“When I first started playing, the Stratocaster just seemed like a cool-looking guitar,” he told us last year. At this point DeLonge was playing a sticker-heavy Strat fitted with, if he remembers correctly, a Seymour Duncan Invader pickup. Unlike these later high-water marks, though, Dude Ranch is scratchy and raw, and there’s a blown-out quality to the guitars that’s in constant combat with the vastly more refined vocal hooks. All of these elements would be successfully repackaged in the band’s subsequent work – on everything from All the Small Things and Wendy Clear to Anthem, Part Two and Feeling This – making Dammit a two-minute, 40-second lightbulb moment. DeLonge uncorks a scattershot riff that still ranks as one of his best, followed by muted powerchords, a half-time chorus and quiet bridge, with the chorus slamming back into the room at the end alongside a descending keyboard line. Trombino found a band who were switched on when it came to their trajectory and commercial ambitions, and also one that had settled into a songwriting mode that was more focused, lean and representative of what they were trying to achieve. I felt weird that there were these guys who had sold way more records than I had ever sold and I’m sitting in the producer’s chair telling them what to do.” I was excited but also nervous and intimidated. “It was a much, much bigger record for me at the time. “ Cheshire Cat had sold 70,000 records at the time we started making Dude Ranch,” Trombino told MTV News in 2017. Blink unapologetically signed with MCA.ĭude Ranch was recorded at Big Fish Studios in Encinitas, California, with producer Mark Trombino, who had played drums in Drive Like Jehu and worked on Jimmy Eat World’s 1996 LP Static Prevails, a Blink favourite. Before long, Epitaph, fresh from releasing The Offspring’s game-changing Smash and Rancid’s …And Out Come the Wolves, were on their tail, along with a handful of major labels. Still, support kept growing both IRL and in the nascent world of online fandom, based around Blink’s harnessing of suburban ennui and their unthreatening entry point into fast, outwardly aggressive music. The problem was that the songs generally sucked and – even on their successful 1995 debut Cheshire Cat – sounded like they’d been recorded in a wind sock. The rough edges that would be sanded clean on their 1999 mega-hit Enema of the State were still present, and they still sounded like friends who happened to be in a popular band rather than full-blown rock stars.
They felt like growing up, fucking up, making up, and learning from the experience. They were stupid, sometimes mean-spirited, sophomoric and fantastic in a loose, almost-there sort of way. Their songs were snotty, breakneck charges written by dweebs who were always pining after a girl who’d inevitably reject them. It’s true that Blink-182 didn’t do deep back in 1997 – they did dumb and relatable, which is its own sort of philosophy. “Don’t expect any deep philosophical insights at the official Blink-182 site,” one of them says as the camera rolls over the lyrics to Dammit and a line that came to define the band and the function they provided for their fans: “ Well, I guess this is growing up.” The presenters in the clip affect the air of polite superiority that a lot of people do when talking about pop-punk, with little interest in scraping below the veneer.
Tom thinks aliens are behind it, prefacing his mid-career swerve into extraterrestrial affairs, but generally everyone just seems bemused by the whole thing. Witness Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge doing just that around the time they released Dude Ranch. Here’s a fun corner of the internet: footage of people talking about it in the mid-to-late 1990s.
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