60 Songs That Explain the '90s - “Santeria”—Sublime

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Listen as Rob reminisces on some of the funniest songs he heard from the back seat of the car as a child, before turning his focus to Sublime, the band’s frontman Bradley Nowell, and the jarring storytelling on the Sublime song “Date Rape.” Somewhere along the way, Rob is able to regain focus on the song at hand, “Santeria.” Later, Rob is joined by his “daughter” Yasi Salek from Bandsplain to discuss what Sublime means to her as a fellow west coaster (1:00:00). Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Yasi Salek Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sayles Additional Production Support: Chloe Clark Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Yossi Salick, and I'm the host of Bansplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists by going deep into their histories and discographies. We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, the Ringer podcast network, tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pop pioneers to new metal legends and many, many more. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify. So I'm on the bus, right? Fall of 1994. I'm sorry? I'm sorry. 16 years old. Keep that in mind. I'm on the school bus. The school bus heading to school. It's like 7 in the morning. It's terrible. Just terrible. Nothing I did in high school physically or socially or whatever impresses me more now than the idea that I traveled to a second location and was ostensibly functional physically and socially at 7.30 a.m. 5 days a week. I would die now if I attempted. If I attempted

to do that two days in a row. Brooding silence reigns on the bus. The vibe on the bus is groggy and morose. Only good thing happening is that the bus driver's got the radio on. Rock radio, to be precise. Cleveland Rock Radio. To be more precise. 100.7 WMMS, the Buzzard.

The K-Rock of Ohio. Not really, but you get me. Great radio station. If I had to distill the essence of WMMS in the 90s down to one song, I'm going with Mother by Danzig. But crucially the live version, Mother 93. People say the crowd noise sounds fake and they're not wrong, but Mother 93 is the superior version of Mother solely because Danzig says,

Thank you when the song ends. You're welcome. My buddy Mike and I met while working. minimum wage at a grocery store, and we were bagging groceries one day in adjacent grocery lines, and Mike started improvising the Christmas-themed version of Mother. Santa, tell you raining not to crap on me. Tell your elves not to break those toys for the girls and the boys. Santa.

It's good shit. Santa! Excuse me. WMMS played that song 8 billion times in the 90s, but Mother 93 is surprisingly hard to find now. I finally tracked it down on DailyMotion.com. The website of Last Resort. The vibe on the school bus this morning is groggy and morose. And the radio's on. We got the buzzard on, but Danzig ain't playing.

And in fact, no music is playing because the wacky morning DJs are talking. The wacky morning DJs are doing a. news of the weird type segment. You know, amusing tales of stupidity and debauchery. And the wacky morning DJs tell this story. One of them says, the lead singer of a rock band called the Screaming Cheetah Wheely's was arrested recently in Cincinnati during the Taste of Cincinnati Festival. This is a food and music situation in Cincinnati, featuring a performance by a Nashville Southern rock band. called the Scream and Cheetah Wheelies. And the lead singer of the Scream and Cheetah Wheelies was arrested immediately after their set at the

Taste of Cincinnati Festival because during their set, the lead singer yelled, taste this and mooned the crowd. That song is called Ride the Tide. That's the only Scream and Cheetah Wheeler's song I've ever heard in my life. Now, based on the emails and DMs I receive and therefore my time, my song. sense of this show's primary audience, I suspect that you are roughly my age, possibly a little older, possibly a little younger, but you are probably an adult. You are grown.

You are mature. So maybe you don't think it's funny that a band called the Scream and Cheetah Wheely's played the Taste of Cincinnati Festival and the lead singer yelled, Taste this and moot the crowd. Maybe you don't think it's funny. A little juvenile for your tastes. You're too sophisticated. for such broad humor. Okay, sure. Congratulations.

But I think that's extremely funny. And if you think I think that's funny now, when I first heard that story on the school bus, when I was 16 years old, that was the funniest shit I have ever heard in my life. Ride the Tide by the Screaming Cheetah Wheelies from their self-titled 1993 album, which I have not heard.

do apologize. I heard that song on a free cassette tape Atlantic record sampler called Spue, S-P-E-W, a free label sampler type deal, also featuring songs by Stone Temple Pilots, the Melvin's Yolat Tango, Bad Religion, and the Juliana Hatfield 3, super weird tape. I was into it. I believe this was Spue Volume 4. The cassette had this nauseous yellow color to it, presumably to better evoke the concept of spew major labels in the early 90s, man. Now it's springtime. Spring of 94 or 95 or maybe 93. Still 7 a.m. or so.

Still on the bus. The vibe on the bus is still groggy and morose. The buzzard's still on. The wacky morning DJs are still talking. Big Al and Scoop. I have just now recalled that the Cleveland Wacky Morning DJs are named Big Al and Scoop. That's perfect. great wacky morning DJ names

and Big Allen Scoop were like, hey, the Indy 500 is this weekend, the race. We got a song to play for you about the Indy 500. And then they play the song. Big knockers, a big knocker

voice be them everywhere. Couple points of interest here. All right. First of all, I found this on SoundCloud. Wow. The website of second to last resort. I opened up a private browsing tab. I googled Indy 500 Big Knockers Radio Song and voila, SoundCloud.

Remarkable. To excerpt that song for you, I just put an MP3 file called bigknockers.mp3 on my desktop. I'm looking at it right now. Wow. Wow. It's right above Danzigmother. MP3. It's not even noon yet here.

Wow. Second of all, I'm pretty sure this is a remake of the song Big Knockers, a newer version. Peyton Manning gets a shout out in this version. I am positive that the version I heard that day on the bus started with a verse about the Indy 500. And it was like, it's the Indy 500 and I don't care. I don't want to see no drivers. I don't want to see no cars. And I'm sitting on the bus thinking, what's going on here? And then that chorus hits. And I'm like, oh, I believe that Big Knockers is brought to you. by two wacky morning DJs from Indianapolis named Bob and Tom. Those names are less wacky. But okay, I believe Bob and Tom's original Big Knockers, perhaps the version I heard that glorious spring morning in the mid-90s. The original version appears on a 1989 comedy album called It's a New Track Record, where you can find Big Knockers at Track 9, sandwiched between songs called Lovely Linda and Hemroids,

respectively. It's a charity album. All proceeds from this album benefit the Jan Opperman Fund and the Children's Wish Foundation. And I got no problem believing that a child of a certain age and temperament would wish for a song called Big Knockers. Your wish is my command, kid. Big Knockers, Big Knockers, Boy, see them everywhere. Key change. Now there's a file in my desktop called big knockers 2.m.3. It's past noon now, but it's still Monday. Amazing. Can you imagine hearing any version of this song unexpectedly as a teenager surrounded by other teenagers on the school bus at 7 in the morning bedlam on the bus when this occurs. I swear to you, I can still picture the bus driver's face as he scrambles to turn. the radio off. In my memory anyway, he looks like John Daly, the debauchress golfer. That makes sense.

To this day, I remember the bus driver's face as he turns the radio off and then turns around to look at us with this beautifully sheepish look on his face just to see if maybe no one had noticed. But oh, we'd noticed. I get to school. I tell my buddy Rick about the Big Knocker song and Rick's like, oh, I heard that too. But my bus driver didn't turn it off. We got to hear the whole song. Rick starts singing to me the parts of the song that I missed. Let's play soccer with her knockers. Dude, I was so jealous. I'm awake and alert at like 7.15 a.m.

In a second location having this conversation. Unbelievable. I go with my buddy Mike, the Danzig Santa guy. Mike and I, we go to a baseball game. A mid-90s Cleveland Indians game. I don't remember anything about this game. Who we played, if we won, if Albert Bell was on the team, then, if he was still called Joey Bell back then, if you tried to kill anybody during the game,

I got nothing. I can give you one concrete fact about this experience. I can tell you that after the game was over, as we drove away, Mike's dad is driving. Mike's dad is navigating us through downtown Cleveland traffic. Mike and I are in the backseat. WMMS is on the radio and WMMS plays us a Frank Zappa song. your dirty love. Can I confess something to you? Can I confess several things? This is my favorite Frank Zappa song.

Dirty Love from Frank Zappa's 1973 album, Overnight Sensation, which I have never heard in its entirety. I don't know that I've ever listened to a whole Frank Zappa album. That's on me. I've been meaning to do the Frank Zappa

deep dive for years. Does Frank Zappa have a lot of songs like this one? I hope so, because to this day, I still catch myself singing dirty love to myself out loud in public. I'll be at the grocery store, right? Assessing the organic produce. And I'll suddenly realize that I'm going, Give me your dirty love.

This is suboptimal behavior. If you ever catch me singing this song in public, please don't call the cops. I'm harmless. The deeper bass voice there is just delightful. So Mike and I are in the back seat and we're cracking up, right? We are dying. This is the new funniest shit I've ever heard in my life.

And we're stuck in traffic and he's distracted. So it takes Mike's dad quite a while to realize what's going on. That day we are overgrown children who got our wish, my friends. And our wish is to listen to several verses of dirty love. And that's the story of how I became the world's biggest Frank Zappa super fan. I'll ignore your cheap aroma and your little more peepid bloomer. And that's about when Mike's dad realizes what's happening and goes, all right, that's enough and turns the radio off.

WMMS, the buzzard, greatest rock and roll station in history. And I swear to you that I can still picture Mike's dad's face as he turns around to look at us, this beautifully sheepish look on his face as he checks to see if maybe we hadn't noticed. But oh, we had. Teenagers notice everything. You play a mildly naughty rock and roll song on the radio, and teenagers snap to attention. You play a mildly naughty rock and roll song on the radio once,

and we might remember it forever. There's me now in the produce section going, oh, finally, organic grapes. While I'm absent-mindedly singing, I just put you in a coma with some dirty love. I'm sorry, I heard that song once. you play a mildly naughty rock and roll song on the radio twice and I guarantee you no one will ever forget it.

If, just hypothetically speaking, if you're a teenager in the car with your dad or worse, your mom and this guitar riff comes on the radio, you have 26 seconds to formulate a plan. Turn the radio way down, turn the radio off, create a distraction, white knuckle your way through it, It's up to you, but you better come up with something because this song is called Detachable Penis.

I woke up this morning with a bad hangover and my penis was missing again. You got 26 seconds until he says that. Detachable penis by the New York City art rock band King Missal from their 1992 album Happy Hour, which I have never heard in full and which has, in my grown adult mature opinion, an unnecessarily phallic album cover. All right, guys, your band is called King Missile and your big hit is called Detachable Penis. Open a private browsing tab

and check out that album cover sometimes. We got it, fellas. King Missal, we got it. Chill out. We are way too sophisticated for your antics. My understanding is that if you live there at the time, if you were haunting the grimy, dystopian, fertile artistic territory

of 1990s, New York City, The village, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn maybe, perhaps other neighborhoods. King Missile were super cool and avant-garde and nuanced. I'll buy that. But meanwhile, I'm on the school bus in fucking Ohio, and I'm having a blast because it's way too early in the morning for subtlety. Then as I walk down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place where all those people sell used books and other jump on the street. I saw my penis lying on a blanket. He buys his penis back for $17.

It's hilarious. That guy, King Missile frontman, John S. Hall, he's a lawyer now. The detachable penis guy passed the bar. That's also hilarious. So I'm standing at a urinal at the Agora Theater and Ballroom in downtown Cleveland, mid to late 90s. I'm here for a concert. I'm here for the rock show. I'm here to see ween.

The Almighty Wean, the pride of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Phenomenal band, Wean. I'm at my first Ween show, and I'm standing at the urinal. And I look to my right, and there's a little kid standing in the middle of the men's bathroom with a crowd gathered around him. And the kid's doing karate moves, karate chops and kicks and whatnot. And I'm like, huh. And I turned back to my left, and the dude standing at the urinal to my left, this, gruff-wizened biker-looking guy.

He looks at me and he nods at the kid. He says, that's my son. It's his birthday. He's eight years old today. You wanted to see Ween. And I look over again and the kid's doing more karate chops. I'd never seen Wean before. And I was like, well, I guess this is what it's like.

And that's what it's like. And then the karate kid got the best birthday present. An eight-year-old could ask for. Wean played Dr. Rock. Dr. Rock is the best Wien song. The original appears on Wien's 1991 album, The Pod, I don't care. Dr. Rock Live is the best Wien song. Generally, I don't go around preferring live versions to original versions.

It goes against my principles. But I make an exception, apparently, for Danzig's mother and Wien's Dr. Rock. Because to this day, this is the raddest shit I've ever heard in my life. All the dudes in the crowd pumped their fists and chant Dr. Rock the whole time. Oh my God, it rules so hard. I took my buddy Mike, the Danzig, Santa, baseball, Frank Zappa guy to see Ween. And Ween played for like four hours. It was both exhilarating and exhausting.

We did not anticipate the time commitment. I was worried the whole time that Mike was mad at me. He was cool with it. Ween even played Poop Ship Destroyer, which is apparently the song they play when they're either trying to reward or explicitly punish the crowd. It varies. That is a fantastic rock and roll concept. The punishment song. I have decided not to play you a clip from Poop Ship Destroyer because if you're unfamiliar, it is way funnier to me if you just have to imagine what that song sounds like. I've seen Ween, I think, four times. And last time I saw them, it was awesome. They encoreed with

the stallion, parts one through five. Holy shit. But they played for like four hours. and yet they did not play Dr. Rock, and I was crushed. I was devastated. I swear to you, and I think you know that I take these matters very seriously. I swear to you that if you let me go to one show right now, then you guaranteed me that I'd hear one specific song at that show, any artist, any song by that artist, I'd go see Ween play Dr. Rock.

I mean that. I haven't seen them since. We played a show in Newport, Kentucky, a couple of months back that I theoretically could have driven out to, but I didn't. And I just looked up the set list for that show, and Dr. Rock was their second to last song that night, their 34th song. And now I'm devastated just reading that because I can imagine myself at that show, dying to hear Dr. Rock.

And for the first 33 songs, right before each song starts, I think, please be Dr. Rock. it isn't. And then the 34th time, it's Dr. Rock. And I can imagine myself just losing my shit, just spontaneously combusting with joy, a nuclear explosion consisting of myself. Like, I grabbed the beer out of the hands of the guy standing next to me and throw it at the ceiling. I am so mad right now that I denied myself that happiness. My second favorite Wien song I don't think I've ever

even heard before sometime in the age of the early internet I stumbled across just a list of amusing ween song titles waving my dick in the wind touch my tutor

fuck homes suck home dick homes stick home and I found my personal second favorite wean song which is called put the coke

on my dick ween have a lot of songs that don't have dick in the title, but this one does. Put the Coke on my dick. Can I confess to you that my favorite word in the song title put the Coke on my dick in a huge upset as put? I don't know how to explain it. Put is just a very funny verb to use as the first word of the song title and complete sentence. Put the Coke on my dick. I have never heard this song in my life. Do you want to, Should we play it right now? Should we share this experience?

Oh, hell yes. This is a song about the Indy 500. I don't know what I expected exactly. But that was it. That was exactly what I expected from a wean song called Put the Coke on my dick. That absolutely met my expectations. That's remarkable. Such purity of vision from wean.

I don't believe I've ever heard a single wean song on commercial rock radio. not once, not even on WMMS. No, to hear Wien on the radio, any type of radio, I had to go to college. I had to become a college radio DJ, and I had to fucking play it myself. But you can. The live version is tremendous, of course,

but on principle I do prefer the original version of Piss Up a Rope from Ween's 1996 album, 12 Golden Country Greats. And I suspect you know enough of, about me to sense my glee at 19 years old or whatever as I profane the airwaves of my bucolic Midwestern campus with this radness. You get it. In a huge upset, my favorite line in Piss Up a Rope is, I'm sick of your mouth and your 2%

milk. It's good shit. My dream, and this dream is impossible because no one was listening to my college radio station while I was in college because we were only available via cable radio and literally nobody could figure that shit out. My dream is that I personally scandalized some 16-year-old kid sitting on a school bus or driving around with his or her mother by playing Weans piss up a rope on the radio. My dream is that I paid it forward, as it were. Now it's me playing a substantially naughty rock and roll song on the radio and some other lucky kid will never find.

forget it because no one ever forgets it. You know, not if the song's good enough and naughty enough and inexplicably popular enough. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 110th episode of 60 songs that explained the 90s. And this week we are discussing Santoria by Sublime. We are discussing Santorea soon. But we're going to get another sublime song out of the way first. If you hear this song on the radio and you did hear it on the radio, and you did hear it

the radio, many hundreds, if not thousands of times if you grew up in the 90s or if you nervously watched somebody else grow up in the 90s. When you hear this song in the radio, you have less than 20 seconds to formulate a plan, whether you're going to turn the radio off or down or up. Perhaps you'd like to rip your car stereo out of your dashboard entirely and throw it into the sea, because this is ska, my friends. Kind of, ska punk maybe. It's fast, all right? this song is fast and it's by sublime and it's called date rape and we're going to get through this together. His name is Bradley James Noel, born and raised in Long Beach, California.

He also lived in Orange County as a kid, but never mind that. Long Beach. A Rolling Stone article from December 1997, an article that declares sublime, perhaps the biggest American rock act of 1997. That article says, these are a few of the things. Brad Noel loved. Surfing, eating, drugs, his dog, Louis, his son, Jacob, his wife, Troy, and music. Maybe music most of all. End quote. That's things Brad Noah loved past tense. Brad died of a heroin overdose in San Francisco on May 25, 1996, a week after his wedding, two months before sublime's

gargantuan breakout self-titled album came out. And long before Sublime became perhaps the biggest rock act in America. He was 28. I'm mentioning this now because I doubt I'm going to feel like mentioning it later. I much prefer the present tense. Brad Noah loves reggae. He loves dance hall. He loves punk. He loves ska. He loves ska punk, etc. He is bilingual. He speaks fluent Spanish. And he will tell you about the stuff he loves in both English and Spanish. May Gusta La Reggae, may gust a punk rock, he sings.

On a mildly naughty song called Caress Me Down, one time on my Yahoo Fantasy Baseball League message board, I rewrote the lyrics to Caress Me Down to be a disc track aimed at Kaz Matsui, the rookie second basement for the New York

Mets, because I drafted him and he stunk. May Gusta L. fly out. may Gusta no bass knock, that sort of thing. Never mind that now. And Bradley sounds like he loves the music he's making. And the music that very explicitly influenced the music he's making. Not everybody does.

Not everybody sounds like they love anything. Plenty of rock stars don't. Most 90s rock stars definitely didn't. Ska and ska punk is briefly, inexplicably. And if you want the truth delightfully, mega popular for like, 10 minutes in 1997. Even more inexplicably, Skah is suddenly cool,

but the warmth and joy and admiration and serenity that Brad Noel exudes is never cool. And that paradoxically is what makes him so cool, even if it takes his tragic death. In the super 90s tragic rock star death narrative, we could then project onto Brad Noel for us to realize how cool he was,

is, excuse me, how cool he is, how he exudes warmth and joy and serenity. Even when he's singing this song that's called what it's called and is unapologetically about what it's about. She heard a noise that she looked through the door inside man she never seen before. Light skin, light blue eyes, a double chin. He is a storyteller, Bradley.

You may not like the stories he's telling or the jocularity with which he tells them but light skin, light blue eyes, a double chin and a plastic smile is more character development than I typically receive from the buzzard.

Speaking of WMMS, let's say I'm alone in the vehicle in the car this time. Let's say I'm driving. Windows down, cool summer breeze, a little bit of grocery bagging money in my pocket, not a care in the world,

not a coherent thought in my head in a song called date rape on the radio. Not a word I typically hear on the radio. Not a word typically featured in the song title or sung in the chorus. The girl and the man have a few drinks, get into his car, and then drive away someplace real far. The backstory, the origin story here, as Bradley explains in interviews, is that he heard that line at a party or something.

Some asshole said it at a party. And so Bradley writes a song, about an asshole who says that. And in the second verse, the asshole will get what's coming to him. That's a quite important facet of this song, the sense of justice. And Bradley's disgust at this character he's sketched out so vividly. But allow me to direct your attention to a way less important, but nonetheless extremely important facet of this song, the guitar solo.

The guitar solo that starts immediately after the asshole's big line. Let's cut out the line and just focus on the way this guitar solo starts because this is, in all seriousness, and I'm conflicted about this, but it's true all the same. This is one of my favorite opening two seconds to a guitar solo in the history of American rock. There is an overwhelming sense of personality, of perhaps ill-advised jocularity to the first two seconds of Bradley's guitar solo, the halting, false. start jauntiness of it. Bwarn, bwarn it. Does it make you forget what the song's called? What the song's about? Is it trying

to make you forget? Or is it flaunting? In its jauntiness and even silliness, the extreme, why would you ever try to do that difficulty of writing a pop song about this and calling it that? Because this is the song that broke sublime nationally.

This is the song, the fabled Los Angeles Rock Radio Station K-Rock, the WMMS of Southern California. This is the song K Rock seized upon at random, possibly to the long-term dismay of Sublime themselves, that set sublime on the path to becoming perhaps the biggest American rock act of 1997. It's a song called Date Rape, in which the date rapist goes to jail. Bradley even radically speeds up his vocals for part of the second verse to maximize the amount of justice we're meeting out here.

I did not A rock through to the car Get him in the head I know It's got a brick Come on Party

She'll listen to me Diet to her drawer Looked up Rolo A dirty outlaw I did not know Until very recently

That the last Super Fast lines There are Come on party People Won't you listen to me Date Rape Styley

Quite a song This song Much to consider Anyways Then this song Becomes a courtroom drama For 10 seconds

Never mind what happens to the guy in jail Look, never read the YouTube comments Right I'm always saying that and you're always listening to me And not doing that Right? Never read the YouTube comments Especially right now

Especially when the comments pertain to this song Yeesh But two years ago Somebody in the YouTube comments to this song says as a woman, the one thing that infuriates me about this song is that the judge not only did not believe or excuse the rapist, but he also gave him 25 years. So the justice system works better in a sublime song than in real life. End quote. Much to consider. Okay. How did we get here? And how is it that out of all their delightful early songs, this is the song that gets sublime to where they're going. Bradley Noel starts out in high school in Long Beach,

playing in punkier bands with names like Hogan's Heroes and Sloppy Seconds. These bands slowly morph into Sublime, which consists, canonically, of Bradley Noel on guitar and vocals, Eric Wilson on bass, and Bud Gow on drums. What I can say about date rape

is that it's there from the very beginning. It's the third song on Sublime's first demo tape from 1988, the mythic Zepeda tape. So named because their buddy Steve Zepeda helped pass it around. Here's the fifth and last song on that tape. That song's called The Boring Song for now.

It will eventually be revamped and retitled Roots of Creation. That's a better title. Five songs on this sub beta tape with a handwritten track list and a phone number, the 213 area code in parentheses, the name Brad, and finally, Long Beach in all caps underlined.

Also, me am a white boy, but I sing a reggae song. He knows. He knows you know. He wants you to know. He knows you know. Culture, then and now and forever, is not a costume. But where Bradley Noel is concerned, can you call when he's wearing a costume

if he never takes it off? He loves this music. Give him that, if only that. He lives this music. vicariously, if nothing else, with every fiber of his being for his entire life. His parents divorced when he was young and when Bradley was a teenager.

His dad took him on a trip to the Virgin Islands, and that's all it took. Do me a favor. Do yourself a favor. Do yourself three favors. Favor number one. My dear friend and former colleague, Kate Nibbs,

wrote a rad thing for the ringer back in 2019 about the sublineissance, about the eternal and somewhat perpetually increasing popularity of sublime. Kate is a little grossed out by the lyrics to caress me down, the G.I. Joe Kung Fu grip of it all, but she's got a point. Read that. Favor number two, one more ringer jam. The rad critic and L.A. scholar Jeff Weiss wrote a massive and phenomenal 25-year anniversary tribute to the self-titled Sublime album in 2021. Headline is Sun Gods of the LBC, endless amusing tales

of stupidity and debauchery and tragedy and somehow legit musical genius. Jeff writes, if you can remember anything to do with sublime with 100% accuracy, you probably weren't there. That's a fantastic line. Carve out some time and read that.

Favor number three. Jeff mentions a playlist, a Spotify playlist called Computerized Revolution of digitally inclined reggae and dance halls. So K-Rock, right? Deified L.A.

radio station K-Rock, the WMMS of California. Bradley Noah loved this K-Rock show called Reggae Revolution, the biggest reggae radio show in America, hosted at the time by the DJ Roberto Engadi. There's a playlist of songs Bradley loved from that show. Michael Miguel Haplett, sublime's unofficial fourth member, producer, musician, early label boss. Michael put this playlist together. Listen to this computerized revolution playlist. It's fantastic. Try and hear this music the way young Bradley Noel heard it, the wonder and ecstasy with which he received this music. And try and hear Bradley Noel in it. This is the blueprint. He wants you to know. He knows you know.

this guy's name is Lieutenant Stitchy. The song from 1987 is called Wear You Size, and it's addressed to girls who wear clothes too small for them. Super rude, super ill-advised, but Lieutenant Stitchy, who later converted to Christianity and gospel reggae, and who now goes by the name Reverend Dr. Lieutenant Stitchy O.D. on Instagram, Lieutenant Stitchy's going to try to win you over anyway with pure charisma. And yep, that's Bradley Noel.

This guy's name is Sugar Minot, extra giant, reggae giant, sugar my not. The song from 1984 is called Herbman hustling. And there's a bubbliness, a somewhat literal bubbliness to it, but an undercurrent of grit and danger as well. Plus, you know, the whole Herbman part. And yep, that's Bradley Noel. That's a part of Bradley Noel's daily living.

Her bitch is like a bunch of rose If I ever tell you about Maxine You only say I don't know what I know But Ooh rad This is the giant reggae duo Shaka Demas and Plyers

With her 1994 smash Murder She Wrote And the sweetness And deafness And lasciviousness Of Plyer's voice Here there and everywhere Ooh I can so clearly hear

Bradley Noel Singing along to this And the van or the RV or whatever. Sounds familiar, don't it? That song rules so hard as well. All right, Young Sublime cut their teeth primarily at parties, house parties,

backyard parties, beach parties, impromptu street corner parties. Bradley and that guy, Miguel Happel, start a label, skunk records, and put out Sublime's first, officialish album. It's more of a compilation, but don't worry about it. In 1991, it's called Jah Won't Pay the Bills. Yeah, Jha. He knows. He knows you know. He's a white boy who says Jha and also quotes the bejesus out of Conway Twitty. This song is called DJs. It's the first song

on Jha Won't Pay the Bills. Do yourself another favor and listen to the Bansplain episode on Sublime, our sister podcast or daughter podcast, I guess. Hosted, of course, by our dear friend Yassi Sallick. We'll be talking to her later. And featuring for the sublime episode, well, look at that. She talked to Jeff Weiss. It's great.

Yassie points out that ain't nothing wrong, ain't nothing right, and still I lie awake all night, is basically quoting Conway Twitty. Reggae giant Conway Twitty. Excuse me. Country music giant Conway Twitty. My grandp.

My father's father's father. father. We called him Grandpap. Grandpap was a coal miner and he lived in rural Pennsylvania and he drove up Buick, like one of those enormous aircraft carrier sized super 80s Buick's. My grandpap got rear-ended once while sitting in a stoplight and the car that hit him blew up. Just bough, and grandpa didn't even notice. He just drove blissfully away with a giant fireball in his rearview mirror. Both my grandpa and grandmother were lifetime smokers. They smelled like cigarettes and the Buick smelled like cigarettes and I loved that smell. And even now I think of them so fondly whenever I smell cigarette smoke in any context. And also, Grandpap had a cassette tape of Conway Twitty's greatest hits,

possibly, possibly, possibly. I loved this song especially. It's called Heavy Tears. There ain't nothing wrong, but then ain't nothing right. It's just a little. kind of thing that keeps you up all night, heavy tears. Jop may not pay the bills, but Conway Twitty might. The sublime story, the arc, the chronology, the discography is a little confounding because so many of their biggest songs, or their second tier biggest songs, I guess, major songs are there from the very beginning. Date rape is on this record, and bad fish, and ball and chain. Love that one. And let's go get stoned. Songs that will be big hits, or at least fan favorites, often in fancier versions, later, soon.

But not now. All the way up to the mega huge self-titled Sublime record in 96, the album that comes out two months after Bradley dies, Sublime are never quite famous in real time. When you listen to Sublime, the dudes singing and playing for you, those dudes aren't truly famous yet. They don't know that they're going to be truly famous. They don't know that the 96 Sublime record is going to sell 6 million copies in America. It's a little heartbreaking listening to Sublime what you know that they don't.

Sublime's first official official album comes out in 1992. It's called 40 Outs to Freedom. We got another super important Sublime collaborator, Marshall Goodman, aka Ross M.G, playing drums on a lot of this record because Bud's got his own problems. This record's famous. It sells two million copies in America, but it doesn't blow up right away. Or really, it doesn't blow up fast enough to do Bradley Noel any good. This song is called Bad Fish. This is a top-tier sublime hit, actually.

This is maybe probably, presumably a song about Bradley battling heroin addiction. Badfish is also the song that makes me think, if only for a split second, of Jimmy Buffett. Bradley and Jimmy. the clown princes of Margaritaville, two barefoot bards of good time partying, all libido and id and conspicuous overconsumption, but with a not so hidden soulfulness, a grace to them, even at their bodiest, shrewd songwriters with hidden depths, Bradley and Jimmy, and Jimmy's still present tense too. They don't specialize in super sad songs that deceive you by sounding all happy. They write happy and anthemic songs where the shrewd undercurrent of sadness somehow only amplifies the happiness, the anthemicness, the pain, the struggle driving bad fish doesn't make it sound painful.

The struggle just makes it sound better. Yassie really likes that line, ain't got no quarrels with God. They use, the deployment of the word quarrels there. Yes, great word. but don't skip over, ain't got no time to grow old. That's, okay, that one's a little painful. Despite the fact that, again, sublime are very much not huge or even successful yet. They're not even on a major label yet.

Even so, 40 ounce to freedom has greatest hits energy. It feels monumental, if only in retrospect. Bad fish, ball and chain. Love that one. and let's go get stone and don't push are all back. Sublime's covers of hope by the descendants and the Grateful Dead's Scarlet Begonias are here. And this is the only record I'm aware of

that covers both the descendants and the Grateful Dead. Smoke Two Joints is here. Smoke Two Joints is a cover also. Smoke Two Joints was written and recorded by the Toys, Toys with an E, a reggae band that started in Hawaii but later moved to Oregon. Tough break. Great songs.

great cover. When Bradley Noel sings, I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints, and then I smoke two more, you believe him. But then again, you believe him when he sings anything. School they never type about hamburgers or steak. Elijah Muhammad or the welfare state, but I know. This might be my favorite song on 40 Outs of Freedom, if you want the truth. Ask him how he knows about hamburgers and Elijah Muhammad in the welfare state. Go ahead, ask him. He wants you to know why he knows. But I know, and I know because of KRS1. This song is called KRS1. It is probably the best quote-unquote rock song about a rapper ever, just the delicacy of this song. The sweetness, the earnestness.

Bradley just loves listening to KRS 1 and wants to shout out everything he's learned about by listening to KRS 1. And I love listening to him talk about why he loves listening to KRS 1. I even love when Bradley slips back into reggae pitwa while he does it. He knows. he knows you know he just saying the words we don't want to pay the money fee here the same old sound he sells the fee

there somehow maybe or maybe not or maybe you could also ask who's we Bradley in the line watch and will take hip hop to a higher ground

but even here there's a difference between wrapping yourself and the flag of KRS1 so to speak and simply waving KRS1's flag on KRS one's behalf. Not that this is the song on this record that unnerves everybody. At first, 40 ounce of freedom isn't a disaster exactly, but it doesn't sell a ton. It doesn't push sublime to the next level. It doesn't work, really. It especially does not help Bradley Noel in his very

public battle with drugs. The next sublime record is called Robin the Hood. It's from 1994. It's four track recordings. It's low-fi in the extreme. It's experimental. It is a theoretically visionary sample-heavy beat tape vibe. It's got Gwen Stefani featuring for less than two minutes, and it features several interludes from a schizophrenic gentleman named Raleigh that unfortunately lasts for way longer than two minutes. There's a lot going on, and pretty much all of it is baffling, but it's all more intriguing than maybe you remember.

Here's a little throwaway tune called Lincoln Highway Dub. Huh, that sounds familiar. I may not actually get around to Santa Ria here today. Is that all right? Are people going to get pissed at me? They might. Sublime's biggest songs are so huge, are so ubiquitous, that I never need to hear them again externally because they've been stuck in my head for 30 years, right?

In a broader sense, I'm never not listening to Sublime. I don't know if there's any point in elaborating on that, but okay, so look, Robin the Hood is not designed to push Sublime to the next. next level, to put it mildly. What pushes sublime to the next level in August of 1994 is that a famous DJ named Tazy Phillips, T-A-Z-Y, P-H-Y-L-L-I-P-Z. T-Z-Y-L-I-P-Z-T-E-L-L-I-P-Z. T-E-Z-L-L-I-P-Rap. On the famous L-A-Roc station, K-Roc, and the phone lines blow up, and soon date-Rap is the biggest song on K-Roc, which means that rock radio stations nationwide pick up on it, which is how I hear it in fucking Ohio, and that's what pushes sublime to the next level. Yeah, this is a story of a single

DJ at a single radio station plucking a random song from obscurity, and that song blows up in a manner so absolute that we even remember the DJ's name now. Day rate blows up. So Lyme gets signed to a major label to the MCA subsidiary gasoline alley, but also Bradley goes to rehab. So Blime to start recording a Redondo Beach with David Kane, who's worked with Fishbone and Tony Bennett separately. But that flames out, so they also record with Paul Leary, he of the butthole surfers at Willie Nelson's Peternale Studios in Austin. Sublime nailed down their biggest, most enduring hits, Santaria, Wrong Way, Doing Time, What I Got. But they also leave a trail of destruction and consternation. Sublime's self-titled album finally comes out in July 1996.

And those songs slowly but surely make Sublime super famous, but Bradley is already gone. We'll spend the rest of our lives listening to Bradley singing about himself in the present tense. It has been pointed out many times that Bradley Noel does not necessarily play the guitar like a motherfucking riot on what I got after explicitly announcing that he plays guitar. like a motherfucking riot.

It's nice. It's a nice little guitar solo, but he ain't exactly shredding. Now is he. But I know every note of that guitar solo. I can hum the whole thing for you right now. I don't actually need to listen to what I got anymore. But when I do,

what I hear externally is the whistling, the hyper-casualness of this whole operation, the higher-impact lo-fi of it all. the sense that he's sitting in the room with you. Bradley Noel is both present tense and physically present. It has also been pointed out many times that what I got has an absolutely chaotic structure such that Bradley plays a guitar solo within like 40 seconds.

People talk about the tyranny of conventional song structure, right? How boring, how predictable it is. Verse, chorus, verse, bridge solo, verse, chorus out. But we still, by and large, adhere, to that structure. Even now, even the most innovative, the most disruptive rock and pop stars among us. Verse, chorus, verse. Kirk Cobain knew the tyranny of that structure, but he still used it. Even on the song, he called verse chorus verse. It feels wrong. It feels revolutionary and refreshing, but it also feels wrong when a pop song totally blows up that structure. And what I got does that

without ever feeling like it even gets out of bed. You know my actual favorite moment on the whole Sublime record? The part where Bradley truly plays his guitar like a motherfucking ride. It's right here. Just that part of Doing Time. That little riff. Blom, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. The bass line slithering underneath it.

Bradley crooning, we got a relationship over top of it. Doing Time samples Herbie Man cover George Gershwin. It also samples the Beastie Boys, Malcolm McLaren, David Axelrod, Lou Donaldson, and reggae star Inie Camozy.

This song is a murder ballad or a prelude to murder ballad. That also includes Bradley singing, What am I going to do for a while? I say I'm going to play with myself. And buoyant reggae patois, there is a lot going on. There is too much going on.

But just that part, Blom, Blu, Blu, Blu, Blu, is calming. is centering to me for 10 seconds anyway because there's a lot going on on this record all the goddamn time when we return to the pad to unload everything furnishings so yes april 29 1992 parentheses miami so the lime song about the la riots following the near total acquittal of the four la pd officers videotaped savagely beating rodney king forget the miami part of the title. It's not important. I put this song on repeat for like an hour recently.

The grimyness, the noirishness, the chill ominousness of the song really does it for me. The smeary and seedy bwarn, bwarn, bwant, of the chords there. Am I distracting myself with granular detail? Because this is a song in which the white boy who sings a reggae song explains the true point of the L.A. Riots? Anything is possible. man, they said it was for the Mexican, and not for the white, but if you look at the street, it wasn't about Rodney King. Not this fucked up situation and these fucked up police. Now, with the important caveat that I personally was not present at the L.A. riots,

it sure seems as though that is what the L.A. riots were about. The line, since that day in my living room has been much more comfortable, cracks me up every time. even when I'm listening to the song and repeat for an hour. But the dude from Sublime doing a personal home makeover show as the LA riots are occurring and then explaining himself afterward, it's a lot. It's the most. I guess I should let him explain what the LA riots were about in his estimation. Yeah, I wasn't there, but it's about coming up and staying on time.

It's about coming up and staying on top feels a little reductive to me. It could be that my favorite sublime songs inherently have some disquieting, unwise, poorly aging quality to them. And Santeria, which has emerged in time as Sublime's single biggest hit by a Spotify play counts at least. It could be that Santaria is just a little too genial for me. I like this part. This is my favorite part.

Santoria comes on the radio and I listen to the whole thing, obviously because it's Santaria. Of course I do. But I tell myself anyway that I'm only listening to get to this part. That's funny. That's a fantastic way to end a verse. You scramble the timeline a little bit and I can picture myself at 16 on the school bus at 7 a.m. And on the radio I hear Santoria for the first time. And it gets to the part about how Bradley's got something for his punk ass. And I giggle in my seat a little bit. And the bus driver scrambles to turn the radio off and looks back at us sheepishly to see if we noticed, but of course we noticed. Teenagers notice everything. But see, I just rewatch the Santaria video, and the video is mostly the surviving members

of Sublime, Eric and Bud and Lou Dog, Bradley's beloved Dalmatian Lou Dog. And they're doing a goofy old West shootout thing. And Bradley shows up a little via old footage. And apparently Lou Dog bit one of the other actors because Lou Dog was apparently always biting everyone. But the whole thing just makes me sad. The past tense disrupts the present tense. And so I stand by my decision not to dwell on it, even if it means not dwelling on Santoria at all. Okay, all right, fair enough. I'll let Bradley play the solo. That's not a motherfucking riot either. But what sublime taught me and what WMMS taught me as well is that it doesn't necessarily have to sound like a motherfucking riots to start one.

We are joined once again by the one, the only Yassi Salick, host of Bansplaine and 24 question party people, winner of the live draft in Los Angeles recently of songs for my own books, very embarrassing, but she totally won. Always a pleasure to talk to Yassie. Hello, Yassie. How are you? Bonge. Bonge, Rob.

Bange, yes. I've created. a prison of my own bongch and I can no longer leave it so I might as well get comfortable. Yes, I'm sorry that I humiliated you at your own book event, but... That's not what I said, but okay. How many times a day are you bonjed, are you addressed with bonged, either on the internet or in real life? I mean, thankfully, it's mostly on the internet, not a lot of real life bonging coming my way.

Okay, that's good. That's a relief. But, you know, enough times that I know that it's made a meaningful impact on people. And for that, I'm grateful and proud. Yes. Okay. Yeah, see, I was hoping you could explain to the people the importance of K-Rock to Los Angeles, to the world and too sublime in particular. What is it about this radio station that makes it so powerful?

I mean, K-rock, babe, it's the only radio station. It is the alternative rock music station of record. I didn't know that until later, obviously, but growing up, like, we all listened to it, and that's how you learned about everything cool that was worth knowing about. And I think they did set the tone for, like, various other alternative rock stations around the country. I won't give you a TLDR history of K-Rock, but I do think it was like in the 80s when it kind of shifted from being

just whatever. I don't know what they would play Steely Dan and should have no idea. Shifting into like, what if we play a little Depeche mode? Like what if we, you know, like sort of like what bridging the gap maybe between college rock stations and terrestrial pop radio stations?

Sure. But yeah, I think with Sublime in particular, it is kind of funny because it's kind of funny because I think Sublime was also influenced very much by K.Rock. So to have K. Rock play a hand, you know, because Kierok had this long running show called Reggae Revolution. I don't know if you talked about it in your two-and-a-half-hour long monologue. It's like two hours and I did. We covered it. But yeah, you know, long after the fact, because date rape was like one of the first sublime songs ever written, several years later, they kind of pick it up and put it on the air.

I guess they send a CD. Does that, is that what you found in your? It's like a compilation. It's on a random compilation of local bands or something. It's not sublime CD. It's like a various artists situation, you know, which makes it even weirder that it got pulled out. All I know is Tazy Phillips is to think. That's right.

So thank you, Tazy Phillips. It is, I was thinking because I know I could just like picture in your mind being like, why this song? I did wonder that, yes. But you know what? I tried to think about it, and I was like, it's so fit in with that era of like, like, think about like, when did Dude Ranch blink when age you came out, like, 97? But like, Cheshire Cat was a couple years prior. Like, that sort of, like, crass, bro humor. Do you know what I mean?

No, I do. Of course. And it was, like, also, like, American Pie movies. It was, like, so prevalent in culture. in the mid to late 90s. And I feel like it makes, even though I will say that day rape is honestly

an anti-date rape song and it very clearly has a carmic turn. But yeah, Justice Revelles, it is not sure, it's a little glib about a kind of a serious subject. But I think that was, again,

the tone of the night, the mid to late 90s was glibness abounded. It was 94 when they started, playing day rape and it's like it's not like the offspring have an equivalent song but i totally that is the largest container of protein drink i've ever seen in my life i'm sorry i got completely distracted just now well rob if you would pay more attention to your health and well-being it's it's true perhaps you wouldn't be so stunned by the size of my protein shake this is this is on me i did you did you have to live in california to truly get it like is k rock a particularly

local station. Did they seize upon sublime because sublime were local or is that incidental? I think both. I mean, I think they did seem to like make a point of playing bands that were local, but they also

would break stuff like Weezer, you know? But I remember hearing like bad religion was played on K Rock from like, since I can remember, which I doubt bad religion was being played in like the Cleveland Ohio. Well, I don't know, maybe it was alternative rock. station. Yeah. So I think kind of a blend. I mean, did did sublime not hit for you personally there in Ohio

the way it did for me? No, it totally did, but I'm just wondering if it hit me differently. Like, I heard date rape on our alternative rock station because of K rock, right? Like I understand now that I'm getting, you know, it's like, you know, it gets to Ohio several months, if not several years later. And I guess what I was wondering is if if you, even when you heard this on for the first, first time you don't know who they are, but they feel they sound inherently Californian to you. Like, you are viving with this music on a different level because you're hearing it on K-Rock and you're on their turf. Oh, totally.

And it just is like, it's such prototypically Californian music. It's like Red Hot Chili Peppers or even like the deaf tones, even though these bands don't sound similar. They're like the kind of bands that their influences are just so. so specifically California, whether it be like, you know, the minute men to like fishbone.

Like you can hear all of that sort of in like the DNA of sublime, the beach, but also like rap music like with like the scratching and stuff. And you know, famously Bradley Null did go to high school with Snoop Doggy Dog. And Cameron Diaz. Yes, I wasn't going to bring it up because it wasn't relevant.

But yes, also Cameron Diaz. Camera Diaz, always relevant. You had Jeff Weiss on when you did the Bansplain episode. I sure did. He wrote a great piece for The Ringer, and he sort of described Long Beach as like the Oakland to Los Angeles's San Francisco, right? Like, what is Long Beach specifically within Los Angeles? What makes Sublime inherently Long Beach?

That's very funny that, that comparison. I don't Long Beach is a lot like where I grew up. which is Torrance, which is like it's a beach side suburban, but like not bougie or rich area. Does that make sense? Which is like sort of a rare occurrence, I think in California where like if you're by the beach and it's not wealthy, you know, and it's kind of changed since then.

So it had like, I think the... That's how punk comes up, right? It's like you're bored, suburban enwi of this place that isn't the big city. Yeah, that's the long beach of it. I couldn't tell you anymore because I didn't grow up there. I did play basketball there as a preteen and teen. Were they good? Were they better than the Torrance team?

I always like to chart your... Comparable. Comparable. All right. A worthy adversary. I woke up with like five, three 11 songs in my head simultaneously. I don't know why this is. Unrelated.

Well, maybe. I don't know. I just, but I just, it got me thinking about like, you know, dudes from Nebraska doing reggae petois, you know,

I'm kind of surprised that you know five, 311. They were all, they're like the hits, unfortunately. Right. It was like, it was all mixed up,

down. Don't stay home. Uh, I forget Amber. Amber is a, and I forget the other one. So it's like, I'm not going to go toe to toe with you on 311 knowledge. Maybe it was beautiful disaster. That's a good one. Oh, there we go. Thank you. See, this is, this is why I wanted to talk to you about this. I, when you listen to Sublime then or now, like, does it raise any of these alarm bells, you know, that we spend, well, just that we spend all our time now or a lot of time talking about this idea of cultural appropriation or whatever, you know, like this. Thinking about the Gwen Stefani arc, you know, and the costumes that she's put on, you know, and refused to take off since then. I feel like we've avoided, you know, that discourse with sublime to some extent. Like we, you know, the fact that he knows so much about reggae, you know, the fact that he clearly loved and, like, lived this music, I think we look a little more kindly upon, you know, him singing about being a white boy singing a reggae song.

or whatever. It's interesting to me because I do think that like there's like a picking and choosing of like who gets to do this and who doesn't, you know? Right. Because it's like nobody ever said Operation Ivy was culturally appropriating. You know what I mean? And SCA is by definition cultural appropriation, right? Right.

Like but but it's sort of held up as like it's okay. It's a genre. So it's like I don't really, you know, it, I guess your point. is held, which was like he was simply like filtering the influences that were authentic and natural in his surroundings and life into the music he made and maybe like just didn't see that as a problem. Also, I don't think Bradley Knoll was thinking about cultural appropriation. Well, he clearly wasn't, you know, and good for him. I don't think. Any sort of appropriateness or really what anyone else thought, TBQA.

I mean, like it's so far in the future, but like Miley Cyrus being like, oh, I'm a rapper now, you know, like this is my culture now. And then be like, oh, never mind. You know, you never got that from Sublime, right? It never felt like a phase. Right. I did not. I did not invoke Miley Cyrus on that. I did not expect myself either. Yeah. So I told you I was doing Sublime and you did the thing that you always do, which is you send me a photo of you. hanging out with the person I'm talking about? This has happened. That was not a person from Sublime, but I was just showing you that my culture is not your costume because we just clearly see how much that man looked like that, Bradley Noel.

That's what everyone I hung out with looked like. You're telling me that that wasn't Bradley Noel. You just sent me a photo. Okay, this is new information I'm receiving just now. So you didn't hang out with Sublime. You just hung out with dudes who looked like Sublime. Correct. All right.

Well, tell me about that. then I'm going to salvage this as best I can. I'm going to look at this photo again, but he looked a lot. He looks a lot. His name was Sean Kreiderman. No idea where he is in this photo. I'm 14 years old. This was in here.

I believe he was like a senior at my high school. Okay. Yeah, but every guy in my high school that I hung out would look like that, like bleached short hair, some sort of old English tattoo on their back. Sure. Dickies. Like this is a very my culture is not your costume situation. As far as I know, Sean Kreiderman didn't have any musical talent to speak of.

I think he ended up becoming an auto mechanic. But yeah, I mean, that was the vibe. I think this is why, like, we connected so much with sublime. We did the same things they did. We hung out at the beach all day. We smoked weed. We went to house parties because when you live in Torrance or Long Beach, you're not going to, like, the rainbow room or wherever, you know, like cool clubs.

Like we don't have those. I'm looking at this photo and he looks like Bradley Noel. It's a real, it's a real doppel game. He's got the backward. He's even smiling. He even has like sort of the evil smile that I associate. This is not my fault. Yeah, no, I never got to meet Bradley Noel because when did he die 90s? It was 97.

Yeah, I was, I would have been 15. Yeah, I didn't even never get. Oh, that's not true. I got to see them play at the K-Rock Weenie Roast in 95. Here we go. When came out. I mean, I didn't hang out with them. My father accompanied me.

Wow. Because I was 12 or 13 and I was not allowed to go to the K. Rock Weeny Rest alone. And so my father was like, I'll take you. And I was like, that's cool stuff to do when you're a cool 14-year-old is to go with your Persian dad. And it was at Irvine Meadows, which is now the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. We were in the lawn area. Okay. What did he do?

he got contact high from in his words the second hand grass and he went to sleep that is he fell he fell asleep he fell asleep he passed out meanwhile i was just enjoying the dulcet tones of bush and rancid and hole and better than ezra and also literally rage against the machine played rob and you should understand the rage against the machine played and people started setting bonfires around us and like doing like doing like like circle pits around them. My dad just blissfully asleep, counting shapes in his mind, just not a waking world touching him. That's a beautiful image right there. How did you find sublime at that time? Did Sublime fit into that tableau in 1995?

I always think about this. Just like the beauty of being that young in like the early 90s is that you had no understanding that like something wasn't, legit or like this was poser but this was real or like this doesn't fit because this is a different genre. If it was on K-Rock babe, it was all cool alternative rock music to me and I loved it. So like better than Ezra whole. Part and parcel for me. Apologies to Courtney Love who is going to scream if she hears this.

But like, you know, I just thought it was all good and cool and like hit me different ways obviously, but it was all it was all hitting. You and I both spend so much time talking about, you know, tragic rock star arcs, right? And I do you, the sublime story is so weird because they're not famous yet, right? Like it just, the timeline doesn't make sense because even date rapes blow up is delayed several years. You know, he's gone before sublime is even out before they even become rock star. They were kind of famous. They were already on MTV because I remember knowing that he died and being.

very sad about it. And I just like, I have it burned in my brain. There's like a photo of the press release or like the press conference. And it's his wife and Gwen Stefani are there. I just, this is so fucking crass and craven. But like I just remembered Gwen Stefani's jacket because it was so gorgeous. It's like an olive green with like a fur fur collar. She looked so cool. But yeah, I very much remember that and being really sad about it. Do you hear like what I got now and think like, oh, man, this is so sad? Or is the music itself, like, so buoyance that it sort of avoids, you know, that thing of recasting happy songs is, like, actually sad and tragic songs now that you know the full

story. But when you go listen to it, don't you hear such an undercurrent? Like, I think that's why Sublime is so good. You know, I think the reason that Sublime, in a way, a little bit transcends, like, a 311 in terms of, like, depth. Sure. Because baked into like the buoyancy of the music is this like melancholy. Like you can really hear it.

I feel like I could hear it from the beginning. You know, Santaria is a sad song. Myruca, while a banger, is kind of a sad song. Bad fish. Bad fish is a totally sad song. I love that song. Tell me, are you a bad fish too? Are you a bad fish?

You know, you talked about it on the show that, like, that's assumed to be a pretty explicit, you know, song about addiction. It's weird to me because in my memory, like, they would say, like, they were a little bummed out that date rape became the song, you know, and I think they scrambled. Sure, of course. And they tried to scramble and get, like, bad fish. You know, they tried to sell K rock on bad fish being the song instead, and it totally didn't work. But I think in retrospect, you know, I think bad fish, you know, is a top tier song that has only grown in esteem. Maybe now that you know the full story, but like, yes, that's an absolutely beautiful song, you know, with a foundation of melancholy to it. Yeah. Is this why there are so many cover bands? I think there's so many cover bands because sublime, while influenced by rudimentary peenai, was also influenced by the Grateful Dead.

and thusly fall into the canon of jam band adjacent. Like, I mean, sublime with Rome is a cover band already at this point, you know? Very much so. It just gives it. It's fucking, you know, Margaritaville core. Like, it's like, it fits into that. Like, let's just fucking sit at the beach, man, and have a beer. Listen to these people play fucking, you know, wrong way.

Dub. A band called Bad Fish sells out shows regularly here in Ohio. In Ohio. Oh, yeah. It's like, maybe that's, we're near OSU, right? Like maybe this is a collegiate, a campus, you know, whatever the 2020s hacky-sack equivalent is, like, still, still very culturally prevalent. It's a great travesty. And I know I'm using that word wrong, right?

because I always remember it's from reality bites where he's like, she thinks travesty means an extra bad tragedy and I'm like, I do think that. What does it mean? Does it not mean that? That's definitely how I mean it. Oh, shut up, Ethan.

Yeah, it's fine. But the fact that sublime is like lumped in with like slightly stupid or like, again, no shade or disrespect to slightly stupid, I'm sure of beloved fan base. But like, it's not really the same thing, you know? Like, and Bradley Noel was a genius. he was a he was a had a voice of an angel he could write these like pop songs that held within them

so many different influences and sort of did them all respect and honor i don't know like i i can't i i don't know why it makes me so sad maybe it's the de boon of it all but every time i think about waiting for my ruka starting with that sample that punk rock changed our lives it like makes me want to cry. Because it's just so pure and beautiful. And then back to your appropriation question, I think that's what it is. It's such like a deeply held respect and reverence for this thing that they're incorporating into their music. Like, I don't know, man.

Siblime. Does it surprise you that Santa Ria is the song to rule them all? No, because it's like, it's so catchy. It's such an earworm. of a song. I remember once I went on a little road trip up. You'll love this story. This could not be a more California. My culture is not your costume story. Drove up to Big Bear Mountain with my cousin Seema. I couldn't drive at the time because my new favorite band, Blink 182, is playing at the snowboarders lodge. Again, this must have been like 96. The radio did not work because of the mountains. I had one tape that I had made for this road trip. It had three. songs on hit. Third Eye Blind. Doot doot song.

Yep. Santeria. Sure. Oh, James Laid maybe. What? So just, yeah. Wow. So just for two and a half to three hours, we listened to those three songs.

That's like eight minutes. I know, babe. Why did you stop at three? I don't know. I was like 14 years old. Leave me alone. I'm not. I just asking.

I didn't know if there was some deeper poignance. You know my ass taped those off K-Rock. I sat next to the fucking thing and just waited for it to come on and smashed the record and play at the same time. That's how you do it. On the tape that I taped, you know, remember you would put scotch tape over the thing so it would become recordable. Life hack. Kids these days, they don't know. They don't know what we won't do.

They absolutely don't. You brought up wrong way, which is what I, couldn't even deal with wrong way in my two and a half hour's creed. What is what do we, what do we do with wrong way now? What do we do with it? What do we do with wrong way? I honestly don't know. It's, you know, in the great tradition of storytelling.

No, Rob, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's, it is a little bit like date rape, right? Where it's like this like, it's just a narrator telling a story without any sort of judgment. Like there's no like condoning what's being said or maybe not condoning. So I don't know. It's a story about a 14 year old prostitute, babe. I don't know.

Whatever. They fucking made a movie called Badlands and now it's celebrated fucking till the end of time. no one's like, what do we do with bad lands? It's an excellent point. Isn't bad lands? Isn't that girl 14 years old in badlands when Emilio Estabez comes and sweeps are off and they go kill people? I had never made that connection, but the connection is there. Honestly, my mind is a wonderland.

Just like John Merr said about other people's bodies, it's my mind. The connections that are made, the synapses that we're firing just now. Amazing. Beautiful. I think there's something. I do think he was a genius, but he doesn't sound or as. act like you expect a genius songwriter to act. And so I don't think he was accorded the same. Oh, they're telling a story. You know, like I would like to think of someone other than Bob Dylan

for this, right? But like people were not willing, people were not willing to grant Bradley the same distance between himself and the narrator of the song he's singing. You know, like he wasn't sophisticated enough to take a detached sort of approach lyrically. And so he must absolutely mean and must have absolutely lived every single thing that he's saying. Right. Whereas like, I mean, I think all he really lived was like hanging out at the beach smoking weed doing heroin, playing with Lou Dog who kept running away. You know, like, I'm not really sure he was hanging around with a teen prostitute. I have to say Just to wrap up

The song that I cannot stop playing on repeat is April 29th, 1999, which is another case where like... I was at a party and tell me where were you. Exactly. There's like a degree to which this is a white person explaining to us what the L.A. riots were about and that the L.A. riots were not about

what you think they're about. And like I, you can recoil from that logically. But there's something about that song that's so perfect to me. And I just, I keep playing it on repeat and trying to figure out if part of my attraction to the song is that it's a little bit, like it's quite unwise.

Like if that's sort of going all the way back to date, right? If there's something about this band where you're like, oh, no, but like it turns out all right somehow. Like they get away with it, even if they should never have tried to do it. Interesting take. I don't know. I guess.

I guess like, again, back to like what we were saying, like, I was obviously 10 years old when the L.A. riots happened, but they're burned into my brain because I lived through it. Like, I remember being held at school till like 7 p.m. and not allowed to leave. You know, like this with the TV's on and watching this. And like, I mean, as the poet Bradley Null says, they said it was for the black man. They said it was for the Mexican, not for the white man.

but if you look at the street, it wasn't about Rodney King. It's about this fucked up situation and these fucked up police. I'm not going to ask you if you're reading that off the screen because I somehow know that you're not. I actually do kind of have it memorized. Yeah. I think you could have gotten it. Just a few seconds delay, you would have gotten it. It does.

My favorite part of that song is when they match the police. I liked that. The guitar. The guitar to the guitar. I've never heard that before. The detail in that song, like the sacks, you know, like there's just, there's, it seems like such a stupid, simple song, but there's just such a level of detail to it, an atmosphere to it, that it really does it for me. Yeah. I mean, it's a fantastic song.

And like, again, sorry, not to, like, be glad about it. But I do think, like, while the L.A. riots were clearly about Rodney King and police abuse, like, Like, these were people who experienced living through that, seeing that through that lens and feeling activated by it and also hitting the place and also, you know, participating, as they said, in some anarchy, which is a very important thing to do. But it does seem like they're on the same side. There's a solidarity to it. There's a solidarity, exactly. Even if his, even if he just goes and get some new furniture. Right.

Well, which a lot of people did. I mean, that was, that was a lot. A lot of the riot was, it was like 10% political. Let's throw things on fire and 90%. Let's take also this opportunity. Why not? To take some stuff. And good for them.

Are you sure this isn't Bradley Noel? The more I look at this guy, the more I'm like, is it possible that he was Bradley no and he was just shy and he didn't want you to know. Sean Criderman. I should look at my own. I wonder if he's on Facebook, see what he's doing these days. There we go. He's an influencer of... Literally, the guy that I had the biggest crush on was named Chris Ives,

and he had his last name tattooed in the exact same font and style as Bradley Noel's Sublime tattoo on his back. And he worked at the beach shack that sold like burger. I'm dead serious. Yeah. I wonder whatever happened to him. Wonder if he listens to the pot. I bet he does. Congratulations once again, Yassie.

on killing it in the live draft. I'm going to take down the audio from that because I'm so humiliated by it. I think you did a great job. I mean, at least we can both agree that Chris lost. There we go. Yeah, it's you really the common people thing

was just a real point of contention there. Common people being a pop song. Yeah, at least I didn't screw up to that degree in your estimation. Always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Rob, for having me.

Thanks very much to our guest this week, Yassi Salick. Thanks very much to our producers, Justin Sales and Jonathan Kerma. Thanks to Chloe Clark for additional production help. Thanks very much to you for listening. And now I must insist that you go listen to Sublime's Santoria. Thanks a lot. We'll see you next week.