Keith Morris Interview

You’ve played in SLO county with the Circle Jerks, FLAG, and now OFF! Do you have any memories on the road heading up here from LA?

Well just starting off this tour, and about two hours out of Los Angeles we had a blow out on our U-Haul trailer and the contract states that you don’t get to just drive into a garage or a truck stop and have them put a new tire on the trailer. U-Haul hires somebody to come out and do it which totally sucks. We knew we were two hours out of Los Angeles because it took the guy two hours to get to us. They couldn’t send somebody from Bakersfield which was 45 minutes away; they had to send somebody from Los Angeles. Luckily once he got to where we were out it took 10 minutes to fix it. While we were stranded on the side of the road, we had the highway patrol come swooping up because one of the guys was skating on the side of the highway.

Let me guess. It was Mario (Rubacabala)?

It was Mario. And of course because Mario has Latin blood, he looks like he would be one of the guys working on Donald Trump’s wall. So here we are at Central California driving by going, “What’s that? Who’s he skating on the side of the road? We need to call the highway patrol” And apparently they got six or seven complaints. So he comes whipping up, and starts going down the lists of stuff we we’re not supposed to be doing, which equates to all of us being in the van with all of the doors closed, none of the side doors open, and everybody buckled in, sitting on the side of the road. Which you can take that rule and automatically shove that up your ass. So that was our driving over here story.

Sounds like a rough start for sure. When FLAG last played here…

Over at SLO Brew, which you’re not gonna see any bands like that anymore there.

Yeah, it’s all changed since you last played.

We got the lowdown with the new owner who doesn’t want any kind of “vandals”. They want the reggae, fourth generation sublime, frat rock to play. We heard that whole area is going to be whitewashed which is sad. The gentleman who told us that is going on also told us the rent is going right through the roof.

It’s already hard enough to afford a house or to rent here. Is there any difference between the processes of touring with the FLAG guys compared to OFF?

There’s not much of a difference. With FLAG we drink more coffee. It’s a race to see who gets the strongest cup of coffee and who can drink the most. Bill Stevenson (Descendents/FLAG drummer) guzzles coffee.

What about the creative process? How do the lyrics and melodies for OFF come about?

What happens is I write lyrics, but I won’t write a whole set of lyrics. I’ll write a line or two then it will eventually turn into four lines, then eight lines, then twelve lines. The whole idea is to jump around. We’re highly influenced by Guided by Voices. So you listen to his lyrics and a lot of them don’t make sense. He’s just using words to fit on top of whatever the structure of the music is. We occasionally do that but that’s a whole new thing for me. The important guy in this process is the guitar player Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides). He plays a big role in how it ends up turning out. We argue and we fight but we get good results.

It seems like it all comes from passion.

Well we know we’re older guys, and as older guys we can’t just show up and play whatever we want to play. There has to be a certain intensity, a certain grit. We’re competing with a lot of bands now. There are more fucking bands now than there is money in the US treasury, which sucks because the majority of the bands suck. Which makes things really important because when you listen to music and you hear something that freaks you out, you go, “Wow, I discovered something”. Unfortunately these kids now, the first music they hear now is some crapola that’s being played on the radio. The voice has some kind of robot auto tuned thing attached to it. It’s not real. The thing with us is we’ve got to keep it as real as fucking possible. We can’t show up and be a bunch of rockstars or arrogant assholes. Everybody that’s in that room is just as important as anybody else and just because we’re in the band doesn’t make us better than people in the room. So we have to knock that fucking wall down which is one of the prime operatives in the whole punk rock thing to begin with.

Your book “My Damage” came out in 2016. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came to be?

There’s a dedication in the front of the book. I dedicated it to my mom and to Brendan Mullen. He was very important in the LA punk rock scene. There would probably be no LA punk rock scene if it wasn’t for Brendan Mullen and a place called The Mask. Which was the clubhouse, which was the central location, which was downtown Hollywood under the Pussycat Theatre, under the porno theatre. It could have been a bomb shelter. Him and I became friends through Black Flag but early on we weren’t friends. He was like, “Get this guy outta here” cause I would just grind on him to let Black Flag play at the Mask. He eventually broke down the last night of the bomb shelter. We were the opening band. There were about 300 or 400 people there because it was the last night and everybody wanted to be there, it didn’t matter who played. Then the fire marshal showed up and when the fire marshal’s comes the LAPD comes along with them. So that was the end of that. We hounded him for like two years to let us play there.

He and I became friends through Black Flag. He would eventually tell me in a conversation up in San Francisco that Black Flag was his favorite band. I was taken aback. I was like why? He said we were real. We became friends over this conversation and became closer through the years. One night we were banging heads at an art gallery and we took it out on the street. We were yelling and screaming, having a great time, and “how you doing”. After Brendan left the Mask, started doing really important things like booking a club on sunset boulevard, where one night it would be Screaming Jay Hawkins, the next night it would be Etta James, the next night would be the Blasters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Flag, the Minutemen. Just amazing line ups. After he left Club Lingerie he went to a venue called the Variety Arts Center downtown by where they built the Staples Center. He was booking all kinds of great stuff. He was a really wonderful character, just a straight up no bullshit guy. 

He said, “Keith, it’s time for you to write a book”. He was already in the third re-write of a Red Hot Chilli Peppers book. Which that book would end up being at least a minimum of six, seven, eight rewrites ‘cause those guys were like “You can’t say that about me! Why would you say that about me? You need to change that!” But he said you need to write a book. I’ll help you get a book deal. He said there are these book companies, they’re not giving out a lot of money now so don’t expect a lot of money but give me a call and I’ll help you write your initial statement as to what you’re going to put in the book.

I called him, he said, “I’m going with my girlfriend to celebrate our anniversary in Santa Barbara.” On a Friday night he fell out of his chair when he was eating dinner. On Monday morning they pulled the plug on him. At first I was really fucking bummed like, “there goes my book”. It was really fucked up thing to think that way because it’s like, “I just lost one of my best friends”. That’s more important than any fucking book, any music, anything else. Because of him I started writing stories. I had already written six or seven chapters for a book. Unfortunately I had no editor, so my stories in the finished book, a chapter could be anywhere from three pages to eight pages. They way I was writing, the minimum chapter would be ten pages long. So it would not have had the fast pace the book has. 

My booking agent, the guy who books FLAG and OFF, said, “Look, I work for a big agency, we handle actors, voice over people, people who write screenplays, people who write books.” They guy who deals with bands said we’ll have you talk to a guy who runs that part of the booking agency. I talked to the guy who said he’ll have no problem getting you a book deal. I met this guy named Ben Schafer who works at Da Capo. He said let’s do this book. I’m gonna find a writer for the book. So he introduced me to a guy who co-wrote the book, a guy named Jim Ruland. At first I didn’t want to deal with him because I know a bunch of people who have written books. But the more I started working with Jim, the more I realized he was the perfect guy for the deal. I was told you can bump him all the way down to just ghost writer. My ego doesn’t allow me to just push someone aside like that. We spent about 70 hours talking back and forth, doing interviews. He was keeping track of what was on each tape and I’d point out certain point of interest. He was responsible for the pacing of the book because it moves quickly. It’s like listening to an OFF record. It’s not a slow paced like let’s really think about this entire book. It’s more like, “Let’s do this and not dick around”. It moves quickly and doesn’t get bogged down.

When I interviewed Dez Cadena (FLAG), we asked him what a Jazzpush is.

I’ve never heard that term.

Most skaters don’t know what it is either so we like to hear interpretations of what they think it is.

One of the big jazz engineers in a studio where the Circle Jerks were making a record said, “You gotta listen to this”. It was the brushes against the ride symbol. He said, “Listen, you can hear each brush”. I guess Jazzpush would be the clarity, pristine sound and freedom. We have free jazz, which is supposed to go over the place, but there’s something that always has to lay down the line. That could be Jazzpush. Something to fall back on. You gotta have a thread.