Innings Festival Tempe 2026: Hitting All The Late Gen-Xer Feels With Sublime

Innings Festival Tempe 2026 took place February 20th-22nd at Tempe Beach Park. This is one of my favorite annual events, mashing together two of my all-time favorite fandoms, music and baseball. This year’s musical lineup had Mumford & Sons, Goo Goo Dolls, Cage the Elephant, Blink-182, Switchfoot, Dashboard Confessional, Twenty One Pilots, OK Go, Marcy Playground, Eve 6, and so many more. It was a dream lineup for this ‘Late Gen-Xer.’ (I refuse to embrace the ‘Xennial’ moniker because it’s dumb. Fight me.)

Of all the amazing acts to play over the weekend, there was one band I absolutely had to see. Sublime was slotted in the 6:35 slot on the Home Plate Stage. I camped out in the VIP bleachers all day because I absolutely could not miss this set.

Sublime’s lead singer Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose one month before I graduated high school. The band’s final performance with Bradley took place in Petaluma, California on May 24th, 1996 at the Phoenix Theater. This venue is twenty minutes away from where I grew up in Santa Rosa. Back then, you could catch local kids playing weekend shows with their garage bands one weekend, and massive acts like Metallica, Primus, The Ramones, Green Day, RHCP, or Slayer the next. 

This was a celebrity death that hit hard. 

Sublime’s surviving two founding members, Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson honored Nowell’s memory by disbanding the group. They went on to form the Long Beach Dub Allstars with frequent Sublime contributors Michael “Miguel” Happoldt, Ras MG, Todd Forman, and others. 

In 2009, Bud and Eric collaborated with Rome Ramirez to tour as Sublime, which was met with a lot of resistance from fans and the Nowell family. The pushback from Nowell’s estate and fans led to the touring group being renamed Sublime with Rome. Gaugh left the group in 2011, followed by Wilson several years later. With that, the “with Rome” experiment ended. 

Fast forward to December 11th, 2024, when Gaugh and Wilson reunited to play a benefit show with Bradley’s son Jakob Nowell, who was just 11 months old when his father passed away. The video of this performance instantly went viral, with long time Sublime fans commenting how uncannily similar Jakob’s vocals and stage presence were to his late father’s. The next month, Sublime appeared at Coachella with Jakob Nowell again on vocals and confirmed they would be performing additional festivals with Nowell as their new front man.

The announcement was met with approval of the band’s fan base, and the following series of shows cemented Jakob’s claim to Bradley’s throne. 

On Sunday morning, I was able to catch Sublime’s soundcheck on the Home Plate Stage at Tempe Beach Park from the VIP seating area stage left. This was the first time I was able to hear Jakob Nowell’s vocals live, and I have to tell you, there is no doubt (see what I did there?) that this is Bradley’s kid. The vocal range and tonal quality of Jakob’s voice are eerily similar to Bradley’s, but he’s not up there doing an impression of his late dad. Jakob is singing the songs, putting inflection on different notes and phrases and ad-libbing in different spots. He’s not a carbon copy of Bradley, but you can hear Bradley in every note, every little quip between lyrics.

The other thing that caused me to get legit goosebumps was watching Jakob interact with Eric and Bud, with Trey Pangborn, with his buddy Zane Vandevort, and with all the other guests he invited to collaborate on stage. These moments were so ridiculously Bradley that it took me back to 1996 watching the elder Nowell share stages with Gwen Stefani and members of The Ziggens. 

These moments on stage were not rehearsed. They were not scripted. We were watching Jakob Nowell on a stage having conversations with his family. With his uncles Bud and Eric. With his brother Zane. With members of the crew and former members of the band. He brought people up and asked them to play his guitar. Asked them to sing lyrics on different hooks. It was a conversation, a living room jam session, a reunion of friends and family. And it was powerful.

Adding to the aura of the evening is the fact that this Innings Festival performance took place on what would have been Bradley’s 58th birthday. So yeah. This one hit differently than the other performances on the weekend. It was surreal seeing Eric and Bud up there with Jakob, with a twelve foot tall inflatable effigy of Lou Dog on one side of the drum kit and a giant inflatable of Opie Ortiz’ unused cover art from Sublime’s eponymous album on the other. 

It was my sincere honor to be part of this evening, to hear the music being played by the original players; the lyrics being sung by the one guy in the world who gets a pass to stand in for Bradley Nowell. It was food for my Gen X soul, a throwback to times when I could drive down the road to catch a punk rawk show at the Phoenix. Back when I could jump off the roof at Montgomery High on my BMX and ride away with nary a scratch. These days, I’m lucky to sneeze without catching an injured rib.

But on that night, I was 17 again, living in the moment, watching a third wave ska-punk band do their thing under the desert sky.