The Offspring triggered a bout of nostalgia for '90s pop-punk fans when they appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night, June 17, to perform their 1994 radio hit Come Out And Play.
Released as the first single from the Californian band's third album Smash in late August 1994, Come Out And Play only just scraped into the Top 100 in the UK, peaking at number 98, but fared rather in America, topping the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart.
"On the radio, with Come Out And Play, you could feel that things were happening," frontman Dexter Holland told English music writer Ian Winwood for his essential '90s punk history Smash! "It was expanding geographically, but slowly. So it went from LA to the next big cities, which were Phoenix and Las Vegas, and it kind of expanded in that way for a couple of months. Then MTV got the video and played it on 120 Minutes, and slowly it got rotation outside of that slot. And that's when it went."
By autumn 1994, The Offspring were selling in excess of 100,000 copies of Smash each week, and such was the demand for the record that the group's label, Epitaph, had to rent out extra storage space in buildings in Los Angeles just to have somewhere to store the CDs before they were distributed to the warehouses of record store chains. By the end of 1994, the record had sold four million copies in the US alone. It has now sold over 11 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling independently-released rock album of all time.
"I don't think any of us thought that this was going to be our career," guitarist Noodles told Ian Winwood.
When Smash was released, the guitarist was still working as a janitor at the Earl Warren Elementary School in Anaheim.
"We had our video on heavy rotation on MTV and there I'd be, sweeping up the leaves each morning," he recalled. "There was a bus stop right across the street from the school, and there'd be these high school kids walking through the school grounds watching me work and pointing at me. They'd say, 'Man, what the hell are you doing? I just saw you on MTV right before I left the house!'"
Watch The Offspring's performance below.
The Offspring are touring the US this summer, starting on July 11 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
