Doing That Brand-New Thing

“You’re where? Near the airport?”

Steve Rennie, partner in the Internet-aggressive music booking and marketing firm ArtistDirect, shakes his head as he talks on the phone with Bryan “Dexter” Holland. The lead singer of the Offspring is caught in traffic coming up from his Orange County home to the company’s Encino offices for a strategy session on the redesign of the band’s Web site.

Holland finally arrives nearly an hour late, so you’d expect him to be pretty grumpy. After all, it’s a long way to drive on what could have been a rare day off. With the demands of fronting a group whose latest album, “Americana,” has sold about 4 million copies in the United States, behind such hits as “Why Don’t You Get a Job” and “Pretty Fly (for a White Guy),” he doesn’t get much time for himself. And Web site building is just the latest addition to the list of chores of a modern rock star, another cog in the record-tour-video-interviews grind.

But the lanky singer strides into the nondescript brick building on Ventura Boulevard with a smile on his face beneath his spiky blond hair, cheerfully greeting the cyber-craftspeople working on the project. This kind of brainstorming is something that Holland--who was working on his PhD in microbiology at USC before the band catapulted from local punk act to multi-platinum youth icon--actually relishes.

At a time when artists of all stripes are embracing the Internet, ArtistDirect has become a leading force, with more than 50 online sites and e-commerce stores in partnership with major acts including the Beastie Boys, Beck, the Rolling Stones, Limp Bizkit, Korn, the Backstreet Boys and Marilyn Manson. Holland, Rennie says, has taken a particularly active interest in his band’s Internet dealings.

In the small office Rennie shares with Jefferson Hendrick, special events coordinator for the company’s Ultimate Band List music resource site, Holland, 33, looks at the desktop computer screen and examines the newly designed home page for the Offspring. It’s basic but eye-catching, and he seems satisfied.

Then he plunks himself down on a corner sofa with Rennie, ArtistDirect marketing director Amy Seidenwurm and, representing the Offspring’s management, Larry Tull, who has accompanied him on the jaunt. Seidenwurm, leading the session, apologizes for all the details and proposals she wants to discuss, but the singer waves her off.

“I like getting ideas and trying things out,” says Holland enthusiastically as the proposals for elements to be included on the Web site start to fly.

First up for Holland today, Seidenwurm explains, is a “matchmaker” feature, something Holland proposed as a way to link up Offspring fans with similar interests or tastes as Internet pen pals.

“The idea is to get people more involved in the site,” Holland says. “We [the band] can put together our own list of questions for people to answer, and use whatever we want to match people up. Might be something as simple as they all hate Diana Ross.”

“As far as I can tell,” Seidenwurm notes, “no other band has done this.”

“Awesome! Cool!” Holland says. “We could rewrite new questions every month, keep it fresh.”

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In Holland’s mind, the Web site done right can create a real online community among the band’s fans. He sees it as almost a large-scale extension of the close-knit musical community from which the band was born in Orange County in the late ‘80s, a scene that also included No Doubt, Korn and Sugar Ray.

“Playing music is what we liked to do on weekends for fun,” he says after the meeting, recalling his early days with his bandmates, guitarist Kevin “Noodle” Wasserman, bassist Greg Kriesel and drummer Ron Welty. “Before Nirvana got huge, it wasn’t about ‘making it.’ ”

They all are still in touch--the members of No Doubt all came over to his house for a July 4 barbecue, and two members of Korn live a couple of blocks away. But given their busy lives, they don’t get to hang out regularly anymore.

Lately, though, Holland has been trying to recapture that old feeling. A couple of months ago, for example, the Offspring played an unannounced show at a small Seal Beach club, the 13th Floor.

“I forgot how much fun that could be--off the cuff, just for fun,” he says. “With 150 people I can stage-dive, joke about buddies I see in the front.”

Holland has also maintained his own independent Nitro label as a vehicle for grass-roots acts both veteran (the Vandals) and newer (AFI, Guttermouth). And through that experience he has been able to reconnect with the electricity of a band building up a strong, core hometown following.

“I like the idea of giving something back to the scene that started us,” Holland says. “Orange County was a more displaced scene [than L.A.] because it was harder to find a place to play. L.A. had a history with the Masque and the Starwood and all those places. In Orange County we had to be more on the lookout for places, or go somewhere else. Gilman Street in Berkeley [from which Green Day and Rancid emerged] was a real haven for us.”

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The biggest boost to the area’s music of the ‘90s, he says, came when KROQ-FM (106.7) refocused attention on locally spawned acts. Holland fondly recalls KROQ support for such ‘80s L.A. acts as Missing Persons and Wall of Voodoo, and says that its attention again stimulated the scene in the mid-’90s.

“KROQ’s been a real strong supporter of Korn and No Doubt, as well as us--once they finally stopped playing that English dance rubbish, Happy Mondays and all that,” he says.

He has no delusions that a cyber-connected network of fans is the same thing as a local community. But it is a way to keep closer touch with that base and keep them more attached with the band.

That sense of community roots seems to direct a lot of Holland’s thinking about the Web site, and he’s conscious of not overemphasizing the commerce aspect of the venture. At the meeting, he says he doesn’t want to hawk Nitro releases too aggressively on the Offspring site, and he opposes proposals for online auctions of band-related treasures and tchotchkes.

“Stay away from auctions,” he says. “I don’t like promoting that way. They [the fans] spend far too much money on those things.”

Of the several other proposals, one thing that does excite him is the discussion of video programming for the site. A band friend, he says, regularly films concert and offstage sequences that could be made available online--an ongoing series of short films about life with the Offspring. It’s exactly the kind of thing the ArtistDirect folks want to hear.

“If you get a lot of things going on for the kids, it becomes their channel,” Rennie says. “And even if you’re not in the cycle [of having a record out and being on tour], they’ll still come to it.”

Holland momentarily looks overwhelmed.

“That’s the hang-up, getting all this stuff to happen,” Holland says.

Seidenwurm looks up and responds, “We can make the ‘happen.’ ”