Blink-182: Survival of the Snottiest
Four years ago, Blink-182’s world fell apart. After an argument about whether the band would keep touring or take six months off escalated out of control, guitarist Tom DeLonge quit the group, had his manager deliver the news to bassist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker, and changed his phone number so they couldn’t reach him. DeLonge started a new band, Hoppus and Barker started another; neither did as well as Blink. DeLonge developed an “insane” addiction to prescription painkillers. Barker got divorced; trying to blot out the guilt of giving his children a broken home, he consumed “excessive amounts” of pills, weed and booze.
Then, last September, a plane Barker was on crashed during takeoff, killing two of his best friends and leaving him with second- and third-degree burns over half of his body. Improbably, the tragedy brought the three friends back together. “When human life comes into the equation,” DeLonge says, “that trumps everything.”
Ten months after the crash, Blink-182 stroll onstage for soundcheck at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. It’s the first night of their first tour since 2004 – and it’s already become one of the summer’s hottest tickets. In cities where the band used to sell 8,000 tickets, it’s now selling 28,000.
Backstage, the band members have separate dressing rooms (plus an extra one for their children). But although Hoppus, 37, and DeLonge, 33, no longer share a deli tray, they keep visiting each other – pretending to make out for a documentary film crew and cracking jokes. “When Blink plays, there’s no difference between that and everyone getting a slow, awesome hand job,” DeLonge says, before turning to Hoppus to add, “the way your dad used to do to you.”
“Are you wasted?” DeLonge asks a little later. “Do you need another drink?” Hoppus declines; he’s already downed Red Bull and Bombay Sapphire cocktails (which he calls “the Queen”). “I hate alcohol – I only drink when I tour,” DeLonge says. “And I tour nine months out of the year.”
DeLonge and Hoppus have been fucking with each other for nearly 20 years. In 1992, when Hoppus was 20, he moved to San Marcos, California (near San Diego), for college. His sister was friendly with the 16-year-old DeLonge; so on Hoppus’ second day in town, he hung out in DeLonge’s garage. They played music for hours, cracking the same jokes, finishing each other’s sentences. By that night, they had started a punk band. “I can’t believe we’re still playing music in our 30s,” DeLonge says. “I remember the day we wrote a song about a Boy Scout troop in the forest falling in love with each other.”
Barker, 33, joined Blink in 1998, improving the band’s dynamics and rhythms just in time for its third album, Enema of the State, which sold 5 million copies, fuelled by bratty, hypercatchy songs like ‘All the Small Things’ and ‘What’s My Age Again?’ Over their next two albums, Blink-182’s music became moodier and more expansive, as if the Descendents had morphed into the Cure. But they never stopped telling dick jokes onstage, and fans relished the spectacle of these pals showing off their immaturity for global audiences – right until they stopped talking.
“They thought I was trying to control the band by wanting to take time off,” DeLonge says of the 2005 breakup. “I thought they were trying to give me ultimatums over the fact that I needed to go home and be a family man.” Hoppus formed the electronica-flavoured +44 with Barker, started producing other musicians’ albums and took up scuba diving. Barker played with everyone from Rihanna to Dwight Yoakam, and starred with his then-wife, former Miss USA Shanna Moakler, in the MTV reality show Meet the Barkers. (He and Moakler have three children, including one from her prior relationship with boxer Oscar De La Hoya. Hoppus has one child and DeLonge has two.)
DeLonge’s new project was Angels and Airwaves, with an epic sweep heavily influenced by U2. DeLonge started abusing prescription pills around the time Blink broke up, because of an old back injury. “I was losing my mind because I was so hopped up on narcotics,” he says. When he finally stopped, he “cut it cold turkey and sat in a room for two weeks, puking my brains out and hallucinating.” He thinks the painkillers were responsible for his grandiose statements about his new music – he called it “the greatest rock & roll revolution for this generation.”
“It’s weird,” DeLonge says. “You start a band so you don’t have any rules – do it your way, fuck the system. And then you get in a partnership with your buddies, and every time someone makes a decision it directly affects you. And you’re like, ‘Wait a second – I didn’t want to be controlled.'”