In early March, Mark Hoppus, the singer and bassist for the long-running pop-punk trio Blink-182, and his wife, Skye, were special guests at a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art auction in London. The sale featured a piece from their collection, a rare Banksy titled “Crude Oil (Vettriano),” up alongside works by Yoshitomo Nara, Gerhard Richter and Vincent van Gogh.
“It was such rarefied air that we’ve never been a part of before,” Hoppus recalled at his home a week later, outfitted in chunky black glasses, a Dinosaur Jr. long-sleeve T-shirt, navy blue Dickies and Gucci Mickey Mouse sneakers. The painting sold for nearly $5.5 million, part of which will go to charity.
It would have been hard to predict such a highfalutin turn for Hoppus back in 1999, when Blink-182 released its magnum opus, “Enema of the State,” which catapulted the band to MTV “Total Request Live” stardom and sold five million copies domestically. The video for the album’s first single, the jocular “What’s My Age Again?,” famously features the band members running unclothed through the streets of Los Angeles. (“Naked dudes are so ridiculous,” Hoppus said. “It just looks comical to me.”) Blink-182 followed up that LP with its first No. 1 album, “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket,” two years later.
Despite Blink-182’s reputation for high jinks, naughty puns and charmingly adolescent hits like “All the Small Things,” Hoppus is remarkably thoughtful in person. Jim Adkins, whose group, Jimmy Eat World, supported Blink-182 and Green Day on a 2002 tour, said in an interview that Hoppus exhibited “human empathy.”
“I know ‘Mark from Blink-182 is emotionally mature’ might seem like an oxymoron if you don’t know him,” Adkins admitted, “but I would say that.”
That maturity translates to the page. In his memoir, “Fahrenheit-182,” written with the music journalist Dan Ozzi and out April 8, Hoppus details Blink-182’s turbulent history and contemplates his own mortality with grace and good humor. The band’s “Behind the Music”-worthy history includes near-death experiences, bitter splits and world-conquering tours. In 2021, Hoppus was diagnosed with Stage 4A diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and underwent an arduous course of chemotherapy. (“I was all decay and poison,” he writes. “Everyone I talked to cried. Every conversation felt like goodbye.”) He now has a clean bill of health.
Hoppus, a 53-year-old California native, was sitting cross-legged on a chair in the round sunken den at the heart of his exquisite midcentury modern house, which was designed by the architect Harold Levitt. “This room is where I’ve suffered the most,” said the musician, who wore his hair, which he had lost during chemo, in a towering front spike. “This room is where I’ve had the most difficult self-reflection and conversations of my whole life.” He compared it to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
“When the band broke up, I sat right here on our couch and just despaired,” he said, referring to the first of two times the singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge walked away from Blink-182, only to eventually return. “I was so filled with animosity and hatred and rage, and I just wanted to get back in our band,” he continued, dropping a number of expletives.
But “Fahrenheit-182” never turns meanspirited or dour. “The book has no demons in it,” Hoppus said. He mentioned that he’d discussed his memoir on the phone with his psychiatrist — Hoppus is treated for obsessive-compulsive disorder, intrusive thoughts, depression and anxiety — earlier that day. “I think that writing the book helped solve a lot of ongoing issues in my life, because I was trying to write it with an even hand,” he said.
The sometimes fraught relationship between Hoppus and DeLonge is what Ozzi described as the “real bromance” at the center of the memoir. Fellow skate punks and self-taught musicians with a penchant for phallus jokes, the pair first met in San Diego County in 1992. Hoppus — the son of a homemaker mother and an aerospace engineer father who split up when he was in the third grade — was 20 and drifting through college. DeLonge, three years his junior, was a high school miscreant.
“Our musical styles fit exactly, and his humor was just as abrasive and as offensive as mine was,” DeLonge, 49, recalled in an interview. “We both came from broken families and saw the world the same way.”
The fast friends formed a band, originally known simply as Blink, with an even younger drummer, Scott Raynor. Blink’s first studio album, “Cheshire Cat” from 1995, did surprisingly well for the independent Cargo Music, and the band leaped to a major label, MCA. In 1997, Blink-182 released the LP “Dude Ranch,” scoring a hit with “Dammit,” a boisterous track with an indelible refrain, delivered by Hoppus: “Well, I guess this is growing up.” Hoppus and DeLonge ended up firing a troubled Raynor and replacing him with the tattooed powerhouse Travis Barker, of another California band, the Aquabats, before recording “Enema of the State.”
It was easy to dismiss Blink-182 in the early days. “When we first came on the scene, the gatekeepers and the people in charge were so focused on Blink’s comedy side, our silliness, that it prevented them from looking deeper,” Hoppus said. “But we did it to ourselves. We played naked. We do mom jokes, Tom and I, back-and-forth onstage, nonstop.” If it weren’t for the many hits Blink-182 scored in the wake of “What’s My Age Again?,” Barker said in an interview, “We very well could have been pigeonholed as the naked band.”
Over the years, Blink-182 only grew in stature among fellow musicians, inspiring emo bands in the 2000s — Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, Paramore — and the latest generation of pop-punk acts, including MGK (formerly Machine Gun Kelly) and Meet Me @ the Altar. “Look how big Blink-182 is now,” said the Meet Me @ the Altar drummer Ada Juarez, 26, who pointed out she was born the year “Enema of the State” came out. “You can listen to it today, and it still fits. A lot of it has to do with Tom and Mark’s parts and the way that their voices just fit so well together.”
The band’s sphere of influence extends to less-expected genres. “There are emo rappers who say, ‘I grew up listening to Blink-182,’” Hoppus said. “There are dudes playing in the shreddiest heavy metal bands saying, ‘I grew up listening to Blink-182.’ The Chainsmokers are like, ‘We grew up listening to Blink-182.’ I love that celebration and that connection.”
Readers coming to “Fahrenheit-182” for gossip will be disappointed for the most part. There is, for instance, barely a mention that Barker is married to a Kardashian. “It’s not ‘The Dirt,’” Hoppus said, referring to Mötley Crüe’s debauched tell-all. “It’s a PG-13 book.” The memoir does, however, provide insight into strife within Blink. After DeLonge’s 2005 departure broke up the group for the first time, he and Hoppus didn’t talk for several years. “It was awful,” Hoppus said. “I felt like my world had been rugged.”
DeLonge called that rupture “a tale as old as time.”
“When you start a band, it’s just you guys,” he said. “You all have the same dream, same aspirations, same work schedule, same passion, same drive. Then each person finds a spouse, might have kids, might start extracurricular activities.” (DeLonge, who formed the alternative rock band Angels & Airwaves in 2005, is a well-known U.F.O. researcher.) “That just creates issues amongst the band members that I wasn’t even emotionally intelligent enough to communicate or understand or be able to remedy.”
Barker’s near death in 2008 — he survived a plane crash that killed four of the six people onboard — precipitated a Blink reunion, but after five years and just one album, DeLonge bailed again. “I don’t think we were all healed, and we didn’t fully trust each other,” he said. This time, Hoppus and Barker replaced him with Matt Skiba, the singer and guitarist for the Chicago punk band the Alkaline Trio.
“I remember that first Roxy show being mildly terrified and looking over at Mark cracking jokes,” said Skiba, who went on to record two albums with Blink. “His joy would just bring me back into the moment.”
Just as the world was beginning to emerge from the pandemic, Hoppus learned he had cancer. “It got really dark,” he said, recounting a conversation with Skye, with whom he has a 22-year-old son, Jack, a video game designer. “We were sitting in our kitchen and I was dying — the medication, the chemo, was just so gnarly,” he recalled. “Felt like I was being crushed between two trucks. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’
“My wife goes, ‘What are you saying? Are you going to kill yourself?’” he continued. “And that moment really crystallized the fight for me. That was when I was like, ‘This is a losing battle, but I have to fight the fight. I can’t just give up in front of my wife and son.’”
When DeLonge found out about Hoppus’s illness, the resentments dropped away. “I was very quick to say, ‘I’m all in, Mark,’” DeLonge said. “‘When — not if — you’re done with these treatments, the north star is we’re going to play again. Let’s do that for each other.’”
Hoppus was cleared of cancer in September 2021, and a year later, he, DeLonge and Barker announced that they were reuniting again. In 2023, Blink released its ninth studio album, “One More Time…,” which became the group’s third record to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200.
“I don’t think the band’s relationship has ever been as healthy or as strong as it is now,” Barker said. “We love this version of our band.” DeLonge marveled at Blink’s longevity: “Plane crash, cancer, top of the charts, breakups. It’s absolutely bananas that we’re still here.”
Blink-182 will continue so long as it’s still fun, Hoppus said. “The one thing that we have all agreed on, and promised one another, is we have no desire to become a legacy band,” he said. “We don’t want to ride off into the sunset playing ‘All the Small Things’ at casinos ad nauseam. I want to play ‘All the Small Things’ forever, but I also want to keep creating new music that connects with people.”
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