Blink-182 released The Mark, Tom and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back!) through MCA Records on November 7, 2000. On the original CD, “Dammit” brings the concert to a close on track 19. The crowd gives way to the opening bass line of “Man Overboard,” a new studio recording and the album’s lead single. A listener who hit stop when that song ended missed another 29 tracks.
The concerts themselves took two nights to record. On November 4, 1999, a mobile recording truck captured the trio at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. The next night it was at the Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City. Bassist Mark Hoppus told Rock Sound that the second show made him nervous. Playing Los Angeles already meant having family, friends, lawyers, label staff and radio people backstage. He likened it to his wedding. Then he had to go out and play a set he knew people would be able to listen back to.
Producer Jerry Finn had worked with the band on Enema of the State, and anyone who owned that album knew the first three songs by heart. The live record opens in exactly the same order with “Dumpweed,” “Don’t Leave Me” and “Aliens Exist.” The giveaway comes at track four. Just where the studio album eases into “Going Away to College,” the live band tears through “Family Reunion,” a burst of harmonized profanity. Then they play “Going Away to College” anyway. A filthy joke and a sincere love song fit comfortably next to each other in a Blink set.
There was room for the band that audiences had heard before Enema, too. With Travis Barker on drums, the trio reached back to Cheshire Cat for “Peggy Sue” and “Carousel,” and to Dude Ranch for “Pathetic” and “Dammit.” After “Pathetic,” the chatter turns to the band’s qualifications. They’re professionals, the audience is assured. More precisely, they “professionally suck.”
Hoppus and guitarist Tom DeLonge had been keeping that exchange going from city to city. As Hoppus explained to Rock Sound, each wanted to see who could say the most ridiculous thing into a microphone. While the recording truck handled the two California dates, the band had been taping the entire tour on digital audio tape. Afterward, someone listened through the run and assembled roughly 15 minutes of their back-and-forth. That’s why the closing stretch of the CD feels like being dropped into the middle of a different conversation every few seconds.
“Man Overboard” had taken a different route onto the disc. Blink wrote it during the Enema of the State sessions and returned to record it after the tour. It reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart, and the limited-edition live album debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200. The jokes got their own billing when Geffen and UMe reissued the record on vinyl in 2016. Flip the second LP over and the whole fourth side belongs to Hoppus and DeLonge. The label called it “Words of Wisdom.”
