A lot went into that powerful song at Sublime’s mediocre final performance. By the time their never-ending tour arrived in Petaluma in May 1996, they’d been playing up and down the West Coast for nearly ten years, and Nowell was trying to stay away from heroin.

Sublime started in 1988 in Long Beach off Ocean Boulevard, at the house where Bradley’s father Jim still lives. Bassist Eric Wilson and drummer Bud Gaugh lived across the alley from each other nearby, in Long Beach’s Belmont Shore neighborhood. Eric and Bud hit it off. They formed a few garage bands, including the Juice Bros. They both got kicked out of high school for what was likely drug possession, though they refuse to say so. Eric had also been jamming with a neighborhood guitarist named Bradley, who lived down Ocean Boulevard in the upscale Peninsula neighborhood. Bradley’s parents had divorced when he was 10. His mother deemed him too much trouble to handle, so she sent him to live with his dad, a rock steady, practical-minded, soft-spoken contractor who lived on the beach, wore Hawaiian shirts, and played guitar. When Jim Nowell took his 11-year-old son sailing to the Virgin Islands, Bradley heard the Island music that would define his life.

Wilson was a quiet guy. Gaugh was rowdy. Nowell was both sensitive and vocal, so he sang in their short-lived bands. “When I met Brad, he was trying out for this junior-high-school band, and the highlight of their career was this talent show,” Wilson remembered. “He tried out for them, and they didn’t want him because they said he wasn’t good enough.” Eric and Bud had lots of time on their hands. When Bud got out of jail for some kind of mischief in 1988, Eric introduced Brad to Bud during Brad’s college spring break, and the three jammed for a week at Nowell’s dad’s house, wrote three new songs (“Romeo,” “Roots of Creation,” and “New Realization”), and recorded two old tunes of Nowell’s: “Date Rape” and “Ebin.” To start booking shows, they put those demos, their band name Sublime, and Bradley’s phone number on what became known as the Zapeda Tape. “It just clicked,” Wilson said, “just like that.” They were friends for life.

Sublime started as a party band, literally playing house parties in Long Beach backyards, and they took that circus energy with them everywhere they went. Their tour van was a party. Backstage green rooms were parties. Recording sessions were parties. Even group interviews descended into a chaos of jokes and banter and people drunkenly talking over each other while Nowell struggled to answer the interviewer’s questions thoughtfully. Before shows, they’d skate and drink and smoke cigs with fans, and wander the venues hanging out before taking the stage. Of course, the shows themselves were ragers.

Their July 4, 1988 show set the tone for their professional lives. Barely months old, they played on the beach in front of Nowell’s house. The concert devolved in what the OC Weekly called “a rowdy good time into a full-fledged riot.” “Brad liked riots,” his stepsister Katie Gibson remembered. “When they played that show, kids were totally destroying property, and the cops had to come in and shut the band down, clear the streets and kick everybody off the Peninsula.” Sublime “caused chaos wherever they went,” she says. “It was awesome.”

To Blaine Kaplan, who later became Sublime’s booking agent and co-manager, their December 1994 Klub Kommotion show epitomized Sublime’s appeal. “That was my first real experience going to some dirtbag, punk rock underground show, paying two bucks and walking in with a 12-pack. …There must’ve been about 25 friends on stage with them while they were playing. They’ve got this one friend, Buddy, who was part of the Church of Rock N Roll in the East Bay, and he was actually passed out on stage. Brad was straddling him while he was playing, and everyone was yelling, ‘Buddy, get up, you #@$^, and do 20 push-ups!’ He started waking up, and when he came to he grabbed the mic and said, ‘There’s no need for push-ups.’ It was so funny. They played ‘Scarlet Begonias’ and Buddy was singing along in the drunken stupor. It was chaos, and it was classic Sublime. The party’s on stage, off the stage, around the stage, everywhere.” I can’t deny how fun that would have sounded had my friends and I known about Sublime in their heyday. We embraced that kind of drunken pandemonium during our teens and early twenties, drinking beer and smoking tons of weed and gobbling mushrooms whenever we could. It made sense that Sublime’s record label named one short tour the 3 Ring Circus.

Like the original Iggy and The Stooges, Sublime could play an incredible show one night, and a horrid one the next, even play one killer song before slaughtering the next. You never knew what you’d get. Some people loathed that about them, including certain bands who watched them bumble through their drunken sets on Warped tour. Other people liked that. “It was a hit-and-miss thing for us,” remembered bassist Eric Wilson. “We used to drink a lot. A lot of my older acquaintances would say, ‘I would never know if you guys were going to sound like total shit or play great.’ We didn’t have our professional skills going on back then. We just thought the world was ours, or whatever.”

Brad Nowell, after NYC show in 1995. Getty Images

As promoter Lil’ Mike put it, “Of course, part of their appeal was the element of don’t give a f#ck danger & unpredictability, which could play out in various ways. Whether it was a skate ramp in Sacramento or a near riot in San Pedro with no notes played…each gig was a thrill, and these were genuinely fun young guys to be around.” But that aura came at a cost.

They arrived late to gigs. They missed others. Botched interviews. Even got too trashed to do simple free recordings. The day after their Robbin’ the Hood record release party in 1994, Sublime opened for No Doubt in San Bernardino, and their tattoo artist friend Opie Ortiz — the dude who tattooed the word ‘Sublime’ on Nowell’s back and drew the famous sun on 40 Oz to Freedom — had to play drums because Gaugh never showed. At another gig, Wilson and Gaugh arrived so late that Nowell played part of the show solo, which people loved.

“People used to come to our shows and stand outside while we played our first song,” Gaugh told the OC Weekly in 2010, “just to see if we sounded like shit before they went in.”

“Or to see if we even showed up,” Wilson added.

Most of 1994 and 1995 was a blur of back-to-back performances in a different city every night, crisscrossing the country multiple times as headliners or as an opening band. In 1995, Sublime co-headlined the first Vans Warped Tour. At a drunken show in upstate New York, Nowell’s dog kept biting people, and the band got in a mud-ball fight with the audience, so management kicked Sublime off tour for a week. “Basically,” Gaugh remembered, “our daily regimen was wake up, drink, drink more, play, and then drink a lot more. We’d call people names. Nobody got our sense of humor. Then we brought the dog out and he bit a few skaters, and that was the last straw.” That kind of life wears people out. Home life was no tamer.

Back in Long Beach, Sublime would wake up to drinks and do breakfast bong rips. Sometimes they’d surf. Sometimes they’d skate, get tattoos or jam in the yard. It was the southern California dream, the lifestyle that many of us aspirational outsiders envy, especially young dudes in their teens and twenties who grow up skating, snowboarding, and yearning to live someplace cooler than home. Even if you didn’t like neck tattoos or shorts hung below peoples’ knees — and I don’t — how could you not envy these guys? Sitting outside on a long brown sofa at the Warped Tour’s Northampton, Massachusetts show, Nowell holds a draft beer in his hand and has his arm around Lou Dog, as he tells the interviewer that even though they’ve been working hard at their music for a decade, “None of us have ever had a real job, like, with the exception of Bud who used to work at a hardware store.” Bradley said that making the video for their song “Date Rape” felt like the start of something bigger. “I’m ready to do this the rest of my life, so this is the beginning of my career, so.” Unfortunately, like many of us wild city kids who found our identities in underground sports and music culture, hard drugs eventually made their way in the band’s life.

Gaugh went to rehab for speed and heroin in 1990, 1991, and 1992, when the band was trying to the tour the US with their first full album, 40 Oz. to Freedom. Gaugh’s mother remembers the horror she felt every time the phone rang at night in the band’s early days. She thought: Bud’s in jail; Bud’s in trouble; Bud needs bail. “He was drinkin’ way too much,” she said. She also remembers the relief she felt when the phone rang one time around 3am. “Hey mom,” said Bud, “I’m just callin’ to tell ya I’m not in jail.” Gaugh struggled to steer clear of the hard stuff after that, but it didn’t always work.

In June 1993, Bad Religion’s guitarist Brett W. Gurewitz let Sublime record demos at his Hollywood studio, for free, while he was away, because he loved their music. “When I got back from tour,” Gurewitz remembered, “the tapes were killer, but my partner said, ‘Hey man, these guys are drinking 40s and smoking crack in the studio.’” That freaked them both out, especially Gurewitz, who was trying to stay sober, but these demos ended up on Sublime’s second album Robbin the Hood and helped get them signed to MCA. That blasé behavior also helped put Nowell in rehab like Gaugh.

Nowell resisted heroin for a while. After he finally gave in, he went all in, believing it improved his creativity. Granted, he wrote some incredible songs that became Sublime standards like “STP,” “Pool Shark,” “Greatest Hits,” and “Saw Red.” He even tried to release a rushed, homemade demo named Chiva Kenevil, until his band-mates stopped it. They weren’t happy about his habit or the way his advertising of it appeared professionally. But from then on, heroin was an unwelcome member of the band and Nowell’s life, alternately a shipmate or an anchor. “It ran the whole show,” his widow Troy told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, while their one year old son Jakob napped in his crib. “Everything revolved around whether Brad was using or not. If he was not, it was a struggle to keep him from using. And if he was using, it was a struggle to help him quit.”

1993 though the 1994 recording of their Robbin’ the Hood album was a period of serious use. Things started disappearing from Bradley’s father’s house. When Bradley’s stepsister Katie Gibson came into her brother’s bedroom to search for her missing CDs, she found a bunch of needles. She kept those secret. After Jim realized why his son had lost weight and kept falling asleep while speaking, he forced him into rehab. Things kept disappearing, so Jim kicked out Brad, who started couch-surfing and staying with his friend and manager Miguel at various flophouses around Long Beach and Orange County.

One place where Bradley spent his time was a San Clamente house that meth users took over after an earthquake damaged it. People nicknamed it STP, for “secret tweeker pad,” and the band recorded part of Robbin’ the Hood in it, on some equipment they’d stolen during the 1992 L.A. Riots. Middle class from a nice home in an upscale, coastal area, Nowell was an intelligent, articulate, intellectually curious guy who enjoyed history books and getting into deep conversions with friends and strangers. And yet, he clearly romanticized drug use and bulked up his musical identity with the aesthetics of squalor. And he was naïve. When he and his future wife Troy first met at a show in 1993, he didn’t hide the fact that he was on heroin from her or other people. He would blurt it out.

“I felt like kicking his ass,” Bud Gaugh told Rolling Stone. “I mean, I’d been there and was still struggling with it. So I was all things that I could be to him during that time. I tried to be his conscience; I tried to be his nurse. I even tried to be his drug buddy; I mean, we got loaded together a couple of times.”

Few in Sublime’s social circle had much leverage, though. Theirs was a party culture. But in Troy, he found someone he could speak to candidly. She understood addicts. Both her parents had been speed users, and her childhood home was so frequently filled with bikers and drug users that she became drawn to them later in life. “I love drug addicts,” she explained to Rolling Stone. “I guess they’re just the kind of people I’m used to being around. They’re great; they’re crazy.”

Of course, Nowell would promise to quit heroin. Then he’d keep using. He’d even pawn the band’s equipment, let their manager Miguel figure out a way to buy it back on the day of a show, and the cycle would start again. He alienated his bandmates and family, burned his proverbial bridges. “It really consumed us,” Troy later said. “Not in a productive way, but in an angry, scared, fearful way. We were always afraid he was going to use again. Afraid that one day it would be the last time.” Brad went into rehab in 1994. “While I was pregnant, he stayed clean for six months, which was the longest he’d ever stayed clean,” Troy told OC Weekly. He struggled.

“He had a patch that was supposed to go on his back to sedate him,” a friend named Shea rembered, “and then he’d take off his shirt, and you’d see he’d stuck these patches all over his back. He was a mess.” Even during his clean periods, his environment never changed.

“It’s not that we didn’t put him in recovery,” Jim Nowell remembered in 2019. “It’s not that he didn’t recover. He just always went back to the music. I would always plead with him: ‘Don’t go back to that damned band, because that’s where your problems are, because everyone wants to party with you.” What changed was the band.

They got so popular, their song-writing so sophisticated, that MCA, a major label, signed them in the summer of 95. MCA’s lucrative advance released them from the need to sneak into Miguel’s school recording studio or set up in a drug house, no matter how much they enjoyed that cat-and-mouse game. It also attached many corporate strings to their disorganized wild lives. “He decided on his own that he wanted to go to rehab,” Troy told Rolling Stone. “He knew he had to get clean before the MCA thing could happen.”

MCA planned to release their major label debut, Sublime, on July 30, 1996. The label poured a lot of money into the band, sending them to Willie Nelson’s Texas recording studio and Total Access Studios in Redondo Beach, preparing marketing campaigns. MCA expected a return on their investment. People were relying on them. Sublime felt pressure to produce. Nowell and Troy bought an expensive beach house in a gated community on a narrow strip of sand in exclusive Sunset Beach, south of Long Beach. Before they even got married, Troy gave birth to their son Jakob on June 25, 1995. Nowell told people he had to straighten up for Jakob. Nowell planned to teach his son how to surf. And he was determined to make this new album the greatest album Sublime he’d made. “He wanted his band to have glory,” Troy said.

Things had gotten serious.

The band wasn’t known for seriousness.

When MCA paid for them to record at Total Access Studios in Redondo Beach in 1995, the band’s partying nearly ruined everything. “They went into a studio with [engineer] David Kahne and recorded ‘What I Got,’ ‘Caress Me Down,’ ‘Doin’ Time,’ and ‘ April 29, 1992 (Miami),’” Sublime’s co-manager Blaine Kaplan remembered. “The morning after the first night in the studio, David called both me and Jon [Phillips] at six in the morning and he was freaking out. He almost quit, he wasn’t going to finish it. The guys were raging, partying, hardcore. Jon talked him down, telling him, ‘I know things seem crazy, but I know they really want to make this music. It seems hectic now but once you get down to it, it’ll be cool.’” Three of those songs turned into Sublime classics, two of them became hits, but this was how Sublime approached everything: with a drink in one hand, and trail of havoc behind them. The fun, unpredictable reputation that created an attractive aura to their growing fanbase also made them unattractive to music industry professionals who understood the challenges of dealing with wild musicians, particularly one with a history of heroin use.

Complicating the physiology of opioid addiction was the way heroin got bound up in Nowell’s ideas about creativity and the strain of being a frontman. Jazz genius Charlie Parker had unintentionally propagated this false connection between heroin and creativity in the 1940s and 50s, when tons of Parker’s Bebop acolytes took heroin hoping they could achieve Parker’s level of creativity. They did not. During the 90s, for whatever reason, heroin was everywhere, too. Maybe Mexican drug cartels had expanded their opium-growing operations by then. Maybe they figured out more successful ways of smuggling it into the US and keeping prices low. Whatever the reasons, anyone paying attention to underground music in the 90s saw many talented people using, dying from, or trying to quit dope.

Andrew Wood from Seattle’s Mother Love Bone set this deadly decade’s tone when he overdosed on heroin in 1990, right before the band’s breakout debut album. The infamous GG Allin overdosed in 1993 a month before The Wonder Stuff’s bassist Rob Jones did. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Hole’s bassist Kristen Pfaff died in 94. Heroin took the life of Smashing Pumpkin’s touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin in 96 and got their drummer Jimmy Chamberlain kicked out of the band he helped found. By 1997 dope was so epidemic that Portland, Oregon’s Dandy Warhols sang “I never thought you’d be a junkie, because heroin is so passé.” For all the lives that heroin claimed, many musicians managed to save themselves: Blur singer David Albarn; Everclear singer Art Alexakis; Pantera singer Phil Anselmo; Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode; Gibby Hayes of Butthole Surfers; Cris Kirkwood of Meat Puppets; Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots. Bombarded with stories of so many users’ death or survival, Nowell came to believe heroin could enhance his creativity. Jim Nowell told an installation artist that his son “started using drugs as an experiment on his music … because of guys like Kurt Cobain and Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon.” Jim told VH1: “His excuse for taking the heroin was that he felt like he had to be larger than life. He was leading the band, leading his fans, and he had to put on this persona.”

At the time, popular alternative musicians like Kurt Cobain, Sonic Youth, John Cale, and Ministry had turned Beat Generation novelist William Burroughs, another icon of opioid endurance, into a punk icon. Burroughs wrote the iconic books Naked Lunch, Junkie, and Queer. He’d inspired a character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, had fascinating ideas about the occult, the mind, magic, and authority. He created the influential cut-up method of composition, and he’d aged into a literary figure and intellectual who knew how to manage both his heroin habit and artistic career. He’d always enjoyed notoriety as a so-called high priest of pleasure-seeking and subversion, dating back to The Beatles, but he experienced a renewed interest in the early 90s. Nowell thought highly of Burroughs. Look, Burroughs’ life seemed to say, if you do it right, you can use dope and still make art throughout your long life, too! Never mind that Burroughs was a rare example. Nowell thought less highly of 90s drug causalities. Nowell thought less highly of 90s drug causalities.

When Blind Melon’s singer Shannon Hoon died from cocaine toxicity after an all-night bender in October, 1995, it terrified Troy. Nowell refused to acknowledge any connection. He thought Hoon was weak, telling Troy, “That guy was just stupid. He just fucked up.” Like Bradley, Hoon was 28 years old and had a child. According so Spin, “even when Nowell was shitting in his pants from the five clonodine patches he’d slapped on to help him kick, he couldn’t give up the illusion that heroin was indelibly cool.”

“He got this elitist attitude because he was a junkie,” Troy told Spin magazine. “He always used to say, ‘You guys don’t understand, because you don’t do heroin. …A lot of junkies are like that. They think they’re doing the most hard-core thing, sticking needles in their arm. We could say anything — ‘We understand what you’re going through’ — but we really don’t, and they know what. They like that.”

Some of us know. Like Nowell, many of us 90s kids developed our own heroin habits during that very blasted decade. I’ve smoked, snorted, and injected heroin. I’ve craved it and pushed it away, laid with my eyes closed reminiscing about times I’d passed out, doped out of my mind, and I played music just to take me back to those euphoric moments, since after my arrest and probation, I couldn’t go back there in real life. I understand the hunger, and I understood the emptiness of both indulging and resisting, how neither delivers the satisfaction you crave until you’ve resisted long enough that one craving dulls enough to endure, and I know how that dichotomous life makes you hate yourself and crave escape even more. Thankfully, some of Gen X kids lived long enough to sort things out. The Baby Boomers we found so bland are now the people we’ve grown into: house, job, mortgage, kids. That life’s actually pretty sweet. Now we play music for fun and introduce our kids to the albums we jammed in our youth, and we work hard to keep our own kids from ending up with the same deadly disease we carry.

Nowell’s childhood friend Todd “Z-Man” Zalkins eventually had the opportunity to reflect, too. After years of partying, he succumbed to a 17-year opioid addiction. He’s nowturned his sobriety into the center of his career as an addiction specialist. One of the first people Zalkins helped was Bradley’s son Jakob, when Jakob quit his own addiction to alcohol and weed. You wonder what 50-year-old Nowell would have thought of his son struggling like he did, or his friend marketing himself as a counselor and public speaker. Old age fucks with you that way, but often in a good way. For example: Gaugh now plays drums in a kid’s band named The Jelly of the Month Club, with Burt Suzanka from the The Ziggens, a band that Bradley loved.

Even as Bradley challenged his limitations, he recognized them. As he sang, “The boss DJ ain’t nuthin’ but a man.” Whatever resolve Brad developed in late 1995 dissolved after MCA sent the band to record the rest of their self-titled debut at Willie Nelson’s beautiful Pedernales Studios outside Austin, Texas, in February 1996.

“They’re the sweetest bunch of guys,” producer Paul Leary told Rolling Stone, “[but] it was chaos in the studio. …There were times where someone had to go into the bathroom to see if Brad was still alive.” According to Rolling Stone, “On good days, they’d show up at 9 a.m. with margaritas in one hand and instruments in the other and go to work; on bad days, they nearly burned the place down.”

Partying was their reflex. They were also stressed. “Brad felt a lot of pressure for the self-titled album,” Troy told VH1. “He didn’t have a lot of songs written when he went out there to start recording it.”

Studying their track list closely, I can sense that: Sublime seemed determined to deliver strong tunes on their major label debut, so they did one of the things they did best: repurposed some of their old songs, combined bits of existing reggae they’d been jamming for years, and mixed their ideas with other peoples’ music. They repurposed a previously released jam called “Lincoln Highway Dub” and remade it into a song with lyrics called “Santeria.” They turned their very old song “Fighting Blindly” into the new fast song “Burritos.” “Caress Me Down” is an almost pure cover of Clement Irie’s original early 90s reggae song “Caress Me Down,” with the same name and same chorus, but some different lyrics about Sublime’s own lives. They built Half Pint’s 1986 reggae song “Loving” into “What I Got,” just as they’d previously used the baseline in reggae musician Courtney Melody’s “Ninja me Ninja” as their baseline on “Garden Grove,” the opening track on Sublime. They mixed The Wailers’ 1965 song “Jailhouse” with the lyrical structure of Tenor Saw’s song “Roll Call,” to create their song “Jailhouse.” The Wailing Souls’ 1984 song “War Deh Round A John Shop” became “Pawn Shop’.” Sublime made them their own.