I had to tell him all the time that he could sing a lot better than the jerk-offs we had singing for us. How Do Great Artists End Up Making Horrible Albums?īrad was mad smart, and he had a huge vocabulary and he had a lot of passion for whatever he did. We went home and right away, by the next day or so, we wrote “Date Rape.” And then we wrote a lot of songs off that first album. These guys were in the air more than they were on the ground! They’d throw their horns up in the air, throw them to their roadies. That was my first introduction to seeing anything that was like ska. Then we went to go see Fishbone for a free gig. I got into early rocksteady, and the Specials. I started learning that it all had the same attitude. I was listening to Bob Marley stuff and wasn’t feeling it at first, but I remember we were driving in Brad’s Jeep Cherokee and he had these subwoofers. I wanted to play with Brad and we just meshed so good together, so I played it anyway.īrad had gone to the Caribbean with his dad and heard reggae for the first time and then came back here all stoked about it. They introduced ska to me, and I wasn’t into it. We started playing in this band called Sloppy Seconds. So we decided not to drive the Lotus anymore.Īnd Brad introduced you to reggae, right? Brad was driving really fast and we almost went off a cliff. I think we had, like, two originals. And then we took his dad’s Lotus out and that wasn’t a good idea. This drunk guy sang and we played some punk songs. But it was supposed to be a party. We were called Hogan’s Heroes at that point. You know, actually, our first gig was at his mom’s house, because they were out of town. What was your first gig together? Like do you remember? And if I hadn’t met him, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. And he helped me broaden my horizons for music. So when he came to Long Beach, he found out about punk rock and other stuff like the Cure. There’s not even sidewalks in Tustin – it’s kind of country, so he was sheltered. He moved to Long Beach, to his dad’s, because his mom couldn’t control him anymore. How far along was Brad as a musician and performer at that point? I had no idea that I was any good at playing bass until then. So I came over the next day with that Orlando bass. Brad and I jammed and we were playing Circle Jerks, Exploited and whatever we could pick up that we both knew. At the time, I was playing in this really shitty punk rock band and I sucked at guitar. You guys will play good together.” I went over there and I had a guitar. Can’t go on the road, come back and think you have the strength to catch a wave!Ī friend of mine that was a musician called me up and he goes, “There’s this guy that lives near you. I surfed for like 10 years and then we got on the road and then I stopped surfing because it’s a lifestyle. But when I met Brad and started jamming with him, he taught me how to surf. I wasn’t into it until I started figuring out that it was cool to play it And I didn’t have much else going for me. And I was kind of turned off about music because he literally had it all the time on this old tube radio. Well, I grew up around music 24/7 my dad had the jazz station on all time. Probably some Minor Threat song or Sham 69 or something like that.Īnd did you have a sense right away that music was what you were meant to do? I was kind of trying to learn how to play guitar, and then my dad bought a knockoff of the SG bass called the Orlando.Īnd what was the first stuff you learned to play? But I never liked the trumpet, so I never got good at it. And he handed me a trumpet one day and said drums are too much to carry around. How did that all work for you? And Was that your first instrument? Tell me a little bit about growing up and starting to play bass. “And that’s what no one else really did.” Sublime’s self-titled breakthrough album turns 25 on July 30th, and in an interview on the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, Wilson - the only original member of the band to play in Sublime with Rome, the band’s current incarnation - looked back on his early days with the band’s late frontman, Bradley Nowell. “The coolest thing we achieved is we took all those different influences and made them ours in one song,” says Sublime co-founder Eric Wilson.
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