Hardcore will never die, at least while Keith Morris is still alive and kicking. The 55-year-old Morris co-founded the legendary Black Flag with Greg Ginn before leaving the band three years later to start the equally seminal Circle Jerks with future Bad Religion guitarist Greg Hetson. That band lasted a decade, though since 1994, the Circle Jerks have continued to tour sporadically but haven’t released a new album since 1995. That was going to change when the band convened last year with producer Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides) to work on new material. The result, however, was Morris quitting the CJs and forming OFF!, a new hardcore supergroup with Coats on guitar, Steven McDonald (Redd Kross) on bass and Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket From The Crypt, Hot Snakes) on drums. OFF! recorded four EPs that will be released as a vinyl boxed set, First Four EPs (Vice), on December 14. The band will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with Morris.
Mario: Another vice that I will hopefully never let up on. It’s not so much about white-label test presses or colored wax as opposed to the satisfaction of uncovering some new lascivious sounds trapped within them grooves. Also the art aspect and info that can come with. It’s like you get this whole world in such a tiny little condensed LP package. My mum bought me Kiss Alive! (the first one) when I was five years old, just after I got my first drum kit. So at first it was all about the Kiss drumming, then I would filter through all of the uncles’ LPs and eight-tracks tapes. The two that stuck were Grand Funk Railroad and Deep Purple. The drumming in those two bands had a huge effect on me as a kid and still do. Both Don Brewer and Ian Paice throw out really tasty meal tickets on them drum kits! Then from there I walked into Zep, Sabbath and Hendrix. Listening to the radio would make me wanna hear more from the bands that I liked, so I would save my allowance and chore money and convince my gramps to take me to the record store. Now, how it got to the point of going to stores and buying up to $500 worth of chit??? Somewhere I developed a real problem, huh? I just seek inspiration in certain ways of drumming or guitar playing or there are some LPs that kinda suck but they have the best production or sounds in the mix. Sometimes it’s the lack of production, too. I really like live bootlegs of certain bands—Led Zep, Velvets—because they are bands that always played different every night. I have around 50 to 75 Zep boots, and Bonzo always played different and they always jammed something different, for better or worse. So yeah, records pretty much rule.
Video after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Wql0CXKi4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeGs7gFHCQ4
