“Here’s the beauty of the situation: having been playing music for as long as I’ve been playing, I’ve watched a lot of things happen,” he says. “There happens to be a lot more girls coming to shows. It’s not just your typical hardcore punk rock crowd anymore, where everybody’s trying to be a contestant in the Sid Vicious lookalike contest. Crowds are getting younger, and now they’re a lot more open-minded.”
A few years shy of 60, Morris hasn’t lost any of the infectious passion that marked his contribution to Black Flag’s genre-defining Nervous Breakdown EP, recorded in 1978 when the singer was 22. Having devoted more than half his life to his own immediately recognisable blend of the addled and the angry, Morris speaks with more enthusiasm and more authority than just about everyone still kicking about from the era – with the possible exception of Henry Rollins, his Black Flag successor. In the time he’s been flailing about on the front of the stage, he’s found it worth sticking by the principles with which he began his career.
“When we started this band, we didn’t have any rules, except that we were going out to play,” he says, “and like Black Flag, we’re not going to limit ourselves to the sort of people that we play to. We were very fortunate in that we didn’t want to limit ourselves, and we’re enjoying ourselves and having a great time.
“Creating this rule where we can’t play with certain bands because they look like that or because they have keyboards or synthesisers – I grew up around a lot of that, the whole hardcore mentality became this very boxlike thing of who’s cool and who’s not. At Big Day Out we’re playing with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. And The Killers, who I can’t stand – but who knows, maybe we’ll play in front of some of their people and they’ll be excited?”
The opportunity for a new outlet with Off! proved to be timely for Morris, who formed The Circle Jerks in ’79 after parting ways with Black Flag and churning out six albums before the band’s second hiatus in 1995. Despite reforming and performing for most of the last decade, The Circle Jerks didn’t put out any new material in that time, and Morris belatedly realised that he wasn’t getting any satisfaction from the music.
“The world is full of bands who compete these days, which in some ways is really sad,” he says. “To compete, the older bands need to run laps around the younger bands. In The Circle Jerks we were milking it: that became our reality. I’d be three months behind in my rent and think ‘we’d better do a bunch of shows.’
“For years I’d been in a band that was basically a side project to one of the other members. I didn’t have the intelligence or my testicles weren’t large enough to say, ‘Hey, you know what Keith, this is over, you’ve got to figure out what your next thing in life is going to be.’ Was I going to keep putting out music, go work for a record label, wash dishes at the local restaurant, pump gas at the local gas station, go to college and get a degree?”
It was his friendship with Dimitri Coats, the guitar player for Burning Brides, which gave Morris the yearning for a new beginning. When Coats offered to produce a Circle Jerks album and the pair began rehearsing some of their own material, Morris knew that the time had come to jump ship.
“Everything that I knew was going to happen happened,” he recalls. “In the process leading up to that, Dimitri and I were working in my living room every day, writing songs. We were volunteering ideas to the rest of the band and we were getting back ideas which were just not inspiring.”
After three years together and a blistering debut album – true to form, more tracks than there minutes of songtime – Morris says he’s “never been happier.”
“Granted, everyone’s older, everyone’s grouchy, three have kids, two of the guys play in other bands – but I enjoy their presence, they’re all really good guys. There’s not a whole lot of bullshit.”
BY SEAN SANDY DEVOTIONAL
