Kriesel is engaged to be married in September to a woman he has known for six years. Holland married the sweetheart he had before he got famous, with the 1995 nuptials graced by a string quartet playing punk tunes. 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. He got elbowed in the ribs and face, like any other pit denizen. 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.
The band’s CD booklets and album covers have used small or oblique action shots but no portrait photos of the members. “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. All still go to the clubs to watch bands, and they report that the experience is typically hassle-free. 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.
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. Walk in the unmarked door, and you’re confronted by a menacing, pistol-wielding clown, painted in Dayglo colors on the opposite wall. 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.Īt Nitro, the hairstyles on the employees and the music blasting in the office is punk, and so is the artwork. “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. 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. 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 OFFSPRING GONE AWAY ALBUM FULL
(A full review will appear in Sunday’s Calendar section.) “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. 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. 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.
Now, for this band led by an erstwhile scientist, comes the pressure of life at the other end of the microscope. The Offspring won honor and glory in becoming Orange County’s most celebrated punk-rock specimen.