Alternative Press June 2001

All The Big Things

It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye, a family member or his privacy. Greg Heller gets the (poop) scoop on how America's favorite rock brats are handling stardom, stalkers and stress while trying to overcome "total gayness" on their latest pop-punk opus.

If you could take any drug with the promise it would do you no harm, which one would you take and why?

MARK HOPPUS: Ecstasy, ecstasy, ecstasy.

TOM DELONGE: There's a reason they call it ecstasy. They don't call it, like, "semi-ecstasy."

MARK: Yeah, they don't call it "bummed out."

Have you taken it before?

MARK: Oh, yes.

TOM: Maybe I'd do crystal meth, too, 'cause then I'd lose weight and be all hyper.

MARK: I've never tried cocaine, but I would love to. The only thing that scares me about cocaine is death. I would totally do coke if I knew I would be okay.

TOM: If nothing bad was gonna happen, I'd do heroin. Everyone says heroin is the best thing in the world.

MARK: I'd do heroin, cocaine and ecstasy at the same time.

TOM: Yeah, some kind of drug cocktail. Heroin with a dash of speed and maybe just a sprinkling of ecstasy.

MARK: Speed's no good. Speed's a sketchy high.

TOM: Yeah, you like itch your face off and shit.

MARK:You want a more natural, early-'80s high.

Did you guys ever do mushrooms or acid?

TOM: I've done mushrooms. I've never done acid, but I really want to. I want to try it at least once. I just want to go out in the desert and take some.

MARK: I did acid once by accident. Someone put it in my drink at a party. I freaked out and thought I was dying. It was out at this house party out in the desert, probably in '91. My old band [Of All Things] was just about to start playing, and right then the acid hit me. I threw my bass down and ran like five miles into the desert. Just kept running. There were like 100 people standing around scratching their heads.

Do you remember the experience as positive or negative?

MARK: It was very, very, very scary. I thought the tail-lights on cars were evil monsters coming to get me. And then I had the total hippie high. I thought the trees were singing to me about how pollution is for them. In the end, I guess it was a positive experience. I don't pollute anymore. And I take the taillights off al my cars.

TOM: That last part doesn't sound so bad.

I think some people perceive Blink as being sober.

MARK: We’re not straight edge; we just don't talk about it. I mean, we've all gotten high before; we've all drunk on tour, experimented with different drugs, but we don't talk about it.

TOM: I used to drink a lot of beer, but I was just getting fat as can be. Now that we've had a little success, I can afford to drink wine. Wine is kind of my thing.

What kind of wine?

MARK: Merlot

TOM: I love Cabernet. That's how punk we are.

Signature Sound Studios in nestled inconspicuously behind a reasonably bustling CoCo's and just slightly northwest of a Carl's Jr. burger joint, in a part of San Diego rightfully deemed unfit for postcards. It boasts neither luxurious multimedia "chill" rooms nor eager servant-folk, save the odd engineer's apprentice who'll track you down a Pepsi if you ask. Among those trophy bands enshrined on its "these-famous-people-recorded-here" wall: nu-metal Bible-thumpers P.O.D. and Big Mountain, best known for their reggaefied redux of Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way."

But however bland the joint may be, it is on this day the scene of substantial rite-of-passage. Twenty-five-year0\-old Blink-182 co-frontman Tom DeLonge is in the main recording room coming to terms with his nakedness. Certainly not his physical nudity--any feelings of "insignificance" there were long ago exorcised in public--but instead the bareness of one voice and one guitar. His.

The song “What Went Wrong” is among the last the band will be tracking for their forthcoming fifth studio album, Take Off Your Pants And Jacket. It’s an acoustic number, but hardly a ballad. It’s still fast and pissed, but there’s no fuzz. If The Replacements’ “Within Your Reach,” Husker Du’s “Hardly Getting Over It” or Green Day’s “Good Riddance” signaled total emancipation from punk enslavement, this song foretells an imminent insurrection against those bully-pulpit despots who see only Minor Threat and matchbox TWENTY with nothing inbetween. “There’s no reason behind it,” DeLonge says of the song. “It’s not ’cause every band has to have their staple acoustic song now. We write every single one of our songs on acoustic guitars and always have. So for once, why not just leave one in its original form?

“You grow up and realize, ‘Fuck! Who gives a fuck about punk rock?’” he says. “There are so many great forms of music out there, and you grow beyond wanting to listen to or write something because your parents will hate it.”

In a bratty, stuffy-nosed tone seemingly on permanent loan from Descendents frontman Milo Aukerman, DeLonge sings over brash chugs and skillfully plucked lead notes, “I’m kicking/up fiercely at the world around me/What went wrong?” Producer Jerry Finn suggested some of the words after seeing a documentary on the first Russian nuclear test. In it, an aged Soviet physicist says of watching the explosion, “There was a loud boom, and then the bomb began fiercely kicking at the world.” It’s an apt analogy for the global blast Blink sent out over the past two years; an expanding, ascending fireball, pregnant with power-pop hooks, youthful uncertainty, good-natured antagonism and cuss words to spare.

Bassist/songwriter/comedy partner/best friend Mark Hoppus has just test-tracked a few harmonies, on the fly, most impressively. The consensus, however, is that they don’t work, and for the second time in as many days, all in the room mount a campaign to leave the song as is: one guitar, one vocal. “It sounds cool like that,” Hoppus says. “Really honest.”

DeLonge turns to producer Finn. “You have to tell me what’s working here. I’ve never doe this before. I don’t want total gayness.”

Finn agrees with Hoppus, but comforts DeLonge by telling him that perhaps (utility session man/ex-Jellyfish guy) Roger Manning can add some piano or synthesizer to the number later on. The notion of a cello is introduced as well, and its resonant moans would indeed add warmth, but DeLonge is again hesitant. “I don’t want anyone to think we’re trying to be Green Day,” he says, referencing that trio’s aforementioned acoustic smash. The song is left alone for the time being.

Maybe the sparseness of a solo track scares DeLonge a little, but when sufficiently buffered by amplification and surrounded on all sides by drummer Travis Barker’s flurry of bash, he’ll volunteer views of deep wounds. Another new song, “Stay Together For The Kids,” is to divorce what “Adam’s Song” (form 1999’s multi-platinum Enema Of The State) was to suicide: an argument against. Tom wrote the song reflecting on his own parents’ split seven years ago, when he was 18. His father was an infidel. Two days after the DeLonges’ 20th wedding anniversary, his mother tossed him out.

“When you’re dead and gone will you remember this night?/Twenty years now lost/It’s not right,” he sings.

“I came home and all the furniture was gone,” DeLonge remembers. “And there were all these scrape marks in front of the house. My dad had dragged all the furniture out of the house by himself. I was in the driveway, on the tailgate of this Nissan truck I had, sitting there thinking, ‘Fuck! I cannot believe this is happening.’ It was the heaviest day of my life.”

Already an angst-ridden suburbanite, and itching to bail stagnant Poway (northeast of San Diego proper), DeLonge left home right then and there.

“I didn’t want any part of the conflict,” he says. “It’s something I regret now. My sister was only 12 at the time, stuck there while my parents were going through a gnarly divorce; living by herself with my mom, who was emotionally distraught for years. I should have stayed there for some support. You live your while life with a father figure, then all the sudden…no more.

“I was older. I could deal with it,” he says. “But I can’t deal with the fact that my mom got hurt.”

In a few months, DeLonge will begin his own marriage to longtime girlfriend Jennifer Jenkins. He speaks of his forthcoming nuptials in a softer than typical tone, with genuine reverence for the institution and immeasurable love for the woman. To this end, “Stay Together For The Kids” seems every bit a letter to himself, a reminder to learn from his past.

“All I know,” DeLonge says, “is that I’ll never ever let that kind of thing happen to my family. If I have kids, little rugrats hanging on me, there’s nothing I would ever do to hurt them. I would stay in a marriage I hated for 300 years if it meant the kids would be happier.”

Before you go thinking the aforementioned new songs portend a morose record, rest assured that, as with all serious things the boys do, there’ll be humor in spades to offset and disarm. Exhibit A: the album’s title. Exhibit B: There will be three different versions of Blink’s new disc, each with a different bonus track. Those tracks are “When You Fucked Hitler” (“Fuck a dead body in the ass/Cocksucking Nazi necrophiliac”), “Mother’s Day” (“Fuckin’ and suckin’ and touchin’/It’s Mother’s Day”) and “Fuck A Dog In The Ass.”

Sing my boob or sign my ass?

MARK: Boob, definitely. Ass could go either way.

TOM: Yeah, the likelihood of finding a poop nugget on a boob is substantially lower.

MARK: Totally. A boob is just a boob. But a butt, you have to pull down pants and you could find sweaty, pooped-up, G-string panties.

TOM: The worst thing in the world is shit, and shit comes out of the butt.

Most tired Blink shtick: midgets, nudity or farts/poop?

MARK: Nudity.

TOM: Nudity. As much as it did for us, fuck, who wants to get naked now when people expect it?

MARK: Farts and poop are still funny and will always be funny, but the naked thing… We’re still tying to live down the curse of the “What’s My Age” video.

Mark Hoppus is by himself in the studio. His argyle Dolce & Gabbana sweater just covers the waistband of his boxers, themselves a few inches above low-slung, oversized shorts. He’s sitting on the floor surrounded by a sprawling mess of fan mail, reading each not intently. He recalls the first fan letter he wrote: to They Might Be Giants, after seeing the band play Washington, DC’s legendary 9:30 Club. He was 16.

Today’s letters were sent over form Sombrero, a local Mexican food place made famous in Blink’s song “Josie” (“Yeah my girlfriend… brings me Mexican food from Sombrero just because”). The humble eatery is ground zero for rabid Blinkophiles, many of whom seem genuinely pissed upon arriving to find the place devoid of Tom, Mark and Travis. (While fear of a fan stampede might keep them from actually eating at the restaurant, Mark and Tom ordered takeout form the place every day I spent with them. Sombrero makes a mean bean-and-cheese burrito.)

Hoppus hands me a napkin covered in scribble. It reads, “I drove for two hours to eat at your restaurant. Let’s fuck sometime.” It’s signed by three girls, all of whom supplied home and cell-phone numbers. In another note, titled “Enemas Do A Body Good,” four Santa Barbara teens detail how they purchased a home colonic kit from a Sav-On pharmacy (receipt provided for evidence) and proceeded to squirt its contents onto a “stuck-up cheerleader bitch” named Brittney. A 43-year-old wheelchair-bound mother mails in some Blink swag, requesting the band sign it and return it. She includes a photo book with her letter. In one of the more touching images, her Blink-maniac teenage son hangs his bare ass above her hospital bed as she looks up smiling. Hoppus signs her stuff and slips it immediately into a FedEx envelope. In the line on the air bill that asks for his company name, he scribbles, “Totally Gay Men & More Men.”

He then calls a girl who included her phone number in a Blink-rules/Mark-is-so-hot-style note, a sorority chick from a nearby college.

MARK: Hi, this is Mark. I play in a band called Blink-182.

GIRL: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. My roommate isn’t here, the girl who wrote the letter. She loves you!

MARK: Does she know how fat I am? [note: according to Travis, Mark’s blossoming belly is a “brand-new thing.”]

GIRL: She doesn’t care. Oh, my God, you have to call back when she’s here.

MARK: So, you’re in a sorority? Are you gonna hump a dude this weekend?

GIRL: No.

MARK: What’s your major?

GIRL: Theater.

MARK: So you’re gonna be an actress?

GIRL: I hope so.

MARK:You know you’re gonna have to do naked movies, right?

GIRL: What? Why do you think that?

MARK: How much money would you need to do a double penetration?

The girl gets kind of pissed. He apologizes profusely and promises to try calling back to reach her roomie. Hoppus turns to Finn and states, “She seemed pretty offended when I asked her about the double penetration.”

The producer looks him in the eye and replies, “You’re surprised by that?”

Two days ago, Mark Hoppus turned 29. Older folks would call him asinine. The younger set finds inspiration in his bucking of the aging-equals-boring theorem. Both demographics might be shocked at the ease with which he lapses into maturity and the true kindness he shows toward others. At an area record store, he’s warm and gracious while signing autographs. Seeing my admiration for his BMW, he hands me the key and says, “You wanna drive back?”

He’s even peaceful in dissecting the downsides of Blink’s ascension to hugeness; mistakes they’ve made and prices they’ve paid. Plucked from hardcore and plopped in TRL’s vapid lap, they were accidental heartthrobs. Mere minutes after running nude through town in the “What’s My Age Again?” video they were on more teeny-mag than rock-rag covers. Median fan age dropped uncomfortably low, and the screams got higher-pitched. So here’s a band of lifelong rebels and misfits suddenly thrown to the lambs; fans who “think Mark is sooooooo hot” and have yet to develop sufficient cynicism to appreciate the importance, the necessity of Blink’s brilliant “All The Small Things” clip—a titanic up-yours to boy-band svengali Lou Pearlman’s armada of suck.

“I still cannot understand to this day why kids have reacted to us in that way,” Hoppus says. “Our biggest hit had a video where we made fun of boy bands and pop acts. Why we would then be lumped into that very scene is beyond me.”

While some elements of the crossover were cool (three out of three Blinks agree: There’s nothing neater than kids discovering punk via Blink-182), others were not. Half-naked mania reached a fever pitch, and to this day remains a standby at photo shoots (the photographer for this magazine asked Travis to take off his shirt; he refused.) Merchandising spiraled beyond their control, their images exploited by a media they never thought to distrust. In a positively Andy Gibb moment, Hoppus was advised by the counselors at Camp Blink to keep the happiest event of his life—his marriage to wife Skye—under wraps, lest his photo be vengefully torn from 10 million school lockers.

With Tom and Travis both set to marry in the coming months, might such a thing happen again? “Fuck no,” he says. “Those people don’t work around or near us anymore.”

Thankfully, though, Blink have not opted to make one of those post-fame, falsely modest albums about their struggle to maintain a sense of self amid the churning turbines of the machine. Instead, they’ve tackled time-tested topics—unrequited crushes and alienation—with renewed urgency. Both Tom and Mark sang on Pant And Jacket harder than they did on Enema, and stripped layers of production reveal the welcome sounds of determined hands banging on string and skins. It’s still yummy, for sure, as evidenced by “First Date” (“In the car I couldn’t wait/to pink you up on our first date”) and “Online” (“Last night I saw you online/that screen name used to be mine”), but the air of doubt hangs a little heavier.

And just as DeLonge’s gone starkly confessional in “Stay Together For The Kids,” so has Hoppus with “Roller Coaster.” Abstractly, the song offers a small window to what insecurities might be shrouded by all that trash talk. He sings of finally finding something ideal (Skye) and fearing for its certain departure. “All I remember/the way her bedroom smelled.”

“It’s about a nightmare I had when we first started dating,” he says, “that for some reason I couldn’t tell anyone we were together. I have no idea what it symbolizes.’

Real or bullshit: Richard Gere and the gerbil?

TOM: We were just talking about that the other day.

MARK: And here’s our thinking: Nobody started a rumor that Brad Pitt had a thing in his butt. Nobody started a rumor that Mel Gibson had a thing in his butt. It must have been super-awful for Richard Gere’s manger to sit him down and go, “Richard, I’ve got some bad news. There’s been some talk.” “Talk? About what?” “Well, it’s about you and your butt. Everyone in the world thinks you love having gerbils in you butt.”

TOM: I don’t buy it, though. There’s too many rad things to stick in your butt besides a living animal.

Rod Stewart had three quarts of semen pumped from his stomach?

MARK: Yeah, I’m buying that. Why not.

TOM: Me, too.

Britney Spears has fake boobs?

MARK: Yes, she does. You can tell.

TOM: Yeah. There’s even suspicion that she has a fake vagina.

Travis Barker is a mute?

MARK: False.

TOM: True.

You would have to try very, very hard to find less rock-star place to live than Corona, California. Deep in the low desert, it’s a place of dry heat, Ford F350s and thirsty orange trees. But to Travis Barker, raised in nearby Fontana, it looks like, smells like and is indeed home. The 25-year-old, ink-soaked drummer has himself a fresh mansion on the town’ outskirts, near the mayor’s estate. Behind the house, workers labor to finish a mammoth, Flinstonian pool where waterfalls will fall onto skulls hand-carved into the bedrock. Soon, there’ll be a studio back there as well; a soundproof, subterranean chamber where he can whack his traps day or night.

Having long ago tracked his parts at a more drum-friendly room in Los Angeles, Barker is free to attend to other things: supervising the home construction, overseeing his T-shirt-and-belt-buckle company (Famous Stars And Straps) and planning his marriage to girlfriend Melissa Kennedy.

We take a seat on is front porch, and just as quickly a carload of young girls, fresh from Del Taco, drives by, screaming, “Travis! We love you!” The reluctant star pulls from a cigarette and drops his head.

“First day here, I had 40 liquored-up high-school girls sitting out front, waiting for me to come out,” he says. “I came out and talked to them, and it seemed okay until Melissa walked out and they started calling her a bitch.”

To best understand Barker’s role in Blink-182, one need only listen to the band’s recent live album, The Mark, Tom And Travis Show. In the great tradition of Cheap Trick’s Live At Budokan, the release showcases the drummer’s quiet fury—which is to say that when not drumming furiously, he’s quiet. While Hoppus and DeLonge hurl funk ‘n’ suck jokes at the crowd and at one another, Travis waits for his cue behind his kit. At times, he anxiously pounds the kick drum or raps the snare.

“Probably 60 percent of the time, what they’re saying between songs is genuinely funny,” he says. “But the other times… that’s when I’m kicking or doing something behind the drum set to say, ‘Let’s go. Let’s play the next song.’ They tried before [to get me involved]: ‘Get a mic. Tell a joke.’ But that’s just not my style. I’d just rather play a song.”

Barker’s completely absent from the final 11 minutes of the live disc, an at-time-hilarious series of Hoppus/DeLonge ‘tween-tune rants that he voted against including. But when playing he’s the loudmouth, squeezing fills into rolls with unthinkable technicality and brutal abandon, like a bar-brawler armed with precision punches. In a essentially rhythmic band, Travis is the soloist. The skinny guy who worships jazz session drummer Steve Gadd (Chick Corea, Al DiMeola), Dennis Chambers (Parliament, Stanley Clarke) and Stewart Copeland and yet “can’t even tell you who the drummer in the Dead Kennedy’s was” has forced a rethink of hardcore beat-keeping.

Ironically, for the least-known and newest (he replaced booted drummer Scott Raynor in ’98) of the Blinks, Travis has worked wonders toward evolving the band from a repetitive blitzkrieg into something slightly more eclectic. “You couldn’t tell the difference between any of the songs on [1997’s] Dude Ranch,” he says. “I wanted to try different things. I slowed down ‘All The Small Things,’ I wanted to experiment with different tempos.

“I did things on [the new album] that I couldn’t have gotten away with if Mark and Tom knew what I was doing. There’s a song called ‘Don’t Tell Me It’s Over’ where I did a full Afro-Cuban thing, but they don’t know it’s Afro-Cuban; they just think I’m doing something cool on the drums. There’s one song where I do the full ‘Funky Drummer,’ James Brown thing and I know they don’t know it’s a ‘Funky Drummer’ beat. Every time I say ‘Funky Drummer’ they say, ‘What’s that?’”

I knew Travis a long time ago, when he was living in my hometown playing in a band called Feeble, working as a trash man and couch surfing. He was painfully intense; so single-minded in his march toward rhythmic mastery that all else—girls who wanted him, parties we asked him to—was meaningless. But anyone who saw the then-teen play drums knew the question of stardom was not if but when. “I got tattoos on my forearm so I couldn’t have a good job, so I’d have to play music,” he says. “I was arranging my life so I’d be stuck with no other option that to play music.”

Barker is as I last saw him—in constant motion. He taps his fingers on this and raps on that. It’s easy to imagine blood pumping through his heart in triplets and paradidles. There’s an unease about him, a sense that in 10 lifetimes of tireless banging he’d still have a world’s worth of issues to expel. “I’m still fighting everything. I can’t roll with things. I can’t accept things.”

It all makes sense when Travis talks about his family. His upbringing was hardly privileged; his folks worked doubly hard so he could study music, buying him his first kit at age four. “I would go skateboarding with my friends,” he says, “and my mom would yell at me, ‘You get in here right now!’ and I wouldn’t’ listen, and she’d say, ‘Your singing lessons are starting.’ It was like, ‘Oh, man, how embarrassing.’”

One decade ago, when Travis was 15, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Before passing away, she told her son, “You don’t worry about anything else. Do whatever you need to do.” Before every Blink-182 tour, Travis visits her grave in nearby Grand Terrace, but he rarely stays for long.

“I can’t hang out there,” he says. “I can’t sit there and talk to a piece of stone with someone’s name on it, but I know she’s had something to do with helping me get where I am.”

If you had to, which one of your bandmates would you have buttsex with and why?

MARK: I can only choose only?

TOM: Probably Travis. He doesn’t eat meat, so his butt’s probably a bit cleaner. He just takes pasta poops.

MARK: I’ll go with Travis, too. He lives out of town, so I wouldn’t have to deal with seeing him afterwards.

If your new album goes octuple-platinum, what will you buy yourselves?

TOM: A house in Aspen. Just to hang out, be a yuppie and drink more Cabernet.

MARK: Maybe a place in New York. There’s not that much shit that I want, really. The thing that makes me happiest in the world is hanging out with my friends. And that’s free.