OFF! – Re-wiring the circuitry

Giles Sibbald

I’m endlessly fascinated with why groups become closed minded or become so attached to ‘rules’ for those groups or communities. From “Fuck the rules!” to “No, you can’t wear/play/say/think that!”

Dimitri Coats

I’ve heard enough people say that this is the best thing that Keith’s ever done in his career, and I think that is something that’s incredibly inspiring and something that pushed me as the producer, always, from day one. And it evolved into Free LSD. Keith and I have hung out a lot, obviously, writing songs over the years and just being friends. And he’s not sitting in his fucking apartment, you know, listening to punk rock records. He’s listening to some pretty adventurous music that really runs the gamut. And I’m the same way, you know, I mean, I barely even listen to rock music anymore.

So, I think finally, with this record, we just allowed ourselves to put all these different kinds of ingredients into what we wanted to do and see what happened. And it was almost like, every time we were faced with a decision, we just decided to do the thing that we’re not supposed to do. And that, to me, feels like punk rock. I mean, I’m the last person to talk about that genre, because I don’t come from it. You know, but being an outsider, I mean, isn’t that what it’s all about?

“Hi, I’m Dale Antwerp, a professional educator and this is Teen Talk where the teens get to do the talking and we adults get to listen and today we’re talking about a new kind of music that they’re calling punk rock. So, anyone heard of punk rock? Who’s a punk? Are you a punk rocker?”

Kid: “Yes”

Dale: “So what’s the punk part?”

Kid: “Well, it’s just being different to the average, like an outcast”

Dale: “Oh, that sounds sad being an outcast, you feel like an outcast, an outsider? Is that sad?

Kid: “I mean yeah I do feel like an outsider, but I’m not sa….”

DA (interrupting): “Oh you’re sad, that’s sad…I felt like an outsider, made me feel very sad…wow. Anyway, a punk rock band has come in to play for us today, so let’s listen a band called OFF! Uhhh….just OFF?”

OFF! nod silently

Dale: “OK, OFF!”

OFF! play Borrow and Bomb. 40 seconds of Pure Fucking Power. Dale Antwerp leads the applause. The kids smirk, look at each other and nod. Approval. Bemusement. Dale…Dale.

Dale: “That was certainly short and sweet. How’d that make everyone feel? You in the space suit over there, how do you feel?

Space Suit: “Good. Power. I like that, that’s what I like in my music.”

Dale: “That’s how it speaks to you?…music for young people I guess…for the youth…{to Space Suit}…how old are you, 37?

Space Suit: 35

Dale: Oh dear. 35. 35. You should…you should probably, you should probably go. Can someone help him leave?”

Space Suit leaves.

Paraphrased from OFF’s official video for Borrow and Bomb

Dimitri Coats

You know, what I mean? Shouldn’t that be the spirit of, you know, what punk rock is? Breaking away from the norm, trying to do something extraordinary with the limitations that you have? I’m not the best guitar player, man, but I found a vocabulary for myself, especially with this new record, just going into some weird tunings for example. It opened up a new world to me, and for Keith, you know, not having to concentrate on current events, or whatever, and go into a fantasy world or a world that may or may not be, it just completely freed us up to be singing about aliens, or whatever.

Giles Sibbald

Makes me think about how we define “great” ….is it having the technical skill or being creative on your instrument or is it having the mindset to think outside the box? Like we talked about in the podcast – how else you can use your instruments in ways that hasn’t been done before, or at least not regularly. I really do think that those sorts of things these days are really important. Keith mentioned about getting out of the rut and I think having the wherewithal and the mindset to do that is a way to do that.

Dimitri Coats

It was interesting, because when we first started the band, it was strange, it sort of just happened accidentally, and all of a sudden, I found myself picking up the guitar in front of Keith – because he told me to – like ‘lemme see what you would do with songs for the world that I that I’m from’. I’d start playing and he’d be like {speaking slowly} “No, no, no. Never upstroke. Only downstroke” {laughs}. I’d never done that before, you know. And so, I’m like, “Alright, give me a second here”. And I started to get the hang of it. All these riffs started to come out of me, you know. I was just attacking the guitar in a different way. It was like a breakthrough for both of us and inspired Keith to pick up the paper and the sharpie and start scribbling stuff down. I remember that we wrote ‘Upside Down’ in an hour and a half. I was just like “What the actual fuck is this?!”, but then very quickly, I started to feel incredibly inhibited: I would play a certain riff and Keith would be like, ‘you can’t go there, we have a certain bullseye”.  Everything felt very black and white to me. If I was used to painting in colour on a canvas with oil paints or whatever, it was like ‘No, no, no, you can’t use any of that stuff. Here’s the paper and the Sharpie. You have 10 minutes. Go.’ And there was something exciting about that to start with, but after three records, I was like, ‘Come on, man’. I felt we had nowhere left to go with that. When you’re in a band, you’ve been doing this thing for a few years, it starts to just feel like, okay, let’s write some songs; let’s record an LP; and then we’ll make three or four music videos; and then we’ll be touring; and then that’ll run its course; and then we get together again, we write some more songs. But there’s got to be something more. Let’s do something that we might not even be able to pull off. You know what I mean? I would say to Keith that we’re fans of so much more colourful music and why can’t I play a riff like that, why can’t we take a left turn or throw a curveball and do something fucking crazy and bring in elements of jazz and metal? Why can’t we explore? And I think it was the film that really freed us up, you know what I mean? Thinking of the album as a soundtrack to this weird sci fi movie, you know, it freed our brains up to think about approaching our creativity in a different way.

And we’re movie buffs. That’s the thing about Keith: he’s a cinephile. Our producer was really impressed when he first started hanging out with Keith. They were talking about movies, and when you go to Keith’s house, he’s got just walls of records, walls of movies. He knows a lot. So, this was something that was fun for us. Anything we could think of that would just pull us out of our comfort zone and make it make it feel like dangerous and exciting. In those situations, you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself. When people see this movie, they’re not going to fucking believe, first of all that that’s Keith, and how brave he was attacking his role in that way and completely trusted it, believed in it and went for it at the risk of making a fool of himself. And we’ve run the risk of making fools of ourselves from the start of this project, starting from, you know, writing the first song with all this crazy approach to making a feature film. It could have gone wrong so many times, but it didn’t. The thing that I’m the most proud of is that we stuck to our guns, we took risks, broke new ground for ourselves and did something extraordinary. All of those things have paid off. I can’t tell you how proud I am.

Giles Sibbald

How did you feel, Keith, going into it?

Keith Morris

When Dimitri was talking about how he does not come from punk rock, I wholeheartedly acknowledge that. And I love that. But when we first started out – before we even knew we were going to be a band – if we were going to listen to punk rock before we start working on songs, we’re gonna listen to Stiff Little Fingers – who are one of our big influences. We’re gonna listen to The Damned. We’re gonna listen to the Sex Pistols. Yes, we’ll listen to Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. Bad Brains, of course. But we had a little get together over at his house when he was living over in like Burbank, or Glendale. And we were sitting there, and it was like, ‘Well, what should we listen to?’ And I said, ‘Do you have any Link Wray?’ You know, because back then I’m still trying to instill the downstroke in him. He would bring the butterfly, which is an up and down motion, which is what a lot of the speed metal guys get away with. That’s how they’re able to play so fast. But with the downstroke approach, it’s much more aggressive, it’s angrier. The music needs that. We’re not singing nice lyrics. The songs aren’t nice, you know. With this new record, we’re talking about all of these different scenarios, including the aliens, and their mode of transportation, we’re talking about historical points, all of this. Dimitri was saying that we’re not trying to sing about current events, political or social events. But we tap into that with the conspiracy theories. And we were finding that, if we were dealing with, say, 20 different conspiracies and trying to work through them – is this one real, is this one not real, are there are enough things that have been happening about this conspiracy theory to make it a truthful scenario – the majority of them all go back to our CIA. And we all understand that they’re one of the most evil organisations to ever walk the planet, you know, and they, they hold hands with the KGB, and they hold hands with your MI5, MI6 or whatever your secret service numbers and letters are.

But we fell into what was a really great groove. And what I mean by that is that we were able to get to a stage of ‘Yeah, I agree with you on that’, without even talking about it. You know, this is a really great thing that we’re doing here. And we didn’t even really talk about it. In the very beginning of OFF!, there was a certain thing that was happening and we got to a place where we never even bothered to rehearse, you know. We’ve got a show, we’re at a hotel and we’re in one of the rooms and we’re just banging out riffs, just to go through it as fast as we could, or we’ll get into the dressing room, and we’ll run through all of the songs for about 20 minutes. We had developed a pattern. Maybe it was lazy, maybe. For me, there were there was a certain point in time in music – and I’m going to cite classic rock bands – Cream, Blind Faith, Traffic – where you had all of these great bands that were all on the same wavelength, they all have the same amount of creative energy. And you gotta let the guys do their thing, because they are such great musicians. You don’t tell them what to do. You just, as hippie-esque as it sounds, let them do their thing. And we had been doing that for so long that maybe we got lazy. See, we now have a new rhythm section. And now we have a member of the old rhythm section (Mario Rubalcaba on drums – more on that later) back in our new rhythm section. I guess it’s like, a cyclical thing. It is what it is. We’re playing with great musicians. And like I said earlier, you don’t tell them what to do. You can say, hey, there’s the canvas, here’s some colours, make up some colours of your own.

I’m completely and wholeheartedly having the time of my life with what I’m doing right now.

Giles Sibbald

I saw you play in Paris on the last tour. I was mesmerized with Justin’s drumming.

Dimitri Coats

There aren’t many people who can play drums like that. It’s very, very short list, you know?! We were very lucky that he wanted to be involved with us, you know, going into make the new album. It just sort of happened. We thought at first, he was only going to play on that Metallica track, Holier Than Thou. But he was equally as excited because he was like ‘I’ve never had a chance to do anything like this. This is like the thing that’s been missing from my repertoire’. As you know Justin plays with Thundercat – aka Stephen Bruner – and Stephen and his brother, Ronald Bruner Jr, were the rhythm section in Suicidal Tendencies when they were younger. And so, seeing friends of his get to do stuff like that, he realized what’s been missing from his career.

Keith Morris

“If they can do it, I can do it.”

Dimitri Coats

Another important ingredient of punk rock is energy and urgency. And often, punk rock is like an anti-technical affair, it can be cruder, and there are limitations, and that’s what makes it great. But bringing him into what we do elevated this material that was already pretty adventurous. He plays drums in a way that just that pushes the envelope. He’s walking the tightrope. He’s rarely repeating himself. It’s energy, you know, and it’s so intense that sometimes we don’t even know where we are. And this is happening on a nightly basis. It gives us the feeling that we could go off the rails at any moment. And I think that makes it exciting, you know? Now, let’s rewind to just this past Friday, the party I was telling you about that we played in Austin. Mario played drums with us and it was fantastic. Mario is no stranger to the songs. We tried to make this record with the old lineup. And, you know, there are recordings of Mario playing those songs that ended up on Free LSD. Now, his approach is very different, but equally as badass. It’s just a different thing. It’s really interesting to welcome him back. I think he’s going to be jumping in with us for a while because Justin is getting really busy with Thundercat. We’re not saying goodbye to Justin. I think now we’re in a position where whoever’s available, you know, will play drums with us and I think our fans are gonna be really excited to see Mario’s interpretation of the music. It’s really fucking cool.