Two men, a decade apart in age, are remembering their early encounters in the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s. Keith Morris was cock of the walk then, the singer with Black Flag, the toughest, angriest band in LA, the band who invented hardcore punk and whose direct descendants would become worldwide superstars a couple of decades later. Steven McDonald was just a kid when he and his brother Jeffrey started going to punk-rock shows. They formed their band Redd Kross when Steven was 11 and Jeffrey 15 – and their first gig was supporting Black Flag at, of all things, a middle school graduation.
"I'll tell you Keith's level of responsibility," McDonald says. "Keith picked me and Jeff up and took us to Hollywood. And I was 12. And Keith drove this big old fucking Chevy Impala or something – some beater – and that was the first time I remember driving on what's called Dead Man's Curve: Sunset Boulevard from the 405 freeway into Hollywood.
"It's really incredibly winding, but wide, so you can drive really fast and not notice it. The Jan and Dean song comes from that. That was the first time I'd ever driven on that strip of highway and I think Keith was trying to outdo Jan. Or Dean. Or whoever it was. I was fucking scared shitless – and that's how the night started. I don't remember what show we went to, but at the end of the night I remember being at the International House of Pancakes on Sunset Boulevard around 5am – the sun was coming up – and just thinking: 'Holy shit, I hope he takes us home soon. Mom and Dad are going to be so pissed off. What do we do?'"
After 35 years of friendship – of being in bands that swapped members like kids exchange football cards – Morris and McDonald are finally playing together. Off! are an unlikely proposition on the face of it: Morris is 55, dreadlocked, and with a tone of voice that seems set unshakably to sarcastic (within 10 minutes of our sitting down in the garden of a north London gastropub, the ladies who lunch at the adjoining table have moved inside, perhaps not wishing to hear stories of elephant tranquillisers at Grateful Dead shows). McDonald is 45, garrulous and funny. Completing the group are Burning Brides guitarist Dimitri Coats, who formed Off! with Morris, and drummer Mario Rubalcaba, of Rocket from the Crypt and Hot Snakes. In a genre that frowns on celebrity, this is a punk supergroup.
What's more, it has got Off! noticed outside the normally closed world of hardcore. They are signed to the Vice, the record label of the online hipster magazine. They get attraction from websites and publications normally more excited about Panda Bear than punk-rock. That's because they've eschewed punk tropes of the past 30 years – the crossovers with metal and pop, the flight to speed and incomprehensible screaming – instead making music that sounds uncannily like the west-coast punk of 1980. Their records have sleeves drawn by Raymond Pettibon, the cartoon artist whose drawings – on record sleeves and flyers for the bands on the SST label – set the style for early LA punk graphics. And they arrived at this point pretty much by accident.
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Morris had called in Coats to help on a reunion record with his then band Circle Jerks, only to find himself outvoted in his own group. "Dimitri and I started writing the bulk of a record, and it was dismissed by the other members, which is probably one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me," he says. "We were working in the middle of summer in my living room. It was 100 degrees. We're going through this gruelling course of him whamming and jamming on the guitar and one day he hit upon something. I was just blown away. I said: 'What you're doing right now takes me back to where I need to be.' A lot of bands don't go back there. They go to something else. They gravitate or get sucked into something that's not really the right band. I told him: what you need to do for your homework tonight – listen to the first Black Flag EP."
Black Flag were formed in Hermosa Beach, south of central LA, in 1976. Morris was working in a record store, whose owner had introduced him to a lot of music, but then started "to really wimp out. But he's planting the seed for Black Flag, because instead of playing really interesting, cool music, he's playing stuff like the Eagles and Joni Mitchell. Greg Ginn, the guitarist in Black Flag, hasn't thought about a band yet. He's picked up a guitar and he's been strumming around – this is late 76 – and his younger sister Erica is bringing Greg along with her to the record store, and the guy who owns the record store is falling in love with Erica. The owner of the store and Erica would split and go hold hands and walk on the pier or whatever young lovers do, and I would be left in charge of the store. And the first thing I would do would be: I'm not listening to that! I'm not gonna play that! I've had enough of that! So I'd go through the bins looking for cassettes, anything that's loud and aggressive. Anything that's rocking. Which could have been anything from Cheap Trick to Aerosmith to ZZ Top to Black Oak Arkansas. Anything that didn't look like it was from Laurel Canyon. And that was the roots of Black Flag."
There were two LA punk scenes, though, and Black Flag were in the one that seemed to be the idiot child of the family. Where Hollywood punk was dominated by arty, conceptual bands playing at the Masque club, Black Flag were the first of the suburban bands – hardcore has been called "the blues of the suburbs" for its appeal to prosperous but disaffected kids – who sprang up around the edges of the city, and who attracted a markedly different crowd. Suburban southern California was the only place where the punks were also the high school tough guys. "There was Edison High and Fullerton High – those became 'punk rock high schools,'" McDonald remembers. "And we would even hear about them and go down there – 'It's gonna be amazing! We're going to this punk rock high school!' But it was actually a bummer scene for us, because we were teenagers, too – and these guys were the jocks, except they were trying to dress like Sid Vicious, and thinking that to be a punk you had to be a fucking dick asshole."
Not that Black Flag exactly discouraged dick asshole-dom. McDonald recalls seeing his first Black Flag show, bottom of the bill at the Moose Lodge – a club for war veterans – in Redondo Beach. "There was this weird, fucking up, extremely brutal, abrasive opening band with a very drunk lead singer. All I remember is it was very loud, very abrasive and the singer pulled the American flag off the pedestal it was on."
"I swung from it," Morris corrects. "In a room full of veterans of foreign wars. I was chased by all these grey-haired fellas …"
Nevertheless, while the art-punk scene of Hollywood faded, the suburban hardcore scene thrived through the 80s. Even if Morris's own band, Circle Jerks – formed in 1979 after he left Black Flag – were too early and inconsistent to break through, and even if Redd Kross moved away from punk into an arch melange of bubblegum, glam and classic rock, the bands who were inspired by that first wave of suburban hardcore got a little bigger with every passing year, until the likes of Green Day and the Offspring became international stars by leaving the underground for the mainstream. They in turn were followed by a generation of bands – the likes of Good Charlotte – who never really bothered with the underground in the first place.
Morris and McDonald look on the commodification of what they helped to create with a mixture of scorn and amusement. "One of the things that irks me are the boy bands on these tours who pull up in their buses and the record label's giving them a bunch of money and they sound like really weak versions of [early SoCal punks] the Dickies or the Descendents," Morris says. They laugh at the idea that all you need to be in a punk band is some black clothes, some piercings, some eyeliner and sleeve tattoos (all of which are conspicuously absent among the members of Off!). Morris calls that look "the first page in the punk rock manual. To get from Point A to Point B this is the way you need to behave, this is the way you need to look, this is the way you're supposed to sound, and if you follow all of these rules …"
"You get the Punk Certificate!"
"And there's the Punk Rock Pot of Gold!"
McDonald offers a slightly more conciliatory note. "With a lot of the newer kids, it's just the classic scenario of kids several generations down the line. They're not discovering the Buzzcocks, they're discovering Green Day. And from our perspective, we've got this snotty old man attitude about it."
Snotty, perhaps, but Off! are a thrilling, brutal experience, especially live. Coats and McDonald flank Morris, legs apart – Coats hammering at his guitar, McDonald throwing rock star poses. The singer prowls and glares, like a demented, dreadlocked weasel. They can rattle through 30 songs in half an hour.Today they are in a tiny room in a converted church, recording a live session for the Daytrotter website. In the confined space, it's crazily loud. It's also crazily brief. They have an hour to record four songs; they knock off six in five minutes and are done.
"We're not really a band," Morris says. "We don't have a lot of time together. So when we do we have to make the most of the opportunity."
"The fact that we're all grownups with all sorts of other responsibilities means when we get together we're not still trying to figure out who we are and be cool," McDonald says. "We're just trying to get together and …"
"Blow up!"
The albums The First Four EPs and Off! are out now on Vice. Redd Kross's new single, Researching the Blues, is available on iTunes.
