The Unpredictable Life of Travis Barker

Barker remembers his apprenticeship in Laguna’s dive bars as one of the happiest periods of his life—second only, he says, to the birth of his children, and right now. He had a place to live and enough money to pay for food and drumsticks; he went skateboarding and played music every day. Back then he would have felt guilty, he says, imagining anything more—like, say, joining an epoch-defining band that would go on to sell tens of millions of albums, for example, or producing and collaborating with scores of big-name artists from across the genre spectrum, or running his own record label, or marrying joyfully into what happens to be one of the most famous families on the planet, or putting his clout behind a clothing label, restaurants, or an organic vegan CBD-gummy-and-tincture line. And yet all of this and more has come to pass. One day you’re a drummer-slash-trash-collector and the next you’re drinking wine with Iggy Pop, and when things like this happen to him, sometimes Barker wonders if he’s dreaming, but that’s the point—his dreams were never like this.

Which is not to say it’s been easy. In 2008, Barker was horribly burned in a private-jet crash that claimed the lives of his longtime assistant Chris Baker and his security guard Che Still, both close friends. Barker spent three months in the hospital, endured 26 surgeries, endless skin grafts, and a period of suicidal depression; he later told interviewers he’d offered friends a million dollars if they’d help him end his life. The only other survivor of the crash was Barker’s best friend and musical collaborator, Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein; about a year after the accident, Goldstein died of a drug overdose in New York. Barker struggled with survivor’s guilt and PTSD. At times, he says, “I didn’t know if I’d ever play music again. I didn’t know if I ever wanted to go outside again.”

Barker has never cared for the truism that everything happens for a reason — “I’ll never think that about the people I lost,” he says—but he acknowledges that the crash saved him from a more tragic and common rock-and-roll ending. As documented in his 2015 memoir, Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, the Barker who got on that plane was a textbook train wreck, drowning his consciousness in weed and pills and Coupe deVilles as his marriage (to former Miss USA Shanna Moakler) fell apart. “I was going down a really fast-paced, dangerous path,” he says. Surviving the crash gave him a second chance he’s determined to live up to.

“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t make the most of it,” he says. “That I don’t appreciate it, and that I’m not grateful for it.”