If you don’t know anything about Sublime with Rome, it is a guy named Rome Ramirez performing Sublime songs backed by a band that, from 2009 to 2011, included the Long Beach punks’ original rhythm section, drummer Bud Gaugh and bassist Eric Wilson. Then it was only Wilson joined by a succession of hired drummers that started with Josh Freese (Foo Fighters, A Perfect Circle, Guns ’N Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Devo, and hundreds of studio sessions). Sublime with Rome will play Billy Bob’s Texas (2520 Rodeo Plz, Fort Worth, 817-624-7117) on Thursday as part of the last leg of a farewell tour, and now with Wilson gone, Sublime with Rome is effectively a full-on tribute act.
The end of Sublime with Rome was heralded by the return of a Gaugh- and Wilson-crewed Sublime. They reformed with deceased frontman Bradley Nowell’s son, Jakob Nowell, who looks and sounds a lot more like his father than Ramirez, who, to his credit, at least sounds passably like the guy he replaced. What’s notable about all this is that when the elder Nowell died in 1996 from a heroin overdose, one of the band’s managers said that “the surviving members of Sublime had no interest in continuing to perform and record under the ‘Sublime’ name.” Yet 13 years later, there they were, in Sparks, Nevada, playing a reunion show as Sublime with Ramirez filling in for Nowell.
Bradley Nowell’s estate threatened to sue this second iteration, which is why they have played as “Sublime with Rome” for the past 15 years, but on December 11, 2023, Jakob joined Gaugh and Wilson to play as Sublime at a Los Angeles benefit for Bad Brains frontman H.R. (who suffers from a rare brain disorder that causes extreme headaches). And less than a month later, the Jakob/Gaugh/Wilson version of Sublime was added to the 2024 Coachella lineup. Wilson officially left SwR in February 2024, and in March, Sublime with Rome announced their farewell tour.
I watched SwR about a year ago when they co-headlined a show at Toyota Music Factory in Irving with Slightly Stoopid. Wilson (who inspired me to pick up the bass guitar) was still in the band, and his performance was solid if eccentric — at one point, Wilson’s tech led him out near his bass keyboard, draped a bass guitar on him, and then Wilson just stood there until the tech removed it, after which he turned to the synth, puffed on an enormous joint, and played the bass parts of whatever song it was one-handed. But the band sounded weird to me. Not because Ramirez is a bad singer or guitarist — he’s probably better at the latter than the man he replaced — but because he and the rest of the band, all hired guns, were too good.
Nowell’s death happened the night before a show in San Francisco, which I, then 17, so had tickets for. It was to be my first time seeing my then-favorite band, so I never got to see them play live, but I understood, even back then, what really made Sublime captivating: the alchemy created by three fat, drunk fools who had been friends since childhood and who, despite wandering tempos, forgotten lyrics, and mushy guitar playing, still electrified a crowd. The evidence of their crowd-electrification capacity was plain on the dozen or so live Sublime bootlegs I acquired in the years between his death and my graduation from college four years later. By comparison, Sublime with Rome in 2023 was fine. But even with Wilson’s participation, SwR just felt like a pretty good cover band. Sublime’s appeal comes from the songs and the marketing of their white-trash Long Beach mystique. But Sublime’s magic, the part that got to me, requires its three core members.
Before I finished writing this column — but after I’d tossed a draft comparing Sublime with Rome to first-century Greek historian Plutarch’s well-known thought experiment “The Ship of Theseus” — I read a Rolling Stone interview with Phish frontman Trey Anastasio, who recently turned 60. They asked him, “If somebody quits Phish, is it over?” He said that “there is no way this band could exist without any of the four members. And the reason that all these bands kind of keep going on with one or two members … is just because there’s so much money to be made. It’s nostalgia, and money, and oldies.”
But as I watched Wilson — a hulking, silent cypher in a bowling shirt, hidden behind huge, round sunglasses — take the stage last July, I wrote this note in my phone: “This guy is 53 years old. He seems fried, but what the fuck else is he supposed to do?”
The same might be said of Ramirez, who turned 36 this June. Will he dust off “Ruca” and “What I Got” 17 years from now? Everybody has to pay bills, after all. It’s no longer better to burn out than fade away, because fading away is hardly even an option anymore.
