Dick Lips

Album: Dude Ranch (1997)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is about a time when original blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge got kicked out of Poway High School during his junior year after being caught drunk at a school basketball game. DeLonge said, "Being kicked out of school was bad, but it was also the best thing in my life. Because none of us would be here today." DeLonge also said that "Blink-182 is one million percent around today because I got kicked out of school."
  • The title phrase doesn't appear in the lyrics and isn't really relevant to the song. The guys came up with the insult while recording the album at Big Fish Studios and attached it to the song for posterity's sake.
  • As the album's third single, this didn't find success on the charts, mainly because it was outshone by the popular lead single, "Dammit."
  • By the time blink-182 released Dude Ranch, their second studio album, they were already known for their irreverent humor (for example, the label had to convince them not to record a "Macarena" spoof titled "Hey, Wipe Your Anus"), so it's not surprising a song called "Dick Lips" showed up on the tracklist. But producer Mark Trombino was happy to learn the band took their studio time seriously.

    "They were the most business-centric band I'd ever seen at that point. They had their s--t together," he told MTV News in 2017. "They were funny, and I was laughing all the time, but they weren't like delinquent children."
  • Blink-182 played a few dates as a secondary act on the Vans Warped Tour in 1996, but they graduated to the main stage for the 1997 tour, which began a month after they released Dude Ranch and took them through North America alongside The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Pennywise, and Social Distortion. They also embarked on a European leg with Limp Bizkit and Dance Hall Crashers, among others. Their nonstop touring helped bolster album sales, which reached 1 million in the US by the end of the decade.

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