Wed, May 21, 2014

How often do you guys play shows these days? I would say, like, once a month.

So is it full-time for you? It’s all I do. I don’t have a job besides that, but I’m on disability actually, so I get money from the government (laughs).

Is it full-time for the whole band? Drummer [Eric Spicer] doesn’t have a job. Guitar player [Bill Stephens] has a job. And bass player [Pete Mittler] has a job. Guitar player is a librarian in a small town near here; he went to library school. Bass player works for Ameritech installing cable phone lines.

Are you writing new music? We are. A couple years ago we wrote six songs and put them out on three 7-inches, and we plan on adding to that. We’re in the process of writing about four or five songs, and we hope to have those out and added to those other six songs to make an album soon. The recording date is in July.

I’ve always felt the Chicago punk scene has been overshadowed by New York and Los Angeles. It was less flashy and less glitzy, but it’s effect and influence are getting spotlighted by events like Riot Fest, with which you are associated. Would you agree? I would. We got off to a slow start, to be quite honest with you. The coasts had a good deal going first, especially California. There was a lot of people out there, it seemed, who were turned on at the same time. But once we caught on, I think people paid attention to what we were doing because it was different to what they were doing and they appreciated us as much as the coasts. It was something fresh that needed to be looked at.

How did those early Chicago and Midwest shows compare to playing the major punk markets? They were a lot smaller. I think I could name the first two kids who were at our first all-ages show—there were only two kids there (laughs). But, you know, when out-of-town bands would come we would go see them, I must’ve seen Black Flag with Dez [Cadena] singing a million times. We used to go see English bands, too, but they were a little more stuffy and more dress-uppy and not so honest. We always liked the Buzzcocks, though.

When you were starting off did you consciously try to diverge from the sound you heard from the coasts and England? No, the first guitar player, Santiago Durango, who was in Big Black with me as well, kind of coined the sound of what we had going—a lot of the “woah woah” stuff and the drum sound—and I just followed suit with what he was doing and emulated him quite a bit. And when he left the band, I don’t think we were consciously trying to sound different. I don’t think we could sound have sounded like them if we tried. We weren’t really great musicians. I know they weren’t either when they started out, but we just did what we could and luckily it sounded different. I would have hated to have it sound the same as anything.

You know, at the beginning Siouxsie and the Banshees didn’t sound like The Stranglers or didn’t sound like The Buzzcocks or didn’t sound like the Sex Pistols, but you could tell they were all from the same school. We didn’t sound like The Dead Kennedys and we didn’t sound like Hüsker Dü, but they were all good and they were all punk bands and that’s what we hoped to achieve—some sort of uniqueness that went along with the movement.

Do you ever feel like the guys who inspired it all don’t get enough credit? Sometimes, but it doesn’t bother me. Green Day, more power to them, I hope they become bigger than they are now. It’s just passing the torch, playing this music until someone younger catches on to it. The Buzzcocks influenced us—we don’t sound like them, but you can tell the influence is there, and you can tell with Green Day and Blink-182 and whoever they’re playing on the radio now. Some of them sound like they came from our school of thoughts, some of them sound completely different, but some of them sound like Arctic Monkeys (laughs), not to slam the Arctic Monkeys.

That’s good to hear. I think it would be easy to feel bitter. Yeah. You know we agreed to play a show with The Offspring recently. They’re not one of my favorite bands, but they’re a punk rock band and they’re paying us pretty well to play. I’ve never met them or anything but they asked us to play, so.

Dave Grohl has always said that his first punk rock show was a Naked Raygun show in Chicago that his cousin brought him to. And he came back here and interviewed me for a documentary, so he’s got his heart in the right place.

Web Link: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2014/may/21/punk-rock-bowling-interview-naked-raygun-Pezzati/

Wed, May 21, 2014, Las Vegas Weekly Magazine 

You’re pulling double duty at Punk Rock Bowling with Descendents and All. Is that fairly common at festivals these days? Well, it is happening a little more frequently. Since Descendents are really only able to do a couple shows at a time because of work schedules, we’ll sometimes add a couple All shows around Descendents shows if we can, just for fun more than anything. That way we’re already all in one place except for our singer, and we just fly Chad [Price] in. We just did that in Europe—four All shows and two Descendents shows over a week in Europe. It’s fun.

When you’re playing All shows, do you ever still have to deal with fans who are upset they’re not seeing Descendents? It’s less that way than it used to be. It had more of that feel to it before we started doing Descendents shows again, but now that Descendents are out there playing occasionally, most people have gotten the chance to see us if they’re able. So now, the people who come to see All are people that actually really like All. The shows are smaller, but that’s just fine by us.

If [singer] Milo [Aukerman] said he wanted to give up being a scientist and do Descendents full-time, would you still continue with All? I would think so. But, you know, neither of them are really in a position to take on a full-band form, be a full-time thing. And Milo abandoning science is strongly unlikely; he’s proven far more likely to not play music, though he’s always drawn to do some of it in some context. What we have now is really ideal for him, because he does his science thing, and he still gets to do his music thing, too. We just kind of do it on a limited basis.

I think for a long time it was going to be one or the other, because the rest of us were full-time musicians. Now, Bill [Stevenson] produces a lot of records. I mix records. Karl [Alvarez] has stayed busy playing more—he was in The Real McKenzies for a long time and All Systems Go for a while. So everybody is busy enough now that we can be part-time with Descendents and it’s fine.

I think if Descendents were able to be full-on we would probably still do All shows, because that music just developed differently over time from Descendents. I wouldn’t say it was an active thing, that we were trying to sound different from Descendents. It was just us writing what we write and playing what we play, and it developed differently. There’s a lot of cool songs in there and a lot of things we enjoy playing, so I think it would continue on.

Who’s going to be on vocals for the All show here? Chad [Price] will be with us. We’ve done some things with Scott [Reynolds], who we’re still good friends with and Dave [Smalley], who we’re still good friends with, but I think we will more often be doing shows with Chad if we do shows with All.

All never really broke up. There came a time between us being a pretty small band and not being able to fill huge clubs with people, and children started coming into the picture—families and children. Eventually we couldn’t really justify being full-time with All; we weren’t in it to make money, and we certainly weren’t accomplishing making money (laughs). It just kind of got back-burnered, but the band never really broke up. And Chad really is our singer. So we’ve done a few things with Scott and/or Dave just out of interest or just for fun.

The Descendents documentary Filmage will screen at Punk Rock Bowling. Were you involved in it beyond your interviews that are included? The guys who made it—the two sort of main guys who put it together, Deedle [Lacour] and Matt [Riggle]—are good friends of mine. They’re in a band called 41 Gorgeous Blocks, which is the first band that ever recorded at my little studio here in Tulsa. So I met them when I was doing a stint as crewman for a band called MxPx, and we hit it off and became friends. They’ve always worked in the video and film production industry, and at some point they approached me and said, “We wanna make this thing. We’re huge fans, and we want to get the definitive documentary.” And we said okay. I wasn’t involved in any part of making it other than doing interviews, but it was me that went to the rest of my guys and said, “Hey, these are my buddies, they want to do this, they’re really good, let’s do it.”

What do you think of the finished product? I think they did a fantastic job. They really caught the band in the way that I see us. It’s of particular interest to me, because even though I’ve been in the band a very long time, I am actually a latecomer to Descendents—I wasn’t there in the beginning. I thought I would have already dragged every story out of Bill, Frank [Navetta] and Tony [Lombardo] and Milo that I possibly could have over my years of friendship with them but even I still had a lot to learn about the band and how it came together. So that was really a lot of fun. And to be able to look back and view some video footage I had never seen before, of the original lineup playing, that part was a blast. I love it.

You referred to yourself as a latecomer to the band, but you’re still about to hit 30 years with Descendents. Coming up, yep.

Is that surprising to you? Yeah, you know, it is really strange to still be such a force for people. I am always amazed at that, because when we were starting out there were all these bands, bands playing all over the country and certainly hundreds of them in California, and for all of us that were playing at that time, there was never an expectation of success. I mean, success at that time meant doing the music at all, success meant playing in a club or whatever or maybe going on a short tour and getting to play with other bands in other cities, that was what it was about. There was no money, there was no fame, there was nothing—there was just getting to do it because you were into it. That was the only reason anyone bothered. So for that music to have impacted people enough that they still care about it all these years later is really something to me. And it is incredibly fortunate that we’re in a position to still play it and that we’re all still alive, except Frank unfortunately.

That this can continue in the way it has is amazing to me. I love it, that it can still happen. And the people—we’ll play shows now and there are young people discovering this music. It isn’t just a sea of old punkers. It’s young people being turned on to this music somehow.

Who do you think is more punk rock, 19-year-old Stephen doing it then or 49-year-old Stephen still doing it now? From the core I am a die-hard music fanatic, that’s really what I am. I am nuts about music; I always have been. I’ve never wanted to do anything else. I don’t know how to do anything else. So the punk rock part of it serves a time that I was in. There were certainly myriad reasons that anyone would be interested in something like that, because it was going against what everybody around you was doing.

Now the need to look a certain way doesn’t hold anything for me, I don’t really care about that, I don’t worry about making some sort of statement in that regard but musically speaking I still do feel exactly the same way. So all of the things that drew me to that are still there.

But now I’m a dad, life changes, we’re 50. Punk rock gave a lot of us a place to work out our issues and figure out who we were as people, It taught us how to be better, and a lot of the smartest people that I’ve ever known came from that scene, and they’re still smart today. They’re still changing the world, and they still see the world in interesting ways.

Full Article: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2014/may/21/punk-rock-bowling-interview-descendents-all-guitar/

Wed, May 21, 2014, Las Vegas Weekly Magazine

How’s the tour going? The first leg was pretty amazing. We had a couple of duds, which would equate to not selling out the venues, but that’s okay. We’ve gone to a couple of places where, as a fairly new band, we’ve still not got a foothold in a couple of these cities. But the shows have all been fun, and all the bands playing with us—Cerebral Ballzy and NASA Space Universe—are fantastic. We’re enjoying ourselves, not bickering like a bunch of teenage girls. It’s all good.

How are you feeling health wise? I picked up something coming out of the Rockies, driving out of the mountains out into the desert of New Mexico, and it’s still with me. It’s hard to describe it, but it feels like someone has a pair of pliers to my Adam’s apple. But it’s all good—when I need to yell and scream I can get that going.

I know you had a big scare last year. Is it tough to control your diabetes on tour? It is very difficult because the problem with diabetes is, one day it can be amazing and the next it can go horribly south. I’ve been extremely fortunate in that before we left on this first leg I was losing sleep and my glucose numbers were through the roof, and once we were, like, three or four days into the tour we kind of settled into a groove and I actually started to feel really great about my diabetes. I mean, you never feel great about having diabetes, but I was feeling really good.

See, I f*cked up royally and missed a couple of meals, and because of that found myself in a diabetic coma a couple of times, and because of that we had to cancel a tour. In my entire musical lifespan, which has been about 38 years, I’ve only canceled two or three shows. So to have to blow off, like, 15 or 20 shows was pretty harsh. So now I’m on a new insulin regimen, and I’m trying to stick to an eating regimen, where you eat every four hours, five hours.

Off!’s new album, Wasted Years, debuted in Billboard’s top 100 …Yes, it did. I don’t normally pay attention to that, but apparently to say that to a record label or a manager or somebody of stature is supposed to be a big deal. So hey, hip hip hooray, good for us. If it wasn’t us it would have been somebody else, maybe some schlocky boy band with an electric guitar player.

But when Black Flag was getting busted by the cops, did you ever think you’d have an album chart? Well, that was so far back, we were playing things by ear. You just live from day to day and hope for the best. Being in Black Flag, we never cared about anything like that; we didn’t even know about stuff like that. Maybe you would go to the music store and there’d be a Hit Parade and a Circus Magazine and maybe next to it would be a Billboard, but Billboard didn’t have Alice Cooper on the cover. They didn’t have The Sex Pistols or The Damned on the cover, or Patti Smith. I believe those types of magazines are industry trade news.

The record feels very live. What was the recording process like? We normally work under a lot of stress. We work under hectic circumstances, because we always set ourselves up for this situation where we book mastering before we’ve even written the songs.

The recording situation is learn and go, one and done—that’s a sports reference for all of those young guys who play college basketball for a season and then go to the NBA—but we didn’t play a season and go to the NBA. We have a couple of days to learn the songs, and because of the way our band is made up of dads we can’t say “Hey, we’re taking two months to record this records.” We don’t get to do that. These guys have gotta have something going on so they can pay their bills.

What type of result do you think you get from that type of urgent recording? You can hear it in the way we play—we’re not going in there and jamming out on a song for 15 minutes. We’re not getting in there and doing a verse and a chorus and a verse and a bridge and a chorus and another verse and then adding all of that on to the end of what we had already recorded and turning it into something radio-friendly, meaning puff and pad things and push things in the proper places and not say expletives and not be so angry. That doesn’t work with us. We know we’re dealing with people with short attention spans; the entire world is that way now. We have the computer in front of us, so we want results immediately. I want my answer right now. I wanna hear that song right now.

The title Wasted Years could be interpreted a lot of ways. It could be the years you’re drinking, or it could be symbolic of punk in general, or your career. What are you trying to evoke with that? All of the above. If you look at the album cover you’re seeing a guy that’s wasted and surfing his life away, you could also equate the guy to Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. There were 30 or 40 of those kids in my high school in Manhattan Beach.

And also, there are certain people who don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye with you, and maybe you don’t have the wherewithal to say, “I am no longer putting up with this. I’ve already wasted part of my life doing this. Time for a change of direction. Time to surround myself with new people.”

That’s the reason I’m doing Off!—not being attached to somebody else’s schedule that dictates what you do with your life. When you’re used to a certain pattern, to break that pattern could be a difficult thing. Or maybe it could be an easy thing, depending upon your mentality, depending upon your outlook on life, depending upon where you are in your world.

I watched you headline Punk Rock Bowling last year with Flag. What was that like for you? Well, I have a certain mentality where I feel that there’s too many of these punk rock events—Punk Rock Bowling, Punk Rock Garbage Disposal, Punk Rock Picnic, Punk Rock Cruise—and I was adamantly opposed to it until I actually went and experienced it and saw it firsthand.

When we started Off! we were gonna sign with Epitaph Records. Brett Gurewitz was super-jazzed, super-psyched out of his mind, going completely ape-sh*t over Off! … We were in the process of signing a deal with them, and one of the guys in the band said, “Hey, I think what we’re creating is pretty happening. We would be selling ourselves short if we didn’t go out there and talk to anyone else.” So he talked to one of his friends, who happened to be one of the owners of Vice.

A lot of people dislike Vice, because they say it’s a trendy, hipster, cooler-than-thou label, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyways, during this process one of our guys went to his friend, his one and only friend at Epitaph and said, “So what are you gonna do with us? What is your strategy?” And the first words that came out of this guy’s mouth was that they wanted me to contact Kevin Lyman at the Warped Tour to see if we could be one of the bands at the Warped Tour.

That was the trap door answer, the boiling vat of hot oil answer. We didn’t want to do the Warped Tour. I’m not dissing the Warped Tour—it has its place. and there are some good bands on the Warped Tour—but that wasn’t the crowd we wanted to play to. That’s one of the reasons we’ve avoided going on tour with Pennywise and any of those types of bands. We chose to travel a different path, and we caught a lot of flack for it. “Oh you’re playing with them? You’re playing that festival?” We played Coachella, and it was pretty f*cking amazing! We played in a giant tent, there were like 6,000 people in the tent, and they were all going ape-sh*t. The majority of them were just girls who needed to get out of the daytime sunlight. It was pretty awesome. So here we are playing in front of 5,000 girls, nothin’ wrong with that—that’s almost like The Beatles.

Who’s more punk rock: 20-something Keith Morris screaming in Black Flag or 50-something Keith Morris still screaming in Off!? I’m just as angry now, if not more angry, because there’s just more stuff to be angry about now. As citizens of the United States we have let a lot of things slip away, and a lot of these things that we allowed to slip out of our grasp have turned around to bite us in the ass. I’ll never be president of the United States, but the first thing I would do is bring back all our troops from all of these different places in the world, so they would all be here—they would all be doing work here. And I would take every politician that has any dirt under their fingernails—and I don’t mean dirt from going out and working on roads or digging ditches—I would take them all out to the desert and dig a giant hole, and no one would ever see from them or hear from them again. Hooray! For the working class people of America.

Full Article: http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/2014/may/21/punk-rock-bowling-interview-vocalist-keith-morris/