“There’s mass murderers, republicans, gang members and then people that play music in bands. I think that’s the lowest life forms. If you live near the ocean, you can go to tide pools and find higher levels of intelligence.”

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By Al Sotack  |  Send to Friend

Keith Morris’ Traveling Fuck Yeah Festival was one dominated by rock and roll nostalgia. Locals had the opportunity to choose from stop-offs on big tours by the likes of Robert Plant and Daryl Hall. Van Morrison tickets peaked at a boggling $350. But, many kids looking to take their own small part in the ongoing and always dimmer history of rock had only to drop seventeen bucks for Morris’ semi-nomadic preamble to his giant indie fest. Punk rock nostalgia comes cheap.

Reunions are a dime a dozen. Is it a huge surprise to see dozens of great, old bands doing sad, ruinous tours, offering lackluster performances of riotous classics? Rock music was a folk music to begin with, and punk rock was maybe its most basic form. There were hundreds of punk bands that played enough or did enough stupid shit to secure their own tiny niche in the annals of rock history. So today, there is an endless parade of reunited former heroes looking for late-life loans from their younger, cooler selves. What separates Morris’ old band, and current headliner for Fuck Yeah, is that the Circle Jerks never broke up. Or they broke up so many times nobody can keep count.

Either way, at fifty three years old Keith Morris finds himself an elder statesman of punk rock.

“Are you accusing me of being a senior citizen?” he scowls, and for a moment you hear bubbling from beneath the articulate, good natured subject, a little bit of the snarl one hopes for from the founding singer of Black Flag.

For thirty years the on-again off-again Circle Jerks have been hacking along with their own brand of classic, totally ridiculous punk. Morris founded the band with guitarist Greg Hetson (now of Bad Religion) after either being thrown out of or quitting the best hardcore band of all time, depending on which version of the story you hear. With classics like “I Just Want Some Skank” off their debut Group Sex, where every track furiously clocks in under two minutes and many under one, Morris and cohorts seemed dead earnest to not take anything, especially themselves or their music, seriously.

“The Circle Jerks only exist as a part-time band at best,” Morris says. “Cause Greg plays in Bad Religion. If Bad Religion has a tour we can’t play. They are going to Europe for a couple of weeks then that removes a couple weeks from us. We are at the mercy of Bad Religion. And Greg has a daughter, and is into spending more time with her too. He doesn’t want to be a deadbeat Dad. The other guys are disgruntled, grumpy old farts.”

But keeping the Circle Jerks as a part-time gig seems well-suited for Morris, who is not particularly fond of touring to begin with. “I’m fifty three, I’m diabetic, and our drummer seems to think every time we go out we should play for three months,” he quips. After being diagnosed with adult onset diabetes in 1999, Morris has had to live with an obstacle his own younger self never had. Bouts with hypoglycemia leave Morris with stories about rushing offstage for a Dr. Pepper. One particularly bad episode had been blacking out behind the wheel and crashing into a parked Mercedes SUV at the bottom of Sunset Blvd.

“Vocalists like myself find it more difficult to keep in shape,” he says.

Instead of constant touring, Morris busies himself with other projects. Over the years he has found himself in roles as opposed as being the defacto leader of Midget Handjob, a performance art group, and an A&R manager for the now-defunct American office of V2 Records. His curatorial role in Fuck Yeah takes up most of the singer's spare time these days. After the traveling Fest (featuring Dillinger Four and Matt & Kim among others) is over, preparation for the full-fledged festival begins. The roster for the big event includes a Murder City Devils reunion, as well as appearances by groups as diverse as Sparks, Mastodon, the Drones, No Age, Superchunk and Philly’s Man Man.

“My day job is plotting my suicide,” Morris says. “I work on The Fuck Yeah Fest, the Fuck Yeah Tour, goof off, do the Circle Jerks thing every now and then, but I’m bored. I’m gonna be looking for a day job pretty soon. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Does this ominous remark to a return to the Record Industry? “We’ve talked about starting a record label, doing a singles thing, but there’s no money to be made in it. Why would you want to get into that? Plus, when you’re dealing with rock bands, you’re dealing with one of the lowest forms of life,” Morris says. “There’s mass murderers, republicans, gang members and then people that play music in bands. I think that’s the lowest life forms. If you live near the ocean, you can go to tide pools and find higher levels of intelligence.”

If V2 left Morris bitter towards the industry as a whole, it is no surprise. According to him, his first assignment at the label was supposed to be an attempted buy-over of SST Records, owned by former Black Flag founder Greg Ginn. “I laughed in their face,” Morris recalls fondly. “SST at one point was the greatest indie label ever. V2 was just this vacuum. Their evil plot was sucking up indie labels.” Not that Morris has any love for Ginn. The two don’t talk.

“He owes me too much money,” Morris says. “He owes me a home. If not, then a condo. And a car.”

One of the last times the two were together was in 2003, when Morris had a chance to witness the farce of the punk rock reunion first hand. He even had a part in it. The Blag Flag reunion show at the Hollywood Palladium drew hundreds of kids looking for one last great chance to see a favorite perform live.

“Nightmare wouldn’t be the correct way to describe it,” says Morris. “I had done a couple of rehearsals and it made Spinal Tap seem serious. Two shows went down and the majority of people…people from all over the world, weren’t very happy. I realized there was a lot of negativity attached to that band, and, obviously, I made the right choice when I quit to start the Circle Jerks 'cause the Circle Jerks were never that serious. Or they offset their seriousness with sarcasm and that added to our longevity, cause a band that takes themselves too seriously…they don’t last.”

 

Writer Al Sotack knows a thing or two about hardcore festivals and they excite the shit out of him.