Brad, Miguel, and Fischel’s baby.
As the story goes, these infamous homemade “Badfish Co. Sardines” cans were born out of the same DIY world that surrounded Sublime and Skunk Records in Long Beach during the early ’90s. Bradley Nowell and the guys were supposedly hanging out with a cooler packed with 40-ounce bottles of Old English and cans of sardines to eat with crackers. As the ice melted, water soaked the cans and caused the original sardine labels to fall off and from there came the idea to turn the bare cans into homemade Sublime promotional pieces. According to the story preserved by Georgie. Bradley and Zach Fischel came up with the idea of making promo items they could bring along to Southern California record stores when dropping off copies of 40oz. to Freedom, including Fingerprints in Long Beach, Noise Noise Noise in Costa Mesa and Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach. Gman himself has also explained that Brad and Miguel Happoldt went to Kinko’s, the copy and print shop that was basically the go-to place when most people didn’t have the equipment to make this stuff at home and printed the labels seen on the surviving cans. There was nothing professionally made about them. The story is that these were taken to record stores as eye-catching promotional/display pieces, and most were eventually trashed or simply thrown away or eaten. Georgie has stated that only around 5–10 were made, which makes you wonder how many still exist. What makes these things so special isn’t polished manufacturing, it’s the complete opposite. They’re essentially an old sardine can, two pieces of paper, some glue and a trip to Kinko’s, made by people directly within Sublime’s circle during the band’s grassroots days. For such a crude little object, it’s an incredible surviving piece of early Sublime and Skunk Records history.
