Sadly, as it is with so many children of abuse, masochism was an essential part of Rollins’s psyche. “I hope I get bashed up soon,” Rollins wrote on one early tour. “I need the pain to play. I need to play for my life or it’s not worth it.” Before a show in a small town in Northern California, Rollins found a piece of broken glass and tore up his chest with it. “Blood started flying all over the place,” he wrote. “It felt good to feel pure pain. Helped me get perspective.” Even Ginn’s antipathy toward him got converted into some sort of macho toughness test, a twisted validation of Rollins’s resolve.
By ’84 Rollins preferred to eat apart from the rest of the band on tour. “There’s just no way that I’m going to sit and listen to all that conversation when I don’t have to,” he explained in his tour diary. Later, instead of traveling in the band van, he preferred the back of the equipment truck, where he lay in total darkness for hours on end, alone with the PA equipment and amplifiers.
Not surprisingly, friction began to develop between Rollins and the rest of the band. Rollins first noted it in the spring of ’84, during a European tour. “Bill and Kira are hard to take,” Rollins wrote in his diary. “It’s none of my business. They are the way they are.” Apparently Rollins wouldn’t deal with the problems with his bandmates head-on, preferring instead to add them to the formidable arsenal of slings and arrows that beset his tortured soul.
Black Flag played every town that would have them, and many others, too, doing nearly two hundred shows in 1984. “They played every single city there ever was,” says Naked Raygun’s Jeff Pezzati. “Every time we’d go to a city I’d never heard of, some crappy little town, they’d say, ‘Well, Black Flag was just here two weeks ago.’ ”
Every punk band in town would try to get on the bill when Black Flag played, so to eliminate arguments, they usually toured with an entire bill: Black Flag headlined and SST bands supported them. This arrangement ensured they’d tour with bands they liked, and it made sound business sense for SST. Since the early Eighties, a band called Nig-Heist often opened. Nig-Heist’s rotating membership included Black Flag roadies Mugger on lead vocals and Davo on bass, guitarist Dez Cadena (as “Theotis Gumbo”), Stevenson on drums, and Dukowski on guitar, all wearing long wigs. This was a band whose stage presence one fanzine admiringly described as “comparable to an epileptic boy scout molesting a bag lady” and possessing “all the humor of a muscular dystrophy telethon.”
Black Flag fans might have thought they’d cornered the market on outrageousness, but Nig-Heist was perfectly happy to burst their bubble. Nig-Heist was the band people loved to hate. Night after night on the spring ’84 Black Flag/Meat Puppets tour, the biggest cheer Nig-Heist got was when Mugger announced they’d play only one more song. The long hair was a big part of the band’s repugnance, and with songs like “Hot Muff” and “Whore Pleaser,” what was there not to hate?
And Nig-Heist wasn’t the only band on the bill that was blowing minds—besides Black Flag and their confrontational sludge-metal, the Meat Puppets were whipping off mind-roasting guitar solos, acid-fried renditions of songs from The Wizard of Oz, and transcendent country rock during their sets. The Black Flag/Meat Puppets/Nig-Heist tours gave a powerful reminder that punk rock could be anything anyone wanted it to be.
Nig-Heist, though, may also have been some sort of manifestation of Black Flag’s collective id. Although they were few and far between, overtly raunchy songs like “Slip It In” and “Loose Nut” (“I’ll be back in a little while / But first I gotta get some vertical smile”) were a good indication of Black Flag’s reputation as groupie hounds. “We wanted to fuck your women,” Rollins boasts. “Big time. If we could, we would. Anytime, anywhere, we would try and get laid.”
Sex was a respite from the stresses and deprivations of life in Black Flag, particularly on the road. “In those days you didn’t get much else in the way of niceness or fun in your life,” Rollins explains. “The gigs were fun but they were always tension filled. But meeting a nice girl who would be nice to you and fuck you? Oh my god, it was just like an oasis.”
The messy, stinking van often became a steel-plated honeymoon suite after shows. “Many nights I had sex in that van, sometimes next to another guy having sex in the van,” says Rollins. “And you have to have a very understanding or very enthusiastic partner to get together with you in such close proximity.”
Every Black Flag release except Damaged featured artwork by Raymond Pettibon and SST sold pamphlet books of Pettibon’s work, with titles like Tripping Corpse, New Wave of Violence, and The Bible, the Bottle and the Bomb. Like the San Francisco–style psychedelic art of the Sixties, Pettibon’s pen-and-ink artwork was a perfect visual analogue to the music it promoted—gritty, stark, violent, smart, provocative, and utterly American.
Pettibon typically worked in only one panel, so the message had to be direct and powerful. One poster depicted an execution victim dead against a tree while a man with a shovel stood in the background; the text reads “THE MEEK INHERIT EARTH.” A flyer for a show to benefit the legal defense against Unicorn was of a well-dressed young man being led away in chains as an admiring group of women looks on. “Everyone loves a handsome killer” the caption reads.
The fact that Black Flag, caricatured as a mindlessly aggressive punk band, could ally themselves with high-concept artwork was a tip-off that there was a greater intelligence at work here than most outsiders suspected. “Some people think that anything as physical as our shows must mean there’s no thinking involved, but that’s not true,” Ginn told the L.A. Times’ Robert Hilburn. “We do want to provide a physical and emotional release, but we also want to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to think for themselves rather than accept what they’ve been told.” Even the media’s reaction to the shows worked in the band’s favor—when kids who were actually there saw how news reports sensationalized what had really happened, it made them think about how the media might be exaggerating and distorting other news as well.
A RAYMOND PETTIBON FLYER FOR A 1982 BLACK FLAG SHOW. NOTE THE ALL-STAR BACKING BANDS, ALL OF WHOM WERE QUITE OBSCURE AT THE TIME.
DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION: RAYMOND PETTIBON
Under the aegis of legendary L.A. scenester Harvey Kubernik, Rollins had started doing “spoken word” (a new term at the time) performances of his poetry and journal entries in November ’83. Family Man—released in late September ’84, making it the fourth album the band had released that year—broke Black Flag down to its increasingly distinct component parts—the band and Rollins—with one instrumental side and one spoken word side. By the following summer, Rollins had published two volumes of his prose poems, End to End and 2.13.61., penning lines like “NOW I UNDERSTAND THE STRENGTH OF SUCCUMBING TO THE STORM, JOINING THE MAELSTROM, FINDING POWER IN ITS TURMOIL, PULLING TOGETHER END TO END LIKE A SNAKE CONSUMING ITS TAIL…” Or “THE DAYS / PASS LIKE / PASSING YOUR / HANDS THRU / BROKEN / GLASS. / A LITTLE / BLOOD / SEEPS OUT. / I FEEL SOME / PAIN HERE / AND THERE…”
By 1986 Rollins was doing more and more stuff on his own, be it spoken word performances or freelance writing, including a much-noticed piece about 7-Eleven stores for Spin magazine. This flew in the face of Ginn’s one-for-all, all-for-one ethos. And with the rhythm section changing so often, Ginn had no strong allies within the band. Black Flag had lapsed into the archetype of dinosaur bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin: a charismatic frontman and an enigmatic guitarist mastermind supported by a relatively faceless rhythm section. And while Rollins’s self-punishment seemed to invert metal’s egotistical posturing, its self-absorption was merely the flip side of the same coin.
Perhaps as an antidote to Rollins’s bardic aspirations, 1985’s all-instrumental The Process of Weeding Out EP found the band stretching out on four longish set pieces (including some sterling playing by Roessler). The title has a triple meaning. Besides weeding out Rollins and the obvious pot reference, it refers to the way the challenging music weeds out the band�
��s less insightful fans.
In his liner notes, Ginn decried the rise of the Parents’ Music Resource Center, a group led by Tennessee Senator Al Gore’s wife Tipper, who sought to censor rock lyrics they personally found offensive. “I have faith that cop-types,” Ginn wrote, “with their strictly linear minds and stick to the rules mentality don’t have the ability to decipher the intuitive contents of this record.”
The torturous music was meant to signify the band members’ intense engagement—most tattooed the Black Flag bars on their bodies—and the frustration of toiling in the face of poverty and indifference. Black Flag’s work ethic—the constant touring, the fully committed performances, the relentless rehearsals—was a way of working through the pain, drowning it out in wave after wave of noise and adrenaline. As the old joke goes, Black Flag was suffering for their art, and now the audience had to suffer for it, too—Ginn even had a name for the approach: “the blasting concept,” or a sonic assault on the audience. Joe Carducci recalls one show when the band played for over two hours. “By the end,” he says, “people were just straggling away, like from a battlefield.”
The band had become as alienated from its own audience as it was from society in general. “We were trying to play through the audience rather than to the audience,” Stevenson said. “We would put our heads down, play as hard as we could, and didn’t acknowledge their existence.” “I was trying with my bass to slam [the audience] against the back wall,” said Roessler. “We were forcing the crowd to submit to the will of the band—for longer than they could stand it.”
Performances became agonizing torture tests for band as well as audience. Roessler injured her hand from playing bass and has played in pain ever since. Ginn’s sweat and blood would seep into the guitar and cause short circuits. Finally, he just set the instrument’s tone control where he liked it, turned the volume knob up to ten, soldered it all into place, and installed a waterproof switch. From then on, when Greg Ginn’s guitar was on, it was on all the way.
“Everyone on stage was writhing and moaning,” wrote Patti Stirling of a July 26, 1984, show. “I wanted to say, ‘It’s OK—you don’t have to do this. Go home, have a beer, watch something funny on TV, or visit a friend.’ Well, were I surrounded by this music much of the time, I would suffer too. The beat dragged so much it seemed to be going backwards.”
Released in early May ’85, Loose Nut contains some of Black Flag’s most conventional hard rock ever, albeit matched up with Rollins’s usual histrionic self-hatred. But the original SST gang was starting to unravel. Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon didn’t care so much that SST never paid him for his artwork, but he was getting increasingly frustrated that although he was a worthy artist in his own right, he was still best known as “the Black Flag guy.”
The final straw came with the cover of Loose Nut. As it happens, it’s a self-portrait: a man winks as two scantily clad women sit on his lap—the caption reads “Women are capable of making great artists.” The art work had originally been used in a flyer several years before and Ginn resurrected it without telling his brother. Then Stevenson, thrust into the role of layout person, cut up Pettibon’s original artwork and used the pieces as elements for the lyric sheet. Pettibon became irate at the desecration of his work, and that year he and Ginn stopped speaking.
This was around the time that Spot left the SST family as well. “The band was taking itself too seriously,” says Spot. “And some of the people in the band were taking themselves too seriously. It just kind of turned into people that were unlikable. I just couldn’t be around them anymore.”
Ginn fixes the blame squarely on Rollins. Although Rollins’s spoken word performances were fairly funny, Rollins was “increasingly cutting out anything with a sense of humor” in Black Flag’s music, Ginn says. “He became negative about those type of things or the songs that kind of bring people together.” Although he’d sing songs like “Six Pack” and “TV Party” in concert, Rollins would not countenance new songs that smacked of fun. Humor did not fit the persona Rollins was crafting for himself. “He started getting into more Jim Morrison than Iggy Pop,” says Ginn, “that kind of serious ‘I’m a poet’ thing.” A little levity would have made the darker aspects of the band more believable and thus more powerful, as it had so memorably on Damaged. Instead, Rollins seesawed indulgently between self-pity and macho excess. “That’s what he was left with, which is just the same themes—‘I kill you, I hurt myself,’ ” Ginn says. “I didn’t want to be a part of that.”
HENRY ROLLINS DOING SOME DEEP THROAT AT THE 9:30 CLUB IN D.C., 1983.
JIM SAAH
Bill Stevenson left the band in late April ’85. “There was a whole lot of vibing going on and the band proceeded to fall apart after that,” he said. “There was a whole lot of personality things going on, which none of us cared to sort out, so Greg just started replacing people.” Ginn explains this somewhat vague statement by claiming that Stevenson, who was once close with Rollins, had grown increasingly alienated from Rollins and wanted Ginn to get a new singer. Clearly, one of them had to go. Ginn edged out Stevenson.
But Stevenson hadn’t really liked the direction the band took when he joined anyway. “Black Flag doing contorted heavy metal wasn’t as good as Black Flag doing contorted versions of punk rock,” he said. “I don’t think we sounded as good slow.” As it happened, the Descendents were starting up again, so it was a natural time to leave—and yet Stevenson was reportedly very upset when Ginn fired him.
With new drummer Anthony Martinez, they began a long tour in May ’85, traveling through the Southwest, the South, the Northeast, over to Michigan, up to Canada, cutting south to the Northwest, down to California—ninety-three shows in 105 punishing summer days.
By that tour Rollins was drinking coffee literally by the pot and, not surprisingly, suffering from crushing headaches. He broke his wrist on an audience member’s head at an August 6 show in Lincoln, Nebraska, and was constantly getting bashed by fans and foes alike. The audiences seemed to be smaller than the last time they’d toured the States, and to make matters worse, promoters were constantly underpaying the band. The ceaseless touring and nightly abuse was taking a terrible toll on Rollins physically and mentally. He got a serious infection of the vocal cords and seemed to be at the end of his psychological tether. “I am no longer human,” he wrote. “I am no longer a sane person. I can’t identify anymore.”
Black Flag was turning into the Greg ’n’ Henry Show. “Henry was increasingly not wanting it to be a band,” says Ginn. “He thought, ‘Greg, you do the band thing and I’ll do the vocal and frontman thing and we’ll just get people that kind of go along with things.”
So when Roessler—an intelligent, self-assured woman and a strong musician—tried to assert herself, Rollins (and Martinez) bridled, causing an escalating tension. Roessler had begun a master’s program at UCLA, and Ginn believes Rollins may have resented the way the band accommodated Roessler’s academic schedule. Also, the band had got it in their heads that it would be provocative for Roessler to exchange her tomboyish T-shirt and jeans for a coquettish punk rock Madonna look; some say this raised sexual tensions within the band to an uncomfortable degree.
For whatever reasons, by mid-August in Vancouver, things had come to a head: Rollins wrote in his diary that Roessler “has a hard time handling reality” and that she “must be out of her weak little unbathed mind.” He and Ginn secretly decided to replace her once they got back home. “I never want to see her lying, rancid, fake self ever again,” Rollins wrote.
And yet in Rollins’s own estimation, the band was playing the best it ever had, and the proof is on the live Who’s Got the 10½? recorded at the Starry Night club in Portland on August 23, 1985. Although Rollins’s voice is clearly in shreds, the band goes at the material like trained attack dogs.
L.A. was the last stop of the tour; but despite free admission, only about six hundred people showed up. It was Roessler’s final appearance with
Black Flag, and Rollins took the opportunity to insult her at length during the closing “Louie, Louie,” making remarks about “getting rid of cancer and what a rancid bitch she was.”
They had recorded the In My Head album that spring. “Henry was getting narrower and narrower in what he was willing to do,” Ginn recalls, which may account for the album’s stultifying sameness of tone. Ginn was getting more and more upset at Rollins’s growing prominence and retaliated by keeping Rollins’s vocals so far down in the mix that he’s almost inaudible. Other than that, the production is far more radio-ready than anything they’d ever done. While the band is tighter and better than ever—Rollins even broaches something resembling traditional singing—the material is distinctly unmemorable, and even at four minutes several songs seem interminable.
By the band’s final tour, the rhythm section was Martinez on drums and C’el (pronounced “Sal”) Revuelta on bass. According to Rollins, they played the same set for nine months. Ginn started the tour by telling Rollins to his face that he didn’t like him. Things went downhill from there. Ginn’s enthusiasm was clearly with the opening act on the tour, his arty instrumental band Gone. Meanwhile, Rollins was hobbling on his bad right knee, which had been operated on in 1982; then he rebroke his wrist yet again when he hit an audience member on the head.
Crowds were often sparse, and when they weren’t, it was because they were playing small venues, mostly cramped redneck bars along anonymous stretches of highway. The police broke up several shows, just like the old days, and Rollins and members of the crew got in some scary punch-ups with bellicose locals. And they were still sleeping on people’s floors.
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