The Mark, Tom and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back)

Background

The Mark, Tom and Travis Show was recorded on November 4, 1999 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California and November 5, 1999 at Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City, California on the group's Loserkids Tour. It was the band's first arena tour. "It was amazing, because it was the first time we'd ever done anything that big. I felt like a success story," said guitarist Tom DeLonge. The album was named after the band's mid-2000 worldwide tour, The Mark, Tom and Travis Show Tour. "We played the songs at lightning speed, and the dick jokes were at an all-time high. It was a perfect representation of what we sounded like and who we were at that time," drummer Travis Barker recalled in his memoir Can I Say (2015).

The album's colorful artwork was illustrated by Canadian cartoonist Glen Hanson. It contains several characters illustrated on previous Blink-182 releases, including aliens, a dancing bunny, wizards, and a caricature of pornographic film actress and Enema of the State cover model Janine Lindemulder alongside caricatures of DeLonge, bassist Mark Hoppus, and drummer Travis Barker. The album also features examples of the band's humorous stage banter between one another, which mostly consists of toilet humor. This includes joke songs, such as "Family Reunion", "Blow Job" and "The Country Song". Following "Man Overboard", the album returns to a live environment with 29 hidden tracks collectively known as Words of Wisdom, which is more between-song dialogue.

"Man Overboard", the only studio track on the album, was initially written and demoed for the group's previous album, Enema of the State. The band entered the studio to record a final version of the song in mid-2000. The live version of "Dumpweed" was also issued as a promotional single to support the album.

Song changes

Commercial performance

The album, designed to satisfy fans between new studio albums, was initially meant to be a strictly limited-edition release. It debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200 chart, with first-week sales of 110,000 copies. On January 17, 2001, The Mark, Tom and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back) was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album's song "Man Overboard" peaked at number 2 on the Alternative Songs chart and number 17 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart.

Critical reception

The Mark, Tom and Travis Show received mixed reviews from critics at the time of its release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 56, based on eight reviews, indicating a "mixed or average" response. MacKenzie Wilson of Allmusic dubbed the album "a real rock show [and] high-speed energy at it's finest [...] in the midst of teen pop mediocrity and post-grunge rollickers, it's good to see a band such as blink-182 enjoying its time on top of the world." Alex Pappademas of Spin was appreciative of Hoppus and DeLonge's "smirky, self-deprecating one-liners [that] can't conceal the music's winning wistfulness." Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone opined that "DeLonge is one terrific little guitar player, the comic chitchat interludes are a sweet bonus for fans, and Blink-182 steal enough moronic hooks to make The Enema Strikes Back a hoot."

Mike Pace of PopMatters wrote that "the recording sounds bright and full, and while the suits at MCA surely had something to do with that production-wise, one can't fault Tom Delonge for coming into his own as a guitar player, and probably getting more mileage out of the C,G,A,F and G,C,D chord progressions than any band thus far." A reviewer for Melody Maker observed that the album "obeys the First Three Laws of Rock: have a good time; maintain the generation gap; keep it simple." The more negative reviews came from NME, with writer Siobhan Grogan deriding the album as "the tragic sound of three men so desperately trying to avoid growing up." Tom Sinclair, reviewing for Entertainment Weekly, found the collection to be "wholly unwarranted," criticizing the "laughably obvious" marketing strategy of "quickly flood[ing] the market with blink-182 product before their fans outgrow 'em." Retrospective reviews have since become more positive. Consequence of Sound retrospectively reviewed the album in 2008, writing that "If you yourself were not into the band, you know someone who was, and the tour that this recording is from sold out many large venues for a good reason. They knew how to write catchy punk rock with more on stage energy than I have seen to date."

Track listing

All tracks written by Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge, except where noted.