Rollins was over at the Ginns’ house so often that they finally invited him to live there. They offered him a bedroom, but Rollins chose what he called “the shed,” a small, furnished outbuilding that had been Mr. Ginn’s study. Rollins’s insinuation into his family annoyed Greg Ginn to no end; he got even more annoyed when Mrs. Ginn asked if her son smoked marijuana and Rollins said yes.
The rest of the band lived where they rehearsed. “Even at the end, we lived with seven people in one room,” says Ginn. “And we always lived in those kind of situations—living where we practiced, or whatever, living in vans and that kind of stuff. Pretty early on, materially we didn’t fit in at all.”
“There were some droughts there where you were eating a Snickers bar and you’d walk in and someone would say, ‘Where’d you get that?’ ” Rollins recalls. “You go, ‘Well, I bought it.’ ‘Where’d you get the money to get that?’ ‘Uh, OK, I took a dollar out of a cash order.’ That’s how broke we were.” Rollins’s mother would occasionally send him a twenty-dollar bill and he’d splurge on a pint of milk and a cookie from the 7-Eleven. “I’d say, ‘Well, I’m going out for a walk,’ ” says Rollins, “go over there and find a place to hide and eat it and make sure the crumbs were off my face. That’s how up against it we were at certain times.”
Sometimes they’d saunter into a local Mexican restaurant and buy a soda. “Then you’d wait for a family to get up and just grab the little kid’s tostada that he couldn’t finish and take it back to your plate before anyone noticed, because if anyone saw you, you would really bum them out and you’d get thrown out,” says Rollins. “That’s not the way I was raised. I was raised [with] clean white underwear, three square meals, a bed with Charlie Brown blankets, total middle-class upbringing. So all this was new. Scamming on chicks for a hamburger—we would go to Oki Dogs, hit on punker chicks, and say, ‘Hey, we’re poor, feed us.’ We’d get Valley Girl punkers to feed us. And you’d hang out all night waiting for that plate of french fries.
“The thing that kept everyone living this pretty torturous lifestyle is the music was that good,” says Rollins, “and we knew it. At the end of the day, we had no money, we were scruffy, we stunk, the van stunk, everyone was against us. But you’d hear that music and know, oh yeah, we fuckin’ rule.”
Even though they hadn’t yet found a replacement for Dukowski, they were anxious to record their next album—the new slow, metallic Black Flag just couldn’t wait to be born any longer. So Ginn, as “Dale Nixon,” played bass on My War himself, often practicing with the hyperactive Stevenson for eight hours a day, just to teach him how to play slowly and let the rhythm, as Ginn puts it, “ooze out.” “He wasn’t used to playing that slow,” says Ginn. “I guess nobody was.”
My War inverts the punk-to–Black Sabbath ratio of Damaged—this time Sabbath’s leaden gloom and doom predominates, albeit pumped up with a powerful shot of punk vitriol and testosterone. The sound got much more metallic and sludgy, with Ginn anchoring the music with bottom-heavy bass-and-guitar formations. Topped off with some serious jazz fusion influences, My War sometimes comes off like the Mahavishnu Orchestra after a bad day on the chain gang.
Much of the material was strong, but because the band was solely a studio entity, there’s a frustrating lack of ensemble feeling to the tracks; in particular, Rollins’s vocals and Ginn’s leads sound disconnected from everything else. Then there was Ginn’s relentless perfectionism in the studio, which may well be what drained the spark out of many of Black Flag’s later recordings. “He was never willing to just let the performance be,” says Spot, who coproduced the album. “And frankly, I think that’s where he screwed up.” Accordingly, the band’s best recordings from the later period are the live ones, Live’84 and 1985’s Who’s Got the 10½?
My War boiled hardcore angst down to a wall of self-hatred so densely constructed that it could never fall; on “Three Nights” Rollins compares his life to a piece of shit stuck to his shoe, railing, “And I’ve been grinding that stink into the dirt / For a long time now.” But sometimes the lyrics were beside the point—on the title track, Rollins’s bloodcurdling screams and disturbingly animalistic roars speak volumes.
To most listeners, the music had lost the energy and wit of before—Rollins bellows anguished speeches, not the searing, direct poetry of the past. The labored chord progressions and clunky verbiage seem like shackles purposely attached to the band in order to see if they can still run with the weight. For the most part, they could—the playing is ferocious and the band often builds up quite a head of steam only to hit the brick wall of an awkward chord or tempo change. But any momentum My War achieves is stopped cold by a trio of unbearably slow six-minute-plus songs on side two. Although Ginn wrote the lyrics, “Scream” sums up Rollins’s artistic raison d’être in a mere four lines: “I might be a big baby / But I’ll scream in your ear / ’Til I find out / Just what it is I am doing here.” The song ends with Rollins howling like someone being flayed alive.
Ponderous and dire, the sludgefest flew directly in the face of the ever-escalating velocity of hardcore—within the hardcore scene, side two of My War was as heretical as Bob Dylan playing electric guitar on one side of Bringing It All Back Home. “It was definitely a line in the sand,” says Mudhoney’s Mark Arm, who had been seeing Black Flag shows in Seattle since 1981. “It was sort of an intelligence test—if you could handle the changes of Black Flag, you weren’t an idiot. And if you thought they were just selling out, then you were an idiot.”
Black Flag’s hardcore-metal alloy proved to be far ahead of its time. But while the bravery and vision of such a move was admirable, it also lost the band a lot of fans. Even Maximumrocknroll publisher Tim Yohannon, one of the band’s most ardent early supporters, didn’t like the record. While Yohannon acknowledged the band had labored long and hard to break ground for punk and endured crippling legal harassment in the process, those trials and tribulations couldn’t redeem the record. “To me,” wrote Yohannon, “it sounds like Black Flag doing an imitation of Iron Maiden imitating Black Flag on a bad day. The shorter songs are rarely exciting and the three tracks on the b-side are sheer torture. I know depression and pain are hallmarks of Black Flag’s delivery, but boredom, too?”
Black Flag eventually released four albums in 1984. Ginn was unsure whether the effort and money expended in promoting albums was cost-effective so he simply decided to put out four albums in quick succession and promote them on the strength of solid touring. College radio, bewildered by the glut of releases, didn’t know what to do with any of them.
By the time of the Slip It In tour later in ’84, the band was opening with an overtly metal-influenced instrumental while Rollins waited in the wings. A couple of years earlier, such a move would have prompted a hail of booing from hardcore purists, but now it only prompted furious moshing from a crowd that now mixed longhairs, punks, and metalheads. In the middle of the set, Rollins would catch his breath while they uncorked another instrumental, then come back and descend into the mire of the sludgy new material.
Both Black Flag and its audience had begun with frenzied two-and three-chord punk rock and progressed into more challenging realms. Ginn was taking a band and a following that had started at ground zero, musically speaking, and slowly lifting it up. “There weren’t many people that had the status to ask something of all of these fuckin’ misfits—and get them to do it,” says Carducci. “Greg is one of the few people.”
The problem was much of the audience wasn’t always interested in going along for the ride. “We didn’t pander to the audience; we didn’t cater to them,” says Ginn. “My attitude was always give the audience what they need, not what they want.” Both band and audience thrived on the tension. As Puncture’s Patti Stirling wrote in a review of the Live’84 album, “Black Flag’s music creates itself best when the band has an audience; they unleash emotions at each other. It’s violently sensual at best and irritatingly childish fighting at worst.”
Then there was the fact that the band never explicitly allied themselves with the punk scene—their songs were introspective, never about “punk unity” or bashing Reagan; their opening bands were either not classically punk (Minutemen, Saccharine Trust) or completely obnoxious (Nig-Heist); except for Dukowski’s mohawk, they didn’t even go in for stereotypical punk fashion.
“People can get real nasty if you don’t do what they think you should do,” Ginn observes. And the nastier segments of Black Flag’s audience focused their wrath on Rollins. People were not content merely to spit on Rollins—they would put out cigarettes on him, douse him with cups of urine, punch him in the mouth, stab him with pens, heave beer mugs at him, scratch him with their nails, hit him in the groin with water balloons. On tour, his chest often looked like a disaster area.
And Rollins was not shy about fighting back. At one early show in Philadelphia, a guy in the audience constantly taunted and pushed Rollins, who did nothing but grin demonically, looking just like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. After several long minutes, Rollins finally snapped, dragging the man onstage and holding him down as he repeatedly punched him in the face. Eventually the man escaped back into the crowd. The band, clearly used to this sort of thing, never missed a beat. Judging by Rollins’s tour memoir Get in the Van, Rollins continued this sort of thing almost nightly for the duration of his tenure in Black Flag.
Yet none of the other band members either attracted or dispensed such violence. “I think Henry, his ego, in a way, brought some of that stuff across,” says Ginn. “At some times he had a condescending attitude toward the audience, and people pick up on that.” Rollins maintained a masochistic tough-guy act onstage, slithering like a snake through the crowd and biting people’s ankles along the way, rolling in broken glass, daring audience members to fight with him, and yet taking extreme umbrage when people took him up on it. “When they spit at me, when they grab at me, they aren’t hurting me,” Rollins wrote. “When I push out and mangle the flesh of another, it’s falling so short of what I really want to do to them.”
Ginn didn’t want exact substitutes for departed band members—that way, old material got a fresh treatment; new material came from a different direction. Better musicianship was one of his prime goals, which is why he hired Kira Roessler shortly after recording My War. Roessler, who had been kicking around the L.A. punk scene since she was sixteen, was jamming with Dez Cadena’s DC3 at Black Flag’s practice space when Ginn overheard her and asked her to join Black Flag. “They were the coolest band I knew—my favorite,” said Roessler, “so of course I said yes.”
Roessler could play heavily and aggressively like Dukowski did, but she also played with more fluidity and musicality. And to seal the deal, Roessler and Ginn shared a similar work ethic: “Whatever you do, do it all the way,” as Roessler put it. “It was agreed that it wasn’t going to be half-assed. This is what it is—less is not an option.”
The Minutemen’s Mike Watt recalls stopping by the studio when Black Flag was mixing 1984’s Slip It In (“A bunch of hands fighting on the control board; it was hilarious,” he recalls), and there on the console was an LP by the commercial metal band Dio. Not surpisingly, Slip It In often emulates the worst aspects of its sources. As critic Ira Robbins wrote, Slip It In “blurs the line between moronic punk and moronic metal.” The Neanderthal sexuality of the title track (“Say you don’t want it / But you slip it in”) and the simplistic doominess of so many other songs from this era amply bear out the comment. Plenty of Slip It In is absolutely dreadful—“Rat’s Eyes” (“If you look through rat’s eyes / You will talk about shit real good”) is an object lesson in plodding; the ponderous instrumental “Obliteration” isn’t much better. And yet occasional stretches of music were the most powerful the band had ever done, largely because they now had a killer bassist. Speed, they proved, wasn’t the only path to power—even the Sex Pistols rarely exceeded midtempo—it just took musicianship to pull it off.
After recording Slip It In, Ginn, Rollins, Stevenson, and Roessler woodshedded all through the winter of ’83, practicing up to five hours a day, six days a week in a dank, stinking, windowless basement space below the SST offices, with floor, walls, and ceiling covered in layers of cheap shag carpet. They emerged as a powerful and cohesive unit for an eleven-week early ’84 U.S. tour for My War. They were eager to hit the road and work their first proper album in two years—“Kill Everyone Now” was the tour motto. They toured virtually the entire year, coming home for a couple of weeks here and there to record.
On the downtime during the Unicorn fiasco, Rollins had started a demanding weight-lifting program; by the time the band hit the road in 1984, he had developed a rippling carapace of muscle. Not just a way of intimidating would-be attackers, his powerful physique was a metaphor for the impregnable emotional shield he was developing around himself.
The song “My War” rails against some vague “you” as being “one of them.” Although it was Dukowski’s lyric, Rollins seemed to take the concept to heart: during the Slip It In tour, he spotted Derrick Bostrom of tourmates the Meat Puppets carrying a copy of the Jacksons’ Triumph album. “I always knew you were one of them,” Rollins sneered. In fact, Rollins seemed to be living out many of Ginn’s and Dukowski’s lyrics to a profound degree. “I conceal my feelings so I won’t have to explain / What I can’t explain anyway,” Rollins hollers on “Can’t Decide.” Ginn’s lyrics certainly applied to their aloof author, but it was Rollins who was acting them out with a vengeance.
By now the band was quite longhaired, fueling even more ire among the audience. How could they be punk and have hippie hair? The band readily worked their lengthy coiffures into the show. “Black Flag was actually an intense hair-tossing contest between guitarist Greg Ginn and singer Henry Rollins,” wrote Puncture’s Patti Stirling. “The suspense of whether they would knock heads, causing dual concussions, was chilling.”
The band was now playing some of its most blazing shows. Unfortunately, the whole thing was beginning to unravel.
Early on, Rollins gladly deferred to Ginn and Dukowski during interviews—after all, they’d been the only constant members of the band, and the press naturally gravitated toward them as spokesmen. But then Dukowski left and gradually Ginn ceded the media spotlight to the charismatic, quotable Rollins. “I liked the fact that somebody was actually into hanging out with these people and doing these interviews and photo sessions,” Ginn says. “There’s nothing that I find more aggravating than sitting and doing a photo session. There’s nothing that makes me feel more stupid. And Henry would enjoy that stuff, so I thought that was ideal…. He would do certain functions and I would do certain functions in terms of managing the band and this and that. It split up the work.”
Ginn feels Rollins saw increased media exposure as a way to get out from under his shadow. “I think he competed, in a sense, with that kind of respect, as [someone who was] masterminding this thing,” says Ginn, “so he tried to paint himself into that type of situation.” And so Rollins did countless interviews despite his outspoken complaints about interviews throughout his tour diaries.
The fact was Rollins was now in his early twenties and swiftly outgrowing the subservient, self-denying side of himself—“Peer Pressure Boy,” the guy who carried amps for his friend because he was “the man,” the starstruck kid who couldn’t believe he was in a band with his heroes, the guy who took acid because Chuck Dukowski told him to. And besides, he was the band’s frontman. “I have to think that Henry was kind of suppressing himself at first with the band and then maybe the true Henry came out or something,” says Ginn. “That’s the only way I can understand it.”
Now Rollins began to assert himself as forcefully as possible, and Ginn began to regret his decision to give the singer the limelight. In his own subtle ways, Ginn let his displeasure be known. “It just got to be this [fear that] Greg’s going to get mad,” says Rollins. “ ‘We want to interview you for our fanzine.’ ‘Well, can you
interview me and Greg? Or me and Bill? If you just interview me, I’m afraid I’m going to get yelled at.’ ”
But Rollins’s self-denying side made sure he crucified himself for his move into the spotlight. In his diary, lyrics, and performance, Rollins would flagellate himself for being an ogre, then revel in being an ogre seemingly so he could flagellate himself some more. Prowling the stage in his little black shorts and Jim Morrison hairdo, Rollins strutted a narcissism disguised as self-hatred (or was it vice versa?). Instead of lashing out, it was lashing in.
Those around him began to notice a shift in Rollins’s personality around 1984, when he became increasingly difficult to deal with—an insular, malevolent character straight out of a Dostoyevsky novel. “At one point he suddenly just changed,” says Spot, “and he was no longer a friendly guy that I considered my friend but just somebody who seemed to feel like it was mandatory to be antagonistic toward everybody. I just didn’t have time for it.”
“I saw Henry’s attitudes keep getting more extreme,” says Ginn, “and him always just disliking everybody in the band, saying mean stuff about them onstage, making demeaning comments about them.” (“Ask a lot of the members why they left,” Rollins retorts. “They’ll say two words. The first one will be ‘Greg.’ The other one would be ‘Ginn.’ ”)
Rollins had become quite an intimidating individual, especially to the mainstream music press. “Get close to him—it’s downright scary,” wrote Rolling Stone reporter Michael Goldberg. “Eyes that bore right through you. Hair, a tangled mess that falls past his shoulders, down his back. Ragged, ripped clothing. Lots of tattoos: Skulls and snakes, ghouls, a spider, a bat. And etched across his upper back in inch-high letters, Henry Rollins’ philosophy of life: SEARCH AND DESTROY.”
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