Working with name producers Paul Leary and David Kahne, Sublime finished the upcoming album that would be its bid for a career-solidifying breakthrough.
Sublime’s climb to national recognition started early in 1995, when KROQ, alerted by Phyllipz, began to pump “Date Rape.” The song kindled interest in the overlooked, 3-year-old “40oz.” album, which went on to sell 151,000 copies, according to SoundScan.Ī contract with MCA ensued. He had such a huge impact on so many people in the whole scene.” It’s not sad for him-he’s gone-but it’s sad for everybody else. “Bradley definitely had a gift, and it sickens me that I’m not going to be able to enjoy his voice anymore. “His voice is like candy to your ears,” Stefani, her voice shaky with sadness, said Friday from aboard No Doubt’s tour bus in New York City. Singer Gwen Stefani recorded two duets with Nowell-one for Sublime’s “Robbin’ the Hood,” another for No Doubt’s “The Beacon Street Collection.” No Doubt, the high-flying Anaheim ska-rock band, also shared many bills and a mutual admiration with Sublime. “But when you saw them hit and do a great performance, it made up for every time.” Sublime’s free-form concerts were “always hit or miss,” Phyllipz said. None of the four shows I saw over the past few years were fully satisfying, and the band’s most prominent area performance, an appearance at last year’s KROQ Weenie Roast, was a chaotic, listless failure. There is no filler as it finds a cohesive focus in struggles social and personal, and there is no attempt to rekindle the novelty success of “Date Rape.”Īs a live band, Sublime was erratic. The upcoming, and final, album is Sublime’s best. “40oz.” is a solid album (it contained the atypically fanciful “Date Rape,” a too-breezy morality play depicting the harsh payback handed out to a sex offender), but “Robbin’ the Hood,” basically a home-recording project, is half-stuffed with noodling filler. Some of the most memorable moments came when Nowell, who could have been a marvelous folk singer, stripped the music down to its barest elements-his voice and a lone guitar. It also deployed thrashing punk beats, alterna-rock guitar riffing, rap elements and lighter, skipping ska rhythms. Trenchant reggae rhythms were Sublime’s musical foundation. It really came from within,” said Tazy Phyllipz, a young rock impresario who helped push Sublime toward mass exposure.
Nowell was one of the most gifted singers the local alternative-rock scene has produced the emotion in his delivery was palpable and uncontrived. Instead, it’s worth remembering the honest, emotionally unstinting and stylistically varied way in which much of his music grapples with what was in his own consciousness-fundamental questions of escape versus responsibility and despair versus hope. The three records he made as Sublime’s singer, guitarist and songwriter hold decisive evidence that Nowell deserves to be remembered for more than the triviality of his coming into the public’s consciousness, and the sordidness of his going. The front man of Long Beach rock and reggae trio Sublime, Nowell arrived as the singer of a cartoonish novelty hit, “Date Rape,” that even he came to find annoying he departed as an apparent heroin casualty, found dead May 25 in a San Francisco hotel room at the age of 28.īut the sadness of an early and pointless death will be unfairly compounded if Nowell goes down in rock memory merely as a guitar-toting druggie who got lucky with a lightweight song, then got very unlucky with his habits. In his introduction to the public last year, and in his exit last weekend, Brad Nowell became the embodiment of sad show-biz cliches.
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