The Circle Jerks + Inconvenient Nazis

Los Angeles is a weird place. An outpost for fleeing entertainment types who were being grifted out of their studios back in New York’s Long Island, Los Angeles was the westward frontier chosen for being well past the long, grasping arms of institutional reach.

That’s the academic side. The day-to-day reality is what it does to the heads of the people who work and live there. If you think this is just going to be a wholesale shit on the city of Angels though you’re wrong. I’m just trying to tell you how it happened that I happened to almost slap Keith Morris off of his stool at a popular LA breakfast eatery.

At breakfast there once, I happened to look up and spy Morris eating. He had figured so heavily in my personal journey from 1977 to, probably, 2010 when this meeting happened that the strangest thing in the world would have been to not say hello.

So I did.

“Hey MAN! How the hell are YOU?”

He cranked his face up from his plate and…dead eye stare. Perhaps he had forgotten how we met. “Eugene…” I went on to explain. “…from Whipping Boy…we played our first show ever with you all at The Farm in San Fran…”

Nothing.

“And a few years ago, you did that thing with Oxbow and your Midget Handjob deal at the bowling alley.”

Nothing. Ohhhhh…I got it.

When the Dropkick Murphys beat up a Sieg Heil’ing audience member…I backed that play. Even though they may have been unclear about his reasons for Sieg Heiling, as the Germans once said about a woman who jumped into the Berlin’s Zoo’s polar bear enclosure, “it might be expected that the result would be as it was.”

This was an LA deal. His meal was being interrupted by a hammerhead. I was not asking for an autograph. I had not even sat down. I was on my way out. Clearly this was going to be brief. Like Arnold as The Terminator I ran through a cursory breakdown of possible responses.

A] Slap him off of his fucking stool on account of churlish early morning behaviors.

B] Beg off and fuck off and chalk it up to people having lives that have nothing to do with you sometimes. So, yeah, fuck off.

I picked B. I mean whatever. He could never undo what he had meant to me and how instrumental he had been in changing somewhat the course of my life. So that was that.

But then this week he’s in my head again. At a Circle Jerk show at what appeared to be a well-equipped pavilion, Morris himself had a moment where some MAGA-types were taking mid-show issue with punk rock agitprop about how much Trump sucks. It happened with Reagan, HW Bush, W. Bush, Trump…the only difference being, outside of skinhead enclaves in Central Valley, there were not fans of either, usually, in the same place at the same time.

This place, this time though, front row and shouting at Morris about..well, outside of middle fingers and g-d knows what else, maybe a few “fuck you’s” and screams of “traitor”? I’m unsure of what this was supposed to accomplish outside of how it bends and trends toward the Internet’s idea that everyone has a voice.

Morris kind of freezes as he runs down his Terminator list of how to respond.

Which was a delicious moment for me. Because traditionally there have been a few ways to deal with this, historically speaking.

Bad behavior in the audience? Minor Threat, sort of, and Fugazi, definitely, would stop the show and that then became their business. They were not interested in becoming the background for subpar behaviors and believed this so much they’d stop the active creation of their art to stop it.

The Dead Kennedys? Well, Nazi Punks Fuck Off, was a way to address the issue AND reap some reward for having done so.

The band X, at least on one occasion that I viewed, attempted to defuse with humor (their latter-day MAGA posturing notwithstanding).

But I always preferred Black Flag’s MO: nothing. Your ticket entitles you to be as expressive as you want as long as you don’t unplug my fucking guitar seems to have been Greg Ginn’s take, and the rest of his band followed suit.

This accorded much more closely to how it seems the world works to me. But I’m a native New Yorker. So if it’s not my business, I’m not trying to make it my business.

This being said, some might add, how come there are all of these legends of you beating people up at shows?

Well…that’s different. Those people were the enemies of art and were attempting to alter the flow of the evening to their own designs for whatever reasons, almost always exclusively nonpolitical.

When the Dropkick Murphys beat up a Sieg Heil’ing audience member at one of their shows, I backed that play. Even though they may have been unclear about his reasons for Sieg Heiling, as the Germans once said about a woman who jumped into the Berlin’s Zoo’s polar bear enclosure and was subsequently attacked, “it might be expected that the result would be as it was.”

The guy Sieg Heiling had to know that too. So, no harm, no foul.

Lydia Lunch also put the zap to my head about this once as well: “I buy a ticket to a show and that gives me license to say whatever the fuck I want by way of critique. IF that’s what I want to do.”

But a well-placed “YOU SUCK” is very different from extended bouts of front row fuck-off-age. I’d say that came perilously close to interfering with the creation of the art. And while Morris’ forerunners in Black Flag might have just played over it, Morris sensed that he was in a moment, and it was nice to see.

He asked the MAGA types if they had ever read their lyrics. Then he threw some invective their way while they were escorted out under a fusillade of what seemed like thrown beers and casual punches and kicks.

Everyone had their self-congratulatory Internet moment and a few days later? Something else entirely. Which, in total, felt like an incomplete response to me.

I mean like no one has remembered Skrewdriver, the National Front, Nazi Skins, Sid Vicious in full swastika’d glory? Or shows with the band FEAR at LA’s Olympic Auditorium where you could spend the better part of the night chasing and beating up punk rockers calling smaller Black guys niggers.

Or Johnny Rotten glomming on to Trump, as well. Or my MAGA-adjacent associates chiding me for not being MAGA because they see him as iconoclastic, and therefore MOST punk rock choice of all?

We all forgot that?!?

Yeah, I didn’t. And haven’t. “Bragging that they know how the niggers feel cold,” sang Jello Biafra on “Holiday in Cambodia”, and everyone was expected to understand how he was parsing this. Or Minor Threat with “Guilty of Being White”. Or Patti Smith’s rock and roll nigger-age. Or Mark E, Smith from The Fall, which The Wire asked me to write about once.

The “scene” as such has always flirted with precisely the kind of dog whistling you hear from that Circle Jerks’ front row. Shots at welfare recipients, Latinos, generalized and shitty attitudes about women have abounded for decades within the scene and that front row had to not have been strangers to that all, confusing as they may have, cause and effect.

Trump IS a piece of shit, however, but he’s OUR piece of shit. I mean he didn’t shoot anyone to get the job. So it was our apathy OR the intransigence of angry dudes who don’t care overly much what they’re mad about who voted for him.

So what would I have done when faced with an audience of yowling bully boys attempting to make some sort of political point while on my dime?

I largely see these guys as having been poorly parented and in every case notwithstanding, outside of those with family money, lots of early life trauma. So violence does not surprise them. Nor will opprobrium, which is what they got. My love letter to them would be exactly what they’ve gotten for the greater portion of their lives until now.

Or to quote the late Prince when asked once to opine on his brief time as a married man: “I just treat it like anything else I don’t like very much: I make believe it doesn’t exist.”

Works for me.

Listen/Hear: This is the non-hardcore record by a formerly hardcore band. Remixed by Joe Chiccarelli. Originally produced by Klaus Flouride. Get it NOW.

ORDER HERE: https://tinyurl.com/dysillusion

And the reviews have started to come in…

“Robinson and Ballinger, working with producer / sound engineer Joe Chiccarelli (White Stripes, Steve Wynn, Oxbow), have brought an entire album back to life. It’s not an easy listen. It’s punk, it’s goth, it’s post-both. It’s experimental and melodic. It’s electric and dangerous.” — The Big Takeover

And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do the one Uncle Barry is doing, The Inimitable Sounds of Love: A Threesome in Four Acts…or the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer’s Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.