Artist collectives generally produce some pretty interesting stuff. The backgrounds of the various members paired with a unique creativity in each leads to a fusion of opinions, talents, and skills. OFF! is the coming together of some pretty impressive people: a member from Circle Jerks, the front-man of Burning Brides, the bassist from Redd Kross, and Hot Snake’s drummer. With so much musical water under the bridge for all of these individuals already, what they’re going to make as a unit will surely be impressive. OFF! took a minute to give a brief bio to FUN Artists and plot their super-stardom with us.
FUN Artists: Do you guys just wanna introduce yourselves?
Keith Morris: That’s Mario Rubalcaba, his nickname is Ruby Mar; his girlfriend calls him Jimmy! He plays drums.
Mario Rubalcaba: This is Keith Morris – rock singer.
FUN Artists: Tell us about OFF!
Mario Rubalcaba: Go for it.
Keith Morris: No, you go for it ‘cause you’re taller than me.
Mario Rubalcaba: Okay okay. Well, my version of OFF! is that my other band Earthless was playing a show for Sean Carlson, it was a Fuck Yeah presents show with Black Dice and Wolf Eyes, and we played and it was loud, and it was a big crowd … Anyway, he goes “Hey, Keith wants to get in touch with you,” and I had met Keith from Rocket [From the Crypt] and from Earthless a couple of times throughout the years and he gave me his number. Two months later I called him and he sprung this project on me and he told me what he was thinking.
Keith Morris: I think it was quicker than that; I thought it was like two or three days. You said that you would drive up from San Diego to play in this band when I told you that Dimitri [Coats] was playing with us.
Mario Rubalcaba: Wasn’t it two to three minutes? But yeah, he told me Dimitri was involved and I actually played in Burning Brides for about a week of shows, so we had this connection already. And he told me the motives behind the band of doing something really urgent and really powerful – along the lines of the Nervous Breakdown EP, just write the songs, put it out, just hammer it down – and I said I was down to do that and I was really psyched to drive up.
Keith Morris: We, when I say “we” I mean Dimitri and I, had started writing songs – we were working on another project; Dimitri was going to produce another project that I’m a part of and it just all started to spiral down, it got ugly “Oh he’s too arrogant,” “He’s egotistical,” “We don’t want to work with him,” and it’s like “Fine – I put in all this time to write these songs and to be creative and you don’t like it?” So we [motions to Mario] are playing them. And when I was contacted by Mario I was super stoked; it was like this is awesome because Dimitri and I made a list of the guys that we wanted to play with and Mario was on it by where it said “drums.” Mario was number one under who were going to have play drums. And then as a bass player we had Steven McDonald who I’ve known since he was like 11 years old ‘cause we grew up in the South Bay. And so Mario said that he would be a part of it, and I had run into Steven and I said “Steven, are you interested in doing this?” and I explained to him who the players were and I gave him three songs. We have this little Marshall backstage practice amp that we were writing all the songs on in my living room, and we made a CD of three songs which I gave to Steven who was just like “When do we start rehearsing?” So everything’s moved really fast. We were hoping it would unravel that way so it wouldn’t be like “Oh you got to do this” or “We gotta record that” or “Here’s this deadline” or all of that fun shit. But we got it done, and it sounds amazing. We’re all proud of it, and we’re here doing it.
FUN Artists: Where would you guys like to take OFF! from here?
Keith Morris: Our next move is at the Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas. Being that three of the guys in the band are fathers, and they’re not deadbeat dads, our windows of opportunity are limited. So we have to be very selective about what we do; we’ve been bombarded to play with like 100 bands and it’s kind of like—for me it’s kind of hard to say no because I’m a yes-guy and I have all of the Yes albums up to Topographic Oceans so I have like 7 or 8 Yes albums, and at one time they were one of my favorite bands. Anyway, all of these people are like “Keith, do you want to play with our band?” “We’re doing this thing at this warehouse,” “Oh were doing this thing over here,” “We’re playing over here at this club,” and it’s like let’s do something fun and special; let’s not just jump at every opportunity that presents itself. It would be too easy to do that and nobody would care about us. We’re the new boy band on the block so we’ve got to let all the people who are in charge of what we’re doing make sure that our career – our arch to super-stardom isn’t just a catapult. It’s like let’s cruise; let’s do some low riding. Let’s just take our time, we’re some older fellas. We’re in no hurry – we’ve been to all of these places. Although we were just asked to play some shows in Brazil which is pretty amazing.
