This weekend, Sublime will perform at Warped Tour in their hometown of Long Beach, CA. The band was memorably part of the inaugural Warped Tour back in 1995, and drummer Bud Gaugh has some painful memories from the time.
During a conversation with The Pier, Gaugh recalled the chaos of that first Warped Tour.
“Some of the first shows were like, ‘Oh my gosh. What are we doing here? Is this really gonna happen?’” Gaugh remembered thinking. Then, an incident that changed everything. The drummer suffered a serious injury — not onstage, but on one of the Warped Tour half-pipes.
How Sublime’s Drummer Broke His Ribs at Warped Tour
“So this BMX guy from Australia … he let me use his bike and and I dropped in on the half-pipe, made one turn, came down, came up back up again and then lost it and landed in the middle of the ramp and broke my ribs,” Gaugh explained. “So I told our management who then explained to [Warped Tour founder] Kevin Lyman that I needed to go to the hospital. So he’s like, “Alright, tomorrow.’”
However, Gaugh didn’t see a doctor the next day – or the day after that. Warped Tour was operating on a strict schedule, and there was simply no time for him to step away and get treatment. As such, the doctor’s visit kept getting pushed off. Gaugh continued to play every Sublime show with the help of painkillers and beer.
“I would roll out of my bunk and start drinking the Heckler Brau that was sponsoring the tour,” the drummer explained. “So we had these like quarts of Heckler Brau Doppelbock, the super dark stuff. And I would drink that, and then another one. You know smoking and joking, you know tell the pain to go away. And then, hopefully I didn’t fall off the kit by the time we were playing.”
The routine eventually got Gaugh in trouble with the law.
When Bud Gaugh Got Busted in Florida
“I was going to self-medicate because my ribs were busted,” he explained. “So I just sought out some painkillers and got arrested in Florida which was a zero tolerant state at the time.”
Even after missing a show due to his arrest, Gaugh rejoined with Sublime for the next Warped Tour stop. He continued asking for medical attention, but it wasn’t until a day off in Massachusetts that he was finally seen.
“[I] went to a real doctor and got x-rays and two of my bones were broken,” Gaugh noted. “He gave me a rib support belt and some non-narcotic pain relievers for the daytime and stuff to help me sleep because at this point I hadn’t slept in 2 weeks.”
The drummer laughs about the experience now, and he still has nothing but positive things to say about Warped Tour. Still, Gaugh cautioned he won’t make the same mistake at this year’s Warped tour.
“I’m not gonna be on the half-pipe,” the drummer laughed. “I learned my lesson. My bones don’t bend that way.”
