Dexter: “I remember having a big discussion with Jim [Guerinot], our manager, and he said, ‘You know this is very new for you guys. I’ve seen the way the industry can really chew up people. Look at Kurt Cobain…’ I sensed there was a change where people wanted to back away from all the exposure. And there can be a personal cost to all this. And he was, like, ‘Why don’t we go slow and see how things go?’”
Noodles: “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: “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!’”
Noodles: “I’m not a nostalgic person, but I remember enjoying that year [1994], for sure. There was a lot of heady stuff going on, and there was some stress too, but it was such an exciting time. I remember our friends’ bands were getting more notice, too. We were touring with Rancid at the time and Madonna wanted to sign them. She even came to one of the shows… she watched Rancid and then left before us!”
Brett: “As punkers, our allegiance was to the indie stores… [and] suddenly these stores were flourishing because they could buy The Offspring’s Smash, and they were selling tons of the things. It helped indie retail. It helped fanzines and magazines. It raised the sea level within the whole punk community. There are distributors in Europe and Australia that cite that time as the period when their companies grew and they were given the opportunity to establish themselves. So it had a very powerful knock-on effect. Those are my people, so I’m really proud to have played a part in all of that.”
Dexter: “The fact that we did it independently seems even more significant now. It’s the part I’m most proud of. The success we had came off our own legs. There wasn’t this huge promotional machine behind it. And promotion doesn’t detract from how good a record is – sometimes you just need a push to get people to hear something that’s worth hearing. But we didn’t have that. We had to get jump-started on our own. I loved that time. No matter how good things were after – and there’s been some great times – there was only one time when we went from almost nothing to all the way up there. It was an amazing thing to be a part of.”