Circle Jerks

Two defectors

Circle Jerks formed in Los Angeles in 1979 around two musicians who had just left other bands. Keith Morris had quit Black Flag in December 1979, after recording the Nervous Breakdown EP with them. Greg Hetson had walked out of Redd Kross after a row over a drummer. Hetson remembered Morris saying outside the Whisky a Go Go that they should start their own band, and Morris recalled meeting bassist Roger Rogerson at a club on Melrose and inviting him in. The drummer was Lucky Lehrer, who had trained in jazz. They began as the Bedwetters. Lehrer disliked the name, so Morris went through a dictionary of slang and came back with Circle Jerks.

The band recorded Group Sex in 1980 at Byrdcliffe Studios in Culver City, and Frontier Records, a new label run by Lisa Fancher, released it on 1 October 1980. It holds fourteen songs in roughly a quarter of an hour. Several began life elsewhere: four were written by Morris with Black Flag, and one reworks a Hetson song from Redd Kross. Five of its songs were filmed for Penelope Spheeris's documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, which showed the band to a far wider audience.

Faulty Products and LAX

In late 1980 the band signed to Faulty Products, a subsidiary of I.R.S., which released Wild in the Streets on 4 March 1982. The title track was a cover of a Garland Jeffreys song, and the record also took in versions of Paul Revere and the Raiders and Jackie DeShannon songs. Faulty Products closed several months later. Lehrer left to study law and was replaced by John Ingram, and the band signed with Jerry Goldstein's Far Out management.

Golden Shower of Hits, produced by Goldstein for his LAX label, came out on 21 July 1983. Its title track strings six pop covers into a story of romance, pregnancy, marriage and divorce. In 1984 the band appeared in Alex Cox's film Repo Man, where When the Shit Hits the Fan was performed in an acoustic lounge style with Earl Liberty and Chuck Biscuits, who had replaced Rogerson and Lehrer.

Relativity years

Keith Clark and Zander Schloss soon took over on drums and bass, and the band moved to Combat Records, a Relativity imprint, for Wonderful in 1985. Alex Ogg of AllMusic gave it a harsh review. VI followed on Relativity in 1987, with a Creedence Clearwater Revival cover and Love Kills, a song Cox had commissioned for the 1986 film Sid and Nancy. AllMusic's David Cleary called VI one of the band's best. The group dissolved in 1990 when Hetson left to carry on with Bad Religion, which he had joined in 1984 and stayed with until 2013. The live album Gig, recorded in Los Angeles and Tijuana, appeared on Relativity in 1992.

Reunions

The Wonderful lineup reunited in 1994 and signed to Mercury. Oddities, Abnormalities and Curiosities, produced by Niko Bolas, came out on 20 June 1995 and included a Soft Boys cover with backing vocals by Debbie Gibson. The band split about three weeks into the tour that followed. A second reunion began in 2001 and ran with periodic shows until a gig at the Bluebird Theater in Denver on 27 January 2011. Along the way they filmed a live DVD, The Show Must Go Off!, in 2004.

In November 2019 the band announced shows for the 40th anniversary of Group Sex, with Morris, Hetson and Schloss joined later by drummer Joey Castillo, formerly of Queens of the Stone Age. The pandemic pushed the dates to 2021. They toured with the Descendents across the Americas in 2023 and 2024 and in Europe in 2025. Morris told LEO Weekly in 2024 that the band planned to write new songs with Tim Armstrong of Rancid producing. Groups that have named the band as an influence include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, NOFX and the Offspring. Morris tells his own story in the memoir My Damage, written with Jim Ruland and published in 2016.