Now back on the road with co-founder Eric Wilson and late frontman Bradley Nowell’s son Jakob, Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh is happy to have his “long-distance family” together again, performing songs for fans who have stayed with the group over its long and storied career and newcomers alike.
LISTEN NOW: Sublime’s Bud Gaugh talks with Dallas
In the years that passed between the inception of Sublime, Bradley’s untimely passing in 1996, and now this new version of what once was, Bud had managed to follow young Jakob’s rise in his own bands. “That really impressed me,” Bud says, “just watching him control the room. He’s just a real entertainer. I was just really impressed with his skills and watching him have fun being himself up there,” he adds.
Bringing Jakob into the band he says has been “an incredible feeling,” although he admits he “never thought that it would happen just because our musical tastes are so different, his style and our style, Eric was like, ‘I can jam with you but let's get in a room and see if we jive with Jake.’ In November [2023], I wanna say right before the benefit show for HR [of Bad Brains], we sat down and started playing some of these songs and it was like memory road with Eric… we just locked in from the first note, and then Jakob started playing. It's like, ‘Oh, this is actually groovin’. This could actually really work.’ So, we played a few songs and then took a break and it was like, ‘All right, I think we can do this show.’"
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Seeing the people's reaction that night, “the feelings that we got… it was incredible. The amount of healing that was going around that room that night, hearing it from the audience, seeing not a dry eye in the house. The feeling that we got from playing,” he says, made the whole band realize “This is what we were supposed to be doing. This needs to continue.” From that point, he says, there was “just no looking back… We have been laser-focused as a group,” Bud says, “looking in the same direction for the first time in a very, very long time.”
“We shook everything up from the top down, just completely changed our whole company and the way that we look at doing music and everything,” Gaugh explains. “It's completely new from the ground up to the top down, and it had to happen that way for this whole thing to happen. Now it feels like a family vibe once again.”
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After giving fans a taste of something new over the 2024 Memorial Day weekend with “Feel Like That,” Bud says there could be more new music on the way. “Sublime has always been a live performing band and a lot of our songs we create on stage, just performing improv… just dubbing our songs out. We've had an opportunity to play a few times now together, so now we're starting to experiment with songs on stage a little bit, getting our groove down.”
“That's the first step in the process for creating new songs for Sublime,” he adds. “We've looked back on some songs that we were working on back in the day, so we'll probably be bringing some of those songs out live here real soon to a stage near you.”
Bud also touched on getting to work on a Sublime feature film produced by the band, revealing that there has in fact been some movement since we last caught wind of it in 2022.
“We have approved a script and we're working with a really great team,” he says. “The writer, he's a writer for one of these shows that I really, really liked a lot, so we chose him because of his dark humor and working on the show ‘Ozark’. Chris Mundy is just a great writer. And then the producer, he actually produced one of our music videos for Long Beach Dub Allstars. We did a song that featured will.i.am on the track and that was shot in my backyard in Long Beach -- all over Long Beach -- but specifically in my backyard, we had a party there for the video. Francis Lawrence was a great director and producer of that, so when I saw him on the list of would-be, could-be people I was like, ‘Oh, we gotta get Francis on here, he did our video!’ And they're like, ‘Yeah, Francis, he's pretty busy guy now. He did the ‘Hunger Games,’ -- just something little. And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, well, he did our video, I wanna get him back!’ We're really excited about this… it should be a really good movie.”
Listen to Dallas' full interview with Sublime's Bud Gaugh above and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists right here on Audacy.