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Within months, Nowell would be dead of a heroin overdose, leaving behind an infant son, a widow, and a posthumous masterpiece that would become one of the most revered (and wrongly reviled) albums of the last quarter-century. In the wake of their unlikely, untasteful smash “Date Rape,” Sublime had signed to Gasoline Alley, a subsidiary of MCA, which warily financed the gonzo recording saga that would yield the six-times-platinum Sublime, released 25 years ago this week. Jagged reefs lurked among the sun-surf-smoke-ska synthesists when they arrived on the shores of Lake Travis during the final weeks of the winter of 1996. Pure serendipity for a band whose lead singer, Bradley Nowell, could produce little photographic evidence of actually owning any shirts. Its attitude was perhaps best defined by a hand-painted “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem” sign. No more harmonious spot could have existed for the LBC house-party heroes than the compound that the Red Headed Stranger terraformed into a 75-acre outlaw hacienda of breezy creativity and reefer madness. Law enforcement in the Lone Star State was no more friendly, but it’s substantially easier to stash a week’s worth of narcotics in a 33-foot traveling motorcoach than the limited apertures of the human body.Īt the end of the trail lay Willie Nelson’s Pedernales Studios, a hallowed shrine for habitually baked experimentation that had hosted Neil Young and Ray Charles, Carlos Santana and Daniel Johnston.
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More importantly, it skirted any potential conflict between the “Smoke Two Joints” trio and the Federal Aviation Administration, an agency traditionally uncharitable to the interstate transport of illicit substances. A road trip allowed them to gig all along the 1,383-mile stretch from Long Beach to Austin. In Sublime’s defense, it seemed like an act of shrewd lunacy.