career and a charismatic singer who died young, leaving a musical legacy to be discovered. The analogy is apt in another way: Sublime were, at the time, classified as an alternative band, but at this point their music has the wide-ranging appeal of classic rock. “I live right down the street from this bar, and I’ll walk by, and even the Top 40 cover band will be playing Sublime songs,” says Greg Lowther (a.k.a. Mudd), who runs the
Sublime-affiliated Long Beach Records label and played drums in the Falling Idols, a band whose songs Sublime covered. “And it’s, like, fat guys who are balding.”
Fifteen years ago, if you were to pick a band that would be voted one of the biggest rock groups of all time and have their songs performed by fat, balding cover bands, Sublime wouldn’t have been the likeliest candidate. Their first album, 40 Oz. to Freedom, was recorded cheaply and released on Skunk, the indie label that Happoldt runs. The record eventually caught the attention of Phillips, then an A&R rep at Gasoline Alley/MCA, who convinced his bosses to sign Sublime, telling them 40 Oz. was this generation’s Dark Side of the Moon. But the deal nearly fell through when the band showed up to the label’s offices with Nowell’s omnipresent dalmatian Lou Dog, got drunk, and stickered a record exec’s car.
The band members—particularly Nowell—were almost willfully self-destruc-tive. Sublime’s second album, Robbin’ the Hood (released on Skunk and later reissued by MCA), was, as legend has it, partly recorded in a crack house where the frontman lived briefly. “It was rock’n’roll excess to the fullest—without the money,” Phillips says. “It was pagers in those days, and every time my pager went off, I thought, ‘Fuck, is this the 911 call from Long Beach?’”
For their third album, the band finally had the money to record properly, at Willie Nelson’s studio in Texas. Nowell was writing what would be considered his best music, but he was so strung out he would disappear for hours; eventually, the producer, Paul Leary, sent them all home to California. Nowell cleaned up (a little), and in May of 1996, Sublime hit the road to support their forthcoming record. A few dates into the tour, Nowell died of an overdose in a San Francisco hotel room, a week after his wedding.
Phillips says he had to beg MCA execs to release Sublime. “To them, it was like
Sugar Ray or something,” he says. “They didn’t get it.” The first single, “What I Got,” was an immediate hit, and Sublime became one of the biggest-selling artists of 1997, eventually moving a reported 5. 7 million albums in the U.S. alone.
As Jack Maness, a guitarist who played on the band’s records, puts it, “Sublime were the muscle car that got built but never driven.”
M
iguel Happoldt insists Sublime’s popularity is due to the band’s music and not to Nowell’s doomed-rock-star status. This is probably true. Unlike, say, Kurt Cobain, Brad Nowell was never a rock star in his lifetime, nor was his image plastered all over MTV or in magazines, so a cult of personality doesn’t quite surround him.
But Sublime’s stillborn career has unquestionably led to the success of Badfish. Sublime performed live primarily in California, and when they did tour nationally, they played to half-empty clubs. They were booted off the 1995 Warped Tour after Lou Dog bit one of the event’s skaters. “We didn’t really take it too seriously as far as being well-mannered.” Sublime’s Eric Wilson says. Soon, Badfish will have played more shows than Sublime, and more people will have seen Badfish’s live renditions of Sublime songs than saw Sublime’s. In the case of several songs on the self-titled album, which wasn’t released until two months after Nowell’s death, Badfish’s may be the only live versions fans have heard.
While Wilson and Gaugh—who continue to earn healthy royalty checks—went on to play in the Long Beach Dub Allstars and Gaugh was in Eyes Adrift with Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic, the guys in Badfish are essentially living their lives,
Garden Grove fans, partying like it’s 1996
References:
Archives