What they don’t got: shirts. Hanks, Pat Downes, and Scott Begin backstage.

If

you didn’t know better, you’d think tonight’s headliners at the Crazy Donkey, a club situated along a stretch of Long Island highway that seems to contain half the nation’s discount-furniture stores, are arena-rock heroes doing an exclusive warm-up show. The 800 people packed inside on this muggy August evening are certainly reacting that way. A short, possibly drunk Latino girl scales a bar stool to get a better view. Three beefy linebacker types act out lyrics, momentarily forgetting that linebacker types aren’t supposed to be into interpretive dance. Everyone is pumping fists and singing every word.

But tonight’s headliner is only pretending to have sold millions of records. They are called Badfish, and they are a tribute to Sublime, the ’90s SoCal punky-reggae rap-rock trio whose career—but not popularity—was cut short by the death of its frontman.

“These guys are awesome!” says one of the dudes, a 24-year-old high school shop teacher named Jim Johnsen. “I see them every time they play Long Island.” A few years ago, a Badfish concert at the House of Blues in Atlantic City, New Jersey, became so crowded and raucous that a triage room had to be set up for the injured and inebriated. But Badfish are more notable for their business savvy than their hell-raising: Three days after the Long Island gig, they will host and headline the second annual Garden Grove Festival, their own outdoor music event in Massachusetts (and, like Badfish, named after a Sublime song). In 2006, Badfish

played 152 shows, sold 99,896 tickets, and grossed $1.4 million—a remarkable figure for what is essentially a DIY tribute band. While they are hardly the only band devoted to replicating the music of Sublime (there’s also Wrong Way, Forty Ounces, Sublemon, and others), Badfish’s fall tour will take them to such high-profile rooms as Milwaukee’s Rave and Manhattan’s Nokia Theatre, venues not generally known for hosting tribute acts.

“It’s impressive,” says Billboard senior editor Ray Waddell. “The kind of business they’re doing on the road would exceed that of many indie bands or even a major-label band on their first or second record cycle. These are numbers that a lot of bands that have been around for a while would be happy to generate.”

Says Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar: “It underscores the pent-up demand for Sublime’s music.” And if the demand is there, someone’s gotta be responsible for the supply.

None of us were ever hard-core about Sublime,” admits Badfish bassist Joel Hanks. “There are lots of people who know so much more about them than we do.”

We are sitting in an Italian restaurant in a strip mall not far from the Crazy Donkey; it’s a few hours before the show. Hanks, 28, and drummer Scott Begin, 30, are explaining how Badfish formed in 2001 at the University of Rhode Island, where the

guys were studying computer science. “I had this idea to do a tribute because nobody got to see them play,” Hanks says. “Here’s this band that got huge, and I never saw them live, and no one I knew saw them live.” They began performing regularly at a beach bar in Matunuck, Rhode Island. “All of a sudden, the shows start getting bigger,” Hanks continues. “Then the shows are sold out. Then a hundred people can’t get in. I was graduating college, so I could either get a job or make this happen.”