Downes, bro-in’ down with the people at Garden Grove

up that people are playing my music and getting paid for it.’ But I have to think that us going around the country helps record sales.” (And in fact, Badfish pay Sublime royalties for live CDs they sell at their shows.) For all their touring, though, Badfish have only performed in Southern California twice. “That’s where Sublime is from, and they played a lot of shows there,” Hanks says. “We try to give people who didn’t see them an opportunity to experience that scene.” Badfish play a majority of their shows in the Midwest and on the East Coast, where Sublime rarely performed.

Badfish has become its own entity, inextricably linked to Sublime, but somehow apart from it. The band sells its own merchandise (shirts, stickers, shot glasses) and has its own logo (a cartoon fish). Hanging with Badfish, it’s easy to forget about Sublime altogether. The musicians spend their downtime on their laptops, checking their MySpace page, or discussing their other (nontribute) band, the ska-tinged Scotty Don’t, which often opens Badfish shows. At the Long Island restaurant, when I ask the band members why they think Sublime’s music resonates with so many people, I expect to hear impassioned gushing about how amazing and groundbreaking the music is. Instead, I hear the following:

“It’s simple and creative at the same time” (Downes).

“The music has good rhythm and feel” (Hanks).

“I think we get the groove right” (Begin).

T

playing songs they never got to play as Sublime and performing for a fan base that has flourished in the years since Nowell’s death. “I wish I could’ve gotten a chance to tour, but that’s something I can’t change,” Wilson says glumly. “It wasn’t really possible.” Neither, he says, is re-forming with a replacement frontman. “I would want the singer to be up to par with Brad, and there’s not a singer on the planet that could measure up.” Gaugh says he “supports Badfish and any tribute band that respects the legacy.” His new band, Del Mar, is even playing a show with Badfish at Las Vegas’ House of Blues in February.

Wilson says he’s “flattered to a certain extent” by bands like Badfish, “but some of these guys take it too far.” He’s referring to another tribute, Sublime Remembered, which claimed to contain members of Sublime and is being sued by Wilson and Gaugh. These days, Wilson and his band Long Beach Shortbus are working on a follow-up to their 2004 debut album, Flying Ship of Fantasy. He also plays in Stone Wing and the Stymies—the latter, as it happens, a tribute act. “I guess we’re sort of like the Badfish of the Stooges,” he says with a laugh.

As for the members of Badfish, they try not to dwell on the irony of eclipsing the very people whose music has allowed them to earn a living. “It really is a bittersweet thing,” Begin says. “I think it’s cool that we’re so popular. But it’s hard to get excited about the fact that a guy dying is what led us to where we are.”

When I ask Hanks what he thinks Wilson and Gaugh make of Badfish, he says, “I guess I can understand the perspective of ‘Dude, that’s fucked

he 2007 Garden Grove Festival is held in Webster,

Massachusetts, at the Indian Ranch campground (“the Country Music Capital of the North”). It’s a rustic setting, with wooden buildings set among towering pines and an amphitheater overlooking a lake. Besides Badfish, the bill features several East Coast bands, as well as Scotty Don’t. There is also a small side stage for tribute bands dedicated to No Doubt, Rage Against the

Machine, and Alice in Chains, among others. Badfish aren’t playing that one.

By mid-afternoon, the crowd numbers close to 2,000. “Cool, right?” Hanks says, as Badfish take in the scene from a second-story deck outside their dressing room. This will be the last Badfish show for six weeks—Hanks and his wife are having a baby, and he is leaving tomorrow for Georgia, where he recently bought a house. The members of Badfish won’t disclose their income, but all say they make more than if they’d gotten jobs in computer science. “We may be bigger than [Sublime] were,” Hanks says. “I try not to think about it too much.”

Between bands, I walk through the crowd. A ratty-looking kid wearing a Skunk Records T-shirt is playing Hacky Sack with some ratty-looking friends. Nearby,

GRAVE

EXPECTATIONS Sublime’s Brad Nowell wasn’t the only posthumous superstar who cashed out before he could cash in

Emily Dickinson This syntax-challenged poet was as eager to show off her work as she was smokin’ hot—which, is to say, not very. She published only seven of her nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime and didn’t earn widespread recognition until the release of a volume that came out four years after her death.

11 years after he’d killed himself, at least in part because he couldn’t drum up interest in his writing. He also didn’t live long enough to see an earlier novel, The Neon Bible, turn into an indie-rock trivia answer.

Emily Dickinson

be more fitting, as he was only in office for 32 days before he died from a cold he caught during his inauguration. It probably didn’t help that he was standing in the rain for more than 90 minutes, giving the longest, and presumably most unfulfilled, inaugural speech in history.

John Kennedy Toole Toole’s book A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981. The sad irony? That was

Vincent van Gogh Though he’s as well known for swirly brushstrokes as he is for acts of self-mutilation, van Gogh sold only one painting (Red Vineyard at Arles) before shooting himself in the chest at age 37. It’s

a shame, because that one went for the current equivalent of about a couple thousand bucks, while Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for nearly $83 mil a few years ago.

William Henry
Harrison
You won’t find many
schools named after the
ninth U.S. president—
maybe a rest stop would

Eva Cassidy
Possibly the closest
parallel to Nowell’s story,
American singer Eva
Cassidy died of melanoma
a year before her 1997
debut, Eva by Heart, was
released. Since then, her
songs have graced romcom
soundtracks and Olympic
figure-skating routines,
while three posthumous
releases have hit No. 1
(in England, but still).
KYLE McGOVERN