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“The Hardest Working Drummer in Hollywood” By Alex Pappademas / Photography by Donna Trope – Travis Barker’s whole career has always veered toward the unpredictable—but even he never could have predicted, well… any of this.
Thursday night, corner booth at Crossroads Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in West Hollywood, just before the dinner rush. Travis Barker shivers in a threadbare Subhumans T-shirt. He could conceivably ask the staff to turn down the AC a little—he’s an investor in this place, as it happens, not to mention, y’know, a rock star—but he doesn’t. “I think I’m, like, permanently cold, because I just spent the last four hours in my underwear,” he says. Then he laughs. Even in the context of Barker’s ever-more-improbable life, this day has been a weird one. He spent the afternoon standing around mostly naked while being measured, photographed, and scanned by representatives from Madame Tussauds, where he’s being honored with a wax figure in his likeness. When it’s suggested that he might be the first person from an American punk band to be thus enshrined—the museum has a Johnny Rotten but not, for example, a Joey Ramone—Barker says, “Very cool,” then asks if they’ve made one for Lemmy from Motörhead. (Answer: no.)
Strange day. Strange week. On Tuesday, Barker was at the Kia Forum, playing “Bad Reputation” and “Cherry Bomb” with the Foo Fighters and guest vocalist Joan Jett at a tribute to the late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died suddenly in March. The gig was an honor in more ways than one. Hawkins and Barker had been friends since the ’90s, when Barker was working for the city of Laguna Beach as a garbageman, living on his roommate’s couch, and playing drums at dive-bar gigs a few nights a week. Hawkins, who lived in Laguna and would soon join Alanis Morissette’s band (he’d meet Dave Grohl while touring with her), was a regular at those shows—and even back then, he could tell Barker had the goods. “He would come up to me and be like, ‘Kid, I swear to God, I come every week just to watch you play. You’re a fucking star.’ And I’m like, ‘No I’m not.’ He would come every week we played.”
Barker remembers his apprenticeship in Laguna’s dive bars as one of the happiest periods of his life—second only, he says, to the birth of his children, and right now. He had a place to live and enough money to pay for food and drumsticks; he went skateboarding and played music every day. Back then he would have felt guilty, he says, imagining anything more—like, say, joining an epoch-defining band that would go on to sell tens of millions of albums, for example, or producing and collaborating with scores of big-name artists from across the genre spectrum, or running his own record label, or marrying joyfully into what happens to be one of the most famous families on the planet, or putting his clout behind a clothing label, restaurants, or an organic vegan CBD-gummy-and-tincture line. And yet all of this and more has come to pass. One day you’re a drummer-slash-trash-collector and the next you’re drinking wine with Iggy Pop, and when things like this happen to him, sometimes Barker wonders if he’s dreaming, but that’s the point—his dreams were never like this.
Which is not to say it’s been easy. In 2008, Barker was horribly burned in a private-jet crash that claimed the lives of his longtime assistant Chris Baker and his security guard Che Still, both close friends. Barker spent three months in the hospital, endured 26 surgeries, endless skin grafts, and a period of suicidal depression; he later told interviewers he’d offered friends a million dollars if they’d help him end his life. The only other survivor of the crash was Barker’s best friend and musical collaborator, Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein; about a year after the accident, Goldstein died of a drug overdose in New York. Barker struggled with survivor’s guilt and PTSD. At times, he says, “I didn’t know if I’d ever play music again. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to go outside again.”
Barker has never cared for the truism that everything happens for a reason — “I’ll never think that about the people I lost,” he says—but he acknowledges that the crash saved him from a more tragic and common rock-and-roll ending. As documented in his 2015 memoir, Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, the Barker who got on that plane was a textbook train wreck, drowning his consciousness in weed and pills and Coupe deVilles as his marriage (to former Miss USA Shanna Moakler) fell apart. “I was going down a really fast-paced, dangerous path,” he says. Surviving the crash gave him a second chance he’s determined to live up to.
“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t make the most of it,” he says. “That I don’t appreciate it, and that I’m not grateful for it.”
Two weeks after Barker’s date with wax-dummy history, Blink-182 will announce a new album and a 2023 world tour—both of which will feature Blink cofounder and guitarist Tom DeLonge, who hasn’t played with the band since 2015.
When we talk about Blink in late September, Barker doesn’t tell me this is happening. At that point DeLonge’s return to the fold is still a secret. But the external, pop-cultural reasons why a classic-Blink reunion tour makes sense right now are anything but. When Blink were at their commercial peak in the early 2000s, critics wrote them off as juvenile and derivative—a dine-and-dash Descendents, a boy band for kids who wore fake lip rings to school-picture day. But legacy is hard to predict in real time. In the 20-plus years since Blink streaked through the streets of LA and into the hearts of impressionable Total Request Live voters in the video for “What’s My Age Again?,” they’ve become maybe the most broadly influential rock band of their era. “They crossed over on such a large scale, and I think that was important for punk rock culture,” says Avril Lavigne, whose 2022 comeback album, Love Sux, coproduced by Barker, is her first release on Barker’s label, DTA Records. “They made it more mainstream, but that’s also what got the CD into my hands, and how more people could discover that type of music.”
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