Blink-182: The Half-Naked Truth

Blink-182 Play Word Association, Part One:

"Childhood"
Hoppus: Lonely.
Barker: ScoobyDoo.
DeLonge: Skateboarding.

I was such a punkrock skateboard kid," remembers DeLonge. "We would start from one end of our town [Poway, California, a San Diego suburb] and skateboard to the other, fucking with people on the sidewalk, stopping in every department store, and knocking everything into the aisles and getting arrested."

"Tom's first musical instrument was the trumpet," reports his mother, Connie DeLonge. "We bought it for him as a Christmas present when he was eleven and told him, 'When you get really good, you can wake us up with reveille.' What we failed to emphasize was that we would decide when that day had come." So one Saturday around 5 A.M., young Thomas DeLonge woke up his parents with a loud noise, closer to the squalling of an ill mallard than to a military bugler. His dad was furious, but his mom was secretly amused.

DeLonge specialized in finding ways to agitate his father — although he also incurred his mother's wrath in junior high school when she heard he had been performing one of his early poppunk compositions, "My Mom's a Transvestite." The song had a harder guitar riff than he had attempted previously — which meant, of course, that "My Mom's a Transvestite" was the work of a more mature artist.

"I knew exactly how hard I had to work in school," says DeLonge. "As long as I got that C, I wouldn't try one minute extra to get a B. I just cared about skateboarding and music."

"He always wanted to open a coffee shop," Connie reveals. "I love him — even though I don't understand the vulgarity of some of the humor."

Hoppus' mom, Carrie, says, "Mark was always a happy kid. Really smart, sensitive. He used to do puppet shows."

Hoppus doesn't remember the puppet shows; in fact, a lot of his childhood is a blur. He was a Navy brat and grew up outside Washington, D.C., and in Southern California. "I didn't do so well with my parents' divorce," he says ruefully. His folks split up when he was in the third grade. For two years, he and his younger sister, Anne, shuttled from one house to the other. When he was in the fifth grade, his dad, Tex, went up to Monterey to get a postgraduate degree. (Tex now works for the Department of Defense, designing missiles. As his son puts it, "He builds bombs.") Anne stayed with Carrie; young Mark went with Tex.

Hoppus would wake up and find his father already gone. When he got home from school, his dad was still in class, so he would make himself dinner, watch TV and go to bed. "I was living by myself in fifth grade," he laments. At the time, the local news was full of reports of a "motorcycle killer." One night, when Hoppus heard a motorcycle engine outside the house, he called up his mom, crying.

In the ninth grade, Hoppus discovered the Cure and the Smiths, and through their music he found solace. He reflects, "That was the first time I ever felt comfortable in my skin."

After high school, Hoppus returned to California from Washington, D.C., to go to college near San Diego. This meant he was reunited with Anne. She had grown up to become a punk rocker herself and was dating one of DeLonge's best friends. She knew DeLonge was trying to get a band together, so she put him in touch with her brother. On Hoppus' second day back in California, he was in DeLonge's garage, writing songs.

Hoppus and DeLonge quickly found that they would crack the same jokes, write the same songs, finish each other's sentences. They recruited drummer Scott Raynor and put together a demo tape to land a gig. Uninhibited by any actual ability, they played around San Diego and made the rudimentary album Cheshire Cat in 1995. Major labels started calling, hoping to sign the next Green Day. The band released Dude Ranch on MCA in 1997, a vast improvement that spawned the hit single "Dammit." They fired Raynor and hired Barker, and then made Enema of the State, which finally had a sound as sharp as their tongues.