I have little ones now – five and eight – so that changes things. When I’m home now, it’s not like I’m going to go golfing for a week, and I’ve got to say, I really love that. I’m certainly not a young father but I’m glad it happened when it did. I was really busy with the band, especially early on, but I have a different perspective now and I get to enjoy some of these moments in ways I wouldn’t have when I was younger.
Do your children take a natural liking to the kind of music you make?
They do, but they’re also at the age where they love my band, which is awesome. Eventually, when they turn 13 or 14, my band’s not going to be cool to them anymore.
It’s interesting you say that, because The Offspring’s brand of punk is making quite the comeback. Have you noticed that?
You know, they say the pendulum swings. I remember about ten years ago, music seemed to have changed such that people were not playing stuff like ours anymore. Lucky for us, it seems to have come back in our direction.
I noticed when we were playing a show recently that it was all 14-year-olds in the front row, and I was thinking about how those kids weren’t there the last time we performed in the city because they would have been nine or something. So yeah, I do feel like there are fresh faces coming in. Then, you have older people in the back, some of whom are probably parents, right? To see something cross-generational like that is the coolest thing. I remember seeing that when I was a kid, whether it was the Rolling Stones or AC/DC, people would come with their kids. I’m also seeing it now with bands like Pennywise. I know those guys and I go to their shows, and you see people my age and then all these little kids – “groms” they call them, with the sideways hats and motocross shirts.
Witnessing punk age that way is quite fascinating since people have always been skeptical of what it would look like past 40.
Yeah, I can’t quite figure it out. I was driving down the street in Huntington Beach, which is where I live, and I saw this high-school kid wearing a Black Flag t-shirt. Now I’m thinking about how Black Flag is from 1978, but let’s say the 80s – you know, you’re going on 40–50 years. Can you imagine if I was in high school and wearing a Glenn Miller t-shirt?
There’s something about this kind of music that has lasted the span of time, like the Ramones came up back when music was changing so fast. The 40s were so drastically different from the 50s, the 60s were a whole other thing and then the 70s completely reinvented that, so it’s strange to see punk have this longevity that you would never think it had because it wasn’t crafted music. I guess it resonates with young people in an entirely different way.
Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Café in Chinatown harboured the local punk scene in Los Angeles for years. Was there a distinct “scene” that helped cultivate and amplify The Offspring during the
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