Circle Jerks

Hermosa Beach, 1979

Keith Morris was born in Hermosa Beach, California, on 18 September 1955, and spent roughly two years as the first singer of Black Flag before walking out in 1979. He put the split down to creative differences with Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski, to feeling shut out of decisions, to the band's inflexible rehearsal regime, and — in his own blunt account — to freaking out on cocaine and speed.

What he did next took weeks rather than years. With guitarist Greg Hetson, freshly out of Redd Kross, he assembled a new band briefly called the Bedwetters, then renamed it after going through a dictionary of slang terms. The South Bay of Los Angeles gave them a scene, a set of rehearsal spaces and an audience that already knew who Morris was. Within a year they had a debut album out.

Fifteen minutes that set a template

Group Sex arrived on Frontier Records in 1980: fourteen songs in about fifteen minutes, with almost nothing held in reserve. It remains the record the band is measured against, and it still supplies the bulk of the live set. Wild in the Streets followed on Faulty Products in 1982, its title track a cover of a Garland Jeffreys song that the Circle Jerks have effectively annexed.

Golden Shower of Hits came out on LAX Records in 1983 — eleven songs plus a title track that stitches AM radio pop standards into a single medley. Morris has since described it as a cornerstone of the discography and the title track as probably the most ridiculous thing the band ever recorded, which has not stopped them playing at least seven songs from the album live. Wonderful (Combat, 1985) and VI (Relativity, 1987) pushed towards metal-adjacent production, and Oddities, Abnormalities and Curiosities landed on Mercury in 1995. It is still the most recent studio album.

The other thing that happened in this stretch was Repo Man. Alex Cox's 1984 film gave the band a cameo as a nightclub act playing an acoustic lounge version of their own song while Emilio Estevez's Otto Maddox chases a Chevy Malibu. Zander Schloss, who has played bass in the Circle Jerks for decades, appeared in the same film as Kevin. Four decades later that cameo has been spun into a touring format of its own.

Four stops, four starts

The band came apart after 1987 as Hetson concentrated on Bad Religion. A 1994 reunion produced the Mercury album and then imploded mid-tour in 1995. A second reunion ran from 2001 until internal disputes shut it down in 2011.

The current stretch began in 2019 and formally in 2020, built around the fortieth anniversary of Group Sex, and it has outlasted every previous attempt. The lineup is Morris on vocals, Hetson on guitar, Schloss on bass and Joey Castillo — Danzig, Queens of the Stone Age — on drums since 2021. Morris has been sober since 1988 and was diagnosed with diabetes in 1999; he manages both on the road.

His other band closed the door in the meantime. OFF!, formed in 2010 with Dimitri Coats, Steven Shane McDonald and Mario Rubalcaba, released three studio albums and played three farewell shows in July 2024. Since then the Circle Jerks have been Morris's only working band, and the touring schedule reflects it.

The tapes, untouched for forty years

On 14 November 2025 Trust Records issued a deluxe edition of Golden Shower of Hits — the first time the original analogue tapes had been handled since 1983. Dan Johnson at Audio Archiving Services digitised and restored them; Pete Lyman remastered at Infrasonic Sound in Nashville. Bryan Ray Turcotte redrew the artwork and Glen E. Friedman contributed previously unpublished photographs, with the record pressed across several vinyl variants.

Reviewing it for Dying Scene, Forrest Gaddis called the results spectacular and singled out how "When the Shit Hits the Fan" and "Coup d'État" read against the present day. The reissue also gave the band a reason to tour on something other than an anniversary. Dates followed almost immediately: Japan from 25 February 2026 at Club Quattro in Tokyo, co-headlining with Gorilla Biscuits, then a US run from 27 March at the Newport Music Hall in Columbus to 11 April at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, with Gorilla Biscuits and Detroit's Negative Approach in support. Azkena Rock Festival in Spain took them back to Europe on 19 June.

Las Vegas, 24 May 2026

At Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas on 24 May 2026, an audience member objected to Morris's between-song politics and called him a traitor. His reply — that he votes in every election and always votes for the least stinkiest piece of shit, followed by an unprintable assessment of Donald Trump and an instruction to stay away from future shows — was filmed and travelled widely.

The band did not distance themselves from it. The autumn tour went on sale a week later with an artist presale on 3 June using the code DENYEVERYTHING, general on-sale on 5 June, and a routing that ran from 1 September in New Orleans to 24 September at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, with rotating support from Municipal Waste, Negative Approach, Haywire and Upchuck. That run is at its end as of this week — the Queen in Wilmington, Delaware on 23 September, Washington on the 24th, then CBGB Fest in Brooklyn on 26 September. Darker Waves Festival at Huntington Beach on 14 November is the next confirmed date after that.

Repo Man, on a cinema screen

Running in parallel is a second format: Circle Jerks x Repo Man, a screening of the Cox film followed by a full set, mostly in old picture houses rather than clubs. The Texas Theatre in Dallas hosted one on 1 May 2026, the Paramount in Austin on 3 May. A summer leg took in the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul on 8 August, the Oriental in Milwaukee on 9 August, the Redford in Detroit on 12 August and the Keswick in Glenside, Pennsylvania on 14 August. Several of those dates carried a Q&A with Cox, Schloss and Morris together.

The remaining 2026 dates are all in this format and all in California: the Crest Theatre in Sacramento on 4 December, the Castro in San Francisco on 6 December, the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles on 11 December and Gardena Cinema on 12 December.

The Dallas show gives a sense of how the two halves fit. The band went on at 8pm and were off at 8.50, playing 27 songs in fifty minutes — ten of them from Group Sex — opening with an Iggy Pop cover with Cox himself at the microphone and closing on "Wild in the Streets".