American Hardcore – Why Now?: Keith Morris believes 2006 is as good a time as any to take a look back at the ‘80s punk scene. “Anytime is a good time to revisit the punk scene. It was such a beautiful, wonderful experience. Everybody should have been there…. No, I’m being sarcastic. I think it’s the iced tea speaking right now. Didn’t someone say something about every 15 years, something needs to be revisited, or something new is going to come up?”
Keith Morris Recalls the ‘80s Vibe: Morris is very honest when it comes to discussing the way things used to be. “We had some problems back then; there were some suicidal tendencies that made it rough for a few people. All of a sudden, these gangs started cropping up and spoiled the vibe that it was supposed to be about. Our tour started to have an influx of skinheads. When we were singing these songs – Stars and Stripes or Killing for Jesus - it was all tongue and cheek, drenched in sarcasm. It was like, ‘How can you be behind something like that?’ The fact was the doors were open, anyone who wanted to come in could come in and be a part of it, as long as they’re not f**kin’ up the vibe because the whole thing was supposed to be a party. It was supposed to be about people being with like-minded people, and turning it into a like-minded community. We had enough people on the outside who were looking at us like, ‘What a bunch of screw-ups. What a bunch of idiots. What a bunch of future Yardbirds.’ One of the reasons why it died was because there were people in a faction there who were all there for a different reason.”
The Path to Being a Musician: Morris doesn’t claim to be a musician even though he did start out trying to play the bass and then the drums. He dropped playing an instrument when Greg Ginn told him he was going to be the vocalist for Black Flag. “And I knew nothing about singing,” said Morris. “I still don’t, and probably won’t even with lessons. But I grew up listening to AM radio; two amazing, incredible radio stations… Also, all that music had personality of its own. We’re not talking about now, where we have 12 zillion bands. It’s like going to the Warp Tour. Can you really tell apart the bands? But just being an outsider, stepping in there…
Morris continued, “I remember going to a Green Day, Muffs – the band would get through playing, and they would play music in between setting up the other bands. I couldn’t discern one band from another. At the time, the Circle Jerks were recording an album and I remember saying, ‘We do not come out of the studio with anything that sounds remotely similar to any of the stuff I just spent four hours of my time listening to.’ I refused, and this new production value where everything is smooth, and for the music listening public – no one wants to be offended. I could not be a part of that.”
Money & Success - Nothing Would Have Changed Jack Grisham’s Attitude: “If someone would have come up to me and said, ‘You’re going to sell a million records. Here’s a bunch of money,’ it’s still going to be a problem,” said Grisham. “I would have f**ked it up in a week. I remember some guy coming up to me saying, ‘You’re going to ruin your career.’ ‘Dude, I’ll come up there with a chainsaw and ruin my whole f**kin’ life, you think I care?’ We weren’t going to perform and behave the way they wanted us to perform and behave anyway. It didn’t matter where you stuck us. It didn’t matter what opportunities you gave us, we were going to f**k it up. There’s just no way… You don’t take wild animals off the streets and expect them to do tricks. If you bring a tiger into the house and it sh*ts on the carpet, you’re shocked? It’s like, ‘Dude, what did you expect?’ We’re going to bite. And that’s why I lived at my mother’s till I was 30.”
Morris added, “I stood on a sound board at Studio B at A&M Records Studios and when I’m standing on a $300-$400 thousand sound board, I’m jumping on this board and they’re trying to grab me off of it.” With Morris screaming at the top of his lungs, their manager was just shaking his head. Morris recalls their manager saying, “‘We had Eye on LA, or some morning show filming this, and you’re supposed to be answering their questions.’ Yeah, every opportunity we had to screw it up, we would screw it up. We didn’t think about what would be happening in the future. We didn’t even think about what was going on then.”
