Springing into action
The Offspring
In the late 90s, bad dance and cheese seemed to rule the charts • from the abysmal ATB (anybody remember 9pm (‘Til I Come)?) to the first chart appearances of Misses Spears and Aguilera, plus Eiffel 65 with Blue (Da Ba Dee Da Ba Da). 1999 was a particularly bad year for anyone trying to find his or her musical feet. I suspect I’m not alone when I say I feel there was not a lot on offer that really grabbed the attention or warranted a second listen. That’s when The Offspring arrived.
Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) was the band’s break-though single in the UK, although they had been one of the most successful crossover punk-rock groups in the United States since their third album, Smash, went supernova. Here in the UK the same success was waiting, but it would take four years and a controversial move from the small-time, influential indie label Epitaph to the mainstream of the record industry before it would come.
Meanwhile, the band’s antagonists were sharpening their knives. Reaction to Ixnay on the Hombre, the band’s first album for Sonyowned Columbia records had been mixed, with many fans abandoning the group amid accusations of selling out. The success of the first single from the bands’ fifth album, Americana, had angered those who thought that the deflated sales of Ixnay had been an apt punishment for such disloyalty to the scene.
It soon began to feel like you couldn’t list The Offspring as a favourite band without being lectured as to how they’d sold out by leaving Epitaph to take Columbia’s megabucks. This self righteous condemnation seemed to stem from the success of Smash, the album that first got major airtime in the United States and caught the interest of the big-time record labels. “All of a sudden, without doing anything differently, we had songs on the radio and MTV.
We got a lot of shit for that” says Noodles (real name, Kevin Wasserman), the band’s guitarist and appointed spokesman, as he taps ash from a cigarette into a plastic cup. I point out that one of the main criticisms at the time was that it wasn’t ‘punk’ to take the corporate dollar. There are incredulous looks all around and I am reminded that we are talking about passing up a multi-million dollar recording deal: “After all, nobody said it was punk to be stupid.
Perhaps not, but to be so totally unapologetic about the situation was surely not a wise move. I ask if the band ever got sick of the single which started the whole storm. “That all came before that, we didn’t really get that much shit for Pretty Fly. There were a couple of celebrities who weren’t all that crazy about it, but we’d had problems from the first time we had songs on the radio five, six years before that with Smash.
But once we’d left Epitaph to go to Columbia all of that pretty much subsided. There were still a couple of people squawking about it but, whatever, get over it.” When I ask which celebrities had been most vocal in their criticism there is a slight pause and a collective smile breaks out across the room, “Everlast gave us a lot of shit.” Who are Everlast? No, it’s not a stupid question.
This is the secret behind the band’s goodnatured acceptance of their detractors • they know that they’ve got the staying power and, what’s more important, the catalogue of bounce along poppunk hits needed to outlive the critics. Tonight’s gig at the Brixton Academy is a sold out event and, thanks to seven albums of material to sift through and an obviously appreciative crowd, they comfortably meet the fans’ expectations.
During the last summer the band also played the Warped Tour for the first time • it seems that after so many years in the business they can handle gigs of any size and significance with equal aplomb. “It’s fun to be able to do both, to play a club with 500 and then go out and do a festival that’s huge. Being able to mix it up is cool.
We got to play CBGBs [a punk club famous for seminal gigs by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols amongst others] the other day, it was a benefit gig • they’re having trouble with their landlord. So we got to do that, and then our next show was a pretty big festival in Milan; there were, like, 80,000 people • it was insane, just insane.
The band’s willingness to play gigs of any size has obviously had a positive impact on their popularity, guaranteeing wide exposure whilst maintaining a sense of approachability • you can’t really imagine Madonna doing a benefit gig playing to less than an arena full of people. What has also helped is the fact that the band are keen to mix with the public, often finishing up in a bar drinking with crew members and fans after a show.
I suggest that the cynical observer might think this was a deliberate tactic to increase the fan-base and immediately wish I hadn’t. Thankfully this is the moment that some divinely sent crew member decides to make his entrance to ask for a sound-check. He quickly leaves once he has established that we are in an interview and the focus is back on my ill-advised observation.
Fortunately the tension is soon broken as the everaffable Noodles settles his glasses and, laughing, lights a second cigarette: “We do that for ourselves more than anything, I don’t think it was ever a career move to go out with fans and drink beer! We do try to do meet and greets with the fans from time to time • I think that’s just giving something back, obviously we can’t meet them all, we’d be shaking hands for the rest of our lives! Tonight, there’ll probably be some fans back stage, but it’s one of our crew guy’s birthdays, so we’ll be tying one on with him.” If there’s one thing that has distinguished this band from the classic punk-rock groups of the 1970s (other than the ability to use a fourth chord), it’s longevity. With the release of a Greatest Hits album in the last year, however, it seems as though The Offspring might have come to the end of the line.
Already weakened by the departure of drummer Ron Welty in 2003 and plagued by a series of solid, but indifferent, album and single reviews, it wouldn’t be stretching the imagination too far to think that this might be a band on the way out. Far from it, however: “We’ve actually started in the studio working on the next record already. We had talked about doing a greatest hits all the last year while we were touring and the pieces finally fell together to do it.
This way we get to play the Warped Tour, which is something we’ve wanted to do for years. “Y’know, it’s the kind of thing where we had the songs and wanted to break up the cycle that we’ve been in for the last ten years, where you make a record and then spend a year touring on it. This kind of broke up the routine a little bit.” Definitely no split in the near future then? “Absolutely not”.
Yet the fact remains that for all that the band wants to keep recording, the critical response is becoming more and more tepid with each release. Other groups that were once their peers and protégés are encroaching on their limelight. AFI, initially only able to get their CDs released on Nitro records, a label set up by front-man Dexter and bassist Greg, rose to fame on the emo wave a couple of years ago.
The impact of this band pales into insignificance, however, when compared to Green Day’s hugely successful reinvention last year. Sales for American Idiot have topped four million while The Offspring’s last album, Splinter, was a comparatively low-key affair. Of course, it’s not fair to compare directly • two years ago Green Day themselves were in a seemingly irreversible decline that was far worse than what The Offspring have to face today.
Nonetheless the tour schedules stuck up on the walls of the dressing room that are plastered with Bushisms seem to indicate a similar political awareness which might be translated into future releases. Will the next Offspring album be an anti-Bush rock opera? It seems plausible. Yet the band does not appear to be taken with the idea: “As a band it’s just not who we are, we’re not really a political group.
Why have the quotes up then? “It’s not hard to do is it? There’s some great ones on dubyaspeaks.com, they just put up lists of quotes that are just so asinine • it’s great. He just can’t get his foot out of his mouth.” In fact, the whole Bush administration seems to be something that confuses this band: “With 9/11 all he really had to do was give a speech that united the nation, and he swore revenge which everyone got behind. But then he just fucking went off therails.
As the band arranges to get going in order to prepare for tonight’s gig, I’m struck by a final question that relates to a description of them as ‘the most reliable band in punk-rock’ • a dubious honour and one which seems to sum up the mixed critical response to The Offspring as the elder statesmen of punk rock.
Do they have any response to this assessment? Once again, it’s Noodles who responds with a low peal of laughter: “We like to show up on time for interviews and things, I guess we’re putting the punk back into punctuality! But other than that, I don’t know about reliable. I think there is something to it. “I mean, we show up and play our shows • and we really try to do a good show every day.
We don’t cancel shows • there’s been some bands, Sublime for example, who had gnarly drug problems and bailed out on a lot of shows. We don’t do that y’know, if we say we’re going to play it has to be some pretty bad illness for us to not show up.” And with that they file out of the door to complete preparations for tonight’s gig. The nature of the punkrock scene is that it is always going to be unsettled • the audience comes and goes, as do the bands.
One gets the feeling, though, that The Offspring will always be chugging along • a comforting thought.
9th Feb 2006