Had ’s frontman and chief songwriter Dexter Holland not swung by his local Starbucks for a caffeine hit in the mid-90s, the US punk rockers might never written their biggest song. Holland was sitting in his car, waiting in the drive-thru queue, when the server caught his attention. “There was a white kid with a sideways hat,” he recalls.
“Orange County is a pretty middle-ofthe-road place, and he was definitely out of his element in how he was presenting himself. He was trying to be something he definitely wasn’t. I was alone in the car and I just said it out loud to myself, like: ‘That guy’s pretty fly for a white guy.
’ It was like: ‘Ding ding ding! Whoa, that’s a good line!’” And so , a track that would become The Offspring’s sole UK No.1, was born. It was just the boost they needed.
Their 1994 third album had made the Californian quartet huge, but then just a few years later they were wondering if their time had passed. “We went from frickin’ zero to a hundred with ,” Holland recounts. “We couldn’t even sell out our local bar in Huntington Beach when came out, then all of a sudden, it was this worldwide thing, which was amazing.
” But rather than try to repeat the trick when it came to making a follow-up, they wanted to expand the styles in their sound. The approach didn’t pay off. The resulting record, 1997’s , stalled.
“It was inevitably the sophomore slump,” Holland reasons now. “I’m really proud of , I think it was really.
