OFF! Punk supergroup
When four legends from punk’s halcyon days joined forces as OFF!, they helped the world reconnect with their energetic roots.
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Keith Morris is feeling a bit sore. He slipped and fell in a shower in Amsterdam yesterday after ignoring instructions on the door. “Nooo fuuucking waaay,” he says in his famously drawn-out way. Peering at me through John Lennon-style specs he adds: “I’m gonna shuuut the showwwer orrrff wherever I waaant.”
We are sitting in the lobby-cum-gallery of XOYO in Old Street, London, where Morris and his band OFF! are playing a show tonight. Although thirty-five years and two thousand miles separate us from the garages of Hermosa Beach, California, where Morris and Greg Ginn formed their first band, Black Flag, traces of that legacy are blooming all around us. “This is a good, little happy scene,” he says, looking around the space that awaits his UK fans, apparently unaware that he helped create it.
Since the Hermosa days, punks have grown up, got suits, mortgages and babies, or fallen through the cracks and met sticky ends (Morris wears a Gun Club tee in homage to his late-friend Jeffrey Lee Pierce who died of his excesses aged just thirty-seven). So why does this fifty-six-year-old act like no time has passed? And how is he still keeping it real? “Well,” he says, leaning back. “Because I’m an idiot and I don’t know any better? There are so many phony, fake, plastic bands out there... A real band is just a real band. People who are true to their heart and what they do. People who don’t put up with bullshit. People who follow their path, even if it’s the blind leading the blind, because sometimes that’s the best path to follow.”
Bassist Dmitri Coats has another theory. “A lot of it is Keith,” he says. “Listen to the way he talks, I’ve never heard anyone talk like that. He’s a total individual. And I don’t think he could do what he does any other way.”
The members of OFF! have histories, like strands of DNA, that intertwine to form the current all-star lineup. It began when Morris left Black Flag to form Circle Jerks in 1979 (the band he would continue to play with for nearly thirty years). By the early eighties, Circle Jerks were rehearsing in ‘The Church’ (a legendary venue in Hermosa Beach, birthplace of SST Records), which is where Morris met a teenaged Steven McDonald playing bass with his Exorcist-referencing band Redd Kross. At the end of that decade, down the coast in San Diego, a kid called Mario Rubalcaba was discovering skateboarding and joining Team Alva. He shredded sidewalks professionally until the early nineties when he picked up some drumsticks and adopted the nickname 'Ruby Mars', drumming for legendary post-punk bands Rocket From The Crypt and Hot Snakes, finally forming his own psychedelic rock band Earthless in the early noughties. At the same time, across the continent in Philadelphia, a curly-haired guitarist called Dmitri Coats was shaking up the East Coast with his stoner rock three-piece, Burning Brides. But their record label collapsed so they uprooted and moved into the studios of Los Angeles, which is where he met Morris attempting to record a new Circle Jerks album. The Jerks fell out, Morris and Coats recruited McDonald and Rubalcaba, and OFF! was born.
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OFF! (text) by Shelley Lee Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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