Blink-182, lucky breaks and the power of place

Episode 15: Blink-182 Transcript 

Anthony Wallace: Today on The Finest, we have a show that expands on some of the themes from our earlier music episodes, although you don't need to have heard them to get it. Those themes are the factor of luck, streaming and the beauty of a local scene — but with a little historical twist. We'll dive into some of the lesser known but essential parts of the Blink-182 story. But our first stop is a little more recent, at this summer's North Park Music Fest.

[Music: Peach Cooler live at the North Park Music Festival]

Wallace: In normal times, the parking lot outside Pretzels and Pints holds just four cars. But at about 2 p.m. during the sold out North Park Music Fest, it was jam packed with 100+ dancing fans. On the temporary stage, local band Peach Cooler was finishing their set, leaving the crowd in a giddy daze.

Peach Cooler: Thank you, we are Peach Cooler and we love you a lot.

North Park Music Fest attendee: It ripped.

NPMF attendee: They are an awesome band.

NPMF attendee: It was great, yeah. My friend Luke is the bass player.

NPMF attendee: The vibes are high.  Everyone seems like they're like friendly, making new friends.

NPMF attendee: You don't know the talents that your friends and your community has and so getting out there and seeing that, it's really impressive. You see a different side of people.

NPMF attendee: Growing up in San Diego, I used to be a huge fan of SOMA, and that's kind of where it was more punk rock and growing up in that scene. And then you would be like, oh man, all these people are local.

Wallace: Today's episode will have some time warps. Because 30 years ago, not far from here, one local band played shows for local crowds just like this — and it changed everything.

[Music: Blink-182's "Fentoozler," live at SOMA, 1994]

Wallace: It gave San Diego a piece of its identity that's still alive today. But how exactly did that happen? And could it ever happen here again? After all, that was the '90s — before smartphones, before Spotify, before we carried every song ever made in our pockets.

Dan Ozzi: There was that scene going on in San Diego of this nouveau grunge scene, but for pop punk kids it was just SOMA. The two venues at SOMA upstairs were for touring bands: NOFX, Green Day, Pennywise. Downstairs were just where local kids played in the dungeon.

Wallace: One of the young bands playing in the old SOMA dungeon downtown back then would go on to become the biggest band in the history of San Diego.

[Music: Blink-182's "Dammit," live in 1999, from "The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show" live album]

Wallace: At first, as teenagers, Blink-182 played to almost no one down there. But people liked their energy and catchy melodies and their crowds grew. They knew how to write a great song. But it was a series of lucky breaks that catapulted them to the top of the world.

Ozzi: There was kind of a Blink-182-shaped hole in pop culture at that time that they just came at the right place, right time and filled.

Wallace: That's music journalist Dan Ozzi, who just recently worked with Blink-182's Mark Hoppus on the bassist and singer's memoir, "Fahrenheit-182," the story of kids from the suburbs who rocketed all the way to MTV, the Grammys, Coachella and pop-punk immortality.

[Music: Blink-182's "Dammit," live in 1999, from "The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show" live album]

Wallace: But as internationally famous as they are, people here in San Diego still have that intimate, friendly connection with the band — the same kind of feeling we saw at the North Park Music Fest. Because sharing a place with an artist gives the music a special power and Blink is a perfect example. I heard that sentiment from fans at Mark and Dan's book tour stop in El Cajon a few months ago.

What does it mean to you that Blink is from San Diego?

Book tour attendee: Oh, it means a lot. I mean, it's a hometown group. It just hits a little bit differently, especially listening to the book. A lot of the places and the experiences that he's talking about: This is my backyard, this is home.

Book tour attendee: I grew up in Poway. The fact that they came from my school, it's very good sense of pride. They're definitely the most famous people that came from Poway. They're still notorious around where I grew up. The Sombrero's that he talks about in his song, everyone knows where that is.

Book tour attendee: It's always a cool little thing to brag about your hometown.

Book tour attendee: Hometown heroes.

Book tour attendee: Yeah.

Wallace: This episode is about  the special power of art that comes from your neighbors, from your community. We'll look especially closely at the rise of Blink-182: the surprising and improbable circumstances that propelled them to fame, and how both the global and local music scenes have changed since their heydey, and how those changes may have made the deep kind of connection people feel with Blink-182 more rare. But that connection is still possible and you don't have to go far to find it. Today, there's a whole new crop of local bands — many of them inspired by Blink — that are striving for greatness while making San Diego proud and vibrant. Because there's nothing quite like art that's made in, and even about, the place you live. And every hometown needs its heroes.

From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Anthony Wallace.

[Theme Music]

Wallace: Julia is on vacation this week, so I'm stepping out from behind the scenes into the host's chair. Although Julia — she wants me to mention — did go to the same high school as Blink's other frontman, Tom DeLonge, this is a good episode for me to do. Partly because I'm currently in a local band here in San Diego, but mostly because I am a self-professed superfan of Blink-182.

For a while, I was kind of embarrassed to admit they were my favorite band. I did have a phase where I got into more artsy music and felt like I was too cool for them, but I will always love them. They are the one band I credit above all others for getting me into music and making me want to be in a band myself, which ultimately led me into audio production and making podcasts.

In a way, they made me into the person I am today. So when Mark Hoppus — one of the band's two frontmen — released his memoir earlier this year, I devoured it in just a couple days. And I jumped at the chance to talk with the book's co-writer, Dan Ozzi, at our KPBS studio. He, too, has loved Blink since childhood, since long before he became a writer.

Ozzi: When I was a kid and when we were in high school and that "Josie" video came out…

[Music: Blink-182's "Josie"]

Ozzi: Every kid I knew, including myself, got their hair bleached. We all bleached our hair and I had my…

Wallace: … like Tom.

Ozzi: Like Tom. Mark had the purple. And we bleached our hair and my first learner's permit, I have blond hair in that 'cause of Mark. So sometimes I think about that and I'm like, huh, I don't even know how I would explain that to this kid — what I'm doing now, you know? It's so funny. 'Cause like now Mark and I are friends. I'm like living in a Blink album now, and there are moments where I'm like, this is very weird.

[Music: Blink-182's "Josie"]

Wallace: Dan started his writing career blogging and freelancing about hardcore, emo and punk — the genres he's always been most into. He got a couple of big breaks, one was landing a job writing about punk and emo for Vice. That led to Against Me! lead singer Laura Jane Grace asking Dan to help write her memoir, which became a huge success. It was named one of the 100 greatest music books of all time by Billboard.

Ozzi: And then I wrote a book in 2021 called "Sellout," which was kind of like a history of commercialization of punk through the lens of 11 different bands.

Wallace: One of those bands featured in "Sellout" was Blink-182 — and apparently Mark Hoppus liked it because when he decided to write his own memoir, he reached out to Dan.

Ozzi: And I remember we had like an introductory coffee to be like, let's see if this will be a good fit. And I remember he took a notebook. It had like an octopus sticker on it, and he opened it up, put it on the table, and he put his pen to the first line. And he just went, OK, Dan, how do I write a book? But yeah, we hit it off. And then he emailed me like, let's do this. And I'm like, yes, yes.

Wallace: So what was the process like? How'd you work together?

Ozzi: Well, I wrote the nouns and then he wrote the verbs — no. It's funny 'cause he wrote like 50 pages by himself, and it was about his grandparents and how they served in World War II and liberated the concentration camps and were almost on the Enola Gay and all this stuff.

And then I looked at it and I was like, oh, wow, Mark, this is so great — nobody cares about this. I'm like, let's start with you. And he was like, OK.

Wallace: Dan and Mark spent many hours in Mark's basement. Mark would tell him the story of his life and Dan would try to shape it into a narrative.

Ozzi: And from that point we kind of do it Google Doc back and forth style. So it's one of the things that we keep joking about is now when we look at the book, neither of us has any idea who put a sentence in there because it was kind of both of us in a weird way. And so I got to be the Tom DeLonge of books and it was really, really cool.

Wallace: Mark Hoppus grew up in the '70s and '80s in Ridgecrest, California — a small, scorching hot, military town in the Kern County desert. After his parents divorced, his mom moved near Poway and Mark joined her there after he graduated from high school. On his first night in town, Mark's sister introduced him to a friend she'd made, a troublemaker who played guitar and skateboarded and was recently expelled from his high school — Tom DeLonge. Mark and Tom hit it off immediately and that same night — the first they ever met — they wrote a song called "Carousel," which they still play on stage today, more than 30 years later. It was the start of the songwriting partnership that defined Blink-182.

[Music: Blink-182's "Carousel," live from Chicago, 2001]

Ozzi: Like all these things came together. It was just like a perfect storm for them.

Wallace: In our second episode of The Finest, where we interviewed Shua, we talked about how music is a superstar economy, where the vast majority of success flows to a tiny portion of the artists in the marketplace. In that kind of economy, becoming one of the few that rocket to the top requires a ton of luck.

Ozzi: Well, you know, Mark talks about it in the book. He knows how lucky they were.

Wallace: Early on, around the time they were playing in the basement of the original SOMA south of Market St. downtown, they convinced a local surfer-turned concert promoter named Rick DeVoe to be their manager. In "Sellout," Dan wrote about how Rick had a stroke of genius that propelled Blink from local band to internationally-known — at least among fans of extreme sports.

Ozzi: He was pretty smart about it. He was like, you know, we were down the block from Tony Hawk and Air Walk. There was this SoCal clothing lifestyle that was really profitable. But he was like, as far as music goes, it was pretty untapped. He had connections with Volcom and whoever else. And he was really good at connecting all of those. And then also, too, he knew that it would really benefit Blink to get them in all these surf and skate Southern California videos.

Wallace: One of their very early songs — "Lemmings" — was in a surfing video that took off.

[Music: Blink-182's "Lemmings," 1996 version]

Ozzi: It really blew them up 'cause they went to Australia with Pennywise. And he was like, we had never left the state and kids knew our song. So yeah, there was definitely, again, them being in the right place, right time. There was this literal wave in Southern California that they rode on that sort of Billabong thing that was bubbling up.

[Music: Blink-182's "Lemmings," 1996 version]

Wallace: A few years later — after the band had a little success but were still quite far from really getting big — Mark and Tom had to part ways with their drummer suddenly in the middle of a tour.  They needed a fill in immediately, like that night. One of the other bands playing the same show was The Aquabats.

[Music: The Aquabats' "Super Rad!"]

Wallace: Their drummer just so happened to be Travis Barker, who agreed to learn Blink's set in just a few minutes and play with them that night. He's been in Blink ever since, and has gone on to become arguably the most famous drummer in the world.  

[Music: Travis Barker "Violence" live drum solo]

Ozzi: And then once Travis joined the band, they were like a mega-talented band that I don't know if we'd be sitting here talking if Travis hadn't joined the band. It was just like they were the perfect triangle of two goofy guys up front and then one virtuoso in the back.

Clip: Blink-182!

Ozzi: They were very marketable. By the time Blink came around, Green Day was waning just a little bit. And here come these guys, which is the second aspect of it, who were really cool. They were funny and good looking and talented.

[Music: Blink-182's "I Miss You," live from the Pepsi Smash concert series, 2004]

Wallace: Once Travis joined the band, they wrote the songs we still hear all the time today — sometimes in between innings at Padres games at Petco Park — "All the Small Things," "What's My Age Again?," "I Miss You."

But it's easy to imagine those songs never happening. What if Mark's sister hadn't made friends with Tom? What if their manager hadn't spotted a clever business opportunity in San Diego's surfing and skate scene? What if any other drummer had been there that night? It makes you think of all the other bands that had the potential, but just didn't get the break.

Ozzi: There are countless stories in "Sellout" of bands who everybody thought, yeah, this could be the next one and it wasn't. The story famously in the book is Jawbreaker.

[Music: Jawbreaker's "Accident Prone"]

Ozzi: If you look at it at what happened to their career — Green Day exploded in 1994, and then the powers that be in 1995 said, yeah, let's put Jawbreaker through that same slot. But guess what? It's not a cookie cutter thing. It's not one size fits all. Just because somebody has all the makings of a success, that does not guarantee it at all.

Wallace: Dan mentions Jawbreaker. But I think there's probably about a million other examples from bands you've never heard of. Almost every musician has a story about coming so close to making it.

When we interviewed Julianna Zachariou for our 4th episode, she told us about being invited on a big national tour that included a gig with Bon Iver right before COVID hit. The whole thing was canceled and never rescheduled.

I remember a band from my hometown that played a showcase for a big-name manager who wanted to sign them. When he saw them live, he suddenly decided he didn't like how the singer played piano on stage. He backed out, and the band basically crumbled.

What if Julianna's tour was a few months earlier? What if that big-name manager had been in a better mood? For Blink, of course, the breaks went their way. And I and the rest of San Diego are eternally grateful. Blink's improbable, multi-decade run has become so legendary at this point that it's a multi-generational phenomenon. I met multiple Blink-182 families at the book event.

Book tour attendee: Oh, this is my nephew.

Book tour attendee: He's my son.

Book tour attendee: This is my dad and son. Just longtime Blink-182 fans.

Book tour attendee: Being part of their hometown and being in our hometown, too, listening to all their music, all the references to Coronado, El Cajon or even just San Diego in general.

Book tour attendee: Sombrero's.

Book tour attendee: Yeah, Sombrero's. It's just everything, everything is in their music that we can relate to. So I love that.

[Music: Blink-182's "Josie"]

Book tour attendee: They're from here. We went to the last show at Petco and it was amazing, 40,000 people were rocking.

Wallace: I'm sure the San Diego shows are extra.

Book tour attendee: Oh, everyone knows the words. Everyone knows what they're getting into with a Blink concert. It's beautiful.

[Music: Blink-182 performs "All the Small Things" at Petco Park in 2024]

Wallace: Of course, Blink-182's story wasn't all perfection and happiness. In fact, after their first few huge albums with Travis, things got pretty chaotic. There was jealousy, cancer, a deadly plane crash, the band broke up multiple times. If you're curious about the drama, check out the book — and our episode webpage, where, as always, we have links to more info on that stuff, and the other things we've mentioned in the episode, like videos and music.

But beyond the headlines, the book and Dan's previous book "Sellout" function as time capsules, painting vivid pictures of the San Diego music scene 30 years ago. And of course, a lot has changed in music since the '90s. So I asked Dan how he contrasts the punk world of the past with the music scenes that we see today.

Ozzi: I wrote "Sellout" because I lived through that. I was mad as a kid. I got mad at my favorite artist.

I think that when there was a physical product — CDs or cassettes or records or whatever — that was such a huge difference in how people consumed. Because, OK, so when I was a kid, $14 was a lot of money for me. I was so selective about like, OK, I heard from whatever sources — a magazine or whatever — I heard that this CD is really good and I only get one a week or two a month or whatever. I feel like there was a mentality — maybe juvenile or not — but when you bought a CD by your favorite band, you almost became like a shareholder in the stock of Green Day or something like that. And now you are moving to a major label? It's like, well, I didn't authorize that.

People got mad, they felt like they had some ownership of the bands that they liked and they were losing it to something bigger. But I think that that's been obliterated now that people don't buy stuff. Now it's like, OK, if you don't like something, just click somewhere else. People don't have that same ownership. It's really funny now because all the things that I lived through — this late-'90s culture — is coming back and it's popular again, but it's popular in the wrong ways. I wish that anti-commercialism, adversity to corporate interests, I wish that part would come back, but instead, people just want the big pants.

Wallace: Yeah, selling out is really not even a notion anymore.

Ozzi: I don't even know… It's funny 'cause when I wrote that book, I was like, oh yeah, now is the right time to write this book because it's over. Selling out, I don't even think young people understand that concept.

And in fact, it's funny 'cause like I'll see a lot of punk or hardcore bands and they'll do a thing with Taco Bell or Spotify or whatever, and they'll post about it. And that would have gotten you run out of town in 1996 or whatever. But you look now and all the comments are like, good for you, get the bag. And my '90s kid upbringing is to be like blech, what a lame move.

But when I think about it on a personal level, I think, did I buy this band's record when it came out or did I stream it? And I think, well, I just streamed it. When I add it up, how much money have I given this band? It's really nothing. And I've enjoyed their music, and so like, OK, well who am I to begrudge them a Taco Bell deal? Because I didn't give them any money,

Wallace: Yeah, it's so hard to make it in music. On one hand you can sympathize with just do whatever it takes. But at the same time, you have lost something where it's like that focus has shifted off of resistance to power and the system. But that sense of ownership point is interesting. And that has come up in our conversations with artists, where it's in the era of streaming, you just don't feel as connected.

Ozzi: Yes, and the depth of the connection that you're talking about, I would get the CDs and these would be two new additions to my collection that would probably last for another two weeks, and I would absorb everything about them. I would read the liner notes. I would learn the track listings. It was like adding things to my collection. And now it's just unlimited, which in a way is so amazing. We can listen to anything ever recorded — amazing. But you treat it so casually that there's so much less appreciation for it.

Wallace: Clearly, the locals at Mark's book event feel a sense of ownership over Blink-182. The band is a real, important part of their lives. That kind of connection might be harder to come by today. It certainly doesn't happen with passive listening — when the Spotify algorithm picks all your music for you. As we heard from journalist Liz Pelly in Episode 4, that is Spotify's goal: to become a quote "self-driving" music app, where users don't have to make any decisions.

But at the North Park Music Fest, there was a palpable sense of connection between the performers and their fans. It helps when you can walk right up to the band after their set and talk to them. And that's exactly what I did after Peach Cooler rocked the parking lot at Pretzels and Pints. And of course, this young band — hoping to be the next big act from San Diego — has some reverence for their Blink-182 predecessors.

Peach Cooler: Having the history of Blink blowing up from San Diego that made a really special mark. Everyone has a certain level of respect and admiration for that band that's from San Diego, regardless of genre.

Peach Cooler: It is cool to see bands come out of here. And basically everybody learned to sing harmonies from Blink-182 songs.That was like Harmonies 101. You'd go in there like, alright, you just learn Mark's part. They're like vocal corrals at the end of these like dumb power chord songs. It rules.

Wallace: I learned harmonies from Blink-182 songs, too. This is the one I always think of…

[Music: Blink-182's "Feeling This"]

Wallace: The local scene is more than just an incubator for the next big thing. It's a community. It's open to everyone — musicians and music lovers alike. And based on the conversations we had at the festival, it's growing. And there's something special happening in our city.

Peach Cooler: So I grew up in San Diego playing music and over the past five years since I've been back, it's felt like there's a whole new wave of music, energy towards live music and just appreciation for it that wasn't there when I had left. More recently, I'm thinking of Sacred Souls and how much they've just blown up on a global stage.

Peach Cooler: They opened for one of my bands once.

Peach Cooler: I played in bands in New York City beforehand, too, and the San Diego local scene is just so well connected. Everyone's supporting each other. You kind of felt like you're on your own in New York.

Peach Cooler: We say, poly-jamorous. Everyone's in many bands, which makes it nice. It's not super competitive. It's more supportive in that way, everyone's OK with it, and always coming out to shows. It's just kind of a fun little one band town it feels like.

Wallace: I moved to San Diego in January to start my job at KPBS, producing The Finest — and pretty much immediately joined a band here. So I'm still relatively new to town and the scene, but in just a few months I can already attest to what the members of Peach Cooler are saying. After playing a few shows, I've seen a lot of the same people — both on stage and in the crowd. We're all rooting for each other, appreciating the music coming from our own city and making new friends. I've even met people at shows who listen to The Finest. So if you're listening to this now and you come out to a show, you might already have something in common with the other people around you.

NPMF attendee:  I mean connecting with people within your community is really important. It's just a different kind of vibe.

NPMF attendee: More personal and relatable.

NPMF attendee: It's a lot more exciting to know the people that are in it.

NPMF attendee: This is part of the reason why I moved here from L.A. was 'cause I knew that the music scene in San Diego is just so popping.

Wallace: Everything about that North Park Music Festival performance was small scale. It was the opposite of 40,000 people at Petco Park for a Blink show. But as big as Blink became, Dan and Mark's book reminds us that its roots are in our own backyard.

Whether its international sensations like Blink-182 and Thee Sacred Souls or up and coming local acts like Peach Cooler, all of us in San Diego can feel a special ownership over bands that share our place. The world can feel big, overwhelming and impersonal, but these artists make it feel a little smaller.

[Music: Peach Cooler's "Falling Forward"]

Wallace: A special thanks to Dan Ozzi, the North Park Music Fest and Peach Cooler for their help with this episode. We're off next week, but in two weeks on The Finest…

Grim Avenue in North Park was recently renamed Lucky Lane, and we bring you the legendary story of the man it's named after. Lucky Wong served breakfast in North Park for nearly 50 years. He worked alone — waiting tables, cooking and cleaning — until he was almost 90 years old. With a million everyday conversations and acts of service piled up over decades, he created a one of a kind institution and a community gathering place whose name will live on forever.

Lucky's Golden Phenix regular: Everybody thought they were special to him. I don't know how he did it, but you knew he cared about you.

Julia Dixon Evans: Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. It really helps new listeners discover the show and best of all, if you can think of anyone in your life that might like The Finest, please share it with them.

I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.