Rome, NY - Grifiss Technology Park
Woodstock 99
July 23, 1999

Offspring defends honor of new punk

The band from California launches into its set with enthusiasm

The details

What: The Offspring in concert.

Where: Woodstock '99's east stage.

When: Friday night.

Time of performance: 55 minutes.

Bryan Holland watched the flying water bottles soar around the huge crowd in front of the east stage Friday night at Woodstock '99. From afar, the airborne objects looked like a thousand moths buzzing a porch light on a hot summer night. The lead singer for the California band The Offspring loved the mischief.

Offspring concert

*** (out of four)

"You guys are so bad," he told the couple hundred thousand fans. They loved the attention.

Not that Offspring was a bunch of instigators or anything.

But early on during the band's just-short-of-an-hour set, Holland introduced the Offspring song "Walla Walla" like this:

"We wrote this song about prison because it's one of our favorite places to meet people," he told the crowd.

The song was a bit punk and a bit, shall we call it this one time, rockpile-abilly.

Holland and his band mates - Kevin "Noodles" Wasserman on guitar, Greg Kriessel on bass and Ron Welty on drums - played it mostly hard and rough. They've been part of the new punk movement for a decade now, and they were ready to defend the style's honor at Woodstock.

They did so with much enthusiasm.

Their big radio hit, "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy),"earned respect as Holland punk-rapped his way through the lyrics.

"Why Don't You Get a Job" brought cheers, too, for its playful tribute/rip-off of the Beatles' hit "Ob La Di Ob La Da."

Holland played the bad boy again, as four dummies fitted with masks of The Backstreet Boys' faces were wheeled behind him.

He grabbed a red plastic baseball bat and knocked their heads off.

It was obvious he liked the way that looked, too.

At the end, Holland half-heartedly tried to make up for some girlfriend-cutting lyrics with this observation:

"I see a lot of girls crowd-surfing getting groped," he said. "Just because a girl wants to go crowd-surfing doesn't mean she has to be molested."

Holland let that sink in a moment. Then he got devilish again.

"Girls, if you see a guy go by (crowd-surfing), I want you to grab him by the ---," he said.

By Mark Bialczak, from Syracuse Online - July 24, 1999