Had The Offspring’s frontman and chief songwriter Dexter Holland not swung by his local Starbucks for a caffeine hit in the mid-90s, the US punk rockers might never written their biggest song. Holland was sitting in his car, waiting in the drive-thru queue, when the server caught his attention.
“There was a white kid with a sideways hat,” he recalls. “Orange County is a pretty middle-ofthe-road place, and he was definitely out of his element in how he was presenting himself. He was trying to be something he definitely wasn’t. I was alone in the car and I just said it out loud to myself, like: ‘That guy’s pretty fly for a white guy.’ It was like: ‘Ding ding ding! Whoa, that’s a good line!’” And so Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), a track that would become The Offspring’s sole UK No.1, was born.
