Prologue

Chris Morris, 1988:

Sometime in late 1977, curiosity got the best of me, and I finally stopped by the little record store I passed every day on the way from my office on Santa Monica Boulevard to my Westwood Village apartment. I found to my delight that the narrow, dark, plainly furnished shop was stocked with the most up-to-the-minute U.S. and U.K. punk rock albums and 45s, its bins overflowed with used LPs, and one wall was lined with cannily selected cutouts. Mecca![i]

Introduction

A music writer executes a piece of writing as surely as a musician performs a piece of music. Music journalist Chris Morris accomplished a fantastic body of work covering the Los Angeles alt-rock scene during the 1980s and 90s.

Week to week, Morris zoomed back and forth from the L.A. scene to the global scene, helping readers appreciate homegrown artists like the Flesh Eaters while informing them about related out-of-town musicians from Pere Ubu to Robert Johnson to obscure evangelical Florida steel guitarists. A common denominator linked all these artists: an imperative to uncover the darkest recesses of the soul, to unsettle the sentimental notions that often leave popular music toothless and duplicitous.  

In his work in the L.A. scene, Morris belonged to a group of excellent music journalists nationwide who wrote for alternative weeklies. These journalists have been overlooked in accounts of music journalism history, which focus on writers working for mass-circulation publications such as Rolling Stone, to which Morris contributed articles. 

As a result, we overlook an essential dynamic required to improve popular music continually: the synergy between music critics and revolutionary local music scenes, such as the 1980s-90s L.A. alt-rock scene. If we look at Morris’s tenure in that milieu, we see a productive back-and-forth that benefited both Morris and the city’s community of musicians, fans, and record labels. This interaction thrived because both the writer and the community sought out the healing powers of musical catharsis.        

A Writer, a Scene, and a Weekly 

Chris Morris came to Los Angeles in 1977 after growing up in Chicago and hosting a radio show on a 50,000-watt free-form FM station in Madison, Wisconsin. There, he played “rock, blues, folk, jazz, pretty much everything but classical.” In 1978, he became the pop music critic for the Los Angeles Reader, a free weekly known for its top-notch reviewers.

The following year, Morris began writing for Rolling Stone and continued until 1996. His 1980 article, “L.A.’s Rock & Roll Renaissance,” was the magazine’s first major article on the L.A. alt-rock scene. In other articles, Morris wrote about well-known artists such as Bob Marley and underrecognized musicians such as the Shoes, the Fleshtones, and Peter Ivers. He also wrote for Musician magazine, respected by critics for its excellent writers.

Morris brought an abiding interest in American roots music, especially blues. He also found sustenance in the outer territories of late-70s rock like heavy metal and punk. In Los Angeles, he found a music scene in which rock and roots came together in a revolutionary new sound that would later be called alternative rock.   

Los Angeles alt-rock resisted the norms of mainstream pop music. As noted, it encompassed a variety of incongruous influences, from heavy metal to punk to 60s garage rock. However, it also diverged from these influences with excursions into the traditions of the Beat Generation, free jazz, and American roots music. L.A. alt-rock thrived on independent record labels more open to transgressive experimentation than major record companies. It was music born in clubs where fans created one-night heterotopias – rule-free zones outside the dominant culture.       

Morris covered the emergent scene for the newly minted Los Angeles Reader. The weekly tabloid joined the community of alternative newspapers in the 1970s that kept the 1960s counterculture spirit alive while resisting its more naïve notions. These independent weeklies provided platforms for top music critics like Morris. They supported key alt-rock music scenes in New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. 

On the Town   

By the early 1980s, Morris was already becoming a known figure. For example, in an article criticizing Linda Ronstadt’s new-wave pretensions, the writer said:

I’ll refer no more to this august lady; LA Reader critic Chris Morris dressed her down properly, with “Sid Vicious died for your sins, you dimwit!”[ii]

Morris occasionally showed up in the LA Weekly’s gossip column, “LA Dee Dah.” One account stated:

At the Whiskey, Carlos Guitarlos of Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs was helping himself to strangers’ drinks. The band stumbled through a set down the street at the Central. Carlos kicked local writer Chris Morris in the stomach because he thought Chris was Fear’s Derf Scratch, and he also threw some chairs around, including the one he was sitting on …[iii]

Another account noted that Morris attended a send-off party for T-Bone Burnette, who was relocating to New York:[iv]

Morris later wrote for the LA Weekly, but at that time, his central platform was the Reader. In addition, he wrote freelance articles for the city’s largest daily.  

LA Times

Alt-weeklies weren’t the only periodicals that covered the L.A. music scene in the early 1980s—the Los Angeles Times boasted some of the era’s top rock critics, such as  Robert Hilburn, Mikal Gilmore, and John Mendelsohn. And Chris Morris, whose Times articles covered the scene’s emergent movements.

One of these was L.A.’s re-energized heavy metal scene. Pop music historian Reebee Garofalo wrote:

Around 1983, the next wave of metal began to arrive from Los Angeles. Groups like Mötley Crüe and Ratt tended toward a glam rock appearance, hearkening back to the New York Dolls and a light metal sound …[v]

The popularity of L.A. metal approached Godzilla-like proportions, as Morris expressed in the title of his 1983 Times piece,  “Local Heavy-Metal Bands Out to Become Monsters.” He said, “Metal, literally and figuratively, is making big noise in the city.”[vi] Morris pointed out the resurgence of heavy metal in L.A. and worldwide.

Morris looked into the metal lifestyle for the article and interviewed local musicians and fans. He attended a show with several upcoming bands, such as Armored Saint, “part of the grass-roots underground of heavy metal sprouting up on the local rock turf.”[vii] 

The music had an anti-elitist appeal, said Morris:  

Heavy metal, at least in the eyes of rock critics and cognoscenti, has long been the black sheep of the rock ‘n’ roll family. Nobody wants anything to do with it. But it won’t go away. [viii]

This egalitarian view ran through Morris’s article along with historical context. For example, he described metal’s history from its roots in “the virtuosic blues bashing of … guitar-dominated English bands …”[ix] A few months later, Morris informed his readers about the origins of another rising movement.

The Paisley Underground

One of the first signs of alt-rock in L.A. came from the Paisley Underground, which AllMusic calls “the most distinctive subgenre of jangle pop in the mid-’80s”:

Like jangle pop, the bands in the paisley underground revived folk rock’s clean, chiming textures, but they had a more psychedelic bent to their sound. Jangle-pop bands weren’t necessarily revivalists – they updated the ringing guitars and melodies of ’60s guitar pop for the ’80s – but the paisley underground was determined to keep the sound of the ’60s alive through their music and their appearance.[x]

Morris asserted this in his article “Tripping Out on the New Psychedelia.” For context, he interviewed musicians like Vicki Peterson of the Bangles (three years before they became superstars). As he did in his look at the L.A. heavy metal lifestyle, Morris dug into the social foundations of the city’s paisley underground:  

On the evolution of the movement, the Long Ryder Sid Griffin observed: “There was a social scene going before any of these people were in bands to speak of. When you’re playing this type of music in L.A., sooner or later, your paths will cross.” [xi]

Now that he was an established writer, Morris crossed paths with essential figures in the L.A. alt-rock community, such as Griffin. With his Schott bomber jacket and shoulder-length hair, Morris fit right into the scene and began to influence it in other ways.   

Beyond and Back

Music journalists’ influence on the scenes they cover often goes beyond journalism. To be sure, Morris contributed to the L.A. alt-rock community in many ways, in addition to writing about it.

For example, in 1984, he wrote the text for a book of photographs of the iconic L.A. band X. Called Beyond and Back: The Story of X, it was one of the first books to come out of the city’s rock scene. X was midway through their series of groundbreaking albums that helped put L.A. alt-rock on the map. By blending punk and American roots music, X countered the synth-heavy 80s sound with a bristling, raw style rooted in country and rockabilly. Fans still seek out the book today.  

Independent record labels also stoked the fires of 80s alt-rock. And in the Southern California alt-rock scene, no indie label fueled the movement more than SST Records. In Morris’s article on the label, he concisely traced its history, focusing on SST’s struggles as a scrappy outsider experiencing growing pains following the success of the label’s bands, Black Flag and the Minutemen. Morris called SST “Southern California’s most radical and revolutionary independent label.”[xii]    

As the 80s rolled on, Morris continued to contribute to the alt-rock scene in various ways. For instance, in the fall of 1986, he hosted a panel discussion on music censorship featuring Phil Alvin of the Blasters, singer-songwriter Ruben Guevara, Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, and Frank Zappa. The year before, Zappa testified in a congressional hearing on record censorship prompted by the Parents Music Resource Center, a committee founded by a group of politically connected Washington wives. That Morris hosted an L.A. panel discussion on music censorship shows how the community respected him. 

That respect had also grown in L.A.’s publishing community.

Music Connection

Iconoclastic music critics like Morris garner credibility by writing for rebellious outlets. One such outlet was Music Connection, an L.A. periodical that billed itself as an “alternative music trade publication.” Morris signed on as a columnist in the spring of 1988, but a turn of events lay ahead.

At that time, Music Connection was edited by seasoned rock writer Bud Scoppa and concentrated on the Southern California music scene. An established journalist, Scoppa brought in younger contributors to the magazine and fostered a more informal approach. This chaffed the publisher, and a divide began to open up between the two.

During this time, Morris came on board and fit in well with Scoppa’s hip philosophy. This can be seen in Morris’s August 1988 column on legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. Morris’s personalized approach gave the column an uncommon emotional immediacy. A long-time blues fan, Morris was involved in an upcoming L.A. concert to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Johnson’s death, another indicator of how he contributed to the increasing influence of roots music on the L.A. alt-rock scene.  

Morris took issue with those who called Johnson derivative, noting the “force and originality that has fired the imagination of musicians, writers, and listeners for decades.”[xiii]

But mainly, Morris focused on Johnson’s tragic sense of life:  

Johnson’s songs, tearing at the seams with a kind of dread that is absent in even the most rarefied blues performances, are the rock upon which the mythic house of Johnson is built. His silvery slide guitar playing and thin, pained, expressive voice, which are achingly clear on the Columbia albums, drive these forbidding tunes into the upper reaches of the blues atmosphere – an area of great and awesome darkness where few men tread.[xiv]

Morris described what the music meant to him:

Johnson’s music has been a good companion for me since I was 19 years old; his was the first country blues music I ever heard, and it has remained, for me, the most durable and enduring playing in that style. Other artists I have heard since may display greater instrumental virtuosity or vocal prowess, but none holds his emotive charge. When my own blues “fall down like hail,” as Johnson’s do in “Hellhound on My Trail,” I turn to his music to salve my wounds. If the blues may be said to be a psychic elixir, then Robert Johnson’s are the most powerful on the market. [xv]

A month after the Johnson story ran, Scoppa decided he’d had enough complaints about his editing style. The breaking point came when his publisher demanded that Scoppa terminate some of the innovative features he had created. Scoppa resigned, and several writers, including Morris, walked out in protest, a demonstration of journalistic integrity.[xvi] 

A little over two years later, Morris revisited the legacy of Robert Johnson in a fantastic article for the Los Angeles Reader.

A Forefather of Rock ‘n’ Roll

20 years ago, I literally lost my mind. And I called upon the music of Robert Johnson to help me find it.[xvii]

So began Morris’s review, “The Devil, Poor Bob, and Me,” in an October 1990 Los Angeles Reader.

Morris had been the Reader’s music critic for 12 years. The alt-weekly was known for its high-quality, long-form arts reviews focused on Los Angeles. At the Reader, Morris honed his writing skills and developed a non-sentimental yet poetic style combined with an unflinching openness to music’s darker visions.

This can be seen in two articles Morris wrote for the Reader in the 1990s, beginning with his review of The Complete Recordings, a two-CD compilation of the 41 tracks recorded by Robert Johnson in his lifetime. In it, Morris took the deeply personalized approach of his earlier profile of Johnson, seasoned with compelling metaphors:

Much of the appeal of Johnson’s work has always been extramusical. And some aspects of his legend plainly had an impact on my febrile imagination so many years ago. Johnson, who died 52 years ago poisoned by a jealous man at a Mississippi Juke joint dance, is the archetype of the bluesman: rootless, compulsively itinerant, a legendary womanizer pursued by demonic spirits, and ultimately doomed.[xviii]

Morris stressed the originality of Johnson’s music despite its influences:

The clouds of myth surrounding Johnson might be blown away by a light breeze were it not for his music’s imposing puissance [prowess]. He may be seen today as the ultimate figure in the country blues, the supremely creative synthesis of all that went before him. …

The cavils of moldy fig critics are blown away completely by the songs in the Johnson canon upon which his reputation rests. These numbers … exist without detectable precedent; an overwhelming darkness of theme mates with grimly determined vocal and instrumental performances and an unorthodox approach to form on these tracks.

Johnson’s demolition of the blues form is often ignored by critics, and that’s also what makes him such a significant forefather of rock ‘n’ roll – and such an oft-covered artist. [xix]

Morris took issue with RJ Smith’s “muddled essay” about the Johnson collection in LA Weekly. For instance, whereas Smith downplayed Johnson’s compositions, Morris praised them:

The performances, to be sure, cannot be faulted, but the songs themselves are durable and unique, the work of an uncommon sensibility that constantly battered the masonry of a musical form often impervious to mutability. [xx]

Although Smith criticized the recordings’ digitalized sound, Morris countered:

The current CDs in no way disturb the integrity of the work’s original sound … Listening to old Delta Blues records can be a daunting experience, even for the aficionado. So the Columbia engineers’ clean, highly detailed work … can only be saluted …

Here, Johnson’s work is returned to us with remarkable presence, his tingling, sly guitar work and keening, often tortured singing remain abiding achievements … For the faithful like myself, to whom Robert Johnson’s music has been a draught of dark poetry in troubled times, it is the perfect call to a body of music that demands regular reacquaintance. [xxi]

Morris’s non-sentimental style perfectly fits Johnson’s music. It also fit a new album by a contemporary artist who, like Johnson, was a poet of loss and despair. 

Gone Again

This is wonderful stuff—stately and never for an instant mawkish or mewling, and touched with divine fire. Death is a subject that too often makes idiots out of artists, but this coolly considered yet impactful song cycle has brought out the most disciplined side of Smith’s art. [xxii]

In the summer of 1996, New York singer-songwriter Patti Smith released her sixth album, Gone Again. It came on the heels of a series of losses, including Smith’s husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith.

Smith turned her grief into healing art in the album’s transcendent songs. Morris wrote:

In terms of its subject matter, the record is not unprecedented: The death of songwriter Doc Pomus was one motivating factor behind Lou Reed’s indelible 1992 album Magic and Loss, while the murder of John Lennon resulted in Yoko Ono’s powerful 1981 single “Walking on Thin Ice” and album Season of Glass. All those works are unforgettable and largely bereft of sentiment; Smith’s may be even finer and more poignant. It reminds me of nothing so much as beat poet Gregory Corso’s farewell to Jack Kerouac, “Elegiac Feelings American”: Full of feeling, it never succumbs for an instant to maudlin emotion.[xxiii]

He concluded:

… On Gone Again, she looks deeply into her riven heart, finds that death may be in fact redefined, and fashions her finest music to date. She has an aiding understanding of the process: “An artist,” she wrote in the introduction to Early Work 1970-1979, “wears his work in place of wounds.” [xxiv]

A few months later, Morris found another type of catharsis in the music of one of alt-rock’s most radical bands. But he wouldn’t write about it for the Los Angeles Reader.

God Says Fuck You

It makes perfect sense that Perry Ubu was spawned in a city where water burned … Cleveland, Ohio, was the ideal site for the gestation of music as jittery, darkly comic, and discordant as Perry Ubu’s. Bred in the insularity of the declining Rust Belt, their sound sublimely reflected the mid-70s malaise of its birthplace and brought visions of decay, both cosmic and down-home, to a cult cocking its ears to the nascent punk rock of the day.[xxv]

In October 1996, Morris left the Los Angeles Reader and began a fantastic run of articles for its competitor, LA Weekly. That month, he published his first piece in the alt-newspaper, “God Says Fuck You: Pere Ubu’s Howl of the Dark Ages.” Morris was particularly riveted by the band’s guitarist Peter Laughner, singer David Thomas, and synthesist Allen Ravenstine:

Laughner’s unreconstructed, raucous tendencies derive largely from the Velvet Underground,  made for an uncertain but exciting balance with Thomas’s more outré primary sources, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. [xxvi]

Thomas’s vocals, a cacophony of yelps, yammers, and quizzical mutters rising to shattering screams, are counterbalanced by Laughner’s peeling guitar (which betrays the early influence of Television’s Tom Verlaine and the ringing imprint of Richard Thompson) …[xxvii]

Morris described Ravenstein’s playing as “a mind-boggling arsenal of roars, course regurgitations and high-end screams of static.” [xxviii]

Over the next three years, Morris wrote regularly for LA Weekly. Founded in 1978, the free newspaper boasted a readership of 165,000. In 1994, it was purchased by the publisher of the Village Voice, America’s first alt-weekly. A hallmark of Morris’s remarkable articles was how he transcribed the euphoria of listening into spellbinding prose. This comes through in Morris’s profile of Lee “Scratch” Perry, the legendary reggae producer and artist.

Lee “Scratch” Perry

All the hallmarks of Perry’s manic style and unique subtractive logic are here: the grandiose phasing that can turn a cranked-up high-hat into a pitch-shifting gyroscopic monolith; the brutal clipped, monstrously echoed vocals which abstractly deconstruct any linear sense in the lyrics and alchemize them into pure sound; the abrupt and unexpected isolation of instruments, which will suddenly focus on a scrape of percussion, a whisper of brass, a bubble of organ, a blat of trumpet or a hard chord on an out-of-tune guitar – often echoed, flanged and distorted to infinity – and it into the center of the mix and the back of your skull. The best Perry dubs disorient even as they delight.[xxix]

Chris Morris, “Dubby Conqueror,” Los Angeles Weekly, Aug. 1-7, 1997

This remarkable passage reflects Morris’s close listening and appreciation for the joyful disorientation of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s music. The article shows how Morris introduced L.A. alt-rock fans to music from other places and times.

This music also included sounds from America’s bounty of vernacular music.

One example was Morris’s review of the reissue of Harry Smith’s iconic Anthology of American Folk Music. For the original 1952 compilation, Smith selected songs from his collection of folk, country, and blues records recorded in the 1920s and 30s. Morris took a holistic view of the collection:

Clangorous and thoroughly bizarre, Anthology of American Folk Music is alive today in a way most influential works seldom are. Harry Smith didn’t merely “edit” the folk revival’s major musical deli platter; he pulled together a transcendently odd chorus of American voices, whose bitter, sawing tones resound as electrically as they did when Smith raised them out of the fog of time 45 years ago.[xxx]

Once again, Morris introduced readers to vitally discordant and uncanny elements of American roots music. This music could convey deep emotions, as Morris discovered in an album recommended by his friend Dave Alvin, who co-founded the L.A. roots rock band the Blasters.

Like Mary Magdalene’s Tears

The set is one of the most revelatory and emotionally affecting works of field scholarship in recent years.[xxxi]    

Morris referred to the album Sacred Steel, an anthology of steel guitar songs recorded in Florida Pentecostal churches from the 1930s. Morris singled out guitarist Aubrey Ghent:

He slithers his bar around the steel with quicksilver brilliance, dropping notes like Mary Magdalene’s tears, and can pick speedy single-string runs with the precision of B.B. King. … this music shouldn’t be mistaken as being solely of academic interest – it aims for the heart and especially the soul and hits the bull’s eye almost every time. [xxxii]

Morris appreciated that roots music had both scholarly and entertainment value. This can be seen in his LA Weekly review of Southern Journey, a collection of field recordings made by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax in 1959 and 1960:

Folklorist Alan Lomax is a combination of the scholar and the showman, the academic plumbing wells of arcane knowledge, and the great popularizer playing to the balcony. … Lomax always viewed folk music as a weapon of truth and an instrument of social justice. As he noted … “The recording machine can be a voice for the voiceless, for the millions in the world who have no access to the main channels of communication.”[xxxiii]

“Recording machines” gave a voice to marginalized musicians from the 1920s through the 1990s, when Morris reviewed this album recommended by his friend David Alvin. Indeed, the recording studios of independent record labels like SST and Slash Records provided an outlet for musicians sidelined by the music industry.    

Morris’s identification with the unsettling sounds of punk and the comforting powers of early American music made him an uncommonly effective catalyst in the L.A. scene. This can be seen in an article he wrote for the Reader in 1981, just a few years after he arrived in L.A.     

A Minute to Pray

I recently had the misfortune to have one of those illnesses so deep and wretched that I feared I’d never get well. It was pneumonia, a stubbornly lingering variety that kept me sweating, feverish, and gasping for breath. …[xxxiv]

In this passage, Morris described the onset of an illness that had him doubting recovery. But help was on the way in the form of a recently released album by a rising L.A. band:    

During this siege, the only record that I listened to was an acetate pressing of the Flesh Eaters’ new album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die (Ruby). There was much else that I could have listened to, but the Flesh Eaters record was the only one that made any sense to my dislocated sensibilities. It’s a fully realized work about physical, spiritual, psychological, and moral upheaval – a dark night of the soul music conceived to shake and rout the Devil Himself. Its loud, hard, satanic cadences affected a cleansing of my system that operated in tandem with the work of the antibiotics prescribed for me.

When I finally got back on my feet, I realized that I had been witness to one of those strange and rare moments when art and experience merge. A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die had operated as the perfect soundtrack to my own walk through the abyss.[xxxv]

The Flesh Eaters formed in Los Angeles in 1977 and just released their third and most acclaimed album, A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die.

The album featured leading L.A. musicians, including vocalist Chris Desjardins (Chris D), guitarist Dave Alvin, bassist John Doe, and drummer D. J. Bonebrake. Morris singled out one musician in particular:   

Although the musicians helped to shape the arrangements and set up the hooks on the album, it is Chris D. who is the prime mover on A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die. His lyrics, which chafe against the music and often demolish the restraints of bar lines, gaze intently and unblinkingly into the hellhole of a tortured and hopeless existence fraught with madness and punishment and devoid of salvation. The songs are sung in the voice of a spiritual casualty – a croak with a built-in scream. Desjardins gives a vital and unnerving performance here …[xxxvi]

And there it is. The quintessential Chris Morris review. The story of a musical firebrand who reached into the darkest corners of the human condition. A broken poet with a fractured voice shrieking into battered microphones in grungy nightclubs and ad hoc recording studios. These are Morris’s anti-heroes, the musicians like Chris D, Robert Johnson, and Patti Smith, who provided “the perfect soundtrack” to Morris’s “walk through the abyss.”[xxxvii]

Conclusion 

Chris Morris spoke for the dispossessed musicians of the 1980s-90s L.A. alt-rock scene. As a participant-observer with the skills and platform to spotlight the scene, Morris advocated for artists who took listeners out of their comfort zones and into healing musical catharsis.   

Bringing attention to Morris’s writings on the L.A. scene is essential because his reviews captured the essence of a time and place that shaped American popular music with lasting effects. As importantly, Morris’s weekly dispatches informed readers about influential artists outside the scene, including early roots musicians who influenced L.A. rockers.

Taking a look at Morris’s writings is also crucial because it reminds us of the importance of alternative newspapers in revolutionary music scenes. These papers capture happenings in timely, granular detail. Writers immersed in these scenes express a contagious enthusiasm that can be near-messianic. Mass publications rarely convey this personal immediacy. Music journalism scholars need to devote more research to the critical role of alternative newspapers and writers like Chris Morris.

Epilogue

Recalling his discovery of Rhino Records soon after moving to Los Angeles, Morris wrote:

For this LA newcomer, Rhino Records swiftly became a second home. At times, I used it as a living room: I’d pick up a six-pack of Bud tallboys at Vendome Liquors at the corner of Westwood and Santa Monica and drop by the store, where I’d drink and hector the clerks into spinning their current favs for me. The music-obsessed staff would usually tolerate such hijinks on the part of their similarity-fixated clientele, but they did not suffer fools or assholes gladly, as the “Worst Customers List” posted at the front of the store attested. To my chagrin, I made that infamous roll more than once. [xxxviii]

Whether describing the “Mecca” of Rhino Records or the cathartic sounds of the Flesh Eaters, Chris Morris gave his readers a fans-eye perspective of the 1980s-90s Los Angeles alt-rock scene. In compelling writings, he captured a revolutionary moment in the history of American popular music.      

Books by Chris Morris  

Beyond and Back: The Story of X (1983)

Los Lobos: Dream in Blue (2015)

Together Through Life: A Personal Journey with the Music of Bob Dylan (2017)

Notes

[i] Chris Morris, “Rhino Records,” LA Weekly, Oct. 1, 1998: 152.

[ii] Uncredited, untitled, LA Weekly, March 27, 1980: 66.

[iii] Uncredited, “LA Dee Dah,” LA Weekly, Sept. 17, 1981: 18.

[iv] Aug. 1982: Uncredited, “LA Dee Dah,” LA Weekly, Aug. 12, 1982: 28.

[v] Reebee Garofalo, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (Prentice Hall, 2005): 329.

[vi] Chris Morris, “Local Heavy-Metal Bands Out to Become Monsters,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, Sept. 4, 1983: 56.

[vii] Chris Morris, “Local Heavy-Metal Bands Out to Become Monsters,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, Sept. 4, 1983: 56.

[viii] Chris Morris, “Local Heavy-Metal Bands Out to Become Monsters,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, Sept. 4, 1983: 56.

[ix] Chris Morris, “Local Heavy-Metal Bands Out to Become Monsters,” Los Angeles Time Calendars, Sept. 4, 1983: 56.

[x] Uncredited, “Paisley Underground,” All Music, webpage retrieved

Aug. 29, 2024.

[xi] Chris Morris, “Tripping Out on the New Psychedelia,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, Dec. 18, 1983: 82.

[xii] Chris Morris, “SST: Low Rent, High Risk,” Los Angeles Times Calendar, Nov. 11, 1984.

[xiii] Chris Morris, “Robert Johnson, In the Darkness,” Music Connection, August-September 1988: 28.

[xiv] Chris Morris, “Robert Johnson, In the Darkness,” Music Connection, August-September 1988: 28.

[xv] Chris Morris, “Robert Johnson, In the Darkness,” Music Connection, August-September 1988: 28.

[xvi] Steve Hochman, “Music Connection – a House Divided,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 4, 1988, webpage retrieved Aug. 30, 2024: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-09-04-ca-1937-story.html.

[xvii] Chris Morris, “The Devil, Poor Bob, and Me,” Los Angeles Reader, Oct. 5, 1990: 10.

[xviii] Chris Morris, “The Devil, Poor Bob, and Me,” Los Angeles Reader, Oct. 5, 1990: 10.

[xix] Chris Morris, “The Devil, Poor Bob, and Me,” Los Angeles Reader, Oct. 5, 1990: 10.

[xx] Chris Morris, “The Devil, Poor Bob, and Me,” Los Angeles Reader, Oct. 5, 1990: 10.

[xxi] Chris Morris, “The Devil, Poor Bob, and Me,” Los Angeles Reader, Oct. 5, 1990: 10.

[xxii] Chris Morris, “Touched with Divine Fire: Patti Smith’s Elegiac Feelings American,” Los Angeles Reader, June 14, 1996. Webpage retrieved Aug. 22, 2024: http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/crit/galaread.htm.

[xxiii] Chris Morris, “Touched with Divine Fire: Patti Smith’s Elegiac Feelings American,” Los Angeles Reader, June 14, 1996. Webpage retrieved Aug. 22, 2024: http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/crit/galaread.htm.

[xxiv] Chris Morris, “Touched with Divine Fire: Patti Smith’s Elegiac Feelings American,” Los Angeles Reader, June 14, 1996. Webpage retrieved Aug. 22, 2024: http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/crit/galaread.htm.

[xxv] Chris Morris, “God Says Fuck You: Pere Ubu’s Howl of the Dark Ages,” LA Weekly, Oct. 17, 1996: 53.

[xxvi] Chris Morris, “God Says Fuck You: Pere Ubu’s Howl of the Dark Ages,” LA Weekly, Oct. 17, 1996: 53.

[xxvii] Chris Morris, “God Says Fuck You: Pere Ubu’s Howl of the Dark Ages,” LA Weekly, Oct. 17, 1996: 53.

[xxviii] Chris Morris, “God Says Fuck You: Pere Ubu’s Howl of the Dark Ages,” LA Weekly, Oct. 17, 1996: 53.

[xxix] Chris Morris, “Dubby Conqueror,” LA Weekly, Aug. 1-7, 1997: 40.

[xxx] Chris Morris, “When We Were Good,” LA Weekly, Sept. 25, 1997: 32.

[xxxi] Chris Morris, “Just a Closer Walk,” LA Weekly, Jan. 22, 1998: 42.

[xxxii] Chris Morris, “Just a Closer Walk,” LA Weekly, Jan. 22, 1998: 42.

[xxxiii] Chris Morris, “We Meet Again,” LA Weekly, July 4-10, 1997: 42.

[xxxiv] Chris Morris, “Flesh Eaters, LA Reader, 1981: Pray Til You Sweat,” webpage retrieved Sept. 3, 2024: https://www.tumblr.com/watusichris/107531903237/flesh-eaters-la-reader-1981-pray-til-you-sweat.

[xxxv] Chris Morris, “Flesh Eaters, LA Reader, 1981: Pray Til You Sweat,” webpage retrieved Sept. 3, 2024: https://www.tumblr.com/watusichris/107531903237/flesh-eaters-la-reader-1981-pray-til-you-sweat.

[xxxvi] Chris Morris, “Flesh Eaters, LA Reader, 1981: Pray Til You Sweat,” webpage retrieved Sept. 3, 2024: https://www.tumblr.com/watusichris/107531903237/flesh-eaters-la-reader-1981-pray-til-you-sweat.

[xxxvii] Chris Morris, “Flesh Eaters, LA Reader, 1981: Pray Til You Sweat,” webpage retrieved Sept. 3, 2024: https://www.tumblr.com/watusichris/107531903237/flesh-eaters-la-reader-1981-pray-til-you-sweat.

[xxxviii] Chris Morris, “Rhino Records,” LA Weekly, Oct. 1, 1998: 152.