![]() By then, Sublime were well-known up and down the coast from San Diego to Santa Barbara, beach towns were their turf. In 1990, one semester before graduating from California State University Long Beach with a degree in finance, Nowell dropped out to devote all his time to the band. Though there were few local clubs to play, house parties could bring a couple hundred bucks every weekend – enough to buy all the beer, pot and gasoline the band needed. From Sublime’s earliest recordings, his combination of ska, dub, punk, funk, rap, reggae and heavy metal seemed less like a synthesis than a natural byproduct of Long Beach’s youth culture. Nowell was a master at melding these sounds into something new. With cheaper rents than Hollywood and lots of available space, Long Beach had a thriving art underground in the ’80s, as well as a music scene in which punk, surf and hip-hop cultures clashed and blended freely. Unlike the wealthier, whiter suburbs of Orange County, where Brad’s mom lived, Long Beach is a funky old port town of 450,000, with affluent bayside communities – Belmont Shore and Naples – and Latino, African-American and Southeast Asian neighborhoods farther inland. “He was probably twice as intelligent as I am,” she says, “but he just wasn’t real school-minded.” Guidance counselors had a name for what was wrong with kids like Brad who failed to live up to their obvious potential – attention-deficit disorder – and a drug for it, too: Ritalin. ![]() He was a smart kid who got good grades and had the brains to make his younger sister, Kellie, do his homework whenever he didn’t want to. He lived with his mom, Nancy, for four years before moving back to his dad’s house in Long Beach, Calif., in 1981. By the time he was 13, he’d started his own band, Hogan’s Heroes. He devoured sounds, and could pick out a tune on the guitar after hearing it once. At Christmas, the acoustic guitars would come out and Brad would spend hours playing and singing with his father, grandfather and uncle. He grew up gifted and musically inclined: His mother was a singer with perfect pitch, and his father liked to strum folk songs on the guitar. These are a few of the things Brad Nowell loved: surfing eating drugs his dog, Louie his son, Jakob his wife, Troy and music – maybe music most of all. Incredibly, the band that is no longer a band has become perhaps the biggest American rock act of 1997. Sublime’s surviving members recently inked a deal to release at least three more albums of archival material over the next few years. The follow-up to “What I Got” was the reggae-tinged ballad “Santeria” then came the shuffling ska of “Wrong Way” and the dance-hall-flavored “Doin’ Time,” which Nowell constructed around the melody of the Gershwin standard “Summertime.”Įighteen months after Nowell’s death, Sublime sell about 40,000 records every week in November, MCA released Second-Hand Smoke, a collection of early songs, unissued material, remixes and alternate takes. Throughout 1997, Sublime produced hit after hit, and the album has sold more than 2 million copies to date. By April 1997, a little less than a year after Nowell’s OD, Sublime had entered Billboard‘s Top 20, and the album’s first single, the breezily grooving, mostly acoustic hip-hop toaster “What I Got,” went to No. Meet the Beatle: A Guide to Ringo Starr's Solo Career in 20 SongsĪt least a boxful. RS Recommends: 5 Devices You Need to Set Up Your Smart Home “We still get lots of letters for him,” says Brad’s father, Jim, who handles his son’s estate. In fact, plenty of Sublime fans don’t even know that Nowell is gone. The heroin death of the Smashing Pumpkins‘ touring keyboard player, Jonathon Melvoin, got more attention in the press. His death came seven days after his wedding to Troy den Denkker, who’d given birth to their son, Jakob, 11 months earlier it was two months before the release of Sublime, the album that would make his band famous. Bradley Nowell died on May 25, 1996, in a San Francisco hotel room, after shooting up some heroin that was much more potent than the brown Mexican tar he was used to. Sublime’s success has come as a slow-building surprise, rather than in a rush of mourning, and it’s been based on the sweet funk Nowell cooked up during his too-short 28-year love affair with punk, hip-hop, reggae and whatever other music he could lay his hands on. The story of Sublime is full of sad, strange twists, but this is perhaps the strangest: Since frontman Brad Nowell overdosed before his band became a phenomenon, before he had a chance to become a bona fide rock star, his death has been oddly free of the mythic impact of so many rock star flameouts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |