the Alice in Chains tribute band members are holding an acoustic sing-along (“Yeah, they come to snuff the Rooster…”).
I meet a short, spunky 21-year-old named Angela, who is wearing a T-shirt that reads KEEP SUBLIME ALIVE, a Sublime button on one shoe, and a Sublime guitar pick around her neck. Angela recounts her journey to the festival, which takes on the cast of a religious pilgrimage: Short on money, she cleaned her mother’s basement in exchange for a $100 loan, then bought two bus tickets for herself and her friend Breanne that took them from Albany, New York, to Worcester, Massachusetts, about 20 miles from the festival site.
“We were going into bars in Worcester, telling people, ‘ We’ll smoke you up if you give us a ride to Webster,’” Angela says.
“I didn’t care if we had to hitchhike,” Breanne adds. Eventually, they paid a cab driver $40 to bring them here.
“I’m not going to have money to buy books when I go back to college, but it’s worth it,” Angela says. “There’s just too much passion in Sublime’s music not to make it a part of your lifestyle.”
Neither girl ever saw Sublime live.
“But I’ve seen Badfish 15 times,” Angela says.
“I had no interest in seeing a tribute to Sublime,” Breanne says. “I thought they would butcher the music. But it was the best concert I’ve ever been to. The singer even looks like Brad.”
Badfish’s faithful get up in arms.
When Badfish go on shortly after 8 P.M., everyone bunches up to the stage. They open, as usual, with “Badfish,” from 40 Oz. to Freedom. During the punky “Same in the End,” a mosh pit erupts. Moments later, when they go into the mellow hip-hop groove of “Doin’ Time,” white guys in the audience wave their arms B-boy style.
The members of Badfish rumble through their set—the exact same one they’ve played all three times I’ve seen them—with cool confidence. Basically, they have the market cornered. Eric Wilson and Bud Gaugh have their own projects, and even if they wanted to reunite and play Sublime songs, a true, big-ticket reunion is, obviously, impossible. But the fans seem more than content with this next best thing, confident that Brad Nowell must be looking down approvingly on the endless party in his honor. Perhaps Angela puts it best:
“There’s a piece of Brad in every joint rolled here today.”
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Photo: Neal Preston
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