Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus from Blink-182 reunited and discussed an interesting Travis Barker kiss.
Tom on his fearlessness and how blink-182 had to lie to book gigs in their early days…
CLIP EMBED:
Mark Hoppus:I was thinking about stuff to ask you, and I was thinking about your personality and just how fearless you are and how you’re unafraid of failure. And you’ll put yourself out there. And the story that came to my mind was back in the early 2000s, MTV was doing this thing where they would have band members go interview actors as part of their junkets and things like that. And so I got to interview Mike Myers and Beyonce and Seth Green and Vern from Goldfinger, Austin Powers, Goldfinger, and you got sent to interview Mel Gibson about his movie, Signs, right?
Tom DeLonge: Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Hoppus: And he was late. And so it was at a bar. And so you started drinking beforehand. You were texting me like, “Dude’s late. I’m drinking, I’m having another glass of wine,” whatever. And you ended up getting over served on your beverages. And so when Mel Gibson finally showed up, your first question to him is, “All right, Mel, why are you so late to this interview?” Which I thought was just the ballsiest, raddest thing to say to Mel Gibson to start off an interview. Why are you like that?
Tom DeLonge: Yeah. One of my other questions was, “Why are you so handsome?” Because my mom was all into him. And I think we started one of our clothing, Macbeth or something too. So I wrote it on the shirt because we didn’t actually… I was trying to get Sharpie.
Mark Hoppus: Oh right, yeah.
Tom DeLonge: The whole thing from his point of view must have been absolutely insane. But yeah, I appreciate, by the way, you saying that I’m fearless. I don’t know why. Sometimes I feel that I’m naive. That fearlessness, by the way, has gotten me into some things that have been… Especially the UFO thing, that’s gotten me some scary situations that were just a big deal. So sometimes I kind of go, “Whoa, I really need to check myself as far as whatever. But it’s funny. I always look at Blink as this combination of just so much like luck that was sprinkled on us in a way that where anything is possible because we were just in the garage. I didn’t think we’re going to be getting on a palette or something. So what I feel like we did, I was like, “Well, anything can happen. You just got to really work hard and you got to see yourself doing it.” Maybe you’ll fail sometimes, but hopefully you’ll be right more times.
Tom DeLonge: I just lost the fear of trying things and so I kept going. And then things kept kind of working, not on the schedule you want or not in the way you want, but it just did. I had to be clever to a degree too, because I remember early on talking to government people, I didn’t have any government people. So I talked to one guy and I was like… I set up two meetings basically. And I went to one and I was like, “I got a meeting with the other guy.” And I go to the other guy and I’m like, “You know who I’m meeting with over there.” But it totally worked. I it was funny. It worked just enough to get to the next step.
Mark Hoppus: Which is kind of how Blink got started, because we were playing in garages and maybe a couple of backyard parties here and there, but you were calling up schools and saying we were a band with a motivational edge to us and we wanted to go and play high schools, and we would show up and play until they kicked us out. But really, to your credit, you were the one that was calling up clubs and getting us on bills.
Tom DeLonge: God, I know. The audacity. I remember calling those high schools. Yeah. It was like anti-drug, alcohol message or something. Whatever it took, that’s kind of how… You know what’s fun about being young though, is you’re not aware of the ramifications of what you do. You can really get away with anything if you don’t really know what’s going to happen to you for it. And I’m always trying new things for that reason. Blink was very much like that. Yeah. Remember we played, one of our very first shows ever, they gave us a bunch of tickets to sell and we sold none because no one we knew was old enough. And that was the only money we’d make. So we show up-
Mark Hoppus: The Spirit Club, right?
Tom DeLonge: Yeah. Here’s all 50 tickets back. We don’t know anybody that can come. And he had us play. And if you remember, no one was in the bar except for the dude sweeping that was the bartender. But he walked up at the end and he’s like, ‘Don’t break up, there’s something here. I don’t know what it is, but I hear something.’ It was a cool little thing, I hung onto that for a few years. I was like, that dude likes us.
