When Blink-182 Was My Neighbor

25 years ago, the band brought a wrecking ball to the house next to mine for a music video. Then history happened.

It was late summer in Southern California, and Blink-182 was staring down a bottomless budget for their next music video. Their album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket had debuted at No. 1 on “The Billboard 200,” a first for a punk-rock album. Three months later, the band was looking to promote “Stay Together for the Kids,” the moody climax of the record written by Tom DeLonge about his parents’ divorce. MCA Records had hired “Smells Like Teen Spirit” director Samuel Bayer to helm the shoot, and it didn’t take long for someone to decide that the video concept would require blowing up an entire home (an apt metaphor for the subject matter of DeLonge’s song). For the location, they scoured Orange County, California, the ideal place to find a residential remodeling job that necessitated demolition. It just so happened that the perfect house to knock down — with a wrecking ball, of course — was right next to mine.

My neighborhood was known to trick-or-treaters as the worst in the city for its manufactured hills and abundance of doctors who didn’t give out candy. Earthquake-cracked mid-century-modern ranch homes and steep driveways lined the streets, and residents took deep pride in having non-native pine trees in their front yards. The house in question had new owners who had planned for a full tear-down remodel. My parents heard a rumor that they knew the band’s publicist. Or maybe their contractor knew the publicist. Either way, the owners agreed to let Blink-182 film during their demolition. I’d love to tell you that I lived in one of those small flyover towns where nothing as glamorous as this could possibly happen, but this was Fullerton, a stone’s throw from Hollywood — two throws with traffic. I once saw Stacey Dash at a Golden Spoon. My friend got to miss school because he had a recurring role on Malcolm in the Middle. Someone on my soccer team was a body double for Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap.

On one of the last days of summer break before my freshman year, I watched from the backyard pool as adults in black jeans and wallet chains scaled up and down driveways to talk to neighbors about street closures scheduled for one week later. Setup would begin Sunday, and the shoot would run from Monday to Tuesday. The wrecking ball would be turned on at 5 p.m. on Tuesday evening with an aimed strike at 5:15 p.m. When setup day arrived, trailers and craft-services tables were erected in the street. Cranes and camera rigs appeared. Crew members with a seemingly unending supply of keys transported various cords and cables. My brother, a newly licensed driver, treated his resident-parking pass like an identification badge and drove around like he was an assistant on a back lot. He used the family printer to make a stack of photocopies of the pass and attached them to lanyards. Some he gave to friends, and some he sold to neighborhood kids for a profit, a fitting instinct from a teen who would become a producer on the first season of Shark Tank eight years later.

After the first day of school on Monday, my brother filled his car with his friends and rushed us home. We wandered the block with the rest of the neighborhood kids, wearing our counterfeit passes and skirting around production vans and studio umbrellas. A group of younger girls I didn’t recognize strutted down the street in UGGs and denim skirts and sat on a lawn in front of Travis Barker’s trailer. He emerged with a folding stool and played guitar for them while his bodyguard, a large man wearing Ecko, asked the girls to keep their distance from the artist, please. Barker was covered in blue-and-black tattoos like I’d seen in his shirtless portrait published in Bop earlier that year, but his signature halo of spiked hair was soft, limp, and hanging to one side.

The extras arrived. Twenty or so adults dressed in spiked collars, giant belts, and gauged ears clomped up and down the block with confidence, freely visited craft services, and even had someone to shine their combat boots. My carefully chosen outfit — a black dress with shoulder pads and a hem that fell at synagogue-appropriate calf length — did not have the same effect. When I hovered near Barker and tried to play it cool, his bodyguard walked over and handed me a sheet of paper with Barker’s autograph. When I looked down at Barker’s scrawl, I felt overwhelmingly stupid and out of place. I would be consigned to fawning-fan status if I didn’t take more drastic measures. To redeem myself, I had no choice but to commit an act of punk rock. I climbed through a hole in the fence and snuck into the neighbor’s backyard to get on set. 

The back side of the house had been sawed off so that it looked like a dollhouse. The two-story tract home had been stripped down to slats and beams. I heard an adult explain the concept to someone sitting on a machine that was covered in all those cords and cables: “The kids come in, the house falls apart, and we knock it down. That’s divorce.” It was easy to imagine DeLonge’s angsty lyrics (“Then why is there so much pain?”) against a background of piled Sheetrock. Crew members were painting PG-rated graffiti on the walls of the drained pool and throwing bricks at the house to rough it up. I was so mesmerized by a smoke machine that I almost missed the wrecking ball. It was perfectly round, terrifying, and held by a chain like the one I was using as a choker, but dustier. 

I walked over to a large group of extras waiting around by the empty pool, where I discovered that my brother, who was carrying an empty clipboard so he’d look like a crew member, had snuck on set too. We made conversation with the extras like it was totally normal to be there. Soon, the producers approached and chose a few extras to join the band inside the house while the rest were sent back to the street. I was part of the latter group, once again forced to be on the other side of the fence. Some parents from the adjoining homes set up ladders for us to stand on and peer over. It seemed like everyone I knew, along with all of those people we brought home from school, was there. 

A man yelled “Action!” and the song blared from speakers. As the song played, the extras pushed each other and slammed into furniture while pieces of plaster and debris showered down in front of them like a curtain. Prop dust and smoke spewed from machines, skateboarders dove into the empty pool on their boards, the earth seemed to shake, and I silently considered using my earring as a lip piercing. I had not seen Mark Hoppus or DeLonge in the flesh until that moment, and their commitment to headbanging did not disappoint. Between takes, we watched as they practiced their instruments and sipped water out of straws to stay hydrated in the late-summer heat. We lip-synced along with them. But because a film shoot is kind of boring, most of us abandoned the ladders after an hour, leaving my brother to watch the rest of the filming alone. He stayed until the sun went down. 

Early the next morning, I was in the kitchen eating cereal alone in the dark and painting one fingernail black just to try it out. It was the second day of school, and my brother and I planned to be back on the ladders to watch the wrecking ball shred at 5:15 p.m. I heard rustling. My dad ran in wearing only his underwear and turned on the TV. He held his hand to his mouth as soon as the screen switched on. Together, we watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center. 

My family was bewildered and didn’t know what to do. My brother and I wanted to stay home, but something about spending the day by a giant wrecking ball outside our door seemed worse than going to school. We pulled out of our driveway soon afterward, and the buzzy hum of the previous day had vanished. The street, still full of equipment and plastic water bottles, felt quiet and ghostly. Barker’s trailer door was wide open. “This is too weird,” my brother said as he drove past it. We looked around for a producer, a rogue teen — anyone. The only people we saw were two men carting a TV set through the front door of the house. 

What happened next — footage of a stunned DeLonge, Hoppus, and Barker on set watching President Bush’s address after the attacks— aired later that week on MTV News. “When you’re a kid, you think that a lot of things don’t affect you that happen in different places. You don’t understand how massive things really are,” DeLonge said during the segment. “It makes me want to throw up.” When my brother and I returned home from school, no neighborhood kids were wandering around anymore. I didn’t even think to peek over the fence. It didn’t take a genius — or an adult — to know it was in poor taste to be knocking down a building for television.

According to Hoppus’s 2025 memoir, the label tried to edit the video to appear a bit less destructive, but when reps flew to New York to show it to MTV, the network’s response was: “There are fire stations in this town who lost every first responder and you’re showing us this? Absolutely not.” The video was completely reshot at a different location with the wrecking ball concept scrapped in favor of a less-explicit demolition device: an expensive camera-rattle effect that had been used in Saving Private Ryan. The new video made its Total Request Live premiere in November. I remember watching it soon after and searching for signs of my neighborhood. There were none.

Weeks passed, schoolwork and play rehearsals ramped up, and the music-video shoot faded into distant memory. Only recently, 25 years later, did it jolt back into my brain, so I searched for it on Blink-182’s YouTube channel. To my surprise, the “Stay Together for the Kids” music video there is the Fullerton version, not the reshoot that aired on TRL. There’s no explanation why. All this time, I thought the video was something that only the neighborhood kids and I had experienced, a memory just for us. But here it was, available since 2009 and with almost 120 million views. Watching it for the first time felt surreal. The extras are there. The skateboarders in the pool are there. And the wrecking ball — even though it never fully knocks anything down — is still there, too.

I tried to ask Blink-182 why they released the original video, but I never received a response. Maybe they just liked the Fullerton footage better, and sometime 17 years ago, they realized the video’s association with a terrorist attack had long faded. For the band, it’s probably little more than a relic from the peak of their popularity, when record labels let Cali skater boys run amok in suburbia. For me, it’s a wild piece of my own personal history I never thought I’d see again.