Songfacts®:

• Blink-182's debut single is a skate-punk love song that finds vocalist Mark Hoppus sexually frustrated and yearning for his girlfriend. It's famous for the lyric about his unsatisfactory love affair with his own hand:
  
  My love life was getting so bland
  There are only so many ways I can make love with my hand
• Hoppus and his bandmates, co-lead vocalist/guitarist Tom DeLonge and drummer Scott Raynor, came up with the tune during rehearsal in DeLonge's garage in the summer of 1994 while they were preparing to record their debut album. They recorded it at Westbeach Recorders, a famous studio in Los Angeles that played host to punk acts like Rancid, The Offspring, and Bad Religion.
  
  At the time, the skate-punk trio was signed to Cargo Music, a San Diego-based punk label that was also home to the local punk-rock band Fluf. That group's lead singer, Otis Barthoulameu, glimpsed the band's potential and urged the label to add them to the roster (he also stepped in as their producer, along with Canadian producer/engineer Steve Kravac). Cargo's owner, Eric Goodis, wasn't convinced. He agreed to sign the band on a trial basis, but created the imprint Grilled Cheese to distance them from the main label. Tom DeLonge, Blink's guitarist/co-lead vocalist, told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2017:
  
  "The guy who owned Cargo seriously made a bet that we would only sell 3000 records, total, ever. He didn't like us, but his son did. So they made a bet. And, fortunately, we beat it. We sold 3012 records!"
  
  Actually, Cheshire Cat sold 250,000 copies... in six years, but it still counts. The album also generated enough of a buzz to catch the attention of major labels, including MCA, who signed the band in time for their follow-up, Dude Ranch.
• Barthoulameu turned to his friend Mike Halloran, a radio DJ with San Diego's 91X, to help select the album's lead single and help a little pop-punk trio from California to stand out against alt-rock behemoths like Nirvana and Soundgarden. Halloran was already a big fan of Blink and tapped "M+M's" for their debut. It quickly became the #1 most-requested tune at the station and helped expand their fanbase in San Diego.
• DeLonge was so stoked when he first heard this on his car radio that he rolled down his window and screamed at fellow drivers to "turn their damn radios on." He recalled in the book Tales From Beneath Your Mom by Anne Hoppus: "I even yelled at people on bikes. Silly me, they usually don't have radios. But I didn't care, 'cause damn them, I had a song on the radio!"
• The band filmed a music video that culminates with them squaring off against their girlfriends in a gun battle. MTV executives were turned off by the violence and refused to air the clip. It's safe to say they wouldn't have been a fan of DeLonge's original concept.
  
  "I wanted the 'M+M's' video to be 50 guys lined up, and have us shooting at their nuts," he explained in Tales From Beneath Your Mom. "Just a whole video of slo-mo close-ups of these guys' nuts exploding."
  
  Directed by Darren Doane and Ken Daurio, the video was shot at Belmont Park, a historic amusement park in Mission Bay, and SOMA, the punk concert venue in San Diego where Blink regularly took the stage. Doane and Daurio also went on to helm the videos for "Josie" and "Dammit."
• The album, which features a bright-eyed Siamese cat on the cover, was named after the fictional feline with the mischievous grin from Lewis Carroll's classic 1865 novel, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. DeLonge was working his day job hauling bags of concrete when he encountered a door-to-door salesman selling cat-themed calendars. When the singer took one home to show his bandmates, Hoppus thought one particular kitty with blue eyes looked like the Cheshire Cat. Unfortunately, the calendar company refused to let them use the image, but the band got around it by having it doctored just enough to avoid copyright infringement.