Still Bubbling Up

Punk rock band doesn't seek to reach the masses with its musical message

Back when The Offspring and Green Day were moving a few million units apiece, there were those who believed that a new generation of punk had arrived to recapture the soul of the mainstream American mall rat.

So long Hootie, 'Ello Manic Panic day-glo hair dye.

Three years later, it certainly doesn't feel like we're in the midst of a punk revolution. Green Day's last one tanked.

The only sign of punk on the Top 40 album chart this week is Smash Mouth (and they're not exactly the Clash of the '90s, are they, love?)

So what of the latest release from The Offspring, the brilliantly titled, agressivly jackhammered, "Ixnay on the Hombre?" It's still on the charts after 33 weeks, but at No. 175, it isn't exactly giving the Spice Girls a run for the money.

And that's OK with Noodles, the band's guitarist, who says he never bought into the notion of bringing the masses around to punk or vice versa, in the first place.

"I think the difference is the Hottie and the Blowfish fans are all Hootie and the Blowfish fans and all punk rock fans are punk rock fan," he says, "And I don't think there's a whole lot of common ground there."

And yet, in a way, the flirtation the music enjoyed with the mainstream was, after all these years, inevitable.

"Punk rock is something that's been a force bubbling up in the underground for 20 years or so," he says. "Back in the '70s when rock was just stagnant and horrid it was all about REO Speedwagon, Journey and Styx and all this crappy arena rock with nothing real to it, punk rock came in and kinda picked up the original spirit of rock 'n' roll."

Formed in the Southern California surf-punk scene of the '80s, The Offspring followed Green Day into the hearts of the heartland teen in 1994 on the strength of a chart-topping Modern Rock radio smash from "Smash" called "Come Out and Play (You Gotta Keep 'Em Seperated)."

It touched off a backlash before they'd even left their independent home on Epitaph for the green-backed pastures of major label life on Columbia Records.

The cries of sell-out, he says, "all happened as soon as we got a song on the radio."

And it only got worse when the video hit.

"It didn't make any sense to me," says Noodles. "When Maximum RocknRoll initially reviewed the record 'Smash,' they gave it a great review. And then a couple months later, we started selling copies, got on MTV and all the sudden, the record sucked. So I don't know. The last laugh, I think, was ours."

With a laugh, though perhaps not the last one, Noodles recalls how kids would turn up at the shows just to protest, "kids who had never heard of us before or the bands we were touring with."

At one show - he thinks it was Pittsburgh - he and the gus in the band started talking and found that the protestors didn't know much about punk.

"We asked them, what did they think of the Adolescents and TSOL and all these bands that got us inspired to start doing this stuff, and they had never heard of them," he says. "They knew GBH and they knew the Exploited and four or five bands of that ilk and that was about it."

Its easy for Noodles to see why the kids are protective, though.

"When I was young, I guess it gave me something to feel connected to," he says. "And I think when punks see other people listening to what they initially thought was their music - when all the sudden the captain of the football team is listening to a punk band - they feel their world is threatened. I don't know. I didn't feel that way. I felt like, you know, I've been listening to this music for 15-odd years. It's about time this stuff is getting played on the radio."

The Offspring dealt with the backlash as best they could.

"It sucked, you know, but we tried to do things the way we felt they should be done," he says. "We stuck with Epitaph for as long as we could. We went out and did tours the way we thought we should do them. We took bands we liked, that deserved a break. We kept ticket prices down. We allways played all-ages shows."

And now that they've signed to a major, he's found that they may have even greater artistic control.

"I think that record companies are starting to understand that they don't know the music as well as the people who are out there making it, the ones who are out there in the trenches," he says. "so they left us alone."

They delivered a finished product, "from the forst note played to the color on the artwork," and Columbia put it out.

They even let Dexter Holland, the band's lead singer, direct the latest video.

And what could be more punk than that?

By Ed Masley, from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - October 6, 1997