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Caylin Capra-Thomas | Longreads | May 22, 2025 | 7,986 words (29 minutes)
Record scratch. Punk rock changed our lives. A dog barks. Good boy, good boy. There’s an empty staccato snare drum, then a kick drum. Snare, kick, snare, kick. A low voice floats in, pretty even as it flattens:
On the East Side.
That’s where I met my Ramona.
“I wanna go to a party.”
That’s what she said.
“Lonely. That’s what I’ve been.”
I don’t know if “Waiting For My Ruca” is a Great Song, but it was my favorite, track one on 40oz. to freedom, Sublime’s 1992 studio debut. It sounds all at once like eavesdropping and invitation, dark and fuzzy and hollow. When I listened, I didn’t know if it was something I entered, or something that entered me. If it was within me or if it was me. Do you remember being 16 and loving a song? Of course you do. It felt like that. It felt like everything.
But what business did I have loving surf-punk-ska-reggae music from Southern California? I lived in Massachusetts, inland—not even really coastal, let alone West Coast. My town was small, my neighborhood the woods. I didn’t go to many parties. Not the kind Sublime sang about, anyway. Not the kind where things got interesting. When I first heard Sublime, parties were single-gender sleepovers or birthdays with thickly frosted Market Basket sheet cake.
Even by the time I was getting into proper trouble, nobody had bands at their house parties, not even the kids in bands. They had tinny speakers and distressingly few snacks. They had that one girl you kind of hated/admired/desired slamming or spewing Southern Comfort. They had creepy dads who pretended like supplying minors with beer and a basement was “parenting like it is.” Those parties were hardly worth the trouble of finding someone to buy booze, then finding a place to drink it and, for kids whose mothers cared (and mine did), another place to say you were.
Parties were a hassle. I preferred a few people in a smokey sedan, late winter with the sun about to set, circling the cul-de-sacs and sticking our arms out the window going down the big hill by the drive-in, last summer’s last feature forever on loop, then ascending again, straight into the feeling that we’d found a way out without ever having to leave, whoosh, a daily leaving for the tragically earthbound and party-less, every track on Sublime’s first album an anthem, a creed.
Greek rhetorician Longinus’s treatise on the qualities that make for particularly effective writing, Peri Hypsous—literally, On Height—was later translated as On the Sublime.
Sub: up to.
Limen: the lintel, the topmost part of a doorframe—the limit.
Sub limen: up to the limit.
What you touch is the limit. You never touch what’s beyond. But the limit establishes the existence of the beyond and drives our hunger to know it.
Band lore has it that Sublime got the name from the dictionary and nobody knew what it meant. That feels right. You’d have to be either completely oblivious or extremely self-aware to get away with that name. You may as well call your band “Transcendently Good” except your band is a trio of fuckups from Long Beach who make, as one meme puts it, music for people who have thrown up in the ocean.
It’s a pretty accurate analogy, actually. A Sublime song ingests bandleader Bradley Nowell’s influences and barfs them back up, a colorful half-digested collage buoyed by the oceanic honey of his voice. A Sublime song finds pleasure in this flotsam.
A Sublime song is the shadow of the dome of pleasure / float[ing] midway on the waves.
That’s not a Sublime lyric; it’s a sublime lyric from the poem “Kubla Khan.” Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge said he dreamed its entirety after taking a few grains of opium on a walk and then falling asleep. He woke in a fever and tried to get it all down but was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock.” While the businessman yapped away, Coleridge’s vision for the poem all but evaporated. He published “Kubla Khan” with an epigraph calling it “a vision in a dream. A fragment.” In calling it a fragment, Coleridge instructs us to want—to desire a totality we didn’t know was lacking, to feel that maddening grasping after something, like when a word or name skirts the edges of your mind, and you might not feel so crazy if you could just reach it.
The sublime is consistently imagined as something beyond. Beyond language, perception, reason. Beyond us. A thought about thoughts we can’t think. Beyond, beyond—so much reaching.
But even if you could reach it—the vanishing word, the almost-poem—a word is, as poet Robert Hass puts it, “elegy to what it signifies.” What does sublime elegize? What would the young Californians have grasped if they’d read the word’s entry? As a verb, to turn a substance into vapor. As an adjective, describing something that awes us with beauty or power. As a noun, the sublime refers to that which evokes that unearthly awe, the pleasure and terror of which Romantic poets like Coleridge found in nature. A slippery concept, centuries’ worth of varied philosophers have considered the sublime as a property of language (Longinus, Edmund Burke), a property of the mind (Immanuel Kant and other German Idealists), something that unifies the self or else fractures it, and something that both creates and transcends the boundless chasm between oneself and the divine (Coleridge, William Wordsworth), between a word and what it signifies. Within all these varieties, the sublime is consistently imagined as something beyond. Beyond language, perception, reason. Beyond us. A thought about thoughts we can’t think. Beyond, beyond—so much reaching. The sublime’s pet definite article suggests that the concept itself is definite, but it is uncertainty incarnate, “a promise of transcendence,” Philip Shaw writes in The Sublime, “leading to the edge of an abyss.”
Or, as Bradley put it:
What I really wanna know
Oh baby, mmm
What I really wanna say
I can’t define
I’m no musician, so I ask my dad to name the drum sounds in “Waiting For My Ruca.”
“Sounds like a kick bass drum and un-muffled tom. Could also be electronic. The ending is definitely electronic. It’s cool and very tight,” he says.
“Billy thought maybe an empty snare?” I say.
“Yeah, he’s probably spot on—maybe metal shell with snares turned off,” he says.
The first act of my dad’s life was spent playing classical timpani in orchestras and theaters, working as timpanist-turned-drumstick-mogul Vic Firth’s first chair replacement in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then as one of Vic’s original employees at the dawn of his drumstick empire. Back then, he made mostly mallets and jazz sticks. When Vic started producing commercially, my dad and another employee would pair the sticks by crouching on the ground and dropping them, listening to determine which ones had the same weight and density. Then my dad and Vic had a falling out—two hotheads who liked to hit things with sticks, you can imagine—and my dad made a sharp turn. He got a master’s degree and started teaching in special education. For 25 years, most of the drumming he did was with his fingers on the steering wheel.
Like Sublime, my dad is also from Long Beach. Although he hasn’t been back in decades, his origins mean that Long Beach was a place I longed toward before I ever heard Sublime’s music. My elementary school journals are full of declarations that I’d be going to California “soon,” or “next year,” or “after Christmas.” My dad, ever the storyteller, would regale me with tales of surfing and sunshine, and of a family he promised we’d visit. We never did. At some point after my folks split up, I stopped writing about it. I was too young to understand the complexities of my father’s relationship to his family, that he was probably never going back.
Long Beach became a vanishing point, a place I was always trying to reach but which kept receding. As a teenager, I’d get stoned with my friends and we’d plan pilgrimages to the place where Sublime was born, though none of us had the means to effectively execute a cross-country trip. We barely had the internet. I didn’t really know what I wanted from the place. Sublime died after Bradley Nowell did—heroin—and although the characters in my dad’s stories had visited us once or twice, they still felt like characters to me. Hardly even his family anymore, let alone mine.
At 31, I moved to California, and even then, I didn’t feel like I had made it to California. I lived in Idyllwild, a community in the San Jacinto Mountains, where I taught at a boarding school. The population number was lower than the elevation number, and it snowed. The people there called it an “island in the sky,” which is to say: isolated. I always told friends that I didn’t live in California—I lived in Idyllwild. During this time I visited my dad’s sister in Long Beach—Long Beach!—but only once, for a lunch.
The California I wanted doesn’t exist. It was never a place, with all of a place’s complex webs of land and culture. It was the idea that sunshine could brighten a secret darkness in me, or else illuminate what it means to be from people who don’t talk to one another. It was a story about my father, who often felt far away. It was an illegible translation of a lost text, a fragment of him I hadn’t known. It was the key, maybe, to knowing him better, being closer. It was irretrievable.
I’ve cried at every concert I’ve been to in the last three years: Stevie Nicks, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Springsteen. I can’t decide if I’m embarrassed by this. In Kansas City, I wept when Springsteen played “Thunder Road,” a song I’ve been singing since I was 5. I walked down the aisle to it. In Indianapolis, after inwardly laughing at some teenagers crying to “Rhiannon,” I lost my shit during “Landslide.” Not a deep cut, but a song whose words I knew before I could read: Time makes you bolder / even children get older / I’m getting older too.
Perhaps I’ve grown sentimental. Or maybe it’s that I can’t shake the feeling that they were saying goodbye. Lucinda had a stroke a few years ago. Stevie and the Boss are in their 70s. When I wept to “Landslide,” I wept for Stevie, whom we are growing closer to losing, and I wept for all my elder family members, whom I am growing closer to losing, and maybe a little for myself. All of us getting older. Can we handle the seasons of our lives? Sometimes, I think not.
There is always something private and unknowable about other people, but when you watch a human being make something and you know they’ve made it for you, that’ll bring you close as you can get to knowing another soul.
Seeing these artists onstage, no matter how far in the distance, is the closest I’ve come to reaching something I can’t get from their catalog: the music’s pulse. The animate center of a song is its human instrument; you only hear its ghost through the stereo. Live music is alive music. There is always something private and unknowable about other people, but when you watch a human being make something and you know they’ve made it for you, that’ll bring you close as you can get to knowing another soul. And there, where you knock on the soul’s rib cage and hear it knocking back—where you sway in time with its knocking and are overcome by the knowledge of its presence—that’s where you touch the limit between yourself and that thing on the other side of your finite mortal vessel. And you feel mournful because you grasp finally that there are truths in this world that you can only know at a distance, and just well enough to understand that this knowledge will never be absolute.
Although I never got to see them live, I feel this mournful grasping when I listen to Sublime lately. Bradley Nowell died two months before Sublime’s major record debut, their wildly successful 1996 self-titled album. He was 28 years old, married for just one week, a father for less than a year. He was about one month clean when he overdosed after the band’s last show in Petaluma. I feel it in the car listening to “Boss DJ” and “Lou Dog Went to the Moon.” I feel it watching interviews with Bradley’s widow, and I feel it, sincerely and absurdly, while watching a video of Bradley arguing in earnest that Hong Kong Phooey is the best cartoon because it shows cats and dogs getting along—finally!
Maybe this stranger-grief is rooted in the fact that, unlike my now-aging favorites, Bradley didn’t get to say goodbye—not to his wife and infant son, not to his band or to his fans or to Lou Dog, his dalmatian, or to anyone.
Maybe it’s because, in some ways, Bradley was no stranger.
So many girls become obsessed with ghosts. I was drawn early to doomed women—Marilyn Monroe, Anne Boleyn. I didn’t love them in their own right. I loved them because they made me sad. I’d don a blonde wig and stuff the chest of this pink vintage dress—for Halloween, yes, but sometimes just to shimmy to the title song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It didn’t make me feel happy so much as it just made me feel. On long car trips, when my dad and stepmom read to each other from some giant tome on the wives of Henry VIII, I sat in the backseat awaiting Anne’s demise as if practicing for my own, so sure was I that love could end my world.
In high school, my best friend wrote me notes about wanting our own island. I’ll reincarnate Brad & the band can continue the legacy, on our island. She drew us as stick figures in front of a hut with a chimney spewing pot smoke and a cooler full of beer. I hate Ohio, she wrote. We lived in Massachusetts. Let’s skip school tomorrow and attend the parade. She drew her cat, Burrito, as a burrito. She drew a maze of swirly pen strokes and wove in lyrics. She wrote, I’d rather be lonely than head over heels for a person that didn’t really exist. After that: I miss Sublime. And in the margins, in small script: hmmm I wish I had vikes or some dexedrine. I want to feel good/different.
We did miss you—you, who were Sublime. You, who sang straight through us. We wanted to be good/different, and maybe we’d get there through feeling it. Feeling: the way of us girls, the only country we were said to rule.
“Kubla Khan” was as close to writing openly about his opium use as Samuel Taylor Coleridge got. But the “man on business from Porlock” story didn’t actually contain the word “opium.” Coleridge says that his visionary nap was induced by an “anodyne” prescribed for “a slight indisposition.”
His readers could have guessed. Opium was legal and easy to get, usually dissolved in alcohol and sold as laudanum, marketed, like so many new, unstudied drugs, as a miraculous panacea. In the first volume of his authoritative biographies of Coleridge, Richard Holmes writes that Coleridge’s first recorded use of opium was during his senior year at Christ’s Hospital School in London, where he was in and out of treatment for rheumatic fever and painfully swollen knees. School sanitarium staff gave him opium to help him sleep. He turned to it again for toothache during his studies at Jesus College in Cambridge, where he lived, Holmes says, “a kind of double life” complete with “wild expenditure on books, drinking, violin lessons, theatre, and whoring . . . with fits of suicidal gloom and remorse.” Despite his voracious reading and good marks, he left Cambridge without a degree, up to his ears in debt and utopian schemes and poetry.
How sublime, addiction’s folly of infinite yearning. A friend in recovery once told me that every day, they had to face their knowledge that nothing on this earth would ever make them feel as good as heroin did. Either way, the craven must submit: to the ouroboros of craving, or to living with another kind of want.
From then on, Coleridge suffered from chronic pain and insomnia, which opium withdrawal produced just as often as opium ingestion soothed. “The Pains of Sleep,” a poem published alongside “Kubla Khan,” describes this state of being both profoundly disconnected from and imprisoned within one’s body:
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
Fantastic passions! maddening brawl!
And shame and terror over all!
This nocturnal torment may resonate with people who have withdrawn from opiates—fitful sleep, self-hatred, and the “desire with loathing strangely mixed” for “wild or hateful objects.” That is to say: craving, a word whose precursors include craven, arising from 13th-century French for defeated, overcome. Treatment centers and medications promise to help people with addiction overcome their cravings. But how is anyone supposed to overcome something which, by definition, overcomes them?
In The Critique of Judgement, German philosopher Immanuel Kant calls the sublime a “negative pleasure,” equally attractive and repellent, which reveals our powerlessness but also creates the knowledge through which we might transcend that powerlessness. How sublime, addiction’s folly of infinite yearning. A friend in recovery once told me that every day, they had to face their knowledge that nothing on this earth would ever make them feel as good as heroin did. Either way, the craven must submit: to the ouroboros of craving, or to living with another kind of want.
Despite opium’s dreamy-nightmary influence on his poetry, Coleridge eventually recognized that his use was beyond control. He considered this a moral failing. (Shame and terror over all.) The same year these poems were published, in what might be the first instance of a famous person checking into rehab, Coleridge wrote a letter petitioning Dr. James Gillman to help him with “the evasion of a specific madness.” He had been trying to taper off on his own: “No sixty hours have yet passed without my having [taken] laudanum, tho’ for the last week [in] comparatively trifling doses.” He told the good doctor that while he would never speak falsely, his craving for “this detested poison” made him capable of deceit and so during the first week of his stay, Dr. Gillman was, under no condition, to let him leave the house alone. He remained in the Gillman house for 18 years—the rest of his life.
Although cagey in print, Coleridge was candid about his opium use in letters to his inner circle, and sometimes in conversations with younger writers, like Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey was a schoolboy when he first read Coleridge’s poems in Lyrical Ballads. De Quincey scholar Robert Morrison says he described the experience as “the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind, and that at 18, he wrote in his diary that he was beginning to consider Coleridge “the greatest man that has ever appeared,” and one worthy of imitation: “What shall be my character? . . . shrouded in mystery—the supernatural—like the ‘ancient mariner’—awfully sublime?” That when they first met, after De Quincey mentioned he’d taken laudanum for a toothache, Coleridge told him that he was “under the full dominion of opium” and warned the younger man off the drug. But, in Coleridge’s own words, we become that which we believe our gods to be, and De Quincey worshipped him.
If Coleridge is the first celebrity to go to rehab, De Quincey is the first to write an addiction memoir. He published Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, his best-known work, in 1821, a few years after his friendship with Coleridge had significantly cooled. Some consider it a thinly veiled hatchet job, outing the privacy-inclined poet as a dope fiend. But the Confessions, Morrison argues, also imply that his path to addiction was made by following Coleridge’s trail of opium grains. Morrison lists the similarities in their journeys: Both were 19-year-old university students when they began their use; both cite rheumatic pain as having driven them to it; and both enjoyed 10 years of opium’s pleasures before it ensnared them in addiction at 28, when they both began to suffer intense nightmares. But De Quincey was less penitent about his use. Sure, the longest part of the Confessions, “The Pains of Opium,” is about being subsumed by addiction. Yes, he admits he’d ceased feeling pleasure when taking the drug, and he does acknowledge that “if you eat a good deal of it, most probably you must do what is particularly disagreeable to any man of regular habits” (i.e., “die”). But De Quincey also clearly delighted in the ecstasies and revelations he experienced under “the Circean spell of opium.”
“The Pleasures of Opium” precedes “The Pains,” and Richard Sackler himself couldn’t have written a more glowing advertisement for opiates:
[A] man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal part of his nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from any disease or other remote effects of opium) feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect.
This, De Quincey says, is the “doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium.” In the beginning, as this church’s lone parishioner, De Quincey prayed mostly at the opera house, where he’d sit zonked on laudanum to hear Grassini sing. Coming from the Church of Opium’s once-disciple, “The Pleasures” ecstatically imagines opium as a sublime conduit, a mediator between the self and the divine, less a god itself than a priest, the hallowed hands that string you as far out of yourself as possible. Almost far enough to reach it—whatever it is. Almost.
I’m married now, and my husband and I have nicknamed the version of me who loved Sublime “Girl Who Does Drugs.” Originally skeptical of the band, my husband loves every version of me so much that he also came to love Sublime. I’m embarrassed by this sometimes. He loves hard and loud, and I’ve never had his courage. He covers “Badfish” with his band despite the bassist’s contempt for Sublime. They slow it down and add a fiddle. It’s nice.
“Badfish” is popular with Sublime fans, but it’s not among my favorites. I don’t know why. It’s beer-colored when I hear it, and it sloshes between my ears. I usually skip ahead. But I like the lines Ain’t got no quarrels with God. / Ain’t got no time to grow old. I always heard them as an expression of that surf-bro live-and-let-live philosophy, a happy-go-luckiness that someone with my social anxiety can only aspire to.
Girl Who Does Drugs never touched that limit. She never even got close. She was a mask, another wig and stuffed dress. I was trying on one way to be, and she didn’t fit. But many of my friends, the ones I loved Sublime’s music with, touched that limit.
I read a comment online from someone who interprets it as Bradley’s acceptance of an inevitably young death, being at peace with that. No one would find him bargaining with his maker for a few more days on Earth. He got what he needed: music, a good dog, drugs.
Because, of course, Bradley needed the drugs in the end. Need is addiction’s litmus test.
Peri hypsous: on height.
Upon getting high, you can only come down, can only realize you’ve gone sub limen: up to the limit. Once dope-desire becomes need, you’ve hit that limit.
Bradley’s need was fluid, a sea he surfed daily, drifting closer to that door at the end of need, which he could open and pass through, or else refuse and make the long swim back to shore. But how long could anyone go on like that? How long could you bear to be at sea? “I swim,” he sings in “Badfish,” “but I wish I never learned.”
Girl Who Does Drugs never touched that limit. She never even got close. She was a mask, another wig and stuffed dress. I was trying on one way to be, and she didn’t fit. But many of my friends, the ones I loved Sublime’s music with, touched that limit. Most of them managed to figure out how to float. Most.
One night 14 years ago, I was out drinking at the Lotus with a friend I’ll call Jay. It was probably a Tuesday; we were working service industry jobs. The place did karaoke some nights, but we went for the mai tais and scorpion bowls. That time I was just drinking beer. When I found myself suddenly drunk off two Rolling Rocks, Jay started teasing me. This was Massachusetts, where sarcastic banter is a love language, so he was always teasing me about something, but I was frowning, diligently trying to maintain an upright position in the bar’s neon-punctured darkness, struggling to figure out how this had happened.
“Did you take something?” he said. “Pills or something?”
That’s when I remembered: I’d taken a Xanax earlier.
“Woah, Cay. I didn’t know you partied like that,” he said.
I didn’t answer him. I was thinking about the drive home. This was pre-ridesharing in a rural area, and I wasn’t about to ask Jay—he already had a DUI, which he and other initiates pronounced dewy. I was also pretty sure his truck wasn’t registered. I waved him off and ordered a water.
Some years later, after I got the news that Jay had died of a heroin overdose, I wondered if he had been taking my pulse on partying “like that.” I wondered if he had been using even then.
He died two days after his release from a two-month stint in jail, where he was, ostensibly, clean. Death is a common side effect of opiate relapse after a period of sobriety. Knowing this, of course, is useless to the grieving people left behind.
When I told the friend who introduced me to Jay in high school—the same friend who wrote me notes about missing Sublime—she said she remembered seeing him once at the methadone clinic.
“Did you talk to him?” I said.
“It’s the methadone clinic,” she said. “I don’t think we even waved.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“It’s the methadone clinic,” she said, slower this time for my benefit. “It’s kind of a rule that you don’t say who you saw there.”
She’s clean now. She’s married with kids, a job she likes. Happy. I’m proud of her. She’d been my best friend in high school, and I have always felt some responsibility for her bad years. So many first times with me—party drugs, mostly. The kind of stuff you tell funny stories about. She didn’t tell me about the pills until she was already in too deep. Nobody tells you about the pills until they’re in too deep, unless you’re deep in there with them. I wasn’t.
“Why didn’t it happen to you, too?” she said once. She said it quietly, almost bashful. We were out to dinner, and she was newly sober. She was sitting in front of an aquarium. I was thinking she looked good. Healthy and pretty and haloed by shimmers of blue and gold fins.
“Why didn’t what happen to me?” I said.
“We used to do all that shit together, and then I was all alone. There were days I wished you were there—not like, just there, but there in it with me. There were days I wished it had happened to you, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
I don’t know why it didn’t happen to me. That’s what fucks me up about it all, really. It could have. Why not? It can happen to anyone, and I’m not so special. All I can figure is that I wanted to leave where I was, and where I went was a place where I found something other than dewys and pills. Burlington, Vermont had all that, but the thing that gripped me there, the thing that sunk its claws in good, was poetry. Poetry and a lot of luck, and the emerging fact that my undiagnosed anxiety disorder made doing drugs with new people a nightmare.
But escape wasn’t everyone’s experience of the place. I saw college friends get hooked on dope. My own sister, who graduated from my alma mater 15 years after me, thinks of Burlington largely as the town that sent her to rehab. Genetics aren’t on my side. I have two brothers and two sisters. Three of the four are in recovery from addiction. I married someone recovering from addiction. Why didn’t it happen to me? Why has chance placed this unknowable gulf between me and the people I love?
There are two versions of “Pool Shark,” both on Sublime’s 1994 album, Robbin’ the Hood. The acoustic version is popular, I imagine, because lyrics predicting one’s own death from overdose are infinitely more haunting in a song stripped down to a voice and a guitar. But I also like the other version. It’s a fast and loud punk song that changes keys eight times in under a minute. Its noise almost disguises the song’s despair, or perhaps glamorizes it, as punk’s “fuck it” ethos makes glamorous any claim to whatever the man says you shouldn’t do. But it shares something with the more sobering (if not sober) acoustic version. After opening with screaming vocals and then crashing to an abrupt close, the final verse travels on without the instruments, suspended in the echo of their finale, stark and elegiac: One day I’m gonna lose the war.
Bradley was singing his own addiction; that much is very clear. But I think he learned the lines from another, older beast. A beast buried deep inside of rock music and rockers alike, all those souls who suffered and sublimated their suffering into art until they fell snarling into the tar.
That’s the line everyone points to as prophecy. Some call it Bradley’s suicide note. Its self-awareness seems obvious to me, and there are other songs whose lyrics about using hit me harder. The almost whiny pathos of but all the DJs do it / all the DJs use it in “New Song” tickles my tragedy bone, and lately I’ve been thinking about how the insomniac chorus of “DJs” sounds like a dancehall version of Coleridge’s “The Pains of Sleep”:
But there ain’t nothin’ wrong, ain’t nothin’ right
and still I sit and lie awake all night
It’s not the war I linger on in “Pool Shark.” The fate of soldiers is a foregone conclusion. Most often, I think about the dinosaur:
Tying on the dinosaur tonight
It used to be so cool
The details are just a little off. The usual slang for shooting up, tying off, becomes tying on—which is maybe more accurate. You’ve got to tie something on to tie off.
And then there’s that dinosaur.
I think it’s supposed to call to mind another reptile. Chasing the dragon first meant smoking heroin—by a process of sublimation, in fact, heating the drug into a vapor the user must pursue with a tube before it floats away. The dragon swirls into being as fog, trails and tails of it. But chasing the dragon also denotes another kind of pursuit: the quest for “the abyss of divine enjoyment,” as De Quincey puts it, the sweet Eden of that first high. Which is, of course, irrevocable, a vanishing point. In chasing it, the user builds up the tolerance that guarantees they’ll never get there again.
A dinosaur is like a dragon. A large reptile we’ve never actually seen living. Usually green. Ancient. Larger than life. But dinosaurs did live, and they walked this earth. Chasing the dragon implies that the thing you caught once and then lost was never real, that it was always already just vapor anyway. But nobody’s chasing this reptile. The dinosaur is all too present, yoked to the singer with ties he fastened himself.
A friend says that when he hears it, he imagines the dinosaur fossilized, embedded in rock. Embedded in rock, indeed. How many rock stars did we lose to opiates before 1996? After? It used to be so cool. Bradley was singing his own addiction; that much is very clear. But I think he learned the lines from another, older beast. A beast buried deep inside of rock music and rockers alike, all those souls who suffered and sublimated their suffering into art until they fell snarling into the tar.
De Quincey and Coleridge are both on a running list of dead writers I’ve armchair-diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). I recognize in both biographies so many hallmarks of the disorder, which I also share. Distractible and fidgety, De Quincey describes opium in Confessions as able “to compose what had been agitated, and to concentrate what had been distracted.” Both authors were daydreamy and moody, butting heads often with authority. They were also anxious, easily frustrated, forgetful, and talked excessively. The latter particularly applied to Coleridge: Writing for the Coleridge Trust, Seamus Perry says that children in Highgate would hide from the poet, who, if he came upon them playing while he was out for a walk, would inevitably steer one away from his friends to monologue about metaphysics.
The symptom that strikes me the most is disorganization. Both writers’ lives were veritable graveyards of ambitions and schemes forfeited to their sheer impossible size, as well as to their fears of failure and chronic procrastination. (Morrison mentions a letter in which Coleridge once recognized De Quincey as a fellow “great To-morrower.”) Their financial lives fared no better; both were impulsive spenders dogged by debt. Once, scrambling to pay off one creditor or another, De Quincey asked Coleridge to return the £300 he’d given him years before, which De Quincey initially called a gift but was now calling a loan. Coleridge couldn’t give it back. He was broke, too.
Bradley Nowell doesn’t need my armchair diagnosis; he got one in childhood from a doctor. A Ritalin prescription “really helped him,” Bradley’s mother told an interviewer, but added that “there wasn’t any consistency”; when Bradley moved in with his father, “he didn’t have the same boundaries he had when he lived with me.” Bradley’s widow would claim Ritalin had predisposed him to substance use, although ADHD itself is more likely his addiction’s accomplice: ADHD correlates with a significantly higher risk for addiction. One study estimates that up to half of adolescents and adults with substance use disorder have a lifetime diagnosis of ADHD, another that children with ADHD are up to six times more likely to develop substance use disorder in adulthood.
There’s some silver lining ADHD’s clouds, and it shines through these stories. According to research scientist and cognitive psychologist Holly White, where the disorder compromises executive function, there’s evidence that ADHD may also enhance creative qualities—among them, the ability to come up with many possible ideas from one entry point, to think of new applications for existing ideas or artifacts, and to overcome the tendency for existing knowledge to obscure what’s possible. Who better than an endlessly curious, musically hyperfixated ADHDer to conceive of a band like Sublime, to create such rich collages of punk, reggae, surf-rock, hip-hop, and ska? The songs themselves replicate the ADHD brain’s nimble (if madcap) leapfroggery. The three albums recorded in Bradley’s lifetime contained samples, lyrics, or instrumental micro-covers of 60 songs by nearly 50 artists. Who but a lookless leaper would sample James Brown in a Grateful Dead cover?
Inquisitives who realize that knowledge is neither certain nor absolute are apt to go one of two ways. You either learn to love the questions, or you become miserable.
The way ADHD expresses itself depends on many social and biological factors, and researchers are only beginning to map these intersections. Most early studies were based on young white boys like Bradley leading to diagnoses lopsided toward that demographic. Like a growing cohort of young women and people designated female at birth, I was diagnosed late, at 33, despite the fact that my second-grade teacher wrote repeatedly on my report cards that “Caylin needs to work on paying attention,” and “Caylin needs to complete her homework on time.” Socialized in the ways of girlhood, I was otherwise well-behaved: polite and conscientious, terminally fearful of disappointing anyone. Besides my chronic bouncy leg, I wasn’t hyperactive. And despite being a great tomorrower myself, I did well in school.
Basically, I wasn’t anyone’s problem, so I slipped through the diagnostic cracks. I learned how to walk the line between tomorrow-ing and disappointing my teachers, and I got good grades because most subjects interested me. ADHD is a disorder of attention regulation, not total inattention; ADHDers are often very smart. And while impulsivity and low dopamine levels must factor into ADHD’s link to addiction, I think having a brain without an off switch can breed the kind of malaise that drugs can soothe, for a while. For some, drugs become an off switch.
Bradley was smart, too. In interviews for Heidi Cuda’s Sublime’s Brad Nowell: Crazy Fool, family and friends say that even when dopesick or high or somewhere in between, he was reading. Sublime’s drummer, Bud, reports that when he suggested Bradley turn to a higher power to begin recovery, Bradley said, “Maybe I believe in Henry Miller, but that’s about it.” He spoke fluent Spanish. He was in a gifted child program, and his lone “F” on one sophomore report card was in football. (Very punk rock of him.) He did well at UC Santa Cruz, where professors wrote glowingly about his work, including an essay about crystal meth, which combined factual research with “his own observations,” and which his composition instructor called “engaging and disturbing.” (The TA in his section of Introduction to Feminism, a course led by influential feminist Bettina Aptheker, also said he wrote an insightful analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which I’d pay good money to read.) But he dropped out after transferring to Cal State Long Beach, just one semester shy of earning a degree to pursue the life of an artist—like Coleridge and De Quincey.
He told his father that he’d gone to college to ask questions, but nobody had any answers. Inquisitives who realize that knowledge is neither certain nor absolute are apt to go one of two ways. You either learn to love the questions, or you become miserable. “A seeker,” his sister called him in her interview with Cuda, and so this seeker moved into a storefront in downtown Long Beach, where he could walk outside and score anything he sought. He was already in deep.
But he could swim, he insisted. Billie Holiday and Miles Davis and all those jazz cats could swim. William Burroughs could swim; so could Jerry Garcia and Lou Reed. Southern California lords of the underground like Thelonious Monster’s Bob Forrest and Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz were floating that deep end, and so was Cris Kirkwood from the Meat Puppets. The Butthole Surfers could do them one better—it’s right there in the name. And all those idols who dove in and drowned? Jim and Jimi and Janis and all the others? They took too much, but before that, it made them who they were: rock gods, larger than life, which, his dad said in VH1’s Behind the Music episode on Sublime, is what Bradley felt he needed to be. All the DJs do it. All the DJs use it. And we become that which we believe our gods to be.
After that last show in Petaluma, the band drove to San Francisco, to a room at the Ocean View Motel. “Located at the edge of the earth,” music writer Jeff Weiss says of it, “a quiet, terminally gray surfer enclave, right where Golden Gate Park sighs into the sea.” Did Bradley sigh into the sea? That morning, his last, with Lou Dog beside him. He tried to rally the others, but in the end, it was just the two of them. Bradley and Lou Dog and the sea. The indifferent, inconceivable sea. Bradley and Lou Dog and the sunrise, the waves. Bradley and Lou Dog and the pleasure dome: the bag scored the night before. Then just Lou Dog.
The year I began writing this, Sublime’s self-titled album turned 28, which means it is now as old as Bradley Nowell was when he died. Also 28 years old: Bradley’s son, Jakob, who that year stepped into his father’s sandals to tour with Sublime.
In interviews, Jakob remarks on the sacred strangeness of playing his father’s music at the age his father died. Stranger still, he’s playing songs the band never got to play on tour. In 1996, when asked if they’d tour to promote the album, Eric and Bud said no, that Sublime had died with Bradley. How surreal it must have been to hear their dead friend’s voice haunting the radio just months after he left them. But they loved music, so they did eventually get back on the road. The Nowell estate wouldn’t let them tour as Sublime—until now, with another Nowell singing. I bought tickets for their headlining set at the Levitate Festival in Marshfield, MA. An unlikely setting, but Massachusetts is my personal context for Sublime, and I could roll it into a trip home.
I take my mom. We park at a middle school, go through metal detectors and a pat-down, then board a school bus to the festival site. It’s at the fairgrounds, so there are signs for the 4-H club in the bathroom, where, in line for the toilets, my mom tells a swaying-drunk middle-aged man hitting on two teenagers to “dream on, creep.” The girls wear cut-off shorts, crocheted crop tops, shimmery fairy wings, and sparkles along their cheekbones. I remember this uniform from “Girl Who Does Drugs” days.
My mom and I walk around the fairgrounds checking out the rows of merchants selling art, jewelry, stickers, and stained glass. In photos, I smile up at a sunny Lou Dog mural, but I’m not feeling great. It’s a muggy 83 degrees at 6 p.m., and the Del’s stand is out of frozen lemonade, so we find a patch of grass a little way off from the stage and watch this temporary world float by.
Here we all are, trying to touch that moment. Many in the crowd are trying to relive it, but just as many, like the girls in front of us, are trying to initiate themselves into it. They sway together tentatively, as if trying on a surrender to it, this moment, slipping always away.
There are people ribbon dancing and bubble blowing. There are shaven-headed queer kids with pride flags, shoeless crust punks, and red-faced, red-flag looking dudes, sun-drunk and drunk-drunk, soon to be security’s problems. There are normy women my age in tastefully festive prints, lots of shirtless bros, little kids with face paint, preppy types in linen button-downs, and more glittery festie girls. There are so many mirror sunglasses that the crowd becomes a sea of lookers in whose eyes you only see yourself, looking.
Close to showtime, my mom and I find a clearing with a good line of sight. Then, a pair of middle school girls muscle their way in front of us clutching extra-large boba teas, which they set down nearly full and never pick up again. As the house music cuts and the band walks out, a pungent wave of pot smoke goes up with the cheers. The girls hold their noses. A new generation, I guess.
Jakob doesn’t sound like his father. He’s sober, and while Bradley was a naturally gifted, soulful singer, he also sang with all of the volatility of someone under the influence—digressions, lyrical improvisations, and a look-mom-no-hands careening emotionality. Beyond all that, Jakob has his own voice, and his own musical projects. He has said repeatedly that he is not trying to be his father, but rather trying to steward his legacy. “You can’t compete with a ghost,” he said in one interview with the Long Beach Press-Telegram. In another, for the Rock Feed podcast, that you can’t “out-moment someone, especially a family member like that. Sublime has a very special moment in history.”
But here we all are—trying to touch that moment. Many in the crowd are trying to relive it, but just as many, like the girls in front of us, are trying to initiate themselves into it. Bradley’s been gone twice as long as they’ve been alive. They sway together tentatively, as if trying on a surrender to it, this moment, slipping always away. Then they stop and their phones go up horizontally to film “Garden Grove.” They’ll film every song. They won’t dance or sing along. They’ll watch the entire show through the screen that captures it.
Jakob hasn’t always been sober. He’s called both rock ’n’ roll and addiction “family diseases.” Knowing his father had overdosed on heroin, he favored booze and amphetamines, but he started young, partly as an attempt to know the person drugs had taken—one who was accessible to his son only through music and mythos, the party gods’ own disciple, slain by the force of his worship and posthumously sainted by the scene. “There was this subconscious desire to kind of understand what my dad’s experiences were. Why would he smoke this, why would he snort that, why would he drink this, why would he pop that?” he told family friend Todd “Z-Man” Zalkins in an interview for Zalkins’s documentary about recovery.
Sobriety suits him. Jakob has a giddy presence and a gremlinish laugh. He prefaces “Greatest Hits” with “This one is my favorite,” and then later moves into “April 29, 1992” saying, “This next one is my real favorite.” He pauses before singing that song’s wanna let it burn bridge to tell the crowd, “Right here—this is my favorite part.” His favorite part of his favorite song written by his father, of whom he remembers about as much as the teens in front of me. Perhaps it makes him a purer conduit for the music. In an interview with San Diego Magazine, he said, “My dad loved making music . . . I love making music. If I could just sit in that moment and live there and just say, ‘This is not for me. This is for everyone around me’—then it becomes a lot more fun.”
And he does seem like he’s having fun. His bleached curls bounce as he hops around the stage, cracking wise between each song. (“Here’s every 311 song in order. Just kidding!”) Otherwise, he simply effuses: “Hell yeah fellas. That was fucking fun. That sounded good,” or “Fuck, that’s a good one.” When he sings “Pool Shark,” smoke machine fog swirls spectral around his hair, the purple stage lights cast their eerie glow, and he keeps his eyes closed until belting that prophetic last line: One day I’m gonna lose the war.
But it was someone else’s prophecy.
Throughout the show, I maintain an unbearable self-awareness. It turns out I am no longer the kind of person who sends back the crowd’s communal beach ball when it falls near me. In fact, I am now the kind of person who tries very hard not to even look at the communal beach ball, lest looking at it send the thing my way. Girl Who Does Drugs is dead, and she won’t be resurrecting for this show.
Maybe I feel weird because I’m with my mom. Or maybe I’m silently writing in my head, jotting down notes in my phone, a mediation of experience not unlike the incessant recording of the girls in front of me, whom I was so quick to judge.
But I’m not just watching; I’m looking for something.
But what, exactly? The holy ghost of a dead singer to emerge like vapor from his son’s mouth? A deeper connection to music that found me when I was becoming myself? Would that make me more . . . myself? Or would it make me more like the girls I’ve pretended to be, melt those masks into flesh? No. I know it when I hear “Jailhouse.”
Like a vision
It was playing on my guitar . . .
I had to be there
I had to be there
I am looking for the sense of being somewhere I can never go. I’m looking for California again.
After the encore—“Santeria,” perhaps the band’s most popular song, which Jakob coyly pretends not to know—the crowd watches the band walk off and the crew start breaking down. Then, Bud Gaugh reappears, walks to the edge of the stage and, one by one, throws his drumsticks into the crowd. The second stick sets sail towards me—a terrible vision, a gift. It lands at my feet; I just stare. Hands swarm over it, and I think, All I have to do is reach . . . but it’s too late. Some shirtless bro in glow stick necklaces leaps from the fray victorious. His friends take pictures of him cradling his trophy.
No matter. Even if I had grabbed it, I never could have reached it.
Caylin Capra-Thomas Caylin Capra-Thomas is a New Englander living in Columbia, Missouri, where she teaches English and creative writing at Stephens College. The author of a poetry collection, Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), her work has appeared widely, but you can read additional recent essays at Georgia Review and Adroit. A recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Sewanee Writers Conference, she recently earned her doctorate from the University of Missouri in Columbia.
Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
