Boston Rock interviewer Gerard Cosloy asked why they didn’t try to stop violence at their shows. Dukowski responded with a succinct summation of the punk principle of anarchy. “Do we have a right to act as leaders, to tell people how to act?” Dukowski replied. “The easy solution isn’t a solution, it’s the fucking problem. It’s too easy to have someone tell you what to do. It is harder to make your own decision. We put a certain amount of trust into the people that come to see us.”
“Through interviews like this,” Ginn added, “maybe we can let people know what we do stand for, that we’re against beating people up, that we’re against putting people down because they have longer hair. We’ve made our statement, but we won’t prevent people from listening to something else, dressing some other way, or doing what they want. We aren’t policemen.”
Still, anyone who looked remotely like a hippie stood a good chance of getting roughed up at a Black Flag show. Maybe that’s part of the reason Ginn started growing his hair after Damaged, with Rollins and the rest of the band soon following suit—it was yet another way to twit their increasingly conformist audience. “We’re trying to always make a statement that it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing,” said Ginn. “It’s how you feel and how you think.”
Damaged made a fairly big impact in Europe and England, especially with the press, who were fascinated by the revelation that there was a really radical punk rock scene developing in the beach communities of Southern California, which they had previously looked on as an idyllic promised land, seemingly the last place where kids would flip a musical middle finger at society. “And it caused certain people to think, ‘Well, is this legitimate?’ ” says Ginn. “There’s that element of ‘This is wrong, coming from this place. People like that should be coming from Birmingham, England. You guys have it good.’ But when you’re surrounded by Genesis fans, I don’t know how idyllic that is. When you’re surrounded by that materialistic kind of a thing and you’re looking for something deeper than that, then that’s not an ideal environment.”
A December ’81 tour of the U.K. was a nightmare: freezing cold conditions, regular physical attacks from skinheads and rival English punk bands, and all manner of bloodshed onstage—at one show Ginn bled profusely after someone threw a bullet at his head; he staggered offstage, but not before angrily heaving a metal folding chair into the crowd. They even missed their first flight home.
Once the Damaged album was out, the band toured from early May all the way through mid-September ’82, a long, grueling trek. But their headlong momentum was about to come to a grinding halt.
SST had been selling its releases to small distributors at a deliberately low list price. But because those distributors usually sold import records, their releases usually wound up in specialty shops, unthinkingly stuck in the import section and at top-dollar import prices. Being a punk rock band on an independent label, Black Flag would never appear in the rock sections of ordinary record stores, alphabetized between Bad Company and Black Sabbath, where Ginn felt they belonged. So he decided to take Black Flag’s next record to a mainstream distributor. Many larger independent distributors wouldn’t even return SST’s phone calls, but one major did—MCA.
As part of the bargain, Ginn agreed to corelease the Black Flag album with Unicorn, a small label distributed by MCA. But in 1982, just as the album was to go out to stores, complete with the MCA logo on it, someone from Rolling Stone allegedly bad-mouthed Black Flag to MCA distribution chief Al Bergamo. Bergamo abruptly announced it would be “immoral” to release Damaged, claiming the album was “anti-parent, past the point of good taste.” “It certainly wasn’t like Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel and the things they were trying to say,” he added.
Black Flag claimed they’d warned MCA of the record’s content, but that MCA, convinced the band would sell a lot of records, looked the other way. In his book Rock and the Pop Narcotic, Joe Carducci, who began overseeing sales, promotion, and marketing for SST in 1981, claimed MCA’s disapproval of the content was a red herring—the real reason was that Unicorn was so deeply in debt to MCA that it made no fiscal sense for MCA to continue the relationship; Black Flag’s “anti-parent” lyrics were just an excuse to sever ties with Unicorn.
So the band went to the pressing plant and put stickers with Bergamo’s “anti-parent” quote over the MCA logo on twenty thousand copies of the record. Then a tangle of lawsuits erupted when SST claimed that Unicorn didn’t pay SST’s rightful royalties and expenses for the album.
Unicorn countersued and got an injunction preventing Black Flag from releasing any further recordings until the matter was settled. When SST issued the retrospective compilation of unreleased Black Flag material called Everything Went Black with no band credit on it, Unicorn hauled SST into court in July ’83 and painted the band as, in Ginn’s words, “some kind of threat to society.” The judge found Ginn and Dukowski, as co-owners of SST, to have violated the injunction and sent them both to L.A. County Jail for five days on a contempt of court citation.
Upon his release, Ginn was ever the stoic. “He wouldn’t even discuss it,” Rollins says. “He just said, ‘Practice is at seven.’ He didn’t discuss it. I’m not kidding—not a word. I have no idea what it was like for Greg Ginn in jail. He said nothing except he got on the bus to go to County, he had a sandwich or some kind of food in his front pocket, and a guy reached over the seat and took it from him.”
Ginn still won’t say much about his experience in jail, deferring to people who have spent much longer periods of time in far worse prisons. “It’s not something I would recommend” is all he’ll say. “It’s a very demeaning thing. And I’d recommend to anybody that they try to stay out of there.”
Finally, Unicorn went bankrupt in late 1983 and Black Flag was free to release records again.
But the ordeal had taken a heavy toll on Black Flag. Damaged had gone out of print and the legal fight had drastically curtailed touring—a heavy blow to the band’s popularity, not to mention their income. And all the strife, tension, and poverty was causing considerable turnover in the band. “People would get worn out,” says Ginn. “Seven guys living in the same room and touring for six months and then still having debts hanging over our head.”
By this point Robo was long gone. A Colombian national, he’d encountered visa problems at the end of the December ’81 U.K. tour and couldn’t come back into the country. (The band had flown in the Descendents’ Bill Stevenson to finish the tour with a week of East Coast shows. Stevenson lived down the street from Ginn; the Descendents—a smart, jumpy, pop-punky quartet given to titles like “I Like Food” and “My Dad Sucks”—was Black Flag’s brother band and shared their practice space.)
In the first half of ’82, a slight, corkscrew-haired sixteen-year-old known only as Emil began drumming with the band. He didn’t last long. The story goes that Emil’s girlfriend was pressuring him to quit the band and spend more time with her and that when Ginn got wind of this, he convinced Mugger to turn Emil against his girlfriend by claiming he’d slept with her. The strategy backfired, prompting a brawl with Mugger. Emil left in the middle of the marathon 1982 U.S. tour and was replaced by D.O.A.’s incredible Chuck Biscuits.
On a West Coast tour, that lineup played a grange hall in the tiny northern Washington town of Anacortes. “Henry was incredible,” raved writer Calvin Johnson, reviewing the show for the fanzine Sub Pop, “pacing back and forth, lunging, lurching, growling; it was all real, the most intense emotional experiences I have ever seen.”
Unfortunately, Biscuits lasted only several months. Biscuits, Ginn says, would not agree to Black Flag’s rigorous rehearsal schedule, which was six days a week and up to eight hours a day. “Greg Ginn practices were like the long march to the sea,” Rollins says. “Talk about a work ethic, he is like Patton on steroids.
“Black Flag was a bunch of very disciplined people,” Rollins continues. “Very ambitious, super disciplined. Being in that band was like getting drill
ed all the time. You practiced the set once, twice a night. We had band practice six, seven days a week. On the weekends I had to rest my voice. I’d go, ‘Greg, I’m going to a friend’s house this weekend because she’s going to feed me. And I will be back on Monday and I’m not going to sing Saturday and Sunday because I’m going to give my voice a rest.’ And Greg would be kind of pissed. Greg would be in there seven days a week. That’s how Black Flag was. There was never any anarchy in our lifestyle.”
Rollins’s desire to occasionally rest his voice wasn’t the only thing that alienated him from the rest of the band. “I never talked a lot to Henry,” Ginn says. “Henry was always kind of the loner type of person.” Another part of Rollins’s isolation stemmed from the fact that he didn’t smoke pot and instead drank vast quantities of coffee, meaning he was amped up on caffeine while others were stoned.
“Understand another thing: Black Flag was never a group of friends,” says Rollins, “never a big camaraderie.” Dukowski did become Rollins’s sardonic guru, but Rollins never really befriended the enigmatic Ginn. “You never knew where you stood with Greg,” says Rollins. “Newer recruits would come to me and say, ‘Does Greg like me? How am I doing with Greg?’ And I’d go, ‘You’re doing fine, just don’t worry about it, play your song, play like Greg says, it’s cool.’ ”
Bill Stevenson rejoined Black Flag in the winter of ’82–’83, in the depths of the Unicorn fracas. Stevenson was a bright guy and knew about songwriting and production, which was both good and bad—although he could assist Ginn on both those fronts, it sometimes meant he would butt heads with him, too.
They set off on a U.S. tour that January, then went over to Europe for a tour with the Minutemen, in the midst of the coldest winter the Continent had seen in years. The way Rollins tells it, the whole tour was an unending succession of unheated clubs and punk rock squats, starvation, misery, and pain; to top it off, their van got repossessed. Very early in the tour, Rollins had already grown disenchanted with at least one of his tourmates. “Mike Watt never stops talking,” Rollins wrote in his tour diary, later published as Get in the Van. “I think I’m going to punch Mike Watt’s lights out before this is all over.”
But he held far more contempt for the people in the audience. At a German show, “I bit a skinhead on the mouth and he started to bleed real bad,” wrote Rollins. “His blood was all over my face.” In Vienna a member of the audience bashed Rollins in the mouth with the microphone; people spat on his face; someone burned his legs with a cigar; he tried to protect a stage diver from some overzealous bouncers and got punched in the jaw—by the stage diver—for his trouble. When the police came, the crowd beat them up, took their uniforms, and allegedly killed their police dog.
When a rowdy punk pestered Ginn during a show in England, Rollins cleaned his clock. “His mohawk,” wrote Rollins, “made a good handle to hold on to when I beat his face into the floor.” Later Ginn berated Rollins for the beating, calling him a “macho asshole.” Rollins felt Ginn would feel differently if he’d been attacked. “I don’t bother talking to him about it because you can’t talk to Greg,” Rollins wrote. “You just take it and keep playing. Whatever.”
When they pulled up to one Italian club, there was a crowd of menacing-looking punks waiting for them. The Italian punks circled the van and started rocking it and pounding on the windows. The band was getting scared, trying to figure out how to get into the club without sustaining grievous bodily harm. At last they burst out of the van and made a run for it. The rabid mob immediately surrounded them—and began hugging and kissing the band and thrusting presents into their hands.
While Black Flag was sorting out its legal situation, leading hardcore bands like Minor Threat had broken up, the Bad Brains went on indefinite hiatus, and the hardcore scene had become absurdly regimented and inbred, both socially and musically. Raymond Pettibon’s illustration for Black Flag’s 1981 Six Pack EP had been uncannily prescient: a punk who had literally painted himself into a corner. Black Flag’s post-Damaged music was devoted to charting a course out of that stylistic cul-de-sac. This meant going back to bands like the Stooges, the MC5, and especially Black Sabbath for ways to convey aggression and power without resorting to the cheap trick of velocity (although the band stuck with the even cheaper trick of volume). So Ginn slowed down the new Black Flag music, reasoning that although a speeding bullet can pierce a wall, a slow-rolling tank does more damage.
But, shrewdly realizing that plenty of other bands, bands he had plenty of contempt for, would take his ideas, turn them into a formula, and sell more tickets and records than Black Flag did, Ginn withheld the new approach from outsiders. “They didn’t want to play the new songs because there were too many bands ready to steal the ideas that they were working on,” says Joe Carducci. “A lot of people were looking to them for ‘What do you do with this after you speed it up to the breaking point, then what do you do, Greg?’ So Greg would keep that stuff…. He didn’t play it in front of other people.”
But Ginn would have to make changes in the band if he was to realize his new musical vision. As a guitarist, Dez Cadena was conservative, leaning toward generic classic rock like Humble Pie and ZZ Top, which Ginn just could not countenance any longer. Cadena left the group in August ’83 to form his own band, DC3, which recorded several classic rock-inspired albums for SST.
And by the fall Chuck Dukowski left the group, too. Ginn was a hard man to work for, but by this point Dukowski was getting the brunt of his ambivalence. “Greg was not going to be pleased with anybody, no matter who they were, on whatever level,” says Joe Carducci. “There’s that sense with Greg that it’s never good enough.”
“I felt that we had reached a dead end in terms of the music that we were playing together,” Ginn says, adding that his musical chemistry with Dukowski was more a product of endless practicing than natural affinity. “In a way, I always felt that it was kind of glued together in a certain respect, instead of a real natural groove.” Ginn had felt this for a long time, but Dukowski was so fully dedicated to the band, such an integral part of its esprit de corps, that letting him go was difficult.
Ginn couldn’t bring himself to criticize Dukowski outright and instead made life difficult for him in the hopes that Dukowski would quit on his own accord. But Dukowski had pinned too much of his self-image and energies on the band to just leave, and the stalemate lingered for many agonizing months. Finally, without consulting anyone else in the band, Rollins simply took it upon himself to end the standoff and fire Dukowski.
Even though Dukowski didn’t play on the band’s next album, My War, it includes two songs he wrote—one of them the title track—so the feelings couldn’t have been that hard on either side. Dukowski also went on to become the band’s de facto manager and the hardworking head of SST’s booking arm, Global Booking. This was a masterstroke, as relentless touring would literally put the label’s bands on the map and help establish SST’s dominance of the indie market in the coming decade.
But the departure of his partner in crime took its toll on Ginn. For the first five years, Ginn felt no need to rule the band with an iron hand—he actually seemed to enjoy the chaos. “But then by ’83, he’d taken total control of the band,” says Carducci. “And he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself at all.”
The band’s work ethic only intensified. “Greg was a fanatic and most people are not,” says Carducci. “He took the business down to a level that was beneath the level lightweights could handle: they couldn’t handle sleeping in the van, they couldn’t handle not knowing where they were going to stay, they couldn’t handle the clubs.” On the road the band got $5 a day. Toward the end they made ten, and on the final tour, twenty. “If we got a flat tire, we would get an old tire that was discarded in the back of a gas station that they’d given up on and put that on,” says Ginn. “It was real bare bones.”
On the early tours, audiences could vary anywhere between twenty-five and two hundred. As their popularity c
limbed, they eventually found themselves playing six months of the year or more. But when the tours began lasting that long, it also meant that the band members couldn’t hold down significant day jobs once they got home, and that’s when things got really tough.
Ginn’s parents would often help out with food and even clothing; Mr. Ginn would buy used clothing for pennies a pound, and the band would take a big sack of it on tour, pulling whatever they liked out of the grab bag. So much for punk fashion.
“Without the Ginn family,” says Rollins, “there would not have been a Black Flag.” Mr. Ginn would rent vans and Ryder trucks for the band and was so proud of his son that when he’d teach classes at Harbor College, he’d often have the Black Flag insignia painted on the pocket of his button-down shirts. Often Mr. Ginn would make a mess of grilled cheese sandwiches, buy a few gallons of apple juice and some fruit at a farm stand, and bring it to SST. “We would eat cheese sandwiches, avocados that were five for a dollar, and apple juice for days,” says Rollins. “Those things would get moldy, you’d just scrape the mold off and keep eating.”
It sounds pretty rough, but Ginn, ever the stoic, downplays the hardship. “I think people would consider it rough but that’s all relative—there’s things I would consider rough, like war,” says Ginn. “I never considered it rough. I considered it not having money, but I always think, if you’re asleep on a floor, how can you tell the difference anyway—you’re asleep.”
Perhaps because Rollins had grown up relatively affluent and an only child, he sought as much comfort and privacy as possible. When the band came back to L.A., he’d find a friend with an extra bedroom or sleep at the Ginn family’s house rather than live in communal squalor with the band. “Even though he really tried, he was never comfortable with that kind of existence,” says Ginn. “Which isn’t a bad thing—I think that may be more typical of the average person. Obviously, I guess it is.”
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