Travis Barker is probably the most famous — or at least, the most recognizable — drummer on the planet. He joined Blink-182 in 1998, and as the band found mainstream success with its 1999 release "Enema of the State" he became known as the quiet, serious musician of the group. He may have run around naked with guitarist Tom Delonge and bassist Mark Hoppus, but he never appeared completely involved in their trademark antics. During an interview at Germany’s Bizarre Festival in 2000, after Delonge and Hoppus recognized the reporter couldn’t speak very good English, he merely watched and laughed as his bandmates referenced masturbation, sex with their relatives, and scrotum — topics, of course, that have solidified Blink’s legacy among the skateboarding, suburban teenagers who are now stationary adults.
Barker, 40, would stand in the background again and again, and his silence developed into something of a running joke for the fans: “Travis talks!” isn’t a hard comment to find on a YouTube. Yet those people seem to forget a running contradiction. Barker clearly doesn’t have a problem being in the spotlight — or he doesn’t try too hard to avoid it: "Meet the Barkers," the reality show starring him and his then wife, Shanna Moakler, aired from 2005-2006 for two seasons; he dated Paris Hilton and hung out with Kim Kardashian; and last month, he released a raw and revealing memoir, "Can I Say" chronicling his life and the 2008 plane crash that burned 65 percent of his body and killed two of his great friends, Lil’ Chris Baker and Charles “Che” Still, as well as the two pilots (the only other survivor, Adam Goldstein, a.k.a. DJ AM, died less than a year later from a drug overdose).
Co-authored with Rolling Stone’s Gavin Edwards, who wrote about Blink-182 a number of times, including their trip to perform for troops in the Middle East, Barker’s book traces the life of someone constantly figuring himself out: beating a pill addiction; suppressing the anger that led him to carrying a gun at his wedding; changing his reputation as the man with a “dumpster dick.”
And he always appears — eventually — to succeed. In the mid-2000s, after Blink-182 and the Transplants, Barker’s project with Skinhead Rob and Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, broke up within the same year (both would later reform), Barker struggled for a bit before finding his way to rappers and hip-hop artists. With no real business experience, he created — and still oversees —a lucrative clothing company, Famous Stars & Straps. He has transformed his body into a walking billboard for Cadillac, with the car company’s emblem tattooed on the center of his chest.
He is, in other words, much more than a drummer.
This interview was conducted over the phone. It has been edited for concision and clarity.
There are so many celebrity memoirs that give me the sense the celebrity didn’t actually want to write the book: he or she sort of just phoned it in, and the co-writer seemed more to be penning a biography of the person than helping with a memoir. In these instances, the elements of a memoir — the self-reflection, the rawness, the candidness — got lost. With "Can I Say," that’s not the case at all. Was that scary?
It was a little scary, but that’s exactly what I wanted.
Gavin Edwards interviewed all the people in my memoir — people from my old bands, people in my current bands, people from my childhood — and we left everything in their own words. Some of the stuff, you know the guest entries, that appeared, I didn’t know would be in there until a few days before we had to send in the final manuscript to the publisher. He convinced me to put in everything, even the stuff that didn’t necessarily paint me in the best light. I’ve said it before, but when I’m reading other memoirs, I wish they could make eye contact. Some of them, I think, are bullshit. Like, that didn’t happen, there’s no way. With "Can I Say," it’s all 100 percent truth, and the sections in different voices — Gavin talked to both my ex-wives, you know — was a way of adding credibility, for sure. There were even some cases where I had forgotten an event had happened, and then I read it in the book. I was remembering and discovering myself by paging through my own memoir.
Did you omit anything from the guest entries?
Nothing at all.
A few of the testimonies were noticeably harsh. Did you also learn aspects of people — regrets, harbored feelings, resentment — that you didn’t know existed? In particular, I was surprised to read the section by Christian Jacobs from The Aquabats, your band before Blink-182, and his criticism of Mark Hoppus and Tom Delonge. He said, in The Aquabats, “you were playing stuff far and away more difficult than anything [you] played later in Blink,” and that Mark and Tom were “so jocky and arrogant” on the tour where you all met them. He concluded that, without you, “Mark and Tom would have been, at best, a lukewarm poser pop-punk band.”
Yeah, for sure. I had no idea Christian had any of that ill will toward Blink. I love him like a brother — we’re still close — but before I read that passage, I didn’t know he felt that way. I’ve asked him about it since then.
You were known — are still known — as the quiet guy in Blink-182, and for the most part you seem to be a chill, quiet guy. Yet you had a reality show, "Meet the Barkers," with your ex-wife, Shanna Moakler. When you were with her, the paparazzi were obsessed with you, and then you started dating — or at least seeing — Paris Hilton, and that didn’t help much to take the attention away. Now, of course, you’ve written a memoir, and you’ve put yourself in the spotlight again. It struck me that there might be two forms of Travis, in a way: the reserved one, the silent drummer of Blink-182; and then this other individual who doesn’t shy away. Is that a fair — or an unfair — assessment? What’s the propulsion to keeping put yourself out there? Is it in contrast to your personality?
Well, with Blink-182, I did sometimes feel a little out of place with the stunts and the interviews. Tom and Mark did the talking, that’s definitely true. I love that band, and I love those guys, and I love that music. We had — and have — a lot in common. But the dick jokes and stuff weren’t me.
When I was kid, I listened to "The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show," the live album, more times than I can recall. It got to a point where I could recite the banter between the songs.
(Laughs) I found them so funny — they were always funny, they are always funny — but I never really took part, I mean. That’s really the answer. I wasn’t involved with their jabs on and off stage. I never was because I never wanted to be somebody I wasn’t.
Mark and Tom would be making jokes about having sex with each other’s moms, which is fine, but you know my mom passed away when I was 12. I don’t joke about that topic. I remember a show where my dad was in the audience, and Mark and Tom were talking about hooking up with each other’s moms. My dad came to talk to me after the set, and he was convinced they were talking about my mom, which they never did. I had to explain to him that’s not what was actually happening. He figured if anyone ever said those sorts of things to me, I’d probably be throwing punches, knocking teeth in. That’s off limits in my family. But, in the band, Mark and Tom only screwed around like that with one another. And then they would both mess around with the press, but it was at the other one’s expense.
Multiple people in "Can I Say," including you, Mark, and Tom, commented that when you joined Blink, your purpose was to be the “musician” of the group. I’d argue this was true in the beginning — in ""Enema of the State," in "Take Your Pants Off and Jacket," everything before the self-titled album — but then there was shift. It seemed that Mark and Tom expressed a desire to evolve musically, and they wanted to be musicians, too. Did that perhaps lead to the downfall of the band? Or maybe better put, Tom not being involved any longer?
Part of it probably has something to do with everyone growing up. I mean, for me, I’m still skating on a mini-ramp with my son, Landon. I haven’t changed. I remain a kid, in that sense. I box, and I take Landon boxing, too. I wish I had boxed when I was younger.
But Mark and Tom were getting a little worried about making the same jokes, I think. And I’m not speaking for them at all — I can’t speak on their behalf. But we all got older — we got married, and we had children — and they seemed less interested in making those same jokes they had made in their 20s, which I understood, I understand. There was also a point when Tom began getting interested in new styles, which led to Box Car Racer forming. We had been jamming a lot back then, and as I mention in the memoir, I got him into post-hardcore music, like Fugazi.
We all spiraled and matured in many directions. But, I don’t know… when we were recording the last Blink album ("Neighborhoods," followed the EP "Dogs Eating Dogs"), Tom would be messing around with a synthesizer, and I was like "play the guitar, man. The guitar is rad."
You never seem to run out of projects. The Transplants and Blink-182 ended in the same year, but afterwards, you were able to recover by playing primarily with hip-hop artists and DJs, like Adam Goldstein (DJ AM). Your plane crash, as tragic and horrifying as it was, led you to get off drugs (pills) and have a new outlook on life (sadly, and ironically enough, it did the opposite for Adam). After you graduated high school, your father told you that you could stay in the house only if you got a job and paid rent — so you moved out to pursue the drums. Would you say being forced to re-evaluate yourself is something you need (a nice kick in the ass), or is it just the natural reaction. In other words, is it just making the best of any given situation?
Yeah, man, I like a nice kick in the ass. I need a nice kick in the ass.
With the plane crash, I didn’t go home with any pain medication. I couldn’t imagine putting another one of those pills in my body, but they had me on other prescriptions. At some point, I flushed all those down the toilet because I didn’t like what they were doing, even though the doctors kept insisting I needed to take them, in case I was suicidal, as I was at times in the hospital. It took the worst thing ever to get me off drugs.
Adam got on a plane almost immediately after the crash, and he was taking pills to fly. In the past, I would self-medicate to get on the plane, and then I would self-medicate when I got off, to handle staying in the country where I was touring. I missed my kids, and I wouldn’t want to be there.
It destroyed me when Adam overdosed. He was such a positive person; anyone who knew him would say so. He helped keep me sober. He was always helping me sober up.
With my childhood, I tell my kids — my son, Landon and my daughter, Alabama—that if I didn’t have the dad I do, I’m not sure what would have happened. I probably would have ended up dead, or in jail, or something. My pops gave me an ultimatum -- not a mean ultimatum at all, but after high school he pushed me: either you pay rent, or you leave and go pursue the drums. So I left Fontana, the town in California where I grew up. I never wanted to be a millionaire. I didn’t have those goals. All I wanted was to get paid to do what I loved — to make money from my passion. My parents put a pair of drumsticks in my hand when I was a kid, and as I got older, they continued to encourage me — high school drumline, all that stuff. They saw it as something I could really do, and they pushed me: like you can’t go out and skateboard until you practice drums for an hour. They gave me discipline, is what I’m saying. I grew up poor, working class, lower middle class: my father didn’t own a construction company where I could go work, nothing like that, and he didn’t have any money to send me to college. He and my mother believed I had a shot at the drums.
I mean, I still did some things my dad didn’t like. He told me not to get tattoos, because getting tattoos would make it hard for me to get a job. But I thought, exactly. It’s in the book, too. I got tattoos so I couldn’t get a job, so I had to play the drums.
It’s like a physical manifestation of what we’ve been discussing. A way to kick yourself in the ass.
Yeah, exactly.
Despite the insane amount of prejudice you’ve faced because of how you look (having difficulty purchasing cars, not getting let into restaurants, being pulled over constantly by the police), there are also moments in "Can I Say" where you get off the hook. I’m reminded, specifically, of the time you borrowed a guy’s car to drive his girlfriend home from a party and had sex with her in the vehicle. Or the day you got stopped by the cops and the officer, after he took your weed, let you drive off. Or even the sheer number of times you were able to avoid getting shot as a teenager. You were in some tricky situations.
Would you say you have a knack for getting out of trouble?
I’d say there have been times when I’ve been lucky, yeah. But man, it was bad at one point. There’s a video, somewhere, of me saying, “Fuck the police!,” or something like that. The LAPD would pull me over constantly. I’ve been taken out of the car at gunpoint, in front of my children, and asked if I had any weapons in the car, my gang allegiance, where I was hiding the drugs.
I put the cop in there that took my weed and let me go because I wanted to show there are good cops. Not all cops are bad. Not that letting someone go like that makes them a good cop — but you know, there are extremes. There are extremes of all types of people.
Can you walk me through your faith and religion — your Christianity — a bit? You write that, after your plane crash, you “felt religiously extreme in both directions”: on one hand, you wondered why you were being so tortured; and then on the other, you saw your survival as a blessing — as what you’ve described in other interviews as a “second chance.” Did you reaffirm your faith after your crash?
Yeah, definitely. It was a lot like when my mom died, when I was a kid. I’d go to adults for answers, to God for answers, but I couldn’t find anything. But then I’d believe I was truly put here for a purpose. It was a similar cycle with the crash.
So many people talk about closure, but there’s really no such thing as closure. Every loss stays with you.
Life’s crazy, man. We go about our days thinking we need to get to this place at this time — I have an appointment here, and I have a meeting there. We never stop to wonder about life and death, about birth. It still freaks me out, the whole thing. I pray every single day. I don’t know what happens after death, but I guess I won’t know until I’m dead — and then, obviously, it’s too late, and you don’t need to know anymore.
But more than anything, my kids kept me alive. They keep me alive. They’ve calmed me down. The partying, the drugs, and all that. I used to be a little bit of a hothead.
I mean, I still think: what did I do to deserve these beautiful and amazing kids? I mean (laughs)... I did so many bad things with my genitals.
I listened on YouTube to your recent conversation with BigBoy on KROQ, and he was talking about how you seemed different after the plane crash. Of course, you’re going to be changed after such a horrible tragedy — how can you not be? — but can you explain exactly, just by looking at you, how people started to believe something wasn’t quite the same?
Sixty-five percent of my body burned, plus 27 surgeries over a four month span — and waking up in the middle of most of them because of the tolerance I built from my drug addiction. I had massive survivor’s guilt for a while. You know, I had to bury two of my best friends, Lil’ Chris and Che. I still see Lil Chris’s son and Che’s mother. I have to answer to them.
One day, I overhead Skinhead Rob — and later I overheard my uncle, too — saying that they worried about me at one point, that I seemed a little slow, or something. It scared me. That’s one reason I didn’t want a single drug anymore.
But still I think, if you look at me, you just know, somehow: there’s a guy who has gone through some real shit.
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