How Circle Jerks turned six of “the worst songs we ever heard” into a classic punk rock medley
In the annals of hardcore punk—a phrase I’m sure they’d appreciate—the band Circle Jerks are somewhat on the fringes when it comes to mainstream notoriety, but absolutely essential in terms of influence, especially when you look at the sound, style, and attitude of the Southern California bands that followed their lead, i.e., Pennywise, NOFX, the Offspring, etc.
Even for punk fans less familiar with the Jerks’ prime 1980s output, it only takes a bit of pop cultural context to explain the reverence in which they were held. Frontman Keith Morris, for example, was an original founder and singer of Black Flag; guitarist Greg Hetson went on to play with the legendary Bad Religion; and the band made cameos in both the seminal LA punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) and the 1984 cult classic Repo Man.
Understanding the band’s sensibilities is also pretty easy to explain. When Morris’s original name for the group, the “Bedwetters,” was dissed by the other bandmembers, he opened up a book of slang terminology to find something better. The fact that everybody approved of “Circle Jerks” pretty well explains how little these guys were concerned with mainstream record sales.
Another case in point is the 1983 album Golden Shower of Hits, which included very memorable cover art of a restroom urinal filled with gold LPs getting rudely treated.
“Several large record chains wouldn’t carry it because of the cover,” Morris told the Birmingham News (Alabama) in 1983. “We don’t care. We don’t sell that many records out of the large chains anyway. We sell mostly through the little independent stores, so that’s no skin off our ass.”
The concept behind both the album cover and the title track of Golden Shower of Hits was the same: a complete and blatantly disrespectful rejection of mainstream radio fluff.
The song ‘Golden Shower of Hits’ is actually a medley, weaving together six very famous easy-listening tunes and re-interpreting them through the hardcore woodchipper of the Circle Jerks’ sound. The songs victimized in this now timeless punk classic are The Association’s ‘Along Comes Mary’; the Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’; Starland Vocal Band’s ‘Afternoon Delight’’ Paul Anka’s ‘Having My Baby’; The Captain and Tennille’s ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’; and Tammy Wynette’s ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E.’
“They were such terrible songs,” Morris explained. “They were like the worst songs we ever heard. When we do songs like those, we’ve got to butcher them, you know? If you’re going to cover a Creedence Clearwater [Revival] song, you don’t butcher it, because it’s a classic. But those, they’re just waiting there to be butchered and chopped to pieces.”
‘Golden Shower of Hits’ wasn’t exclusively a chance to tear apart six songs they despised, however. Being the crafty, under-the-radar artistes that they were, the Jerks figured they might as well build some sort of Frankenstein’s monster out of these AM radio disgraces, so they interlocked the tunes in a way that created a sort of new narrative about the rise and fall of a relationship. A boy and girl meet and fall in love [‘Along Comes Mary’ and ‘Close to You’], then they do the deed [‘Afternoon Delight’], the girl gets pregnant [‘Having My Baby’], they decide on an abortion [‘Love Will Keep Us Together’], and finally the whole thing ends badly [‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’].
Shockingly, ‘Golden Shower’ didn’t quite lift the Circle Jerks to mainstream success, but when the next wave of SoCal punk did reach a much wider audience in the 1990s, the Jerks starting getting their credit and tried to capitalise with a reunion on a major label, 1995’s Oddities, Abnormalities and Curiosities. That album included an ironic collaboration with the pop starlet Debbie Gibson—just the sort of artist they might have “chopped to pieces” a decade prior.
“Debbie’s grown up and she’s a pretty rockin’ gal now,” Keith Morris told the Santa Barbara News-Press in 1995. “She was in the studio shaking and gyrating and baking and flipping out, so I just had to ask her to sing.”
