Ron: First off explain who's in the band and what they do.
Noodles: Okay we have Dexter who sings and plays guitar, Ron who plays drums, Greg who plays bass and me, Noodles, on guitar.

Ron: What are the roots of the band? I know you started of in Orange County.
Noodles: Yeah, we started playing in Orange County, Dexter and Greg actually started the band with a couple of other guys, and our first drummer James, and I had played in a band with James and Dexter before and that never made it anywhere I don't think we had even played a party or anything.

Ron: What was the name of the band?
Noodles: Clowns of Death (laughter) which we stole from Oingo Boingo. I think we did a couple of parties and that was it. Dexter only played with us a short while, so then when they started forming what is now The Offspring he was writing songs that had a lot of double guitar parts and so he asked me to play with them and I loved the songs that Dexter was writing at the time so sure I went for it, it's fun.

Ron: What are some of the heaviest influences?
Noodles: The ones that kind of tie us all together as a band have been a lot of the Orange County bands and California bands like Dead Kennedy's, TSOL, Adolescent's, Agent Orange, stuff like that. A lot of the more melodic fast punk rock stuff. That was really what we were all into and what tied us together. We all have other influences that we all bring in as individuals to the band but those are the influences that tie us together.

Ron: What was it like playing with TSOL?
Noodles: You mean when we had them at the Palladium? (Club in California)

Ron: Yeah.
Noodles: It was a fucking blast! It was so amazing because we idolized those guys growing up. The Dance With Me record just blew me away, I used to listen to it all the time, so we had them out to do "Code Blue" with us. It was such a buzz to be up there playing with those guys it was amazing, I had to do a stagedive towards the end of the song. It was bitchin'.

Ron: What's it like now playing some of the larger venues?
Noodles: Well we're use to playing smaller, packed to the hilt clubs so it's a little weird for use playing these bigger places. It sucks with the barricades and all that shit, but it's nice having a good size audience, you get a lot of energy from the audience. We're used to people trampling all over us on stage doing stagedives so it's kind of weird when we don't have that.

Ron: I remember last time you were in Chgo you got in a little brawl with the bouncers.
Noodles: Yeah a friend of ours, Mark the singer from Guttermouth went to do a stagedive and the bouncers just dragged him out and I think we ended up stopping at the end of "Burn It Up." I saw him getting dragged by and I said "Hey wait a second I know that guy!" (laughter) We got in a big argument with the promoter after that, he was trying to explain how the bouncers have to beat everybody up because of insurance and I'm going, "I understand they have to stop the stagediving for insurance reasons but there's no reason to beat anybody up after they've already done a stagedive, if you want to escort the people out fine, but you don't have to beat the people up to do it."

Ron: So what's been the weirdest place or show you guys have played?
Noodles: Oh God, the weirdest place was at this co-op in Berkeley called Coin Court, and they had us there one time to play for a diner show and people are filing in to eat and they're sitting down eating just looking at us. It was the weirdest, most uncomfortable fucking show we've ever done in our lives. We're sitting there trying to kick ass and get all wild and stuff because this is punk rock but we should've just sat down and done a jazz thing or something because that sucked. (laughter)

Ron: Have you ever played in a bowling alley?
Noodles: We've played a bunch of bowling alleys actually those aren't that weird.

Ron: So is Epitaph going to put out the next record?
Noodles: Yeah and then we'll take a look at where we're at and where Epitaph is at and ether re-negotiate with them or see what else is out there for us. I'm really happy with what Epitaph has done for us, those people have just worked there asses off to get the record were it's at now and I have a lot of respect for them, I think they're a label and a group of people that show a lot of integrity, they really stand behind what they do so hopefully will work something out with them and just stick with them cause I think they're great.

Ron: Are you getting tired of hearing people say you guys have "sold out".
Noodles: Yeah, you know we have done absolutely nothing to "sell out," we're playing the music that we always loved to play, we wrote an album that we thought was a decent album, and we wanted to do things a little differently then on Ignition but still stick with our roots. I think we've done that so I don't take it to seriously, I think that the real viament crowds that are calling us "sell outs" have got a little bit of an elitist attitude and a lot of these people were never into us in the first place so big fucking deal if they want to call us a "sell out" that's fine, they're way of the mark.

Ron: When are you going to repress your first album?
Noodles: Hopefully soon, we're not sure actually when or how we're going to do that but hopefully soon.

Jennifer: Are you planing on using the ska sound more often?
Noodles: Not really, there's no plan to do that. What happened with that was that Dexter wrote that song about four or five years ago when we were all listening to Operation Ivy quite a bit, we've done a couple shows with them and they were one of our favorite bands at the time and now we're playing with two of them tonight, two of the guys are in Rancid from Operation Ivy, so that's just how that song came into being. When we were looking for material for this record that was just a song that we had a lot of fun with but that's certainly not a vein that we're thinking about going unless we have another song that comes up that we have fun playing like that. It is a fun song to play.

Ron: I had heard a interview right after Come Out An Play started getting radio play that you guys hated hearing yourselves on radio and were intentionally going to make the next record ruffer.
Noodles: Oh really...

Ron: I think Dexter said that. (laughter) What's it like hearing yourselves on the radio?
Noodles: It's weird, it's really weird. Some of the stations that are playing us now in LA, like I heard us on the radio and then they went right into Judas Priest on one station, and I heard them play Green Day and they went right from Green Day into "Two Tickets To Paradise" by Eddie Money. (laughter) I was just sickened and I could picture them doing that to us too so it's kind of weird but in the same time it's kind of neat hearing yourself on the radio, we just never thought that would happen, we never expected it.

Ron: What do you think about the way the punk scene is going? I know five years ago at least in Chicago it was all but dead, it really dropped off.
Noodles: It just seems to go in cycles all around the country cause we've been touring since 89 and we used to do a lot of shorter road trips before that and there has always been a punk rock base of fans through the country and the world and all of the sudden the mainstream is kind of absorbing what used to be kept in back alleys and the really shitty parts of town because nobody wants to face the fact that there was such a thing, so I don't know, we'll see what's going to happen to it. Every once in a while I see a commercial coming from the punk rock rebellious thing and that sucks, that part of it sucks. I'm hopeful that if the mainstream is going to absorbing punk rock then the punkers, the people that are out there trying to expand limits will just have to go into different areas and there will be even more interesting scene coming from that.

Jennifer: Would you rather seen it go into the mainstream or would you rather see it stay in the underground?
Noodles: I don't know if we could avoid it. I've loved punk rock since I was in junior high and I always thought it was the best music and that everybody should listen to it and everybody should giver it a chance and because it was so against the grain and so unusual people wouldn't give it a chance and I think it's unavoidable that more and more people are going to start seeing what's good about it and appreciate it for the same reasons I appreciated it when I was a kid and all my live every since I was a kid. So I think it's unavoidable that the mainstream is going to absorb it, like I said there will just be another fringe area that will hopefully be expanding. That's what got me into punk rock growing up in a rather conservative county in southern California and there's so much emphasis on image on how your supposed to present yourself, image was so important, and once you started to scratch the surface and see that the worlds not such this beautiful place that the conservatives wanted to be and all this shit you were taught to believe in as a kid kind of falls through, there is just so much more out there and a lot of what your being told is true isn't true and it's bullshit and punk rock kind of expended the rules of who you were aloud to be, at least for me it showed me a whole other area of who I could be and how I could live my live and that's what I love about it. There was just all of the sudden very few limits and it was rebellious and it was like, "Fuck you, and fuck your rules" to all of authority, so that's what I liked about it. You want responsively but at the same time there area a lot of rules that people are trying to place on your live that are bullshit, there is no reason for them.

Jennifer: Do you hang out with any of the other bands from Orange County?
Noodles: The only band were really tight with from Orange County is Guttermouth. I hang out with people in bands that nobodies really heard of, just younger bands that are just up incoming.

Jennifer: In the future are you guys planing on trying to play some smaller places were your able to hang out with the fans?
Noodles: As far as hanging out with people I like doing that I think that's neat., I like being back with the people. The thing is now we just did a tour of Europe and we were playing really small packed places and the problem was that a lot of the times we were sending people home that didn't get to go in, were turning people away at the door, and that sucks you don't have a good feeling about that, so it's one thing to say that we'd loved to play smaller shows but when the crowds is to big then it becomes a problem. We don't want to turn people away from our shows, we want anyone who's in to the music to be able to come and hear it and hopefully have a good time.

Jennifer: Are you guys involved in trying to keep the ticket prices down?
Noodles: We're really working on keeping our ticket sales down I think that we've been able to do that too. All our tickets this tour have been ten dollars except for one or two shows and were taking Rancid with us who are a great band and we have at least one local band at our shows, so for ten bucks I think that's really reasonable in this day in age especially the way things are getting really crazy. That something we definitely want to work at so if we have to do bigger shows hopefully we'll be able to keep the prices down as well.

Jennifer: Do you guys plan on coming around more often?
Noodles: We don't really have any detailed plans for the future, we have this tour and then we'll be home through Thanksgiving and then we're going to Italy and Spain for nine days and then we're have about thirteen fourteen shows on the west coast in December. Beyound that we reallt don't have anything set up. We don't want this to flop. This is a big thing way more than we ever realized and all the sudden we're in this whole new ballgame so we want to make it last, we don;t want this to become the "soup de jour" and we're also trying to keep somewhat of a low profile because we don't want this to be an overnight thing and we don't the media to get a hold of punk rock and make it into something that it's not. We want to try and keep punk rock what it's been.

Jennifer: So your not going to push it to much?
Noodles: We're trying not to, it's kind of like we just got caught up in this wave. We just went into the studio and did a record that was a little better than our last one, we had no idea what was going to happen. Once Come Out And Play started getting radio play back home it was like, "Wow this is weird, we're on the radio, a lot!" Since then we just had this huge wave and we did a video and we're thinking, "We'll hopefully we'll get on 120 Minutes" and then that went into the "Buzz Bin" and we're just like, " Fuck what's going on?" So we're just trying to figure out what the hell's going on and how we're going to deal with it. We're working a lot on our stage show, getting our stage show better and more energetic and tighter. That's really what we're doing, as far as plans we really don't have any plans. We don't want this to get too big too fast, we've seen it get way bigger than we ever thought, I mean when we hit Billboard at 187 we're like, "Fuck, we're on Billboard's Top 200!" It's just gotten sicker since than.

Jennifer: So would you be dissapointed if the attention eased back a bit?
Noodles: No, it's going to happen anyways. None of us expect this to last forever anyways, we all have other plans for our futures beyound the band. Music always going to be part of my life, and I hope always to be playing music but this isn't going to last forever, I plan on going back to school and getting a real education and this is like finally that's a possibility, there's no way I was going to be able to afford college and work through, it was going to take forever. I have a daughter that means a lot to me and I don't want to spend all my life missing out on her because I'm on the road.

Jennifer: So do you feel caught up in all this?
Noodles: There's times, I like a lot of time to myself so I have to be creative on how I'm going to be able to do that beacsue it is hard. We're surrounding ourselves wiith people and bringing a lot of attention to ourselves and ther's times when the attention is not wanted, you just want some time to yourselve, you want to be left alone. It's difficult but you just have to be creative on how you go about doing that.

Jennifer: Do you have a favorite place you like to play?
Noodles: It changes, Denver is really fun and a lot of places in Colorado are really fun right now but the shows are starting to be a lot more alike actually so it depends on the city. I have fun playing anywhere I really do, depending on how well I play. If I don't feel that I've put on a good performance then I get pissed... (laughter) come backstage and break bottles and then go to hotel rooms and oh we don't wanna talk about that...

From "Spontaneous Combustion" - issue #17