The Offspring, inarguably one of the most successful punk bands in history, have reached the quarter century mark. Of course, the first 10 years was mostly a hobby, considering their landmark Smash wasn’t released until 1994. Flash forward 15 years, and the band’s sold over 30 million albums, still producing hit radio singles, evidenced by “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” off last year’s Rise And Fall, Rage And Grace.
But some things have changed for the California-based group. While once drawing the ire of parent-teacher groups across the country for angsty deep cuts about road rage like “Bad Habit” being sung by teenagers across the country, the band are now family men themselves, and many of the teenagers are, too.
Still, much remains the same. Having long drawn on social issues for lyrical inspiration (in the great punk tradition), the band is still drawing attention to “messed up” stuff as they did 25 years ago via their music. And as guitarist Noodles explains, they’ve got a whole new album on the horizon to fill with socially conscious, hooky punk cuts.
You’ve been out on tour almost a month and a half now?
About five, six weeks. It’s been good, shows have been going really well. We started out with Alkaline Trio and the Street Dogs, and then we had Shiny Toy Guns and the Street Dogs, and now we have Dropkick Murphys and Time Again. The Dropkicks we wanted to work with since we did Warped with them back in 2005, just a great band, really cool guys, and they couldn’t do the whole tour, so we worked it out, just kind of added other bands where they fit. All the bands are great. They run that by us, and we the thumbs up or thumbs down.
Why the ‘Shit Is Fucked Up’ tour?
Well, you know, one, for obvious reasons. Shit’s pretty fucked up (laughs). There’s a song on the record, ‘Stuff Is Messed Up,’ and that’s the line it in it, ‘I know one thing / Shit is fucked up.’ And the song was written about a lot of things going on, a couple of wars, this was before the economy got even worse, but the economy wasn’t great, natural disasters and nobody knowing how to react to them, and then the news media just not really handling the job well at all. All this stuff going on in the world and you have Britney Spears shaving her head for 24 hours on the news. They’re like one trick ponies, and every other day, they change tricks.
