POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Fast, Raucous Offspring Gets a Heroes’ Welcome

With its album “Smash” having sold more than 6 million copiesworldwide, the Offspring has broken the platinum barrier many times over. Friday night at UC Irvine’s Bren Events Center, Orange County’s hottest-selling rock act since the Righteous Brothers’ mid-’60s heyday proved that it also can break the plastic barrier.

That happens when the skill, heat and excitement that a band generates onstage surpasses the familiar studio performances embedded in the plastic of a compact disc. Near-constant touring stretching back to last spring clearly has paid off for the Offspring. The result was a fuller and more authoritative concert than the four-man punk band gave in its last home-county appearance, seven months ago at a smaller UCI venue, Crawford Hall.

The Crawford show was good; the Bren performance, played to 5,200 mostly teen-aged fans who bought all the tickets the day they went on sale, was a powerhouse. The Offspring--singer/guitarist Bryan (Dexter) Holland, guitarist Kevin (Noodles) Wasserman, drummer Ron Welty and bassist Greg Kriesel--benefited from a sound mix that was about as good as can be expected for a loud, raucous band playing in a basketball arena. Meanwhile, Offspring fans, who paid a face price of just $13.50 per ticket, benefited from as good a bargain as can be expected from a major pop attraction.

Kriesel’s bass was a throbbing, insistent yet cleanly hitting force throughout. Welty’s drumming was crisp and propulsive, and its dry tone avoided distracting glare and clutter--a perfect approach for a melodic-punk band that wants to emphasize the vocals.

Wasserman was able to slash out meaty chords throughout his bouncing, antic, dash-about performance, and Holland, during the numbers when he picked up a guitar, used it to fine effect, picking out pealing, taut riffs. He was in fine voice, except for a few strained moments down the home stretch.

(In the style department, the previously hirsute Welty and Noodles have collectively shed about a yak’s worth of tresses and beard and now are even more closely buzz-cut than Kriesel, the one Offspring member who always looked like a prototypal punk rocker. Holland carries on in his trademark long blond bead-strung cornrows).

Through 70 minutes and 19 songs--15 minutes and six songs more than the band played in August--the Offspring was infallibly catchy without ever sacrificing thrust. The bright, ska-flavored “What Happened to You?,” the Nirvana-esque “Dirty Magic” (with Noodles strumming an acoustic guitar under Holland’s lead-electric) and the anthem-like “Smash” were among the previously missing highlights.

The biggest uproar of the night greeted the set-closing (before encores) “Self Esteem,” in which raised house lights revealed three separate mosh pits swirling on the packed arena floor. Even “L.A.P.D.,” a lesser song drawn from the band’s 1992 album “Ignition,” was more coherent and well-wrought than the routine hard-core of the album version.

The show’s wild card was a cover of Agent Orange’s 1980 release “Bloodstains”--performed both as a tribute to an old OC punk influence and as an apparent act of defiance: Holland preceded it by saying, without elaboration, that the band is being sued by Robbie Fields, whose Posh Boy label released the Agent Orange original. Reached Saturday, Fields, the song’s copyright-owner, said he has not sued but wants the Offspring’s label, Epitaph, to pay a penny-per-album sampling fee because of what he contends are close similarities between the two-bar, snake-charmer guitar hook in the Offspring’s hit “Come Out and Play” and the Middle Eastern/surf-rock guitar solo in “Bloodstains.”

The Offspring came off with a curious mixture of down-to-earth graciousness--as Holland and Wasserman happily thanked fans and fondly noted home-county ties--and somewhat forced punker obstreperousness.

It has been much remarked that the band, which hails from Cypress and Garden Grove, is full of nice-guy solid citizens and former A-students who don’t fit the stereotypical profile of an alienated punker. Holland cussed a blue streak, as if that would make him more punk (but isn’t cussing to make an impression on young fans actually more the province of Sammy Hagar-ish metal dudes?).

In joking tones, Holland also challenged the audience to stage-dive, an idiotic punk ritual that got an 18-year-old would-be Greg Louganis killed three months ago in New York City. Three or four fans met Holland’s challenge, evading guards to jump on stage and dive off; the singer himself took a couple of flops into the crowd, emerging with his shirt in tatters after his second, show-closing plunge.

The whole debate over what’s-punk-and-who’s-punk-enough is getting tiresome. Call it what you will, a band that plays nothing but fast, aggressive, raucous music, covers Agent Orange, and charges the customers half what it could have commanded can’t be too far afield from authentic punk performance and proper punk ethics.

The lighthearted, for-the-fun-of-it tone of the Offspring’s show obscured some of the punkish ire and questioning of authority that runs through Holland’s lyrics. Introducing a darker or cathartic mood at some points might be something to consider in the future, when the band faces up to the challenge of expanding its capabilities and not repeating itself. For now, let the Offspring have its honeymoon.