On and Offspring

GARDEN GROVE — The Offspring won honor and glory in becoming Orange County’s most celebrated punk-rock specimen. Now, for this band led by an erstwhile scientist, comes the pressure of life at the other end of the microscope.

Their actions scrutinized, their motives often questioned, their group personality sometimes stereotyped, and their status as commercial high-achievers subjecting them to the marketplace’s inflated expectations, the four band members have learned how uncomfortable life under the lens can be.

Pressured by the mass-market, targeted for humiliation and scorn by some of their former brethren in the punk underground, the Offspring nevertheless has kept its equilibrium in producing a follow-up to “Smash,” the 1994 album that helped redefine punk’s place in rock culture.

“Ixnay on the Hombre,” which comes out Tuesday, succeeds splendidly on musical terms with songs that are almost preternaturally catchy and cannily arranged, while packing plenty of wallop and zoom. (A full review will appear in Sunday’s Calendar section.)

Amid widespread talk of punk-alternative rock losing its vitality both creatively and commercially, the Offspring is one specimen that has a good chance of continuing to flourish.

Three years ago, the Offspring was just another struggling act on the punk circuit. Its singer, Dexter Holland, composed most of the band’s music on his daily drives to USC, where his colleagues knew him as Bryan Holland, a Ph.D. candidate in microbiology who was studying the cloning of viruses.

Then KROQ and MTV swooped in. Modern-rock radio and music television became the two-headed genie that ushered these startled Aladdins onto a flying carpet previously beyond imagining for a punk band on an independent record label.

“Smash” sold nearly 5 million copies in the United States, and more than 8 million worldwide. Only one punk album has sold more--Green Day’s “Dookie,” a major-label release that also arrived in 1994 and benefited from the same media forces and mass-audience awakening as “Smash.”

When it came to the purists in the punk community, Holland, Greg Kriesel, Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman and Ron Welty had flown way beyond the line Thomas Wolfe wrote about in his novel about the costs of fame, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

The band members themselves, however, say they have been able to go home again--home meaning not their artistic cradle in the underground punk scene, but the low-key everyday existence they were used to leading in Orange County before they became famous.

“It really wasn’t that hard to get back to normal life,” Holland said in a recent interview at the office where he runs Nitro Records. He and Kriesel established the label with some of their “Smash” earnings, to provide a forum for such grass-roots punk acts as the Orange County bands Guttermouth, the Vandals, and One Hit Wonder.

At Nitro, the hairstyles on the employees and the music blasting in the office is punk, and so is the artwork. Walk in the unmarked door, and you’re confronted by a menacing, pistol-wielding clown, painted in Dayglo colors on the opposite wall. The wall-length tank of tropical fish behind Holland’s desk is the only thing you might expect to find in the office suite of a corporate mogul; he says they relax him.

The Offspring members say they continue to fit in locally much as they did back in the early part of their 12-year career, when the band couldn’t draw more than 150 fans to an Orange County gig. All still go to the clubs to watch bands, and they report that the experience is typically hassle-free.

“We’re not instantly recognized faces, and that was partly by design,” Holland said, noting that the Offspring avoided making videos that lingered on facial close-ups or invited a cult of personality.

The band’s CD booklets and album covers have used small or oblique action shots but no portrait photos of the members. As a result, Wasserman said in a separate interview, he was able to mix it up in the mosh pit at the Tiki Bar in Costa Mesa recently and watch the Dickies play without being recognized. He got elbowed in the ribs and face, like any other pit denizen.

The four band members, who are in their early 30s except for 25-year-old Welty, all bought houses with the spoils of “Smash”--Holland and Kriesel in Huntington Beach, Welty in Santa Ana and Wasserman in Lemon Heights.

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Holland married the sweetheart he had before he got famous, with the 1995 nuptials graced by a string quartet playing punk tunes. Kriesel is engaged to be married in September to a woman he has known for six years. Drummer Welty and guitarist Wasserman, both single dads, help raise their own offspring and have avidly taken up snowboarding.

Welty set up a home recording studio and worked on songs for Spinning Fish, the side band he has played in for years. Wasserman, who used to work as a janitor in Garden Grove public schools, bought a used fishing boat. Kriesel, the quiet bass player who founded the band with Holland when they took up instruments together in 1984, likes to play some golf.

The Offspring’s members say they didn’t seek the celebrity high life in Hollywood, choosing instead to hang out with the same friends they’d had all along. Dennis Crupi, a local rock singer who grew up with Holland and Kriesel, says, “They haven’t changed a bit. They just have more money. [Holland]’s just a sweet guy. They always have been and still are.”

The Offspring’s members nevertheless have gotten used to seeing the accusing finger of the hard-line anti-commercial punk camp directed at them: Welty says that there is a handful of fringe-punk fanatics in every Offspring concert crowd and that the finger they point typically is the middle one.

“It seems this is the only genre that’s like that,” said Kriesel, who appears to endure the extremist brickbats more stoically than his band-mates. “With rap or the hair bands of the ‘80s, you could go out and flaunt [stardom]. This one, you have to be embarrassed by success.”

As the Offspring prepared to follow-up its “Smash” success, relations soured with Epitaph Records, the grass-roots punk label it started with. The group then signed with Columbia Records, part of the mammoth Sony corporation. (Related story, F13.)

While wrangling over its contract went on in 1995-96, the band had a record to make. To make an honest one, Holland knew, he would have to ignore the fringe-punks’ scorn and the pressure to sell millions more the next time out, having already hit a preposterously high mark with “Smash.”

Holland did what he always had done: he got in his 1979 Toyota truck and drove, making up tunes as he rolled down the freeway. Several times a week, over the course of a few months in 1995-96, Holland said, he would travel almost the length of Orange County, from Huntington Beach to San Clemente, hang out for a while at the beach, then hold another songwriting session on the ride home.

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Success had bought the Offspring plenty of time and money to record “Ixnay,” compared with the three weeks and $20,000 they spent making “Smash.” The biggest challenge, Holland said, was mental.

“You have thoughts like, ‘If we try to make good songs, we’re perceived as sell-outs. If we make songs that aren’t commercial hits, we’re perceived as trying deliberately to get our [underground] credibility back.’ The hard part was to do the record as if nothing ever happened before.”

The Offspring came up with an album that has the same basic virtues as “Smash”--a stylistic palette that includes speeding yet ever-tuneful punk, a light and silly ska song, and weightier hard-rock anthems that can recall the likes of Nirvana and the Cult. A couple of songs carry a distinct rhythmic and vocal whiff of Jane’s Addiction.

Holland’s method is to labor over the music and arrangements, then wait until the last possible moment to write a set of lyrics. His themes on “Ixnay” are familiar--embattled defenses of the ideal of independent thought, stormy depictions of emotional turmoil, and scoffing, sardonically funny character studies. On the lighter side, “Mota” skewers a fellow whose motivation goes up in a haze of marijuana smoke, and “Me & My Old Lady” is as amiably bawdy as Aerosmith in celebrating a happy erotic match.

“There’s so many songs about tortured relationships, and it’s getting old now,” Holland said of the Offspring’s first love song not to ooze neurosis. “I thought it would be cutting across the grain to say, ‘Hey, I dig my chick.’ That’s kind of a sad commentary on society, when writing a positive song about your girlfriend is a novelty.”

On the other end of the emotional scale is “Gone Away,” an epic expression of grief that Holland won’t discuss. “It’s based on some personal experience, but I don’t want to go into it more than that,” he said.

With the brightly rollicking “I Choose,” Holland comes up with his most advanced and philosophic lyric to date, tracing moments in his life from toddler-hood to the present, and linking them to a personal credo of cheerfulness in the face of ever-lurking death and disaster.

“Life is one big train wreck. You know you’re just heading straight into the brick wall, so you might as well enjoy it on the way in,” Holland said. “It’s a positive song in a twisted, demented way.”

It’s not a philosophy that’s easy to maintain when you’re worrying about the music industry’s grandiose expectations, the punk fundamentalists’ sniping, and what the press is going to say about it all.

“It wasn’t always easy” to write and record as if nothing had changed for the Offspring, Holland admits. “There were times when it did get to you. It’s so easy to forget it’s supposed to be about music and what you enjoy.

“But you’re there with the guys in the band, and eventually the [undistracted] mind-set comes back again,” he said. “It’s a mental exercise to get yourself out of that. Either you do it or stop dead in your tracks and fall flat on your face.”

Or, as Holland sings in one of many catchy new Offspring choruses:

This is life,

What a [messed]-up thing we do.

What a nightmare come true,

Or a playground if we choose.

And I choose.