Punk legends NOFX called it quits this weekend in front of 15,000 fans in San Pedro, Ca, with “Fat Mike” Burkett, Eric Melvin, Aaron “El Hefe” Abeyta, and Erik “Smelly” Sandin playing their final show.
The story of their retirement isn’t a short explosive one, but a long, drawn-out saga spanning multiple decades and complicated relationships.
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“People might ask ‘Why would you want to stop doing this? Being in a punk rock band — specifically a punk rock band — is probably the best job in the world,’” Burkett says as sits in one of NOFX’s handful of trailers at Chicago’s Riot Fest, the penultimate stop on their final tour that stretched over 18 months. “I’ll tell you why. Generally, we’d tour about three weeks at a time, and never more than four shows a week. We work for an hour and a half per night, and the rest of the time, we just do whatever we want. When you’re in a punk band, you don’t have to practice as long as you know the songs a little bit. When we fuck up every night, people think it’s charming, but if someone like Lady Gaga or Barry Manilow plays a wrong note, it’s a big deal. So why would we quit this job that’s so easy? Actors have to fucking learn lines and do 16-hour days. Writers have to fucking write original material all the time. All of the other artists have it much harder than we do. It’s the best job in the world. Why would I give that up?”
Well, there’s no way we could explain it, so here’s the extremely abbreviated and story of the last 25 years of NOFX as told by the members of NOFX.
The Decline (1999) / Pump Up the Valuum (2000)
Eric Melvin: There was a good decade or so after [Punk in Drublic] that we were just riding the wave of success and possibilities of what we could do. We kept making record after record, and talking about how we could keep making this high-energy riffy stuff without just making Punk in Drublic over and over again. We were very intentional in making sure it wasn’t just the same thing. We knew we were gonna piss off some people, but that’s punk rock and it’s exactly what we needed to do.
Aaron “El Hefe” Abeyta: The scene was the biggest it’s ever been. We were the headliners on the Warped Tour like every other year, and playing huge festivals with bands like Rancid and Bad Religion both here and overseas. It was about that time we went to Japan, and we were discovering that we were all big everywhere else too. I think we were just discovering that we were pretty big all over the world. We could play anywhere and an audience would come.
Erik “Smelly” Sandin: Everything was on cruise control back then, so there’s no definitive thing that jumps out to me. Mike was all about being the businessman, not the drug guy. He wasn’t the cross-dressing, look-at-me guy yet. It was like the era of Green Day and the Offspring kind of calmed down, but we found a very solid niche in the music world.
Mike “Fat Mike” Burkett: When I wrote those albums, Bill Clinton was in office, and you really couldn’t complain about anything. He bombed some big pharmaceutical company’s laboratory in the Middle East and deregulated banks, but no one saw that as a bad thing at the time until the real estate crisis. I was more concerned with the prison system at that point — as you can tell by the lyrics — and I was gonna go into prisoner rights more, because that’s what I was interested in. You couldn’t really be mad about politics at the time, because there was a fucking surplus in the country and things were generally pretty good — but boy do things change real fast.
The War on Errorism (2003)
El Hefe: We were having a lot of fun our whole career, and we were making great money at that point. Then Mike got really heavy into politics with Rock Against Bush and all that, and that was the first time we realized that some of the punk people were Republicans and would just be like ‘Fuck you!’ Some of our friends’ bands didn’t want to be involved because they were right wing or whatever, but the whole thing was a lot of fun for the most part.
Smelly: We had some goofy, stupid lyrics, but there was some political shit in there on the earlier stuff. I think it felt like it gave Mike a purpose, which in turn gave us a purpose. I’ve never been that political of a guy. I vote and all that shit, but never been on the picket lines or anything. Bush and Cheney really fired Mike up, because he knew it was all fucking bullshit — just like pretty much the whole world did. It gave him a purpose and it gave him a voice beyond just being in a punk band. Looking back on it, those were some pretty important years for us because it gave us a foundation of sincerity.
Fat Mike: I never worked so hard for something in my life, and I definitely never worked so hard to make the world a better place — and the world would be a better place now, if Al Gore or John Kerry would have won. We raised over a $1 million for John Kerry, and I was at the Democratic Convention rubbing elbows with Larry David and Michael Moore. Back then, with a civil half-hour conversation, you could turn a Republican into a Democrat — or at least get them to not vote for George Bush — just by giving them the facts. The reason why I’m not doing anything like that now is because you cannot change the mind of a Trump supporter, so I’m not gonna waste my time.
El Hefe: When we dropped that album, we played (Late Night with) Conan O’Brien, and we were backstage getting ready to play this song, and they said ‘Hey, you guys, can you be careful not to say this one phrase in your lyrics? We don’t want to create controversy.’ And Mike said ‘Sure, OK.’ Then Mike did it anyway.
Fat Mike: NOFX has always been a political band. The songs [on The War on Errorism] aren’t that political really. It’s just a really angry album with a political cover. It was the first album we did to hit No. 1 on the [Billboard Independent Albums] chart, and it was featured on CNN. “The Separation of Church and Skate” is the guitar sound I’d always wanted us to have, and we’ve used the same guitars and amps ever since to get it.
Melvin: We almost forgot that politics and social awareness were a part of the punk rock scene that we came out of. It was still in Mike’s writing along the way, but it would adjust to every record we did. Then he was like ‘Let’s see how much influence we can have on this because we’re really in the public eye now.’ But we also found where the trappings were, and the disappointment of how slow and impossible to move the system can be. So I think when Bush won that second term, it felt a bit crushing for him. We thought we were going to make a difference. On election night, Mike and I were drinking and having a bit of a party watching the results. As soon as it was clear Bush was gonna win, I remember him saying “I’m gonna go take ecstasy” and it almost feels like he hasn’t stopped since,
Fat Mike: We had a party at my house on election night, and I had a shot glass full of Valium and a shot glass full of ecstasy, depending on how it went. We lost, but we all decided to take the ecstasy anyway because we were celebrating how hard we worked to make the world a better place.
Smelly: The night that Bush won in 2004, Mike called me up right after crying. “It didn’t happen!” But I mean how can you take that personally? You are just one voice of how many millions? It’s not about you.
El Hefe: I just remember him being more upset than we’d ever seen him before. He was a mess. We went on stage not long after and had the worst show. He was pissed off about the whole thing and would not let it go. Smelly was trying to talk to him like ‘Dude, use it to get pumped. Do something about it. Raise awareness. Shit happens.’ But he just could not let it go.
Melvin: I still think about it like ‘Wow, is that the thing that broke Mike?’ It was the one thing he couldn’t do, because, up until that point, everything else worked. Nothing’s that black and white, but it’s kind of been all coke, ecstasy, and ketamine flowing into his body ever since that moment. At some point I was like ‘OK, I can’t do this anymore,’ and I just started finding my own passions again. I love playing music, so I started focusing more on playing a good live show. I love being active, so I pay attention to my body more. I love going deep into my thoughts and emotions, so I got more into that. It was right around that time that our paths — which were always slightly different but pretty parallel — started feeling like they were going in different directions and we weren’t connecting as much anymore.
Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing (2006)
Fat Mike: This one is our top five albums, even though I kind of fucked up and put too many songs on it. If I took three songs off, I think it could have been a perfect album. And there are songs I left off that I should have put on, like “Everything in Moderation (Especially Moderation)” and the Mel Gibson song [“I’m Going to Hell for this One”]. It’s my favorite production on any album that we made because Bill [Stevenson, producer and Descendents drummer] made all of us play everything absolutely perfectly. Those songs are way more political [than The War on Errorism]. People think “USA-Holes” is about the Titanic, but it’s about the fucking government — and that ship with all the Jews on it, the [MS] St. Louis. I thought it was so funny to say “The captain hit an iceberg and started a war on the Arctic” because that’s what George Bush did. We got attacked — if you believe we got attacked — by [15] Saudis and [four people from the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt], so he started a war with Iraq. It’s like if the U.S. bombed France, so France started a war with Mexico.
Smelly: Mike’s always been a good songwriter and a good visionary, musically, but that’s when Mike’s songwriting got really good and the recording process got really bad. Bill Stevenson is phenomenal, but that’s about the time we started using Pro Tools, so we didn’t have to get into a room and figure songs out beforehand. It would be like “Oh, we’re recording next week? I don’t even really know the songs.” We’d get into the studio and Mike would be like “Just play a drum beat,” because he doesn’t look at drums as a musical instrument as much as it’s just something to hold up the rest of the song. My drumming really suffered on the recordings because I never got a chance to work shit out. But in the end, I think Mike’s songs actually blossomed because he could experiment with different things on the computer at that point.
Fat Mike: That era was a dream for us. Everybody on Fat Wreck Chords sold so many CDs and made so much profit. Bands like No Use for a Name and Lagwagon were buying houses, and bands were just making a killing — and it was easy because they were making great records.
El Hefe: Everyone was doing pretty good and getting well taken care of at that time. That was when we started focusing on playing these huge festivals all over the world with bands like Guns ‘N Roses, the Prodigy, and Metallica, but also with everyone from Coldplay to ZZ Top. Sometimes I’d be surprised when I’d start talking to a band and they listened to us. A lot of those bands were here today, gone tomorrow because that’s the way the pop scene works, but we partied with a lot of cool bands during that time — everyone from 3OH!3 to Steve Aoki and Skrillex.
Melvin: It was still important to us, collectively, to try to see as much of the world as we could. We loved going to out-of-the-way places — Iceland, Israel, South Africa, Jakarta, Manila, Hong Kong — because it felt like Europe and America and Canada were wide open to us. So whenever we had the chance, we would want to go where the challenge is. I still have some great memories of walking on the Great Wall of China and playing Reykjavik at 4:00 in the morning when the sun was low on the horizon. Things you really can’t see anywhere else in the world.
Fat Mike: Aside from the other touring, I did the Warped tour every year — NOFX on even years and [Me First and the Gimme Gimmes] on odd years. We went with bands like Bad Religion and would just always park our bus with them or Joan Jett, Bouncing Souls, Less than Jake, all the old guys. It was so fucking fun, and even though they barely paid us shit, it was just a nine-song half-hour set. We always had a blow-up pool, tons of drugs, drinking, golfing and riding bikes. It was summer camp with all of your friends, and there were no rules. It didn’t matter if a big band would come out — like Sum 41 was platinum — Kevin Lyman would make them go on at noon on a small stage. And if you were a dick band, you would get fucking shunned by all of the other bands. I think even fans who went didn’t realize how cool it was for the bands. We were running poker games with Good Charlotte and hanging out with Christian bands like Underoath — even though I convinced them to quit because I made so much fun of them.
Melvin: I don’t remember the exact timing, but it was around the end of that when I feel like we started to see some of the first cracks in Mike. I know he had some personal stuff going on, but then the drugs and sycophants started becoming more and more. That’s also when he started having a hundred ideas going on at once, and it was hard to tell which ones we should be taking seriously. He’s always held tight to his beliefs and that he’s doing the right thing, but sometimes that includes self-destructive things.
Coaster (2009)
Fat Mike: On the last tour of [NOFX’s 2008 documentary/reality show] Backstage Passport, when we were coming back from South Africa, I told the band at the airport “Hey guys, I need to take a long break. I’m hurting way too much.” Smelly said, “Do what you gotta do, bro.” Hefe said “It’ll be hard. We’re not making money, but do what you gotta do.” But Melvin said, “Get it together, dude! We need money. What are you fucking talking about? Taking eight months off?” That was the first time I thought to myself on that plane ride”‘I’m not going to grow old with Eric Melvin.” Who would say that to a friend? “Don’t clean up. We need the money.” That’s a fucking narcissist.
Melvin: We tried to make a second season of Backstage Passport, and Mike was like “We did all this footage, and it’s just more of the same. That’s gonna be boring for people.” But I was like “I don’t think so. People want to see more of it. Maybe if we try to do it four or five or six years in a row, but the second year? Come on.” That was when I realized that our intentions might not be aligned, because if two people are doing the same thing for their own reasons — even though they’re doing it together — they may not be striving for the same goal. From the beginning, I always thought we were doing this just to do it, and the reward was that we got to do it. But I remember having a discussion with Mike at some point around then, and he was like “After the show, I’m gonna do a bunch of coke. That’s my reward.” I was like ‘Isn’t it reward enough just that you get to go do this?’
Fat Mike: What’s ironic is that when I was in rehab, he wrote me some really mean emails. On one of them, I go ‘Eric, please stop sending me these emails. I’m trying to get healthy, and you keep telling me what a dishonest shithead I am. Please stop.’ And he writes back “That’s something a narcissist would say, like it’s all about you.” I don’t even think he knows what the word means. I have a large ego, but just because I’m the one with the fame doesn’t mean I’m a fucking narcissist.
Melvin: That’s when it started to feel like the whole band was more about ‘We have to do whatever’s making Mike happy’ and I started to check out a little more. Looking back on it, I think that might’ve made it worse because it was a lot of enabling. I could see he was suffering from something, and we all just went into support mode like ‘This is my buddy. I love him. We’ve been through so much already together. I’m gonna do whatever is gonna make him happy and keep him happy.’
El Hefe: That was also around the time when CDs were becoming worthless — which is why the album is called Coaster, because CDs became coasters since no one is playing music on them — which changed a lot of things. Everybody’s royalties were dropping dramatically and the whole scene was changing. First, they dropped in half with Napster and stuff, then they got cut in half again when everything went digital, so everyone’s bank account got hit badly.
Smelly: That record was so hard to record with Mike because he would record a song and then just leave for like two hours. So I’m like ‘What am I supposed to record? I don’t know what the fuck to do!’ Then he’d come back and go “You did it wrong!” He was obviously high on coke during a lot of it and being really irrational, and it was really fucking hard for all of us. That’s also when his singing really started to suffer because coke numbs your fucking throat.
Fat Mike: I love the album because my goal — and most people don’t know this — was to put out an album that sounded like a classic L.A. ‘80s punk band. It was a blast for me, but it’s not as fast and less distortion than we usually used. I love the acoustic guitar we did on [“One Million Coasters”] and it’s a really cool progression. It also has “The Agony of Victory,” which isn’t even a NOFX song, it’s a song from my musical, Home Sweet Home Sweet Home, and I think “I Am an Alcoholic” is the best thing Karina [Denike, keyboardist] ever did with us. We don’t play that song live because it’s too hard, but I’d like to because it shows what a big part of NOFX Karina has been, and for way longer than people know.
Self Entitled (2012)
Fat Mike: I think it’s our perfect album. Twelve songs, and they’re all fucking good and tight as fuck. This was the first time I was really on cocaine and Oxycodone. I wasn’t hooked on Oxy yet, but usually when I go and do an album, I go in sober because I want to fucking concentrate. Halfway through this album, Bill’s like “What are you doing?” because I just started partying and you can hear it in my voice. I love it so much. I think I sound like Milo [Aukerman, Descendents vocalist] on Milo Goes to College. I had this cool tone from the Oxy and Bill was really working me. Bill was pissed though, and I barely finished the songs.
El Hefe: All I remember is Mike being on a lot of cocaine, drugs and alcohol, and it was really tough to get anything done. It took a long time to finish it, because we would record, and then re-record, and then re-re-record.
Fat Mike: I wrote “Xmas Has Been X’ed” the night before and I love those lyrics. People think ‘I, Fatty’ is about me, but no, it’s about Fatty Arbuckle. I read his autobiography and it was really good. “Cell Out” is another one on that record, because we were recording at Hurley’s studio in Costa Mesa, and I was taking the train back and forth from my dungeon. The day before we stopped recording drums, Eric Melvin goes “I have some songs…” and one of his riffs was pretty fucking good. So I wrote “Cell Out” and put chords behind it. That was the quickest a NOFX song has ever come together. It took like two hours.
Smelly: I think that’s when we started having conversations with Mike where he would say “I’m tired. I don’t want to keep doing this. I’m not having fun anymore.” But we were all like “Dude, why don’t you fucking change your lifestyle a little bit and try to prioritize getting some fucking sleep? We’re fucking lucky to be here. I don’t even know that we deserve to be here.” I think all of us just love playing live and love being with each other more than anything, whereas Mike was looking at it more as a job, and he was just tired. I understand on some level that being a frontman is a different story than being a drummer or a guitar player. All we do is just show up and do our parts, whereas a frontman has to be the face, the personality, the voice, all that kind of shit. I just don’t have the capacity to understand what that’s like because I’ve never done it.
Melvin: Mike’s been complaining about doing live shows for a long time. I attributed that to just that he couldn’t stop partying. Even when he’d call himself sober, it was because he was only doing coke and vodka and not painkillers.
First Ditch Effort (2016)
Fat Mike: I was hooked on painkillers and coke. I just crushed painkillers every day and did cocaine in the bathroom, even when we were in the studio. We’d come in really late, and I was kind of out of my mind. There are pictures where I’m wearing latex dresses, heels, and nipple clamps while doing vocal takes. It was a crazy recording. Cameron [Webb, producer] brought in Hefe when I was passed out at the hotel to do vocals even though I had Spike [Slawson] from the Gimmes and Johnny [Carey] from Old Man Markley to do perfect harmonies. If you hear the harmonies Hefe did on Heavy Petting Zoo, our voices don’t buzz, so I either have to do harmonies on my own or get someone who sounds like me. Cameron didn’t like that, so he brought in Hefe and Zoli [Téglás] from Pennywise. I didn’t notice at first, but there’s one harmony in “California Drought” that Hefe did wrong. It’s a note that doesn’t belong there. There’s also a guitar rhythm on that song that I think has never been done. It’s a very weird rhythm and chords. But that whole record has weird production. It’s muddy because Cameron didn’t make us play perfectly like Bill did — and also I was just wasted the whole time. It’s got some cool songs like “Oxy Moronic,” but it doesn’t sound as good as our other records. That’s my bad because I was just too fucking wasted.
El Hefe: It seemed like that one took even longer to get finished than the ones before it, and then we put it out and the TMZ thing [NOFX’s 2018 Punk Rock Bowling controversy] feels like it happened right after. The guy that posted the original thing, I think he was seeing us for the first time — but that shit went viral. I don’t condone what was said. I was the guy on the other side of the mic like ‘Dude, that’s not cool, man. Let’s change the subject.’
Smelly: That was right in the middle of that cancel culture bullshit — which is fucking bullshit, because when one voice has the authority to cancel the other, it’s not an even playing field. Who’s to say I can’t cancel them for something that I don’t agree with? So when that Vegas thing happened, everybody was all worried. I’m not gonna lie, it sucked, but I was like ‘Dude, it’s gonna fucking blow over in 40 seconds. Oprah Winfrey is gonna fart on camera or Kim Kardashian’s left nipple is gonna come out and everyone will forget about it.’ But everybody was so herky-jerky to be defensive and on the right side that we lost our own tour. It hurt, but life went on.
Melvin: It really started to feel like Mike thought only he has the keys to the band’s success, and if we didn’t do what he said, we weren’t going to maximize our success. That kind of drove him into this crazy frenzy. The shit in Vegas happened because we were so much in the public eye and so reliant on sponsors, which meant we had to answer to them for it. He was just going crazier and crazier because he wanted us to have all of these huge successes. He would say “Oh I know a guy who said they can get us a thing on Netflix, and I want to do something with that.” But the whole time, I’d be thinking ‘We’re from L.A., dude, every idiot knows somebody who wants to try to get them a thing on Netflix. You’re being that guy right now.’ I love him and know he just wanted us all to be successful and have something to retire on, but it’s like we already had our process and we knew what to do to make money.
Fat Mike: It feels like things really fell apart around then when Eric moved to San Diego because it was hard for him to drive up to [the studio in] Costa Mesa and everything. I’m a control freak, and they’re my songs — but getting anyone in the band to come to the studio and work on songs was impossible. Eric was the only one who would be in the studio with me [earlier in their career], but then it became just me and Ryan Greene or me and Bill Stevenson. Bill’s a fucking monster in he studio, and he and Jason [Livermore] never make bad-sounding records. I’m so glad we got to work with them, but that’s just how it was.
Melvin: By that point, Mike would just tell us whatever he would tell us. He’d come to me like “I got all these songs for the next record!” But it was like the Netflix thing, they never really materialized. Or he’d be like “I got this riff” and he’d send me him on an acoustic guitar, but he kept stopping and starting and changing the chords each time. Eventually, there would be a song there, but he gave us less and less to work with.
Single Album (2021)
El Hefe: I think [the drama within the band] all started between Melvin’s wife and Mike. She would get drunk and start going off on Mike, and — the way he is when he’s drinking and on drugs — he’s going off on her. Then Melvin gets pissed off like “That’s my wife!” And it would just go back and forth. That went on for years, back and forth and back and forth. Finally, he said “Your wife can’t come out on tour anymore. She can’t be at the shows. She can’t be on the stage, or I’m not playing.” It’s just so much drama. Smelly was trying to facilitate everything and make peace by going to Mike and saying “Come on, man. Just let her have a little section.” But Mike kept saying “If she shows up, I’m not playing the shows. I’ll cancel the shows and the tour.” It was pretty bad. She’s allowed to come to the last three shows in L.A. because Mike said “You know what? I’m fucking over it. I just want peace.” I think he tried to make peace with them for the first time in a really long time because he was holding on to that for so long.
Melvin: I’ve already been grieving what’s happened to our relationships within the band. I feel like Smelly, Hefe and I are closer than ever, But Mike and I have drifted off. I just have to appreciate what we’ve had, and I’m trying to look at what’s happening now as another transitory phase. Things might be different in another year or two. I don’t know what that means for the band, but as far as our personal relationship, we’ll see where it goes. Maybe the pressure of being in a band together will change the way he feels about me. I think that’s my biggest point of grief in all of this. Grieving the personal relationship and what’s happened to it over the last decade. I don’t know exactly when it started, but it’s just slowly gone to the point where I’ve found fewer and fewer points of connection between us. We’re getting older, and we’ve done so much together, so I still reference those. I still remember us in my parents’ beat-up station wagon — well, we beat it up — driving around the alleys of Beverly Hills looking for houses that were being renovated with empty pools. I still remember sitting at immigration getting into Peru or somewhere and them trying to rattle us like “You’re not getting in! We’re searching for everything!”
Fat Mike: Melvin and I have a rift, and it’s the greatest heartbreak of my life. I’ve never had my heart broken like this, and I feel like it didn’t get really bad until COVID. That’s the first time that NOFX actually got into heated discussions — not fights — but some things were said that were lame. We don’t make money selling records anymore — no one does — so we were only making money playing live. When we couldn’t tour anymore, that caused a lot of stress for everyone and some people were more desperate than others. But the one really cool thing is that we will not let our disputes — which are gnarly — affect the magic we have on stage together. He and I were the ones who started the fucking band together, and that magic is still real.
Melvin: I’ve never had a brother, but I have a younger sister, and it feels like the term ‘brother’ isn’t even close enough for Mike and me. It feels like we have the same DNA and had the same balance of chemicals within us that operated all of our hormones, urges, and perceptions and pointed us in a direction. I don’t know what’s on his mind anymore, and he’s kept his true mind really well-protected for at least a decade or more. There were times when we used to talk about things, like when he first told me he was considering divorcing his first wife. That felt like a big thing, and maybe it felt like him admitting some defeat. But now he doesn’t want to talk about things and he doesn’t want to hear opinions or what we want to do. He thinks he’s got it, so it’s almost like an insult to him to hear the advice of another person. Maybe he thinks he’s trying to make a better life, where even if it’s not here now, he’s kind of aimed in that direction. He’s expressed things like that, but just partying and being surrounded by people who want to party doesn’t feel like a good connection for a better life. I guess it really comes down to that I want to be more connected to people, and he wants to be connected to more people. That’s where we’ve gone totally different, and even though I get upset at him for the choices he makes — because most of them seem to be self-harming for him and some of them are also affecting my world in negative ways — I just have to say ‘You can do whatever the fuck you want to yourself, but fucking leave me out of it. We have to respect our old agreements. We have to respect what once was a companionship.’
Smelly: The [pandemic hit] and the world was thrown into fucking chaos — like a zombie apocalypse — and all of a sudden I was no longer employed. Overnight, it went from “Everything’s cool, we’re just taking a little bit of time off” to “I guess we might not be able to do this ever again.” We didn’t know what was going to come out of it. I got a little bit of money in the bank, but nothing crazy. My wife has a good job, but I was not financially or emotionally ready to be jobless. In order to participate in society and in my family and show my wife and my kids that I’m not useless, I started delivering groceries through Instacart. It sucked, but I didn’t know if NOFX was ever going to do anything again. That’s when I started really doing the surfboard thing, because I was making $100 a day doing Instacart, and I was like ‘Wait a minute. I’ve been shaping surfboards for 10 years, why not just fucking do that?’ But it was scary and weird for everyone, not just us.
El Hefe: I did a Valentine’s Day sketch comedy show at the Pack Theater [in Hollywood], and it was the first time I was the main guy. Jen [Razavi from the Bombpops] was my guest, and we had a great time. The show was sold out — packed with people outside who couldn’t get in — and literally two weeks after that the news of COVID started dropping. I was in the middle of acting classes, and they said “Sorry, we’ve got to shut the school down. We’ll let you know when we can reopen.” That was the first time I started thinking things were getting serious, and then everything else started shutting down. We were like “Well, we could probably tour Europe.” Then Europe shut down. It was like “Fuck, what about Australia?” Australia shut down. I was like ‘Oh my God! How are we going to play and make money?’ There was no income, so I stopped making my house payment because I didn’t know what the fuck was gonna happen. We were all scared. People were panicking, trying to sell equipment to make money. I was doing Cameo from home to make money to buy groceries. My sister sent me toilet paper because my niece worked at Home Depot, so she ended up getting a big fucking thing of toilet paper and splitting it up for the family.
Fat Mike: I bought a place in the Valley like a year before [the pandemic] happened. It was a nine-bedroom ranch house, and I had my own wing because I was just getting divorced and I can’t live on my own. I invited Baz — who’s a great engineer and musician who worked on The Decline and stuff — and a bunch of S&M people. It was a crazy cool household with nine of us, and when COVID hit, we grew vegetables, had crazy S&M parties, went bar-hopping — because someone would always set up a bar somewhere — and I set up my studio there. Even though I was getting loaded a lot, I always spent 2-4 hours in the studio every day with Baz. It was an amazing songwriting experience. I would give him a melody and a song I wrote on guitar, and the next day, we would have drums, guitar, and bass done. It was like an instant NOFX demo, and it was so easy.
Melvin: We first found out it was Baz who was helping him produce and write the songs during COVID. Mike would bring him an idea, and Baz would provide the chords. Or he’d be like “Baz, I want this drum beat here. I want to hear this part.” Then he and Baz would record demos — but then I found out that Baz was re-recording stuff that Mike had played when Mike wasn’t there. That’s when I was like ‘What are you guys doing over there? Who’s actually in charge?’
Fat Mike: Baz demoed every song from Single [Album], Double [Album] and Half [Album]. We would work on them, and then I’d send them to Smelly. I play all the guitar, all the bass, sing everything, and write the drum parts. Baz and I wrote a lot of this shit, like “The Big Drag.” The band’s feelings started getting hurt when I got with Baz, because other than Hefe, nobody was coming up to the Valley to work with me. I had the songs, but they really had the worst work ethic of any band ever. When we were recording our then-new album, Everybody Else Is Insane, Smelly would come up, do two songs, and leave. I was just stuck with it — with nobody. Songs like “I’m a Rat” and “I’m Not Dead Anymore” are very complicated, so no one would learn them. What am I supposed to do? They feel like I’m not including them, but they aren’t learning the songs.
Melvin: There was this whole thing of Mike needing to control everything, but also letting other people do it. They were trying to do what they thought he wanted, but he was not that specific and busy with a dozen other things. The wheels were falling off, where we used to be this vehicle with four wheels that could go anywhere, and one just became this broken wheel while the three of us were still going. We were dragging him out and he was resenting us for trying to help.
Fat Mike: My band had a third intervention with me. The first one was needed, and it was awesome. About 15 years ago, I started drinking martinis before we went on. I stopped eating dinner, I was doing 10 milligrams of Valium, and I fell off the stage a couple of times. Brian Baker from Minor Threat and Bad Religion said ‘Mike, what is going on with you? You can’t even play your songs.’ The band sat me down and said “You need to stop.” So I said ‘OK, I’m gonna go to dinner every night. I’m gonna have mixed drinks with vodka, and only take five milligrams of Valium.’ That worked great for 10 years. The second intervention was in South Africa, and that was whatever. But the last one…
Smelly: I only remember two interventions. One was after a show in Boston like 20 years ago or so because he was just a pile of shit that whole fucking tour. The other one was during the pandemic. He was becoming unreasonable, hard to deal with, being irrational and making decisions without a consensus.
El Hefe: The intervention happened after we had a rehearsal. We had a nurse come and swab our noses to make sure we were clean, and we all wore masks. Mike stayed outside of the rehearsal building with his bass. He didn’t want to be in the room. He was really freaked out. He was making all of us test before we could get together. We were doing stuff on Patreon, where we would play live or be in the studio recording stuff. People could pay to watch us in the studio putting together an album and learning the songs and all that.
Fat Mike: We played in my backyard, and I fucking partied. There was a bunch of blow, I filmed a porn with three doms beating the fuck out of me and anally raping me. I was gonna release it and it would’ve been huge, but I didn’t. Anyway, I hadn’t seen the guys in months, but I saw them that weekend and I partied. On Monday, I texted the whole band ‘Hey, we have this great offer for this commercial for one of our songs. What do you guys think?’ Not one of them responded. They always respond when there’s money in the mix, so Tuesday night I texted them ‘I guess you guys don’t care about this offer. I’ll see you tomorrow at the intervention.’
The next day, they all came for the intervention and Smelly said “Who told you?!” I go ‘You guys didn’t answer a fucking text about money, so I knew something was up.’
Smelly: We threw the intervention down and said “Look, unless you go to rehab…” It wasn’t about the stipulation of making him stay clean, it was just “Unless you go to rehab, we’re going to stop playing right now.” We were dead serious because we can’t sit here and enable him without at least trying to help him. It was just not a good time for us, and that was a serious intervention.
Melvin: Mike was so rude to us at the intervention, and the whole time we were like ‘We’re not trying to beat you. This isn’t a competition. This is love and a request to please go to rehab.’
El Hefe: He was so bad and so out of his mind. When you’re an addict, you can’t see yourself or how you’re behaving. In your mind, everything’s fine, like ‘It’s not me. It’s all of you. It’s everybody else in the world. I’m fine.’ We brought Bradley [Nowell]’s best friend in to do the intervention because he’s in the music industry, and that didn’t go well. Mike was pissed off about that and not taking it seriously. He was like “I’ll show you! I’ll do even more coke! I’ll drink more! I’ll do even more drugs! I got a book that says that I can do drugs and that people are putting people down who do drugs and they shouldn’t!” It was some pro-drug book that some other drug addict probably wrote.
Melvin: That intervention with Mike felt different, because I’d found a place where I was like ‘I can’t do this stuff anymore. I’m not who I want to be and not who I was.’ When I was doing drugs, the things I used to love or made me happy just didn’t anymore, but once I stopped doing drugs, those things came back. So I was trying to tell him that as a friend. ‘I remember when you were this rad and happy guy, and you’re not even happy anymore. I love you, and I want what’s best for you.’
Fat Mike: They sat me down. I went to my room. They said “Where are you going?” I go ‘I’m gonna do a line and have a drink, because it might be my last one.’ They told me they wanted me to go to this fucking rehab. But at the time, I was riding my bike five days a week and just partying in my backyard. I hadn’t seen them in months, so it was like ‘You don’t know me. You don’t know how I live.’ Why don’t they ask me how I’m doing? What’s going on with my life, my divorce and my musical? Why don’t they ask me what I’m going through instead of ‘You need help.’ So I went on a sober vacation to the Grand Canyon, and the second day I started throwing up and shitting blood. I went to the hospital and they said I had a bacterial infection, but everyone wanted me to go to rehab, so I went to rehab.
El Hefe: He went off and started on a bender in Palm Springs, but he started bleeding out of his mouth and ass. Not just bleeding, but vomiting up and shitting out a ton of blood. Luckily, Gary, my manager for acting, was also working with Mike on projects and happened to be there visiting his mom. He’d just arrived and wasn’t far from the house that Mike was renting — which I think belonged to the guy from Avenged Sevenfold. Gary goes over there and there’s blood everywhere, so an ambulance comes and takes Mike to the hospital. The doctor told Gary that the use of cocaine and vodka was causing bleeding in the intestines. To this day, Mike denies that and says “No, man, I had chlamydia in my intestines,” but the doctor told Gary differently.
Melvin: When Mike went to rehab, a lot of the shit disappeared from his studio. We went up there, and it was like “Whoa… Where did all this stuff go?” My guitars were there too, and they were like “We’re taking care of it, because we don’t know who has access to the studio.” And I’m like ‘Well, I don’t know who you guys gave access to the studio, but I need to pick up my stuff. I took everything I’d left there, but one of my Marshalls is still missing to this day.
Smelly: Mike went to rehab in the middle of the pandemic, and then when he got out of rehab, it felt exciting. It was like seeing my family again. I don’t know how it is with most bands, but when we get together — even if there’s a lot of work to do or something — we end up shooting the shit and just goofing around and laughing most of the time. Our core as a band is that friendship and family, so it was really fucking cool to get together with all of us again. It felt like a breath of fresh air.
El Hefe: When Mike got out of rehab was the first time we started having those meetings where he would say “OK, I want to do one last run.” He’d been saying for almost 10 years that he was almost ready to call it, so it was kind of hard to take it seriously, like ‘Does he really mean this or not?’ But here we are 10 years later and he is serious. At that point, I was able to hang out with him again. He got clean for a month, and I went over to his house, started talking to him and thought ‘This is fucking awesome. He’s back. Here’s the guy that I met when I joined the band.’ I could hang out with him. I could bring my son over and go swimming. He’s fucking cool. But that didn’t last very long.
Fat Mike: We recorded 25 songs for a double album, and Bill Stevenson was bummed because there was just no way we were going to finish the album. At this point in my life, I’m not doing 10-12-hour days. I’m doing 6-hour days, because I don’t want to work that hard, but I’m the guy in the band who always has to be there. It was really important to me to make the first great double album — because I don’t think anyone has, besides maybe Pink Floyd. The White Album would have been a great single album. Use Your Illusion would have been a great single album. So I tried, but it gets in your head. You don’t think about songs, you think about a double album. You overthink everything.
El Hefe: That album seemed to take forever — probably the longest to finish. Everybody’s lives were in limbo, and it was hard to get people together to record. Mike was doing a lot of drugs, and he was just re-recording and re-recording. It was also really hard organizing everything, because Melvin was in San Diego and Smelly was in Long Beach, and we were all dealing with the pandemic stuff. Everyone was struggling like “How are we gonna make our house payments? What are we gonna do now?” Everyone was out of money, out of work, so it was a really hard time during all of that.
Fat Mike: I played it for six people — like Jen from the Bombpops — and I go ‘I really want to hear your views on this.’ I played them the second album first, and they were all like. ‘This is great. It’s so fun. It’s awesome.’ I said ‘Take notes on every song.’ Then I played them the other album — the one that would become Single Album — and they were like ‘Fuck that other album. This one is the album.’ That’s what I thought. That’s why I wanted to play it for people. I never played an album for people to get their approval before, but I ended up putting the best songs on Single Album and it was our best reviewed album ever, which is so validating. At first, everyone was like ‘You’re putting a six-minute song first?’ But everyone who heard it goes ‘Oh, it doesn’t sound like a six-minute song.’ One of the reasons that song works is because every time I change a chord, the rhythm changes as well. You never hear a chord played the same amount of time as a different chord, it’s always different. You never know when it’s going to change, so it creates this tension. Or on “I Love You More Than I Hate Me,” those lyrics are so fucking sad to me. It’s about someone I’m very close to who really doesn’t have friends, but the first part is about me, and then I move into them, and then my ex. ‘Fuck Euphemism’ has maybe the best lyrics I’ve ever written. Oh, I also played the album for my friend Matt Sanders from Avenged Sevenfold and he was like “I love it, but you don’t have a ripper on this album. It’s really cool, but it left me wanting more.” I took that to heart because he tells it like it is, and I wrote and recorded “Your Last Resort.” That song kills it on that album. It’s fucking gnarly and heartbreaking.
Double Album (2022) / Half Album (2024)
Fat Mike: I was so proud of “I’m a Rat.” It’s 54 chords in a row, and everyone played a little bit on the song, which is rare, as usually it’s me and Smelly. I did 10 mixes — so it took me a couple of weeks to mix it — and I sent them the final mixes, and no one responded. No one said, “This sounds awesome!” They didn’t even respond. I got a response from Kent [Jamieson], our manager, and Karina, our keyboardist — and that that fucking cut deep. It’s been like that. They don’t care about these songs that I’ve spent months writing. 54 chords in a row! That’s fucking special! What am I doing this for? If it’s not fun for me anymore. The last song on Half Album [“The Last Drag”] is all about stuff like that, ‘When they stopped picking up the phone, only your oldest and best friends can make you feel so alone.’
El Hefe: About 10 years ago, Mike started saying “I don’t know how much longer I want to do this for, and I’m letting you guys know now so that you can start planning for your future and figure something out.” Right about that time, I started taking acting classes and started figuring out something else to get into. When he finally dropped the bomb and said “Hey, this is it. I’m going to do one last run. We’ll go around the world one last time. It’s probably going to take a couple of years to go around the entire globe and do every country, but I’m letting you guys know now that this is going to be it. I don’t want to tour anymore,” it was very scary. It was like a huge bomb being dropped, and we’re all just like “Fuck! We’ve got to start putting our finances in order and figuring out how we’re going to survive when the band stops touring.” It was scary for all of us, and I think we’re all very nervous still to this day. This is a major change, and it’s the fear of the unknown. How is this going to play out? How are we going to survive? Are we going to be OK? Everyone’s trying to put money away and save to get ready for this.
Melvin: We’ve had so many conversations where I’m like ‘I can’t talk to him. I can’t take any more drama’ and the other guys are like ‘Just don’t talk to him. Let’s just get it over with.’ [The final tour] for Mike was all about “We’re going to all make so much money that we’re all going to be able to retire.” That’s not really our reality. The money’s good, but not good enough to retire now.
Smelly: He sat us down like “Look, I’m tired. I don’t want to do this anymore. We should do one final tour. We could play these cities. We could do this. We could make this much money.” But on the inside I’m — and I’m pretty sure the other two — like ‘What the fuck, dude?’ We’re listening to the conversation and entertaining the conversation just for the sake of being respectful, but it was like ‘OK, maybe that could be cool. Let’s figure this out.’ It was that kind of shit. But when Mike hears “That could be cool,” he hears “That’s cool.” The ball just started rolling, and I was never really 100% on board with it. I’m pretty sure the other guys weren’t either.
Melvin: He and I just started going head-to-head even more when he pitched it to us. He was like “Here’s these cities we could do, and it’s gonna be millions of dollars for everyone.” But we were like “OK, where did you get these numbers from?” He said he got them from the booking agent, and I think she might have said “You might be able to get that much money in L.A.” and he just assumed there’s like 12 L.A.s in the U.S. We all knew it wasn’t going to be what he was saying it would be, but we had to do it anyway.
El Hefe: Mike said, “I don’t want to tour anymore.” And we’re like “Fuck, this sucks!” But we’ve had tons of conversations with him about it. His thing is that he’s wanted to finish on a high note forever. You don’t want to wait until there’s barely anybody paying to see us anymore and then stop like “OK, I guess we’re gonna stop since there’s no more audience.” A lot of bands do that, whereas he said “I want to go off on a high note. Right now, we could do this one last run, finish on a high note, and peace, we’re out. We can say goodbye to the fans.”
Melvin: We always somehow just found ourselves aligned with everything. A lot of the stuff that Mike came to us about or that we’d have a conversation about, something would come up and we’d all go “Yeah!” It wasn’t always Mike with the ideas, but he’s also the record label owner and songwriter, so he’s really right on the tip of the spear. When he brought the final tour idea to the rest of us, I think we all knew “This is something that has to happen right now.” We all had our own reasons to keep going that outweighed the reasons for the final tour, but we felt like we can’t keep propping him up to do it any longer. It feels a little bit selfish and cruel to him.
Fat Mike: I can’t be on stage pretending like I’m having a good time, so I don’t. Instead, I do drugs — cocaine, specifically — and drink a lot of vodka before I go on stage. The thing is, I’m actually very healthy. I ride my bike 30-40 miles a day and my organs are all good. My doctor said “Well, if he’s not playing that much, it’s fine,” because I don’t party like this at home. But I have to drink and do drugs before going on to a show because I have to have a good time. On this last tour in Edmonton, I was working out a lot and wanted to play sober. I played the first show sober. I got through it, but four or five people in our crew were like “What happened? You weren’t funny. You were just going through the motions.” I told them I was sober and they said “What the fuck are you doing being sober? Nobody wants to see Fat Mike sober.” That’s a real thing. I don’t want to do that anymore. I love being sober and partying on the weekends. I’m allowed to retire.
El Hefe: My take is that the drugs are just a symptom. I think drugs and mental illness go hand-in-hand, and we’re dealing with someone who’s really sick and suffering from mental illness and needs help. There are signs of mental illness there, and everything you take has side effects. The number one side effect of cocaine is paranoia, and I think he does so much cocaine that he’s always paranoid. He makes things up in his head that are just not true, and those just fuel the fire with situations like the one with Melvin’s wife. He’s just out of control and doing a lot of drugs.
Melvin: I think quite a bit of my frustration with him was ‘Hey, this isn’t the guy you used to be. This isn’t the guy that I knew for the first 20-30 years of our lives.’ I spent the last 10 years trying to push and prod like ‘Hey, how’s that going to affect the people who really love you? Can’t you see what you’re doing to people who love you?’ That was kind of the nature of a lot of the conflict. Here I am trying to make him see the things that I see, but it’s not for him to see if he doesn’t want to see it. It’s such a cliche that the demise of NOFX is this guy’s drug problem, you know?
El Hefe: He can be very abusive, yelling and calling people names and putting people down. We would deal with text messages at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, and there would be like 80 messages of him just saying the worst things you could possibly imagine to band members and their wives. We’re all just waking up to all of it without knowing what’s going on because it’s the craziest rant. That’s how he is verbally, and it turns into “Nobody appreciates me. Nobody appreciates what I’m doing. I’m doing all this for you.” But really, it’s like “We’re worried you’re going to die. We’re worried you’re not going to live much longer. We’re trying to talk sense to you, but you can’t force someone to see the light and try to get their mental health together.” That’s the reality of this whole thing. We’re all adults now. We’re all pushing 60, and he’s still doing what you do when you’re 16 or 20 or whatever.
The End (2024)
Smelly: I was eating lunch with this guy who I had just met that I was trying to do some business with, and my phone started going bing bing bing bing bing bing bing. I got like a million texts, and I’m like ‘What the fuck? Did a fucking plane crash into my house?’ Mike let it slip that we were doing a final fucking tour without running it by us. It was like stumbling across your wife on Pornhub. My world just got pulled out from underneath me. Mike’s a visionary and a fucking good businessman, but he’s also gonna do what he’s gonna do for better or for worse. I don’t mean that to sound like it’s a selfish thing, but I don’t think any of us were ready for that day.
Melvin: Without any meetings or any concept of how long the tour will take — or anything like that, he just put it on some fan’s social media page. He said “This will be the last time we play Edmonton” or something… Which it wasn’t! There was a lot of fallout within us after that, and Mike was in this headspace of just not being able to hear anyone. He often comes up with ideas that aren’t fully fleshed out and relies on other people to mold it into something beautiful, and I think part of his frustration at that time was that it just wasn’t working for him, and he felt like he had to force some of those endeavors through to make his ideas work — even if they weren’t thought through, like the final tour announcement.
Fat Mike: The last tour has been amazing. It’s much more than I thought it would be. I thought we’d draw good crowds, but the first last show we did was in Barcelona. We did three shows, and after the first show, the whole band was huddled up and Hefe was crying while we were hugging. I’d never seen him cry before, but he said “You were right, Mike. This is so special.” It’s because our fans of so many years are all coming. The audience is crying. We’ve never felt this kind of love before, because we just kept doing it. Normally, we draw 2,000-3,000 people, and now we’re drawing 15,000-30,000 in some places. It’s like going to your own wake. We’re not breaking up, we’re retiring — and now we get to see all that love that we didn’t get to see when we were touring all the time. People are saying “Thank you” to me all the time — much more than I ever thought I’d get. And I think it’s so wonderful to have a beginning and an end. You can look at it and say “This was NOFX.”
El Hefe: When we first started, it was very emotional. When we played our last show in Spain, it was the beginning of the end. That one hit me. I was sitting there on the stage looking out at the audience as we finished the last song, and instead of it being like “Thank you, goodnight,” it was “Goodbye, Spain. We’re not gonna ever see you again. We’ll never play here again.” I started tearing up, and me and Mike looked at each other and both started crying. As the tour kept going, we got a lot more used to saying goodbye.
Smelly: I’ve been really stressed out recently over it. It’s pretty fucking weird. But in the last couple of days, I started getting kind of excited. I’m not financially or emotionally ready to retire. It’s going to be stressful on the household because my wife is going to have to carry the whole financial load now, but the shows have been so fucking spectacular. The energy and the love, it’s like nothing that I’ve ever felt before. I never realized that we actually made a huge dent in the music world. We’re just four fucking dumbasses, 100% on our own, all by ourselves. No fucking big team, no fucking lawyers — well, we got a great publicist, but not like a fucking high-end PR team. We did it all ourselves. Seeing the reaction from people, it’s fucking heavy and trippy and really cathartic. It’s fucking humbling. I’m not excited for the retirement aspect of it, but the energy of the shows is getting insane.
Fat Mike: I can’t explain how fulfilling this is for us. All of us came from families where even though I was a good student and went to college, my parents never went to graduation or looked at my report cards or anything. They kind of wrote me off, so I’ve always wanted
to be seen. I’ve always wanted approval, so I really put it into my songwriting and tried to make this band the best band I could be in. But I never got that approval until now. Now I see the faces on everyone, and people are saying the nicest things to us about how much our band meant to them. My fucking cup and heart are full.
Melvin: My feelings have evolved immensely over time, but I keep saying it’s an emotional roller coaster. It’s such a cliche, but it’s just so true. It’s like 100 emotional roller coasters all going at the same time. On one hand, I’m so stoked because we have a reason now to play all the deep tracks. Doing these three nights in each city is great, because we get to play even more than ever. I’ve always been the one going ‘Come on, we can just do a few more songs,’ and Smelly’s always tired like ‘Hey man, it’s been an hour.’ I’m also stoked to celebrate, look at the whole thing and be like ‘We’ve done so much.’
Fat Mike: I’m a songwriter. I love writing songs. It’s what I’m meant to do. When I wake up in the morning, I make coffee and write a song — usually after kinky sex when my mind’s clear. But they go nowhere because my band’s not interested in recording them. It’s like tears in the rain. If I die, I have all these songs that people haven’t heard, and I want my songs to be out there. It’s my art. I stopped writing because I didn’t know what to do with these songs, so I started writing for other people a little bit.
Smelly: When he would write the songs in the past, no one would say anything [to Mike] about it because he would just do what he was going to do anyway. It didn’t really matter, so at some point we were just like “Whatever.” right? The love that he’s feeling now more than ever is just because of the energy of the shows themselves. It’s not an appreciation of all that Mike has done in my perspective. Yes, he spearheaded all of this, but it’s just pretty fucking eye-opening of what we’re all seeing. Playing live has a little bit of different magic right now for all of us because we know it’s the last time.
Melvin: So many people keep saying things like “You made a sound. You made a wave through the punk rock scene that’s only yours and it affected everything.” I don’t really look at it that way. I look at it like we’ve tried to do the things we wanted in the way we wanted, like all of the traveling and playing live. The four of us all had our eye on the same goals in hundreds of ways, and even as that started drifting off, most of us have always been in alignment on most things. Smelly and I have always been in agreement that we just want to do this because we want to and we’re going to find a way to not let it get old. That was how that wave took shape, and there was just a bit of luck or fate that always just sprinkled a little bit of fairy dust on us.
Fat Mike: I’ve designed our career. I wouldn’t say “planned,” because I didn’t know that we were going to get popular or anything. We’ve never had a hit. Even though “Linoleum” is our biggest song, there’s no video. It never comes on the radio. It’s just a song that touched people. I don’t write hit songs, I write songs that I think will really touch 10% of our audience. I’m not writing songs for everyone to like. A lot of our songs are about my traumas, my philosophies, my life, and they’re all honest.
Melvin: We didn’t so much make the music that we thought fans would like, we made music that we like. We didn’t do it for the fans. We did it for ourselves. Because of that, we enjoyed ourselves so much, and I think maybe that’s what people came to enjoy and kept coming back to see.
El Hefe: I’m hoping that we go down in history as a band that did things our own way and didn’t follow any rules — or didn’t follow any of the way the majors ran their businesses. We did it our own way. I hope that we go down in history as that band that just never crossed over and stayed independent and did everything their own way.
Melvin: I don’t want to say “We did it our way,” because that’s such a cliché and everyone does it their own way, but we tapped into our way of doing it and just did it. We never let emotions or fear deter us. We just set out to do it, and we did it. We started from almost literally nothing and never had a huge amount of success all at once, so instead of having those big ups and downs, we had so many little ups along the way that any down left us still way better than we ever thought we’d be.
Smelly: I just came to realize that we’re one of those legacy bands, like Ramones or Black Flag or the other bands that are really stamped in punk rock. We’ve become one of those legacy bands. That was not apparent to me until this, and I’m sure that it wasn’t apparent to the Ramones until after they all died. We were just four fucking guys wanting to have a good time, and if it wasn’t a good time, we wouldn’t be here. I don’t have any words of wisdom on what our legacy is, but we’re just four fucking average dudes that started a band because we wanted to play music and have a good time — not because we wanted to be famous or rich or rock stars. Every day, it just got a little fucking bigger than the day before, and it was all natural. It was all on its own, and it was super organic. That’s probably the reason why we’re still here 41 years later. We were friends to begin with. We had zero expectations. All we wanted to do is play in front of two people, then four people, then six people, and then it just became what it became.
Fat Mike: They have my permission to keep going, but I’m not gonna do it. NOFX is an extension of all of us, but the songs are an appendage of my life. People feel like they know us because it’s not a gimmick. We’re not putting on a show, we’re just rocking out. All of my lyrics have been honest, and I’m an honorable man. I’m not tricking anyone [by saying this is the final tour]. How dare anyone say that we’re just doing this to cash out? I mean, we’re cashing out, but it’s our last tour. We’re not Slayer or Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath or Mötley Crüe. What do all those bands have in common? They’re fucking stupid metal bands. Punk bands really haven’t done that.
Melvin: I was just talking to a friend of mine, and she was like “I had this vision of you in this old library, taking books off the shelf and dusting them off.” And for the last few years at least, I feel like I’ve been dusting off my own library to find my own center, as opposed to the band being my center. There’s tons of fear of the unknown about ‘How am I going to do this now? I don’t have my guys around me to validate what I’m doing,’ but I’m also reaching out to other people all over the place. I talked to Brett Gurewitz a few times recently and realized he was a really good friend who I just hadn’t talked with enough because he fucking led his own hugely successful life. But he’s also someone I can check in with and ask him what he thinks about things. My guys in NOFX will still be here too, but I’m also looking forward to a little bit of distance and having things outside of the band.
Fat Mike: There’s so much more I want to do. I’m gonna relax more and golf more. I’ve found my own happiness through kinky sex and being ultra feminine, and now I feel like it’s Plato’s [Allegory of the] Cave where I need to share that knowledge. I’m like ‘Hey guys, come out of the cave. There’s all kinds of cool shit going on. It’s the sun and rivers and whipping posts and blowjobs and all kinds of shit.’ But a lot of people are fine in the cave. I’ve also been reading a lot of [Albert] Camus, which is so interesting because it really came back into play right now with politics. There are these complete morons and horrible people who are Trumpers, and then there’s the rest of us. But it could go either way. What if Trump wins again? I’ve already made plans, and they’re not changing at all. The world’s a fucked up place. All you can do is take care of your neighbors and have a community, and punk rock is a community more than people know. Punk rock’s a church where we take care of each other and have the same value system.
Melvin: I imagine [Smelly and El Hefe] feel a bit like me in that they can’t wait to get the fuck out of here, but they’re also terrified. We’re a little old to start again, but it’s definitely not starting again entirely. I’m sure if I released a song as ‘Eric Melvin from NOFX,’ it’s gonna get more listeners than any other 58-year-old punk rocker that suddenly released a song. We’ve definitely got a leg up on things, but the uncertainty is still scary to deal with. I’ve had people say to me “Why don’t you guys keep going? You’re singing more than ever. Just do the songs like that and find a stand-in bass player.” But we’ve got to let the dust settle first and do some introspection. I want to get some music out and deal with things first, but in a year or two or three, who knows? It’s four of us that have to come together to make anything happen, so we’ll see what direction everyone’s headed and what state of mind we’re all in then.
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