They paved paradise and put up a parking lot...
“I don’t believe this... It should be here!”
Fidgeting behind the steering wheel of his pick-up truck, a crumpled old piece of paper with a number of addresses scrawled on it in his hand, Aaron North furrows his brow in mute frustration as he stares out through the windscreen, like a hunter trying to spot teasingly elusive prey, around the parking lot of a roadside mechanic. Around us lay beaten-up automobiles in various states of decay, idly oblivious to the surgery being performed on one of their number in a nearby garage.
Aaron leans over the steering wheel, peers further up the road, checking the numbers of the surrounding buildings, his lips tightening as he realises that the address is correct, that we’re at the exact location we’d been aiming for, but that someone had gotten here before us - years before, obviously - and demolished the hallowed site we’d spent the afternoon searching for, replacing it with this modest motor repair concern.
We’re trying to locate the Moose Lodge Hall in Southern California’s Redondo Beach, one of thousands spread out across America, owned by and maintained by the local chapters of the Loyal Order Of Moose, a fraternal organisation dating back to the late 1800s. Many such groups - including such brightly named brethren as the Knights Of Columbus, the Modern Woodmen Of America, and the Benevolent And Protective Order Of Elks - thrive in the suburbs here, and are very much an all-American tradition: Howard Cunningham, fictional patriarch in fifties-set Mom’n’Apple-Pie sitcom Happy Days, was a high-ranking member of Milwaukee’s Leopard Lodge, eventually becoming their Grand Puba.
Along with serving as a hub where local members could meet and hold social and sporting events, these halls could be rented out by non-members, at a reasonable fee. In this particular location, almost 30 years before our arrival, the Redondo Beach Moose Lodge Hall played host to a punk rock gig featuring three LA-based punk bands: Long Beach quartet Rhino 39; The Alleycats, fronted by husband and wife duo Randy Stodola and Dianne Chai; and Black Flag, a group from nearby Hermosa Beach who, over the next six or so years, would change the face of the then-nascent California punk scene and, through their fearless and, at times, foolhardy commitment to touring as far as they could across America, pioneer a pathway across the country for a generation of underground rock bands to follow in their footsteps.
That such a historic location no longer existed, had been razed and replaced with this mechanic’s garage, without so much as a blue plaque to memorialise it, was not, by this point in the afternoon, entirely surprising. For one thing, it conformed to the deflating experience of various other such quests undertaken that day, Aaron serving as our gracious chauffeur and gnarly tour guide, tracing routes across Los Angeles and some of its nearby suburbs, chasing down his shopping list of sacred Black Flag sites, only to find a succession of former legendary punk-rock venues, recording studios and punker hangouts all demolished, and subsequently rebuilt as hotels, or parking lots, or hotel parking lots.
Our journey began at Aaron’s apartment in West Hollywood, where a homely sofa nestles between walls of vinyl, racks of CDs, various discarded guitars and FX pedals, in a very artful tangle. On the stereo, Aaron is pumping tracks from a CD of Black Flag’s hitherto unreleased 1982 demos with former-DOA drummer Chuck Biscuits. The jewel in the crown of the Black Flag bootleg discography, it captures the group as a five-piece, fronted by Henry Rollins, with firebrand bassist Chuck Dukowski still in the group, backed by previous singer Dez Cadena on rhythm guitar, which frees band-leader and chief songwriter Greg Ginn up to blitz the proceedings with glorious, atonal, harmolodic guitar howl. Though these tracks, recorded in direct contravention of a court order, will never officially reach vinyl, chronicling a version of the group that will soon, and messily, dissolve, they contain the raw materials of the music Black Flag pursued throughout the rest of their career. The Fi is Lo, the sonics muddy, but epochal later-era Flag songs like ‘Slip It In’, ‘Black Coffee’, bleak noiseout nightmare ‘Nothing Left Inside’, and the Dukowksi-penned ‘My War’ - a paranoia-steeped bolt of panic that seems to speak for the group’s adversarial, entrenched mind-set - will never sound so ferocious, so unforgiving, so revved-up on fresh kill and desperate bloodlust.
Aaron’s a dyed-in-the-wool Black Flag fan, a SoCal native who struck up enough of a friendship with Greg Ginn in the late Nineties to interview him for his fanzine, and whose mum attended Mira Costa, the Manhattan Beach High School that counts many Flag members as alumni. Aaron first won infamy as guitarist with The Icarus Line, a sulphurous and self-destructive Los Angeles group whose music plotted a murderous path between The Stooges, Black Sabbath and Spacemen 3, and whose era with Aaron was notable not least for the guitarist’s penchant for onstage destruction and audience confrontation.
With The Icarus Line, I saw Aaron swing from speaker stacks, face off Hell’s Angels, and steal from its presentation case in the Austin, TX Hard Rock Café a guitar autographed by fallen local blues hero Stevie Ray Vaughan, a stunt that won the group death threats from the venue staff. Leaving that group after their 2004 masterpiece album Penance Soiree, he went on to play guitar for Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails, enlivening that group’s shuddering industrial rock with his jagged punk wiles, and now fronts his own group, Jubilee, whose forthcoming debut album will blow your minds.
Aaron’s pick-up truck used to serve as one of The Icarus Line’s touring vehicles, and he logged thousands of miles in it back in their early days, when the group pursued rock’n’roll infamy with a doggedness they doubtless learned from their beloved Black Flag. Like the Flag, The Icarus Line’s lot was tough and unglamorous, regularly running afoul of the police and finding only confrontation and abuse within the moshpits at their concerts.
This was, of course, part of their appeal, Aaron aware that some absurd, punk anti-glamour lay in his tales of spending the long drives between concerts repairing the guitar he broke onstage that night, because he couldn’t afford a replacement. Scowling about a soon-to-depart drummer and explaining that “We told Troy when he joined, this is not a hobby... We’re gonna tour for months on end, and if you gotta eat shit, sleep on floors and play hurt once in a while, that’s tough. If you wanna be in the band, that’s the way things are. We’re not gonna rub anybody’s crotches to make ‘em feel better.”1
The poverty-level punk-rock bravado of such lines could have been drawn from the pages of Henry Rollins’ Black Flag tour journal, Get In The Van.
We live in an era where punk rock won whatever cultural wars it waged 30 odd years ago, where the flashpoints of this conflict - versus the staid and lofty prog-rock of the day, versus the establishment that wanted to silence it, versus a record-buying demographic originally resistant to its charms - are recalled in the pages of the rock press like all war stories, passion and partisanship blurring the facts. The truth is, at the time, punk rock didn’t vanquish the ruling prog classes, chief targets Genesis thriving well into the Eighties as a bona fide chart pop success, fellow travellers Pink Floyd co-opting the revolutionary ire of punk for their most bloated and pompous of releases, The Wall. And while punk rock in America is rewritten as some bloody coup to topple the swaggering stadium rockers of the day, the truth is that many of the movement’s stalwart warriors grew up on and were unabashedly fond of Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath and all the rest.
Punk, meanwhile, thrives today, as most of the current generation’s rock superstars owe a debt of influence to the music and the movement, despite themselves now occupying the lofty status once cherished by the dinosaur rockers. Green Day are among the biggest rock’n’roll bands in the world today, and while they’re currently given to sweeping political rock-operas, their crunchy and winningly simplistic attack follows a blueprint forged by the Southern Californian punk-rock uprising once led by Black Flag. This blueprint, however - one shared by a welter of SoCal-flavoured punk-pop bands, including such multi-platinum acts as Blink 182, Sum 41 and indeed Green Day themselves - was not forged by Black Flag, but rather by a fraternal band signed to a label related to Black Flag’s SST imprint, a group named The Descendents, whose witty and touching blasts of melodic shrapnel have since been crudely appropriated by this dominating culture of punkers.
Black Flag, meanwhile, enjoy a more subterranean kind of fame. Their music, and the struggle they underwent to make it, is now perhaps as famous as any of their songs themselves. The group’s corpse has lain untouched since a handful of posthumous compilations in the late Eighties: their albums haven’t enjoyed the exhaustive remastering/repackaging programmes that many other cherished relics of the day have, which is indeed a shame, as the two-decades-old CD mastering jobs lack a certain punch, and any Flag fan would love to explore Greg Ginn’s archive of recordings via bonus tracks. Barring a couple of fleeting reunions in aid of worthy causes, reconstituted versions of the group don’t currently tour the punk revival circuit, earning the cash they never made the first time around by rattling through songs they can barely remember writing, for audiences who weren’t even born the first time around.
If Black Flag have a legacy worth exploiting, certainly none of the group’s principals seem to have the stomach for the feast. Ever the singular and unstoppable creative spirit, Greg Ginn would rather explore new sounds with a variety of group and solo projects, remaining an inveterate road-rat who, despite his love of playing as many hours a day as he can, would now seemingly rather throw his axe to the ground than churn out the chords to ‘Nervous Breakdown’ one more time. Their most famed frontman, Henry Rollins, meanwhile, refuses to discuss his days with the group any more, surmising that his published tour journals tell the story better than he could, and aware that no matter how glowingly he speaks of the group, Ginn will still find a barb somewhere among his words.
“In a way, they’re a ‘musician’s band’,” says author Joe Carducci, of Black Flag’s core fan base. “The musicians listen to ‘em. They’re not just casually put into kids’ record collections.”2
He’s not wrong. Black Flag’s impact on other musicians has been seismic, in their music, in their fiercely DIY approach, in their creative fearlessness, in their no-compromise commitment. When the punk rock scene Black Flag had fomented began its assault on the mainstream, in the form of Nirvana, not only was the Flag’s powerful roar heard through the grunge-era’s barking guitars and venomous tempos, their ethos and value system similarly overshadowed the era. The major labels, newly discovering punk rock and how lucrative it could be, were perhaps rightfully viewed with cynicism, while the underground groups were raked over the coals by McCarthy-esque witch-hunts, searching for artists who’d committed that most heinous of sins: selling out.
Black Flag never sold out, and they never really gave up, and this is partly why they remain so inspiring. As Michael Azerrad’s excellent 2001 tome Our Band Could BeYour Life points out, they forged the very touring circuit that now supports countless underground and indie groups, building it from the ground up, where before were only fields. It was an example that inspired many bands, and daunted others. For some indie groups, growing up in the shadow of SST and all that, Black Flag’s struggle bred an uncomfortable guilt over their own dreams of ‘crossing over’, resenting the fact that mainstream success was now instantly codified by a crowing Greek chorus of fanzine writers and record store snobs as ‘selling out’. I remember interviewing Conrad Keely, frontman of Austin, TX noiseniks Trail Of Dead, in 2002, shortly after they’d signed to major label Interscope, as he spoke defensively of wanting a career that more closely resembled U2’s than Black Flag’s. He felt such an ambition somehow marked him out as a traitor to the punk-rock cause.
But Black Flag’s influence is generally more positive than that, and the group can lay claim to directly inspiring many of the modern era’s biggest and most electrifying groups. For Dave Grohl, former drummer with Nirvana and frontman for Foo Fighters, they represented punk rock and its energising spirit so perfectly that his first tattoo was of their iconic logo. “When I was 12 or 13, I gave myself a Black Flag tattoo, prison style, with a needle and pen ink,” he told me in 2005, revealing three puny, faded green bars on his left forearm. There’s only three bars there, I told him. The Black Flag logo has four bars. “It hurt,” he replied.3
So powerful is Black Flag’s hold on their key demographic - rawly sensitive kids who go on to make music themselves - that even their briefest-serving frontman, Puerto Rican wild man Ron Reyes, remains a powerfully inspiring character to young punk rockers looking for a hero to emulate, a path for themselves into punk rock. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Puerto Rican-born guitarist and composer with The Mars Volta, regards Black Flag as “my bridge from listening to pure salsa music into punk rock. Black Flag was the first band I heard where I thought, I can do that! As it was for a lot of people... Black Flag music gave me the same feeling that salsa music gave me, that desire to get up and dance, to go crazy about something, that same pulse. And, of course, it helped that, when I was introduced to them, the singer was Puerto Rican. I used to watch [punk-rock documentary] The Decline Of Western Civilization every single day, and the Black Flag part was incredible. They were the most interesting group in the movie, the group that made you wanna turn the TV off and practise; we sort of adopted that whole mind-set, it was what made us want to tour.
“For me, the first prototype for guitar playing was Greg Ginn,” adds Omar. “All the dissonance, all the heavy riffs... And once I started getting more and more into the music, I loved the fact that he stayed true to himself, kept changing, and when people complained, saying, ‘We want the old stuff’, he was, like, ‘Sorry, this is where I’m at now, I’ve got long-ass hair and I play heavy riffs, I’m not going back!’ I dig all that stuff, all the stuff that people always harp on, I dig it as much as the early stuff.”4
Black Flag’s debut album, 1981’s Damaged, remains rightly revered among the punk-rock discography, a landmark record that is, however, only one entry in a catalogue that sprawls across eight years, encompassing seismic shifts in tone, sound and line-up throughout that era. And while Damaged remains their defining release, it never completely overshadows their propulsive early singles and EPs, while the molten heavy metal of their later releases oozed its oily influence all over the Pacific Northwest rock scene, laying the seeds for that area’s subsequent ‘grunge’ movement, and later cited as a key reference point for the global stoner-rock scene.
The path, from the primal clankings of ‘Nervous Breakdown’, to the thorny jazz-fusion fury of The Process Of Weeding Out, or the slow-motion metal trudge of ‘Three Nights’, is one I’ve sought to illuminate in the pages of this book. To tell this story, I’ve interviewed their friends and contemporaries, musicians who toured with them and recorded for their label, punks who squatted with them at any number of illicit locations. I’ve interviewed members of the group themselves, journalists who interviewed them along the way, members of the audience from their scorching, unforgettable shows, and the people who worked hard to make sure Black Flag accomplished their mission as best they could.
It’s a story of conflict and violence, of friendship and betrayal, of disillusionment and tragedy, and of the costs and rewards of pursuing your own creative vision, of sticking to your own values, to the bitter end. It’s a story that has inspired countless punk rockers to Get In The Van themselves, a story that holds within its twists and turns enough intrigue and drama to sustain the storylines of a major television soap opera. More than this, however, it’s a story of a resolute creative spirit, rebelliously refusing to be cowed or coerced, even when faced down by LA’s finest baton-wielding riot police; it’s also the story of musicians overcoming the prejudice and small-mindedness of their fans, and fearlessly chasing a purity of self-expression that’s diamond-sharp and dazzlingly pure, even if that pursuit left them playing to mostly turned-off and hostile punk teens.
It’s a hell of a story, and I can only hope I’ve done it justice.