In the early 1990s, Brian 'Dexter' Holland was living a double life. During daylight hours, Holland was pursuing a Ph.D. in molecular biology at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, while in the evenings, he'd rehearse and play shows with his punk rock band, The Offspring. His bandmates had jobs - guitarist Kevin 'Noodles' Wasserman was the Head Custodian (aka janitor) at Earl Warren Elementary School while bassist Gregory 'Greg K.' Kriesel worked in a print shop - and although the band were signed to Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz's Epitaph Records label, The Offspring's status as a part-time band meant that they didn't employ a manager.
While commuting to college on the city's south side in his "shitty car", Holland would drive through Watts and South Central, two neighbourhoods blighted by poverty, racial tensions, and gang violence between street gangs the Crips, and the Bloods. His observations on the spiralling death toll on the streets of "gangland central" were poured into lyrics for a new Offspring song, Come Out And Play.
"The lyrics for Come Out and Play... were just about whatever was happening in front of me," Holland recalled to Rolling Stone. "I was there the day of the L.A. riots. So I was very aware of that part of the world."
While one of the song's key lyrics "gotta keep 'em separated" might seem like a worried suburban white boy's naive plea for the warring factions in Los Angeles' most troubled neighbourhoods to be kept apart, it was actually inspired by Holland's studies.
One day at university, he took two flasks of chemicals out of an autoclave and was waiting impatiently for the liquids to cool down.
"I thought, These things are never going to cool off. I’ve got to keep ’em separated'," he recalled while speaking with ASBMBTODAY, the magazine of the American society for biochemistry and molecular biology in 2014. "It was literally a biology inspiration."
"The riff... we both loved the surf guitar thing, especially Dick Dale, and that harks back to Orange County surfing in the 60s," Holland told Total Guitar. "We also got a kick out of the Middle Eastern melodies, which was similar in a way. We’d messed around with parts like that for years, such as on Blackball [on debut album The Offspring], but this just worked."
