Lawrence.com

The Offspring has always been a band intent on forcing an opinion from its audience. Loved and loathed in equal numbers, the Southern California quartet has perpetually gotten people talking, be it with praise or condemnation. Currently in its 16th year of recording and touring, The Offspring can easily command the various trappings of rock stardom � packed venues, platinum discs and groupies galore. But as a group that grew up among the California punk elite, typical notions of success don't easily satisfy, and The Offspring has continually searched for ways to make its fans matter most.

"The more you suffer/the more it shows you really care," yowls Offspring vocalist Dexter Holland on one of his band's biggest hits. Big words, but ones that ring true, according to bassist Greg Kriesel.

"Dexter's easygoing, but his songs are his own," Kriesel says, phoning from a New Orleans soundcheck. "You can suggest something, but for the most part he wants it done his way. I've been doing it for 17 years. so I've been able to adjust to it. I accepted my role in the band a while ago."

That sort of "democracy" is not atypical for group like The Offspring, which has consistently done things its own way, ever-striving to narrow the gap between band and audience.

Igniting audiences

Forming in 1985 and cutting its teeth on Southern Cali's thriving metallic-punk scene, The Offspring (Kriesel, Holland, guitarist Kevin "Noodles" Wasserman and drummer Ron Welty) earned its success the old-fashioned way.

"The first 10 years there were plenty of times when we played in front of seven people at a dinner club or something," Kriesel remembers.

In 1989, the band signed with Epitaph Records, which lent the group just enough money to record its self-titled debut. Four years and a few thousand gigs later, "Ignition" was released, creating a strong underground buzz that set the stage for 1994's "Smash." The album was appropriately titled � "Come Out and Play," "Self Esteem" and "Gotta Get Away" became commercial radio and MTV staples. "Smash" moved more than 6 million copies in the United States, making it the best-selling indie record in history. Though The Offspring's transition from garage band to stadium supergroup certainly wasn't overnight, the mainstream success of "Smash" took the group by surprise.

"Looking back, I don't know if I can really think about what it was," Kriesel says of the record's appeal. "It just kind of happened and we went with it. That album sort of built up the charts. It entered at 176 and went up every week up for six or eight months or something. So it didn't really happen all at once."

Unfortunately, "Smash" proved to be a curse as well as a blessing for The Offspring. Though the multiplatinum sales and sold-out shows were the stuff of rock dreams, the band soon found itself embroiled in a series of bitter disputes with Epitaph owner (and former Bad Religion frontman) Brett Gurewitz. According to the band, Gurewitz attempted to sell Epitaph and its roster of artists to a major label, while Gurewitz contended that The Offspring had become greedy to the point of exasperation.

"We just couldn't work anything out with them," Kriesel says of Epitaph. "We were trying to renegotiate with them. They were the ones who suggested we renegotiate, because they wanted us to sign for a few more albums. The negotiations just fell apart over minor things, and our relationship with them fell apart and we felt like we had to leave."

After numerous lawsuits and legal round robins, the band signed with Columbia Records, which reportedly bought out The Offspring's Epitaph contract for $10 million. The punk community was duly outraged and cries of "sellout" were heard around the nation. Exacerbating the problem were the stinging remarks about The Offspring made to the press by Gurewitz and former labelmates such as Pennywise.

"We knew what happened and they knew what happened," Kriesel declares. "They knew we didn't just bolt. Looking back, I think we made the mistake of not talking to the press. We thought it would be better to not say anything, and it ended up that people only got one side of the story."

As for the hardcore fans who abandoned The Offspring when it went to the majors, Kriesel believes they had already left. "We lost all those people once we hit MTV and once we became big anyway. So I don't know how much of an impact that it had, as far as album sales or losing our fan base. I'm sure we lost some, but those people were gone before that anyway."

Ice, ice baby

The Offspring's 1997 Columbia debut, "Ixnay on Hombre," was, by all accounts, a disappointment, barely managing to sell 1 million copies and straying far from the public's consciousness. Though "Ixnay" was hardly the chart-topper Columbia was looking for, the band was happy with its efforts.

"We thought it was a really good, really strong album," Kriesel says. "The only problem was that there was no standout single. There were a lot of songs that were kind of mediocre, those kind of middle songs. I don't know if we picked the wrong ones or what happened with it. Anytime you do worse than you did before, there's always gonna be disappointment. We did 10, 12 million on 'Smash' and "Ixnay" did a million, so it wasn't anything bad. If that had been our first album, we would've been totally stoked."

Nonplused, The Offspring sprinted back into the studio, churning out 1998's "Americana," which scored big with the novelty-ish hit "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)." The across-the-board success of the song launched The Offspring into a whole new stratosphere of surreal rock stardom. Though 1998 contained many bizarre moments for the onetime punk rockers, the pinnacle experience occurred at a Los Angeles concert where the band was joined onstage by none other than Vanilla Ice, one of "Fly's" prime targets.

"That was one of the funnier things we've ever done on tour," Kriesel says, still relishing the memory. "It was really cool of him to do that, because it was kind of making fun of him, but he was really good about it. We'd never met him, so we just called him up and he was totally into it. It was probably the biggest response we've ever got for anything we've done."

Interestingly, "Fly" set another record for the band: it's currently considered the most-downloaded song in history, being digitally bootlegged more than 22 million times during one 10-week period. Those downloads didn't hurt The Offspring's CD sales a bit: "Americana" sold nearly 11 million copies worldwide, opening up the band to a new generation of fans, many of whom had never heard the group previously.

"It doesn't really bother us," Kriesel says of The Offspring's newfound fans. "When we sold as many records as that album sold, there's gonna be people who just know the one song. We're lucky enough to headline our shows lately, so we're not really playing in front of somebody else's crowd. At radio shows when there's a bunch of bands on the bill, there's always someone in there flipping us off."

That sort of no-holds-barred evaluation is something that has become relatively normal for The Offspring, which seems to be one of those bands that some critics, music fans and peers refuse to embrace.

"It's mixed," Kriesel admits, when asked how other groups react to The Offspring. "I think the bands that are up there at that kind of level seem to respect us because we've gone through the same things that they have. Some of the lower bands, we'll go to play a radio show and ... I don't know if it's disrespect but they just don't ... We're kind of like the big band coming in and they're like, 'Who the hell are you guys?' They have the attitude that they're making the 'real' music and we're just getting lucky or something."

Online conspiracy

During the summer of 2000, The Offspring entered the studio to record tracks for its latest effort, "Conspiracy of One." Given the band's online luck with "Pretty Fly," the group came up with a radical idea: put the entire new album on its Web site (www.offspring.com) as a free download. Columbia Records was unsurprisingly dismayed by the idea, and quickly threatened to sue The Offspring if it proceeded.

"They were going through a case with Napster at the time," Kriesel explains. "They felt that if they allowed us to do it, they would compromise their case. If they let a band do it and it's still successful, then Napster can argue that (file sharing) doesn't hurt sales."

Thus, when "Conspiracy" was released late last year, it quickly became a hit on sites like Napster and Gnutella, yet was unavailable on the band's own site. Though The Offspring has received a mountain of press for its efforts, the band is quick to point out that it's not here to crusade on behalf of file sharing.

"For us, it was already there," Kriesel explains. "If it hadn't existed, I don't know if we would've said, 'Hey, I've got this idea: Let's give our album away free!' We knew it was going to be out there anyway, and we wanted to be able to communicate with people who are already downloading it. That's the ironic part: Anybody could put it on the Internet but us."

Fortunately, The Offspring still had a trick or two up its sleeve. Since it couldn't give fans free music, the band opted for a more direct approach, offering $1 million to a randomly selected fan who downloaded "Original Prankster" � the first "Conspiracy" single and the only song sanctioned for download on www.offspring.com.

"It started with the Internet thing � to entice people to come to our Web site rather than Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or whatever else," Kriesel says. "Even though the (free downloading) thing fell through, we just kind of stayed with it and decided it would be cool to give back to a fan. Everyone's giving away a million dollars these days, so we figured what the hell."

The $1 million prize eventually went to Ashley Hitchcock, a 14-year-old fan from Georgia who was floored when The Offspring showed up at her front door like rock's answer to Ed McMahon.

"I think she was more stunned than anything else," Kriesel recalls. "She's only 14, so we're hoping it doesn't screw her up."

Has making money screwed The Offspring up?

"I don't think so," Kriesel says. "I think we were old enough by the time it hit for us. We were all around 30 and established in our ways. If it had happened when we were in our early 20s, we would've been out partying every night and renting limos."