Songfacts®:

• Blink-182's album Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, the follow-up to their commercial breakthrough, Enema Of The State, finds the pop-punk trio looking back at their humble beginnings playing seedy dive bars in their native San Diego. The lead single, "The Rock Show," was particularly inspired by SOMA, an all-ages club that operated out of a former slaughterhouse and hosted up-and-coming bands in a basement dubbed "The Dungeon." In 1994, the club relocated to a former warehouse near the University of San Diego, and Blink followed, playing several shows there until the location closed in 1999.
  
  Blink bassist Mark Hoppus, who sings lead vocals on the track, shared his memories of the infamous venue: "It was covered with graffiti, it stunk, it was made of metal, the sound sucked, and the toilets were always overflowing. It was the best, we loved it. We used to watch bands play there every weekend. Blink-182 began in this club. This song is about those days. SOMA isn't around anymore. The city hates it when kids have somewhere to go and hang out. F--k them."
• "The Rock Show" became kind of an anthem for the Warped Tour, thanks to the line, "I couldn't wait for the summer and the Warped Tour."
  
  Blink-182 first played the tour in 1996 and returned the next three years, building a core fanbase that set them up for stardom.
• In the music video, directed by The Malloys (Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend"), the band is given a huge budget to produce a suitable clip, but they decide to blow all the money on destruction (trashing trains and TVs) and off-beat good deeds (taking homeless people to a day spa and hiring strippers to mow lawns). The band also handed out money to strangers but, according to Hoppus, many of them were wary to take it because they thought it was a scam.
  
  In an interview with Rock Sound, Hoppus explained that the record label was always pushing them to do videos with skateboarders to project the image of a SoCal skate-punk band, but Blink wanted to do their own thing, and by the time this video came around, they finally had the clout to push back against the label. "I called like a week before the video and I was like, 'Just give us money and let us do our thing and it'll be rad,'" he recalled. "We had to really put our foot down and say, 'This is what we wanna do.'"
• The album title is a play on masturbation. One of their roadies, Larry Palm, came up with the name while he was snowboarding with friends.
  
  "His friend came in all wet, and he said, 'Dude, take off your pants and jacket!' They all started laughing," Hoppus told MTV. "I was eating at a restaurant, and he called me on my cell phone and said, 'I want to make a suggestion for the next album title.' As soon as he said it, it was obviously the best."
  
  In other countries, the joke in the album title doesn't translate.
  
  The band also considered the titles If You See Kay and Genital Ben (as a nod to the classic children's novel and TV series Gentle Ben).
• According to the band, this upbeat tune about finding love at a rock show captures the spirit of early punk-rock acts and their own humble beginnings. "I think it's actually as if we built a punk-rock time capsule and went back to five years ago when we were writing songs. We wrote that song as a mid-tempo punk-pop song about a girl, and it ended up being one of the better ones on the record," they told BBC Music in 2001.
  
  "It's got the spirit of the Ramones and Screeching Weasel about it, but definitely influenced by bands like the Descendants and all the early punk-rock bands. It's a really really simple song, three-chord punk-rock song."
• "The Rock Show" is one of blink-182's most popular songs, played at most of their concerts throughout their career. It reached #2 on the Modern Rock chart.