At the end of December, I made a short visit to the NYC to kick it with my main man W. Nathan "Nasty Nate" Aiken. I also wanted to hang in Queens with my friend Andrea "Dre" Schwartz. Dre represents Queens, but we met in D.C., so we’d never chilled together on her turf. Or with her hometown friends. Both of which sounded rad. On Thursday evening, the 28th of December, I met up with Dre and her peeps at a Lower East Side spot called the Skinny. If you have ever been to the Skinny, you’ll understand how it came to acquire that sobriquet. Having spent uncountable hours in D.C.’s own Adams-Morgan, I am used to bars in narrow spaces. But the Skinny is kind of extreme. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being not extreme, and 10 being extremely extreme, I give the Skinny’s narrowness a 9. It feels like it is about twelve feet wide.
At the Skinny, I was talking about music with Dre’s friend Matt. (I love talking about music.) We were discussing bands, specifically. More specifically, I mentioned that if I had to name my five favorite bands, not one would be American. At the time I think said, and this is in no particular order, Led Zeppelin, Los Amigos Invisibles, Queen, AC/DC and The Police. And actually, I’m going to make that top eight, so I can include New Order, the Clash and Super Furry Animals. Anyway, for the top five, one is Australian (although Bon Scott and both Angus and Malcolm Young were born in Scotland), one is Venezuelan, and the remaining three are English. If we make it top seven, we add a Welsh band and two more English ones. Matt expressed the opinion that the British really have us, as bands go. We’ve got some incredible musicians, no doubt, but American musicians frequently become famous as solo acts.
So I thought about what my favorite American band is. I thought of Sublime. I can think of a few people who will take issue with this (two Langley graduates come to mind), but I think Sublime had an absolutely fantastic sound. There are two things, I think, that a band can do to be great. One path is to pick one style, and play that better than anyone else. AC/DC is the best example. The other is to create a synthesis of more than one style. After you introduce it, other cats might start playing it, but the creation will be your own. The Police, Led Zeppelin, and Sublime are good examples of this.
The straight-up punky stuff Sublime did was good (especially if you dig the O.C. Punk, and I do), but I don’t think it was terribly groundbreaking. No, they made their mark with those reggae/hip-hop/ska/rock jams. That’s what got them on top 40 radio and made them beloved by whitebread college students across the nation. Their eponymous album put them over the top (it included the Modern Rock chart number one "What I Got," "Doin’ Time," "Santeria," and naughtiest of all, "Caress Me Down"). It was arguably the biggest rock album of 1997. But Brad Nowell, Sublime’s sublimely talented songwriter and singer, didn’t get to see any of this. Inexplicably, he had o.d.ed on heroin right before a European tour, and two months before the album ultimately came out. He died three days after he was married. There was nothing cool about this. It was just a shame. Due to this pointless event, Brad Nowell’s son will grow up without his father. His wife, family, friends, band mates and dalmatian were left behind. And that’s to say nothing of all the people who loved his music because it held meaning for them.
(I don’t mean to suggest in anyway that Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson, the other 2/3s of Sublime, are not incredible musicians whose talent was anything less than a critical part of the band’s success. I have the album they recorded as the Long Beach Dub All-Stars after Brad Nowell’s death, and it’s great. But it’s not Sublime.)
My favorite Sublime album is "40 Oz. to Freedom." This is technically their debut album. It was released in 1992 and was sold largely from the trunk of Brad’s car, a method that would later set Master P on his road to success. Brad Nowell was about 23 when he wrote the lyrics for many of the songs on "40 oz." When I was 23 I listened to that album a lot. Usually I pay a lot more attention to music than lyrics when I listen to CDs. But there was something about the stuff that he was writing about in those songs that got me. The thoughts he expressed felt awfully familiar. And Brad Nowell was only 23 when he composed those songs. This is the worst part of his death, for Sublime fans. Imagine what Sublime albums would have sounded like when the band had been around for 15 or 20 years. When they had been alternately cosseted and then discarded by the cruel mistress called fame. After they had gained the maturity and wisdom that comes with fatherhood, marriage, success, failure and an awareness of one’s own mortality? What kind of songs would Brad Nowell have written then? We shall never know.
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