Getty Image / Arturo Holmes
Jakob Nowell took the Main Stage at Coachella with Sublime for the band’s second performance without Rome and without an asterisk.
Jakob is the son of Sublime-founder Bradley Nowell who passed away in 1996 just as the Ska Punk-Surf Rock band was beginning to take off. And his taking of the proverbial reins of the band marks a pivotal moment for millions who each have their own connection to the band.
As videos of Sublime‘s performance on the main stage get circulated I’ve stopped to watch every single one of them, marveling at how similar Jakob Nowell’s voice sounds to his father. He’s even picked up similar mannerisms on stage.
Sublime Performs ‘Badfish’ At Coachella
Trigger alert: I speak about my own experience with loss of life and losing my brother.
For me, Sublime is one of the last connections I have to my older brother who introduced me to Sublime in 1996, the same year Bradley Nowell died from a heroin overdose and two years before my brother would take his own life after a battle with depression.
He was eleven years older than me and five years younger than Bradley Nowell but to me, my brother was everything. My best friend. The person I looked up most to in the world. My idol. I was the last person in the world to speak to him when he called me up out of the blue on a Friday in March to cancel my sleepover plans at this house, telling me “always be a good man” right before he hung up. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
And I didn’t think anything of it a month later when his girlfriend told him she’d see him (in the afterlife) before me and would make sure to kick his ass for me. She dropped me off after a day of fishing and then took her own life. On my birth certificate I was just kid but I grew up more in that month than any 13-year-old should ever have to.
He left me “all of his worldly possessions” which wasn’t much but I did get his Sublime CDs, 40oz. to Freedom and Robbin’ the Hood. I’d already been introduced to the band by him and even though they had a distinctly SoCal sound there was something about growing up on the beach in Florida that made the music resonate with me like nothing I’d heard before.
I was just reaching that age where you begin to discover the world for yourself. That end of middle school/start of high school era where you suddenly have more freedom than you’ve ever had in your life. And with that you get to begin to discover for the first time what your own tastes are.
Sublime was the first band I ever truly fell in love with. Definitely not the last. But I can look back at my personal chronological history of music and everything prior to Sublime was forced on me through my parents, music we’d listen to in the car that I liked but it was never my choice to put it on. With Sublime, I chased down every new CD I could for years. I spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to Greatest Hits, Stand By Your Van, Sublime Acoustic: Bradley Nowell & Friends, and the studio albums.
Despite me being (probably) too young for the lyrics and content of the songs, my mom recognized that Sublime was a connection to my brother that I desperately needed. That I still need. We probably listened to ‘Santeria’ a thousand times in her car.
‘Santeria’ by Sublime at Coachella
To see Jakob Nowell on stage singing his father’s song after all these years, after Jakob’s own battles with substance abuse and overcoming those struggles, it opens up a lot of old wounds. And that’s why I wanted to write this up today because I know my experience with Sublime might be unique but their music was the soundtrack of a generation for people from SoCal and Florida.
Do the lyrics hold up? Not always. Does the sound take us back to a time and place when life was special? It sure as f— does.
And it’s incredibly selfish of me to not mention Bradley Nowell’s bandmates and best friends who lost their brother back in 1996, when Jakob Nowell was just 11 months old. I cannot even begin to imagine what that experience was like for them, particularly for Bud Gaugh who was the one who found Nowell after he’d overdosed.
I’ve never met the members of Sublime but do feel a kinship through our shared experience of loss. And I think that’s something that millions of Sublimes fans fail to recognize.
But even in that failure to acknowledge our shared experience of loss, we are all able to relish in the return of Jakob Nowell and the band being put back together. Bradley Nowell could never be brought back. But his song has been the missing puzzle piece all along and for these two weeks at Coachella and on any future tours, we Sublime fans get to live in a world that feels good again, at least when it comes to music.
If reading through my Sublime story and tales of loss was difficult, I apologize. I just need to get this story off my chest from time to time and to ensure that certain people never go forgotten. But if anyone read this is having a hard time and needs to share that, drop me an email at [email protected]. I’ll always listen.