Who says a dollar doesn’t get you anywhere these days?
Come November, a buck will be enough to get you into a Blink-182 show when they embark on a rare club tour.
“We’re paying for this [show] ourselves,” singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge said recently. “It’s a chance for us to just come back together because we always play gigantic stages. Mark, Travis and I are always like 30 feet away from each other so we get to come back closer and remember what it’s like. It’s so much fun to play in the smaller places.”
The DollaBill Tour launches November 6 at the Avalon in Boston and hits clubs like Irving Plaza in New York and the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., before ending November 21 at SOMA in the band’s native San Diego.
“The venues have been awesome and helped us out a lot,” DeLonge said. “So all those little clubs, the cool clubs in the cities, the kids should be stoked on and [we] thank them for letting us do this with them.”
The outing will feature Bubba Sparxxx and the Kinison as openers.
“We tour with punk rock bands every time we tour, so we’re just going to tour with bands we like now,” drummer Travis Barker explained. “[Bubba’s] one of my favorite rappers of all time.”
“We love punk rock, we love hip-hop, we love drum’n’bass music,” DeLonge added. “People gotta grow. They gotta open their minds and listen. There is a lot of good music out there and it’s like, since I was in 7th grade, I only listened to punk rock. I was so biased, so stupid. Now there’s so many great bands out there and it wasn’t until our band started having a little success that I see these bands out there doing their sh- and it’s amazing.”
While Timbaland protégé Sparxxx is already established, Blink are hoping to introduce the Oblong, Illinois, band the Kinison to the masses.
“They are way more punk rock,” DeLonge said. “They are like an art-hardcore band, but they’re not really hardcore. People are gonna trip on them.”
The first batch of tickets for the tour, sold exclusively at MTV.com, go on sale October 23. Two days later, a small number of held tickets will go on sale at MTV.com as well as box offices and ticket outlets.
Blink-182 actually wanted the tour to be free, but venues asked them to charge a dollar.
“They didn’t want kids showing up and getting angry or hurting each other [while] trying to get in a small venue because it was all free, first come, first serve,” DeLonge said. “If you charge just a dollar and someone gets an actual ticket, the kids are safe.”
Mark, Tom and Travis are hitting the road to promote their new untitled album, due November 18. While the album marks an experimental turn for the band, the live show will not deviate too much from Blink-182’s bread-and-butter pop punk.
“It’s all rooted in melody. It’s all rooted in what people are familiar with in Blink-182,” DeLonge said. “And if there are some people that hate Blink-182, there’s a lot of that stuff that they hate in there, too.
“We like playing fast… we’ve always loved playing fast,” he added. “I mean, even the slow songs, we get onstage and we’ll belt them out. We have a lot of energy, we come from the punk rock scene and that kinda breeds that kind of sh-.”
Blink-182’s video for “Feelin’ This,” the first single from the untitled album, will premiere on MTV’s “Making the Video” later this month.
Blink-182’S DollaBill Tour Dates, According To Geffen Records:
- 11/6 – Boston, MA – Avalon
- 11/7 – Philadelphia, PA – Electric Factory
- 11/8 – Washington, DC – 9:30 Club
- 11/9 – New York, NY – Irving Plaza
- 11/12 – Detroit, MI – St. Andrews
- 11/13 – Chicago, IL – House of Blues
- 11/14 – Minneapolis, MN – Quest
- 11/17 – Los Angeles, CA – Avalon
- 11/18 – Los Angeles, CA – Avalon
- 11/21 – San Diego, CA – SOMA
