Background and career
Mark Allan Hoppus (born March 15, 1972) is an American musician, songwriter and record producer. He is the co-lead vocalist, co-founder, and bassist for the rock band Blink-182 and the only constant member. Hoppus became interested in skateboarding and punk rock in junior high, and received a bass guitar from his father at the age of 15. After he moved to San Diego in 1992 to attend California State University San Marcos, his sister introduced him to Tom DeLonge, and they formed the band Blink-182 with drummer Scott Raynor. The band produced several rock recordings and toured exhaustively before signing to major label MCA to co-distribute their sophomore effort, 1997's Dude Ranch, which featured the Hoppus-penned hit "Dammit". After replacing Raynor with Travis Barker, Blink-182 recorded Enema of the State (1999), which launched them to multi-platinum success. Two more records followed—the heavier Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001) and the more experimental untitled fifth album (2003)—before the band split in 2005 following internal tension. Hoppus continued playing with Barker in +44 in the late 2000s. Blink-182 subsequently reunited in 2009 and continue to record and tour worldwide. Aside from his musical career, Hoppus has had multiple successes behind the recording console, producing records for groups such as Idiot Pilot, New Found Glory, The Matches, Motion City Soundtrack, and PAWS. He has previously co-owned two companies, Atticus and Macbeth Footwear, and created a new clothing line in 2012 named Hi My Name is Mark. Hoppus hosted a weekly podcast in 2005 through 2006, which returned in 2015, and he hosted his own television talk show, Hoppus on Music, from 2010 to 2012 on Fuse. He also was part of the pop rock duo Simple Creatures from 2019 until 2020.
Mark Allan Hoppus was born on March 15, 1972, in Ridgecrest, California. He was raised near Washington, D.C., before his family settled in Ridgecrest, a place he later described as "geniuses, scientists, physicists, and then just complete strung-out meth-heads". His maternal great-grandparents, Aaron and Lempi Orrenmaa, were Finnish immigrants from Laihia. His father Tex, like many in Ridgecrest, worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, designing missiles and bombs for the town's Navy testing center. Hoppus describes himself as "pretty mellow" until his parents divorced when he was eight, which had a "drastic, unsettling effect" on him. He said, "When my parents argued, it was always behind closed doors. I remember sitting outside my parents' room when I was seven years old, hearing the dulled voice of anger behind the door. It upset me a lot." Following these events, he spent two years shuffling between his parents' homes with sister Anne, until he and his father moved to Monterey. His father was often away earning a postgraduate degree in college. He later would describe his childhood as lonely, remarking, "[I] was living by myself in the fifth grade." His father introduced him to the music of the Beatles, Elton John and Billy Joel. Hoppus describes himself as "pretty straight" until junior high, when he began skateboarding and listening to punk rock. In his early high school years, he lived in Fairfax, Virginia, attending nearby Annandale High School during his second year; he received his first bass guitar during this time and attended his first concert, They Might Be Giants, at the 9:30 Club shortly before his 16th birthday. He recalled, "I didn't know where I should stand or what I should do, so my friends and I bought some menthol cigarettes and smoked for the first time and tried to look as cool as we could. We probably looked like idiots." He received his first bass (a Mako) as a gift from his father, purchased at a local music shop in Annandale. He earned money for a set of amplifiers by helping him paint his house. Hoppus never took bass lessons, instead teaching himself by playing to bands such as the Descendents, the Cure, and Bad Religion. He has remarked that "Silly Girl" by the Descendents was the "song that made [him] fall in love with punk rock music [...] that song changed [his] life forever". He borrowed a cassette tape of the Cure's album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me from his friend Wendy Franklin the summer following junior high school, and was taken with the song "Just Like Heaven".
Hoppus began to dress like Cure frontman Robert Smith, donning eyeliner and "occasionally bright red lipstick" to his high school classes; he later quipped, "This all went over exceedingly well with the faculty and staff in the small desert town where I grew up." Beginning in his first year, he gained solace through music of both the Cure and the Smiths. He played by himself and sang in the band Pier 69, primarily covering songs by the Cure, and recorded a live demo with a group named The Attic Children in 1988, featuring covers of the Cure songs. Hoppus returned to Ridgecrest in 1989, completing high school at Burroughs High School. In his teen years, a friend stole his mother's car in the middle of the night to pick him up; the two would sneak out to the desert and burn trees and any objects they could find. After graduating from Burroughs High School in 1990, he began playing in a band called of All Things he formed with two friends, covering songs by Descendents, Social Distortion, and Bad Religion, as well as writing original punk numbers. The group primarily performed at friend's parties and bonfires, and once played Oasis, the local music venue. Hoppus left Ridgecrest in summer 1992 to attend college and get a job at a local music store in San Diego. He continued playing gigs with of All Things, returning on weekends. Eventually, his manager became suspicious of his weekend activities, as Hoppus had told him he worked with mentally disabled children in Ridgecrest, and refused to give him any time off on weekends. His "short-lived attempt" at college, studying at California State University, San Marcos, revolved around plans to become an English teacher. He recalls he "hated" college and his reasoning behind becoming a teacher involved sights set for educational reform. He dropped out in the early 1990s after "things began to take off with Blink-182" and lived with his mother for many of the early years of the band. Hoppus describes his mother as always supportive in his decisions to drop out of college and tour with Blink-182; however, he describes his father as "more realistic, [...] he said, 'Have something to fall back on.'" "I'm really fortunate that my mom always completely supported me, even to the point that I dropped out of college and lived at her house for five years before our band started to catch on," said Hoppus.
After moving to San Diego in the summer of 1992, Hoppus was reunited with his sister Anne Hoppus, to whom he expressed his desire to be in a band. Anne attended Rancho Bernardo High School, and had become friends with new student Tom DeLonge over the summer. In August 1992, Anne introduced the two, and Hoppus and DeLonge immediately began performing music in DeLonge's garage. To impress DeLonge, Hoppus climbed to the top of a streetlight outside of DeLonge's home – however, he broke both ankles on the way down, resulting in being on crutches for the next few weeks. DeLonge recalled the meeting in 2000: "When I first met Mark, we were running around naked, doing weird stuff. We were up skateboarding until late hours of the morning, antagonizing security guards, and we were just always having fun." DeLonge recruited old friend Scott Raynor from his days at Poway to become the drummer for the new band, named blink. Hoppus and his girlfriend at this time lived in a basement apartment, barely scraping together funds to pay rent. With money in savings, Hoppus went out and bought his first professional equipment: a new amp and bass cabinet. He came home and his girlfriend proceeded to argue with him, angry that he spent money on something they did not need. "I just kept telling her that this was what mattered to me, this was my life," Hoppus recalled. She demanded he make a choice between the band and her, which resulted in Hoppus leaving the band shortly after formation. Shortly thereafter, DeLonge told Hoppus he had borrowed a four track recorder from a friend and was preparing to record a demo tape, which prompted Hoppus to break up with his girlfriend and return to the band. Flyswatter—a combination of original songs and punk covers—was recorded in Raynor's bedroom and landed the band their first shows. Three more demos were recorded over the course of 1993 and the band began performing its irreverent live show at local all-ages venue SOMA, which alerted local independent label Cargo Music. Cargo signed the band on a trial basis, and Hoppus was the only member to sign the contract, as DeLonge was at work at the time and Raynor was still a minor. During this time, Hoppus lived at home in San Diego at his mother's, where the band would prepare cassette demos and the entire family would fold cassette inserts. Raynor, whose parents moved to Reno, Nevada, stayed with Hoppus in summer 1994. Blink's first album, Cheshire Cat (1995), was a strong seller for the independent band and would come to be regarded as iconic within the skate punk scene. In 1995, the band signed on for their first national tour, which extended as far as the East Coast. The band purchased their own tour van and embarked on the GoodTimes tour with Unwritten Law, Sprung Monkey and 7 Seconds. The band slowly built a young, devoted following with indie recordings and an endless series of performances and various clubs and festivals. MCA Records signed the band in 1996 and would co-distribute their next release, the sophomore effort Dude Ranch. Hoppus penned the record's lead single, "Dammit", which became a nationwide rock radio hit single as the band toured on the Vans Warped Tour.
Hoppus grew increasingly lonely on these tours, having no significant other while other band members did. The exhaustive schedule created tensions within the band, who would fire Raynor in the summer of 1998 in mysterious circumstances never fully explained. With new drummer Travis Barker behind the kit, the trio hit the studio with producer Jerry Finn and recorded Enema of the State, which launched the band's career, catapulting them into the "stratosphere of pop music" and solidifying them as the biggest pop punk act of the era. Three singles were released from the record—"What's My Age Again?", "All the Small Things", and "Adam's Song"—that crossed over into Top 40 radio format and experienced major commercial success. Hoppus got married in 2000 (see Personal life) just before the band prepared to record their highly anticipated follow-up, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2001). Hoppus felt complacent creatively but DeLonge felt otherwise, creating post-hardcore side project Box Car Racer to experiment with ideas he deemed unsuitable for blink. Hoppus felt betrayed (Barker was also in Box Car Racer) and a rift developed between Hoppus and DeLonge that would carry on into the band's future. When the band regrouped to record their next record in 2003, all of the members had become fathers (or, in the case of Barker, becoming one) and the trio took a darker, more "mature" direction with their untitled fifth studio album, infusing experimentalist elements into their usual pop punk sound partially inspired by Box Car Racer. Unresolved feelings from that project would arise in late 2004 when the band began to argue regarding their future and recording process. The February 2005 breakup of blink-182 affected Hoppus greatly: "I had no idea what to do. After blink broke up I had such a loss of identity and purpose. I just had a giant sense of void." Hoppus then began to work on even darker, electronic demos with Barker in his kitchen. He also turned to producing, hitting the studio with Motion City Soundtrack to record Commit This to Memory (2005). In October 2005, Hoppus and Barker purchased a studio together (named Opra Music), where they would bring together a full band to expand upon those electronic demos, creating +44's When Your Heart Stops Beating (2006).
The record, by all accounts, sold poorly and received mixed reviews in the music press. Hoppus and Barker continued touring on the Honda Civic Tour and commenced work on a second +44 album. The August 2008 death of friend and producer Jerry Finn deeply affected Hoppus, who referred to Finn as a lifelong friend and mentor. The following month, Barker and collaborator Adam Goldstein (aka DJ AM), were involved in a plane crash that killed four people, leaving Barker and Goldstein the only survivors. Hoppus immediately boarded a plane to the burn unit, and DeLonge reconnected with the duo under the tragic circumstances. When the band regrouped in the studio for a day, past acrimony vanished with near immediacy. Regarding these experiences, Hoppus wrote, "The events of the past two months supersede everything that happened before. Life is too short." In February 2009, the band's official website was updated with a statement: "To put it simply, We're back. We mean, really back. Picking up where we left off and then some. In the studio writing and recording a new album. Preparing to tour the world yet again. Friendships reformed. 17 years deep in our legacy."
