It’s 2022, and The Offspring Were Still Pretty Fly in Sacramento

On Saturday July 30th, The offspring, made their 3rd stop back in the Americas after a string of successful festival stops all over Europe and Canada on their Let The Bad Times Roll Tour.

Even though it’s a long way from 1990’s when The Offpsring took the world by storm, like a good wine they get better with age and Saturday night at the Hard Rock Live in Wheatland, outside of Sacramento was no exception.

Epitaph Record’s Plague Vendor, opened the show with an amazing performance that, for any other band, they would have been a hard act to follow. They got the crow into it from the very beginning with singer Brandon Blaine’s on-stage charisma and acrobatics and even jumping into the crowd and getting a mosh going and then being crowd surfed back to the stage.

When The Offspring hit the stage, the crowd was more than ready, and from the very first chords of the opening song, “Staring at The Sun” the audience was electrified and with each song the momentum the kept rising as it did with “Come Out and Play”.

With a new album out, Let the Bad Times Roll, The Offspring played several tracks from the new album and songs like “The Opiod Diaries”, “Army of One”, “Behind Your Walls” fit right in with the rest of the set and the fans took them in as if they were already band classics. The new album also includes the piano version of “Gone Away” which had already become a staple of their shows since they came back to the stages after the pandemic, and in Sacramento, it was definitely one of the highlights of the evening.

The crowd was as diverse as their music, there was a mixture of different ages, from teenagers to people in their 50’s and some 60’s, skaters, new and old punkers, metal heads, parents with their young kids and we even had some “pretty fly” guys and gals from the gated communities around Sacramento.

For those casual fans who came to hear the hits, there was plenty of that too, besides the previously mentioned, they played “Hammerhead”, “Bad Habit”, “Why Don’t You Get a Job”, “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” and closing with “The Kids Aren’t Alright” and a double encore of “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid” and “Self Esteem”.

The Offspring

Plague Vendor: