This was the band that centered their 1992 debut album with “40oz. (Leary distinctly recalls the broken-down bus.) If you can remember anything to do with Sublime with 100 percent accuracy, you probably weren’t there. Gaugh actually remembers the RV ride to Austin as a flight, which raises a consideration to take into account. What are we gonna do when we get out there?’ Eric said, ‘I don’t know, I guess we’re gonna have to figure it out.’” “This time I turned to and was like, ‘Dude, we got two, maybe three songs. “I was really concerned on the way to Texas because before, when we’d have studio time, we had everything down tight-so that it didn’t cost us an arm and a leg,” says drummer Bud Gaugh.
He was about to turn 28, and plagued by a debilitating case of writer’s block. After swearing to his fiancée, Troy Dendekker, that he’d sober up for their newborn son, Brad relapsed again. MCA had already forked over six-figures-plus for his rehab stints. After eight years of clobbering every house party from Belmont Shore to San Diego, every sweatbox club with skinhead audiences and strung-out promoters, they had finally “made it.” But Nowell was stressed: the pressures of delivering a hit compounded with the devils of addiction. Those were mere afterthoughts at the moment. No one remembers what happened to the RV. And if Louie came, that meant Wilson had to bring his basenji mix, Toby, too. That was one of the few rules of Pedernales, but Louie, the rescue Dalmatian, never left Nowell’s side. The canines weren’t invited either (error no. The studio employees were used to absolute freaks, but they still reeled from the tattooed pranksters’ Tasmanian chaos: pissing-in-the-sink drunk, squinting greasily into the daylight, reeking of stank dog, amphetamine gas, and stale Olde English.
Picture the dysfunction: Nowell, bassist Eric Wilson, and drummer Bud Gaugh oozing out of the jalopy on that cold day in Texas. After valiantly heaving through four states, the belching RV finally stalled out and collapsed on the steep incline that led to Nelson’s Xanadu. Maybe history should interpret it as a foul omen. But before that could happen, they had to make it up the driveway. Widely imitated, it spawned three alternative-radio stoner anthems (“What I Got,” “Santeria,” and “Wrong Way”), and made the band the most inescapable fixtures on FM rock radio since Nirvana. On their first and only major-label album of originals, Sublime coughed up a bleached beachfront creole, a seedy pawn-shop slop of punk, reggae, and hip-hop. Within months, Nowell would be dead of a heroin overdose, leaving behind an infant son, a widow, and a posthumous masterpiece that would become one of the most revered (and wrongly reviled) albums of the last quarter-century. In the wake of their unlikely, untasteful smash “Date Rape,” Sublime had signed to Gasoline Alley, a subsidiary of MCA, which warily financed the gonzo recording saga that would yield the six-times-platinum Sublime, released 25 years ago this week. Jagged reefs lurked among the sun-surf-smoke-ska synthesists when they arrived on the shores of Lake Travis during the final weeks of the winter of 1996. Pure serendipity for a band whose lead singer, Bradley Nowell, could produce little photographic evidence of actually owning any shirts.
Its attitude was perhaps best defined by a hand-painted “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem” sign. No more harmonious spot could have existed for the LBC house-party heroes than the compound that the Red Headed Stranger terraformed into a 75-acre outlaw hacienda of breezy creativity and reefer madness. Law enforcement in the Lone Star State was no more friendly, but it’s substantially easier to stash a week’s worth of narcotics in a 33-foot traveling motorcoach than the limited apertures of the human body.Īt the end of the trail lay Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios, a hallowed shrine for habitually baked experimentation that had hosted Neil Young and Ray Charles, Carlos Santana and Daniel Johnston. More importantly, it skirted any potential conflict between the “Smoke Two Joints” trio and the Federal Aviation Administration, an agency traditionally uncharitable to the interstate transport of illicit substances. A road trip allowed them to gig all along the 1,383-mile stretch from Long Beach to Austin. In Sublime’s defense, it seemed like an act of shrewd lunacy.
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