Bradley Nowell is shirtless and resplendent. He looks upon his kingdom of California and beams. It’s all his for the taking. For now anyway.
It’s 1995, and Sublime is playing the Weenie Roast, an annual festival held by Los Angeles’s king-making station KROQ. On the strength of their two independent releases, 40oz. to Freedom and Robbin’ the Hood, the trio – frontman Nowell, drummer Floyd “Bud” Gaugh, and bassist Eric Wilson – has become the most popular independent band in the Golden State. One year later, Sublime’s self-titled album, their first to be released on a major label, will make them one of the biggest bands on the planet.
Then, a month before its release, Bradley dies from an overdose at the age of 28.
Jakob Nowell endlessly rewatches live footage of his father performing. Partially, it’s for his job. But it’s also one of his ways to understand the man he never knew. “He just has this nature to him, the way he talks and performs up there,” Jakob observes. “He’s just having so much fun up there. Everything he did came off as effortless.” By contrast, he says, “a lot of deliberation goes into everything I do.”
Since 2024, he’s been fronting Sublime, and now he’s putting the final touches on Till the Sun Explodes, the group’s first album of original material in three decades. Both of these endeavors once seemed unthinkable to him. “I never wanted to join the band,” says Jakob, who wasn’t even a year old when his father died. “I just didn’t think it was right. “There were a lot of complicated emotions that went into it, but the timing felt right, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
Truthfully, there was a time when he didn’t even listen to Sublime, and not just because his tastes run more towards arty metal groups like Tool and Mastodon. His father’s music was just too much to engage with. “My mom would play it a lot as a kid, and it’d make her cry,” he says. “So that translated, to me, to a lot of feelings, a lot of wishing I had my dad in my life.”
Bud Gaugh always knew Jakob “was going to have music in him,” remarking that his mother was always “spinning records, singing to him, and having musician friends coming in for campfire jams down at the beach.” But Jakob was determined to carve his own path. He spent nearly a decade fronting the ska-punk group LAW, and his alt-pop act Jakobs Castle released its Epitaph debut in 2023. (His Jakobs Castle collaborator Jon Joseph produced the new Sublime album.)
“By the time I joined Sublime,” Jakob says, “I had all that under my belt. It felt like I’d paid my dues. It doesn’t feel like I’m cheapening out by accepting a little bit more notoriety based on who I’m related to and what I’m doing.” That said, he understands where his detractors are coming from and, without prompting, brings up the derisive term “nepo baby” more than once.
“Claims of nepotism are always going to get thrown around,” he concedes. “But there was no growing up and going to L.A. parties and making the network solely based on who my father was. That’s not to say I came up out of the muck and I made it from nothing. But I am truly just a person and a guy who’s lying somewhere in the middle.”
Jakob’s home life was often “chaotic and unsafe a lot of times,” he says, though he’s very careful to defend his mother and stepfather, admitting that “it’s hard to talk about it without disparaging the people that I care about. It wasn’t necessarily a safe or well-handled environment at the house. There were times of plenty and there were times of nothing.”
Jakob grew up seeing his “uncles,” and future bandmates, once or twice a year. Wilson gave him a guitar when he was little. It was Wilson’s idea to see whether Jakob wanted to play a Sublime show to raise funds for the Bad Brains frontman H.R. (a.k.a. Paul Hudson), a cause his father would appreciate. “When we started out, we just wanted to be the Bad Brains,” says Wilson of the punk innovators. He also notes that as soon as their rehearsal started, he realized that Jakob’s voice sounds uncannily like his father’s. “He was the best swimmer that day in his dad’s ballsack.”
The benefit show took place in late 2023 at Los Angeles’ Teragram Ballroom, and Gaugh recalls that “it was an energy of love and healing. Not one dry eye in the place.” “Musicians and lifelong fans,” he says, “were coming up and telling us, ‘Just stop whatever you’re doing and do this, please.’”
Soon, offers for more shows were rolling in, starting with a spot at the 2024 Coachella festival. Opinions differ on how that went. From Gaugh’s perspective, everything clicked from “the first drum hit.” “Just watching Jake fall into the lyrics,” he says, “and the crowd’s reaction, it just kept on piling more and more confirmation that this needs to happen.”
While appreciative of the support, Jakob sees his second-ever gig with Sublime a bit differently. “It was nerve-wracking, dude,” he says. “I didn’t really enjoy it. You’re just looking at the clock, like, ‘How the hell are there 40 minutes of this fucking set left?’ And I have to come back next weekend?”
But, eventually, the band became tighter.
Gaugh and Wilson were devastated by Bradley’s passing, and experiencing the success of 1996’s breakthrough Sublime and its multiple hit singles without him was, at best, bittersweet. Gaugh constantly battled with MCA’s efforts to extend Sublime’s commercial success.
“‘Are you really gonna make us do another music video? Well, we’re not going to superimpose Brad’s image on this one again,’” he recalls saying, adding that executives were pushing them to hold “tryouts and interviews for the next singer.” Instead, Gaugh and Wilson started the more experimental group Long Beach Dub Allstars. Later, the pair teamed up with the singer Rome Ramirez for shows and albums as Sublime With Rome, an experience they now have mixed feelings about at best. “It was basically just a job to get through,” says Wilson. “Rome was good at doing the songs, but it was more like a cover band.”
Gaugh and Wilson became estranged from one another, and both struggled with depression and substance abuse, with the former admitting “I tried to put the fire out by throwing more alcohol on it, and the flames got hotter. I was becoming more and more of a recluse and was distancing myself from my own heart.” But the reunion, Gaugh says, “has been repairing the relationships between all of us and the Sublime family. We have never been on the same page since Brad’s death.”
Jakob has been sober for eight years, and now Gaugh is as well, and they’ve bonded over their losses and hardships. “You don’t get to see all of the hurt and sadness and stuff that he’s gone through,” Gaugh says. “He carries himself really well. It’s amazing how he’s overcome his burdens.”
Eventually, all the bits of onstage jamming led to the idea of a new album, for which Jakob poured over a terabyte’s worth of unreleased vocals from his father, live footage, and more, trying to make sure he could nail the assignment. It wasn’t easy, but he even eventually learned how to deliver the rock-steady derived toasting his father was known for.
“It felt like we were historians digging through this stuff,” Jakob says, “and, maybe less charitably, sometimes we felt like we were heathens sneaking into the realm of the gods and stealing their statues. I had a lot of trepidation. I want it to be good. I don’t want to besmirch the memory. We were just trying to get as close to that classic sound as we could without fucking it up too badly.”
Sublime had songs about dependency and feeling restless in your own skin, and their music had more depth and innovation than people who only know them from hearing “What I Got” on the radio for decades might realize. But they were also one of the best party bands of the era, a crucial distinction Jakob tries not to lose sight of. “I take this shit so seriously, man,” he says. “This is my life, and the hopes and dreams of many are riding on that. But I know we’re not curing cancer here. We’re making fun music and performing for good people to have a good time.”
As such, their single “Ensenada”, which recently broke Sublime’s own record for the most weeks at KROQ’s number one slot, features Jakob boasting that if he were ever president, his cabinet would be staffed with a multitude of exotic dancers, a sentiment his father would appreciate. (Strippers were very important in the early days of Sublime, Gaugh insists.)
He’s proud of the album, feeling that it picks up where Sublime left off and also ties a bow on it all as he doesn’t think they’ll do another one. “I wanted to have finality,” he says. “This is sort of the epilogue to the Sublime saga.” And now he’s going to bring his father’s music all over the world, writing one last hopeful chapter to one of music’s most tragic what-if stories.
“There’s not a day that goes by that I wish I couldn’t just give this all back to him,” he says. “I wish it was him doing this. I feel like it’s my custodial duty.
“My dad didn’t get to play Coachella or go down and play Brazil or Japan or all these places. And I take solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who feels this way. That’s the love that binds everything together.”
