The three-decade history of Blink-182 is marked by epic highs and miserable lows. At the peak of their popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were selling out arenas all over the globe and scoring hits like “What’s My Age Again” and “All the Small Things.” But there were also two extremely ugly band splits that played out before the public, near-death experiences due to a plane crash and a cancer battle, partial reunions, and long periods where it looked like the band would never return. The only constant member from their formation in the San Diego suburbs to the present day is singer and bassist Mark Hoppus. Here are 10 of the juiciest revelations from his new memoir, Fahrenheit-182.
Hoppus hasn’t spoken to original Blink-182 drummer Scott Raynor in more than 25 years.
Raynor was in the band from the very beginning, and plays on their first two records, including breakout single “Dammit.” But, in 1998, Raynor was told he had to either quit drinking or quit the band. Unhappy with the ultimatum, chose the latter. They moved on with new drummer Travis Barker, and didn’t hear from Raynor for another year when he suddenly called. “He ran through a laundry list of grievances, both real and imagined, cursed me and Tom [DeLonge], called us hypocrites,” Hoppus writes. “I said I was sorry, this was just the way things were. We sat in long silence. Then we hung up. That was the last time I talked to Scott.”
Hoppus’s famous American Pie line wasn’t in the script.
The three members of Blink were given a chance to shoot cameos in 1999’s original American Pie as a high school band (with a monkey) who watched Jason Biggs’ fumbling attempt at sex with Shannon Elizabeth on a webcam. They were instructed to merely look shocked at what they saw on a computer screen while a professional actor said, “That guy’s in my trig class.” Hoppus blurted out “Go, trig boy. It’s your birthday.” The improvised line made the final cut. When the movie became a massive hit, strangers started to yell “Go, trig boy” at him in public. “It was a quick, throwaway gag,” Hoppus writes. “I have no idea why it caught on as a popular quote. Maybe it’s because the entire movie is quotable. Keep in mind, this is the movie that immortalized the phrase, ‘This one time, at band camp…’”
The Enema of the State period reminds Hoppus of the second act of a mobster movie.
“[That’s] always the most fun,” he writes. “Everyone’s on top of the world. Nothing can touch them. Doors open wherever they go. People kiss their rings and do any favor they ask. No one ever stops to worry what might be waiting for them around the corner in the third act. Life is too good to worry about how they might end up stuffed into a car’s trunk or hanging in a meat locker.”
A female fan aggressively stalked every member of the band.
At the peak of Blink’s success, a woman began parking her car outside their homes. Using binoculars and a telephoto lens, she kept a journal that listed their license plates, when they typically arrived home each day, and the times they turned off their lights at night. She wasn’t technically breaking any laws, but it made all of them deeply uncomfortable, and Hoppus eventually moved to a house behind a gate to get away from her. Months later, she showed up at a San Diego record store where they were signing copies of their new album. Mark and Tom quickly signed her album and avoided eye contact. Travis did not. “I’m not signing that shit,” he said. “You hang around our houses? You stalk us? You follow our wives? Get the fuck out of here, I’m not signing shit.”
Hoppus was furious when Barker and DeLonge formed the side project Boxcar Racer without him.
When the new band released their first LP in 2001, Hoppus shrugged it off in public. Things were very different behind the scenes. “What the fuck is going on? I asked myself,” Hoppus writes. “It was a big conspiracy against me. I questioned everything about myself: Am I bad musician? Do people think I’m a dick? What is it about my personality that’s making everyone so fucking eager to do something else without me?”
There was a lot of bad blood when Green Day opened for Blink-182 on a 2002 summer tour.
The tour came at a time when Blink-182 were ascendant and Green Day were at a low point right before American Idiot. “I got the sense that Green Day fucking hated that they’d been reduced to opening for us,” Hoppus writes. “It must have been a difficult pill to swallow. There was a lot of tension on that tour. Some nights we drank together like old war buddies. Other nights we got into screaming matches with their manager in the hallways.” They haven’t toured together again despite some overtures from Blink’s camp. “We keep asking for a rematch and they keep refusing,” Hoppus writes. “They’re the rival gangs across town who both despise and respect each other.”
When Tom DeLonge first quit the band in 2005, Hoppus was shattered.
DeLonge’s decision to sever any direct communication made the situation even more painful. “Everything had to go through lawyers and management,” Hoppus writes. “My best friend of more than a decade, and I had to have my people call his people. I was paying a lawyer top dollar to communicate with the kid I used to break into abandoned buildings with to skateboard…I didn’t just lose my best friend. When Blink fell apart, I lost everything.”
Getting the Blink-182 spinoff band +44 off the ground was incredibly difficult.
After DeLonge left the group, Hoppus and Barker attempted to carry on making music together under the name +44. “People knew the name Blink-182,” Hoppus writes, “but the who the hell was +44? It felt like I was giving the world a math problem.” At this same time, Hoppus feels that DeLonge’s group, Angels and Airwaves, was not living up to their hype. “Tom had over-performed and under-delivered,” he writes, “which might’ve made people skeptical towards another post-Blink project. We had to work twice as hard for everything. All the supports and safety nets we had in place were suddenly gone. Radio stations used to roll out the red carpet for a new Blink album, but now we had to play the game and kiss ass for airplay crumbs.”
The first Blink-182 reunion didn’t go so well.
The band got back together shortly after Travis Barker’s plane crash in 2008. They cut a new LP and toured the globe, but old tensions remained. “Tom arrived as late as he could, walked directly to his dressing room, and closed the door,” Hoppus writes. “Showtime came and we did what we do. The second the show ended, he was in his car back to the hotel, never to be seen.” They had plans to tour in 2015 until DeLonge decided he didn’t want to do it. “It was ridiculous,” Hoppus writes. “Tom was out of control. Pretty soon we were speaking to each other solely through management. All fighters retreated to their corners to sulk as the saddest millionaires punk rock ever suffered. Did we really get the band back together only to end up running it into the ground, reverting to petty arguments about schedules? Again?”
They didn’t reconnect until DeLonge learned Hoppus had been diagnosed with leukemia in 2020.
Tom became my best friend again,” Hoppus writes. “Some days I just wanted to waste away on a couch feeling sorry for myself. But Tom wouldn’t let me. Every day he sent me a new joke. Or an old photo of us rocking out. Or just a dick pic .The past was never mentioned. All that mattered was right now.”
