Subliminal Messages--and Too Few Real Answers

This 2-hour, 37-minute account of Sublime’s career combines the informational and performance elements of a standard music documentary with the silly, sentimental, just-hanging-out-among-ourselves feel of a family album.

In fact, “Stories, Tales, Lies &Exaggerations;” was directed and produced by members of Sublime’s extended family for Skunk Records, the label that arose as a loose confederation of buddies supporting the grass-roots Long Beach band that turned into a posthumous, multiple-platinum success.

Sublime ceased to exist with front man Brad Nowell’s death from a heroin overdose in May 1996. That was two months before the release of its third album, “Sublime,” which brought modern-rock radio omnipresence to a band that was no longer present. (Drummer Bud Gaugh and bassist Eric Wilson declared Sublime defunct immediately upon Nowell’s death.)

“Stories, Tales” fills an important need for the vast majority of Sublime fans who never got to see the band play: It includes performance footage of 18 numbers--some complete, most fragmentary, including several songs taken from a solo-acoustic set Nowell played in 1995 at the Firecracker Lounge, a weekly rock soiree that No Doubt guitarist Tom Dumont hosted at an Anaheim steakhouse during a lull before the release of that band’s “Tragic Kingdom.”

The live sound quality is adequate to good (about half the concert footage was donated by fans who had taped Sublime before stardom struck), and the performances are mainly passionate and kinetic. A couple of sequences from Sublime’s trek on the first Warped Tour in the summer of 1995 hint at the intoxicated wreck its shows were prone to become.

But “Stories, Tales” fails almost completely at what an outsider filming a documentary would have conceived as the main mission: to reveal who Bradley Nowell was, how he created his songs and what he thought about them, and what in his experience pushed him onto the path toward addiction and that final, unlucky dose.

Nowell himself was no help. The big void in all this sprawl is the almost complete lack of interview footage of Sublime’s star presence.

Although Sublime was getting national recognition as a contender for about a year before his death, Nowell apparently left no significant, in-depth interviews on tape; if he did, it was incumbent upon the makers of “Stories, Tales” to hunt them up, audio or video, and use them.

To some extent, Nowell’s self-revealing songwriting speaks for him--the video includes poignant footage of him singing, with full-on anguish, the plaintive addict’s lament, “Pool Shark”--but songs, by nature, distill feelings rather than explain them.

The video makers had access to those closest to Nowell--his bandmates, his wife, Troy, and his father--but nobody is pressed to attempt an explanation, to try to illuminate whatever it was that ate at him and led to that final shot.

Troy Nowell’s assessment--”He really loved life . . . [but] his brain liked drugs,” is left to stand alone as explication for a major talent’s tragic flaw.

Nor do his associates have much to say about Nowell’s creative process as a songwriter, or about the incidents that gave rise to songs. The most cogent segment on Sublime’s creative methods is band associate Marshall Goodman’s account of how he put together the backing track for the hit “Doin’ Time” from samples of records by Herbie Mann and Bill Withers.

“Stories, Tales” spends most of its time conveying the appealing sense of fellowship shared by Sublime and its extended family.

Life was a portable party of humor, intoxicants and pets--notably Nowell’s famous Dalmatian, Louie, who seems lucky to have escaped the pound, given a penchant for biting that’s hilariously explained by the Lordz of Brooklyn, a rap group that toured with Sublime.

If Nowell hadn’t died, Sublime might indeed today be viewed as it is in this documentary: an unpretentious good-time crew, primed for innocent, prankish rock ‘n’ roll hedonism, sometimes going overboard and screwing up, but without any aura of cruelty or decadence.

Obviously, “Stories, Tales” should have been about half as long as it is. The story unfolds exclusively through interviews and music footage; using a narrator as a bridge between segments could have tightened the piece and made it clearer, more informative.

Ron Jeremy, a gnome-like porn star who has become a mascot to rockers, is given a pointless say just because he got to introduce Sublime at some shows. A long postscript about the Skunk family’s ongoing musical activities is extraneous, although it yields a brilliant performance by Jamaican reggae star Barrington Levy, backed by Gaugh and Wilson’s new band, the Long Beach Dub All Stars.

Some of the best stuff comes from other musicians talking about Sublime, including Mike Watt, Tony Kanal and No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani, and “Sublime” producer Paul Leary and engineer Stuart Sullivan, who allude to (again, more detail is needed) the havoc that comes from trying to pull top performances out of a talented person who has become distracted by drugs.

“It’s not easy working with a junkie. You don’t know what you’re supposed to do,” Leary says. The same goes for anyone who slogs through this official Sublime documentary: After a long, meandering, frequently entertaining, but insufficiently informative and sometimes tedious and irrelevant journey, we still don’t know what to make of Brad Nowell.

ADDENDUM: For the record, director Josh Fischel videotaped an interview with me while collecting material for his documentary; I don’t appear in the finished product, so we know that, as sprawling as “Stories, Tales, Lies and Exaggerations” is, he made at least one judicious cut.

Ratings range from * (poor) to **** (excellent), with three stars denoting a solid recommendation.