Blink-182 turns trash into treasure

With a new album and video, punk act's drummer says this is growing up

By MARK CARPOWICH
Staff Writer

Losing a band member is never easy. So when original drummer Scott Raynor left Blink-182 about a year ago, his bandmates found themselves down in the dumps.
Which is where they went looking for his replacement.
"I was working as a trashman in Laguna Beach, and it was like Disneyland," said Travis Barker, now playing drums with the new-and-improved San Diego punk trio, of his pre-big-time life. "Laguna Beach is beautiful, and if I had to do it again I would."
For now, though, Barker will keep his day job, thank you. With its new album, Enema of the State, debuting at No. 9 on the Billboard charts, Blink-182 - Barker, guitarist Tom DeLonge and bassist Mark Hoppus - continues to ride the wave of success stirred up by its previous album, 1997's Dude Ranch, and the two hit singles it spawned, "Dammit" and "Josie."
For Barker, the timing could not have been better. It was in the spring of 1998 - not long after the band's appearance at USC's Springfest - that Raynor left Blink-182 "due to internal problems that are none of your business," as Hoppus tells fans on the band's web site. Raynor walked out only hours before a show at which Blink-182 and the Aquabats, with whom Barker was then playing, were sharing the bill.
Panicked, Hoppus and De-Longe approached Barker and asked him to learn all of Dude Ranch in an hour. He did, and in the blink of an eye, the band had its new drummer.
"The main drums on all (Blink's) other albums were real repetitious, kind of the same formula over and over again," Barker said. "So when we wrote this album, I was in charge of arrangements, and Mark and Tom concentrated on a lot of the singing and melodies."
Enema sees the band moving forward, with Barker's more complicated drum parts nudging Blink-182 past the offerings of other, dime-a-dozen punk acts. Unlike Dude Ranch and its predecessor, Cheshire Cat, though, the new album offers a bit more variety in tempo and sound, and lacks the in-your-face, sexually driven naughty humor the band has, um, put out in the past.
"It is more mature, but there's still some silly stuff on there," says Barker of Enema. "But I think we were more interested in rocking on this album. I guess you could say we've matured a little bit, but we're still not that mature."
Take, for instance, the video for Blink-182's new single, "What's My Age Again?", which features the band streaking through various parts of Los Angeles, and through the set of a mock Gap commercial and shows like Talk Soup and Jim Rome's The Final Word. Wearing skin-colored briefs, the band members' members were censored via tiling, though anyone who has seen the band play live didn't have to use much imagination.
"On the last part of our (summer 1998) tour, we'd been playing in our underwear, just because it had been so hot wherever we'd been," Barker said. "The (video's) director knew that we were kind of weird, and thought it would be great to have us run naked through the whole thing. We thought about it a while, that us running naked would be kind of creepy, but it actually worked out for the best."
Even if their new video doesn't make them stars, the boys of Blink-182 have plenty of fans who are. As the "official band" of Jim Rome's radio show, Blink has enlisted the services of Alyssa Milano, The Brady Bunch's Florence Hender-son and porn star Janine to appear in its videos. Janine is also on the cover of Enema, an appearance the band didn't have to try too hard to arrange.
"We just wanted a hot girl on our cover, and we were thinking about people like Jennifer Love Hewitt or someone like that, but then we were like, ŒLet's get a full porn star'," Barker said. "We went to Vivid Video and said, ŒWe want to get one of your girls to be on the cover of our CD,' and (Janine) was like, ŒI like those guys. I want to do it.'"
Though older than the throngs of teenage girl fans who swoon over the band, Janine is among many who have contributed to Blink-182's success. As co-headliners of this summer's Vans Warped Tour (in San Bernardino Thursday and Friday), the band members hope you come see them play. You just may see more than you'd bargained for.