Celebrity Status Doesn't Ruffle Offspring Members

The Offspring may be the most modest of rock stars. When last in town for an outdoor show on an intramural field at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the pop-punk rockers went out of their way to goof on the nearby Hard Rock Hotel (frontman Dexter Holland called it "cheesy," suggesting the nearby Double Down Saloon as an alternative) and not-so-subtly reminded the overly enthusiastic crowd that it hadn't been that long since they'd played the Elk's Lodge in Henderson. Two years later, The Offspring returns, and this time the group is playing at ... the Hard Rock Hotel, 4455 Paradise Road. But you can't call them sellouts, if you figure they're doing two shows Wednesday and Thursday, when they could have played just one in a larger room. (Hotel officials predicted both shows would be sold out by today, but tickets if available are $15; L7 opens at 8 both nights)."It's just more fun for us", explains guitarist Noodles Wasserman. "We want to keep the shows energetic. We want a smaller crowd, have the people up front, have 'em goin' for it."

With 8 million in sales of their breakthrough album "Smash," and the single "Come Out and Play (You Gotta Keep 'em Separated)" becoming part of the pop vocabulary -- "That can get kind of old, when you're at a hockey game and they play it when a fight breaks out," Wasserman says -- it would be strange to hear a member of any other band happily report, "It has cooled off for us. Which is kind of cool, actually." But The Offspring refuses to take the rock-star trip seriously. "It's a weird thing, the fame or celebrity," Wasserman says. "It just seems kind of artificial. You've just got to realize it's not the real world. ... If you take it seriously, you're gonna be in therapy or alcoholism."

The follow-up album, "Ixnay on the Hombre," peaked at No. 9 on Billboard's album chart (it's currently at No. 45), although the single "Gone Away" seems to be on every rock radio station every time you get into the car. "That was one that my (7-year-old) daughter picked off the demo, actually," Wasserman says. "Whatever my daughter sings along to, I think, `Yeah, that's gonna be the big one' " Some say the song is about a friend of Holland's who died, but "he's real tight-lipped about it," Wasserman says. "We're leaving all that up to the imagination of the listener." The rest of "Ixnay" remains a melodic punk rock that never seems overbearing, thanks to its more traditional pop influence. "We all grew up on radio in the '70s. The influences that preceded our punk-rock influences creep back in," Wasserman says. "We're not so strict that we sterilize what we're doing. We have a lot of fun and there's a lot of good energy going in."