Group Sex

Group Sex was the first big release on Frontier Records, a label Lisa Fancher started in 1980. Hetson said the sessions were mostly live: the band played together, picked the best take of each song and added a few guitar overdubs. Morris recalled a small studio where the band waited for calls offering short gaps in the schedule. Cary Markoff and the band produced it, Cliff Zellman engineered, and Frank DeLuna mastered it.

Material came from wherever the band could find it. Wasted, Don't Care, Behind the Door and Red Tape were first written and performed by Morris with Black Flag. Wasted had appeared on Black Flag's 1979 Nervous Breakdown EP, and Behind the Door was later rewritten as Room 13 on Damaged. Morris and Lehrer worked out the arrangement of Red Tape together, with Lehrer bringing the jazz idea of trading fours into hardcore. Live Fast Die Young puts new Morris lyrics on Cover Band, a song Hetson wrote for Redd Kross. The title track was co-written by Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club, as payment for Morris naming his band. Hetson said the band added a few seconds to every song on the label because they feared buyers would think a record this short was a rip-off.

The cover is Ed Colver's photograph from a Circle Jerks and Adolescents show at the Marina del Rey Skatepark, shot from a ladder beside the skate pool, with a color treatment by Diane Zincavage of Frontier. Robert Christgau gave the record a B+ at the time. Mark Deming of AllMusic later wrote that anyone looking for nuance in a Circle Jerks album had been misinformed about punk rock. A remastered reissue on Trust Records, reviewed in Maximum Rocknroll in December 2020, added a booklet and five rehearsal demos.