“It doesn’t represent a single place or a point in time. “Second to the music, the art is the strongest message Sublime has to offer,” she says while flipping a pancake in her San Diego-area home. So Holmes has gradually phased out the city from a lot of Sublime products because she thinks the feelings and ideas should translate to everyone who wants them, regardless of geography. But the Sublime ethos was always about hosting an eternal house party, with an open-door policy as long as you’re going to have a good time and not harsh anyone else’s scene. Sporting band merch historically identified the wearer with a scene, an exclusionary tribe. Wearing a Sublime logo now has little to do with the music or Long Beach itself. The first officially licensed surfboard design is in the works. There are socks, skateboards, posters, shower curtains and wallets. Decals on cars and bootlegged T-shirts are hawked in swap meets. The Old English lettering and sol regis is everywhere in American lowbrow fashion: Hot Topic, Spencer’s, Macy’s, Old Navy and Target. to Freedom, an album that didn’t sell well in its initial release-has transformed into shorthand for Southern California beach culture, something as emblematic of the region’s scene as the Beach Boys or surfers of decades past.Īn army of Sublime merchandise is now marching into stores across the world, all approved by Nowell’s widow, Troy Holmes, and the band’s management, Dave Kaplan Management. That crying sun that the homies admired-the cover image of their 1992 debut, 40oz. The band’s name tattooed in Old English on Nowell’s back served as the cover art for their eponymous 1996 release and remains one of the most famous of the 1990s. “I mean, ‘Caress Me Down’ and ‘Date Rape’ are both classics,” Nikki says, “and it’s summertime in the LBC, you know?”īut a fascinating cult has evolved around the art of Sublime. Two other times that day, I had spotted that exact logo, once on the shirt of another twentysomething lady at Alamitos Beach and again on the back window of a car driving down Pine. She’s wearing a black Sublime shirt, complete with the sun and clean white script above it.
“They’re definitely one of my favorite bands,” says Nikki, a twentysomething woman walking down Pine Avenue in the East Village Arts District. Millennials and Gen-Zers can quote lyrics as easily as gnarled skankers and rockabillies. Critics who dismissed the bar ballads and soul vocals of Bradley Nowell are finally reassessing their worth. The reconstituted Sublime With Rome tours the world their back catalog continues to sell well. Two decades after the trio’s eponymous album propelled them to national recognition and quickly became a summer soundtrack for Southern California, Sublime is more popular than ever. And then the homie blurted out a common conversation opener in beach-themed dives, pretty much the official compliment of SoCal surfer and stoner bros everywhere from Menifee to Solana Beach, Baja Sharkeez to Woody’s Wharf. But the homie kept looking at a simple white shirt with a basketball-sized print of a multicolored crying sun across the chest: resplendent, oversized, a skeleton on the bridge of its nose, a devil on one cheek and a switchblade on another, a mushroom for a brain-folk art to the max. The maroon one had the band’s hometown of Long Beach written in white under the group’s name the black tee featured a round “LBC Sublime” logo in an ornate font. Instead, one of the guys pointed at a bunch of T-shirts reppin’ Sublime. Before them was a galaxy of iconic rock-band logos on T-shirts, including the golden “W” of Wu-Tang Clan the Doors’ bubbly lowercase font a red, yellow and green headshot of Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones’ wagging tongue. The two men in front of a booth at the Body Art Expo convention in Pomona resembled homeboys straight out of American Me: black tank tops, backward baseball caps, dark-gray shorts, each heavily tattooed with black-and-gray portraits and imagery down their arms and back.
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