There were no visible acts of magic performed during blink-182’s sold-out, often triumphant homecoming concert Sunday night at Petco Park in downtown San Diego. No rabbits were pulled from hats. No one was sawed in half. No one was lowered upside down into a tank of water that was then padlocked and draped in black.
Even so, this Poway-bred pop-punk trio accomplished a feat that was as uncharacteristic as it was impressive. The usually raucous band — long noted for its brash, proudly juvenile lyrics and profane stage patter about sex and various bodily functions — concluded its 92-minute, 26-song concert with an introspective ballad about friendship, love and mortality.
Downbeat, vulnerable and unabashedly sentimental, “One More Time” is the title track of blink’s 2023 album. It’s the group’s first since 2011 to feature guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge back in the fold after his 12-year hiatus from recording with the band.
The new album was released three years after bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma — and 16 years after drummer Travis Barker survived a fiery plane crash that killed four of the six passengers aboard. Each of these life-or-death experiences inspired the members of this now-32-year-old band to reunite after extended periods of estrangement, the latest of which saw DeLonge replaced by Matt Skiba from 2015 to 2022.
“It shouldn’t take a sickness, or airplanes falling out of the sky,” DeLonge sang to his two bandmates and the 40,000-plus audience at Petco Park. “Do I have to die to hear you miss me? Do I have to die to hear you say goodbye? I don’t want to act like there’s tomorrow / I don’t want to wait to do this one more time.”
Pensive and understated, “One More Time” almost seemed to come from a different planet than most of the concert, including the four high-octane blink favorites that immediately preceded it: “What’s My Age Again?”; “First Date”; “All the Small Things”; and “Dammit” (which playfully quoted the chorus from Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”).
Swift, incidentally, performed at Petco in 2015, about seven months after DeLonge’s departure from the band. The first Petco show by blink, with Skiba on board, came in 2019 at an invitation-only twitch.com convention.
Last year’s reunion of blink with DeLonge, who replaced his own replacement to rejoin Hoppus and Barker, kicked off at the 2023 Coachella festival in Indio. It was followed by a tour that included two shows last summer at Pechanga Arena San Diego.
There was a “welcome-back” air of celebration at blink’s Pechanga concerts. But it paled compared to the triumph of Sunday’s Petco performance, which was the sixth stop on blink’s 2024 North American summer tour and includes a Saturday L.A. date at SoFi Stadium.
At Pechanga, blink’s members were feeling their way back together. Hoppus was still regaining his voice after multiple rounds of chemotherapy, while Barker’s ferociously virtuosic drumming tended to dominate many songs, which was both a plus and a minus. The band’s Pechanga repertoire did not include “One More Time,” “Edging” or the four other songs from blink’s latest album that were performed Sunday.
Happily, those new songs accounted for some of the highlights at Petco, most notably the thundering “More Than You Know” and the snappy, lust-fueled “Dance With Me,” which boasts the gloriously silly refrain: “Olé, olé, olé, olé!”
Very few veteran bands these days dare to include so many songs from their newest album, let alone a pop-punk band bringing its pyrotechnics-punctuated stadium show to a finish with a contemplative ballad about the frailty of life.
Playing with a renewed sense of purpose, blink took to the enormous circular stage after spirited opening sets by England’s Hot Milk and San Diego’s Pierce The Veil, whose enthusiastically received eight-song set culminated with rousing renditions of “Pass the Nirvana” and “King for a Day.”
“We’re blink 182-from Poway!” DeLonge declared to cheers. It was one of multiple hometown references, including a shout-out to Rocket From The Crypt as “the greatest band ever to walk the face of the earth.”
“We used to play at a club not far from here,” Hoppus said, in between “Aliens Exist” and “Dance With Me.” “Our biggest (expletive) goal was to sell SOMA out.”
It was at SOMA that Hoppus and DeLonge met Barker, then the drummer in the Orange County ska-punk band The Aquabats. He joined blink in 1998, replacing the trio’s original drummer, Scott Traynor.
One of the most accomplished rock and hip-hop drummers of his generation, Barker combines expert precision and electrifying power in his playing. On Sunday, he alternated between two drum kits, one front and center on the stage, the other on on a metallic riser that hovered nearly 20 feet above the rear of the stage.
Other rock stars over the years have performed on drum kits suspended in the air, be it in the 1970s, Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee in the 1990s or Muse’s Dominic Howard in more recent years. But none of them can elevate even the most elemental songs as well as Barker did throughout blink’s Petco concert.
Whether playing pile-driving beats at insanely accelerated tempos or skittering syncopations that seemed to pay homage to the groundbreaking work of the late hip-hop production visionary J Dilla, Barker was a constant source of percussive skill, fire and imagination.
After “Dance With Me” concluded, Hoppus gleefully told the cheering, multigenerational crowd: “You can’t join a band and do what we do! It’s unique to us.”
On cue, DeLonge responded with a quip about oral sex, a topic that — like flatulence and incest — has long been a staple of blink’s stage patter.
Later, when DeLonge claimed to have lost his virginity to “the sister of a friend,” Hoppus volunteered that it was his sister, Anne, and – with a grin – described the situation as “awkward.”
If DeLonge, 48, and Hoppus, 52, appear too old to engage in such lowbrow hijinks, well, maturity has never been blink’s goal. Except, that is, with the show-closing “One More Time,” a song whose tender sentiments suggest that poignant insights and fart jokes can coexist at a rock show, even by a band whose potty-mouthed teenage sensibilities remain perpetually front and center.
