The Offspring members Dexter Holland and Noodles recently spoke to Kerrang! magazine about the 25th anniversary of their breakthrough record Smash.
Noodles recalls, “Prior to Smash, we were pretty much a part-time band. Even when we blew up, I didn’t even quit my job [as a janitor at the Earl Warren School in Anaheim] outright – I took a three-year leave of absence. I was still working there when we were blowing up ’cause I’d promised my boss I wouldn’t quit until the end of the school year. There was this one high school girl that I knew [there] and she used to see me in the morning and say to me, ‘Man, what are you doing? I just saw you on MTV!’
There were a lot of things at that time that we didn’t do. We didn’t do any late-night TV shows until Days Go By [in 2012]! On Smash, we turned down Saturday Night Live, simply because we didn’t think we were good enough. Again, I think that has something to do with the fact that we were a part-time band.
We did do the Billboard Awards, which was on TV, but it wasn’t widely viewed. The organisers were pissed off that we played Bad Habit rather than one of the hits, but we thought, ‘We’re punks. We’re not a pop band. Let’s go out and fuck things up a little bit.'”
Dexter added, “We actually considered playing Too Drunk To Fuck [by Dead Kennedys] at the Billboard show. In the end we played Bad Habit. But we played raw, and at the end I dived into the crowd. I remember the looks on the faces of the people at the front as I did this, and thinking, ‘Wow, these aren’t the same people that come to see us when we play [punk venue] Gilman Street!'”
Smash was originally released on April 8th, 1994 via Epitaph, and was the first album released on that label to receive gold and platinum certification thanks to the hits “Come Out and Play”, “Self Esteem”, and “Gotta Get Away”. Along with Green Day‘s Dookie, Smash was responsible for helping bring punk rock into the mainstream, as well as paving the way for the emerging pop punk scene of the 90’s.