Fat Mike of NOFX performs at Riot Fest 2024 at Douglass Park on September 21, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. (Credit: Barry Brecheisen/Getty Images) There's a scene in the new NOFX documentary, 40 Years of Fuckin' Up, where Michael "Fat Mike" Burkett—wearing a blue, Wilma Flintstone-esque dress, giant pearls, and white go

Fat Mike of NOFX performs at Riot Fest 2024 at Douglass Park on September 21, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. (Credit: Barry Brecheisen/Getty Images) There's a scene in the new NOFX documentary, 40 Years of Fuckin' Up, where Michael "Fat Mike" Burkett—wearing a blue, Wilma Flintstone-esque dress, giant pearls, and white go-go boots—says, "My band thinks I have a drug problem." That statement quickly becomes a focal point of the film but one the NOFX founder/former lead vocalist and bassist doesn't run away from. Instead, he embraces it, putting his rabid cocaine use and alcohol consumption on grand display. Burkett didn't start using drugs until he was 31. By this time, NOFX was massively successful and, for all intents and purposes, there was no real reason for him to start snorting coke like he was Rick James. More from Spin: “Ponderous, Cacophonous, and Boring”: Our Editors Reveal Their Concert History The Dwarves’ Blag Dahlia on Punk, Sub Pop, and Blood Tommy Lee: “Quantity Over Quality. Everything’s Getting Fucking Stupid.” He was the straight one. He was the one who handled business while his bandmates—Erik "Smelly" Sandin, Eric Melvin, and Aaron "El Hefe" Abeyta—partied. Sandin, in particular, was battling a debilitating heroin addiction and was eventually given an ultimatum: go to rehab or leave the band. (He chose the former and has been clean ever since.) But in 1998, Burkett was in Berlin, Germany, hanging out with the Gimmie Gimmies and was presented with the option to do coke."My wife at the time, Erin [Burkett], neither one of us partied," he explains from a hotel room in Norway. "We just took care of business. We were both 31 and had been millionaires for a while, and some drug dealer in Berlin was like, 'Oh, you don’t do cocaine?' We were like, 'We don't do anything,' and she poured cocaine into our beers. We saw her do it. And it was like, 'Well, shit.' We’re rich. We own our own company. We can’t get fired. All our friends are doing it. Maybe we should try drugs. So that began the idea of why the fuck wouldn’t you?"As Burkett's foray into drugs took hold, NOFX continued its ascent to punk rock deities. Albums like 2000's Pump Up the Valuum, the follow-up to the gold-certified So Long and Thanks for All the Shoes, and 2003's The War on Errorism were coming at a steady pace, roughly every three years. While the doc dives into their triumphant, DIY career, at its core it is a story about friendships and what can happen when one begins to unravel, as in the case of Burkett and guitarist Eric Melvin, whose decades-long relationship imploded following NOFX's 2024 farewell tour. The group put a cap on their 41-year career in front of 15,000 fans in San Pedro, California, on October 6 of that year. Tears were falling like cascading waterfalls as the band said their goodbyes to friends, family, fans, and each other, but what was supposed to be a smooth transition to retirement turned into a nightmare for Burkett. The following morning, Melvin slapped him with a letter, accusing Burkett of "legal financial malfeasance." It was a sobering accusation, one Burkett swiftly and emphatically denied. As rumors swirled that Melvin had sued Burkett for "millions," he pushed back in an Instagram post. Fat Mike attends NOFX: 40 Years of Fuckin’ Up at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre on March 19, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for NOFX LLC)"I never sued Fat Mike, NOFX, or served anyone in the band legal papers — not at 8:00 a.m, not ever," Melvin wrote. "What actually happened: a letter was sent in the late afternoon of October 7, 2024. Not a lawsuit, not a demand Mike pay me millions of dollars, the words 'thief' or 'illegal' appear nowhere in it — it was a letter requesting financial records I'd been requesting for years without receiving, and asking for certain conduct to stop. As a member of this band and the LLC, that's my right. It was private." A story published by SPIN shortly after the last show stopped Burkett in his tracks. What he thought was essentially a deep dive into the NOFX discography morphed into what felt like a hit piece by his bandmates. For example, when talking about 2012's Self Entitled, Abeyta said, "All I remember is Mike being on a lot of cocaine, drugs and alcohol, and it was really tough to get anything done. It took a long time to finish it, because we would record, and then re-record, and then re-re-record." Comment after comment felt like a dig. "That interview made me cry," he says. "It was the worst thing I ever heard—and no one told me about it. That was the worst part. I found out from our publicist. When I read that, that was the worst day of my life. When it came out, Smelly actually flew to Las Vegas to apologize." Burkett felt blindsided by several accounts in the documentary, too, but moved ahead with it anyway.Jordan Burns and Tommy Lee attend NOFX: 40 Years of Fuckin’ Up at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre on March 19, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (Credit: Jerod Harris/Getty Images for NOFX LLC)"When I found out that the band talked so much shit about me and when I saw the first reels, it was the most heartbreaking thing ever," Burkett says. "I wanted to take that out and I wanted to protect myself, change the narrative. And my wife Astara said, 'Michael, you don’t need to change anything. You didn’t do anything wrong. Do not defend yourself. They made the statements and just do you.' "That’s when I decided, 'Yeah, I’m not going to hide anything and I’m not going to have any shame because there’s nothing to be shamed about. Doing drugs is just fine.' If drugs or alcohol take over your life, not fine, or your work, your anger, whatever. But I’m a sweet person, and I took care of my fucking boys."And he did. When all was said and done, NOFX walked away with $2.8 million each from the NOFX Final Tour—enough to retire on (well, in Mexico or Detroit, as they joke at the end of the film). As Burkett was getting ready to hike a glacier somewhere in Norway, he sat down with SPIN for a candid conversation about the documentary, where he stands with Melvin, drug use, the time in 2020 when he nearly died from an H. pylori bacterial infection, his work with the Codefendants, and where you won't find the film. I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol when I was 14. You didn't start until you were 31. What the fuck business do you have doing drugs? You’re a fucking teenager. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. My brain was still developing, Mike. And it stopped developing, clearly [laughs]. My mom had always told me, "Mike, you’re too smart to do drugs, and I listened. But then there came a point where you’re just like I don’t have to listen anymore. I can do what I want. That’s what society says. Everybody drinks alcohol, which is the worst drug for anybody, but fucking pure Colombian or Peruvian cocaine is awesome. Fuck you if you’re buying it on the street and there’s fentanyl in it. Well, you know what? That’s what you get. But you can’t judge someone by what they drink or the poisons they put in their body. I probably couldn’t afford that good shit now, so I probably would be dead from fentanyl at this point. You work for SPIN. It's crazy I’m doing this, because that interview made me cry. It was the worst thing I ever heard and no one told me about it. That’s the fucked up part. No one told me, and I was told by our publicist, Vanessa. I had initially said no to SPIN. But it was like, "Oh, they just want to do an interview about the albums." Your part seemed so disconnected from the rest. You’re on this other topic, and then they’re roasting you basically about your drug use. Eric Melvin didn’t do an interview. His wife wrote the answers, and they just made up shit. When I read that, it was the worst day of my life. They never said those things. The interview was done at our third-to-last show, and they had stuff they wanted to say and get off their chest. When it came out, Smelly flew to Las Vegas to apologize. He said, "I'm so sorry. I said so many great things about you." The writer, who is a pile of shit, was told please put that in the fucking story. But he wanted to write an article that would be sensational. That’s all I know. He ruined my life for a while. He was pissed I said no so he came up with an idea, like, "Oh if I ask about all the records they did, maybe that'll interest Mike." And it did interest me. Like, "The last interview we do will be about our history of recording. I like that." And what a pile of shit. Everyone will believe all that shit. Why wouldn’t they? They have no reason not to, and I’m not going to deceive myself. I texted Ceschi [of the Codefendants] earlier and asked about the doc. He's like, "I think it’s so well done. It captures their career so well, but also there’s some heartbreak in there." I'm sorry that you had to go through that. The relationship between you and Melvin seems to be at the crux of NOFX's breakup. Is that accurate? I know you wanted to retire, too. Oh, yeah. But the reason I was done is because I didn’t want to be on stage with that guy anymore. He was my best friend for so many years. About six months into COVID, he started accusing me of shit. Like, what are you talking about? We used to split everything in four ways when we were in a van. Dude, I write the songs and I fucking do everything. NOFX didn’t have a manager. We had a tour manager. I managed the band. For the record, this is interesting because NOFX made a partnership agreement, a solid one, in 2001. And it said, "Fat Mike is the managing member because he manages the band and he shall get a fair market value of what a manager would get." So like 15 percent. I never took it. Why would I? On our last tour—and it doesn’t say it in the movie so much—I invented this tour. We were able to cut out the manager, the parking fee, like you got the parking, we got merch—we got everything because of all my IP. You made $2.8 million a piece, right? Yeah, and we were used to making about maybe $200,000. I would say you’re the best friend in the world. If someone did that for me, I would be in gratitude. That’s why I had nightmares. Now it’s only once a week. It used to be three times a week. I was talking to my lawyer about it. My lawyer said, "Mike, you having nightmares?" I go, "Yeah, all the time." He goes, "Just so you know, my clients who are innocent, they’re the ones who have nightmares. The ones who are guilty have already rationalized it to themselves." I just didn’t see this coming because I didn’t do anything wrong. Eric Melvin and his lawyer sent me and the rest of the band a legal letter on the day after our last show. Is that the one he was trying to defend on Instagram? Yeah. "I did not send Mike this legal letter in the morning after our last show. It came in the afternoon." It doesn’t make any sense, which is why it’s so fucking hard to comprehend. When the band had this intervention with me, it was about a week or 10 days after our show at my house in 2021. We had a backyard party during COVID. Melvin was doing blow with me in my room a week before the intervention, so shut the fuck up, dude. During COVID, we didn’t see each other very often. There was a part where you say you "haven’t even known me." I’m biking every day. But when we did that show at my house, I fucking did a lot of blow. I did ecstasy and I filmed a porn accidentally that night. Just another day. I didn’t release the porn, OK? Even though my wife thought it was a good idea. You have a wife that’s one in a gazillion. She’s wonderful. I would kill my husband. We weren't together at the time. I didn’t fuck women or anything. I just got beat up by a few. That’s one of my personal expressions.Fat Mike performs at the “Punk in Drublic Presents Final NOFX Tour” at National Western Complex Stockyards on July 21, 2024, in Denver, Colorado. (Credit: Thomas Cooper/Getty Images)So he was doing shit with you a week before the intervention and then puts you on the spot, saying you have to go to rehab? Because he’s been making a court case for three years. He’s been building a case, trying to just character assassinate me. I still look at the SPIN story. I keep it on my desktop and look at it to remember what he did to me. No good deed goes unpunished is a real thing. Where are things now? Smelly, Hefe, and our crew, they all said, "This is bullshit. Mike’s not a thief." They all got the same amount of money and they’re just happy about it. What do you think sparked this in Melvin all of a sudden? NOFX has always been his bread and butter. That’s what breaks my brain. We went out for lunch like less than a year ago. I was in San Diego for my daughter’s graduation. And he’s like, "Mike, you want to go to lunch?" At first I’m like, "No, it’s awkward," but I like awkward. I do well in awkward situations, but it was just too much. I asked him, "Do you really think I'm the kind of person that would purposefully rip off my best friend for 40 years? He said, "I refuse to answer that question," and I was like, "Because the answer is no." You’d think he would be smart enough to think well, "Maybe Mike didn’t do anything or he didn’t know," but it’s way beyond that. The lawyers and accountants have all gotten back to us, and are like, "Yeah, you did not do anything wrong." Melvin still won’t admit it. Now, you would think a response from him would be, "What a relief it is to find out my best friend for 40 years did not rip me off. Nothing crooked about it." But no. The response is, "I still want a settlement because I’ve spent all this money on my lawyers." He wants you to pay for his lawyers now? He wants me to pay him a lot of money. Like millions? Like $100,000 to $200,000. That’s a lot. Look, I’ve had a label for 35 years. No one ever accused Fat Wreck Chords of ripping them off. No one ever. When we partnered with Hopeless Records—Hopeless took over the label—we gave $3.5 million back to our bands. Any band that owed us money, we erased. It was $3.5 million just to do the right thing. Why we did that is because every band gets paid on every record they sell now. You don’t owe Hopeless anything. That’s awesome. No one’s ever done it. I thought that was just such a cool thing to do, but now because of Eric Melvin, people question me still because even though out of maybe 70 to 100 bands that we had on Fat Wreck Chords, even though nobody ever claimed that we ever ripped anybody off, because we didn’t. The one person in this world that is saying that I’m a thief is the one person people might actually believe, because he was my best friend for so long. That is a level of betrayal that’s hard to wrap your head around. No wonder you have nightmares. That’s the right word. And that’s why I still have nightmares. I tried to make this all go away, and the whole band did. Like, "Melvin, just drop this and apologize for sending that letter the day after our final show." Why would he do that? There’s only one reason. It’s to hurt me. What a horrible note to end it on.That’s why Smelly and El Hefe and our entire crew won’t speak to him anymore. Oh, no kidding?Then he denied it at the premiere of the documentary and said that's why he wasn't invited to Fat Mike’s NOFX documentary in Austin.I noticed he called it Fat Mike’s documentary in the Instagram post, too. Do you think at this point he’s pushed it so far that now he can’t back up? That’s exactly what it is. So now he can’t look like an asshole. Now I'm an asshole for—I wouldn’t say I’m defending myself, maybe I am—just saying what happened. It’s your side of the story. But it’s not my side. It’s what happened. I’m sure if he was here, he’d probably argue with you. The craziest part is even when we were on the last tour, there’s a part of the movie where Keith [Morris] says to Melvin, "Why wouldn't you call Mike back?" We could have talked about it. He walked away with $2.8 million. It was so much more money than we’ve ever made. But fuck that. Our final shows were legendary. The love between us and all the bands there and all the fans, it was just absolutely amazing. How would that have changed the dynamic had you known he'd been plotting this the whole time? I knew he was. I didn’t know he was going to send letters the next day. I knew he was going to do stuff because he wouldn’t talk to me. I still believe that onstage there was still the love and the magic that we always had. It came across in the film.Yeah, because that’s how I felt. I’d go rock out on Melvin’s side of the stage and I’d rock out with him. I believed more than there was. I could see it in you. It was real. It’s all genuine emotion. There’s a part in the documentary where your medical emergency is pretty well documented. It's very graphic. I know that changed the trajectory of your life a little bit. Can you talk about that moment? Were you scared? It didn’t scare me. It’s funny because it was in the movie, but we took it out at first. I had H. pylori, which is a bacterial disease. It wasn’t drugs or alcohol. I did almost die, but it was because I had a really bad bleeding ulcer. Luckily, my wife was there with me. But I think it’s kind of funny how I still didn’t change. That scene in the movie is one that I edited. Was it crazy to look at that and see that happening to you? My life is so absurd. But when I put it together, I go, "Ooh, what if we do this? And what if we animate me and my daughter’s conversation? This has never happened before on film. This is just so crazy how I took what could have been the biggest tragedy of my life and made it funny. But that’s always kind of been you, right? You’ve always had the sense of humor, albeit it can be very sarcastic humor sometimes. Right. I remember the first time I interviewed you and I was like, "Is he fucking with me?" It was right in the middle, and that’s how I like it. Sarcasm is an art, in my opinion. That was 2020 when you nearly died? And I don’t have diabetes anymore, because I'm in the fjords right now. Wait, do you really have Type 2? Yeah, I did. I thought that was a joke. Watch the movie again before you fucking write this article. See, sometimes I don’t know if you’re fucking with me or not [laughs]. Six months after our last show, I didn’t have it anymore. Interesting. Me and Astara just hiked a glacier in Finse, Norway. Today we took the wrong ferry and rode our bikes two hours on some weird islands. When I was on tour, when I had to play shows, of course I fucking did drugs every night. It wasn’t because I needed to—it’s because I fucking wanted to. We haven’t partied now maybe in two weeks. We don’t want to. We’re fucking living, doing cool stuff. How are you feeling without doing that for a couple of weeks?None of your business [laughs]. Physically, great, but it’s always been that way. When I came back from tour, I would get sober for two or three weeks, and no one knows what I fucking do when I’m not on tour. We’re having the best time. I’m about halfway through with this book I’m writing. You’re writing a book? Yeah. Awesome. What’s it about? You? Your band? Fjords? There’s some fjords in there. No, it’s called How to Write a Punk Song in 67 Easy Lessons. A music theory book. Do you listen to hip-hop at all? No. What? Rakim wrote a book called Check Your Technique, all about the structure of rhyming, and it's really good. Well, mine’s also fucked up and personal, but I don’t know. There’s a chapter called "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." It’s about an episode of the TV show that I watched that meant something to me. What was the episode about? It's about when she was with a painter and he showed her a painting he did that no one else had seen before. He couldn’t sell it and he couldn’t show it to anyone, but he showed it to her. And I make the connection of when you write really personal songs, it gets addicting. But what happens is that the more you give away of yourself, the less you are, and the more people own you and think they own you, and you sell pieces of your life to make great art. That’s something that I’ve done way too much of because it is addicting. And here I am now. Fat Mike performs at the Vans Warped Tour on June 26, 2009, in Pomona, California. (Credit: Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)What do you think that does for you, though, also as a person? Letting all that stuff go must feel freeing in some sense, right? No. What do you get out of it? It’s not cathartic.You’re probably the first artist who’s ever said that to me. They always say how cathartic songwriting is for them. Well, maybe. But when you give up pieces of your personal life and your personal thoughts, which is what artists don’t do—they say they do—but they only put out there what they think people want to fucking hear. I did just do an interview like that, where I was like, "Dude, this is all bullshit." When I wrote a song about killing my mom, that was actually what happened. [The song, released under his alter ego Cokie the Clown, is called "That Time I Killed My Mom." In 2006, she opted to be euthanized amid her battle with ovarian cancer.] I wrote that a few weeks after I killed her. It was never going to get released to the public. I just wanted to record this beautiful song, but what I did for my mom, how anyone would do that. Cause that’s what you do. I didn’t do it for people to hear it. I ended up putting it out years later just 'cause I did that Cokie the Clown album. And I thought, "Shit, I’m going to some dark places," but I did that album. It was not cathartic. And when I played shows, it was just like reliving experiences that I didn't want to fucking relive. You tell me a fucking artist that gives part of their fucking life up. They just tell people what they want to fucking hear, because a lot of times there’s other forces at work pulling the strings. You don’t have that.They just make choices and make more money to get more popular. That’s never really mattered to you though. Would you still be playing music had NOFX not blown up the way it did? Why even ask that question? I’m just asking. You know how long it took us to make any money? Yeah. A long time. Why did we do it? Cause you love it.There was no hope of making money. Why punk rock is still alive and thriving is because most punk bands don’t think they’re ever going to make money. They’re playing garages or they’re playing in fucking downtown L.A. or East L.A. They’re playing shows because they have to. But our movie. People should go see it because it’s fucking awesome. We just won the best music documentary in Melbourne, Australia. We beat out the Beatles. Congratulations. It's probably the best music documentary ever made. Well, it’s the realest. Isn't that important? I don’t want to see a bunch of fluff and a bunch of bullshit. NOFX members (L-R): Guitarist El Jefe, bassist and vocalist Fat Mike, drummer Erik Sandin, and guitarist Eric Melvin perform at the Vans Warped Tour, an all–day annual barrage of bands at Dodger Stadium parking lot in Los Angeles, Wednesday, July 12, 2006. (Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)I love the Devo documentary on Netflix. Genius. I love Devo. That brings me to the Codefendants. What are you doing with them lately? The coolest thing about being in a band—and this is funny because no one believed me—our first record is a perfect album. What I mean by that is there’s no bad song. I’ve heard from people that every song on that record that it’s their favorite song. That’s when you know. The next record, no one can decide if it’s better or worse than our first record. That’s how you know. One of our secrets is we’re all good songwriters, but we don’t put out any song until all three of us are very happy with it. If someone’s not happy we don’t put the song out.Will you go out on the road with them? I’ll jump on stage with them. But you don’t want to be an entertainer. I’ve got important things to do. You’re doing a million things. I feel like retirement is ridiculous because you’re not retired. You’re just doing other mediums.Really a big difference is that I’m finding so much happiness in not entertaining and not partying and doing things that I’ve always wanted to do. I fucking hiked a glacier. Look where you are right now. Where are you going next? We’re going up to the highest point of Norway tomorrow on a train and we’re bike riding five hours down to Flåm and then we’re whitewater rafting and going on a bike and hiking almost every day. It's freezing here, but it’s the best. That’s how I’d want to live my life if I could. I’m almost 60, and I don’t want to be fucking playing shows. You’ve done enough. Forty years is enough. I really tried to make it so my band could retire. It sounds like you did, so no regrets there. What are you hoping for in terms of this Melvin situation? While I was doing this interview, I ended up just venting. The movie is an extrapolation of how we’ve lived our whole career—doing it ourselves. We’re not streaming the movie. You have to pay for it. You don’t have to pay for music anymore. Music’s all free and fuck that, too. You like a band, you want to see a documentary, no one’s bitching about not having to pay for the next Star Wars. Fucking support bands. Now that we’re retired we don’t make any more money. Like, "Oh, I have to pay fucking 15 bucks to go see a movie?" Go fuck yourself. But that's not the only reason we’re doing it in theaters only. It’s because I want people, our fans, to be able to congregate once a month and celebrate. It’s a celebration movie. Ice-T, Fat Mike, Jay Bentley of Bad Religion, and Tim McIlrath of Rise Against, at the Vans Warped Tour 15th Anniversary Celebration at Club Nokia in Los Angeles on September 6, 2009. (Credit: Paul Hebert/Icon SMI/Corbis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)I saw your daughter do some interviews with some fans after one of the premieres. What's it like seeing people uniting through the NOFX doc?That was awesome. We want our movies to show once a month. That’s why we partnered with the Rocky Horror Picture Show people 'cause that is the paradigm. Smart. That’s going to be awesome. In a couple of weeks, if you want to see the NOFX movie and it’s not playing in a theater near you, you can throw a house party and show our movie at your house or in a local bar.That’s a great idea. You gotta pay for it. You don’t get this fucking movie for free. It's gonna be I think $750 to show our movie at your house, but if you pay another $500, you get a half hour Q&A with one of us. Kick ass. We’ve been doing that at movie theaters. After a movie they just played in Italy, me and Hefe, we Zoomed on the big screen after the movie. You don’t get to see our movie for free on a stream. Watch it and we’ll fucking hang out with you and talk to you afterwards. And the score for the film is out, right? Yes, one of my favorite things to do in the studio is record strings. What I've heard is beautiful. I'm happy that you’re in the place that you’re in right now. And I’m sorry you’re going through what you’re going through. All the happiness in my life outweighs it totally. It gets better and better. I don’t think I feel bad for talking about the situation, because it's unfair. But you know what, life’s unfair. Well, you’re doing something right.Thanks so much for the interview. I know it’s late, so I’m sorry if I kept you up, but thank you. I think I’m going to get laid now [laughs]. The 40 Years of Fuckin' Up film score is officially out. Physical copies will follow on October 2. Find more information on screening the film here. To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.