“I was the little guy at school who always got picked on, and look at me now! Black Flag’s so loud it’s like I’m beating you up with music! I was always the last guy to be picked on the baseball team, so fuck all of you guys! Fuck you, athletes! Fuck you, jocks! Fuck all of you, who didn’t like me when I was such a great guy in high school and junior high! Fuck You!”48
In the months that followed Black Flag’s usurpation of the old Baptist house of worship, the church had fast become the hub of Hermosa Beach’s nascent punk scene, although its illicit residents were careful not to advertise their presence there. “The beauty of the church,” remembers Joe Nolte, “was that it had these vast concrete walls, which meant we could blast music really loud, and no one could hear it from the outside. It was like this secret, strange place where terrible, anarchic orgies would be going on...”49
Nolte had been a frequent visitor to the church, having fast become a close friend of the Flag, and a regular at their late-night rehearsal sessions and impromptu parties and performances. He was also a vocal proselytiser for the scene developing around the building. Two of Nolte’s closest friends in the Hollywood scene were former Back Door Man writer Phast Phreddie, and Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a louche East LA native with a fevered passion for rock’n’roll; both wrote for Slash magazine, and both were growing gently tired of The Last frontman’s sermonising on behalf of the church and its inhabitants.
“I’d met Jeffrey after he cut a song called ‘Jungle Butt’ with his old group, the Red Lights,” remembers Nolte. “Phreddie played it for me, and I loved it; I said to him, ‘I’ve got to meet this guy’. Jeffrey and Phreddie both drank like fish, so we were destined to become comrades in arms. But I was being very annoying, bugging Phreddie and Jeff, telling ‘em, ‘C’mon, these groups are good, even though nobody knows who they are yet... They’re gonna be big, it’s gonna be a scene, and I think you should write about them.’ And they said, ‘Joe, nobody gives a shit!’”
By the summer of 1979, having finally exhausted his mother’s patience, and her tolerance of his full-time pursuit of dreams of rock’n’roll stardom, Nolte found himself facing a speedy eviction from the familial home. “My mom was through with me,” he laughs. “So I was gonna need to find alternate lodging, very quickly. I didn’t know what to do... I knew I’d need a room-mate, that I couldn’t afford a place of my own.
“I got a call from Ron Reyes, who had been living in the garage of the Cadena family. Ron said he was moving into a room at the church, and needed some help getting his stuff there. As we’re moving all his stuff into this large basement, much too large for one person, I said to Ron, ‘How would you like a room-mate?’ It meant he only had to pay 10 bucks a month rent, instead of 20! It was completely illegal of course, we were pretty much squatting there. Those rooms were not designed for people to live in, but we all were.”
His new room-mate, Ron Reyes, had joined Black Flag’s circle soon after seeing the group’s debut show at the Moose Lodge, thrilled to discover a punk scene in his own backyard. “There was an instant bond that I felt towards Black Flag,” he remembers, “because they were from our neighbourhood. ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a punk-rock scene and a band that’s actually in our own backyard?’ That kind of blew my mind. Then I started hearing about The Last, and later The Descendents, these other local bands, and we started hanging out at the church. I would go down to the SST Electronics office, where Greg had his shop, and just hang out there. And when they would go off to the church to practise, I would follow. I’d ask my friends, ‘What are you doing today? Let’s go see Black Flag practise!’ So we were at all their band practices, and we became like family.”50
Ron had been living in his brother’s garage before he moved into the church. “It just seemed a very natural progression,” he says, “as soon as they started rehearsing, the rehearsal space turned into a party space. I don’t think I had any real, conscious desire to live at the church, it just sort of happened. During my time with Black Flag I was more or less unemployed, making a few dollars here and there doing odd jobs. Certainly, the cheap rent was a bonus.
“We were slowly but surely beginning to destroy the place with our parties,” he laughs. “There was one bathroom, no showers, and there were a bunch of hippies there who rented out some space for their arts and crafts stuff. If the hippies arrived while I was asleep, I couldn’t come out like I had just woken up; there were times when I had to just stay in my room, locked in my room, because my neighbours were there, and I was afraid that if they saw me, I’d get kicked out. We had no running water, it was pretty grim.”
“One Sunday, after a horrendous party,” adds Nolte, “Ron and I were sitting in the basement, and there was a bag of chips on the ground. As we stared at the bag of chips, it started moving across the concrete floor. That’s how we found out there was a whole family of rats living with us. I’d been sleeping on the couch, which was also their home; I was therefore quite intimate with the rats.”
For Ron, the church compensated for such hardships and rodent fraternity with more than just cheap rent; living in the same premises as Black Flag brought him closer to the group, and ensured he never missed a rehearsal. “I think Keith and I probably hit it off the most,” he smiles. “He was still working at his dad’s fishing tackle place, so I would go and hang out with him there all the time. Even in those early days, Black Flag was this monster for self-promotion, and they would just poster like nobody had ever done before; and of course, there was the graffiti. Me and Keith would go out with buckets of paste and posters, and stick flyers up on every post and wall all over the place. And during that time we drank a lot, a lot of beer together. Me and Keith were probably the closest.
“Robo was very quiet, the most mysterious of all of them. Gary was quite accessible, and a lot of fun to hang out with as well, but he had a full-time job, working at the pool-table factory, so I really only saw him at practice. Greg was pretty full-time involved in his business at the time,” Ron adds. “If he wasn’t in the back, putting together his electronic gizmos, he’d be sitting around playing guitar. He would play guitar all day long, and I’d just sit there and listen. He was very accessible that way, it was really cool.”
Aged 18, Ron was several years younger than the Flag, and admits to looking on the group somewhat like older siblings, with a little of that hero-worship and yearning for acceptance. “These guys were university students, I was a high school dropout. In some ways we didn’t have much in common other than music, and Black Flag in particular. But Keith and I were just kind of crazy, and would drink together, so we had more of a bond.”
Another regular at the church was Greg’s girlfriend, Medea. A girl from the streets with a tough background, and trauma in her past, Medea was passionately committed to the punk-rock cause, to Black Flag in particular, and to Greg most of all. She was fearless and wild; some in Black Flag’s circle credit her with pioneering their vandalistic publicity campaign, and certainly she was the most enthusiastic with the spray-paint can.
“Medea was our biggest fan,” says Keith Morris. “When she wasn’t at home or hanging out with Greg or listening to us rehearse, she’d be up in Hollywood, spreading the word, letting people know, telling her friends, who in turn would tell their friends, spreading the name Black Flag like a rash. She was in charge of word of mouth. Every wall Medea ever came across, she’d try to spray the bars; she’d do it in the middle of the day, she just didn’t care. And she was a really motivational person, always saying, ‘Greg, why aren’t you doing this? Greg, why aren’t you playing here? I’m gonna go talk to the guys who run that bar, maybe you guys could play there.’”
“Medea was a big factor in opening Greg up,” agrees Joe Carducci, “from being the electronics nerd who didn’t surf or do whatever the cool kids did. She was Mexican; she didn’t have an accent but she was LA Hispanic. Medea was a key figure, in the very beginning, in giving Greg the confidence to make music, to step outside of his own little world, and to take that music out there.”51
“She was entirely devoted to the band, and to Greg,” remembers Ron. “She went everywhere with them, she was like the fifth band member. There’s that old cliché, of girlfriends in rock’n’roll as always being the Yoko Ono figure, who comes along and spoils things and splits the group... But that wasn’t Medea at all. She would not put up with any shit, if anybody - anybody - said anything bad about Black Flag, she would kill ‘em. She was strange, a very eclectic person, who didn’t really fit in with the Hollywood scene; she wasn’t like Exene or any of those girls from Hollywood, she really just danced to her own tune. She was a lot of fun to be around.”
“Medea was really cool, and she was kind of a freak, too,” laughs Keith. “But in a good way: a lot of drugs, a lot of drinking ... When I was in Black Flag, she lived across the street from my dad’s fishing tackle store. Back then, I was always bouncing between jobs, and my dad allowed me to leave for three months here, four months there, and always let me come back to the bait store. I was his best employee, I could do the work of six different people, but get paid for being just one guy. After work, I’d just walk right across to Medea’s space. She lived above Schlumpfelder’s bar, and their claim to fame was that once a week they would have turtle races: they had a race track set up on top of a pool table, and they’d have these turtles race, so the drunks had something to scream and yell and cheer about.
“Her place was real scuzzy, just the kind of place you can imagine being above a really seedy, dive-y shithole of a bar. She lived at room 13, and that’s where we’d go for our drugs, and we’d party and we’d drink, hang out, and then go and rehearse. A lot of times, a rehearsal would start at 10pm, end at 1am, and we’d go right back down to Medea’s, to hang out and party until two or three in the morning.” Keith pauses for a moment, and then laughs. “Then we’d all get up, go back and do whatever we were doing, wherever we were working, and do the same thing all over again.”
That summer, the walls and lamp posts and telegraph poles across Los Angeles and the South Bay remained under permanent siege from the Flag’s guerrilla publicity dive, as Greg cranked the group’s operations up several gears. Beginning that June, Black Flag started playing shows they hadn’t necessarily organised themselves, at venues that weren’t typically peopled by retired and cranky veterans, or bloodthirsty oil-refinery workers. First, though, as the summer of 1979 dawned, Greg ensured the release of some of the group’s session at Media Arts, which had been gathering dust in the can for 18 months before it saw vinyl.
Greg had already selected the four tracks from the session that he wanted on the EP, which Greg Shaw had planned to release on Bomp! back when the group were still called Panic. However, the label was suffering from serious cash-flow problems as 1978 closed, stalling production of the Nervous Breakdown seven-inch. Early in 1979, Joe Nolte offered to release the single on Flashback, the imprint on which he’d self-released The Last’s debut seven-inch, but he too struggled to finance the pressing.
Ultimately, Greg realised that if he wanted Black Flag to make their debut on vinyl any time soon, he would have to release the single himself. He was hardly daunted by the prospect of starting up his own label and handling the distribution of the record to stores; he had, after all, been in successful business for himself since his early teens. Indeed, Greg admitted to Outcry ‘zine the following year that he’d felt “really cocky” about the record’s prospects.
“We pressed up 2,000 copies, for $1,000,” he explained. “We liked it a lot, you know, and we thought, ‘Why shouldn’t people like us?’ Because we would play it and go crazy.” His enthusiasm wasn’t immediately matched by the record stores. “Zed Of London only took five copies,” he sighed, “and they were a little nervous about that. We said, ‘Why don’t you take a few more?’ And they said, ‘Well, we’ll see how it sells.’”52
Greg’s label would share its name with his electronics concern: SST Records. Despite his faith in the Black Flag product, however, Greg was, at least initially, a reluctant record mogul. He felt that he had his hands full running the ham radio company that he had little time to spend on this second business. And yet, he knew that if he didn’t step up and release the record itself it might never see the shelves.
“I started in business when I was 12 years old,” he told Sound Choice in 1989. “I didn’t really want to get into the music business. As for just business, I prefer electronics or something a lot better. It’s just a lot straighter, a lot more honest. And you’re not dealing with all of these unrealistic aspirations.53
“SST was formed to put out the first Black Flag record,” he told Eric Olsen in 2003. “Basically, there wasn’t anyone else to do it. There weren’t very many independent labels putting out rock music other than reissues, and other speciality stuff. I felt that what I was doing with Black Flag was very worthwhile, and I wanted to get it out there. It really just started from scratch: from looking in the phone book for a record pressing plant, pressing records, and then dealing with everything else by just doing it.
“Hooking up with a major label was completely out of the question at the time,” he added. “People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the band’s existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. I’m sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared. I think that that’s how times have changed, in a sense. There aren’t enough groups who are scaring the kind of people who work in their offices at these companies.”54
Numbering four tracks, and lasting around five and a half minutes, Black Flag’s debut EP was an object lesson in brevity and exhilarating, pop-edged brutality, and as perfect an opening statement as any punk group recorded. Visually, the sleeve contained all the classic components that would make the Flag’s cover artwork so distinctive and instantly recognisable, the band’s name printed large beside the rippling flag logo that had begun appearing all over Los Angeles and the South Bay. The sleeve featured a Raymond Pettibon illustration depicting, in nervy and anxious pen strokes, an aggravated figure wielding his fists with threatening menace, another man in the foreground thrusting a chair to fend him off; the tiled floor and blackboard on the wall suggest the location is some conflation of a schoolroom and an asylum cell. The illustration’s mood is one of wound-up tension on the edge of brutal release. This was a dynamic also shared by the songs contained within, with mental illness and explosive catharsis a running theme in the lyrics of three of the four songs.
Musically, lead track ‘Nervous Breakdown’ doffed its Mohawk towards the Flag’s roots as fans of arena rock. Its revving riffs and scything guitars (distorted not via an FX pedal but by the sheer volume of Ginn’s amp), and its constant whiplash segues between high-velocity guitar dash and Neanderthal headbang breakdowns come off like a savvy rewrite of ‘Communication Breakdown’, the leanest blast of heavy metal thunder from Led Zeppelin’s 1969 self-titled debut; exactly the sort of din that would thrill the dropouts down at the pier. Keith’s vocal is no preening Percy Plant love-howl, however, more a Rotten-esque sneer that he makes his own, snarling a very convincing warning to all within earshot that he’s nearing the end of his fuse and doesn’t care who gets caught in the aftermath. Angry, and you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
This dynamite motif was echoed in the two other Ginn-penned lyrics on the EP. ‘Fix Me’ opened with a barked “1-2-3-4!”, fitting for a track that made out like a West Coast take on The Ramones’ ‘Teenage Lobotomy’, a riff like a power drill powering Keith along on a 58-second plea for electroshock therapy before his demons drive him to suicide. In ‘I’ve Had It’, however, Keith wields his self-destructive psychosis like a weapon, threatening to take his various vexations — his boss, the losers at school, the girl who won’t call him up — with him when he blows.
For all the violence and psychosis spread across the lyric sheets for these three songs, however, the tone is anything but dark, Keith locating the black humour at the heart of Ginn’s adrenalised blues songs for the Californian outcast, and taking a hell of a lot of glee in the destruction he imagines causing; a caustic cocktail of confusion and catharsis, but also, he says, of celebration.
“With that huge sound roaring behind me, I was in celebration mode,” Keith grins. “I was the little guy at school who always got picked on, and look at me now! Black Flag’s so loud it’s like I’m beating you up with music! I was always the last guy to be picked on the baseball team, so fuck all of you guys! Fuck you, athletes! Fuck you, jocks! Fuck all of you, who didn’t like me when I was such a great guy in high school and junior high! Fuck You! That’s what that was all about... ‘What are you doing? This is what I’m doing! Yeah!’”
The Nervous Breakdown EP closed out with ‘Wasted’, Keith’s anthem to Keith, to the guys he knew down at the Pier and to everyone who liked to get royally fucked up, the addled swagger underscored by a keen black lining of self-loathing. Within its four tracks, the seven-inch encompassed the unique dynamic that underpinned this first incarnation of Black Flag, as Greg’s wit-flecked angst ploughed headlong into Keith’s impish hedonism, Ginn’s nervily antisocial lyrics given voice by Black Flag’s diminutive party-animal frontman, whose wind-tunnel howl was as belligerent and bracing as Greg’s wall-of-noise guitars. Backed by so muscular a rhythm section - the departed Migdol’s drums hammering the songs home with a taut discipline at odds with his supposed lax commitment to the group, Gary’s steamroller bass lending Greg’s axe-blade riffs a crucial extra heft - the synergy between Ginn and Morris was insanely potent, although it thrived on a friction that hardly suggested longevity.
For Ginn, the single served as proof of what Black Flag could achieve if they maintained the fearsome focus and drive he’d thus far established within the group. He knew, however, that the path he was choosing for Black Flag would be strewn with obstacles and challenges. “I could see in the beginning that the music that I was writing would be something, if we worked hard at it. It was different to the other music that was around, and I felt no doubt that we would find an audience, it was just a matter of keeping a band together to work at it. But if you do something different, it’ll be harder than doing it the easier way, so I knew I’d have to work that much harder at it.”
“Nervous Breakdown set the template,” Ginn later told Michael Azerrad. “This is what it is. After the EP was released, people couldn’t argue with me as to what Black Flag was or wasn’t.”55
Their first release, Nervous Breakdown also doubled as a killer calling card for Black Flag, announcing, to any and all who might want to book them for a show, the thunderous din they could deliver at will. Greg also mailed a small number of copies to selected writers for the rock press, including the scribes who wrote for Slash and Flipside.
“The same weekend I moved into the church, Jeffrey and I went looking for a place in Venice,” remembers Joe Nolte. “We didn’t find anything, so we ended up hanging out at the Slash offices, where I got to meet the legendary Claude ‘Kickboy Face’ Bessy.” French-born Bessy had relocated to LA in 1973, a suave brothel-creeper-shod hell-raiser who’d helped found Slash and fast became a crazed and glorious character on the Hollywood scene, his columns making stars of the groups down at the Masque, and forever exhorting them to new, even more anarchic heights. “I looked over, and saw that he had a copy of Nervous Breakdown sitting on his turntable,” chuckles Nolte. “I was, like, wow... the Slash guy likes Black Flag!”
With the SST Electronics address stamped on the back sleeve, the single also proudly announced Black Flag’s South Bay roots and background, in contrast with the Hollywood scene. The detail was just as proudly noted by many of their early South Bay fans.
“I remember we bought Nervous Breakdown,” says Steven McDonald, “and looking on the back of it, we saw that SST had a local address. And that kind of blew our minds, because we felt we were the only people within 20 miles who even had an interest in this music. We figured everybody else who was into this stuff lived in Hollywood or something, or London or New York. We pursued them. I don’t remember how we made contact, I think we just looked them up in the phone book, or wrote to the address on the back. But soon after that, we were going to the church, and meeting them and seeing them rehearse.”
The church, in all its malnourished and mistreated glory, left a deep impression on 11-year-old McDonald. “The floor was always beer-soaked and dirty, real gross,” he laughs. “The walls in their rehearsal space were spray-painted with graffiti. The whole building smelled of mould, and spray-paint, and stale old crappy American beer. It had that crappy indoor/outdoor carpeting in a lot of the rooms; it was green, but so old and dirty that it looked black, thanks to gallons of spilt Budweiser deeply ingrained in the pile. Granted, we grew up high on the fumes of LAX, but my mom was still a very staunch housekeeper, and we’d grown up in a modest but very hygienic environment.” By contrast, the church was “scary, and creepy. But it was also fun; like a kind of Treasure Island, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in Neverland type of thing. Or Lord Of The Flies [laughs].
“The times that were the neatest for me were the little intimate moments,” he adds. On their first visit to the church, Steven and Jeff brought along Greg Hetson and John Stielow, guitarist and drummer with their group, The Tourists. “We were in the rehearsal room in the church, and Black Flag were playing, blasting our heads off in this small confined space. And then they handed us their guitars, and told us to play. ‘You guys are a band,’ they said, ‘Let’s see it.’ And in a lot of ways, it was like auditioning to hang out with them. It’s funny, our drummer, John, was a normal 12-year-old kid, a bit of a soccer jock and popular at school. And I’m imagining him behind Robo’s drum kit, this massive, man-size drum kit [laughs]. And I played Gary’s huge Ibanez Flying V bass, where my bass was this little student model, a Fender Music Master.
“So we got up there, and just fuckin’ played our set of songs, which included the songs we would cut for our first EP, and two cover songs, ‘Who Are The Mystery Girls’ by New York Dolls, and a punk-rock version of The Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, where we played a verse and a chorus at normal tempo, and then slid into a double-time verse and chorus, at punk-rock velocity. And that was our set, probably 10 or 15 minutes long.”56
If the performance was an audition, then The Tourists certainly passed, and were soon booking rehearsal space in the church. Black Flag were impressed by this new young South Bay punk group, but they weren’t uncritical in their support. “They said, ‘You guys are cool, but your drummer sucks, and your band name sucks’,” laughs Steven. “It was super-dogmatic, kinda like they were our A&R staff, or something.”
Despite the age difference between the two groups, Black Flag and The Tourists became fast friends. “Keith Morris was belligerent, out of control, unstable, but really, really a great guy,” remembers Steven. “Keith was probably what you would nowadays call an alcoholic, but then, just really, you know, a great punk-rock frontman, really pissed off, very unpredictable. And also very cool to us. He had this image of being some crazy animal, but at the same time, he would take me and my little brother to rock shows. Granted, he would keep us out until five in the morning and get us into horrifying, death-defying experiences, like driving down Sunset Boulevard, around Dead Man’s Curve, at 80 miles per hour. But he was a really sweet guy, he really took us under his wing, and was really cool to us.
“Raymond Pettibon was very mysterious and dark, but funny and friendly. But sometimes he would get really drunk and do something really violent, like smash a bunch of bottles at a sink and then stick his hands in the broken glass. Like, woah, wooah! He seemed so quiet all the time, and then had these crazy outbursts. Greg and Gary seemed older, they were bohemian - their version of bohemian anyway, which was kind of hippie-ish, beatnik. I just remember Gary always having that Cheshire cat grin, like he knew something about everything, and was kinda laughing at it all. A funny character. Greg always seemed like some sort of spaced-out mad genius guy. Greg seemed almost like someone who’d sniffed too much glue, but he was always very sweet to us, and smiled a lot. I don’t know how great of a conversationalist I would have been at that point in my life. But they definitely had a huge impact on me, and a massive influence upon some of the choices we made.”
Indeed, the Flag helped The Tourists locate their next drummer, who was sitting right under their noses, sleeping in a closet in the basement of the church. “My friend Christine was leaving town, moving to England, and she needed some money,” remembers Ron Reyes. “And so I bought her drum kit from her. I put it over in the corner of the room, and sometimes people would come over and start drumming on it. But I had no intentions to be a drummer, none at all.
“But the church had become a party place, and people would come over, and there were more and more late-night sessions. So, in order to get rid of people, I would go over to the drum set, pick up the sticks and play the ‘My Sharona’ beat, the only thing I knew. I would play that, without saying anything, until people left. And then I’d put down the sticks and go to bed. The Tourists were looking for a drummer, and they asked me, are you a drummer? Well, I had a drum kit... So we just started jamming. I had no experience, beyond playing the ‘My Sharona’ beat, but they asked me to play, and we started practising in the church.”
“So Ron Reyes joined our band,” says Steven. “He was this runaway kid who lived in the basement, and shared a weird windowless room with Joe Nolte of The Last, and they had some crazy closet they had rigged into a makeshift bed area, and had spray-painted the walls of the room. It was very punk!”
Joe Nolte was the next church resident to take the McDonalds under his wing, schooling The Tourists in his own specific brand of rock and pop arcana. “Joe was really a very instrumental person in that whole scene,” says Steven, “really influential over The Descendents in particular, and us as well. He was a really great character, a true rock’n’roller.”
In August of 1979, Nolte sat in on a Tourists band meeting at the church where, having elected to follow Black Flag’s advice (and fearing being confused for a British post-punk group also called The Tourists, featuring future Eurythmics Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox), they discussed possible new names for the group. Nolte’s suggestion, The Sick, was laughed out of the room. Red Cross, however, proved a better fit. As Steven notes, it would look good on a flyer alongside Black Flag’s name.
By September, Red Cross had saved up enough money to record a demo, booking some time at Media Arts for their first recording session. “I came home one night, real tired, all I wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep,” remembers Nolte. “They said, ‘We’re going to the studio tonight, and we don’t know what to do.’ So I ended up producing the session, after drinking three cups of coffee. We had fun, and they sounded good, and I sorta liked the recordings. Their label, Posh Boy, hated them though, and made them record everything again. But they were actually able to get gigs and actually play, and make a recording, in part because of the great marketing ploy that they had a 12-year-old in the band...”
Reyes’ whirlwind entry into the world of rock’n’roll left him exhilarated and reeling. “Within a few weeks of joining the group we were in the studio, recording our first EP,” he says. “It was so punk rock... ‘Are you a drummer?’ No, but I have a drum set. ‘OK, you wanna join the band?’ That was so cool. I thought you had to practise and practise for years in your garage, before you could put a band together. But along comes punk rock, and it doesn’t matter if you have no experience. [laughs] The new rules!”
Swiftly, Red Cross had joined the family of groups congregating at the church, and were mainstays of the building’s late-night parties and jam sessions. “Inside the main room of the church,” remembers Steven, “there was a stage, where the choir originally got up and sang for the congregation. It was at the end of this vast empty room with a sloped floor, and there were these spray-painted old stained-glass windows up above, where the light was coming through. There was always some friction between the Black Flag community, their little group of five or six oddballs, and the hippies that also occupied the church, this ongoing battle, of good vs. evil, punks vs. hippies, new vs. old... But sometimes we were able to take over that main space and have parties there, and the hippies wouldn’t shut us down, and Black Flag, and Red Cross, and an early version of The Descendents would all play, and we’d all get really drunk. They were really exciting, magical times.”
Greg: “Yeah, we’ve played some weird places... We like to play to any audience.”
Gary: “We’ve played new wave places, and parks and... you name it, we play it. There’s more impact in playing for people who aren’t just soaking up the ‘punk’ thing. It’s actually more stimulating to play for an audience that has not heard it, and probably has a prejudice against it.”
The summer of 1979 would witness punk rock’s slow spread outwards from its Hollywood base, as the scene that had grown up around the Masque began to find other venues to play downtown. “In the wake of the first local punk wave came a seemingly endless number of tiny beer and wine toilet dives,” remembers Brendan Mullen. “Weird converted storefronts, former titty bars, desperately failing Chinatown restaurants... From west LA to downtown Los Angeles, all were wonderfully grimy public lavs in their own right: One Way, Club 88, Madame Wong’s, the Hong Kong Café, Blackie’s, Al’s Bar, Brave Dog, Anti-Club, Cathay de Grande, Vex... Most had legal occupancies of less than 200. Black Flag did the rounds at some of these places, most regularly the Hong Kong and the Anti-Club.”57
Down in Chinatown, a fierce rivalry was being waged between two ailing Chinese restaurants that had latterly found a lucrative sideline in putting on all ages rock’n’roll shows; indeed, Esther Wong, owner of Madame Wong’s, refused to book groups who’d had the temerity to also play shows at the Hong Kong Café, just up the street. The demarcation line between the two restaurants also marked the border between two warring musical factions, as the underground scene split into two opposing tribes, new wave and punk rock.
New wave was a genre invented by the major record labels for their new underground signings, as the first punk-rock wave failed to generate sales to match the musicians’ notoriety. Sensing that the controversy that surrounded punk rock might actually prove a turnoff for potential record buyers and the media, the marketing departments scrabbled to cook up a new pigeonhole untainted by high-visibility scandals like the heroin-overdose death of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious while under suspicion of murdering girlfriend Nancy Spungen, hoping to lend their signings a more palatable sheen by rendering any reference to that vulgar and drug-addled punk scene verboten.
At least on the surface, new wave sounded like punk, albeit a neutered, bleached-out and declawed version. Stars of the scene like The Knack shared punk rock’s sense of concision and simplicity, though these bare bones were robed in studio polish and radio harmonies, while the group themselves sported skinny ties, matching haircuts and unthreatening clothing, like some late Seventies LA version of Herman’s Hermits. “The Knack’s success was a crushing blow to bands like X, The Weirdos, The Screamers, The GoGos, and The Germs,” wrote Brendan Mullen, in We Got The Neutron Bomb, “all of whom had designs or dreams of going big time.”58
The Knack played at Madame Wong’s, and Esther proudly touted this fact with signs outside the restaurant declaring it their home. Black Flag, meanwhile, made a home for themselves at the Hong Kong Café, with the assistance of Joe Nolte.
“We were able to get Black Flag into the Hong Kong Café, which became the home for punk by the end of 1979,” says Nolte. “The Café started out as an alternative/new wave place, and The Last would play there, because we were a ‘nice’ band. They told us we could choose our own opening band, so we brought Black Flag. The Café is a restaurant by day, so there’s all these tables set up in front of the stage. Black Flag walked in to soundcheck, and Keith started grabbing the tablecloths, whipping everything off the tables, and the waiters were running around, yelling... [laughs] I knew it was going to be a good night.”
Black Flag’s first show at the Café was on Monday June 18, and they were glad to find a place to play; a week before, they’d played another downtown bar, the Bla Bla Café, for what was supposed to be the first in a series of shows at the venue, but the raucousness of their performance, and the resulting ruckus it provoked in the audience, saw the second show cancelled, and Black Flag banned. As for the first Café show, Nolte says the Flag “acquitted themselves well, but Keith had shaken the owners by causing trouble, before anyone had even bought a ticket for the show. Within a month, however, the Hong Kong realised there was big money in punk, and were suddenly converted, so we were able to get Red Cross on the bill there too.”
As the South Bay groups began to find their feet in this frontier of the Hollywood scene, some sensed or perceived a distance between themselves and the Masque groups who were also beginning to play shows downtown. “We didn’t dress up,” says Joe Nolte. “There would be kids who would put their punk-rock outfits on and gel up their hair for the night, but it seemed wrong to us; it just wasn’t real, it was like having Hallowe’en every night. None of us were studying photographs from England and thinking, I need a length of chain as long as Sid Vicious. We were probably unfashionable. We were just dumb South Bay kids who wanted to make music.
“But so many of the Hollywood people were friends,” adds Nolte, “so it didn’t seem all that important. In the sense that we felt any distance from the proper Hollywood scene, I think that distance was deliberately created by us, to stake out our own territory, to differentiate ourselves from a larger scene that was already in existence.”
“The thing about Black Flag was, you would look at us and not think, These guys are a punk rock band,’” says Keith. “We had a kind of boy-next-door thing; we looked like Deadheads, like we were on our way down to Anaheim Stadium to see Peter Frampton, or to see Ted Nugent and Lynyrd Skynyrd play a big summer festival show. Which we did, because we liked all of those bands.”
The South Bay contingent, and Black Flag in particular, were unconcerned by their lack of hipness, their love of rock’n’roll deemed uncool because it dated from before punk’s Year Zero. “I’ve always been in love with trad folk,” says Joe Nolte, “and I didn’t know too many other people into this music, until I met Keith Morris, who was a huge Steeleye Span fan. We used to hang out pretty much seven nights a week, wherever vagabond punk rockers would go, often outside the Hong Kong Café whenever there was a show. You could buy cheap beers there, so it was a hangout for us. I think X was playing, and there were a lot of cool people hanging around outside. And Keith and I were standing by the door, in a general sort of punk-rock environ, singing Steeleye Span’s ‘Gaudete’... One of X’s roadies comes up and says, ‘Save that shit for church’.
“Probably a month or so later, once Black Flag started getting known, the same guy was all over Keith, thinking he was the coolest guy on Earth. As Black Flag started getting notoriety and getting fans, whatever cynical sneers and sardonic glances or just general attitude the Hollywood kids were displaying toward the provincial South Bay quickly disappeared, like how all the rock critics of the day made fun of The Stooges, and now they all profess to have loved The Stooges.”
On September 25, they played a show at the Hong Kong, with Rodney Bingenheimer - who’d played Nervous Breakdown on his KROQ show - again in the audience, accompanied this time by the Thin White Duke himself. David Bowie’s presence in the club thrilled many of the glitter survivors within the audience, and Bowie was said to be highly impressed by the Flag’s performance. They were certainly a finely honed machine by this point, having spent the rest of that summer ricocheting between the church and the Hong Kong and the other downtown clubs like Club 88, Gazarri’s and King’s Palace, as well as the civic halls and parties they were still playing.
“It was a lot of VFW Halls, a lot of Moose Lodge and Elk Lodge halls, Knights Of Columbus, Knights Of Pythias, a lot of dingy shithole bars,” remembers Keith. “The problem with playing the bars was that, if you wanna expand your audience and play for everybody, you have to get there early and play at eight o’clock at night, and then be prepared to play again at midnight. We were playing two shows a night, and when you’re, like, pouring everything that you have out, you’re completely wasted afterwards.”
Nevertheless, Morris and his bandmates embraced their heavy workload, a chance to work out the tensions and pent-up energy they’d built up in their endless rehearsals, to release it all in ecstatic 20-minute bursts. At the end of those sets, says Keith, “I felt psyched. We only had 16 songs, and we would play those 16 songs in, like, 25 minutes. It was more exhilarating than it was exhausting. Plus, we were younger, we were sturdy. And this was what we wanted to do, this was why we’d spent so much time rehearsing. We were protesting all of these other bands that the audience had embraced, these Top 40 bands, and whoever was being played on the radio, whoever was popular at the time. We had absolutely nothing to do with any of those bands, except that we were playing amplified music; we were playing rock, but it wasn’t ‘rock’ as the majority of these people understood or wanted it.”
Chaos reigned whenever Black Flag were in the room. An illegal party held at Mars recording studio in Santa Cruz on Saturday, September 1 ground to a halt 10 seconds after Black Flag had begun to play, with the arrival of the cops. The shows they did get to play were no less wild and anarchic than their early gigs. “Early on, I kind of embraced the chaos,” laughs Keith. “But at the same time I was thinking, ‘Why is this happening? Are we causing this? Could the music we were playing be the fuel for all of this?’ And I decided, I’ve just got to go with it, whatever. Because I was actually having a good time, and a lot of these people who were going crazy in the audience were friends of mine.”
At these downtown shows, Black Flag played alongside Masque stalwarts like The Germs and The Mau Maus, and also a clutch of younger, more abrasive groups, including Orange County’s The Middle Class, who plied punk of fearsome velocity, and Fear, whose heaviosity and violence verged on the metallic. “A lot of the bands we played with had the mentality of, ‘We’re no better than the people coming to see us’,” says Keith. “You’ll see photos of bands playing, where there’s 20 kids onstage. We didn’t mind that in the least. Our only request was that you not pretend to be a member of the band — we’re quite capable of butchering these songs on our own. Leave the microphone, I need no assistance. And if you really need to be up here, why not go start your own band? A lot of people did...”
Meanwhile, up in Hollywood, the Masque 2 finally closed its doors after a February 24 bonanza that featured performances by The Cramps, The Dead Boys, The Germs and Wall Of Voodoo. Brendan Mullen promoted a couple of further Masque shows at BACE’s Hall that spring, and another gig at the Vanguard, a gallery in Carmel specialising in retro pinup art in June. Later on in the summer, two musicians and Masque regulars, Rick Wilder of The Mau Maus and Paul Picasso of Youth Party, approached Mullen about throwing a blowout party down in the basement just off Hollywood Boulevard, where the old Masque had been located.
“The basement space was still being used as a practice place,” remembers Mullen. “Now on its last legs, the auld pit was a month or so away from permanent shuttering, a homeless shelter for proto-gutter punks, and a hangout for impromptu jams and parties. Rick and Paul suggested putting Black Flag on with UXA, Smart Pills (from NY, who I’d never heard of before or since), The Blackhearts, and, of course, The Mau Maus. ‘Black Flag?’, I thought. That’s that band with the noisy, drunk kid... Fine by me, I shrugged... the end of the Masque was nigh, and anyway, it was Wilder’s birthday, or some other excuse for a final blowout. We weren’t charging a cover any more and the bands who played did so for free because they wanted to. Everyone had a huge unlimited guest list in an attempt to pass the event off as a ‘private’ function.”
The ruse failed, however, and while Black Flag did finally get to play the Masque basement, on that Sunday August 12, Brendan Mullen didn’t get to catch their set, as he was out at the club’s entrance, dealing with the authorities. “Someone must’ve dropped a dime. I was upstairs in the alley with fire marshals and cops up my nose during their set. They closed us down, once and for all, so Black Flag were one of the last groups to ever play the Masque.”
“The Air Force Big Band were supposed to play, but apparently a couple of the members came down with the flu. The City Of Manhattan Beach Parks And Recreation needed some entertainment, so we showed up, to entertain [laughs]. I mean, who better to replace the Air Force Big Band than Black Flag?”
Polliwog Park was the pride of affluent, pristine Manhattan Beach. Its beautifully landscaped 18 acres were the mannered playground where the local suburban families enjoyed leisurely weekends, revelling in the lush splendour of their tasteful surroundings. Located a mile and a half from the sea, on Manhattan Beach Boulevard, the park’s cement walkways interconnected tennis and basketball courts and several baseball diamonds; by the roadside, a series of metal chain nets hung from chest-level poles, so kids could play Disc Golf, a Frisbee game developed in Sixties California.
At the heart of the park sat a large pond, filled with ducks and swans, fish and frogs. It was overlooked by a fair-sized bandstand where, in the summer, the Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation department booked performances for weekend picnics in the park. The selection of such entertainment was, unsurprisingly, conservative: classical performances, easy listening music, polite jazz quartets. The US Air Force Orchestra had been booked to perform on Sunday July 22, but had to cancel; their replacement was, of course, Black Flag.
The group’s infiltration of the Polliwog family picnic that pleasant July afternoon was another unlikely triumph of will on the part of Greg Ginn, who had spent weeks trying to persuade the organisers that Black Flag were, in fact, a Fleetwood Mac covers band, specialising in the group’s then insanely popular Rumours-era catalogue. Ginn accomplished his ruse using all his powers of persuasion, but mostly by promising - but never actually delivering - a tape of Black Flag’s music. By the time the weekend arrived, Black Flag were booked for the park’s first ever rock’n’roll show, sharing the bill with The Tourists and two local new wave groups, Big Wow and Eddie & The Subtitles.
Beatific calm was the ambience at Polliwog that Sunday, as the families of Manhattan Beach lay out their picnic blankets and baskets on the grass before the bandstand, awaiting that afternoon’s performance. That calm was irrevocably shattered as the Hermosa Beach contingent arrived at Polliwog, a raucous, leather-jacketed convoy sweeping through the pastel picnickers. While outnumbered by locals, the South Bay punks were an impressive presence that afternoon, with various church denizens and Hollywood scenesters gathering near the stage, drinking beer and generally getting their party on.
“It was a beautiful day,” remembers Keith. “People were taking their kids to the park, walking their dogs, bringing their Frisbees and beach balls and their suntan lotion. They were eating watermelon and cantaloupe and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And all of a sudden, the freak show shows up. Not only were the punk kids and the hard-rock kids from the South Bay there, but there was a sprinkling of people from outlying areas, people from Hollywood; Jeffrey Lee Pierce was there, hanging out with Dianne Chai, who was the bass player with The Alley Cats. Although The Alley Cats were from Almeida, it was easy for them to drive the six miles to Polliwog Park.”
“At the time, Manhattan Beach was like Happy Valley,” remembers Ron Reyes. “Crisp, clean, a very nice neighbourhood. And along come Black Flag... It was really messy, and chaotic, and crazy. We just took over this park, with all the families sat there... And I’m a family man now, right? But that was not our scene at all, then. We just walked in and kind of took over, and made a mess of things.”
“Enter Black Flag,” laughs Joe Nolte. “And it was beautiful, too, because in those days nobody knew who they were, so they could get away with sneaking into something like that... Jeffrey and I got there in time to see the Flag setting up, there were thirty of us, friends and supporters who were there in front of the stage. And then there were all the nice families.”
By the time Black Flag were due on stage, Keith had gotten his own particular party on with impressive efficiency, and had passed out underneath a car. “They pulled me out and handed me a beer, and we went on,” he laughs. Choosing not to moderate his typical onstage belligerence for this audience, Morris ambled onstage, took the microphone and yelled, “We’re loud, and if you don’t like that, you can go watch Walt Disney.” As they launched into their first number, however, the Polliwog picnickers decided to register their disdain in a more confrontational manner.
“Maybe 60 seconds into the first song, it began to rain food,” says Keith. “Sandwiches, half-eaten drumsticks, watermelon and cantaloupe rinds, banana peels... We tried to dodge it; I remembered seeing Gary pick a sandwich up off the stage and eat it. Poor Robo, stuck behind his drum kit, couldn’t really move or duck, so he really got pelted.”
“There were certainly hoots of derision from the audience,” says Joe Nolte, “but the families actually took the thing largely in the spirit of fun. Parents would give empty beer cans to their kids and say, ‘Go throw it at the band, they’re expecting that!’ And the kids would do it, like it was a game. At one point Keith said, ‘I feel sick, I’m gonna throw up, right on this little kid!’, and made motions like he was gonna vomit on a child... I mean, Black Flag are nice guys! It was actually, in some bizarre way, a friendly little thing. But, as the set wore on, there were definitely people who were annoyed, not pleased about having to put up with it. There were a lot of shouts of ‘Get ‘em off!’, and a lot more things thrown, and now there were high school kids throwing things, and they could aim better and hit harder.”
Halfway through the set, the concert’s master of ceremonies waded onstage and stopped the performance; he’d periodically appeared in the preceding minutes, to harangue Keith against using four-letter words, and to sweep some of the picnic detritus from the stage, but this time he brought Black Flag’s glorious noise to a halt. A rather miraculous bootleg recording of the performance, taped from within the conclave of Flag fans gathered by the stage, captures the interaction between the MC, the Flag, and the punk-rock devotees in the audience, in messily low but audible fidelity.
“OK, do you want the concert to continue today?” asks the MC, to jeers from the Flag contingent. “OK, well, we’re going to hear more of Black Flag if everyone stops throwing things around ... We’ve been putting on concerts all through this whole summer, every single Sunday, and then the first rock ’n’ roll show... and then look at this... I’ve got to clean this mess up!”
At this, Keith leers to the audience, “We’re not the Air Force band, so you can throw whatever you want... They told me I can’t use the foul language any more, so I’ll have to make up some other words. Like, instead of ‘sex’, we’ll say ‘intercourse’.”
The MC then impotently tries to regain command of the situation, telling the church residents by the stage, serving as the Flag’s road crew for the day, to back away, initiating a spirited discourse between the parties.
“We’re the road crew!” shouts an unidentified Flag associate. “Roadies must continue their jobs! It’s called participation... You don’t know what’s going on!”
“Everybody has to go sit where they were, and stop throwing things... See, a big problem that I’m having here is, a lot of people coming up to me and saying that they have a lot of kids here in the park...”
“Send ‘em home!”
“…and they’re not going to take them home either. So I have a decision to make, and I’m going to pull Black Flag off the stage... Please, help me out here, please help me out... I don’t wanna have a riot on my hands here, that’s the problem. Now, a lot of the parents with their families up back there, don’t like what is going on down here onstage. I have a lot of people coming up to me and saying they want Black Flag off the stage, and get the next group on.”
The MC is then drowned out by boos, and yells of “Fuck you! Fuck you!”, and “Play something!” Keith, meanwhile, takes the microphone and yells, “I’m wasted! Just like your parents!” as Greg starts revving up the opening notes to ‘Wasted’. The rest of the band kick in and raise an unholy racket for the next 60 seconds, Robo racing like a fevered jackhammer, Gary’s bass pounding like a series of punches to the chest, Greg’s guitar a contrary, righteous roar, and Keith babbling like he’s screaming in tongues. They race through four more songs before closing on a brutish and chaotic stomp through ‘Louie Louie’, a vile and foul-mouthed version flung at the Polliwog audience with ecstatic venom.
“It was clear Black Flag had come to Polliwog to piss off Manhattan Beach,” says Joe Nolte, “and they’d succeeded admirably. So the poor MC gets on the microphone after they’ve finished, announcing the next band, and saying, ‘They’re new wave, they’re not punk! They’re new wave!’”
“It was a mess of spit and beer and blood and sweat and tears,” remembers Ron. “And it was over, as soon as it began. So much fun...”
The fun continued afterwards, as the Hermosa Bay punks returned to the church for a late-night party, and another set from the victorious Black Flag. “We had to go to our cars in groups,” remembers Joe Nolte, “because there were angry surfers out there, ready to beat the shit out of any of our number. As far as I know, nothing happened, but there was definitely menace; by the end of the Black Flag set, we felt very much like freedom riders in Georgia [laughs]. ‘Let’s get out of Dodge!’ So we all went back to the church, and Black Flag set up on the main stage and we had a nice little party, in what was my new home. As we were slamming, Dez Cadena managed to shove me down on to the very hard wood floor, and I blacked out for a second... Everything went black.”
The end of Black Flag’s set at the church was just as abrupt. “Robo was playing and somehow his cymbal stand got knocked over,” says Keith. “The cymbal came down and cut my mic-cord in half. So that was the end of the party, the musical part anyway.”
A local newspaper reported on the show the following week. “The caustic new wave/punk sounds of The Tourists and Big Wow had caused many of the families in attendance to leave even before the featured act,” wrote Kerry Welsh. “As it turned out, the first two acts were like the Vienna Boys’ Choir in comparison to the Hermosa-based Black Flag... Lead singer Keith spewed obscenities while challenging many of the crowd to a fight. Parents quickly collected their children and fled the park.”59
Welsh’s piece quoted Ric Morton, the Manhattan Beach special events supervisor who’d arranged the concert, as saying: “The recreation department was as angered and embarrassed as the audience. We plan to screen and audition every act from now on that wants to perform at Polliwog Park, so nothing like this will ever happen again.” The piece ran accompanied by a photograph Spot had taken at the show, Keith leaning into his microphone and screaming, while before him on the ground, Ron Reyes and Dez Cadena wrestle good-naturedly at the feet of the audience.
For Greg Ginn, his guerrilla assault on the sensibilities of Manhattan Beach had been a resounding success. He wasn’t a provocateur for the sake of it, he’d just wanted to share his music with a wider audience, to try and show them Black Flag’s world view, and give them a taste of what was going down at the church, this DIY rebellion against the soft-rock complacency of the mainstream, and the Top 40 covers bands. The violence of the audience’s response, however, was an early sign of how his music could provoke, and how it would aggravate more conservative listeners, not just because it was loud or abrasive, but because they regarded Black Flag as something antisocial, or antithetical to the beliefs of the ‘moral majority’.
Jerry Morris read the newspaper reports on Black Flag’s performance, and he wasn’t impressed. “He was pissed,” remembers Keith. “He said, ‘So this is the path that you choose? This is what you’re doing when you should be going to college?’ It took him a little while to get what we were doing, and to understand why. My dad surrounded himself with an interesting group of characters; one of his best friends was an eye surgeon, another was the criminal psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University, and they were both in love with the band, and he warmed to us because of them. To this day, I’m still wondering why they were so into our group. I believe that what they were seeing was something they hadn’t been allowed to get away with when they were younger.”
For many, though, Black Flag and the other denizens of the church were outsiders and misfits, disrupting the order and peace of their Pleasant Valley Sundays. “We looked funny, we weren’t wearing bell-bottoms,” remembers Joe Nolte. “The general community did not like us, most of the kids did not like us. Hermosa was an easy-going, bohemian community, but it was also very nice, very pleasant, there was a beach. Who wanted to see a bunch of weirdos hanging around? ‘I paid a lot of money for this condo, and I don’t wanna have to see weirdos walking past my driveway, can’t they do something about these people?’ And I would sometimes think to myself, ‘Why are we doing this’? And I would feel bad for some of the regular people, sometimes. I remember walking down a peaceful street, with a girl who proceeded to snap the radio antennae of every car we passed.”
One wasted afternoon, Nolte and some friends considered selling guided tours of the church to the nosy locals. “We felt something of a freak show back in those days,” he remembers. “One morning I was walking through the main section of the church, and on the steps was a mannequin that had been dressed up to look mildly new wave or something, and inscribed on the forehead was the word ‘punk’, and there was a big knife through the mannequin. That was ‘fun’.”
Tensions with the wider community took an even darker turn on the evening of Monday September 24, with an arson attack on the building. “Somebody tried to light the church on fire from the outside,” says Joe, “so me and Dez Cadena ran up the street, because we had no cellphones in those days, to tell the Fire Department or police or somebody. We ran a couple of blocks, found a cop and said, ‘The church is on fire!’ Boom! They go off. And I found out later, they were considering us as suspects. There was, of course, a certain amount of police surveillance on the church. They wanted us out of there. The police station was a five minute walk away, so they could’ve just spied on us with binoculars if they’d wanted.
“I was hanging out there with Jeffrey Lee Pierce at one point, trying to convince him of what a great scene it was. And he said, nobody cares, a bunch of squatters in the basement, it’s not a scene. And I said, you live up in West LA, immune to the kind of stuff we have to go through! I was a bit in my cups at that point. We were arguing, and all of a sudden we had to douse all the lights, because the cops were outside shining flashlights in all the nooks and crannies, and we were hiding like we were in the French Resistance or something. Me and Jeffrey ended up bailing, and got 10 feet before the sirens started wailing, and the cops stepped out from behind us. They spent 15 minutes trying to find something, anything. ‘There’s got to be drugs here somewhere…’”
The church’s notoriety had begun to swell in the wake of press attention on the scene; both Slash and Flipside would publish profiles on the Hermosa Bay punks, along with photographs of their dilapidated base of operations. A piece in local newspaper the Herald Examiner, meanwhile, focusing on violence in the punk scene, provoked a visit from the local police, who began to harass Joe, Greg and Robo. “How many punkers do you have here?” asked one, “Five? Ten? A hundred?” “Better be careful walking down the street here,” added another, “the surfers don’t like the punk rockers.” The cops’ predictions came true later in October, when the guys were harassed outside the Church by a drunken one-legged hippie who yelled that punk rock was just “surf music”, before swinging a few punches in Gary’s direction. “That we didn’t get into more trouble was just dumb luck, I can only think,” says Joe. “It was still the Carter era, a relatively benign period.”
The Last played a show at the Troubadour in Hollywood on Thursday October 4, and Joe caught a ride back to the South Bay with Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Keith Morris, Ron Reyes “and probably 180 other people crammed in the Black Flag van. There were easily seven or eight of us in there, and naturally most of us were drinking beer. That’s a definite nono, and we got pulled over, and were all made to stand outside the car, with all these half-empty bottles and cans scattered about like so many tombstones. I thought, ‘Well, we’re going to jail’. And then suddenly, the cops got an emergency call. One of them cursed at us, said, ‘You guys are so damned lucky’, and they sped off. And we went home... Like I said, dumb luck.”
“To some of the people in the circles in which I was running, it was my responsibility, to be the fuckin’ little wild monkey... You know, you’ve got the organ-grinder, and he’s smoking his cigar, playing a tune on his box, and the monkey is tied in the box, dressed in the little suit and jumping around, acting all goofy and stupid... That’s pretty much what I was: the little performing monkey, with an M80 shoved up his ass.”
Black Flag continued to play sporadic club shows and parties throughout the autumn of 1979, including a couple of sorties to San Francisco, where they played the Mabuhay Gardens in the company of local punk firebrands The Dead Kennedys, a group who well understood the outlaw status their Hermosa Bay kindreds were beginning to earn. Their first trip up north ended with an extended graffiti spree across San Francisco.
“Ron and I drove up to the show with Greg Hetson,” says Joe, “in the open back of this pick-up truck, travelling the 400 miles to San Francisco. At the time, Jello Biafra, the Kennedys’ frontman, was running for mayor, in the wake of the Harvey Milk assassination. He wasn’t going to win, but it was good publicity. Afterwards, we drove around the streets of San Francisco in the dead of night, with Black Flag and Jello Biafra, the mayoral candidate, spray-painting every wall in sight. I think Keith was doing most of it.
“I remember being at a party at Target Video, a local underground video production company, and Keith and I were trying to invent a new version of bowling. We would stand at either end of a very long room filled with people, and the object was to roll beer bottles and see if they could connect without being stepped on. We had marginal success, but it was a great deal of fun. I remember the hipsters of San Francisco shaking their heads at our woefully suburban antics…”
A show in November, meanwhile, found the Flag and the DKs sharing the bill with British ska group Madness, whose spirited and vaude-villian 2-Tone stomp was an upbeat, lunatic parallel to the grittier fare played by the American groups.
“Madness were actually a lot of fun,” remembers Keith. “Jello described them as nothing but circus music. But I actually liked Madness, I thought they were really cool guys; they were actually, like, ‘Let’s bro down’. The guitar player, Chris, was really cool. He was a gardener, when he wasn’t in a band, he went out and trimmed hedges for a living. So we were exchanging, I was talking about how I worked in a fishing tackle shop, and we’d sell sinkers and hooks, and anchovies, and you’d go out on the pier and fish.”
The group spent the rest of the time planning out their projected debut album, which of course meant more rehearsals. “We normally rehearsed at least five or six times a week,” remembers Keith. “Our set list was all the songs that we knew how to play, 16 songs, so our rehearsals were probably four or five times as long as our set. We would play the same songs over and over, and if someone messed up one of the songs, we would go back to that song and play it two or three times, and then move on.
“I enjoyed rehearsing, for the most part. But I would be bummed if there was a really happening band that was playing that night, and I would have to come up with excuses to miss rehearsal. I just kind of burned out on the work mentality. I was working a day job, for my dad, and I was working with Greg in the SST electronics division. I would be working all day, and then rehearsing all night.”
These long rehearsal sessions took their toll on all the members, and impacted badly on relationships within the group. Joe Nolte remembers a rehearsal on Friday September 28 that went awry, leaving Greg in a state of frustration and black depression. Keith and Joe then absconded to go see The GoGos play at the Hong Kong Café, but Greg continued to brood, and cancelled the following night’s Black Flag gigs, at parties in Hollywood and Redondo Beach, because, he told Joe, “I can’t think of a single reason why we should play.”
In subsequent weeks, Keith would miss more and more rehearsals, and other residents at the church would step up to the microphone and cover for him. Keith began to feel more and more isolated within the group, and that exacerbated his problems with drugs and alcohol. “I was doing a lot of drugs, and I was drinking quite a bit. That’s like the major reason for me leaving Black Flag, because it wasn’t fun, and part of my fun was to drink away the bad stuff, or party away all the things in my life that I didn’t want to be a part of.”
“There was always friction,” remembers Joe. “There were a few of us who perhaps drank a little too much; I was one of them, Keith was one of them. He would get to that point where he would become surly and lash out at everyone. When you’re surly, and relatively incoherent, so people aren’t going to be able to talk to you, it’s kind of annoying for everybody, especially when you’re doing it in the recording studio.”
Matters came to a head during the Flag’s second session with Spot for the projected debut album, recorded at Media Arts that November. As ever, the Flag were recording late into the wee small hours, when it was cheapest. “We had one of Greg’s guitar cabinets out in the echoey hallway, turned up full blast at four the morning with both kitchen windows open onto the still night air,” remembered Spot. “That was enough to bring at least one complaint. Two night-prowling cops invited themselves up. As the cops were exiting they asked, ‘What band is this?’ I should have said something other than Black Flag, because they rejoined with, ‘Ah, yes! We’ve seen their graffiti on the Edison wall!’”60
The group already had four unused tracks from the Panic/Nervous Breakdown session with Dave Tarling in the can, including ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’, which had become a live favourite, with a lopsided drumbeat Robo later made his own, and a classic Ginn outsider lyric that Keith had invested with a frothing insolence, a braying and sarcastic roar, the loaded gun waiting to go off, with nothing to do but shoot his mouth off.
In addition, the Flag cut a further five songs: ‘Revenge’ was a frenzied, paranoid rant that spat bile in the direction of myriad imagined enemies, ‘Police Story’ a martial rumble that sang of the Flag’s ongoing conflict with the authorities, and how outnumbered and outgunned they were. ‘Depression’, meanwhile, was a fractured and snarling beast, a full-pelt dash that rode a fractured, squalling Greg Ginn guitar hurricane into Neanderthal instrumental breakdowns that articulated the seismic levels of frustration that fuelled the track, a frustration that was audibly bubbling over in the studio.
“The tape’s rolling,” leers Keith, sarcastically, in the opening seconds of ‘Clocked In’. When a couple more seconds pass without the band starting up, he adds, “Does [Spot] have to tell you, and hold your hand and shit?” The song itself, another dervish dash with the devil on its heels, channelled the rage of menial wage slavery, misdirecting the anger that should’ve been aimed at the boss towards a brick wall. The lyric was a Ginn original, but the man had an undeniable skill for ably voicing the indeterminate frustrations and angst of others; Keith himself could doubtless identify with the stresses contained within ‘Clocked In’.
As Keith glumly admits, he also identified with the avaricious drug-lust of his own ‘Wasted’, which the group re-recorded for this session. This take, however, sounds rushed, hasty and uninterested compared with the earlier version; for one thing, Greg’s guitars sound strangely raspy and thin this time round, lacking the bludgeoning heft of the Nervous Breakdown take, the juggernaut steamroll Dave Tarling had managed to capture. The true culprit, however, was Keith, who sounds oddly under-rehearsed and uninterested, with none of the vicious humour and lively attack of the original; he even stumbles over his lines on the second verse. He spits out his last line of “I was so wasted!”, ad-libbing a deadpan, “and I still am” in the song’s dying seconds.
As the two-day session drew to a close, Keith announced he was leaving the group. In fanzine interviews in the years that followed, Black Flag would retell the story in a manner that flattered them, and belittled their exiting singer. Gary told Ripper ‘zine that Morris quit because “he wanted to stay exactly the same. Our music was changing, and he didn’t like a lot of our new songs. We don’t just write four ‘Nervous Breakdowns’, just one; we don’t just pump ‘em out like that. It’s not a formula.
“And so,” he added, a tad cattily, “at a certain point, he didn’t want to take the risk that all his friends would go, ‘What a geek!’ at the new material that doesn’t sound like ‘Nervous Breakdown’. It’s an emotional thing, a fear of doing anything new. It’s a resistance to new things, and you find it especially when someone gets older.”61
“What was really happening was, people were taking sides,” says Keith, “and one of the things I disliked was the finger was always being pointed at me if things went wrong,” he remembers. “All of a sudden, there were a couple of camps within Black Flag; it was the Robo, Gary McDaniel, Greg Ginn camp, versus the Keith Morris camp. And in that battle, I would get my ass kicked. Whenever there would be arguments, disputes, everyone would be pointing their finger at me, and it would be my fault. Like, if we weren’t learning new songs fast enough, it was my fault. Coming to rehearsal after having drunk a six-pack of beer, maybe having snorted a couple of lines of coke, that would be my fault. They made me feel like I was the cement shoes attached to their feet.”
For Keith, the endless rehearsals had extinguished the fun of being in Black Flag, the simple joy in the friendships he shared with the group’s members. Without the lubrication of such bonhomie, the Flag rehearsals had turned into an endless grind for Keith. “Greg and I had started out as friends, going to shows and hanging out. But it got to the point where there was none of that. Robo, another one of the guys I hung out with quite a bit, stopped hanging out. After we’d get through rehearsing, I’d go to my space in the church, and it would just be me, myself and I.
“I guess our line of communication just ceased to exist, and that’s really important. There has to be some free space, some head time, we can’t be around each other in these grungey, dirty, filthy-carpet-covered rooms all of the time. We needed to get out and breathe some fresh air, rub elbows with our friends in other bands, and play more shows, instead of just rehearsing, rehearsing and rehearsing all the time.
“It was entirely my decision. For me, we had pretty much run our course. I love Robo, I still respect Greg, Gary kind of irritated me at times. But the fact of the matter is, when I left I felt no hatred towards them; it wasn’t like, ‘Fuck you guys, man, I don’t ever wanna see you again!’ It wasn’t like that. Because I still lived in the church and they were still rehearsing there. They probably breathed a sigh of relief, because I was completely in the throes of being a full-blown alcoholic cokehead, and it didn’t help that Robo was one of my suppliers. A couple of weeks later, I started my next group. The flow of the universe, at that time for me, went from being negative in Black Flag, to just blowing up and becoming a whole new thing.”
“At the time I thought he’d be back within a week,” remembers Joe Nolte. “But this time it wasn’t going to happen. And it was sad, because I knew it wasn’t ever going to be the same. That original line-up was so perfect. Keith quit at the worst possible moment, because the great Black Flag album was going to be recorded.
“But Keith was drinking too much. I think there were actual genuine difficulties within the group that were only exacerbated by booze. Musicians, at the best of times, walk a fine line to keep from killing each other. I think Keith just felt, ‘Aw, screw it, I’ll go get wasted, it can’t make things amazingly worse.’ In retrospect, Keith’s leaving was inevitable, and it could have happened earlier. It was just great that they managed to record that first single, and set themselves on their way to notoriety.”