Discussion topics:

Dexter Dexter: This is more press than we've ever seen in our entire lives. More press than America.
Noodles Noodles: Anywhere. I feel like we should be doing a puppet show or something up here. It's weird.
MuCoMo: You've made the biggest selling independent albumof all time. How does that make you feel?
Dexter It hasn't really changed our perspective, or the way we do things. We've stayed with the independent label. We've stayed with everybody that we were with. We have the same booking agents and all that stuff, so, we really are trying to let it affect us as little as possible.


MuCoMo So you're not thinking about moving from the independent label to a major.
Dexter That's not what we're doing now. We're renegotiating with Epitaph for more records. I don't feel that you have to compromise what you want to do in order to further your band's interest, as I think we kind of showed by staying on Epitaph. I don't know what more a band could ask for. We've managed to do it this way, so we're happy where we are. We feel like they stuck by us when no one else wanted to sign us, and we want to be loyal back to them, too.


MuCoMo What other bands have been your inspiration?
Noodles The bands that tie us together as a band are a lot of the bands that came from the same area that we're from, from Orange County. It was a lot of the punk bands at the time, as well as the Dead Kennedys from San Francisco. But down in LA you had TSOL, Agent Orange, Adolescents. That's the kind of music that's tied us together. As well as Simon and Garfunkel and Abba.
Dexter Everyone likes Abba, right?


MuCoMo Why do you think your kind of music is so popular right now?
Dexter I don't really know. I think we're the wrong people to ask. You have to ask all the kids out there. The music's been around a long time. People used to say, "Oh, punk is dead" or whatever. It was never dead. It just kind of existed at a lower level. I think maybe kids nowadays relate to the music a little bit more. I think there was, at least in America, more of an illusion of an American Dream and a good life and all that during the Reagan years that people kind of bought into. And now I think people are realizing it's not really all true. A lot of things punk bands sing about are something that they now are starting to relate to.


MuCoMo Do you relate to the punk bands of the 70s.
Noodles Yeah. The bands that came out of that era were some of the first bands we started listening to. Bands like X, the Germs. The Dickies is one of my favorite bands. The Dickies and the Sex Pistols were the first two punk rock records that I got and they dramatically changed my life.
Dexter And the Ramones. Bands like that too. There's been a lot of different....You call it all punk rock, but there's a lot of different styles of bands all the way from the Sex Pistols to the Dead Kennedys to Bad Brains to Green Day, or whatever. But I think there's a common thread throughout all the bands and all the times. There's a real attitude in the music. It's a real rebellious kind of fuck you attitude about it, and the music's real energetic, and the lyrics generally talk about something that is kind of real.
Noodles As opposed to just like girls and cars.
Dexter Yeah, get in my hot rod and let's go for a ride, baby. There aren't too many punk bands that sing about stuff like that. We relate to all that stuff because I think there's a common thread that goes through all of it.
MuCoMo Is there a difference between the punk rock now and the punk rock of the 70s?
Dexter It sure sells a lot more now, doesn't it.
Noodles Everyone these days - at least all the big labels - punk seems to be where the money is right now, or at least it's one the new areas where there's money. Everyone seems to be scrambling to that unfortunately. We don't want punk rock to became a label for selling jeans and cars and things like that. It certainly has changed since the 70s when it was really brand new and cutting edge, but it's been happening ever since. Punk rock has never died. It's always been building, just at an underground level.
Dexter Because there's been something real about it. Unfortunately, it does seem like it's becoming exploited more by major labels and that kind of thing. You really saw this whole thing happen with grunge, where it started off mainly on Sub Pop and out of Seattle, and then all of sudden a couple of bands broke and then it became this big fashion thing, and they sell grunge clothes at fashion stores. And then it becomes totally ridiculous. It becomes a parody of what it was meant to be, which was something which was anti-establishment and all that, and then what's left to do except move on to something else. And right now a lot of people are kind of seeing punk rock that way, I think, because it's starting to get more successful. And I don't really know what we can do about that except try to stick to what we want to do. At this point we still stuck on our old label and we're trying to not make a joke out of it.
MuCoMo You guys come out of the old punk generation. Do you identify with the young punks out there now?
Noodles I like the fact that we have a young audience. The young people are the ones that are always very idealistic and still have some hope. They're just coming of age and they're faced with all the crap that we all came to realize at some point - that this world really isn't as nice and neat as everyone led us to believe, and yet they still remain idealistic about it. They don't get jaded yet or cynical yet. I'm stoked that we have that audience.
Dexter Maturitywise, we're also about 12 years old, so we relate to the young kids really well, actually.


MuCoMo On a different subject, you started your own label, Nitro.
Dexter Yeah I did. There were bands that we've been friends with for a long time that haven't been as fortunate as us. We go picked up by Epitaph and that helped us out a lot, but there are a lot of friends of ours who didn't have that kind of break. And once this record started doing well, I had the opportunity that I felt to help out some of these bands. So, I picked up Guttermouth and put out their record, and recently I put out the Vandals. For my label, I want to promote bands from where we're from, which is Orange County, so I'm focusing on Orange County punk rock. But I'm really stoked on the idea that if we could actually help other bands that come up, that's what we want to do.
MuCoMo Is there any competition between Fat Mike's Fat Wreck Chords label and yours?
Dexter Oh, his label sucks, man (laughs)...No not at all. We talk all the time. We call each other on the phone, we help each other out. The Offspring has taken Fat Wreck Chords bands on the road, and NOFX has taken Nitro bands on the road, so it's a good situation. There's enough room for everybody. There's plenty of good music, and everybody should be helping each other out.


MuCoMo What about the first record - what do you think when you hear that now?
Noodles As bad as therest of the shit. A little bit faster. It's pretty raw - we were still pretty young then.
Dexter We were a pretty bad band for a long time actually.
Noodles We still are.
Dexter We decided to be a band without having instruments. We just kind of decided and went out and bought stuff. We didn't know how to play anything, we never took lessons and we just messed around, so, it's taken us this long just to become mediocre.


MuCoMo You say your roots are grounded in Orange County. For those that have never been there, what's it like?
Noodles It's a real conservative place, it's like houses and back yards, that's the whole of Orange County.
Dexter It's like being beaten over the head with mediocrity. There isn't much to do except go and work in McDonald's or something. Yeah, it's a different set of circumstances than you have in the city where there's drugs and guns and probably more violence and that kind of thing, but the suburbs kind of kill you in a different way. You have so many kids that are just so bored.
Noodles Yeah, the Vandals have a new record out and one of their lines is "Orange County is not the breeding ground for blues," but what it is a breeding ground for is complacency. And there's just a lot of emphasis on image - look clean cut, drive a nice car, get a decent career. And as we were growing up, we started to realize that there's a lot more to life. You know, a lot of the values and images you want to place upon us are just plain bullshit. It's all a reaction to that.
Dexter It's bullshit to see all the people around who's only goal in life is to grow up and be a dentist and drive a Mercedes Benz. It just didn't seem real to us.


MuCoMo Do you consider yourself an underground band?
Dexter It depends what you mean by underground. The fact of it is that we're very much thrown into the mainstream at this point as far as the way we're perceived and the number of records that are out there. As far as the way we feel and what we do musically, I would say that we're still different than a lot of the stuff that's out there, so in that sense, I guess you could still call us underground.
Noodles What I see happening in a lot of music right now is - and I think it's favorable for the whole music scene - there's a lot more common, salt-of-the-earth kind of feel in the people playing music right now. Bands like Weezer and even Pearl Jam - a lot of these people to me seem to just be decent people. They're not adopting all these rock star trappings. It's not really underground anymore in the small clubs, it's just a common...
Dexter It's getting better. When we were starting the band, the glam rock things was so big, with bands like Faster Pussycat and Poison, and I just despised that shit. The rock star, bullshit attitude. It was so lame.
Noodles The Ted Nugent's of the world.
Dexter It was so conceited. And not that all rock bands are like that, but there was a lot of them, it was very popular. And I just fuckin' hated it, and we were never like that, and none of the punk bands we knew were like that. It was a very down to earth kind of thing, and you're seeing a lot more of that now, with bands like Pearl Jam and stuff, and I think it's really cool. It's a good sign.


MuCoMo How come you didn't print all the lyrics for Smash?
Dexter Basically we were kind of lazy when we recorded our record. We had no idea anything would happen with this record and we were on tour with Pennywise, and we were having a tough time finishing the record, and I'm really bad about writing lyrics, and they said, the only way we're going to get this record out is if we just print up the sleeves even though you haven't finished up the lyrics yet, because we hadn't finished recording. Basically it's because the lyrics weren't written yet for some of the record.
Noodles I wouldn't really say lazy, I would say disorganized.
Dexter We did go back, and later, the second pressing had all the lyrics in it. So some of them have and some of them don't.


MuCoMo You used Tom Wilson as a producer for both albums. What about that?
Dexter When we were talking about the bands we were influenced by growing up, all their records were produced by Tom Wilson. The Adolescents, TSOL, all the Vandal's records, the Dead Kennedys. We were just amazed because we loved those records so much that we kind of tracked this guy down. We had to find him, and he agreed to do it, and we got along really well and we just used him ever since. We've recorded everything together for about 5 years.
Noodles Actually more like 6. Since 89.
Dexter He's really helped us out a lot. It's good to have him along.


MuCoMo Where do you think Offspring will be in 10 years?
Noodles That's when the drug abuse is probably gonna kick in.
Dexter Yeah, we'll be reaching alcoholism....In 10 years...I don't think we'll be around in 10 years. I think we'll be onto something else.
Noodles We'll be close to retirement by then, I think.