At Punk Summit, Bands Rise Above Politics

Someone inclined to take cheap shots might say that Friday’s unexpected punk-rock summit at Chapman University was a meeting of the copycats and the fat cats.

It’s easy, in fact, to dismiss the evening’s headliner, Rancid, as a copycat band, a Clash rehash from its spiky and slicked-back hair to its frenetically leaping and bounding feet.

And the Offspring, which played unannounced, pinch-hitting after San Diego’s Rocket From the Crypt withdrew from the show because of a back injury to singer John Reis, has earned some scorn in piously fundamentalist punk circles for the sin of selling 6 million albums.

A vocal minority in the packed Hutton Sports Center (a big name for a sweaty little gym) was not shy about wanting to drum Orange County’s top-selling rock band out of punkdom, or at least off the stage, for being too musical, too popular and, in the case of singer Dexter Holland, too longhaired.

Easy targets though they may be for detractors, both Rancid and the Offspring showed that they can make persuasive cases in their own defense.

The Offspring, which has proved itself a reliably good live band, was once again in fine form, deploying a clean, hard, flexible and perfectly balanced combination of melody and clout that is a sure formula for satisfying rock ‘n’ roll.

And Holland, with the air of a fellow who knows whereof Elvis Costello speaks when he sings, “Well, I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused,” didn’t return snarl for snarl in the face of epithets and raised middle fingers, but instead parried disdain with tolerant humor.

If the Offspring is on any kind of star trip, it didn’t show. The band members humbly thanked Rancid (with whom they have in common a long history on the California punk scene, and a shared manager, Jim Guerinot) for having them as opening band and apologized to anyone disappointed that the estimable Rocket From the Crypt was off the bill.

The Offspring’s 40-minute set featured ignited versions of such staples as “Gotta Get Away” and “Kick Him When He’s Down,” plus two new songs that might emerge on the follow-up to the group’s career-making 1994 album, “Smash.”

The first new number rode a two-step punk beat, but its taut, dark mood and soaring melody gave it the wide-screen feel of a high-plains Western epic. The other, also tense and urgent, featured an insinuating, pealing guitar figure.

Holland is clearly in the category of rock songwriters who know their craft and have the gift of pulling strong melodies out of the air. Purist punks can call it treason if the Offspring refuses to flatten and coarsen what that melodic talent yields. The rest of us will be glad to call it music that’s a pleasure to hear.

Rancid can’t override the “copycat” criticism so easily; its similarities to the Clash, the hall-of-fame-caliber band that helped launch the British punk outbreak of 1976-77, are apparent and undeniable.

Anthems with sing-along choruses that soar, reggae rhythms and rockabilly licks for changes of pace--these were the Clash’s trademarks, and they are Rancid’s too.

The Bay Area band’s three singers--Tim Armstrong, Lars Frederiksen and Matt Freeman--all are gargly-voiced sons of Joe Strummer, and Rancid’s sartorial choices make it look like a traveling fashion show for late-’70s punk finery.

But Rancid isn’t the only rock band recycling the past nowadays; others may do it more cannily, by putting together a collage of influences, rather than tracing from a single model. But originality--what we admire in Chuck Berry or the Beatles (both of whom had their own obvious influences)--may be out of reach after 40 years of rock.

What’s left, as in folk music, is the spirit with which the old styles are played, and the degree to which the musicians can turn a traditional form into a vehicle for expressing ideas and feelings and personhood that is their own.

It’s on those counts that Rancid can and does make its case. If “copycat” applies to the band’s style, “solidarity in action” is a good thumbnail description of its spirit and its live impact.

The action through Rancid’s hourlong set was nonstop. The spike-haired Frederiksen spun and leaped and scissor-kicked while playing raw, slicing lead guitar riffs. Armstrong cavorted with the haphazard energy of a delighted toddler, slinging his guitar as if it were a toy.

Solidarity emerged in shared vocals and rousing, all-hands choruses, and in the balance between Frederiksen’s guitar and Freeman’s rumbling bass lines, which at times seemed patterned after another classic source: the Who’s John Entwistle.

The songs, drawn mostly from “. . . And Out Come the Wolves,” a half-million seller that places Rancid high on the punk popularity parade, talked about tough times on the road, the sorrow of dashed romance, hopelessness and the danger of addiction.

The musical raw material may be secondhand, but the melodic invention that lifted such highlights as “Time Bomb,” “Junkie Man,” “Ruby Soho” and “Lock, Step & Gone” was real, and so is the life coursing through them.

So much the better that Rancid’s reality is gritty but not grim: There was an overriding sense of encouragement and affirmation in its songs of sorrows faced and troubles endured.

Rancid’s future challenges are to keep that wonderful spirit alive, but to diversify its music so that it doesn’t seem to be constantly channeling the spirit of one beloved ancestor.

Openers U.S. Bombs, a band of veterans from the Orange County punk scene, harked back to the initial wave of British punk. The show, billed as “Noise for the Needy,” was a sellout, with part of the proceeds going to Mary’s Kitchen, a grass-roots effort to help homeless people in Orange.