warped Tour 1997 in Chicago, but their set along with many others was rained out. (Mark McGrath from Sugar Ray did get struck by lightning while performing, though, so the day wasn’t a total wash.)
I remember buying Dude Ranch (the joke of which I literally just got, like, last year) on CD at Media Play, putting it in my mom’s minivan as we ran errands and experiencing abject horror as “Voyeur” played and seeing my mom’s real-time reaction. (It wasn’t good.)
I remember listening to “A New Hope” and deciding that any punk band that could write a song about Star Wars was officially my new favorite band. Sorry, Green Day.
I remember buying The Show soundtrack at my local record store, 15 Minutes, because it had a brand new Blink-182 song on it called “Mutt.” (This was in 1998, and this early version of “Mutt” is still exclusive to that compilation.)
I remember the spring of 1999, when Enema Of The State was announced and my friend Anthony and I spent forever on a dial-up modem connection downloading an MP3 that contained snippets of “What’s My Age Again?,” “Aliens Exist” and a third song that escapes me (but was probably “All The Small Things”) from Blink’s website. We listened to that MP3 countless times in anticipation of Enema’s release, and we purchased the CD the day it came out, on June 1, 1999. It was an okay record, though one which I wildly called “mature” and “emo” in my review of it for my brother’s webzine (which, embarrassingly, is still archived online). The photo above is from the Enema artwork photo shoot and was taken (and shared) by the band’s former publicist, Erik Stein. There are a lot more miles on all four of those faces now, especially Janine.
It’s been a weird 20 years since then. I covered Blink-182 extensively for Punknews.org, especially around the release of untitled (which is still their best album, fight me). By the time I got hired at Alternative Press, though, Blink was all but done — they went on “indefinite hiatus” in February 2005. My coverage didn’t stop, though: I became the go-to writer for all things Blink-related, interviewing Travis Barker about the Transplants, Mark Hoppus about his show on Fuse TV and the idiotically named +44 and even scoring the very first interview with Tom DeLonge about Angels & Airwaves. I interviewed all three guys countless times over the intervening years before they decided to get back together, and then I wrote not one but two cover stories on Blink — one, for the well-received reunion tour; a second for the not-as-well-received Neighborhoods album.
It was that second cover story that really complicated my feelings on the band, as it was a messy, uncomfortable experience that found me being verbally threatened by their manager and having no one — not the band members, not my bosses — standing up for me. I wrote about the experience at length in the cover story itself, but to sum it up: It sucked. (Neighborhoods is still a pretty okay record, though.)
Then Tom quit Blink again, and the band went all Sublime With Rome on us and recruited Matt Skiba from Alkaline Trio, a band I also have a complicated relationship with (though the Trio’s manager has never threatened me, to the best of my knowledge). Long story short: California came out and completely killed any excitement I ever had for Blink. It was a truly terrible record, one specifically designed for mass consumption with little soul behind it, and everything more or less sounded like Goldfinger. (Thanks for that, John Feldmann.) This was officially a rudderless band — and as a diehard Weezer fan, trust me, I know a lot about rudderless bands.
Now Blink is going to tour amphitheaters this summer performing Enema in its entirety every night. The sheer idea of Matt Skiba singing “Aliens Exist” makes me cringe. I will not be attending this show, but I’m sure many nostalgia seekers will. DeLonge recently announced Angels & Airwaves’ first tour in many years, though the Cleveland date sold out so fast, it looks like I won’t be attending that either. Maybe Mark, Tom and Travis will eventually patch things up and we’ll get a proper reunion before Blink gets retired to the state fair circuit, or maybe Tom will continue to spend literally millions of dollars to try and prove aliens are real. Either way, I think I’m done with Blink-182. I guess this is growing up.
Today’s subject line is a lyric from the song “Cringe” by Alkaline Trio. It is better than everything on California by a country mile. Listen to the song below, and if you dig it, you can buy the record it’s from on Amazon (and by clicking that link, there’s a chance I may make a few cents):
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