PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE Friday, March 13, 1998
BY SCOTT MERVIS, WEEKEND EDITOR, POST-GAZETTE
GOOD TIMES, RAD TIMES
BLINK 182 FIGHTS FOR THEIR RIGHT TO PARTY

Blink 182 singer and bassist Mark Hoppus is on the phone from icy cold Rochester, N.Y., describing what life is like back in the outskirts of San Diego, where temperatures below 60 throw the inhabitants into a tizzy. "In the same day," he boasts, "we've gone snowboarding in the morning in the mountains, come back and gone [surfing] in the afternoon and skateboarding at night."
When life is that "rad," there's no reason to feel the vein-popping angst that tormented such punk icons as Joe Strummer, Bob Mould and Henry Rollins.
So, rather than put on some big phony show of rebellion, the three members of Blink 182 just go with their fun-loving flow. The trio has been bouncing along on punk package deals like the Vans Warped Tour and now the Swatch Sno-Core Tour playing poppy songs about girls and bodily functions in a breakneck burst of speed.
With the success of the new single, "Dammit," they're even up to second billing and 50 minutes of stage time on the Sno-Core lineup with Primus, the Aquabats and the Alkaholiks.
Fifty minutes is all Blink 182 ever really wants to rock the worlds of their young fans.
"Any band that plays for more than an hour should be shot," Hoppus says. "Primus is different 'cause their songs are long, and they're just jammin, they' re rad at it. But basically any band that plays more than an hour is really bad news."
It only takes MTV two minutes and 45 seconds to play the cartoony video for "Dammit," which has put Blink 182 and its second record, "Dude Ranch," on the charts and in the CD changers of teen-agers across America. "It exposes our music to a whole hell of a lot more people in a hurry," Hoppus says of MTV. "And it' s really helped us out a lot. . . . The only down side is that there are people who come to the shows who only know us for that one song, and that's kind of a bum-out at times, you know. We're definitely more than that one song."
Don't worry. Hoppus, guitarist Tom DeLonge and drummer Scott Raynor, who was 14 when the band started five years ago, never bum out for long. And, unlike Green Day even, they aren' t given to the kind of introspection that would require slowing down for two seconds to express deep thoughts. "I think we all still have the high school mentality," says Hoppus, the band's elder statesman at 25, "and I hope I never lose that. There' s plenty of time in your life to worry about bills and to grow up and all that [stuff], and you only get one chance to be young and I'm gonna hold onto that for as long as possible."
Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins can scream and pose and writhe in anguish all they want. Blink 182 would rather embody the current feel-good sentiment of modern rock radio.
"I don't like listening to bands who just sit there and piss and moan about everything that's wrong in the world," Hoppus says. "There' s things that depress you that you can deal with, and there's things that are upsetting that you can't deal with - and you deal with the things you can. I think kids are more in tuned to just going out and having fun with their friends and not worrying about all the bad [stuff] in the world." Blink 182 will go on singing about girl troubles and being the, um, masters of their own domains. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for their art, rock stardom hasn't changed everything.
"That' s one of the big fallacies about being in a band, that all these girls immediately come flocking to you. If we were like good-looking guys who wrote rad music and were good musicians that might be one thing. But we' re just a bunch of dorks who happen to be in a band so we don't get the girls that other bands would."
What they get mostly are teen-age boys taking their aggression out on their friends and neighbors. To the obligatory question of what he thinks of mosh pits, Hoppus has a mixed response.
"When I first started going to punk shows there was a sense of camaraderie in the pit. It was basically just a bunch of kids running around bumping into each other and having fun. . . .
Now, there' s more guys who are all tough-guy and they go in the pit just to knock people around. It's not the place for kids to take out their anger at their parents on their fellow show-goers, you know?"
While not in the mosh pit, Blink 182 fans can while away the hours trying to decipher the band's name. It was just plain Blink until an Irish techno band had its lawyers place a call to them. Why they added 182 - as opposed to say "Jr." - has been explained in various ways over the years: It was taken from the movie "Turk 182." Or, it was the number on the life raft that saved Hoppus' grandfather in WWII. Or, it's Hoppus' ideal weight. Those are the ones we can print.
What's the current explanation?
"It's the number of times Al Pacino says [a certain word for intercourse] in 'Scarface.'"
"Is it even close to that?"
"I have no idea," Hoppus says. "Someone told me that."
-sent to me by "bbb" from loserkids.com chat