Blink-182 [ARCHIVED] Band • Page 363

My 12 year old emo ass will always love Down. Cut California tracks for Dude Ranch classics.

 

Down sucks so bad

 

Down is great. Like the rest of Untitled. It's just boring live, relax lol

 

lol obvious and here’s your letter should be played every night! What y’all think?

 

Here’s Your Letter? Fuck yeah. I’d cut just about any song in the set for that one

 

Toast & Bananas! Apple Shampoo! Dick Lips! Peggy Sue! Pleaseeee

 

They’ll always be constrained by their 90 minute limit... a 2 hour set would allow them to play the deep cuts whilst still playing the songs the majority of people have come to see.

 

Throw in She Wolf from Kuts as well - sounds like something off +44

 

Then why do they only play 90 minutes?!?! That’s stupid

 

Actually, they pretty consistently only play 70 minutes now. Even 90 minutes would be an improvement

 

Even during their prime they never played more than an hour and 20 minutes except on rare occasions. The TOYPAJ, Pop Disaster Tour and Untitled tours they pretty much played between 70 and 80 minute sets each night. So this isn’t really anything new from them.

 

Came to say this. You beat me to it

 

To do 90 minute shows, they'd have to vastly improve their current live show or play smaller venues. It sucks that they don't switch up the set list but after going to too many shows the past few years, I get that the majority of people at arena shows probably aren't there to hear deeper album cuts. There's nothing about their show that would be entertaining enough for those people sitting further away and in the rafters to slog through a bunch of songs they don't know. In comparison, even with the stale set list, the 1500 cap Metro show was the funnest because the experience is completely different. They weren't struggling to fill space and it felt a lot less stiff and uniform.

 

One of the best setlists was at that show.

(lol at mark having the guy come out to tie his shoe)

 

I wouldn’t mind if blink stopped. I’m happy for them to go on as is. But first break up felt like unfinished business. But I at least have that out of my system with subsequent reunions and albums now and am good

 

That’s th Grammy nominated California to you

 

I actually enjoy Down a lot more live, basically any boring song Travis spices up with drum fills. They do that extended bridge and outro...it works for me.

 

Ok so conversation is getting dull here and before we go down another list binge I propose the below (it's a bit of a conspiracy theory...or maybe it isn't I don't know)

Untitled was the beginning of the end for blink...from 1992 to 2003 they were the epitome of pop punk, arguably second to green day (note i said epitome, not "best band in pop punk"). Untitled comes out which is a very different take, people loved it lyrically because it showed "growth" while musically they had shifted away from NFG/sum 41/green day and more towards brand new/taking back sunday/jimmy eat world. Pop-punk of the late 90s was dead, emo-pop-punk had risen for the early 2000s. It was blink taking elements of the other bands at the time...they knew they'd always have us diehards but they needed that "mom where's my hair dye?!?!" crowd who got turned off by the skateboards and fart jokes. They were 16 but they were "mature".

I consider that to be unauthentic and the beginning of the end for blink. They started incorporating the sound of other rock bands into their own. Their live shows completely degraded. Their set ups and kits were very different. It was not blink.

Mark and Tom started diverging, just look at how starkly different +44 and AVA were as evidence. I always theorized that both of those bands just took the rejected songs from untitled that were too pop-punk or too experimental/stadium rock.

Anyway, just a fun thought since the whole "I want a mature blink" thing came up. Last time blink pushed the mature bit, they broke up shortly after.

 

I think untitled was absolutely genuine and authentic. You can see that in the cheetah videos and even how Mark talks about the record. Tom wanted to go heavier and try new things as early as TOYPAJ, it wasn’t out of nowhere. It was a logical growth, and just as much blink-182 as any other blink-182 album.

 

According to Mark he felt like the band was basically over after the TOYPAJ concert cycle ended but no one wanted to admit it or say anything about it. Obviously BCR caused a lot of the problems but Tom was trying to change the direction of the band as early as the TOYPAJ recordings while Mark was more comfortable making albums similar to Enema moving forward. Plus the guys were simply changing, they were growing up and families and lives outside of the band. Tom and Mark were just two different people now compared to what they were in 1999 for example, I think the break up was going to happen whether they made an album similar to Enema/TOYPAJ or not. Tom wanted to be like U2 and tour less and Mark just wanted to be blink-182.

I will say seeing blink play in 2004 after they just did the Pop Disaster tour 2 years earlier, they looked and felt like a different band. There was hardly any joking/banter in between songs but they sounded and played the best they ever had. I think part of the reason was they were probably tired of being labeled as a joke band and wanted to show case their new mature sound. Of course the joke label will happen when you record songs about dogs, grandpas and depends.

 

I don't know that I'd say their live show degraded after Untitled. They were playing the biggest shows they'd ever played and were HUGE at that point. Their live show was killer then.

 

I'd say if anything, the animosity between them at the time hurt their live shows (not as much banter and they played the songs fast as fuck but I'm not sure if that is to blame).

Anyway, I've always said that Untitled just hit the sweet spot in their evolution. It happened at a time when their tastes were changing and when the scene was changing - they needed to adapt at least a little bit to keep things exciting, but that doesn't mean it was unauthentic. It was just enough change and experimentation to keep things fresh and interesting while also pushing themselves, but they still retained so much of their previous sound that it didn't drive people away. Plus, they hated each other just enough that it pushed them in different directions, but they held it together well enough to collaborate so the end result was perfect.

Basically all of these things went too far after that point in time - too much animosity, too much experimentation, not enough collaboration, etc.

 

I hear that. I always seem to love the records people make when they hate each other, haha! I can’t think of any others off the top of my head but there’s been times when you hear about the turmoil in a band and it created a great record. TBS comes to mind with like, New Again. I’ve also made some great music with people I absolutely hated, lol. It’s a weird thing.

 

Personally I don't care at all for how fast they were playing their songs live at that time. It was too fast. It was let's burn through our songs, not banter and get the fuck off stage since we can't stand each other lol

 

I think it depended on the song, some of the songs were fine playing it faster and some sounded eh, I never liked them playing Feeling This at mega speed for instance. I think by speeding up some of the songs it gave the fans a new listening experience for that song too. They also did some cool stuff with the songs like The Rock Show where they slowed the bridge part down a lot and it sounded great. They also slowed down STFTK quite a bit too. And don't forget about the medleys they played with parts of Dumpweed/M+M's/Josie/Man Overboard/Dumpweed again.

Even them playing their set list faster, they still averaged roughly the same number of songs played and their set time was around 70ish minutes so it wasn't like fans weren't getting the full blink experience minus the jokes/banter. I actually wouldn't be surprised if you took out the jokes/banters/encore wait times out of their older concerts and just tracked the actual time they spent playing songs they probably played more on that Untitled tour.