When an audience member at the Circle Jerks‘ Las Vegas concert on Sunday called Keith Morris a traitor sometime after the pioneering hardcore-punk group performed their Golden Shower of Hits song “Under the Gun,” Morris gave him a mouthful. “I’m a traitor?” Morris said. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Fuck you. I vote in every election. I always vote for the least stinkiest piece of shit.”
Video of the exchange, which took place at Las Vegas’ Brooklyn Bowl venue, captured someone comparing the gig to one by the more politically explicit, lefty group the Dead Kennedys, which prompted Morris to respond with a series of rhetorical questions.
“So you’re not here for my political bullshit, you’re here for the music?” he said, sarcastically. “Do you fucking understand our fucking lyrics? Do you understand what we’re singing about? Do you fucking understand that I think fucking Donald Trump is the biggest piece of shit to ever walk the face of the Earth? Are you fucking Nazis? Are you fucking fascists?”
Morris summed things up with a suggestion for the fan. “The next time we come to town, stay the fuck home,” he said. “It’s really simple.” Then they kicked into “Coup d’Etat,” their contribution to the Repo Man soundtrack, which finds Morris describing the violent overthrow of a government. “A push from the left and a shove from the right/It’s all planned out, we’ll do it tonight,” Morris sings on that song. “First the president then his wife/We’ll take them for ransom/Or take their lives.”
The Circle Jerks became Morris’ on-again, off-again main band after he split with Black Flag. Their first two albums, Group Sex (1980) and Wild in the Streets (1982), have become genre benchmarks. The latter album’s “Political Stu” and “Moral Majority” both blasted Reagan-era Republicans.
Rolling Stone ranked Group Sex Number 50 in the magazine’s recent list of the Greatest Punk Albums of All Time. “The group formed just a few months before the LP’s release, when singer Keith Morris rage-quit Black Flag, but the feral energy of songs like ‘World Up My Ass’ and ‘Live Fast Die Young’ hit a nerve with the growing SoCal hardcore scene,” the magazine said.
The band has a run of European shows this summer and will return to the U.S. for the CBGB Festival in New York this September and the Darker Waves Festival in Huntington Beach, California in November.
