![]() Despite existing in the shadow of Nowell, the band has earned a dedicated following in its own right, especially among music fans who tend to congregate at the crossroads of jam bands, reggae-rap, and ska-punk. Impressed by Ramirez’s knowledge of the band’s catalog as well as his vocal similarities to the late Nowell, Wilson asked him in to join a revived iteration of the group that would, after a legal skirmish with Nowell’s estate over the use of the name “Sublime,” eventually be called Sublime with Rome. in the mid-2000’s and began bumming around the music scene, eventually meeting Sublime’s former bassist, Eric Wilson. “I wanted to be that.” In pursuit of his goal, a near-broke Ramirez moved to L.A. “All I wanted to do was be in a Sublime cover band,” the 30-year-old Ramirez tells me of his younger self, calling from his home in Los Angeles. While bouncing back and forth between Oakland and San Diego as a teen, he’d internalized Sublime’s aesthetic sensibility, and, with little in the way of post-school prospects, decided to dedicate his life to making music like his heroes. This was the situation Rome Ramirez found himself in shortly after he graduated high school. There have been better bands - and, doubtlessly, ones whose politics haven’t aged extremely poorly - but only a handful who were able to communicate an entire worldview to their listeners. As a 15-year-old who’d never so much as seen a joint, I remember listening to Sublime and concluding that this music sounded like how smoking weed felt. The key to Sublime’s success, however, was its ability to use this musical omnivorousness as a means through which to articulate a specific lifestyle, one that prized skating, surfing, drinking beers, smoking weed, and generally chilling as hard as humanly possible above all else. ![]() Led by the late Bradley Nowell, the band synthesized a truly staggering range of influences, pivoting from SoCal ska-punk ( “Seed”) to Misfits-style horror-prom ballads ( “New Realization”) to dubbed-out trip-hop tracks that crib their choruses from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess ( “Doin’ Time”). Now, imagine your favorite band is Sublime. And how are you, an 18-year-old kid, supposed to fill the shoes of your musical hero? Is it even possible? Do you even try? Now, imagine randomly meeting the bassist for that band, impressing him with your knowledge of his band’s catalog, and then being asked to join that band as their new frontman. Your favorite band, the band you obsess over - the band whose songs you’ve played and sung so many times that you know them backwards and forwards and inside out - has been broken up since you were eight years old, when their lead singer died of a heroin overdose. That tragic loss effectively ended the band (aside from a reboot in 2009 as Sublime with Rome)-but certainly not their influence, which has since reigned over third-wave ska, rap rock, nu-metal, 21st-century genre-obliterators like twenty one pilots and Post Malone, and even Lana Del Rey.Imagine, if you will, being 18. These restless anthems would prove even more potent in the wake of Nowell’s death from a heroin overdose, just two months prior to the album’s release. With 1996’s Sublime, the band made its launch into the mainstream with career-defining hits “What I Got,” “Santeria,” “Wrong Way,” and “Doin’ Time,” all of which reveal Nowell as a sharp, sincere poet of the times with his evocative tales of unfaithful lovers, broken homes, and the sun-dazed illusion of lovin’ and livin’ easy. Sublime name-dropped Bob Marley and KRS-One, covered Grateful Dead and Toots & The Maytals, sampled Primal Scream and The Doors, and introduced Gwen Stefani (on “Saw Red”) at least a year before No Doubt began their rise out of Orange County. ![]() That album and its follow-up, 1994’s Robbin’ the Hood, are scrappy, lo-fi documents of coming-of-age revelations fueled by sex, drugs, and a voracious appetite for rock, reggae, and hip-hop. Sidestepping grunge’s moody rock template, Sublime slipped their hardcore melodies with rocksteady riddims, thick dub bass, furious record scratching, and savvy hip-hop sampling, and unabashedly washed it all down with cans of malt liquor-the titular inspiration for their self-released 1992 debut, 40oz. Coming out of Long Beach, California, the trio of vocalist/guitarist Bradley Nowell, bassist Eric Wilson, and drummer Bud Gaugh joined forces in 1988 and soon led the charge in spreading SoCal punk-an urgent, unruly mix of rebel calls drenched in sun, surf, and stoner philosophy-to unsuspecting suburban homes across the U.S. ![]() Sublime’s woozy, skanky ska-punk not only represents the “LBC,” but also ‘90s alternative at its most defiant and decadent.
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