Losing the signal

Keith Morris and the Punk Rock Museum

On a dark desert highway

First the Dodgers game on the radio cut out. Then the map on my phone stopped loading. I was in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve and it was pitch black outside my window.

I was headed to Las Vegas and decided to take the long way through the desert, retracing the route I’d taken two weeks before while driving back from Punk Rock Bowling. Only this time I was hurtling into the darkness in the opposite direction without a map to guide me.

I have a terrible sense of direction. My instincts are almost always wrong, even in places that are familiar to me. (I can’t tell you how many times I got lost inside the casino where I worked for more than five years.) Common sense told me to turn around. My reckless spirit said, “Go for it.”

Losing the signal was a blessing in disguise because it forced me to slow down and focus on the road, which might have saved my life. As I came over the top of a small hill I saw six eyes gleaming at me. I slammed on my brakes. There in the middle of the road was a gang of wild burros, their long skeletal faces regarding me with indifference.

I put on my emergency lights and inched forward but the burros were in no hurry to move. One broke off from the group to the right and another cantered off to the left while the last one stubbornly stood its ground before finally, reluctantly giving way.

Scenes from Amboy and the Mojave National Preserve

Such a lovely place

I went to Las Vegas to hang out at the Punk Rock Museum. Keith Morris was in town to host three days of tours at the museum.

The way the tours work is the host leads a group through the museum, telling stories and riffing on photos and ephemera on display in the collection. Typically the tours last anywhere from one-and-a-half to two hours. Guests ask questions and at the end they can take pictures with the host or ask them to sign stuff, which they are usually happy to do.

Would it surprise you to learn that Keith’s tours typically run long? I’m talking three hours minimum and even then he seldom makes it all the way through the museum. He also holds the record for longest tour at 4.5 hours. This is hard to pull off since the tours start at 12:30 and 4pm and the museum closes at 7pm. How the hell did he do it?

Most of the stories Keith tells are familiar to me. I spent many, many hours in Keith’s apartment in Los Feliz listening to him dredge up the thrilling moments and sordid details that mark his life. But I still learned quite a bit that I didn’t know.

For instance, I didn’t know the Alex Cox, director of Repo Man, Sid & Nancy, and many others also directed the video for “I Wanna Destroy You.” Keith told some stories from life on the road in the deep south that I’d never heard before. He also revealed he’d never taken LSD on purpose, but had been dosed twice. The first time was at Disneyland when he was 14. The second time was at a cookout when someone put LSD in the barbecue sauce. He ended up at Flea’s apartment, sprawled out on the carpet, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

He told that story over lunch in the break room. I learned a lot about the people who work at the museum and how it operates, which I appreciate a little more with each visit.

Keith Morris at the Punk Rock Museum

You never know who will be passing through the museum. Suicidal Tendencies and TSOL were in town for a show Saturday evening and two of the newer members of the band came through. Bayside played a short set in the Pennywise garage and I chatted with the singer of Modern Action, who played the pool party on the final day of Punk Rock Bowling, about sobriety and the arts. Throughout the day, Fat Mike buzzed around the museum.

“Sorry I’m late,” Keith told those who’d assembled for his Saturday afternoon tour. “Actually I’m not. That probably makes me an asshole.”

Despite his legendary laconic SoCal delivery, Keith really gets into his tours. He waves his hands and will stop at nothing to make his point, including crawling around on the ground. You won’t see that at the Getty.

We had a free event at the Triple Down saloon on Saturday night, and Keith was so concerned about cutting his tour “short” (at a little under three hours) that he bought everyone a drink at the bar. This was probably a good thing as not too many people turned up for the event. (Maybe they were all at the TSOL show.)

On Sunday I recorded a short video for the museum about my favorite spot, which is the corner with SPOT’s photos of Black Flag in Polliwog Park in July 22, 1979 and a stack of SST tuners. When I told Keith this was my favorite place in the museum he quipped, “It’s not mine.”

This could be heaven or this could be hell

On my last day in Las Vegas, I finished the first draft of the novel I started in March during a writing retreat at Wellstone Center in the Redwoods in Soquel, CA. I’d written a short story with an interesting premise and I wanted to see if it would work as a novel. I had a week in the redwoods in a cabin with no electricity. It was the perfect opportunity to explore something new. That week proved to be incredibly productive and I went home with the start of an exciting new novel.

The problem? A project I’d started several years ago was moving forward (more on that soon) and I suddenly had all kinds of deadlines. This was on top of several freelance assignments that involved live music and travel: two things I’m passionate about and throw myself into. I didn’t really have time to work on a new novel, especially when I was trying to sell the novel I wrote in 2023 and revise the one I wrote in 2024.

What I thought was a straightforward crime story had all kinds of connections to my past work and present interests. Even if I was only able to work on it in short bursts first thing in the morning or at the end of the day, the pages piled up quickly. It helped that the story is set in San Diego and has a lot of movement that mirrored my own travels. All that action fueled my momentum.

Even though I was close to finishing and had a few scenes left to write, on Sunday night I took a break and walked to the STRAT: the concrete monolith that presides over the Las Vegas skyline.

I went up 108 stories to the observatory deck and took in the sights: the Strip, the Sphere, downtown Las Vegas. Beyond that lay Pahrump, the Hoover Dam, the nuclear test site. After a few minutes my enthusiasm for sightseeing waned and I felt called to take out my notebook to write the final scenes.

The whole book felt like that: the words clamoring to get out. I think any writer will tell you that when you feel this urgency, you have to listen because it’s not always like this.

What can I tell you about it? It’s a novel of the moment. It’s very short: 66,000 words and a little over 250 pages, i.e. about half the length of the previous novel. It’s got a scene with a gang of burros in it.

The next day, I packed up my stuff and drove across the desert to San Diego. Naturally, I took the long way.

Miscellaneous Mayhem

I reviewed Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive for the LA Times. If you’re not a subscriber, you can read it for free at AOL.

There’s still time to give Trump the finger by subscribing to Razorcake during the June subscription drive.

Thanks for reading and thank you new subscribers. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays (but not last Sunday, but definitely this Sunday). It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.