With a good-natured laugh, Dexter Holland recalls that “so many people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I thought your band’s music was really happy – until I read the lyrics.’” Sometimes maligned, often misunderstood, for 40 years The Offspring have been a standard-bearer for the kind of American punk rock that cracked the U.S. mainstream in the middle years of the ’90s. In this, the group from Orange County played as pivotal a role as any; released in 1994, to this day their third LP, Smash, remains the highest-selling independent rock release of all time.
Its success took everyone by surprise. As his band became staples of the airwaves, guitarist Noodles was still working as a janitor at a local junior school. Raking leaves, each morning the pupils at an adjoining high school would tell him that they’d just seen him on MTV. As Smash went gold, and then platinum, and then more, he finally handed in notice. He hasn’t looked back.
Here, we join Dexter and Noodles in a review of the highlights of the past, and the promises of the present…