“The Rock Show” and “First Date" were the last songs written for blink-182‘s Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, and that was because their manager did not feel like the album had Enema-style hits on it. You can read how the two songs were written and more on why below after the jump.

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The first person outside of Blink-182 to hear the songs was the group’s manager. “He listened quietly to the tracks one by one,” Hoppus says. “At the end we turned to him with an ‘am I right or what?’ expectation, to which he said, ‘I think it’s really cool, but I don’t hear thatthing. That Blink-182 good-time, summer-anthem thing.’”

Blink-182 had been a band for nearly a decade by that point, but fame and fortune were still new to guys who had spent most of their band lives playing small clubs, touring in a van, and sleeping on floors. Getting hassled by management or the label about a single was a music-industry cliché experienced only by big rock stars. But Blink-182 had spent the past year selling out arenas around the world—its members were rock stars. Rock stars make hit albums, and hit albums need hit singles. Blink-182 wasn’t three dudes goofing around anymore. Well, no, it was still three dudes goofing around, but now people expected things from them. “After years of hard work, promotion, and nonstop touring, people knew who we were, and listened to what we were saying—it scared the shit out of us,” Hoppus writes in the liner notes.

Their manager’s reaction infuriated Hoppus and DeLonge. They had already struggled with writing the new songs, and now that they had settled on something they all liked, the person who was supposed to be their greatest ally just wanted another dopey summer single.

Hoppus describes their response: “‘You want a fucking single? I’ll write you the cheesiest, catchiest, throwaway fucking summertime single you’ve ever heard!’ I drove home, grabbed my guitar, sat on the floor, and wrote ‘The Rock Show’ in 10 minutes. Tom drove home, grabbed his guitar, and wrote ‘First Date.’” Those cheesy throwaways would become the album’s first two singles, both of them hits, and remain live staples to this day.