While the Hollywood punks tended to be spindly, druggy, and older, the suburban kids who followed Black Flag and other bands tended to be disaffected jocks and surfers, strapping young lads who rarely touched anything stronger than beer. And when they all gathered in one place, fights would break out and things would get broken. The most thuggish of the suburban punks were a crew from Huntington Beach, better known as the HB’ers. “The HB’ers were all leather jackets, chains, macho, bloodlust, and bravado, and exhibited blatantly stupid military behavior,” wrote Spot in his Everything Went Black liner notes. “It was never a dull moment.”
This new kind of punk rocker perplexed the local authorities. “All of a sudden you’re dealing with thick-necked guys who were drunk and could go toe to toe with some cops, guys who will get in a cop’s face,” says Henry Rollins. “They’re white and they’re from Huntington Beach and you can’t shoot ’em because they’re not black or Hispanic so you have to deal with them on a semihuman level. The sheer force of the numbers at the shows totally freaked the cops out to where they just said, ‘Don’t try to understand it, we’ll just squelch it. And how will we squelch it? We’ll just smash the hell out of ’em—arrest ’em for no reason, smack ’em on the head, intimidate the shit out of them.’ And boy it was intense.”
Police harassment blighted the early days of South Bay hardcore, and Black Flag was the lightning rod for most of it. It all started when Black Flag threw a party at the Church in June ’80. In the name of property values, Hermosa Beach was then in the midst of clearing out the last remnants of its hippie culture, and the town fathers were apparently intent on preventing bohemian youth culture from ever blighting their fair city again. The police showed up at the party and almost literally told Black Flag to get out of town by sundown. Conveniently, the band had scheduled the show for the eve of a West Coast tour, so they piled in the van, took off for San Francisco, and later returned to Redondo Beach. After a year or so they came back to Hermosa Beach and were promptly given the bum’s rush once again.
Between 1980 and 1981, at least a dozen Black Flag concerts ended in violent clashes between the police and the kids. And the more the band complained to the press about the police, the more the police hassled them and their fans. Not helping matters was the fact that the Black Flag logo was spray-painted on countless highway overpasses in and around Los Angeles. Then there was the flyer that got plastered all over town featuring a Pettibon drawing of a hand jamming a pistol in the mouth of a terrified cop. The caption read “Make me come, faggot!”
Ginn claims SST’s phone lines were being tapped, cops sat in vans across the street and monitored SST headquarters, and undercover police posing as homeless people sat on the curb in front of SST’s front door. Hiring a lawyer simply wasn’t an option—they couldn’t afford one. “I mean, we were thinking about skimping on our meals,” Ginn explains, adding, “It’s not like you’re part of society. There was no place to go. That’s what people just don’t get that haven’t been in that place. Because you don’t have any rights. If you don’t have that support, then the law is just the cop out there and what he tells you to do.” But the band never backed down, fueling even more ire from L.A.’s finest.
Starting in 1980, L.A. clubs began to ban hardcore bands. “That’s the last thing I thought would happen,” Ginn says. “I thought we’re pretty mild-mannered people and we don’t write songs about some sort of social rebellion; it’s basically blues to me. It’s personal, my way of writing blues.”
Rollins, who admittedly was not yet in the band when most of the harassment went down, believes much of the controversy was a Dukowskian plot. “Looking back at it, I think it was some press manipulation,” he says. “And to rouse some rabble.” If so, the plan backfired—what good was police harassment if you couldn’t get a gig?
Black Flag had booked their first tour, a summer of ’79 trip up the West Coast, hitting San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and up to Vancouver, British Columbia, when Morris, an admitted “alcoholic and a cokehead,” left the band to found the pioneering South Bay punk band the Circle Jerks. He was quickly replaced by a rabid Black Flag fan named Ron Reyes, aka Chavo Pederast. “He’d go real crazy at the gigs and we just thought he’d make a really good singer,” Ginn explains.
But Reyes quit two songs into a show at the Fleetwood in March ’80, and the band proceeded to play “Louie, Louie” for an hour, joined by a long succession of guest vocalists. “A guy named ‘Snikers’… jumped up and began singing ‘Louie, Louie’ and then proceeded to perform a most disgustingly drunken striptease during which cans, bottles, spit, sweat, and bodies began flying with a vengeance,” wrote Spot. “It was the finest rock & roll show I had ever seen.” For several shows afterward, the band played without an official lead singer—anyone who wanted to would come up and sing a song or two before getting yanked back into the crowd.
They convinced Reyes to come back and record the five-song, six-and-a-half-minute Jealous Again EP (released in the summer of ’80), a nasty nugget of low-rent nihilism, with Ginn’s guitar slashing all over the music like a ghoul in a splatter flick, the rhythm section pounding out boneheaded riffs at hectic speed, Reyes conjuring up a different species of temper tantrum for each track. Ginn’s lyrics were laced with satire, but it wasn’t very pretty—on “Jealous Again” the singer rails against his girlfriend, “I won’t beat you up and I won’t push you around / ’Cause if I do then the cops will get me for doing it.” And it was easy to miss the sarcasm of “White Minority”—“Gonna be a white minority / They’re gonna be the majority / Gonna feel inferiority.” The record was a harsh wake-up call for the California dream: for all the perfect weather and affluent lifestyles, there was something gnawing at its youth. Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore—it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.
Black Flag became more and more of a focal point for violence and condemnation. “The Black Flag Violence Must Stop!” proclaimed the title of one editorial. All the media hype was now attracting a crowd that was actually looking for violence—not that Black Flag did much to stop it. “Black Flag never said, ‘Peace, love, and understanding,’ ” says Rollins. “If it got crazy, we’d say, ‘Guess what, it gets crazy.’ We were the band that didn’t go, ‘Go gently into that night.’ One of the main rallying war cries for us was ‘What the fuck, fuck shit up!’ Literally, that was one of our slogans.”
Refusing to give up, the band made a hilariously provocative series of radio ads to promote their shows, twitting the LAPD mercilessly. In one ad, a mobster tells the owner of the Starwood club that booking Black Flag was a big mistake. “Chief Gates says this is going to cost the whole organization plenty,” says the hoodlum. “We don’t need this.” An ad for a February ’81 show with Fear, Circle Jerks, China White, and the Minutemen at the Stardust Ballroom opens with a voice that says, “Attention all units, we have a major disturbance at the Stardust Ballroom…” “Chief Gates is in a real uproar,” says one cop, and his partner replies, “What the hell are we waiting for then, let’s go over there and beat up some of them damn punk rockers!”
Eventually the violence became too much for the police and the community. If Black Flag was to keep playing shows, they’d have to play them out of town. But back then literally only a handful of American indie punk bands undertook national tours; lower-tier major label bands did them as promotional loss leaders, something independent label bands couldn’t afford. Besides, there were few cities besides New York, L.A., and Chicago that had clubs that would even book punk rock bands. The solution was to tour as cheaply as possible and play anywhere they could—anything from a union hall to someone’s rec room. They didn’t demand a guarantee or accommodations or any of the usual perquisites, and they could survive that way—barely, anyway.
Ginn and Dukowski began collecting the phone numbers printed on various punk records and made calls to set up shows in far-flung towns.
People were eager to help; after all, it was in everybody’s interest to do so. In particular, North American punk pioneers like Vancouver, B.C.’s D.O.A. and San Francisco’s Dead Kennedys shared what they’d learned on the road. “With those bands, we did a lot of networking, sharing information,” says Ginn. “We’d find a new place to play, then we’d let them know because they were interested in going wherever they could and playing. Then we would help each other in our own towns.”
Black Flag began making sorties up the California coast to play the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, doing seven in all before venturing out as far as Chicago and Texas in the winter of ’79–’80. Spot went along as soundman and tour manager, a job he would do, along with acting as SST’s unofficial house engineer, for several years. His assessment of the situation: “Smelly. It was everyone in a Ford van with the laundry and the equipment. It was uncomfortable.”
Wherever they went, they tried to play all-ages shows, even if it meant playing two sets, one for kids and one for drinkers. It was simply a way of making sure no one was excluded from their shows. But no matter how good their intentions, Black Flag’s reputation preceded them. “In some towns it was like people expected us to pull up with a hundred L.A. punks and try to destroy their club,” Ginn said. “We’re not out to destroy anybody’s club. We’re just trying to play music.”
By stringing together itineraries of adventurous venues who would host their virulent new brand of punk rock, bands like Black Flag, D.O.A., and Dead Kennedys became the Lewis and Clarks of the punk touring circuit, blazing a trail across America that bands still follow today. But Black Flag was the most aggressive and adventurous of them all. “Black Flag, back then, was the one that was opening up these places to these audiences,” says Mission of Burma’s manager, Jim Coffman. “It was because of their diligence—Chuck’s diligence. A lot of times you’d hear ‘Black Flag played there.’ And you’d say, ‘OK, we’ll play there then.’ ”
In June ’80, months after Reyes quit, the band still hadn’t found a replacement—and their West Coast tour was a week away. Then Dukowski bumped into Dez Cadena (whose father happened to be Ozzie Cadena, the legendary producer/A&R man who worked with virtually every major figure in jazz from the Forties through the Sixties). The rail-thin Cadena went to plenty of Black Flag shows, knew the words to all the songs, and got along fine with the band. Cadena protested that he’d never sung before, but in typical Black Flag fashion, Dukowski said it didn’t matter. Cadena agreed to give it a try. “This was my favorite band and these guys were my friends,” Cadena said, “so I didn’t want to let them down.”
Cadena worked like a charm, and his sincere, anguished bark—more hollering than singing—was a big change from the Johnny Rotten–inspired yowling of Morris and Reyes, and swiftly became a template for hardcore bands all around the South Bay and beyond. The band arguably reached the peak of its popularity with Cadena as lead singer. On the eve of a two-month U.S. tour, the band headlined a sold-out June 19, 1981, show with the Adolescents, D.O.A., and the Minutemen at the 3,500-seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, a feat they never again achieved. Noting the rowdiness and chaos, an L.A. Times piece on the show wondered, “Is the whole thing a healthy release of tension or yet another disturbing sign of the escalating violence in society?” And of course it was both.
On the other hand, not everybody thought slam dancing was such a great idea. “To me, they’re just like the guys who try to bully you at school,” fifteen-year-old Tommy Maloney of Canoga Park told the L.A. Times. “Who needs ’em? The shows would be a lot more fun if they found some other place to fool around.”
Cadena’s arrival coincided with the onset of the band’s heavy touring. Unfortunately his inexperience as a singer—coupled with his heavy smoking and some woefully underpowered PA systems—meant his voice crumpled under the constant strain. Eventually everyone realized it would be best if he moved to guitar and the band got a new singer.
Henry Garfield grew up in the affluent Glover Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., same as another future indie rock powerhouse, Ian MacKaye. “Word spread around that there was a kid with a BB gun down on W Street,” MacKaye recalls. “So we went down to visit this kid and he was kind of a nerdy guy with glasses.” But MacKaye soon realized Garfield’s appearance was deceptive—his new acquaintance attended Bullis Academy, a hard-ass military-style school for problem kids. Garfield, MacKaye concluded, “was a toughie.” Moreover, Garfield had a makeshift shooting gallery in his basement, and soon MacKaye and his friends were coming over and firing BB guns, listening to Cheech and Chong records, and admiring Garfield’s pet snakes.
Garfield, an only child, didn’t come from as affluent a home as most of his friends and didn’t have a very positive self-image; not surprisingly, he often did whatever it took to fit in. “If it was the thing to do,” he says, “I would be the first person to be Peer Pressure Boy and go be part of the throng without thinking.”
Garfield’s parents had divorced when he was a toddler; he had a short attention span and was put on Ritalin. Thanks to “bad grades, bad attitude, poor conduct,” he got sent to Bullis, which favored corporal punishment. But instead of a disrespect for authority, the experience instilled in Garfield a very rigorous self-discipline. “It was very good for me,” he says. “I really benefited from somebody going, ‘No. No means no and you really are going to sit here until you get this right.’ ”
Despite Glover Park’s comfortable environs, “it was a very rough upbringing in a lot of other ways,” he says. “I accumulated a lot of rage by the time I was seventeen or eighteen.” Some of that rage stemmed from intense racial tensions in Washington at the time; Garfield, like many white D.C. kids of his generation, got beaten up regularly by black kids simply because of his race.
But much of that rage came from problems at home. “A lot of things about my parents made me very angry,” he says. He told Rolling Stone in 1992 that he had been sexually molested several times as a child; many of his spoken word monologues refer to a mentally abusive father. “Going to school in an all-boys school and never meeting any girls, that was very hard. I hardly met any women in high school and I really resented the fact that I was so socially inept because of being separated from girls in those years. There’s a lot of that stuff.
“Also,” he adds, “I’m just a freak.”
Garfield and his buddy MacKaye were big fans of hard rockers like Ted Nugent and Van Halen, but they hungered for music that could top the aggression of even those bands. “We wanted something that just kicked ass,” he says. “Then one of us, probably Ian, got the Sex Pistols record. I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘Well, that’s something. This guy is pissed off, those guitars are rude.’ What a revelation!”
By the spring of ’79 Garfield, MacKaye, and most of their friends had picked up instruments. Except Garfield literally picked up instruments. “I was everybody’s roadie,” he says. “I basically did that just to be able to hang out with all of my friends who were now playing. I was always picking up Ian’s bass amp and putting it in his car. Not that he couldn’t—he’s the man and I’m going to carry the bass amp for the man.”
But sometimes when Teen Idles singer Nathan Strejcek wouldn’t show up for practice, Garfield would convince the band to let him on the mike. Then as word got around that Garfield could sing—or, rather, emit a compelling, raspy howl—H.R., singer of legendary D.C. hardcore band the Bad Brains, would sometimes pull him up to the mike and make him bark out a number.
In the fall of ’80, D.C. punk band the Extorts lost singer Lyle Preslar to a new band that was being formed by MacKaye called Minor Threat. Garfield joined what was left of the Extorts to form S.O.A., short for State of Alert. Garfield put words to the five songs they already had, they wrote a few new ones, and these made up S.O.A.’s first and only record, the No Policy EP, released a few months after the band formed. In little over eight minutes, the ten songs took aim at things like drug users, people who dared
ask Garfield what he was thinking, the way girls make you do dumb things, and the futility of existence, all in the bluntest of terms; the rest of the songs had titles like “Warzone,” “Gang Fight,” and “Gonna Hafta Fight.”
After releasing the EP on Dischord Records, which MacKaye and some friends had founded, they rehearsed at drummer Ivor Hanson’s house—and since Hanson’s father was a top-ranking admiral, his house happened to be the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the vice president and the top brass of the navy. Every time they practiced, they’d have to drive past armed Secret Service agents.
S.O.A. played a grand total of nine gigs. “All of them were eleven to fourteen minutes each in duration because the songs were all like forty seconds,” says Rollins, “and the rest of the time we were going, ‘Are you ready? Are you ready?’ Those gigs were poorly played songs in between ‘Are you ready?’s.”
Garfield spat out the lyrics like a bellicose auctioneer while the band banged out an absurdly fast oompah beat. Along with a few other D.C. bands, S.O.A. was inventing East Coast hardcore. “The reason we played short and so fast was because [original drummer Simon Jacobsen] never really played drums—he was just a really talented kid who picked it up,” Rollins says. “So we didn’t have much besides dunt-dun-dunt-dun-dunt-dun as far as a beat. And there wasn’t enough to sing about that you couldn’t knock out in a couple of words, like, ‘I’m mad and you suck.’ There wasn’t a need for a lead [guitar] section—you never even thought of that.”
Garfield had found his calling. Indeed, he was a classic frontman. “All I had was attitude,” he says, “and a very intense need to be seen, a real I-need-attention thing.”
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 3
