Impactful things come into life from time to time and change the way you look at things. Sometimes, these are major events and lead to a new ideology, and other times, they open your eyes a little bit wider. For me, both of those things happened when I put a VHS tape into my VCR when I was fourteen years old.

This is when I became aware of Keith Morris and the Circle Jerks . It was in 1984 when I watched a terrible dub of Penelope Spheeris ’ 1981 punk rock documentary, "Decline of Western Civilization," on a crappy tape that someone loaned me. I never wanted to give it back, but that movie was hard to come by then.

I had heard the LP version of the soundtrack a few years before, when two of my friends from the neighborhood brought it back to Phoenix after a couple of months in Ca

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