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It was so fucked up and the humiliation was so vilifying for Mark. It hurt his self esteem and it sounded like he never healed back. Travis has always said “Tom wanted me to play drums on his songs and you know I’m always down to play for anyone” but it was more than that to me because, according to Travis and his book, he was the one who turned Tom into post-hardcore music that year (he said Tom was only listening to the same punk rock records over and over so he got him into Fugazi, Quicksand, and hardcore bands) and I’m no longer sure that BCR was just this little thing that snowballed. Mostly because Tom didn’t say anything to Mark until it was too late, but also Travis and Jerry Finn and the label were just all intentionally leaving Mark out. So much that even in the book Mark is still wondering why no one wanted to talk about BCR with him. I also picked up on that thing about Jennifer - the part where she’s shouting at Tom on the phone because he’s on tour with a newborn at home seems something in passing but I think it was put in the book because it’s important. Another thing that should be said is that Mark and Tom have always been straight-up awful at communicating. That’s the glue that holds any relationship together, whether it’s a band or anything else, and they just couldn’t get it right. Mark talks about all the fighting and shouting in the book, but it seems like Mark and Tom weren’t big on really confronting each other head-on when it mattered. With the stalker it was Travis who told her to get lost while Mark and Tom were smiling and signing the albums, and with Fat Mike it was Travis once again who had the guts to call him out because he was friendly with them IRL but he always trashed blink on stage 😅 Makes you wonder how things might’ve played out if they’d just hashed things out directly. With BCR but also in 2005 and 2014/15.

Yea I think the success of Dammit is usually overstated. I didn’t hear of blink until WMAA and I watched MTV religiously at that time. I’m sure it popped off in California and other regions but blink was still very much underground in Michigan until Enema popped off.

"Dammit" was rough for a single despite being a very polished song on DR. The label didn't care because nobody signed them (Cargo did, not MCA). That's a lottery win right there considering they didn't have a lot of people in their corner.

I think the reason I like Dude Ranch so much is that I feel like Mark and Tom's songs were equally great.

It is kind of interesting how Mark was sort of the ‘lead’ of the band and Tom was the lovable ‘2nd lead’ on the lesser known hits (aside ATST) then things sort of flipped after the Boxcar dealio and then certainly by Self Titled Tom became the new ‘lead’ of the band’s image. Now Mark feels a tad old and Tom feels like the lead again for the most part, although, things just different overall. I do think the band was most identifiable and stable when it was the Mark Tom & Travis show though, obviously. blink is so interesting!!! No bands ever do this

Dammit wasn't really a hit title meaning it needed the Growing Up after it as a single. Dick Lips could never be single material and was only released in Australia without a music video and no extra title, but if they released that in the US as a different title like Nothing to Do or Please Mom I think it would've been a hit. It seems Mark was prioritized when it came to singles.

I wonder if 43-45 year olds are very into blink now. I always felt they were too old, but might be the perfect age.

^Well apparently he was being used and abused by these guys (like some of us said) so I do feel sorta bad. Tom is just passionate about this stuff, he wasn’t all psychotic obsessed until he met these guys. Not taking all the blame away from Tom for being over the top with it but it does make more sense.

Yeah, like Mark says, Tom was the grandiose one. He had a penchant of wanting to do wild, big, audacious things and Mark had to figure out how to do that and make it work. In terms of success in the music industry, Tom and him won the lottery 5 times in one lifetime. After Enema came out and did what it did, Mark had been the lead singer for 5-6 of their singles by this point. Only ATST was Tom's. Was that song a giant ploy by him to write a big hit? ATST seemed so calculated and perfect. I always wonder if that friendly rivalry was there at that point. Take that, add a prescription drug addiction, every album is consistently popular, business ventures like loserkids and atticus doing super well, mobs of obsessed kids, a wife with newborns who would prefer you had nobody to answer to for your job, waning interest in the "punk" genre, your best friend and bandmate not loving all your ideas, the last time you stepped out of his comfort zone with your career he freaked out, and the paranoia/disillusionment of being a rock star with people judging every thing you do, and I think you get why Tom was difficult/secretive. I always sided with Mark in the sense that Tom took much needed time off and decided to start a new band and that's fucked up when you bitch and moan about touring too much or missing your family. The duality of Delonge.

Long ass rant here, I'm still in 97 in Mark's book but it has me thinking... I've often wondered if Dude Ranch and Enema had come out in 94-96, would they be even bigger or was 97-99 undisputedly the perfect time for them. Hard to argue it could have been better, but I'm open. On one hand the 2000-2005 years are during the emergence of Napster and thus their literal numbers in album sales are punctured by that. They had an insanely ravenous fanbase for sure, but the changing of the times/lack of album sales probably hurt their overall reach despite being a big fish in the rock world circa the new millennium. Blink was big, but not Limp Bizkit big, not Red Hot Chili Peppers big, they were not Creed big. Yeah I had to look this up, cause this may surprise you, but Creed outsold all these bands by a couple million in 1999. Truly they were taking butt-rock higher than rap/rock or pop/punk were. But blink was strategically smart about what they put out in that TOYPAJ was a grand summation of blink at that point and displayed how far they had come and knew their strengths. They didn't seem to have a real identity crisis until 2002 and really lead them "going for it" with untitled. It again, suited them and the times. They weren't Radiohead, but they actually brought something to the table and dare I say it, were pretty unique in their sound. Then they crashed along with the music industry. It's kind of perfect, but the industry was a pale imitation of its former self by that point and blink wasn't going to sell 5 million albums on a singular continent anymore. However, compared to Limp Bizkit or Creed, they were way more alive and re-inventing themselves for newer audiences and old fans to dig into as controversial that record was at the time (I distinctly remember people not getting it on first listen and felt betrayed by their ill-conceived efforts to sound more "mature"). In 1999, being "punk" was harder to quantify nor did it actually matter to most consumers/tastemakers. Blink were never tethered to ideals beyond playing their music for as many people as they can. They just loved punk music and made something resembling that. It's pure in a way. But they had no broad, strident morals or codes in terms of who they were (beyond maybe being on Girls Gone Wild compilations or something, who knows what they actually turned down during that time) and were in the music industry to be anti-rockstars by removing all pretenses of being "cool" or "above it" or devoid of even caring about social awareness of .. anything. Largely if it was funny, or maybe cool, blink was into it and for it. The skate-surf community was like this throughout the 90s and was getting bigger and bigger. You had the rise of surf-shop turned mall stores like PacSun, and shows like Jackass, who all came from this movement. If there was a poster-band for this movement, blink 182 was kind of it despite really having nothing to do with them. Looking at Blink in 99, the big takeaways from their music, image, and interviews were "we're stupid and gross, and who cares, nudity is funny, the backstreet boys ARE pretentious but our pseudo-contemporaries which is weird, can you believe we're paid to do this? who wants to see the new star wars/south park movie?". Seeing them next to antics of Tom Green (who you could argue influenced skate culture or vice-versa) was not surprising. You kind of forget Mark and Tom had a show called You Idiot! that was the most MTV in 99 thing. It was the kind of thing that you would be made fun of if it was 94 and I wonder why the show largely didn't work (I have a feeling Mark doesn't even mention it in his book). The most deep thing you got from them was a suicide song (that was rather brilliant on Mark's part) which felt whip-lash inducing when you look at the track list on Enema. It allowed them to have a dark ballad in their pocket. It showed there was something underneath. Not everything was burritos and porn stars. It also perfectly coincided with the youth who were shellshocked by columbine. While this was right after TEB's Jumper, Mark's version of the end was some Pagliacci shit. It's rather stark coming from a group of guys who seemed to big on the upswing and seemingly forever grinning at their own puerile nature and exploits. And with that, the album really was the perfect encapsulation of the horned up, prosperous but depressed American male teen archetype of the late 90s. That's the big secret sauce with the band, they seemed like normal dudes who got off on being immature and funny. They wanted to be in movies, they wanted to be in any magazine, they were above being embarrassed or "un-cool", undercut themselves constantly, etc. They didn't care if you liked it or not, or found it needy, or found it annoying. It was them. That was perfectly in fashion because the dream of the anti-corporate 90s was all but dead in 1999 and buying in with ironic detachment was the best way to "win" really. MTV had the pulse of the 15-25 year-olds from 91-96, and then shifted to 12-18 year-olds by 97-99 because they didn't know what a MP3 was. Timing is everything. So basically, did everything kind of work out perfectly until they broke up or what? Could they have been bigger?

New addition to the timeline website! found flyer for this show (huge and massive credits to 311Archive for sharing it!) 8/8/1996: The band performs at Club La Vela in Panama City, Florida as a part of Warped Tour 1996. Other bands included Pennywise, Fishbone, CIV, Red 5, Down By Law, Samiam, Rocket From The Crypt, Fluf, Strung Out, Guttermouth and Mr.Miranga. Source : https://311archive.com/1996/08/08/8-8-96-panama-city-fl/

I guess I'm not surprised, but Tom's daughter works for live nation now.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIcS1LFBPM0/ damn he looked so dumb in that pic u posted there, glad he got over himself and started just being a kool dude again

Lmfao this is wild and everyone here should watch it. Never thought I’d hear DJ Vlad talking about Tom DeLonge 🤣

Just got general admission tickets to see Social D in Grand Rapids on July 5. They were only $52.50 a piece and that’s after all fees! Crazy. No backing tracks, no overpriced tickets. Thank you for saving rock n’ roll Mike Ness!!!

in recent years tom has been stuck on forcing jokes from like 2001 that are not funny anymore but these wordplay in the flyer made me laugh, well done blink(im sure tho its ppl working for them who found those just like they have ppl writing their music now, ahah they r basicaly just fronting puppets i guess now)

Honestly I feel like you kind of CAN blame Tom based on almost everything we know, which is quite a bit. According to the book, he deliberately avoided telling Mark and waited until the project was well into development to even tell him about it, only then underselling it as a simple acoustic thing. He then also left him in the dark as the coterie of agents, managers, label execs and Travis (!) got involved. part of me feels like Travis hasn't been as truthful regarding his participation. is there something we don't know about mark then? was he annoying or pissing people off, driving people like rick, tom, travis, even jerry finn to want him absent? then, for Tom to play both sides — this went way beyond my control, but also I’m fine with doing radio, tour, promo, videos — is telling. that and he had originally asked for time off after his back injury… Mark says this in the book, but you’d think that if he really needed the time away from touring, he wouldn’t mount two full-scale tours back to back like BCR did in 2002. what seals the deal is that after having sort-of buried the hatchet, two years later, Mark was mistakenly copied on emails about Tom’s secret solo project (this was in 2004, right before they broke up). why would tom again be looking for the door or planning something solo without being truthful to mark about it? Mark even writes: “The message to me was clear: Tom thought I held him back from greatness.” while it sounds like conjecture and somewhat parasocial to analyze, i've always felt like it was entirely duplicitous of him. it feels like tom got what he wanted -- fame and fortune -- and became embarrassed with their image and sound. maybe he got tired of sharing the limelight with mark. mark mentions the wife and life arms race they were having in '01. he even says that tom became secretive when he wasn't previously, and if you read between the lines, it's not hard to glean that a lot of tom's problems stemmed from his marriage. perhaps there were people in his circle like jen that pushed him to do things like BCR and later AVA that made *him* more of the star. at the end of the day, it happened and there was no obvious reason for it to happen. it's just fucked up it did and i'm surprised to this day that mark can forgive him, honestly. way to humiliate him at the peak of their success on the world stage.

"Let's talk about AI...."

AI is gonna turn the friggin frogs gay

You really feel for him during the box car chapter. I’d be devastated if my two best mates started another band without me. You can’t really blame Tom either imo, I think the whole project kinda snowballed and wasn’t meant to be as big as it was. I’m still devastated that album isn’t a blink album, imagine those songs with Mark on them

I loved the chapters on his childhood in that desert town. I think his childhood and all those worries and insecurities he had because of his parents’ divorce play a huge role in understanding why he feels the way he does in the band—like he’s always battling this sense of not being good enough, or how he was so lost when the band broke up.

Darby Crash only died a few hours earlier than John Lennon and got overshadowed!

Tom said on that Morse pod he's going to start demoing this summer.

That would ruin the joke!

So you skipped over Nirvana…straight from the Germs to the Foo? lol