Turning Points: Keith Morris
In his definitive indie anthology Our Band Could Be Your Life, author Michael Azerrad relays the moment in 1976 when Black Flag/SST Records overlord Greg Ginn first met a 21-year-old ‘hard-partying loud-mouth’ named Keith Morris.
While the partying has waned – he’s now 58 and straight – Morris’s hyperactive jaw continues to tell one of the most remarkable stories in the history of punk rock: from being the original mouthpiece of US hardcore’s foremost progenitors, to forming the trailblazing Circle Jerks; and, 38 years on from that initial leap of faith, to be releasing Wasted Years, his second album proper with punk A-team OFF!. Here he breaks down the five pivotal moments which have defined his turbulent career.
Meeting Greg Ginn and the genesis of Black Flag //
We were young, we had a lot of energy, and the music scene in Los Angeles had been dead for a long time. If you went out on a Friday night you’d see a band playing Top 40, there was no creativity. We’d go up to Hollywood to see bands playing original songs and that was very inspiring. I went to a concert with Greg Ginn, to see Thin Lizzy open up for Journey at the Santa Monica Civic, and that’s when he turned to me and said ‘y’know, I’ve got a handful of songs, let’s get in a room and see what happens’.
1979: Quitting Black Flag and forming Circle Jerks a month later //
Well, I was gonna get kicked out of Black Flag anyways, Greg had grown tired of my antics. At Black Flag shows there would always be some kind of violence. When you’re from the beach, you’re surrounded by surfers, skaters, this gung-ho mentality, and the way people responded to our music was to jump up and down, or do some kind of fucked up dancing, and that used to bum out the art students and the literary types. The crowds became more macho and muscular. So when I formed Circle Jerks the vibe was festive, we just wanted to party: ‘where’s the keg, where’s the coke, who’s got the pills,where are the girls’. We were like a Saturday morning cartoon, Black Flag were the evil villains out of a Batman comic.
1989: Going sober //
I hit a bottom. Speed and drinking and partying had been such a big part of my life since I was a kid under the pier on Hermosa Beach, but it had run its course. Y’know, how drunk are you gonna get? Your hangover is lasting three to four days, not three to four hours, and your life schedule is based around what time the coke dealer wakes up. Bukowski, he glamourised skid row, he was just a run-of- the-mill loser who was able to write about it in an amazing way. But for a lot of people that was the reality.
2009: Forming OFF! //
Circle Jerks went into the studio to record our first album in 14 years with Dimitri (Coats, now OFF! guitarist) on production. But there’s an egotistical mentality amongst that band, ‘we’ve been doing this for a long time, guys really like us, we can just write songs and people will rush out to buy them’. It was a terrible mentality, cause the music being brought forward was bogus, like, are you kidding? We’re gonna record that? Dimitri was the guy cracking the whip, doing the homework, telling us that we needed to be Circle Jerks and we weren’t coming close to that. So me and Dimitri started writing songs in my living room, and that
became OFF!
Present Day – Wasted Years //
We’re telling a story, a lot of that is about my past, bands I’ve been in, people I’ve known, wasted lives and wasted years. I find playing this music is very aggressive, very demanding physically, it’s a workout and it keeps me excited. Lyrically, I’m creating imagery that’s not something I would do. I’m not a gun owner, I’m not gonna blow up somebody’s warehouse, I’m not that guy. But you can think about that, you can write about it. Y’know, “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker! Man, if I could walk up to Dick Cheney I’d blow that fucker’s head off” – you’re not gonna do that! IT’S NOT HAPPENING! But it’s a lot of fun to think about.
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Wasted Years is released 7 April via Vice Records.
Words: Geraint Davies
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