The Offspring

The truth is out there, and you'll find it on "Ixnay on the Hombre", The Offspring's fantastic new album. It says that punk-rockers can be nice blokes who get married, like their moms and aren't even remotely cool. "Bring on your geeks and nerds!", singer Dexter Holland begs Jason Arnopp...

"I've got your cover caption for this story" beams The Offspring's singer Dexter Holland, his mouth brimming over with shiny white teeth. "It's not about the hair, dudes, it's about the tunes".

Nice bloke, Dexter, and his new haircut suits him. Ever since 1994's "Smash" went ballistic, it`s been all too easy to see Mr. Holland as something of a reluctant platinium punk canceling all interview because he is depressed. Yet here he is, sitting alongside bassist Greg K, full of life and chat.

It's around midday in a sizable hotel room. Taller than you'd expect, Dexter is wearing a lumberjack-style shirt and khaki trousers, with boots. His perpetual cartoon character grin is reassuring, as his willingness to discuss practically anything broached. The majority of his sentences end in "or whatever" or "and stuff" - each used for modesty, or in the same way some would use "allegedly".

Greg is much more reserved - an intense, perfectly polite yet not entirely at home here. He looks like he'd rather be off indulging his favorite hobby, playing golf, than discussing life in The Offspring. Still, discuss it he will.

The Offspring are gearing up again. After hefty touring for the "Smash" smash - which has now sold in excess of eight million copies - the Orange County quartet stayed off the road for almost a year, resting up, re-instating the "The" in their name, and planning their next move.

The album they subsequently recorded, "Ixnay on the Hombre", has turned out to be a right royal result; far more consistent and hummable than Smash ever was. We'll talk about the new album more specifically in the next issue, but right now we are interested in The Offspring as people. Where are their heads at, how has fame affected their lives and where in the name of Satans trousers did Dexter's braids go? The fate of the world hangs in the balance.

"The hair question!" he laughs. I don't know, people really identified us with a look or whatever, and it was just kinda played out". "Jeez, it was time for a change anyway. My hair was awfully smelly. Maybe it'll move a bit of the focus back to the music."

For The Offspring, the music is all. It transpires that this is why they do so little press. Their low profile has been quite deliberate.

"Having the spotlight on you consistently can be emotionally hard for a band", considers Dexter. "Seems like if you ever read an article on Nirvana or Pearl Jam, they got depressed after a while, just because of the focus on them all the time. We were able to avoid that - even our videos don't show us very clearly.

"I could go home, to the post office or the supermarket, and no one would recognize me. We could really go back to a normal life when we were off tour, and I think that's why it made things okay.

"We've stayed away from things like talk shows, Lollapalooza and Woodstock", confirms Greg. "It's not like we are trying to stay out of the press, but staying away from a lot of magazine cover`s really helped us. Some bands become poster boys."

"People have asked this question about success changing us," continues Dexter, looking strained, "and I'm not sure how to put it into a good answer. But personally, I really don't think we have changed that much - partly because we were friends for a long time."

"When this stuff broke, we'd already been a band for eight or nine years, and we were already set in our ways. Also, bands out at the same time, like Green Day, really took the attention away from us. We did sell a lot of records, but quietly, relative to other bands.

Dexter decides that the main difference success has made to them is the way other people discuss The Offspring. "It's a new experience for us to hear someone saying "I hate that band", " he chuckles. "When we were unknown, we were just used to no one knowing us, or people just liking us."

"What is frustrating, " he concedes, "is when people judge you based on other things besides your music. When someone says I've got a terrible voice, I`ll say, "thank you! Thanks for having a valid reason for hating us." But if someone says they liked Offspring before everybody else did... that's an elitist attitude, and the really hardcore PC punks are notorious for that. I don't subscribe to it at all."

"I mean, we never wanna dictate whether someone was cool enough to like us. Bring on the nerds. Bring on the geeks. It's like that "I love Lucy" episode, "The friends of the Friendsless". That's what we are."

One of the criticisms continually leveled at The Offspring is that they're "plastic punks". But they have never claimed to be anything other than frenetic fun merchants just having a good time.

"It's kind of where we came from," considers Dexter. "I didn't grow up in a fucking squat or whatever, y'know? I grew up in a suburb, so there's some different elements going on here.

"There was a strong influence from punk bands," he allows, "and there were a lot of punk bands where we grew up, like Social Distortion, TSOL, The Adolescents, and The Vandals. But we basically grew up in a surf town, so there's other elements. It wasn't like the punk consumed us. If I'd grown up in (Green Day's hometown) Berkeley, it might have been a whole other story.

If you'd pretended to have been a Berkeley ophran, you might have sold an extra couple of million records. "I know," he chuckles. "Sometimes I get so pissed at my parents - like, "why am I fucking middle class? Why am I not fucking poor?!."

Ironically, the miserably toung-in-check "Self Esteem" is The Offspring's signature tune, along with "Come out and Play (Keep 'em Separated)". "When we finished "Smash", recalls Dexter, "I thought Self Esteem was terribly vulnerable, and people would think I was this really spineless guy. What was so amazing was people started coming back and saying "My God! I really identify with this guy". I had five different friends saying "Did you write this song about me?"

Dexter nods thoughtfully when it's suggested that Offspring tagged out of the end of the grunge era with "Self Esteem". "Someone did this study in the 80s," he offers, "where they took a look at these heavy metal guys. They discovered that the one unifying personality trait was that all these guys wanted power or something. They wanted to be on top of the world."

"Then they took a look at punks and found that they all saw themselves as victims. I think that's true; I definitely identified more with the punks, so the whole "Self Esteem" thing fits into all that kind of stuff.

The Offspring are no longer victims. To 8 million record buyers they are gods. Does 8 million records guarantee you a fleet of sycophants, hanging up to your coat tails?

"I think people will approach us because of certain things," admits the ever-careful Greg. "but me and Dexter still live in the same area, and we've had the same friends for 10 years. They even come to our shows sometimes." "I mean, sometimes you get a call from someone you haven't heard from in a long time," he considers, "or someone wanting to talk to you in a bar just because of what you've done. But for the most part, it hasn't been people bugging us and tagging along. That's something we are not really into."

The bassist insist that The Offspring still hang out together. "Maybe not as much as we used to," he allows, "because Dexter got married in '95 and I'm engaged to my girlfriend, but we still go out and hang out with the same circle of friends in Huntington Beach. Noodles and Ron only live half and hour away."

"We used to hang out at my mom's house all the time, in a big upstairs room that we used to party in. Ten people would come over every weekend. I guess thing has changed, and Dexter was saying the other day that he kinda missed being at my mom's house."

Fans will be relieved to hear that The Offspring doesn't care for heroin. Dexter claims his main vices are "nicotine, alcohol and caffeine".

"And that's bad enough, if you have ever been through one of my hangovers.", he adds, "I feel live and let live" as far as drugs go unfortunately harder drugs kill people, as we have seen. The guys from Blind Melon, Brad from Sublime, The Smashing Pumpkins..."

"Ixnay on the Hombre" will be Offspring's last release in the UK for Epitaph. But despite having defected from the ever-credible indie label to the massive Sony corporation, their credibility has emerged relatively unscathed. "It's something I'm sad about, actually," he says. "I really thought we were gonna stay on Epitaph forever. What we did was a little bit unique, in that we really tried to stick it out.

"We're proud of "Smash" being being the biggest indie rock record ever, and I love the people and the bands at Epitaph. But the owner, (Ex Bad Religion guitarist) Brett Gurewitz, told us in '95 that he was interested in selling part of his company, and he was talking to major labels. I felt like we were gonna be sold off. It really upset us, because we were not a commodity.

So The Offspring sprang. Ahem. "We wanted to make our own decision about moving, just like we made our own decision about everything else," says Dexter. "We didn`t want to be airing dirty laundry, so we tried to keep quiet about it. Then people thought we were keeping quiet about it because we were really guilty!. But who wants to read about all that? After a while, you just go "I hate them both".

"For the most part, it seems like most people don't really care.", interjects Greg. "When rumors about us leaving Epitaph came out, we were reading one of our internet pages and some kid wrote: "Did you hear that The Offspring are signing to Sony? You know what that means..." We were waiting for some kind of sell-out thing, but he just said "A new album's coming out - cool!"

"You should judge bands based on their music", nods Dexter. "I didn't give a shit if Nirvana were on Geffen, or if they were popular because they used to be on Sub Pop. I still liked them. It's funny how people's perceptions can change, even when the records hasn't."

"Some of the negotiations with Epitaph weren't friendly", says Greg. "But for the most part everything worked out. Both parties thought it was the right thing to happen. Now, Epitaph can give more attention to the rest of the bands. Rancid, Pennywise and NOFX are all doing really well".

But not as well as The Offspring. In fact, The Offspring are not only outselling their peers, but many of their heroes too. This proved embarrassing last August, when Social Distortion supported them at a storming London Cmaden Underworld show.

"We really idolized and looked up to Social Distortion, so it's strange when things turn around like that, " gasps Dexter. "Another good example was last summer in Oslo with the Ramones. The promotor insisted that we played after them, and I really didn't want to do it. I went up and talked to Joey Ramone and said we would be glad to play before them. He just laughed."

"I felt almost ashamed," smiles Greg. "They deserve a lot of the credit that we got." Dexter sits considering the matter further. "The bands we have played with have been very cool," he decides. "I guess they have realized that the attention on the music as a whole can be beneficial for all of them. They can get results from it." "I talked to the guys in Pennywise and they said "man thanks!. All our records have sold twice as much." . I think there is a new interest in Social Distortion too."

Thankfully, the Underworld show proved that The Offspring have kept their identity. They appeared untouched by everything but the hands of the crowd.

"Yeah," beams Dexter. "You get us in that kind of environment and it comes back instantly, because that's the kind of thing we did for a long while. We try to have a real direct link with the audience. You put yourself in a room with all these kooky people and you forget everything else."

"If we did a show, and all of a sudden I was depressed and not gonna let anyone get too close, it wouldn't be fun anymore. I don't know what some bands are so afraid of. What are people going to do if they touch you? Maybe they've had bad experiences and I'm really lucky. Knock on wood".

Are The Offspring superstitious? "I don't walk under ladders," smilers Dexter "And my Mom told me never to put my shoes on the table, because that means death in the family. So whenever we're on tour and Greg puts his feet on the table, I tell him to put them down. I don't believe in superstitions but I don't wanna fuck with that one!".

It also says next week they will they will print part two of the interview, where they talk about Ixnay on the Hombre. I didn't buy the next issue, but it should be in stores now.

Last thing, on the same pages the interview was on, there was a little article where they talked about Motley Crue:

April 29, 1995, Kerrang! 543 we cunningly got Dexter Holland to tell us what he thought of Motley Crue. Then we splashed his response, "Motley Crue makes us laugh" across the cover. He'd like a word with us about that.

"Shame on you guys for putting it on the cover" He laughs. "I thought "My god, they are gonna start a band war here". Sure enough, next issue there was a letter from Nikki Sixx (Crue bassist) saying he wanted to kick my ass."

So Dexter learned to keep his mouth shut, then? "Err, no.. I stand by that", he announces. "Motley Crue symbolizes everything I hated about rock 'n roll - dudes doesn't wear makeup unless they are Marylin Manson and want to look horrible.

And there is more: "I'm sorry that your band is over, Nikki, and you've got a chip on your shoulder. Actually, I should probably thank Motley Crue, because it was bands like them that inspired us to start". Your response to the usual address, Mr. Sixx...

From "Kerrang!" magazine - February 1, 1997