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Carlin had his famous “seven words you can never say on television” bit, which I gleefully committed to memory—shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. I recited them to anyone who would listen, and plenty who wouldn’t.
I sat in the hall outside their room, listening to the usual cacophony. The ebb and flow of a couple’s fight, tears and accusations.
But my foot kicked something as I turned. My cup of apple juice. It spilled everywhere. On the walls, on the floor.
The door flew open as the juice soaked darkly into the carpet. That same shag carpet I lay on and listened to records when life was normal. It had betrayed me. I was caught.
It’s what I did for the entirety of my parents’ divorce. I became a lifelong peacekeeper. I’m always the guy in the middle, the guy who wants to keep the mood positive. I like creating things that make people happy. I don’t like chaos.
that desire to please people comes the fear of letting them down. I am constantly worried about being the source of friction. I want everyone to get along. I never want to put my own needs forward in case they upset a precarious balance. This dynamic is what made me the person I am.
She jammed the key in the ignition, gunned the engine, slammed the car in reverse, looked over her shoulder, and . . . Sat there. And sat there. Mom what’s going on what are you doing Mom he’s gonna come out the door any second and GET US! Mom! Let’s . . . GO!
But Mom just sat there in the long, silent dark. Tense seconds passed where none of us said anything. Anne and I looked at each other, afraid. Mom sighed and turned off the engine. She crossed her arms on the steering wheel, rested her head on them, and wept. We had nowhere to go.
“I’ve seen plenty of kids just like you over the years, Mr. Hoppus,” she scolded. “If you don’t fix that smart mouth of yours, you’ll never amount to anything.” Never amount to anything! It was just like in the movies! I was vindicated.
For my sixteenth birthday I went to my first concert, They Might Be Giants at the old 9:30 Club.
should’ve taken the lessons. Decades later, I still have terrible technique. I’m a solid bassist and proud of where it’s taken me, but I’ll never be one of those musicians who wears it up underneath their chin and runs scales all over the place. I guess I never wanted to be a bassist. I wanted to be a dude in a band. My
got my first real girlfriend in tenth grade. Her name was Heather, a fellow desert goth a grade below who liked a lot of the same music.
Heather was the kind of girl who drew the Dead Kennedys logo on her shoes. We ditched formal dances to drink at parties, spent weekends at Disneyland, made out in a shed in our friend’s backyard. We punched our V-cards at another friend’s apartment while Bauhaus played in the background.
a cassette that changed my entire life, again—Descendents’ I Don’t Want to Grow Up.
Punk was all I wanted. Hey ho, let’s go.
We saw Nine Inch Nails just after “Head Like a Hole” came out, in a tiny, four-hundred-person capacity room with no barricade. Just a stage two feet off the floor.
Another night, at a Sonic Youth concert, a new band called Nirvana opened. They crushed and told people to check out their new album, Bleach, which I went out and bought the following morning.
We spent the summer after high school practicing in the garage, exploring mine shafts, and jumping off the second-story roof of our friend’s house into their pool. We called it cliff diving.
“I don’t know! Something is . . . off. It feels like I’m fighting gravity. I might be dying.” I kept looking at my hands and shaking my head. “This makes no sense, this makes no sense, this makes no sense . .
Anne had a whole network of people in San Diego. She had friends and a boyfriend, Kerry, but I had nothing.
“You should meet Kerry’s friend. He skates and plays guitar,” she said. “All he’s been talking about lately is putting together a band. Maybe you two would hit it off.”
We pulled up to a house that was the same as any other on the block and rang the bell. This tall, lanky kid answered. He had a pimply face and skater bangs. He wore a plain white T-shirt, torn-up skate sneakers, and baggy jeans with a wallet chain. “Hey, I’m Tom.”
“I do have this one thing,” I told him. “I was trying to learn to play ‘Für Elise’ but my fingers were in the wrong position and I thought it sounded kind of cool. It goes like this.” I played him my accidental bass line while he noodled around on his guitar, searching for an idea. Then his face lit up.
“Wait. This might fit with something I’ve been working on,” he said. He put this lightning-fast guitar riff over my arpeggiated bass line, and we looked at each other like holy shit. It sounded imperfect but we were imperfect together. Separately our two different melodies sounded incomplete, but when they weaved in and out of one another, they created something real. Something cool. It felt intentional.
Tom tried some vocal melodies. He had a snotty, nasally voice, and I backed him up in the choruses.
After a few hours, we’d put together three minutes of music and figured that counted as a song. It was fast and sloppy, but we were proud of our creation and called it “Carousel.”
After a few seconds, I made it to the top. I knew I could do it! But when I started easing myself back down, I made a mistake. I let go too early and dropped. I hit the ground hard and both of my ankles screamed in pain.
They weren’t broken, but they were so badly bruised that I needed crutches to get around for the next three weeks.
That was my first day in San Diego. I made a new friend, wrote a new song, and fucked up my heels.
I no longer felt scared of my new city. All of the uncertainty and fear washed away that first night. I knew what I wanted to do now. I wanted to make more music with Tom. The next morning Tom called me to see how my feet felt. Then he said, “So . . . you want to come over again tonight and write more songs?” I loved Tom from the first day I met him.
We called ourselves Duck Tape and then Figure 8. Finally, Tom suggested blink. He just liked the word. It was short, easy to remember, and evoked quick motion. Like our band, it was fast and to-the-point.
I suggested we use a lowercase b because I thought it looked better. The gothic spires of the b, l, and k,
blink. Look at the word. It’s beautiful and elegant. Graphically, it’s perfectly weighted. It makes total sense.
Finally, in March 1993, we got the chance to play our first show in an actual venue.
We walked onstage and played our first show ever, to an empty room. Our only witnesses were Cam and a bartender sweeping the floor in front of the stage. Sensing our obvious disappointment, the bartender pulled us aside afterward and said, “Look, I know no one is here, but don’t quit playing. I can hear it. You guys have something special.”
my mom always supported me. Not just me, the entire band. Early on, Tom wanted a new guitar but didn’t have enough money for the Fender Stratocaster he so badly coveted, so my mom and Glenn cosigned the loan for him. She just loved blink and got a kick out of watching us play.
We called it Flyswatter. I made the artwork for the insert. Just a pastel drawing I did in a sketchbook, but it was good enough for a demo cover.
I’d copy and paste images that I cut out of magazines and books, draw on top of them, bring the materials to Kinko’s,
Late nights at Kinko’s are the absolute best.
Buddha demo cassette with the actual Buddha statue, which I still have in my studio.
Cam also took a photo of a Buddha statue Glenn had brought back for me as a gift after a deployment to Japan.
Bored in class one day, Scott drew a rabbit leaning behind a circle that said BLINK inside it. The rabbit suspended a pocket watch in front of the circle. We bought some blank T-shirts at Target and taught ourselves the messy process of silk-screening—covering
We called the album Cheshire Cat. I love Alice in Wonderland, and obviously the coolest character in the story is the Cheshire cat. He’s unknowable, he’s here and then he disappears. He says weird shit. He’s The Fool of both Shakespeare and tarot.
One day a door-to-door calendar salesman came calling, offering a cat calendar. Tom bought one and ripped out a random month. We handed it to the art guy at the label and said, “This is our album cover.”
We made the album exactly the way we wanted. No one ever told us no. No one told us anything, really. Nobody at Cargo ever checked in on us or asked to hear what we’d recorded. In fact, years later, we learned the owner actively bet against us. He bet his employees that blink would never sell more than a thousand copies.
Frustrated, irritated, and no closer to a solution, I threw up my hands and said, “Fine, how about blink . . . I don’t know. One eighty-two?” The response from the head of our label was a defeated “sure.” And that was it. From that moment on we were blink-182.
Pennywise agree to let us open, they paid for our international airfare. Why? No reason. They just saw an up-and-coming band they liked and wanted to help.
we turned to our friends the Aquabats, and asked if we could borrow their drummer, Travis Barker.
improvised and sang, “Go, trig boy. It’s your birthday.”
if I’m remembered for nothing else, let it be my one glorious addition to the American pantheon of quotable movie lines. “Go, trig boy. It’s your birthday.” You’re welcome.
