Keeping a Punk Ethic, With Spirit of Sublime

Drummer Floyd “Bud” Gaugh knows commitment. It’s scrawled across his back in the form of a vast tattoo, an inky mural that depicts a guitar, a weeping Christ figure, a fallen microphone and the name “Bradley Nowell.”

The image is a tribute to Gaugh’s friend and bandmate. Nowell, the singer-guitarist of Sublime, died from a heroin overdose in a San Francisco hotel room on May 25, 1996. His death at age 28 came just two months before the release of Sublime’s self-titled major-label debut, which later spawned the radio hits “What I Got,” “Santeria,” “Wrong Way” and “Doin’ Time.”

For Gaugh, the tattoo is only a small gesture.

“I always said Brad had my back,” Gaugh says with a smile.

Another sort of lasting tribute to Nowell is the Long Beach Dub All Stars, a seven-member ensemble that includes Sublime survivors Gaugh and bassist Eric Wilson and specializes in high-octane reggae and punk rock. The new band’s debut album, “Right Back,” came out this week.

The Dub All Stars were initially just a gathering of friends designed to perform at a benefit concert at the Hollywood Palladium after Nowell’s death.

“Every single one of us was going through a rough time then,” says Gaugh, 31. “Everybody in the band knew Brad. He was a real good friend.”

But the Dub All Stars enjoyed the experience of playing together enough to keep going. Each of them had been involved creatively with Sublime.

“We used to play in front of a bank in Long Beach and put a hat out with the same guys before Sublime was anything,” says Wilson, 30. “Just jam out and make enough money for a 12-pack. It’s a kind of family of people we grew up with.”

The creation of the Dub All Stars, Wilson says, “helped me out a lot, because I didn’t know what I was going to do. I spent a good part of my life with Brad playing, since I was 10 years old. Then he was gone just when things were starting to happen.”

Not surprisingly, the sound of the Dub All Stars shares much with Sublime. The song “Trailer Ras,” already enjoying heavy airplay on KROQ and other modern rock stations, is built on a rhythm that would be immediately recognizable to Sublime fans.

There isn’t much straight-ahead punk on the new album, but the band clearly still adheres to a punk ethic, avoiding outside interference by self-financing the recording of “Right Back.” They even seriously considered releasing the album through the independent Epitaph label before finally signing to DreamWorks, part of the Universal Music Group.

The Dub All Stars have been playing now for two years, slowly building their own reputation and following. But the band will still be measured against the commercial legacy of Sublime.

“Of course, Sublime had so much success,” says the Dub All Stars’ manager Jon Phillips, who also represented Sublime. “You’re talking about 6 million records total, a catalog that still is selling 20,000 a week. I think there is a lot of pressure in that respect, and how you adjust to it is really the challenge.”

The band will be touring off and on through the rest of the year, returning to Southern California to join Cypress Hill and others at the Orange Show Events Center in San Bernardino next Saturday.

That event is Cypress Hill’s pro-marijuana “Smoke Out,” but hard drugs are an unpopular topic around the Dub All Stars, says Gaugh, who discovered Nowell’s body in the hotel room they shared after performing their final show in Petaluma. Nowell had struggled with heroin for the last three years of his life, just one more casualty in a music scene where drug use remains common. Even now, people will sometimes approach Gaugh and others with drugs.

“We try to keep it out of our camp as much as possible,” says Gaugh. “You can definitely let people know that it is not cool. If we find out about it, our tour manager is about 350 pounds, and he likes to throw them out on their foreheads.”