“We’re Not F%&#ing Doing It!”

“Farts!” Hoppus exclaims upon entering his dressing room before the show in Philadelphia the following day. “This place smells of farts!”

He’s not wrong. Yet the room’s flatulent odor is not its most irritating aspect. That would be the constant pinging noise coming from next door — an electronic metronome indicating that Barker has begun his preshow warm-up assault on a rubber practice drum. The least communicative of the trio when being formally interviewed, the drummer is, in many ways, the most intriguing. Defiantly anti-celebrity, Barker had earlier noted the numerous Blink posters decorating the venue and disgustedly sighed, “I’ve never seen my face as much as I have on this tour — fuck this shit.”

Yet Barker is the man who also owns 11 cars and, just a couple of weeks ago, had a son with Shanna Moakler, a former Miss USA. Despite being a fitness nut, Barker is the band’s only real drinker, and he admits that he freshly primped his extravagant mohawk just this morning. Moreover, when he does say something to a journalist, it’s usually interesting. Asked by the MTV crew, for example, about why Blink had played in the Persian Gulf, he responded that his father had served in Vietnam and that he had “heard stories,” before clamming up again. When Blender wondered aloud what Barker would do if he couldn’t play the drums anymore, the new father rather terrifyingly announced that he would pay someone to shoot him in the head.

Indeed, in the last year alone, in addition to his Blink duties, Barker played on Pink’s new record, released an album with his other band, the Transplants, and a second with his other other band, Box Car Racer. Essentially a bleaker, thrashier Blink-182, Box Car also features DeLonge. But not Hoppus.

“That did feel strange,” Hoppus says hesitantly. “At the beginning, yeah, it was weird, for sure. Because nobody talked about it. It was this strange situation that nobody addressed. It got to be this weird thing in the band for a while.”

While Hoppus still sounds hurt, he agrees that spending nine months apart had a rejuvenating effect on the band when they reconvened last December to record their new album. They decided to treat this record as if it were their first. Renting a house in San Diego, where both Hoppus and DeLonge live, they spent months trying out new sounds and stripping nearby record stores of CDs by favored bands such as the Who and the Cure, whose frontman, Robert Smith, they successfully wooed to sing on the new song “All of This.” Such expensive experimentation, they claim, was encouraged by their new label, Geffen, in whose lap they landed following the effective dissolution of sister company MCA.

“When we were on MCA, it was kind of accounting first, creative second,” DeLonge says. “They said, ‘We want this record by this time. And if it’s not here by this time, we’re gonna penalize you X amount of dollars.’ It was a huge pissing match. But Geffen came in and said, ‘This is the best record you ever made; take as much time as you want.’ So we did. We accomplished our goal.”

If that goal was an album that expands the band’s sonic horizons while rigorously excising their comic lyrical elements, then they undoubtedly did. Notably heart-wrenching is “Go,” on which Hoppus describes being locked outside his house as a teenager, hearing “the angry voice of the man inside” and seeing “the look of fear in my mother’s eyes.” Did the bassist have any concerns about revealing so much in such a specific fashion?

“No, not really,” he says. “But it’s a personal song. It’s very…uh…I don’t know. Has my mother heard it? Yeah, but it’s not specifically about my mother. It’s just, like, kind of a situation. It’s kind of like…uh…I don’t know. I feel weird talking about it.”

Looking at Hoppus’s sad, confused expression, so does Blender.

“I did a really fucked-up jump earlier on and hurt my back,” Hoppus informs the crowd toward the end of tonight’s set. “Which of you guys is man enough to give me a massage?”

One of the band’s crew had earlier told Blender that Hoppus is the key to the band’s live show — if he’s “up,” so is everyone else. This evening, the bassist couldn’t be higher as he balances his instrument on the palm of his hand, gleefully throws fistfuls of DeLonge’s guitar picks into the crowd and bounces around the stage like a hyperactive 3-year-old.

“I liked that show a lot better,” he says afterward. “That was a solid A-minus.”

“The new songs seemed to go down well,” DeLonge interjects. “We always try our hardest to make the best record we can — but this is different. We don’t want to be a pop-punk band. You know, I have PUNK ROCK tattooed on my arm. But you grow out of it. It’s so dumb to be 27 years old and go, ‘I am still punk!’ It doesn’t mean anything.”

So are the days of the band being as funny on record as they are in person gone for good? Have they passed the point where they would, say, release an EP of novelty songs about masturbation?

“We’d do it only if people completely didn’t think it was going to happen,” DeLonge says, laughing. “If everyone thought we were the darkest, most serious band in the world, then I’d want to do it. We would need to get to that Radiohead level. Actually, they should do it. An EP of masturbation songs by Radiohead would be awesome.”

With that, he disappears with the rest of the band toward their tour bus for an overnight drive to their next show, in Washington, D.C. As they walk, their tour manager outlines to Hoppus what else the next day will bring: the interviews, the meet-and-greets and so forth.

As the band climbs aboard the bus, the wind carries Hoppus’s reply: “I’m not fucking doing it!”