Thursday night, corner booth at Crossroads Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in West Hollywood, just before the dinner rush. Travis Barker shivers in a threadbare Subhumans T-shirt. He could conceivably ask the staff to turn down the AC a little—he’s an investor in this place, as it happens, not to mention, y’know, a rock star—but he doesn’t. “I think I’m, like, permanently cold, because I just spent the last four hours in my underwear,” he says. Then he laughs. Even in the context of Barker’s ever-more-improbable life, this day has been a weird one. He spent the afternoon standing around mostly naked while being measured, photographed, and scanned by representatives from Madame Tussauds, where he’s being honored with a wax figure in his likeness. When it’s suggested that he might be the first person from an American punk band to be thus enshrined—the museum has a Johnny Rotten but not, for example, a Joey Ramone—Barker says, “Very cool,” then asks if they’ve made one for Lemmy from Motörhead. (Answer: no.)
Strange day. Strange week. On Tuesday, Barker was at the Kia Forum, playing “Bad Reputation” and “Cherry Bomb” with the Foo Fighters and guest vocalist Joan Jett at a tribute to the late Foos drummer Taylor Hawkins, who died suddenly in March. The gig was an honor in more ways than one. Hawkins and Barker had been friends since the ’90s, when Barker was working for the city of Laguna Beach as a garbageman, living on his roommate’s couch, and playing drums at dive-bar gigs a few nights a week. Hawkins, who lived in Laguna and would soon join Alanis Morissette’s band (he’d meet Dave Grohl while touring with her), was a regular at those shows—and even back then, he could tell Barker had the goods. “He would come up to me and be like, ‘Kid, I swear to God, I come every week just to watch you play. You’re a fucking star.’ And I’m like, ‘No I’m not.’ He would come every week we played.”
Barker remembers his apprenticeship in Laguna’s dive bars as one of the happiest periods of his life—second only, he says, to the birth of his children, and right now. He had a place to live and enough money to pay for food and drumsticks; he went skateboarding and played music every day. Back then he would have felt guilty, he says, imagining anything more—like, say, joining an epoch-defining band that would go on to sell tens of millions of albums, for example, or producing and collaborating with scores of big-name artists from across the genre spectrum, or running his own record label, or marrying joyfully into what happens to be one of the most famous families on the planet, or putting his clout behind a clothing label, restaurants, or an organic vegan CBD-gummy-and-tincture line. And yet all of this and more has come to pass. One day you’re a drummer-slash-trash-collector and the next you’re drinking wine with Iggy Pop, and when things like this happen to him, sometimes Barker wonders if he’s dreaming, but that’s the point—his dreams were never like this.
Which is not to say it’s been easy. In 2008, Barker was horribly burned in a private-jet crash that claimed the lives of his longtime assistant Chris Baker and his security guard Che Still, both close friends. Barker spent three months in the hospital, endured 26 surgeries, endless skin grafts, and a period of suicidal depression; he later told interviewers he’d offered friends a million dollars if they’d help him end his life. The only other survivor of the crash was Barker’s best friend and musical collaborator, Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein; about a year after the accident, Goldstein died of a drug overdose in New York. Barker struggled with survivor’s guilt and PTSD. At times, he says, “I didn’t know if I’d ever play music again. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to go outside again.”
Barker has never cared for the truism that everything happens for a reason — “I’ll never think that about the people I lost,” he says—but he acknowledges that the crash saved him from a more tragic and common rock-and-roll ending. As documented in his 2015 memoir, Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, the Barker who got on that plane was a textbook train wreck, drowning his consciousness in weed and pills and Coupe deVilles as his marriage (to former Miss USA Shanna Moakler) fell apart. “I was going down a really fast-paced, dangerous path,” he says. Surviving the crash gave him a second chance he’s determined to live up to.
“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t make the most of it,” he says. “That I don’t appreciate it, and that I’m not grateful for it.”
Two weeks after Barker’s date with wax-dummy history, Blink-182 will announce a new album and a 2023 world tour—both of which will feature Blink cofounder and guitarist Tom DeLonge, who hasn’t played with the band since 2015.
When we talk about Blink in late September, Barker doesn’t tell me this is happening. At that point DeLonge’s return to the fold is still a secret. But the external, pop-cultural reasons why a classic-Blink reunion tour makes sense right now are anything but. When Blink were at their commercial peak in the early 2000s, critics wrote them off as juvenile and derivative—a dine-and-dash Descendents, a boy band for kids who wore fake lip rings to school-picture day. But legacy is hard to predict in real time. In the 20-plus years since Blink streaked through the streets of LA and into the hearts of impressionable Total Request Live voters in the video for “What’s My Age Again?,” they’ve become maybe the most broadly influential rock band of their era.
“They crossed over on such a large scale, and I think that was important for punk rock culture,” says Avril Lavigne, whose 2022 comeback album, Love Sux, coproduced by Barker, is her first release on Barker’s label, DTA Records. “They made it more mainstream, but that’s also what got the CD into my hands, and how more people could discover that type of music.”
Blink split up for the first time after releasing their self-titled fifth album in 2003, but their success had carved out space for bands like Paramore, Fall Out Boy, and My Chemical Romance to cross the streams of pop and punk in front of mainstream audiences as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s. More recently—and more surprisingly, and maybe more importantly— they’ve become a touchstone for TikTok bedroom-pop producers and zoomer SoundCloud rappers who learned to play power chords during quarantine.
The future of punk, and maybe pop music in general, is genre agnostic, heavily medicated, and extremely online, born out of fast-imploding distinctions—between influencer and rock star, hip-hop and guitar rock, white music and Black music, therapeutic sincerity and ironic trauma bragging. While Blink’s early-2000s detractors wouldn’t and probably couldn’t have thunk it, a generation of young musicians who’ve never known a world without forever war, financial crisis, environmental calamity, and social media have reached back to the sounds of the past for an emotional vocabulary by which to vent their pain—and what they’ve pulled off the shelf is Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, not Kid A.
Part of the reason all those post-everything, unclassifiable internet-bred emo artists sound so much like Blink is that they’ve probably got Barker himself behind the boards—and, often, the drums. Blink-182 proved that punk could go pop; what Barker’s doing now is helping artists born in the genreless reaches of the internet go punk, in order to go pop. In 2019, Barker coproduced and played on the single “I Think I’m OKAY” with Machine Gun Kelly, a white battle rapper from Cleveland who was then best known for beefing with Eminem and who had never released a rock song before. Barker thinks this is why it was a hit on the radio: “A rock band would probably be ignored if they did that song,” he says. “But it was different, because it was Kells kind of coming like you’d never heard him before.”
Afterward, Barker remembers, “Kells was like, ‘I can’t help but think—did we just get lucky with that one song, or can we make more fucking songs like that?’ ”
The result was Tickets to My Downfall, which was both Kelly’s first full-blown pop-punk album—“I said, ‘We’re not gonna rap on this album,’ ” Barker recalls—and his first platinum record. “And when that did well,” Barker says, “doors were kicked down, and after that you saw the resurgence of that genre doing really well.”
A cynic would call this music cynical, and you could certainly accuse Barker of aiding and abetting shameless/clueless opportunists looking to suck up to modern-rock radio programmers by draping themselves in borrowed rock clichés. On the other hand, anyone still policing who is and isn’t entitled to dress and sing punk (or self-identify as emo) is guarding a gate that’s been broken since the day Malcolm McLaren first pimped out the Sex Pistols. Kelly might be fronting, but—if you look at it from a galaxy-brain enough level—so is every punk-identified person who wasn’t there the first time the Ramones played CBGB.
“Everyone thinks that someone else is a poseur, but pretty much everyone on earth is a poseur,” reasons music journalist Josiah Hughes, the cohost of the admirably exhaustive Blink-182 podcast 155. As understood and practiced by artists like Kelly, punk or emo might be an abstract pseudo-genre—born of nostalgia, commercial expediency, and the same streaming-age, historical context collapse that fuels alt-throwback DJ parties like LA’s long-running Emo Nite, where the definition of emo includes everything from post-hardcore to Linkin Park to Post Malone. But the imprimatur of an artist like Barker connects it to something resembling a tradition.
“I think that’s why people turn to Travis,” Hughes says. “It’s a vibe. It’s a feeling—this melding and crunching together of different punk-related subgenres. He’s like the king of punk-adjacent.”
Barker sits in the booth at Crossroads for just under two hours, consuming only one small coffee. His phone sits faceup on the banquette beside him the entire time, lighting up more or less continuously with text messages and alerts. The one time it actually rings, he answers.
“Hey, baby,” he says. “Hey. I’m gonna call you. I’m gonna call you— yeah. As soon as my interview’s done. I love you. Mwah.”
He hangs up and doesn’t explain who was calling; he doesn’t have to, and presumably I don’t have to tell you either.
Barker met his first Kardashian in the early 2000s, when he briefly dated Paris Hilton. Kourtney’s sister Kim—perhaps you’ve heard of her—was Paris’s assistant. Travis and Kourtney were platonic friends for years; in a 2017 holiday episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, he and his kids drop by to visit their Calabasas neighbors and Travis frosts an anarchy symbol onto the side of a gingerbread house.
The first rumors of them being more than friends made the rounds when they were seen leaving Crossroads Kitchen together in 2018; they went public as a couple last year, and—after a few months of intense and thoroughly documented PDA—got engaged in October 2021.
The proposal itself was filmed for the Kardashians’ new Hulu show, at what Barker says was Kris Jenner’s request. Barker says he agreed on one condition: “I can’t see one camera, and Kourtney cannot see one camera.” (Barker popped the question on a beach in Santa Barbara, in a heart-shaped rose garden that had been placed there for the occasion; the footage that aired on the show was captured via GoPros hidden in the foliage.)
A few months later, House Barker and House Kardashian gathered at Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce’s villa in Portofino, Italy, for a gala wedding ceremony that was technically private, although anyone interested could follow the action on social media, where the Kardashians act as their own panopticon. (Barker and Kardashian had already tied the knot by then, a few weeks earlier at a courthouse in Santa Monica, in front of Travis’s father and Kourtney’s grandmother, who are both too old to fly.)
It’s worth noting that Barker has already been a reality-TV husband once before—on MTV’s Meet the Barkers, which attempted to turn Barker and his then wife Moakler into a punk rock version of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey (who didn’t stay married either.) It ran for two seasons, and according to Barker, the level of disclosure it demanded makes his current part-time reality-TV gig feel like a walk in the park.
“There were cameras placed throughout my house. There were people living at my house,” he says. “It was insane, y’know. And it wasn’t really for me, at that level—it was too much.”
These days, he says, “the only time I really film with Kourt is when she asks me to, and I’m only around for some of it. She’ll be like, ‘Hey, by the way, we’re filming today,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, cool”—it doesn’t change how I act or what I dress like, you know what I mean?”
There’s a scene in a recent episode where Travis accompanies Kourtney to the doctor for an egg-retrieval procedure. When Travis is called upon to provide a semen sample, Kourtney asks the doctor how much, y’know, assistance she’s allowed to offer.
When this interviewer suggests that some people might not feel comfortable sharing events this intimate with every Hulu subscriber on earth, Barker cheerfully replies, “I don’t give a fuck.”
“I don’t care if I’m cumming in a cup, or whatever,” he says. “It’s real life. And if any of that can help people—seeing Kourtney’s journey through IVF, which is super hard for a woman. You saw her struggle with it and talk about it. That’s real. And there’s however many millions of dudes that have to go give their semen for this same procedure. So it’s, like, relatable, you know? I’ve never been fazed by any of that.”
Travis Barker does not know what happens after we die. He hopes it’s something cool—like, a situation where you still get to hang around with your living loved ones, invisibly, while simultaneously somehow being reunited in heaven with those who’ve pre-deceased you. “I think you could be present, but not be hurt,” Barker says. This, he thinks, would be a cool way to exist.
He believes this is possible, because he still feels the presence of all the people he’s lost. His mother, who died when he was 13. Chris and Che, who died on that plane. AM. He knows they’re in some beautiful place but also here with him. He knows Taylor Hawkins was watching him at that tribute show, so he tried to play harder and louder and wilder than everyone else, because he wanted Hawkins to see him and say, He honored me correctly. He went hard.
Barker went to Catholic school for a few years. His parents were “never, like, super strict” about religion, but they went to church on Sundays.
These days he and Kourtney go to church together sometimes. People rarely count the Kardashians among the world’s highest-profile Christian entertainers, which is strange—not just because of the family’s connection to equally high-profile Christian Kanye West, but because they’ve made their faith as public as any other aspect of their lives; the words Lover of Christ come after Momager in Kris Jenner’s Twitter bio. Maybe this isn’t a surprising thing to learn about a guy who’s had a pair of praying hands inked on the side of his head since he was 19, but Barker says he’s “really close with a couple pastors,” and adds, “Yeah, I’m like, Christian now,” as if this is something he’s just realizing, talking about it. He says he and Kourtney pray every night, sometimes first thing in the morning, and before every flight.
This is a new thing too. Barker has spent years managing the trauma of the crash using every tool at his disposal—therapy, running, boxing, breath work, CBD, and probably more than a little bit of benign workaholism, plus new tattoos of his parents and children to cover the burn scars on his back—but as of last year he hadn’t set foot on a plane since 2008. For years just seeing a plane would freak him out; the smell of jet fuel reminded him of his time in the burn unit. When he had tour dates overseas, he took a boat; when Blink played Australia in 2013, they took the drummer from Bad Religion.
At that point, he was divorced from Moakler and he had survived the crash and to get past all of it, he says, he told himself a story, about what he didn’t need: “Like, I’m good being single, I don’t wanna love anyone, I’m gonna spend every day at the studio.” He told himself he wouldn’t fall in love and he’d never fly again, which was a way of
telling himself he’d never get over what had happened, and gradually—he sees this now—his life got small, stuck, fixed.
And then he fell in love with Kourtney, and he would sit and listen to her talk about everywhere she’d been and everywhere she was about to go, all of it made possible by planes and planes and planes. “She’s been everywhere beautiful in the world,” Barker says, “that I’ve never even heard of.” Finally, Barker says, “I was like, ‘If you ever want me to fly with you, just tell me 8 to 10 hours before.’ ”
And one night she told him. That night Barker told her she could probably go home instead of sleeping at his place, which wasn’t what they normally did.
“Because I was trying to get out of it,” he says. But Kourtney said she wouldn’t leave. “She’s like, ‘I’m gonna spend the night with you. I’m staying the night with you and we’re gonna go to the airport.’ She just knew, and she stuck by me and toughed it out. And it was the best flight. And I wasn’t scared once.”
That flight was to Cabo San Lucas. He flies all the time now. He can’t wait to go to back to Australia. To Japan. And he can’t wait to travel just to travel, not to play a show. Anytime he’s gone anywhere outside the US, it’s almost always been a tour date. “I’m like, ‘I get to go and just, like, have fun?’ I didn’t know that existed.”
He’s learning how to be comfortable; it’s a process. At the Hawkins tribute show this week, “they had this lavish room we could hang out in,” he says. Barker asked if he could chill in the hallway between sets instead, practicing drums on a stack of road cases until it was time for him to go on. The organizers, he remembers, “were like, ‘Yeah, whatever, Travis.’ I’m back there going, ‘I want to be uncomfortable!’ ”
He knows how silly it sounds: Travis Barker, indisputable rock star, budding music-business kingmaker, a famous man with an even-more-famous wife, politely asking if he can be bumped down to shittier accommodations. But that’s what it’s like to be him—at least right now.
“When everything’s perfect, it scares me,” he says. “I want some adversity during a show. I want it to rain and the show almost gets canceled. I don’t want to be too comfortable. I mean, my drum tech used to clean my cymbals, and I’m like, ‘Daniel—I like the blood on my cymbals. It makes me feel good.’ He’s a perfectionist. I’m like, ‘Just leave a little bit of blood on the cymbals.’ It just makes it feel like home for me, you know?”
Alex Pappademas is a writer based in Los Angeles.
A version of this story originially appeared in the December/January 2022 issue of GQ with the title “The Hardest Working Drummer in Hollywood”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Donna Trope
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Fabiola using Barker Wellness Products
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Produced by Aaron Zumback at Camp Production