Keith Morris is not an easy guy to get a hold of. I mean that quite literally. The legendary hardcore punk rock vocalist - who plays the Mercury Ballroom with the Circle Jerks on September 15th, and who turns 69 years old on September 18th - is still far more punk than any of us, as he refuses to own a cell phone, (at least until the end of September, when he’s reluctantly forced to get one due to a new diabetes monitoring device that only works via a cell phone app). So getting this interview with Morris - who has fronted the Circle Jerks, OFF!, and was the original vocalist for Black Flag - has not been an easy task. The interview was scheduled and rescheduled four times due to Wi-Fi issues and shoddy hotel phones. Each time saw Keith being very apologetic for things that were out of his control. But fifth time’s a charm apparently as Morris and I were finally able to connect over Zoom. What followed was an amazing hour and a half long conversation - by far the longest interview I’ve ever done - with a man whose work I have greatly admired for 35+ years now.
MUCH thanks to "Dirty" Dave Johnson for his help in getting this interview set up and providing the photos to accompany it!
(The transcript of this conversation was over 14 pages long, so obviously this interview has been edited for length and clarity)
LEO: The Circle Jerks have been out on tour for quite a while now and it looks like you will be going through December. What comes after the tour ends?
Keith Morris: We actually have a month off, which is because we are supposed to immediately go into a studio situation where we are going to write songs for a new record we're working on with our friend Tim Armstrong from Rancid.
Can you tell me anything about the new album?
I have no details. We have to write a bunch of songs first because we're actually a really lazy band.
We've already recorded a couple of cover songs; a Gun Club track called “Bad Indian” for a movie called Where The Devil Lays His Head. I haven't been given permission to talk about the movie, but it is a cowboy movie, and a bunch of my friends are going to be in it. It hasn't been filmed yet, that's not until October, so it's gonna be a while off before that comes out. And there's a D.O.A. documentary that's coming out pretty soon, and we recorded “The Enemy” for the soundtrack.
How did Tim Armstrong become the producer for the new album?
Well, we've been friends for a long time. I've known Tim going all the way back to when I worked for John Roecker and Exene Cervenka at a place called You've Got Bad Taste on Sunset Boulevard, and Tim would come into the store and just hang out, and we would have hour long discussions, that's how we became friends. And Tim has this studio that used to be owned by Flea, the bass player of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it’s a great studio. Tim said, “Look, you guys haven't recorded anything in years.” It’s been like 28 years since our last record, that's ridiculous. And I've been doing a band called Off!
I was going to ask you a little bit about that.
Off! just called it a day because we've been doing it for a long time. What happened was Dimitri [Coats - Off! guitarist] started to see me going out on more dates and playing more shows with the Circle Jerks than I had told him I was going to do, and he's got other things he wants to do. And it's all good. It's all okay. We ended on a good note. I'm doing the Circle Jerks now, and the way that it was initially presented was it was supposed to just be a world tour, and when the tour was over, I would have enough money to live on for two or three years and I wouldn't have to worry about paying my bills and putting food in my mouth. But what happened with the Circle Jerks was we have a new engine that runs our vehicle: a guy named Joey Castillo, [Circle Jerks’ drummer], who knows our songs better than we do. What I love about Joey is he's a machine, and he pushes us like, “No, we're not going to be playing these songs like we're a bunch of old men. That's not going to happen.” And in this process, I became friends with guys that I had sworn that I would never, ever get in a room with again. And we're all getting along really, really well. We're getting along like a bunch of brothers. And there'll be a lot of people out there that'll say, “The Circle Jerks, they're just out there doing it for the money, they don't really care.” And for all of those people, all I can say is go play with yourselves! Because one of the things that's happening is Zander [Schloss - Circle Jerks’ bassist] will go out to the merch booth after we play, and he's talking to all of these people, trying to get down into the reason why we have discovered this new resurgent. Our popularity has never been like this. And the number one answer that he always gets is, “We're tired of the new music that's out there. There's something about the new music that we're hearing that it doesn't have the energy, it doesn't have the electricity, it doesn't have the excitement, it doesn’t have the vibe, and we want to be a part of something that's real.”
Do you think you'll ever revisit Off!?
One of the things that Dimitri and I talked about while we were coming to this part of our lives is we can call it quits, but it's not the end of our world. You know, somewhere down the line, somebody might say, “Hey, you want to come over here and play a couple of shows and go to some exotic place that nobody's ever been to?” I mean, stuff like that goes on all the time, and we're not going to slam the door shut because we have this movie, Free LSD, which took us eight years to make. It's now streaming on like five or six different networks. And I consider the movie to probably be my most favored artistic endeavor. Out of all of the different things that can be created - painting, drawing, poetry, literature, music, lyrics - making and acting in a movie and making it real is probably the most difficult of all of the things you can do on a creative level.
When you recorded Nervous Breakdown, Group Sex, and Wild in the Streets, did you have any idea that you were making records that would become so monumental?
We were flying by the seat of our pants. It was fun, it was exciting. We were caught up in all of this energy, and we weren't paying attention to any of that. We were just, “Hey, we're in the studio!” We didn't know the quality of the music we were making. We didn't know if it was cool or uncool. It was cool to us, and that was the bottom line. We had no wherewithal as to “Well, what does this mean to future generations?” We never considered any of that. It's like we're just doing this. This is what we are. This is what we recorded. At the time we didn't know Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were part of a musical movement that was going to spawn all of these other bands. We didn't know that we were going to end up influencing really big name musical artists that have absolutely nothing to do with what we do. Randy Newman loves the Circle Jerks. One of my friends was buddies with Elton John, and one day my friend put Group Sex on the turntable, and Elton John just lost his mind. Bill Ward, the drummer from Black Sabbath, he loves the Circle Jerks. Chris Robinson from the Black Crows told me; “We would not be doing what we're doing if you hadn't been playing the music that you were playing.” And he's telling me that he and his brother used to skate to our records. The guys in Los Lobos, they're like, “We wouldn't know who you guys are, except that we played with you a couple of times in some really oddball, weird situations, and our kids listen to your records all the time. It's driving us up the wall!”
I know you and Greg Ginn, [Black Flag’s guitarist and only remaining original member], had some problems. Would you ever even consider working with him again?
Never!
I know when you all were doing Flag, he sued you all.
He sued us, and even though we won, we still ended up spending a lot of money. When we were approaching the halfway point for all of this legal stuff to get sorted out and settled, Greg Ginn’s lawyer had a conversation with our lawyer, and he said, “I'm going to make this cost your clients $500,000.” We're all working class, we don't have that kind of money, and a couple of the guys were paranoid because they’d actually accumulated enough money to be able to buy houses. I mean, who would say something like that? Like, go get run over in a parking lot. Step out in front of the next bus getting ready to come through a green light. Just step right on out there.
Do you think you'll do Flag again?
At some point we will. We actually had a tour booked, and one of the guys said, “I can't tour. I'm not going to tour.” That would be Chuck Dukowski. I kind of fucked up, because I was supposed to be the middle man, and I, for some reason, thought one of the other guys was going to be the middle man, and so some of the details got kind of left behind, and it was very uncool situation.
But everything's still cool with you all?
Yeah, yeah, we're all friends. That's one of the reasons why we do this.
Did you actually trade weed for recording time for Group Sex?
That would be Lucky's call. Lucky [Lehrer - Circle Jerks’ original drummer] had a high school buddy who was a pot dealer, so he gets credit for being the producer of the first Circle Jerks album, Group Sex. The only time he showed up in the studio was just to bring a shopping bag full of skunk weed to cover our costs. We recorded in a voiceover studio. It wasn't like a real music recording studio, although they did record music there, but it was where they did all of the effects and the voiceovers for all of the movies and television shows that were filmed on the lot. It was Desi Lou Studios, which is Desi Arnaz, who was married to Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy. So the way it worked was we had to sit by the phone and wait for them to call us, like, it’d be a Tuesday at three in the afternoon and they would call; “Hey, we have three hours tonight starting at seven. So you could be in here at seven until 10. Can you make it?” In which case everybody would call each other and say be at the studio at seven. And this went on for about two or three weeks.
How did you get to fill in as vocalist for a Red Hot Chili Peppers gig back when they first started?
Well, the first time I met Flea he was playing in a band called What Is This? They were fantastic, just mind blowing. We would eventually all become friends because we all ran in the same circles in Hollywood. So Flea and I have been friends for probably at least 40 years. And the situation where I filled in for Anthony Kiedis was at a place called the Olympic Auditorium, and that show was with Suicidal Tendencies, Society System Decontrol - which is SSD from Boston, The Minutemen, and I think there was one other band. But Anthony had disappeared; they couldn't get a hold of him. They didn't know where he was at, and they were in panic mode. Then about 15 minutes before they were supposed to play, I was hanging out with them in their dressing room, and Flea came up to me and said, “Keith, do you want to sing with us?” And I'd done about $200 worth of cocaine and I drank about 12 of their beers, so I was feeling really, really good. And I said, “Sure, I'll do it.” I knew none of their lyrics, and what happened was I got up there, started jumping around and screaming into the mic “What you see is what you get!” And I repeated that three dozen times. But Flea and their guitar player, Jack Sherman, sang some of the lyrics. So it was all covered.
And finally, what keeps you motivated to keep singing? Do you still enjoy it?
I'm having fun, which is the most important thing. Being able to pay my bills and getting along with the people that I'm traveling with, which are also very important things. And on a health level, I feel pretty damn good being a diabetic. I probably should have fallen over years ago, you know, being a former alcoholic and a cocaine addict, I’m not doing any of that stuff anymore. But at the same time, the major challenge is to just be able to get up there and put out as much effort as possible and leave as much of yourself on the stage in the eyes and ears of the fans.
The Circle Jerks play Mercury Ballroom with Descendents and Surfbort on Sunday, September 15 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at mercuryballroom.com. For more info on the Circle Jerks and Off! visit circlejerks.net and offofficial.com.
