Hello Americana!

On the forthcoming fifth album, The Offspring have undertaken the high-brow task of documenting the disintegration of American culture in the 1990s, to a soundtrack filled with Johnny Mathis covers, Def Leppard samples and "the same old shit"...

"The other day, there was a pounding on my door in the middle of the night which scared the hell out of me and my wife," Offspring guitarist Noodles sighs. "We thought the house was on fire and the neighbours were trying to get us out. When i went down I found these kids on the doorstep and they were like (adopts Beavis and Butt-Head voice), 'Hey, are you that guy from The Offspring?'. I said, 'Fuck you and get the fuck away from my house'. Sometimes fame isn't so nice."

Life was never meant to be this way for The Offspring. When frontman Dexter Holland, Noodles, bassist Greg K and drummer Ron Welty started playing in Orange County garages in the mid-'80s, they were happy if they could work out the chords to "God Save the Queen" or "California ûber Alles", or whatever day-glo seven inch had taken up squatter's rights on their stereo most recently. Punk rock was was all about having a laugh, getting wasted on cheap brew and making as much noise as possible. It certainly wasn't about arena gigs or showbiz parties or, God forbid, making money. Punk was dead, remember?

And then, in 1994, The Offspring released "Smash" and their world went decidedly pear-shaped. Punk was back in vogue. The quartet toured the globe and watched as "Smash" soared towards 11 millions sales. And while the world waited for cocaine habits to develop and egos to explode, Dexter, Noodles, Greg and Ron calmly returned to their old neighbourhood and started having a laugh, getting wasted and making noise all over again, as if nothing had changed.

Today, in a central London hotel, Dexter Holland and Noodles don't look like rock superstars, but like the scruffy skate-punk no-marks they have always been in their own heads. In town on a promo trip for their forthcoming fifth album "Americana", the pair are remarkably bright-eyed and bushy-tailed considering they only flew in from LA yesterday. As they help themselves to coffee and discuss the pernicious influence of the "Teletubbies", currently spouting gibberish on the hotel TV, they couldn't be more polite or chirpy.

"Americana" is the follow-up to last year's "Ixnay on the Hombre", the album on which cynics expected The Offspring's bubble to burst. But while "Ixnay..." didn't scale the commercial heights "Smash", sales of three million worldwide showed that The Offspring were here to stay. "We never expected the last album to do as well as 'Smash'," Dexter admits. "Bands always have that so-called 'sophomore slump', and everyone says how terrible their follow-up album is compared to the one before. We were never bothered, because that's not the reason we're in this band. Music isn't just about sales, it's about making a connection with people."

"I wasn't dissapointed at all with 'Ixnay...'," Noodles smiles. "It was kinda nice that we got to relax a little and learned to feel comfortable in our skin again. We weren't entirely at ease with jumping from playing neighbourhood garages to being on TV and playing huge shows."

"At the time of 'Smash', there was a momentum building up beyond what we'd done and it was kinda feeding on itself," Dexter adds. "We tried to downplay it by not doing high-profile TV stuff, so we wouldn't look like a flash-in-the-pan group. We wanted to stress that we'd been doing this happily for 10 years without the whole world caring." - (Reporters question) There have been rumors that since you've moved to your new label Columbia, the suits are trying to steer you towards kid's TV appearances with the new album... "What, like The Offspring on with the 'Teletubbies'?," grins Noodles, glancing towards the TV. "Thats okay, I think we're good role models...."

Success doesn't appear to have tainted The Offspring. They've never been interested in hanging out in the hippest clubs with the 'in' crowd, and Dexter and Noodles happily admit that their address books remain conspicuosly free of celebrity phone numbers. "The most famous person who ever came to one of our shows was Cyndi Lauper.," Noodles laughs. "She was giving me advice, but the more I leaned over to hear her the quieter her voice got, so in the end I was just nodding and smiling without having the slightest idea what she was saying. She could have been telling me to go fuck myself"." The band still go out drinking together once a week when they're back home, allthough now that Noodles, like Dexter, has got hitched they're trying to spend as much time as possible with their good ladies before they head off to the road again. In his free time Noodles goes snowboarding to chill out, while Dexter cites running Nitro Records as his hobby. "And Greg K investigates crop circles," Noodles says. "Be he won't share his findings with us."

Dexter began writing "Americana" last December. He always has some fears about being able to come up with good songs, but says that the songwriting process was pretty relaxed this time around. "There was such a pressure to prove we weren't one-hit-wonders last time," he says. "I didn't feel that this time. People know our sound and what we're about by now, so they either like us or don't at this stage". "It wasn't like, 'Shit, we better be good this time or we're *really* all over'," Noodles jokes.

Before the release of "Ixnay on the Hombre", Dexter described the album as "The same old shit, mainly fast punk rock with a few new things thrown in". Now he's describing "Americana" as "a bunch of fast stuff and a few different sounding songs". Is there an echo in here? "Shit, I've been rumbled," he giggles. "That's my standard quote. We're not reinventing the wheel here. A lot of our fast stuff does sound similar to songs we've done on previous records, but die-hard fans of the band like that - and I like the idea of us having an identifiable sound."

"An unconscious theme seemed to develop when I started writing," he continues, "We called the album 'Americana' because each song seemed to describe american culture or the American lifestyle and its disintegration. When you used to think of Americana, it'd be Norman Rockwell and barbecues and big cars, but these days it's Jerry Springer and monster trucks and McDonalds."

"Americana" is classic Offspring, with all their trademark hooks, speeding riffs and huge chant-along choruses firmly in place. Its most bizarre moment is a cover version of MOR staple "Feelings", previously recorded by veteran crooner Johnny Mathis. "Dexter was trying to get us to do that song for years and we were like 'You're fucking crazy'," Noodles grins. "But one day he started playing the riff and we were like 'Hmmm...'."

"It's hardly a novel idea for punk bands to cover cheesy songs," Dexter notes. "This was the cheesiest one we could think of, but we changed some of the lyrics to make it a little more '90s. Stuff like, 'Feelings like I want to kill you/Like I want to deck you'." "After Korn got Cheech from Cheech and Chong to appear on 'Eararche My Eye', we were going to ask Morris Albert, the guy who wrote 'Feelings", to do a cameo on our version. But he'd probably be totally horrified and burst into tears," Noodles smiles. Another weird side-step for the Orange County punks is the sample of Def Leppard's 'Rock of Ages' which kicks off 'Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)'. "I don't know exactly why we used that, but it just seemed to fit," Dexter grins. "Def Leppard were really good about us using it. We've another song called 'She's Got Issues' with a sample from The Zombies' 'Time And The Season', and when we tried to get clearance they told us we had to rename the song to include their title and give them a dollar per album. Def Leppard just said 'Give us something thats reasonable'- That was cool. I'll give them props for that." 'Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)' also name-checks talk show hostess Ricki Lake; much of 'Americana' being informed by the hours Dexter and Noodles have spent bemused and bewildered watching the US public airing their diry laundry on national TV.

"I have a morbid fascination with those programmes," Noodles admits. "They're like watching a train wreck. I love the ones where the girl is a stripper and her boyfriend is a struggling musician living off her money. Then she tells him she's been having an affair with another girl and... Wooah! Sorry, I was off in my little fantasy world there..."

As ever with Offspring, there's much humour on "Americana" but it's balanced by more serious observations on the state of American life. "We grew up with bands like the Dead Kennedies and Sex Pistols, who didn't always say nice things about governments or society," Dexter says. "But then we were also influenced by bands like the Dickies and the Toy Dolls, who don't care about anything. I hate preachy bands, but you can't help noticing that certain things about our society are fucked up."

"There is an underlying theme to 'Americana' about how people don't take responsibility for their actions anymore. 'She's Got Issues' is about that; about people blaming their mistakes on their messed up childhoods. And 'Walla Walla', which is the name of a prison in Washington, is about a guy who keeps messing up and ends in jail, but he keeps shifting the blame."

"A lot of the album is about stuff like that, or about how one individual makes sense of their own life in America. Songs like 'Have You Ever' and 'Staring at The Sun' are about facing adversity and saying, 'I'm going to make it on my own, whatever your stupids fads or your sense of me'. There might be alot of cynical digs at America on the album, but I think a positive message comes through - that through the bullshit you can still find your way." -(Reporters question) Okay, gentlemen, time for the hard sell. Why should we shell out for "Americana"? The pair consider the question for a moment. "It's simple, don't," Noodles laughs. "Spend your money on beer and steal our records!"

By Paul Brannigan, from "Kerrang!" magazine - October 17, 1998