Blink-182’s ‘Rock Show’ van lived in Sacramento for 2 decades. Here’s why and what’s next

The van had a blue carpet and a huge dent in the back door, and Terra Lopez said that in 2002 it could fit at least 15, maybe 20, teenagers.

Did it run? Not reliably. Was it the same ’80s Dodge Ram from the Blink-182 music video for “Rock Show”? Weirdly, yes. Was everything better when that van was around? Immeasurably.

It seemed like Lopez threw a party almost every weekend. “Some folks have tree houses or clubhouses,” she said. “That was my clubhouse.”

She was a student at Sacramento High School when her mom called and told her to be outside in 10 minutes. The teenage skater walked out of the south Sacramento house right off the 65th Street Expressway and watched in shock and delight as her mother’s boyfriend drove that van into the driveway. The back doors were still badly dented from when Blink-182’s bassist and singer Mark Hoppus backed it into a red convertible on camera.

It quickly became a sensation, Lopez said. “Everyone at my school knew: ‘That’s the girl with the Blink-182 van.’”

Lopez had loved the “Rock Show” music video for the band’s album “Take Off Your Pants And Jacket.” She watched the band ride around in the van, giving away money, picking up a homeless man and getting him a haircut and a new white suit.

In the video, the band says they were “given money by a production company to shoot their new music video. This is what they did with the money.”

The video had next to nothing to do with the song’s lyrics about falling in love with a girl at a rock show, but it was unabashedly cool.

“The van was — it was iconic,” said Lopez, now 38. She was a millennial teenager, so she decked it out in inflatable furniture.

Her mother, Michelle Delso, acquired that van through sheer force of will.

Lopez said that Delso worked in the same J Street building as alternative rock station KWOD-FM (106.5 now broadcasts Top 40 hits), and the station tried to give away the van as a prize in a contest. Instead, the car sat unclaimed in the parking garage until Delso asked whether she could have it; she was informed by the station that if she could get that van to start, it was hers.

And when Delso sets her mind to something, she follows through.

The van never really ran again, and it sat in Lopez’s mother’s driveway until 2010. Because the family lived off such a busy street, “If you wanted to go to the Florin Mall back in the day, you would pass our house,” Lopez said — and you’d admire the van.

Lopez had her own room inside the family home, but the car felt more private. She’s now a musician — she sings in the electronic R&B bands Sister Crayon and Rituals of Mine. The Dodge is part of that, too: She taught herself to sing and play guitar in the van, where she couldn’t be overheard by her mother or her brother.

“It truly was my safe space,” she said. “And also, you know, being a moody, angsty teenager wanting to have my own space and have my own place to go to, that was it.”

So how did the van that was the site of so much Sacramento teenage malaise and enchantment end up in Austin, Texas this year?

A Texan longs for a Sacramento car

Andrew Baldwin was a fussy 8-year-old, and that’s why he bought this Blink-182 van 24 years later.

The way he remembers it, it was 1999, and he was upset in the car on the way back from the airport. His brother — some 20 years his senior — had done something a little mean or thoughtless, maybe. To cheer the boy up, the older brother began to sing along to the song playing on the radio:

“Say it ain’t so, I will not go.

“Turn the lights off, carry me home.

“Na na, na na, na na na, na na, na.

“Na na, na na, na na na, na, na na.”

Baldwin laughed. It is, he said, one of his first memories of hearing music on the radio: a voice of treason turning into the best trip.

The moment sparked a decadeslong love of Blink-182 that recently led him to spend $2,300 on that piece-of-junk van from the “Rock Show” video — a car that spent the last 13 years rusting out in an East Sacramento auto shop on Elvas Avenue. The car became the victim of darkness in the Central Valley after Lopez’s mother moved out of the family home and had to relocate the van.

Baldwin, now 32, followed Reddit posts about the car. He talked for years about his indecision to call the auto shop. Finally, his partner, Taylor Sheets, 31, urged him in 2023 to stop talking about it and act.

Don’t act like there’s tomorrow, she coaxed. Life, as they say, is too short.

They bought the van. And this was another outlandish gesture of love: Sheets is not a Blink-182 superfan like Baldwin, but she is a big fan of this man who was once a fussy 8-year-old. It wasn’t love at first sight, like in the song, but she knew it could be love not long after they met in the fall of 2019, when he took her hand on a crowded street.

After a few matter-of-fact phone calls with the current owner, Baldwin received a contract from the auto shop handwritten on lined paper, which the couple documented on their TikTok, @therockshowvan. They signed the agreement and sent a $1,000 check back to Sacramento in June. They spent another $1,300 to ship it to the home they share in Austin. It arrived in July.

Baldwin and Sheets signed on for a massive restoration project. The car is giant and ridiculous, and it had a not-insignificant amount of rodent droppings inside.

Nevertheless, they’ll take one lift.

Fell in love with the girl at the rock show

“Rock Show” shouldn’t be described as Blink-182’s most lyrically compelling song. In the chorus, Hoppus offers the listener a lifeless exchange: “I fell in love with the girl at the rock show / She said, ‘What?’ and I told her that I didn’t know.”

The song is not Baldwin’s particular favorite, either.

“I don’t know if it strikes a chord any more than any of the other Blink songs that I love,” he said. But the van was the Blink-182 van, he said, and he wanted to have it. And like Lopez, he said, “I’ve always enjoyed the music video.”

And the van has come to represent more than the song and the accompanying video.

Lopez said her favorite memories in the car are “kind of bittersweet.” One of her best friends, Duayne, would sit with her in that van for hours. The teens would talk about life and listen to music on a Walkman. “I think we liked one another,” Lopez said, “but nothing really ever happened.”

In 2003, just before their high school graduation, Duayne died by suicide.

“We couldn’t comprehend it at the time,” she said. “It was the first time that I had ever lost someone in that way.” Now, she cherishes the youthful memories of time whiled away with him in the van. “Those moments with him,” she said, “I didn’t really realize at the time just how special they were.”

There was sorrow in the Dodge, but so much joy, too. The parties. The simple fact that it was a sweet, bizarre gift from her mother. And Lopez, who is gay, remembers playing spin the bottle with her friends. “It was really an opportunity for me to kind of explore,” she said, “without feeling judgment.”

The inside of that car was so important, she said, in a way she didn’t understand until she became an adult.

“When you’re a kid, you don’t realize just how magical it was, to be in the early 2000s, and have that space in that van,” she said. “I just thought, ‘This is so cool. I have my own van, and it’s Blink-182’s.’ But now, reflecting, it really helped me just have the space to kind of explore in all the ways. It was important.”

Lopez graduated high school in 2003 and went to college in Long Beach. Twenty years later, Sheets and Baldwin decided to restore that rusty old heap that meant so much to so many Sacramento teens.

The Texans don’t yet have a real plan for where they’ll put the van, which they bought without real purpose or direction. It barely fits in their garage. Maybe they’ll take it to shows on the upcoming Blink-182 tour. Maybe they’ll rent it out, or go on road trips if they ever get it running. They’re figuring it out as they go, posting updates on TikTok along the way. It is, they said, just fun for now.

In the end, all the small things added up to love.