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Nowell's last gift to everyone else is this outstanding album. The first song on it, Garden Grove, features a scratchy, staccato guitar riff, characteristic of ska, along with sampled snatches of sound and music. The result is a feeling of restful introspection coupled with an underlying sense of urgency. On April 29, 1992 (Miami), the band combines an itchy ska beat with a kind of enlightened gangsta-rap attitude to capture the incendiary, anarchic mood on the streets during the nationwide Rodney King uprisings. Nowell is not just channel-surfing through these emotions and genres, and he's not parodying them, as the Beastie Boys once parodied rap and heavy metal. Instead Nowell uses eclecticism to explore and understand his own shifting thoughts and moods. There is a purpose to his pastiche, and his bright, versatile voice holds everything together.
It was Nowell who first introduced his bandmates to ska and reggae, when the trio were middle-class, punk-rock-worshipping youngsters growing up in Long Beach, California. They formed a band in 1988, and when clubs refused to book their strange-sounding hybrid act, they founded their own label, Skunk Records, just so they could proudly tell clubs they were "Skunk Records recording artists."
In 1995 the band played on the very first Warped tour (an annual skateboarding/ska/punk traveling music festival) and became the very first act asked to leave the tour (for a week) because of unruly behavior. This group was too punk rock even for punks. Explains Gaugh: "Basically, our daily regimen was wake up, drink, drink more, play, and then drink a lot more. We'd call people names. Nobody got our sense of humor. Then we brought the dog out and he bit a few skaters, and that was the last straw."
The drinking, the unpredictability, even the out-of-control Dalmatian, were all part of Sublime's volatile appeal. Gaugh says he and his bandmates were looking for extremes, for the raw experience that could help them write and perform compelling rock. For Nowell, harder drugs than alcohol were part of his wild ride to artistic inspiration. Gaugh says now, not surprisingly, that it was "definitely the wrong way."
But for rock stars, it has been an all too popular way. The music industry has been rocked, in the past few years, by the drug-related deaths of Nirvana's Cobain and Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, and more recently Blind Melon's front man Shannon Hoon and Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. As for Nowell, his bandmates say they tried to help him. Recalls Wilson: "If you tried to talk to him about it, he would get mad. He thought he was invincible. When someone would die, other artists, he'd just go, 'O.K., they're stupid, they shot too much, they didn't know what they were doing.' "
The night before Nowell died, Gaugh says, his friend told him he was giving up heroin and that his next hit would be his last. Of course, addicts always say that. It's usually a lie. Unfortunately for Nowell's friends, family and fans, this time it proved true.