Anatomy of an Album: Cheshire Cat

Before there was a "-182," there was just Blink: Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge, and drummer Scott Raynor, three teenagers from Poway, California who'd been playing together since August 1992. Hoppus had just moved to San Diego to attend Cal State San Marcos when his sister Anne introduced him to DeLonge. The two met in DeLonge's garage and spent hours working through songs DeLonge had been keeping in a red notebook, alongside compositions of Hoppus's own — a session that produced "Carousel," the song that would eventually open the band's debut album nearly three years later.

The band scraped together three self-recorded demos on a four-track in Raynor's bedroom — Flyswatter, an untitled second tape, and finally Buddha, financed by Hoppus's boss at the record store where he worked. Buddha found its way to Cargo Music, the San Diego arm of a Montreal indie label, via a friend and a member of the local band Fluf. Cargo offered the trio a deal on a trial basis — and the contract itself tells you something about how young this band actually was. Hoppus was the only one of the three who could sign it: DeLonge was at work during the meeting, and Raynor was still a minor.

Three days, one hotel bed, and a broken microphone

Cargo's budget for the debut didn't stretch far — by some accounts as little as three days of studio time to record sixteen songs. The band booked time at Westbeach Recorders in Los Angeles, a studio DeLonge and Hoppus were genuinely starstruck by: it had hosted Bad Religion, NOFX, Face to Face, and Ten Foot Pole, bands whose records had shaped their own writing. The reality of the sessions was less glamorous than the location. Unfamiliar with LA, the trio got lost on their way to the studio and arrived three hours late on day one. When they finally set up, they didn't waste time catching up — Hoppus recalled to the band's own 2001 book, Blink-182: Tales From Beneath Your Mom: “We were working ten- to twelve-hours straight, hardly even breaking for food or anything.” Accommodations were no more comfortable: the band had booked a hotel room with two double beds, but were given a single king instead, and ended up sleeping three across it for the duration of the sessions.

The recording itself was handled by Otis Barthoulameu — known simply as "O," a member of the San Diego band Fluf — who produced, while Ten Foot Pole's Steve Kravac engineered. Kravac was reportedly won over by the trio almost immediately, less by their technical polish than by their humor and eagerness in the room. He recorded most of the album live with minimal overdubs and few retakes, chasing exactly the kind of raw, unpolished energy that gives Cheshire Cat its charm. DeLonge, for his part, recorded his guitar parts through an amp borrowed from Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz and, in the process, managed to break his microphones. Kravac eventually convinced a frustrated DeLonge and a determined Hoppus — described as simply trying to "make the best of it" — to book additional time for overdubs, and the band decamped for an extra week to the more familiar surroundings of Doubletime Studios in Santee, closer to home.

The songs

Seven of Cheshire Cat's sixteen tracks were reworked from the Buddha demo, tightened and re-recorded rather than written fresh. “Carousel,” the opener, carries the record's whole DNA in miniature — a fast, hooky punk arrangement built around Hoppus and DeLonge's original 1992 jam session, with lyrics that swing from real heartbreak straight into the band's signature juvenile humor within the space of two lines. “M+M's,” written primarily by Hoppus, became the album's first single and the band's first track to get any radio airplay at all — a song about wanting to travel somewhere far away with a girl he liked, set to one of the record's fastest, most immediate riffs. “Wasting Time,” the second single, had actually existed even earlier than the album itself, in a rougher form on a 1994 split 7-inch the band released with a group called the Iconoclasts.

The album's back half leans harder into the joke songs that would become a Blink signature — and, by most retrospective accounts including the band's own later self-assessment, leans on them a little too hard, closing the record on novelty tracks rather than its strongest material. That's a sequencing choice the band would notably not repeat on the album that followed.

What it did

Cheshire Cat was never a chart record — it was released on a small independent label with a fraction of a national label's promotional reach, and its impact was local and gradual rather than immediate. What it did do was get the band noticed: the album led directly to tour slots with Pennywise and NOFX, and put Blink on the Warped Tour circuit that would become central to their identity for the rest of the decade. The Buddha demo that fed roughly half the record was itself reissued in 1998 and went on to sell some 300,000 copies on the strength of the band's later fame — a real commercial afterlife for songs that had first been recorded for almost nothing in a teenage drummer's bedroom.

Reading the band's own account of how it came together, Cheshire Cat reads less like a fully-formed artistic statement and more like exactly what it was: three teenagers with three days, one borrowed amp, and no real idea yet of what they were building. Every element that would define Blink-182 for the next decade — the whiplash between real feeling and dumb jokes, the speed, the total lack of self-seriousness — is already present here in a rougher, less confident form. The band wouldn't fully figure out how to use it until the next record.

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