From Blink-182 to today's rising bands, San Diego's local music scene shows how place and timing can shape an artist's future and forge a lasting connection with fans. With Dan Ozzi, co-author of Mark Hoppus' new memoir, we explore strokes of luck and the beauty of a local live music scene that streaming can't replace.
Today on The Finest, we have a show that expands on some of the themes from our earlier music episodes, although you don't need to have heard them to get it. Those themes are the factor of luck, streaming and the beauty of a local scene — but with a little historical twist. We'll dive into some of the lesser known but essential parts of the Blink-182 story. But our first stop is a little more recent, at this summer's North Park Music Fest.
And then I looked at it and I was like, oh, wow, Mark, this is so great — nobody cares about this. I'm like, let's start with you. And he was like, OK.Dan and Mark spent many hours in Mark's basement. Mark would tell him the story of his life and Dan would try to shape it into a narrative.And from that point we kind of do it Google Doc back and forth style.
What if Julianna's tour was a few months earlier? What if that big-name manager had been in a better mood? For Blink, of course, the breaks went their way. And I and the rest of San Diego are eternally grateful. Blink's improbable, multi-decade run has become so legendary at this point that it's a multi-generational phenomenon. I met multiple Blink-182 families at the book event.
And in fact, it's funny 'cause like I'll see a lot of punk or hardcore bands and they'll do a thing with Taco Bell or Spotify or whatever, and they'll post about it. And that would have gotten you run out of town in 1996 or whatever. But you look now and all the comments are like, good for you, get the bag.
I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer, lead writer and composer is Anthony Wallace. Our engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.Blink-182, from left, Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker, arrive at the Teen Choice Awards 2001 in Universal City, Calif., Sunday, Aug. 12, 2001. The group won Choice Rock Group.Blink 182 accepts the Best Group Video award for their song"All the Small Things" at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Thursday, Sept.
In a way, they made me into the person I am today. So when Mark Hoppus — one of the band's two frontmen — released his memoir earlier this year, I devoured it in just a couple days. And I jumped at the chance to talk with the book's co-writer, Dan Ozzi, at our KPBS studio. He, too, has loved Blink since childhood, since long before he became a writer.Like Tom. Mark had the purple. And we bleached our hair and my first learner's permit, I have blond hair in that 'cause of Mark.
I remember a band from my hometown that played a showcase for a big-name manager who wanted to sign them. When he saw them live, he suddenly decided he didn't like how the singer played piano on stage. He backed out, and the band basically crumbled. People got mad, they felt like they had some ownership of the bands that they liked and they were losing it to something bigger. But I think that that's been obliterated now that people don't buy stuff. Now it's like, OK, if you don't like something, just click somewhere else. People don't have that same ownership.
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