Sublime: The Band That Shouldn't Work

On paper, Sublime makes no sense. A three-piece from Long Beach, California playing a genre salad of ska, punk, reggae, hip-hop, and dub that borrowed from every tradition without committing fully to any of them. The singer played guitar with one hand and a Dalmatian on the couch behind him. The bassist had a day job. The drummer kept the whole thing from falling apart through sheer force of pocket. None of this should have worked. All of it did.

The Long Beach Sound

Sublime came out of the Long Beach punk scene in 1988, but they never sounded like a punk band. Bradley Nowell had grown up listening to everything. His father played jazz. His friends played punk. The radio played reggae. He absorbed all of it and refused to choose. The result was a band that could play a hardcore punk song, pivot into a dub breakdown, drop a hip-hop verse over a ska upstroke, and make it feel like a single continuous idea rather than a genre exercise. That is harder than it sounds, and most bands who try it produce something that sounds like a sampler platter. Sublime produced something that sounded like Long Beach.

The early records, 40oz. to Freedom and Robbin' the Hood, were recorded cheap and sounded like it. That was the point. The lo-fi quality was part of the aesthetic, not a limitation. Nowell recorded parts of Robbin' the Hood on a four-track in his house, layering samples, live takes, and answering machine messages into something closer to a mixtape than a rock album.

The Gear

Nowell's rig was as eclectic as his music. His primary amp was a Mesa/Boogie Triple Rectifier, which gave him the saturated crunch for the punk and rock material. For the cleaner reggae and ska parts, he ran a Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus, the cleanest solid-state amp ever made, with its built-in stereo chorus adding shimmer to the offbeat skank. His pedalboard was minimal: a Boss OS-2 OverDrive/Distortion for mid-gain grit and a Boss DD-3 Digital Delay for the dub-influenced echo that ran through songs like Santeria.

His main guitar was a custom instrument built by Dan MacDonald, commonly called the Brown Guitar. It was a stripped-down, no-frills instrument that sounded exactly like what it was: a guitar played by someone who did not care about gear fetishism and cared about getting the sound in his head onto tape.

The Self-Titled Album

Sublime, the self-titled third album, was the one where everything came together. Paul Leary of the Butthole Surfers produced it with David Kahne, and the production was cleaner than anything the band had done before without losing the looseness that made them sound like Sublime. What I Got, Santeria, Wrong Way, Doin' Time, April 29, 1992. Five radio singles from a single album, each one pulling from a different genre, all of them sounding unmistakably like the same band.

Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose on May 25, 1996, in a San Francisco hotel room. He was 28 years old. The album came out two months later. It has sold over six million copies. The band that should not have worked became one of the biggest acts of the 1990s, and the person who made it all work was already gone.

Why It Still Matters

The thing about Sublime that gets lost in the mythology of Nowell's death is how genuinely innovative the music was. Nobody else was doing what they were doing. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones were playing ska-core in Boston. Operation Ivy had done punk-ska in Berkeley. But nobody was blending reggae, punk, hip-hop, and dub with the fluency and naturalness that Sublime brought to it. The genre-hopping was not a gimmick. It was how Nowell heard music. He did not experience genres as separate categories. He experienced them as a single continuum, and his band played that continuum.

Slightly Stoopid, Pepper, 311, Dirty Heads, Iration. The entire reggae-rock and surf-punk genre that followed Sublime is essentially a footnote to what Nowell built. Some of those bands are good. None of them have the range. None of them switch between hardcore punk and lovers rock within a single song the way Sublime did on April 29, 1992. That track is five minutes long and contains more ideas than most bands put on an entire album.

The band should not have worked. It worked anyway. That is the whole story of Sublime, and it is the reason the music still sounds like nothing else thirty years later.

Explore Sublime, the Mesa/Boogie Triple Rectifier, and ska punk on Sonic City.