Keep ‘Em Separated! 30 Years of the Offspring’s ‘Smash’

The Offspring ‘s “Come Out and Play” (you know, the “gotta keep em separated” song) was all over MTV in 1994 — with a video that cost all of $5,000. The Nineties were full of unlikely breakthrough acts, but the Offspring were one of the few bands of the era who made it to the mainstream without even leaving their indie label, Epitaph. In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now , Offspring frontman Dexter Holland looks back on his band’s hit-packed 1994 album Smash , which turns 30 this year.

Go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or just press play below. Some highlights from the interview follow. Holland wrote most of the songs on Smash in a 1979 Toyota Pickup.

Holland was commuting every day at the time to his biochemistry Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California, which he put on pause after the band’s success — and ended up finishing years later.

“I had a really old, really shitty car and the radio didn’t even work,” says Holland. “And so I had an hour to kill twice a day. And I was just thinking about the songs, rolling them over in my head.

You would just make up parts in your head and hum them into the tape recorder and figure out how to play it on the guitar later.” Holland was convinced that the songwriting in most punk rock simply wasn’t good enough. “We loved the energy and the rebelliousness of it and the attitude and all that,” he says.

“But I didn’t feel like th.