All he ever wants to do - any time of the day, any day of the week - is jam.

He knew that I was a really big fan of his, but I wasn’t weird to him and all I really wanted to do was just jam. Everybody always wants something from him.

He really vocalizes himself through music a lot of the time, even when you know him very well. What was the process of you actually joining a new version of Sublime?Įric is not a man of many words. I was just hanging out with Eric so much, jamming over at his house. In the process of that, I started working at a recording studio. So I was like, “Fuck being in a band, I’m just going to make my own music and do my solo shit.” But nobody wanted to jam, nobody was that committed. What sort of music were you making at the time?Īll I wanted was to be in a Sublime cover band, or to start a band like Sublime. My plan was to move to southern California and become an engineer, then become a producer, then become an artist. Well, not my friends, but people my age should be going to college and shit!” So it’s like, “Everyone tells me I’m good at music, I’ve got to think of something. All my friends are about to go to college and shit. And I was like, “I’ve got to do something with this music. I just got high and skateboarded and played music. We were just fucking broke, man, and being a broke kid sucks. I had a bunch of family down south so I was always staying down there, going to school down there, getting in a bunch of trouble.

I lived there up until I was about 14, and then I was going back and forth from San Diego to Northern California. On Friday, the band will release their third album of original music, titled Blessings.Įast Bay. Despite existing in the shadow of Nowell, the band has earned a dedicated following in its own right, especially among music fans who tend to congregate at the crossroads of jam bands, reggae-rap, and ska-punk. Impressed by Ramirez’s knowledge of the band’s catalog as well as his vocal similarities to the late Nowell, Wilson asked him in to join a revived iteration of the group that would, after a legal skirmish with Nowell’s estate over the use of the name “Sublime,” eventually be called Sublime with Rome. in the mid-2000’s and began bumming around the music scene, eventually meeting Sublime’s former bassist, Eric Wilson. “I wanted to be that.” In pursuit of his goal, a near-broke Ramirez moved to L.A. “All I wanted to do was be in a Sublime cover band,” the 30-year-old Ramirez tells me of his younger self, calling from his home in Los Angeles. While bouncing back and forth between Oakland and San Diego as a teen, he’d internalized Sublime’s aesthetic sensibility, and, with little in the way of post-school prospects, decided to dedicate his life to making music like his heroes. This was the situation Rome Ramirez found himself in shortly after he graduated high school. There have been better bands - and, doubtlessly, ones whose politics haven’t aged extremely poorly - but only a handful who were able to communicate an entire worldview to their listeners. As a 15-year-old who’d never so much as seen a joint, I remember listening to Sublime and concluding that this music sounded like how smoking weed felt. The key to Sublime’s success, however, was its ability to use this musical omnivorousness as a means through which to articulate a specific lifestyle, one that prized skating, surfing, drinking beers, smoking weed, and generally chilling as hard as humanly possible above all else. Led by the late Bradley Nowell, the band synthesized a truly staggering range of influences, pivoting from SoCal ska-punk ( “Seed”) to Misfits-style horror-prom ballads ( “New Realization”) to dubbed-out trip-hop tracks that crib their choruses from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess ( “Doin’ Time”). Now, imagine your favorite band is Sublime. And how are you, an 18-year-old kid, supposed to fill the shoes of your musical hero? Is it even possible? Do you even try? Now, imagine randomly meeting the bassist for that band, impressing him with your knowledge of his band’s catalog, and then being asked to join that band as their new frontman. Your favorite band, the band you obsess over - the band whose songs you’ve played and sung so many times that you know them backwards and forwards and inside out - has been broken up since you were eight years old, when their lead singer died of a heroin overdose.

Sublime singer