The Offspring in 1995 (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images) We played with DI and TSOL on their reunion tour in 1989.” We played with Agnostic Front one time in San Bernardino. “We’d take turns in who would headline the show. “One of the bands we played with the most was Guttermouth,” says Noodles of the Huntington Beach urchins, who Dexter would later sign to his own label, Nitro. This guy goes, ‘come and do a show here, we can just mess up the house!’ So we played the show and the people there destroyed the house!” “We once played a show at a house that was going to be demolished. So he’d rent out generators then pass out flyers, and he would go about 50 miles out into the desert and just set up and have concerts. There was this guy in Las Vegas who used to put on shows but he couldn’t find a venue.
So we started playing more shows further afield. Dexter: “When we started out there weren’t really places to have concerts and there wasn’t too much of a scene happening like there was in San Francisco. That lack of a real scene in their hometown had other consequences for the band. There were a lot of great bands like Social Distortion, TSOL and The Adolescents that sprung up in the early 80s but that whole scene died out.” “It was a really exciting time about four years before we started. So what was the Orange County punk scene like when Offspring were starting out in the mid-late 80s? “It was kind of in a lull,” says Dexter. Dexter: “Jello Biafra from Dead Kennedys once said that after Ramones did this one US tour in 1978, almost every town they played in, all of a sudden, five new bands sprung up.” It was that DIY spirit that kicked off the entire SoCal – not to mention the US – punk scene. It was music that really related to average kids and music that the average kid could do.” I think it was more the idea that these bands put forward: anyone can do it. “There was something about the punk bands when I was a kid that inspired me, rather than wanting to be in a band,” he says. I just started jamming with friends taking guitars down the park and having a few beers.”ĭexter was a punk fan from the word go. “They showed me I didn’t have to be Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen to play the guitar. “I was listening to bands like Ramones and The Clash,” says Noodles. Influences that shaped their early sound were wide-ranging. Ron Welty joined in 1986, just after The Offspring recorded their first self-financed seven inch I ’ll Be Waiting. “I think it was actually James our original drummer who came up with it.” “The Offspring was the only name everyone could agree on,” he tells us.
“It was just a horrible name,” says Noodles, who was working as a school janitor at the time –a job he continued until sales of Smash took off. Plagued by their awful moniker, they decided it was time for a change. The Offspring live at the Metropolis festival in Rotterdam on Septem(Image credit: Paul Bergen/Redferns)
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