Anatomy of an Album: Take Off Your Pants and Jacket

By the time Blink-182 came off the road from touring Enema of the State, they weren't the same band that had gone into that album's sessions two years earlier. They were bigger, richer, and — for the first time — genuinely pulling in different directions. Mark Hoppus laid out the split with unusual candor in his liner notes for the 2013 vinyl reissue of Take Off Your Pants and Jacket: “I loved everything about Enema of the State — the music, the videos, the live show, everything. I wanted to do it again, make it bigger, better, and louder. Tom wanted something different. He was striving for something heavier, more guitar-driven, dirtier. He was listening to a lot of post-hardcore bands” — Fugazi and Refused among them — “and their influence showed in what he wrote. Travis, never simply a punk rock drummer, wanted to challenge himself, as well as the band. During that time he was listening to a great deal of hip hop and heavy metal.”

The result, in Hoppus's own summary, wasn't a compromise so much as an open argument set to tape: “So there you have it, the creative struggle, the tension, the push and pull of Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. Pop punk meets post-hardcore meets hip hop meets heavy metal. For the first time, the three of us worked in opposition to one another. We weren't starting from the same point or working toward the same goal. Sometimes the differences became contentious.” Producer Jerry Finn, back for his second Blink record, was tasked with holding that argument together into something that still sounded like one band — recording ran roughly December 2000 through March 2001 at Signature Sound in San Diego, with additional sessions at Larrabee West and Cello Studios in Hollywood.

The manager who said there was no hit

The album's two biggest songs exist because of a single blunt conversation. Once the band had a finished record they were proud of, they played it for their manager, Rick DeVoe, expecting him to share their enthusiasm. He didn't. According to Hoppus's own account, DeVoe told them plainly: “I don't hear THAT thing… that blink-182 good time summer anthem thing.”

The irony Hoppus has more or less acknowledged since is that the two songs written in anger, specifically to satisfy a manager's commercial instincts, ended up defining the album in the public's mind far more than the record's more ambitious, more contested material — the very songs the tension in the room had actually produced.

The songs

The album opens with its most structurally complex song by far. “Anthem Part Two” stacks three distinct guitar riffs and a constantly shifting rhythm section into its first 45 seconds alone before vocals even arrive — and when DeLonge does start singing, it's not about a girl or a party. “Everything has fallen to pieces / Earth is dying, help me Jesus,” he sings, addressing corporate and political failure from a teenager's powerless vantage point, closing the chorus with a shouted “If we're fucked up, you're to blame!” aimed squarely at the adults in the room.

“Stay Together for the Kids” became the record's slower, sadder hit in the tradition of "Adam's Song" — but where that song addressed suicide, this one looks at a home coming apart through divorce, with Hoppus singing the verses and DeLonge shouting the choruses over quiet-loud dynamics pushed further than anything the band had tried before. “Story of a Lonely Guy” takes a similarly introspective turn, ostensibly about a girl but really built around the anxious, low-grade dread that defines adolescence generally, with Travis Barker's drumming shifting shape constantly underneath it.

Of everything on the record, Hoppus has singled out “Every Time I Look For You” as the song that best captures what the whole album actually was, structurally: “perhaps the most obvious Frankenstein monster of [each songwriter's] disparate elements combining into song.” It never became a single, though it soundtracked the opening of American Pie 2 — and Hoppus has suggested that had their manager not sent them home to write "The Rock Show" and "First Date," this might well have been the record's actual follow-up hit to Enema of the State instead.

The album's back half — "Roller Coaster," "Reckless Abandon," "Shut Up," "Give Me One Good Reason," and closer "Please Take Me Home" — carries the same nervy, unresolved energy throughout, songs as fast and catchy as anything on Enema but shadowed by a dread that record never really had. “Something's wrong, this is gonna shock them,” DeLonge sings on "Reckless Abandon"; Hoppus, on "Shut Up," goes further still: “Now that all my friends left, this place is fucking dead.”

The album was also released in three separate versions — "Take Off," "Pants," and "Jacket" — each carrying its own pair of bonus tracks: one joke song and one genuinely serious one. Those serious bonus cuts, "Time to Break Up," "What Went Wrong," and "Don't Tell Me It's Over," arguably fit the album's more mature direction better than some of what made the main tracklist; "What Went Wrong" in particular is one of the only fully acoustic songs the band recorded in this era, a direction DeLonge would return to more fully on his Box Car Racer side project the following year.

What it did

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling more than 350,000 copies in its first week — still, as of this writing, the only time in the band's career they've opened at the top of the American chart. It went double platinum in the US and has sold an estimated 12–14 million copies worldwide. It was also the band's last release through MCA Records before the label was absorbed into Geffen. Shortly after release, the September 11 attacks paused the band's touring schedule, and the break gave DeLonge room to pursue the heavier, more experimental direction he'd been chasing throughout these sessions — work that became Box Car Racer's 2002 album, and fed directly into the far stranger self-titled record Blink-182 made the following year.

Reading Hoppus's own account of how the record actually got made, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket looks less like a confident victory lap after Enema of the State and more like exactly what he called it: “the permanent record of a band in transition.” Three people who'd been writing songs together since high school were, for the first time, no longer agreeing on what those songs should sound like — and the record survives as the sound of them arguing their way, however contentiously, toward the far more radical album that came next.

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