The Tim “Napalm” Stegall Substack Interview: Keith Morris, Part Five

In the fifth installment, Brother Keith continues explaining why OFF! changed rhythm sections in the middle of recording FREE LSD.

So, when did someone from The Locust join OFF!? (Pic:Jeff Forney)

Hello, dear reader. Let’s barrel outta the ass end of 2022 and ramrod straight into another installment of the Keith Morris interview begun late August. When we last left our intrepid Black Flag/Circle Jerks/OFF! frontman, he was explaining how original OFF! bassist Steven McDonald and drummer Mario Rubalcaba got replaced by Autry Fulbright II and Justin Brown, respectively, basically in the middle of sessions for their new FREE LSD album.

KEITH: So, we recorded at this point with Dale Crover. We recorded 23 of the 25 songs with Dale. And as great a drummer as Dale is – mucho, mucho, mucho heaps of respect – working with Buzz (Osborne) in the Melvins, he had developed a certain work mentality. We normally get it on the first take, maybe on the second take. There’s never really a third or fourth take. If we didn’t get it the first or second time, we weren’t gonna get it. That wasn’t going to work with us, because we had recorded some songs with Dale where he seemed maybe a little bit lost, because he wasn’t familiar with the song. It was basically, “Learn the song and record the song.” We had recorded these tracks with Dale, and Mario heard them and said, “Oh, no no no no, fellas! I’m going to be a part of this. Nobody’s gonna be doing anything like this. I can do this better than Dale.”

We said, “Okay. Let’s do this.” And we recorded with Mario coming up from San Diego and learning the songs and turning around and recording them immediately. We recorded 25 songs in two sessions of two days – a total of four days. Because he was coming up from San Diego, he said, “I’m not coming up to be involved in anything else.” And we really did not like that mentality. So now, Dimitri (Coats) and I are looking at ourselves and going, “What the fuck are we going to do?” Because this is supposed to be where the band gets really creative. We’re creating these soundscapes. Like if we were playing live, we might play three songs in a rock, then we might be getting into some freaky/heavy/psychedelic/noisy/industrial/free jazz jams – just a combo of all this stuff for these pieces in between, these minute-long /minute-and-a-half/maybe two minute pieces. And we wanted to record about six or seven of these pieces. And we couldn’t do it with Steven and Mario, because once we’d recorded the songs, it was like they just disappeared: “We’ve got other things that we have to do.”