Dexter Holland, the frontman of the Offspring, also has a Ph.D. in molecular biology, and he competes in triathlons, and he's a licensed pilot, and the band has a new album, Supercharged. How does the 58-year-old maverick do it all?
HERE IS WHAT punk-rock star Dexter Holland, the frontman of the Offspring and prolific songwriter of the band's music -- including writing all the songs on its first album, The Offspring, released in 1989, writing or cowriting most of the songs on Smash, the one you know best, which was released in 1994 and has sold 11 million copies worldwide, powered by the iconic singles "Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)" and "Self Esteem," both of which you know some of the words to, and on Supercharged, the band's 11th studio album, which comes out October 11, and on every album in between -- says when you ask him why, within the discipline of molecular biology, he chose to focus on HIV when he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in 2017, defending his dissertation, titled Discovery of Mature MicroRNA Sequences Within the Protein-Coding Regions of Global HIV-1 Genomes: Predictions of Novel Mechanisms for Viral Infection and Pathogenicity.
"I know this sounds funny to say, but I think viruses are cool. They're cool because they're so gnarly. They go in and they take over your cell, and they tell the machinery to stop making cellular things and start building viruses, so all the things that would normally be making your mitochondria, or your cell membrane, those parts now get taken over and turned into hundreds of viruses -- little robots! -- and when the virus has finally used up all the stuff in your cell, the last instruction is: Blow the cell up! [Holland's eyes grow wide.] And the viruses go out, and it's just evil! It's like Darth Vader stuff, right? I don't mean to get a kick out of it, because it's obviously bad for you, but there's something fascinating about that. And then the more people learn about it, they can start tweaking the machinery and say, 'Well, if we can just block that little step, then the viruses get stuck and no more viruses get made' -- I'm fascinated by that, too. So that's why we spend so much time going into all the detail of all the tiny steps that go into making a new virus out of an old one, and then they try to figure out how to fuck with it. How to break it. So I've always been interested in viruses because of how gnarly they are. And the more I learned about viruses, the more interested I became in HIV, because just from an academic standpoint, it's very complex. It has an extra life cycle, which is even gnarlier than what I told you about. That was kind of a typical life cycle for a virus, and I don't want to make it too long a story, but what HIV does is, it gets into your cell and then it has its own genetic material, which is RNA -- we have DNA. It converts its RNA into DNA and then it gets into your nucleus, and it inserts itself into your DNA -- and then it just goes silent. [Eyes wide, like "Can you believe this?"] And stays there for -- could be months, could be years! And your body can't detect it. It just sees that it's DNA -- it doesn't know that it's a virus. So this thing fucking goes into your cell, takes off its cloak, converts to DNA, and hides in your DNA for sometimes years. And I was just like, that's fucking gnarly! And when it's ready, that DNA turns on and starts making the proteins that make the virus, and then it kinda just squeezes out the virus every so often. It just oozes out, so the cell doesn't die, which in a way is more gnarly -- it keeps it alive. It's sick, but it still can keep on making viruses!
Holland is sitting in his home office in Huntington Beach, California, a couple towns away from Garden Grove, the inland working-class suburb where he grew up. His hair is bleached, as it has been since the '90s, and spiked. He is 58, tall, trim, and wearing a fitted golf shirt, khaki trousers, and cool sneakers with an indeterminate logo. Behind him are towering built-in bookshelves, three wide and five tall, lined with hundreds of classic volumes bound in leather accented with 22-karat gold. On other shelves around the room: books about flying airplanes (he owns two and is a licensed pilot), four bottles of hot sauce with his face on the label (Gringo Bandito, his hot-sauce brand), triathlon training plans (he does those), and stamp albums. (See: another whole bookcase in the office, with many of the binders meticulously, and curiously, labeled isle of man post office.)
It is challenging not to feel at least a skosh intellectually inferior to the guy if you have not written an album that sold 11 million copies or earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology (or anything else). Not that he tries to make you feel that way. Holland is exceedingly nice and smiles a lot. His voice sounds like that of a patient and encouraging middle school English teacher who always stretches to find something smart in even the dumbest questions. Right, yes! But think about it like this . . .
The questions most people ask Holland are things like: You're an actual rock star. Why did you get a Ph.D. in molecular biology? Or, you have a Ph.D. in molecular biology. Isn't that a lot different from playing punk music? Or, how do you find the time to tour the world with the Offspring and write your dissertation (which is based on years of research) and keep current with your pilot's license and train for triathlons and read Doctor Zhivago and taste-test the new hot sauce and collect postage stamps from the fucking Isle of Man and also be a great father and take your wife out to dinner sometimes?
These are not necessarily dumb questions. But it turns out that they are not the right questions.
THOSE QUESTIONS -- ALL of which I asked him -- are all versions of the same question, which is, Can I be like Dexter Holland, barreling through life pursuing so many interests at such a high level, or is he a supersmart freak of nature and I should just stick to being my underachieving self?
Holland is supersmart -- we have to start there. When he was around five and the kindergarten teacher sent all the kids home with a letter to parents titled "Welcome to Kindergarten," he read it out loud to his mother flawlessly. He found high school easy and was valedictorian of his class. He went to USC and felt less sure of himself, because while the point of high school was to get into college, what was the point of college? "Now all of the sudden it was like, 'All right, buddy, what are you actually going to do with your life?' It was a very uncomfortable feeling."
There was the band he had started with his friend Greg Kriesel in Garden Grove in the mid-1980s, which was fun. And there was his interest in science. He got his master's degree at USC and was hustling his way toward a Ph.D.
The Offspring back then were like most bands: unknown and sleeping on floors. "We made our own cassettes and tried to get someone to sign us, and no labels wanted to sign us," Holland says. "We wanted to put out a record, so we found a place that would press a thousand copies of a seven-inch, and then we found a printer to do a sleeve, but they were like, If you want us to actually -- because you know how [vinyl-album covers] have those little tabs that fold in and you glue it together? -- they said if you want that, it's going to be another 15 cents a sleeve. So we got glue sticks and we glued our own covers together."
But "Come Out and Play (Keep 'Em Separated)," the first single off the band's third album, Smash, was getting airtime on KROQ, the biggest rock station in Los Angeles, and the station eventually ranked it number one for the week -- not national exposure, but suddenly hundreds of thousands of people, or maybe millions, were listening to Holland's lyrics and the Offspring's singular jump-up-and-down punk-pop sound. (The song's most famous line, "You gotta keep 'em separated," came from Holland's years in biology labs, when he figured out he would have to keep petri-dish samples separated so they would cool down faster during an experiment.) Then a station in Las Vegas started playing it. Then one in Phoenix. In June 1994, two months after Smash was released, it was number 20 on the Billboard chart.
So: Biologist? Rock star? Biologist? Rock star?
"My parents were concerned, but then the band took off, and even then they were like" -- Holland scrunches his face up like a parent looking at a boneheaded teenager. "Because I had to take a leave of absence from school, and my mom said, 'You're doing what? You're going to give up your Ph.D. for this band thing? What are you doing?' " he says with a boyish smile. "I was like, 'Well, Mom, no, I think [the band thing] is really gonna go.' "
And it really went. Smash was huge, and they toured for three years, then in 1997 they released Ixnay on the Hombre, which also went platinum, followed by Americana. That one has sold 10 million copies and includes the singles "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)" and "The Kids Aren't Alright." The band played Woodstock '99 and was absolutely owning the slice of the music world where punk and pop overlap.
After years of premed studies and visions of becoming a surgeon, Holland had eschewed a life in which, he learned, doctors can disappear into their work at the expense of actual living. He loved the figuring-out part of biology, and he loved the idea of helping people. His junior year at USC, he volunteered in the emergency room at L. A. County Hospital. He saw people with fresh gunshot wounds. He saw people die right in front of him. He also saw doctors and nurses making fast decisions that could save a patient's life, and that was exciting.
But he also noticed that devoting yourself to saving other people's lives means you don't have much of a life of your own. "I'd talk to these doctors and they're like, 'Yeah, I don't see my family too much,' " he says. "I'd say, 'But that's just at first, right? It gets better?' 'Mmm, not really.' "
Being in a punk band was empirically cooler. The Offspring had graduated from floor sleeping to proper touring, but it wasn't yet glamorous, and there were plenty of grimy, exhausting nights that could make a man wish for a quiet, pristine, air-conditioned lab.
"They would put us in these clubs, and a lot of them aren't so tightly controlled," Holland remembers. "When it's a little club, it's just a guy who wants to try to make as much money as he can, and they're gonna stuff 'em in. We'd be playing five nights in a row in these places, and they would stuff 500 people into a 300-capacity [room]. You could see the sweat dripping off the ceiling, like a steam room. I'd start getting nauseous during the show. It's hot as fuck, 100 degrees, you're sweating your ass off, you can't breathe right because it's so thick in there with all the exhale and people moshing around. I remember a couple times getting off the stage and having to throw up. Just miserable. After a couple tours like that, I was just like, 'I can't do that anymore. I have to get on top of this physically.' I was 26, 27, and you realize after three weeks in a row: I don't feel good when I drink every night!"
For about 20 years, that was that. The Offspring toured the world and sold millions of records, Holland ended up in an Orange County mansion with a four-tiered fountain in the courtyard outside his office door -- and, in the eyes of the University of Southern California, he remained "A.B.D.," a snarky term for Ph.D. candidates who have completed "all but dissertation."
It seemed as if Holland had chosen between opposites. Punk rock is countercultural, antiauthoritarian, antisocial, antiestablishment, and often rude. "Ixnay" is pretty much pig latin for "nix," and "the hombre" translates to "the man." And "Bad Habit," the third track on Smash, is a fun song about road rage: "Drivers are rude/Such attitudes/But when I show my piece/Complaints cease/Something's odd/I feel like I'm God/You stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker." Holland's music seemed to be contrary to all the things medical research is about: meticulous laboratory work, often solitary, dependent on precision, and usually overseen by a hierarchical, well-funded institution like USC.
But in his mind, "the science stuff" was not so antithetical to "the band thing," and he never forgot about it.
"Other people try to figure it out," he says of his disparate-seeming vocations. "I think it just sounds like such a dichotomy -- someone who's into music and also into science. It feels like they're opposite. But I think they're both part of the same thing: patterns. There's definitely something mathematical about a song: It goes verse-chorus-verse-chorus, or the way the chords move around. Do they last an equal amount of measure, or does this one last twice as long? The thing about music is, there are no rules -- but there sort of are."
One of the Offspring's early producers, Thom Wilson, used to tell them, "Passion without precision is chaos." During the lockdown portion of the pandemic, when the band couldn't record or perform live, they would get together and just play.
"We had nowhere to go and nothing to do, and we just sat down on couches and started strumming our songs, and pretty soon we were saying, 'Wait, you've been playing like that all these years?' We were realizing we'd developed bad habits and diverged. Because when we're playing live, I can't hear the intricacies of what the other guys are playing -- it's just too loud. So we actually had to sit down, not plugged in, no amps, and just play and strum and go, Let's get it all together. Because I always want it to be tight. When everybody's moving together, there's a power in that."
TOMORROW, HOLLAND WILL fly to Austria for a two-week European tour, a continuation of the rollout plans for Supercharged. And no more blowing into some town and playing a few hours later in a sweaty club. They'll have a night to sleep after arriving, then play the next night. It's nicer but still demanding. Biology is about discipline; so is this. "In a way, the band thing is a funny kind of discipline," Holland says, "because it's a job, and I can't think of too many jobs like this, where no matter what happens, you're going on at 9:00 p.m. that night. Don't feel good? Tough shit. Hungover? Too bad. Bad mood? You have to go on! There's fans that have paid to see you; your bandmates are depending on you."
He's used to this, and he has built a life that can handle it. His daughters, who are five and nine, are playing somewhere, and his wife is in the kitchen, several rooms away. The fountain gurgles. On the computer monitor on his desk, Holland has some routine forms open related to his FAA certification, and under that, a list of potential song titles or lyric snippets that might find their way into the Offspring.
"Sometimes I just have an idea or a title . . ." he trails off, reading down the list.
" 'You Can't Get There from Here' -- that was a joke about some guys in high school who worked at a gas station and people would ask for directions and they'd just wanna fuck with 'em.
"Oh, I didn't use this one but I like it: 'It Didn't Kill Me but It Didn't Make Me Stronger Either.'
" 'We Value Your Privacy' -- they do not value your privacy!
"It's almost like a scratch pad. Oh, here, I was making up songs for this record and I went back and found a title that I really liked: 'Okay but This Is the Last Time.' I grabbed it out of this list and thought, What would this song be about? Obviously it's about a guy who's a pushover for the girl."
Many years ago he was driving alone in his car and "uno dos tres quatro cinco cinco seis!" popped into his head, and it worked its way into a big hit, "Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)." He pulls out his iPhone and finds a voice recording he made eight days ago. It's him singing a chord sequence and a guitar riff, Nah-nah-nah, do-do-da, da, da, and while he's listening to it, he starts singing a bass line, Buh-da bum, bum, bum-bum-da . . .
An acoustic guitar is cradled in a stand in the corner near the stamp collection, just about the only evidence in his large office that the person who works in the office might dabble in music, let alone be the frontman of one of the biggest punk bands of the past three decades. He wrote his dissertation mostly in this room ("I was thinking I could spend a couple days a week on it maybe? I could do it on the road and I'll wrap it up pretty quick! But it ended up being five years").
The dissertation runs 150 pages and lists 178 references in its bibliography. Writing it was solitary work, studying his own laboratory findings as well as reports written by other researchers. It includes sentences such as "Repression of translation may occur by preventing initiation of translation, which is achieved by blocking recognition of the 5' cap protein, or by preventing the 60S ribosomal subunit from joining the initiation complex." Summarizing it for people who aren't molecular biologists, Holland says, "I studied microRNAs, which are small molecules in our bodies that are able to 'turn off' other genes. My focus was on how miRNAs are involved in HIV infection. I discovered several microRNAs that may be able to interact with the HIV virus and its infection process. By manipulating these miRNAs, it might be possible to mitigate HIV infection."
Mitigate HIV infection.
Now that it's done, he thinks a lot about what's next when it comes to the science stuff. He is officially Dr. Holland, but that's not why he went back after so many years and spent another five years finishing it. "I don't want the degree just to be a plaque on the wall so I can say I'm a Ph.D.," he says. "I want to have done something."
In medical research, having one's work published in scientific journals brings a legitimacy and attention to one's findings, and Holland hopes to do that, with guidance from his pathology professor at USC, Suraiya Rasheed, Ph.D., with whom he met again just two months ago.
"We made some notes, I was going to do a draft revision and get it to her, but . . . we've had an extra-hectic schedule lately because of finishing the record," he says. "But yeah, I really do want to figure out how to carve out that part of my life where there is time for some sort of science. Because I put all the work in, and I think, not to sound cheesy, but making a contribution would be a cool thing." He would very much like to work with Bono on Red, the U2 frontman's international organization to fight HIV globally. "I would see myself as being some sort of ambassador, like a go-between, the guy that can speak music and science because he knows enough about both," Holland says.
He also recently thought of a way to make the plastic seals around the tops of the bottles of his hot sauce cooler, rather than the all-black they were. He's 58 now, and he's thought about getting certified as a commercial pilot. ("I'm pretty sure I could get hired by United.") There are all the books -- he's never read Moby-Dick, or all of Shakespeare. Then there are all those songless titles saved on his computer and guitarless riffs he's sung into his phone.
Which brings us back to that question: Is Bryan Keith "Dexter" Holland -- he chose the nickname because it was the furthest thing from a rock-star stage name he could think of -- some kind of genius or freak who can accomplish more than other humans?
I don't think so, and neither does he. We all have ideas, and most of them are fleeting notions that whisper in and out of our heads, or they burble out of our mouths excitedly after a couple drinks and sound genius at the time.
Then we forget about them. We go back to our job that's kind of just fine, and the gym never gets opened and the hot sauce never gets made, because who the hell has time for that? I think Dexter Holland is what happens when you act on one of those ideas and it works, and then you act on another and another, and they don't all work, and some of them are just hobbies, and you're smart about it and don't plow your money into a hair salon for pets -- but you act. You try. You do. And it's not that hard.
"I guess it's time management," Holland says, searching for a way to explain how not-hard it is. "I see it more like, what's the word, chunking? Is that a Tony Robbins word? Where you focus on one thing as completely as you can for two days, and then the rest of it is nagging at your brain waiting to get done, so you have to shift your attentions. I think putting it in blocks of time definitely helps. Like, this is my day when I'm gonna do this."
The truth is, he doesn't devote a lot of time to analyzing how he is able to accomplish so much in any given day, which is part of the answer. "I don't have a great explanation for it," he says. "I've always been interested in a bunch of stuff. What do they call it, the classic overachiever? But I don't like phrasing it that way, because that implies there's some kind of insecurity, that I'm not complete unless I'm doing something. I don't feel like that. I just get a kick out of doing stuff."
He smiles and says, as an explanation, "I don't do crosswords."
Now, you might say: Sure, he devoted the time and he gets a kick out of it, but he's obviously supremely gifted at songwriting, and at science, too. He's different. He's special. He has gifts.