Rock star Travis Barker on the plane crash that killed his friends — and drove another to self-destruction
Can I Say Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums
by Travis Barker with Gavin Edwards William Morrow
EVER since he was a kid, Travis Barker had been terrified of air travel and plagued by thoughts and visions of dying in a plane crash.
But flying was something the drummer had to do frequently after joining bassist Mark Hoppus and guitarist Tom DeLonge in punkpop trio Blink182 in 1998. As the band’s world tours got bigger and more grueling, Barker medicated himself with heavier and heavier doses of prescription drugs just to get through each journey. During a flight to Australia in the early 2000s, he took so much Xanax that he slept almost the entire way and had to be dragged off the plane by flight attendants who couldn’t wake him up.
His bandmates and friends would often make fun of Barker’s fears, but on Sept. 19, 2008, they became a nightmarish reality when a private Learjet carrying six passengers — including Barker — crashed in a ball of fire in Columbia, SC. The accident killed four, set another on a path to fatal selfdestruction, and nearly ruined Barker’s own life.
It’s recalled in horrifying detail in Barker’s new memoir “Can I Say,” along with chapters about the death of Barker’s mother when he was a teenager, endless rockstar excesses and his unlikely role as a realityTV star on MTV’s “Meet the Barkers.”
From the outset, the drummer sensed that the flight was cursed. At the time, he and Adam-Goldstein (aka DJ AM, one of Barker’s best friends) were playing as the dance duo TRV$DJ-AM and were set to perform a concert in Columbia. Initially, Barker’s exwife, model Shanna Moakler, was meant to go with him, but she decided to stay home with their son, Landon, who was almost 5 at the time, and daughter, Alabama, 3. Alabama was inexplicably frantic about her dad leaving. “[She] just kept saying, ‘The roof’s gonna come off, Dad, the roof’s gonna come off,’ ” Barker remembers in the book.
After the show, he, Goldstein, their security guard Charles “Che” Still — who took Moakler’s seat on the plane — and Chris Baker (Barker’s longtime assistant) decided to fly back to Los Angeles instead of staying in South Carolina. Even though he was medicating with Xanax and Vicodin, the waiting Learjet 60 spooked Barker. He called his father, Randy, before getting on and told him “something doesn’t feel right.”