When I search through the haze of the years of my youth, through the assimilatory trudging, the beer foam and pot smoke, the slide show of my memory pauses on the back of an old Acura Legend. The smells work to polish the clarity the picture, but they’re too complicated to do anything but enhance the overall mystique of the hazy visions of a raw bench seat. There’s the distinct smell of harbored sweat, heated and preserved by three or four sets of snowboard boots. A grease-blotted McDonalds bag releases the remnants of the egg-and-sausage-and-cholesterol drive-through breakfast. The car reeks of sleep and unbrushed teeth; the dankness of the morning is corralled and weighted by a convenience store air freshener, two months past prime, working its strawberry-powered ass off to disguise the musty bubble. No one in the car seems to notice any of the pungency as the Legend careens along the precarious banks of the American River Canyon, and three, four, sometimes five voices bounce along with every bloody word to a cassette of Sublime’s 40 oz. to Freedom. Yes, in my memory, Sublime has a wetness to it, a nearly-dead smell that refuses to unstink.
The Acura was also a time machine. Bradley Nowell had been dead for nearly three years, and as those winter days bore on, we did our part to keep him—along with the possibility that he and his Long Beach band might not have found another way to obliterate their chances at success—alive and well. We poured through the idiosyncrasies of his music, Saturday after Saturday, as we bobbed and bounced our way to the ski ranch. We investigated from where the dialogue in the track “40 oz. to Freedom” came. We reported the results of our mission to procure pre-Second-hand Smoke translations of the song “Chico mi tipo.” We emulated the way Bradley whistles to Toby Dog and Louie Dog in the “Thanx Dub,” not to mention the drawl of his “NKOTB” call out, and “thesouthsidepardemcapreed?wassupduuuude?” line we could never quite figure out. I’d never heard the Dead’s cut of “Scarlet Begonias,” but it didn’t stop me from signing about “nitrous, opium, acid, heroin, and pcp” on the Sublime cut. One infamous trip up the hill, in a foreign car this time, my cousin Lindsay and I sang the entire album in protest of the bearded asshole behind the wheel (her mom’s boyfriend) who believed a radio, knuckle-dragging snowboarders, and teenage fun were all a waste of time because skis were holier than the two planks nailed to Jesus.
40 oz to Freedom was certainly the snowboarding soundtrack, but it permeates my other memories. My copy never made it back into the giant 200-disc carrying case; it either played in the Camry's discman-a-la-tape-coverter CD player or sat in the console while some other band, probably Unwritten Law, took its turn. Unlike later Sublime albums, it wasn't just a collection songs. The album itself was a self-contained trip that actually suffered when played in segments.
It’s only now, after seeking out countless versions of “5446 (That’s My Number)” and the post-40 oz. radio play of “Badfish,” after linking the verse, “My name is Eric I have nothing to say / ‘Cuz I am not a fucking D.J.” to Gwen Stefani’s presence on Second-hand Smoke’s “Superstar Punani,” after the inundation and exposure and tracing the reggae roots and the bonus cuts appearing on subsequent posthumous releases, this mammoth album of my teenage years holds absolutely no relevance in my current life. None. I possess not the patience, desire, or palette to travel that canyon road. The deep white promise in the rhythmic chanting of "she picked up a rock / threw it at the car/ hit him in the head / now he's got a big scar" before trading the hot stink of youthful subversion for the fresh mountain air is no longer tantalizing, even for old time’s sake.
