“Keith was heckling me from the audience: ‘You’ll ne-e-e-ever make it in Bla-a-a-ck Fla-a-a-g.’ I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember any of the lyrics, so I’d written them out, and as I finished each epically short ditty, I’d crumple the sheet and toss it over my shoulder. I insisted on changing the lyric from ‘White Minority’ to ‘Purple Minority’, not to be the classic knee-jerk PC liberal about it, just erring on the caution tip over ambivalent lyrical intent. Someone sliced open a pillow and feathers were flying all over me and the stage for my big finale. Thankfully for me, it was a fun crowd and there was no tar in the building.”78
Having once again shed a vocalist, Black Flag faced even more upheaval as the summer of 1980 dawned; the more illicit activities at their residence at the church were rumbled by the building’s landlord, and the attentions of the local constabulary became too heavy a drag to tolerate, forcing the group’s exit from their ramshackle place of residence. “We’re Hermosians in exile,” explained Chuck Dukowski, to Ripper fanzine that September, adding that “if I return, the cops will give me a free apartment in the Hermosa jail”.79
“Black Flag left the church with a bang,” laughs Joe Nolte, who’d already ceased living at the building, the squalor and lack of showers having lost their appeal for the rocker. “It was getting old, you know? I had a job flipping burgers, and I couldn’t afford a car, so most evenings I’d pile into the Black Flag van and we’d drive off to Hollywood, to catch a show or a party. Otherwise, I’d be stuck by myself in the church, with no heat, and only the rats for company. When I could, I began sneaking back to my mom’s place, crashing on the couch and trying to get out before she woke up in the morning. She had a shower, you know? And a refrigerator.”80
Joe ultimately got an apartment with his brother Mike in Inglewood. Nevertheless, some of his possessions remained in the basement room he’d once shared with Ron Reyes. “Punk rock really was good-natured mayhem, with a heart of gold,” he says. “And then you have all these kids, basically destroying the church. And yet, I’d left this big mirror in the basement, which you would’ve thought was the ideal target for destruction. And apparently, somebody was going to smash it, until someone else said, ‘No, that’s Joe’s mirror, don’t break that.’ So, the mirror survived the chaos.”
True to the fierce DIY spirit he’d thus far displayed within Black Flag, Greg Ginn didn’t allow their exit from the church to scuttle the group’s forward momentum, securing new (if similarly degraded) rehearsal space in nearby Redondo Beach. Likewise, he refused to allow Ron’s exit from the group to scupper a series of shows he’d already booked in the weeks that followed. In response, he drafted in some replacements for Reyes who were unlikely to last the duration, but would mean they could still play these shows.
First up, for a strictly limited engagement of a show at the Fleetwood (where Reyes had quit the group), and a show in San Francisco, was a returning Keith Morris. “Circle Jerks were up and running, we were doing our thing,” remembers Morris. “But Black Flag was my first love; I’ve got the Black Flag bars tattooed on my heart, branded in my brain. Greg and Chuck asked me to fill in, and I knew that I was just filling in, that I wasn’t rejoining Black Flag on any permanent basis, because The Circle Jerks had made a record, it was very popular, and people really loved us, and we were selling out shows. So everything was cool, and I had no problem filling in for Ron Reyes for a couple of nights.”81
Travelling in the Black Flag van for the San Francisco show, at Mabuhay Gardens on Broadway, was Brendan Mullen, then playing with support band Geza X And The Mommymen, a group formed around Masque luminary, musician and record producer Geza X. “Brendan had never really gotten Black Flag,” says Morris, “but that weekend he got to hang out with us and know what kinda guys we were. And that’s when his opinion of us changed, when his appreciation of Black Flag made the turn.”
“We were far, far away from LA, and it was a whole different punk world up there,” remembers Mullen. “I was playing drums with Geza X and Black Flag were opening, I understood, thrown on at the last minute by club booker Dirk Dirksen, an avid fan of Geza X. Jello Biafra was also a fan of Geza’s, hence our opening a special show for The Dead Kennedys the following night, immediately after which Jello made his mayoral bid speech at City Hall.
“I was sitting upstairs at the venue, in this loft space overlooking the stage, swizzling a drink and a smoke, when suddenly this amazing thunderous roar erupted from downstairs. My glass clattered and slithered along the table as if driven by an earthquake tremble. I gawked over the balcony and was transfixed by Robo, who was able to hold together a guitar player, a bass player who leapt around who could barely play at all, and a raw as fuck vocalist.
“All of them raged, stomped and thrashed full bore, yet somehow making it feel tight ‘n right, like an even rawer, garage version of Fear, without the musicianly chops. Mixed reaction among my bandmates, but I was knocked out. The drunk waste-o kid from Masque 2 turned out to really rock - it was Keith - and I said I wanted to book them into the Whisky, where I occasionally booked shows, once we got back to LA.”
Mullen says he and his bandmates watched the Flag play their set to what was - save the Mommymen - a mostly empty room, before Geza X’s group took the stage, to perform for the members of Black Flag. “No one else there except Dirksen and the bartenders; the SF punks were waiting it out for the big one the next night, with the DKs. I think we were slated to play two sets apiece, but when no one showed Dirksen canned the second, muttering, ‘What’s the point?’, before shutting the club early on this disastrously slow midweek night. Afterwards, I got plastered with Keith and Chuck in their van and went on a Black Flag spray-tagging expedition around SF, where we bombed walls, alleys and sidewalks with Pettibon’s immortal logo.”
The Flag’s next, fleeting post-Reyes vocalist was another friend from their immediate circle, although Joe Nolte would never make it to the stage with the group. “I became a member of Black Flag for two weeks,” he explains. “The Last were getting ready to record our follow-up album, but Bomp! didn’t have the money, really, to finance it, and suggested we maybe cut it live, which in retrospect would’ve been a great idea.” Instead, Nolte hooked up with a local start-up studio that was willing to record the album on spec, provided they use the in-house producer. “And, for various reasons, the recording went kinda wrong. The album wasn’t released. It should be said, however, that the Black Flag folks all think it’s the best album ever made. And SST would have been gung-ho to put it out, but they were just this tiny, nonexistent label.”
The group began talks with Columbia Records, with an eye to releasing the album, but the esteemed label balked when they heard the botched sessions. “Columbia actually went so far as to say, ‘Would you guys consider re-recording?’ And we, collectively, said, ‘No, this is what we have, this is what you would get.’ So Columbia shook their heads.”
It was around this time that Greg asked Nolte if he would be willing to sing with Black Flag; that Joe was also a guitarist doubtless influenced Ginn’s decision, enabling Greg to focus on his guitar solos while Nolte handled rhythm, as he’d planned to with Ron. “I had a 12-string Rickenbacker at the time,” says Joe, “so we had a series of rehearsals, where I mirrored what Ginn was playing, but on this 12-string guitar. It was the most amazing sound, like if you could imagine a Chinese symphony orchestra playing Black Flag. We were able to mirror each other really well…”
While Nolte’s guitar added an electrifying new element to the group, he was less well-suited to the role of vocalist. “I still didn’t know the songs,” he admits. “I could do ‘Wasted’ pretty well, but I never bothered to learn the other lyrics... And also, I had been smoking since I was a kid, and my voice wasn’t very strong. At about the same time as the Black Flag show I was scheduled to sing at, we had a big The Last show to play, and after a couple of Last rehearsals, I strained my voice, and realised I wasn’t going to be able to play both shows. If I had played the Flag show, I would have had no voice for the Last show.”
The Last show in question was the first of a series of high-profile ‘comeback’ shows for the group, to garner them attention and momentum before shopping their unreleased second album to more labels. Ultimately, Nolte decided he couldn’t sing with Black Flag for the planned show, at the Fleetwood, on June 6. “And so I left them in the lurch, and bailed out at the very last second,” Nolte winces. “That was, I believe, the infamous show where people from the audience got up to sing, so that’s my fault too. I was too ashamed to go to the show myself though, I felt too bad. They were as nice as they could possibly be about it - I had a Last show I had to do, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do both. They had to accept it, and we didn’t become mortal enemies or anything, but they were certainly disappointed. I was disappointed too. It would have been fun, and I would certainly have sold more records had I joined them and chucked The Last [laughs]. Even at that time, nobody could have imagined how big things would get, with what came afterwards. It was a brief, wonderful moment, and of course, nothing was taped.”
The Last’s show, however, was a triumph, and the group sent tapes of their album out to the labels, and waited to get signed. “So we’re still feeling on top of the world,” remembers Nolte. “When you’ve just recorded an album, you can’t really see the flaws, you have no perspective. I was convinced we were going to get the record deal, and life would be wonderful. We sat, and waited for the phone to ring. And by the end of summer, the phone hadn’t rung.”
Newly warmed to the Flag, Brendan Mullen became the group’s unlikely next frontman. “I did one gig with Black Flag strictly for laffs, and to help out,” Mullen remembers, of a gig at the Vanguard Gallery in downtown LA on Tuesday June 10, which Mullen was co-promoting with the group as a Masque Presents... show. “Greg and Chuck asked me to help out since their friends, the Subhumans, had lost their LA anchor gig and were stranded here with no money.
“I spent an entire weekend with Greg, Chuck and Robo, rehearsing four or five hours a day with them in some seedy Redondo Beach storefront they’d taken over after they were booted from the church. Like the church and the Masque before it, there was tag graffiti and the same oily old carpeting tacked up to the walls. Since I had no car to get back to Hollywood, and I was also crashing on the floor there.”
Rehearsing with Black Flag gave Brendan a new perspective on the group, and their fearsome work ethic. “Even coming from a background like the Masque, I was still totally amazed at how primitively Black Flag really operated. During rehearsals, I’d say daft things like, ‘Where do I come in?’, and Chuck would just look at me and say, ‘I’ll just go ‘doo-doo-doo’ a few times and you jump in ...Whenever... it feels right... it’s easy, dude... ‘But where do these choruses come in? How do I know the difference between a verse and a chorus?’ ‘Oh, just feel it,’ said Greg.
“Everything was 150% feral thrash at max volume all the time, with nothing to discuss. Three hours in the afternoon and three or four more at night, the same 20-minute set, the same six or seven three-chord songs over and over and over again, until their fingers bled and my voice - such as it was - gave out. Black Flag would go at it ragin’ full-on with their trademark maxed-out vein-popping psycho onslaught, as if they were playing live,” laughs Mullen, “with no monitors to hear myself!
“To this day, I’ll never know how Robo managed to hold it all together, when his bandmates were each off in three different times, not knowing one bar from the next! That was Robo’s particular genius, and why I’d go see the Flag play any chance I got. He reminded me of this baldie, white French drummer who played as a duo with Memphis Slim for many years, with his ability to dance around weird, chaotic time, without losing his shit. I used to call his style ‘karate chop drumming’. During soundcheck, Columbian-born Robo - whose English was shaky at best - kept squinting his eyes in amusement and jabbing splintered sticks at me saying, ‘You jazz, man...you jazz!’ And I never knew if that was accusatory insult or compliment (the former, I’m sure).”
The show was, unsurprisingly, something of a baptism of fire. “Keith was heckling me from the audience,” Mullen laughs. “‘You’ll ne-e-e-ever make it in Bla-a-a-ck Fla-a-a-g.’ I knew I wouldn’t be able to remember any of the lyrics, so I’d written them out, and as I finished each epically short ditty - ‘Wasted’, ‘I’ve Had It’, ‘Nervous Breakdown’ - I’d crumple the sheet and toss it over my shoulder. I insisted on changing the lyric from ‘White Minority’ to ‘Purple Minority’, not to be the classic knee-jerk PC liberal about it, just erring on the caution tip over ambivalent lyrical intent. Someone sliced open a pillow and feathers were flying all over me and the stage for my big finale. Thankfully for me, it was a fun crowd and there was no tar in the building.
“Afterwards Greg suddenly piped up, ‘Well, what d’ya think...we got a bunch of dates up and down the Coast lined up...’ I was gobsmacked. Just as I was sheepishly working up the gumption to apologise for sucking so bad; I’d stupidly taken all this speed before the show, I thought that’s what you were supposed to do, but it had all backfired and wiped me instead of firing me up... I wanted to just slink on home, older and dumber.
“Even if it’s unclear he was offering me the gig permanently, Greg definitely wanted me for those dates up and down the West Coast, which I might have considered with a bit more cajoling. But I was already too idiotically committed to promoting more money-losing hall shows where I couldn’t just up and leave the bands high and dry. Even though they’ll probably continue denying it to their dying days,” Mullen concludes, “Black Flag actually really did offer me the Get In The Van option.”
Greg would find more success with his next selection for the Black Flag microphone, and this time, rather than choosing someone like Keith, or Brendan, or Joe - men who were of or close to his own generation - he invited another teenager to take the mic. Dez Cadena had been a fan of Black Flag since attending their very first show, at the Moose Lodge in Redondo, back in 1979, and had hung out at Black Flag rehearsals, shows and parties with his buddy Ron Reyes, soon becoming a member of the Flag’s wider family, and a regular at the church. Cadena was born in New Jersey on June 2, 1961, and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1974 where, like Reyes, he found himself alienated by life at high school. “I used to ditch school and go to the library and read, cos I didn’t like school,” he told Ripper, in 1980. “I used to hate school; all the hippies over there were smoking dope all the time. I haven’t even graduated high school, I need about a year to go.”
As the son of jazz legend Ozzie Cadena, Dez came to music naturally, picking up the guitar at the age of 12; indeed, he was serving as guitarist with the reformed Red Cross when Black Flag first approached him to sing with the group. “It was noon, and Chuck was drinking coffee and beer,” remembers Dez later, “and he said, ‘You know all the words to our songs, in a week we have to play a gig in Vancouver, why don’t you become our next singer?’”82
Cadena had never sung before, and he shared his reservations with Chuck, but, characteristically, Dukowski would not be shaken. “‘That doesn’t matter, we’ll try it today’, he said. “Black Flag was my favourite band, and these guys were my friends, so I didn’t want to let them down.”
Dez Cadena certainly did not let Black Flag down. Keith Morris’s vocals had lent the group a gleefully anarchic, mischievously sardonic quality, while Ron Reyes’ brief tenure with the Flag was characterised by the boundless energy and helter-skelter chaos of his singing. Dez’s style, however, was a definite step away from those of his predecessors, a blunt and flinty bark that matched Greg’s guitar for sheer, overdriven rage. Dez’s vocals punched hard and held their weight alongside the mangled-metal onslaught of the group, and he delivered them with a heedless passion, a focused fury that evoked vocal chords straining at breaking point, that conjured images in the mind of bulging neck veins, and spittle-flecked microphones.
His guitar-playing skills, meanwhile, again offered Greg the chance to throw off the shackles of playing rhythm with Black Flag and focus more on his wild, scabrous guitar solos. Dez wouldn’t pick up the instrument until towards the end of his tenure with the group, but early on in Dez’s stint Greg was sharing these plans with Ripper fanzine. “Dez plays guitar real good,” he said, “and eventually, he’s gonna play on some of the songs, the guitar as well as sing, so that way we can do a little bit more. We have some ideas for using songs that would be better with two guitars. We’ve been working on it, but as far as playing that way, we haven’t yet. I think it’s gonna fit in real good. It’ll just give us more to work with, more freedom for doing some stuff that I’ve always wanted to do. I always really wanted to have two guitar players, but when the band started, it was hard enough finding a drummer and a bass player that would play this kind of music.”
Dez was a fearsome presence onstage: lean, wiry, easily as tall as Greg, with an olive-skinned Mediterranean handsomeness, all jagged cheekbones and piercing eyes. The same age as the HBs slamming in the mosh pit, Dez stared down the Flag’s rowdy audience with a furrow-browed authority that belied his youth, winning their respect, if not quite calming their chaotic behaviour any.
Dez’s earliest show with the group was a farewell to the church, as the summer of 1980 faded into fall. The group had, of course, already moved out of the building, moving first to Redondo Beach and then, later, Torrance, the first two locations in a series that marked the group’s peripatetic nature during these early years. “They’d been getting flak from the city and notorious write-ups in the paper, so they decided to have one last party,” Cadena says. “At that point, the cops were following Chuck around everywhere he went, so he said, ‘OK we’ll get those cops. And for their little egos, we’ll make it even seem like they kicked us out.’”
For this final party at the church, the Flag opened the invitation up to their entire mailing list, including the militaristic, rabble-rousing Orange County contingency who, with predictable mayhem, took to demolishing the church from the inside out. As the melee reached boiling point, the police arrived, and the Flag quickly loaded their amplifiers and instruments into their nearby van, peeling out onto the highway, and along to the next date of the West Coast tour that followed. “On the way out,” remembers Dez, “one of the cops got a hold of Dukowski and said, ‘If I ever see you here again, you’re either going to jail or the hospital - or both.’”
As the Flag snaked their way up the West Coast, to again play Vancouver, they fell afoul of their former singer, Ron Reyes. Since moving to the city after quitting the group, Reyes had immersed himself in the local scene. “The punk-rock scene there was not as developed,” he remembers, “and I was drawn to that, the purity, and the organic nature of the scene. It was a small scene, so a lot of people were in multiple bands, people like Wimpy, who was in the Subhumans, and DOA... They shared one another, and there was a real close, family-like atmosphere. Drugs, in particular the heroin, hadn’t really made it into the scene, whereas in LA, certainly in Hollywood, it had already started to take its toll. So I just immersed myself in the Vancouver scene, and joined every band I could. But the beauty of it was, it was never, ‘Hey, let’s join a band and take over the world!’ It was, ‘Hey, let’s go play the Smiling Buddha next Sunday!’ And that was it, that was the only impetus for doing it. Some of the stuff I did was serious, some of the bands had ambitions; but for the most part, they were what we called ‘Fuck’ bands, and that was it.”83
Reyes says that when he heard of Dez’s enrollment in Black Flag, his first reaction was, “‘Great’, because I love Dez, I thought he was fantastic, another South Bay boy, part of the family... It was just perfect. I would’ve been pissed if they’d gone for anyone else, Dez was the absolute natural next choice.” However, when Black Flag swept into town, Reyes didn’t greet his old friend with open arms, but rather a closed fist, wrapped around a brick. As Cadena pasted flyers about the city for that evening’s show, a soused Reyes attacked him, smashing the brick into his head. “It crumbled,” remembered Cadena, later. “I don’t know what it was made out of. I didn’t want to fight him, but he began throwing punches; he was really, really drunk. Someone finally pulled him away.”
Later that evening, Reyes put another brick through the windshield of the Flag’s van, and called the Canadian border patrol on the group; on discovering the Flag had no work permits to cover their presence in Vancouver, they were speedily escorted out of the country, unable to play their second show the following night. Trying to make sense of why his friend had so violently turned against them, Cadena reasoned that it must have been resentment from his taking the Black Flag microphone, along with the fact that during Ron’s period with the group, Cadena hadn’t often gone to see him perform. “I was excited for him,” says Cadena, “but I just preferred Keith.”
Today, Reyes is remorseful for his behaviour that night, but says there was no dark motivation behind his actions. “It’s really unfortunate, because over the years, stories emerge, and a lot of them aren’t too accurate, right? But me and Dez were close, we were never enemies. When Black Flag came up to Canada for that tour, things got a little ugly there, but it was totally because I was in a drunken stupor. I absolutely adore Dez, but, you know, you do stupid things when you’re drunk. Outside one of the shows, we got in a fight somehow, I threw a brick through the window of their van, and a bunch of other stuff went down. But it wasn’t because I hated those guys, or because they’d done me wrong, or had changed my name... It had nothing to do with any of that. It was just being young, dumb, and drunk, a drunken misadventure.”
Vancouver proved a mere blip, however, and Cadena soon slipped confidently into the role of Black Flag frontman, Greg Ginn later telling Eric Blair, in 2003, that “in a lot of ways, Dez was the best vocalist, and probably most people’s favourite singer in Black Flag”.84
Dez’s tenure as frontman would come at a crucial time for the group, as they began to play more and more shows outside of California, embarking on their first proper cross-country tours. His shows, however, would also be marred by the most severe confrontations with the police that Black Flag would ever experience in their career. The local South Bay cops had proved a serious impediment to the Flag’s operations since early on in their career, but as 1980 wore on they would find even more fearsome adversaries, in the form of the infamous LAPD.
“I started running and throwing shopping carts behind me to evade my police captors. In the fog of war, broken bottles were flying everywhere. Car windows were being smashed-in with bricks and bandana-wrapped engineer boots. People were fighting and scuffling around. It was like a war with no bullets. Instead, it was punches, kicks, bites, tears, knives, rocks, batons, sticks, shopping carts, trash [and] debris, egg cartons, mirrors broken off cars, antennas snapped off Mercedes... you name it! It was all around you. But you know what... It was fun!”85
It would take the riots of 1992 - which followed the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been videotaped beating black motorist Rodney King after flagging his vehicle down - for the wider world to learn of the strong-arm tactics employed by the Los Angeles cops throughout the latter half of the 20th century. However, all those involved in Los Angeles’ underground youth cultures of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties were sickeningly familiar with the LAPD’s operations, and the reputation of their Chief of Police, Daryl Francis Gates.
Gates would later win infamy for theorising that black suspects were more likely to die from his officers’ restraining ‘choke holds’, “because their arteries do not open as fast as on ‘normal’ people”86, and for arguing that even casual drug users should be taken out and shot, fair targets in the War On Drugs. As part of his efforts in this latter conflict, Gates founded Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), an anti-drug programme that saw police offers enter schools and lecture students on the evils of intoxicants, requiring the school-kids to sign pledges of abstinence, for which they would receive T-shirts emblazoned with the DARE logo, and the slogan “To keep kids off drugs”. In 2001, the US Surgeon General declared that DARE’s methods simply did not work, while their distinctive T-shirts have become ironic attire for the underground youth; Nick Oliveri sports one on the back sleeve of the debut album by Queens Of The Stone Age, whose infamous single ‘Feelgood Hit Of The Summer’ quoted a list of their favourite illicit highs as its chorus.
Lifelong cop Gates had reached the rank of Inspector, when the Watts riots of 1965 swept through the mainly black Southern Los Angeles district, after a squabble over a parking violation sparked off long-simmering tensions within the working-class community there. Six days of rampaging followed, resulting in nearly 4,000 arrests, 34 deaths, and almost $40 million of property damage, an uprising quelled only by an influx of 3,000 National Guardsmen into the battle scene.
The riots emboldened an authoritarian like Gates. In the aftermath, he was instrumental in the formation of the LAPD’s Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) team, a crack squad of armed troops trained to counter riot situations with unequivocal displays of force. However, the kind of confrontation that would justify violent acts of suppression, and prove the SWAT team’s effectiveness to any who witnessed them, was in short supply. Instead, Gates directed his storm troopers down to the Sunset Strip, where the first flowering of the Los Angeles underground rock scene was occurring, groups like Buffalo Springfield drawing young and wild audiences to shows at former folk clubs like the Whisky-A-Go-Go and Gazzari’s.
“Growing traffic problems and the constant presence of thousands of teenagers drew complaints from merchants, and the Sunset Strip Chamber Of Commerce urged the police to intervene,”87 wrote Fred Goodman, in his excellent book The Mansion On The Hill. The LAPD and local sheriffs instituted 10pm curfews, and dealt with late-night teens with cold brutality, assaulting and handcuffing their detainees.
In response, the teens banded together on November 12, 1966, to protest the police harassment, as up to 3,000 youths converged on Sunset Boulevard, stopping traffic and winning the fistfighting ire of some spectating servicemen. Reporter Brian Carr wrote in the pages of the Los Angeles Free Press that the teenagers he interviewed argued that “their defiance of some social conventions does not mean that they are either imbeciles or criminals, that it takes intelligence on their part to make a choice that is different from that of the majority. And those under eighteen say: ‘Shortly we’ll be asked to fight in the dark jungles of Vietnam. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to visit the area of our choice in Los Angeles after 10pm?’”88
As the face-off wore on, the clashes became more violent on both sides. “The shit hit the fan on Sunset Boulevard,” remembered musician Richard Davis to Jimmy McDonough in his superlative Neil Young biography, Shakey. “A bunch of teenagers flipped out at being rounded up at ten o’clock every night. They’d run down the street, burning cars, smashing windows, screaming and yelling, protesting their own mistreatment.”89 The police violence would inspire Stephen Stills’ haunting ‘For What It’s Worth’, Buffalo Springfield’s breakthrough 1967 single; the brooding folk-rock tune conflated the police harassment with the deaths occurring in Vietnam, and eulogised the Sunset Strip protests of the previous year.
The parallels between the Sixties Sunset Strip scene and the punkrock movement in LA weren’t lost on Keith Morris. “I think of us really as the second wave of LA punk-rock bands. Because I firmly believe that the first generation of punk rock in LA - even though they were hippies from Laurel Canyon - were the bands playing the Whisky-A-Go-Go, who took part in the riot on Sunset Strip, when the cops showed up in full force, beating up on the hippies. That was absolutely the same thing as the police beating up the punk-rockers: ‘We don’t like you, we don’t like what you stand for, so here we are, we’re going to fuck with you’. It was the same thing, just a different time.
“Maybe the hippie mentality was different from the punk-rock mentality, the hippie mentality wasn’t nearly as aggressive. You hear all these ‘punk-rock’ sentiments of, like, ‘Kill the hippies!’. And that’s fine, when you’re angry and you’re energetic and you’re young and you’re pumped up, you got a hard-on and its rubbing against the front of your jeans, and your brain is on fire and you’ve splashed some alcohol on top of it ... But the hippies were opposed to the majority of the same things that we were opposed to, and they were getting their asses kicked just as much as we were.”
Gates’ LAPD cracked down on the punk-rockers with exactly the same extreme prejudice they’d displayed with the hippies on Sunset Strip. But while Black Flag would provoke the police’s most sustained and forceful attention from the LAPD, it was a gig by Hollywood punk girl-group The Go-Gos, later to win themselves mainstream success with their polished new wave, that became perhaps the most infamous confrontation between the punks and the cops.
The show had been booked for Saturday March 17, 1979, St. Patrick’s Day, at the grand Elk’s Lodge near Macarthur Park, an impressive building that boasted fine Neo-Gothic architecture throughout its Grand Hall and breath-taking entrance. Thanks to the decline in Elk’s membership in recent years, the building was later sold on to become a luxury hotel, the Park Plaza, and is often used as a filming location, notably by David Lynch for his 1990 film Wild At Heart; the movie’s violent opening scene featured actor Nicholas Cage as Sailor Ripley, smashing a potential assassin’s head to a pulp on the Elk Lodge’s vast, sweeping staircase.
The bill for that night was like a roll-call of Masque regulars; X were headliners, supported by The Go-Gos, Alley Cats, The Plugz and The Zeroes, although the majority of the groups didn’t get to play, as riot police swept the venue as the evening wore on.
“It was nasty,” remembers Ron Reyes, in the audience that night. “People were getting beat up, and we were running for our lives... It felt like the whole LA SWAT team was upon us. People got hurt, it was an awful, terrible thing. I don’t remember anything like that happening in Hermosa Beach. Cops there would just cruise around, and make their presence known.”
“It was a lot of ridiculous violence,” adds Red Cross’s Steven McDonald. “I don’t remember exactly when it went from peaceful to violent, but the cops were there, and at some point they were encouraging people to leave. But really there was no reason, the venue could accommodate a thousand people, and there were maybe 300 people there. It was really just that they didn’t want this ‘element’ in the neighbourhood. I think there was some badgering going on between the cops outside and some people maybe yelling stuff at them, like ‘Piiiigs’ or whatever. And then, at some point someone got hit, I think a photographer grabbed for something in his bag and got hit with a baton.”90
“I’d decided to go out and smoke a cigarette,” remembers Keith Morris, of the night. “I went out the front door, took a left turn, went over to the main street there, and I started to see the police in their riot gear, lining up. And I’m thinking, this isn’t right. Something’s going on here. So I turned and headed back to the front door, and these cops were right on my tail, and moving fast. Once they broke into their gallop, they were coming like a fuckin’ black wave. They came through the front door, and I only had time to take a sidestep and sneak into the men’s room.
“I grabbed a couple of friends and said, ‘We need to hang out in here, because some shit’s going down.’ And then the cops came into the Lodge, swinging, and I didn’t know what happened until afterwards. I was safe in the men’s room. The police didn’t even bother to check it out. I actually breathe a sigh of relief over that, because they came in and they were cracking skulls... They came right up the stairs, where maybe a hundred kids were hanging out. And they came with shields, and batons, just swingin’ and shoving and pushing and kicking.”
“It seemed to happen so fast” says Reyes. “All of a sudden, there were cops everywhere, and everybody was out on the street, and it seemed like something out of a movie ... I don’t know how many cops there were, but it seemed like the whole bloody force was out there. And like I said, people were getting hurt. I remember a bunch of us were just running, in every direction, and the cops were yelling at us, people were running and tripping over each other. It was just chaos. I don’t remember getting hurt myself, I think I escaped pretty well that night, but it was... kind of like, ‘Wow. The police don’t like this.’”
“My parents were there,” remembers Steven McDonald, “waiting outside in their little Toyota for us. And we were inside, really wanting to see X, and anxious that the show was running late. Between bands, we’d hang out on the grand staircase, just outside the ballroom, wondering, ‘Are our parents out there? Will we have to go out and negotiate with them to stay for X?’ And that was what was going through our minds, when all the violence broke out. The cops were just clobbering people over the head, you couldn’t get out without having to try and escape them. And all I know is that my dad was at that doorway, he saw what was going on, he saw them hitting people and stuff, and that’s when they went from sitting in their car, waiting for us, to my dad getting out of the car, diving into the battle zone and grabbing us, right as we were trying to make our way out, like some dramatic, heroic moment.
“It was intense, and my parents, for the first time, saw this kind of shit happening; up until then, they were trusting, law-abiding citizens, but I think they saw it as a ridiculous act against youth culture; it was the first time they’d really been exposed to all of that. So on one level, they felt like our negative ‘punk’ attitudes towards authority were somewhat validated or justified at that moment. But at the same time, they felt really afraid to let their kids go out, because the people who are supposed to be protecting their kids are actually the ones putting them in danger. I remember driving back from the show, and my dad yelling at us, telling us we were never going to another show again.”
“I don’t know how many people were arrested,” says Keith Morris. “Both Slash and Flipside ran photos from the riot. One of the photos was one of the Atta brothers, who played in the Middle Class; one of them was pointing at his girlfriend’s head, where she not only had a black eye but also stitches, from the sort of blow that gives you a hardcore concussion. I know that she was one of the casualties.”
Joe Nolte’s younger brother Dan was in the audience at the Elk’s Lodge that night, a 13-year-old punker awaiting X’s performance. In his journal, after the show, he wrote: “David, Marz and I went to the car and watched the action. There was cops everywhere. They blocked off the streets, they roamed the park, they had a helicopter flying around - spotting a big light on us. Then Joe, Mike, and some other guy came and our mission began. A bunch of other shit, I can’t even remember, happened before we got back home where I sat back and watched Monty Python And The Holy Grail. We’re mad, Los Angeles Piggy Department! What happened on March 17, 1979 wasn’t a police riot? Oh no? Know why? Because the police said so, and everyone knows police don’t lie (don’t you believe it).”91
The St Patrick’s Day Massacre, as it would later become known, left the punks bloodied, but also emboldened their resolve against the authorities, who’d reacted to their culture with an entirely unjustified amount of brutal force. “That was when we all pretty much agreed that we hated the fuckin’ LAPD,” says Keith Morris. “Because it was totally unnecessary. There were no criminal activities, it was just a gathering of people. Their behaviour was typical of any kind of authority group, saying, ‘Let’s go in and show them who’s the boss.’ They thought we were an affront to their authority, an affront to their egos, an affront to their arrogance, to their sensibilities. They didn’t like it, because they weren’t a part of it; they didn’t wanna be, they thought it was anti-American, anti-establishment. Which, of course, it was.”
The violence at the Elk’s Lodge didn’t politicise every punk. “I didn’t really care,” says Ron Reyes. “It wasn’t going to stop us from doing what we were doing. We were careful to preserve what we had, so we didn’t want to stand out in the streets and rub the cops’ noses in it. It was an act of self-preservation, in the sense that, this is cool, we like what we have here, so let’s not blow it. But on the other hand, we were not going to restrain or constrict it beyond what we had to.
“I actually experienced violence and persecution from the jocks from Hermosa, Redondo and Manhattan beaches, where we’d play and carloads of jocks from Redondo Beach would show up and beat us up. One time, a bunch of us were coming from the liquor store, on our way to the Fleetwood, and we got circled by a group of people with bats, and I got my ass kicked by these jocks who hated punk-rockers. That was really the only persecution and violence that I experienced myself. I mean, the cops not digging what was going on, I didn’t care, it didn’t really matter. Even when we got arrested as a band at Blackie’s one night and got thrown in jail, I didn’t care. But it was a drag, when you were walking down your own street, and someone who wore a different outfit than you would start beating on you. That sucked, that pissed me off. I was like, come on, live and let live.”
“I was running from the police after one Black Flag show,” remembers photographer Glen E. Friedman, “and I got hit in the face with a baseball bat. I got beat up by these guys, whose car windows had been smashed in by some other punks. I thought I was running from the police, but I was running from these guys. Of all people, the soft-spoken Raymond Pettibon came to my rescue, and said, ‘Hey, this guy’s not who you’re looking for, he didn’t do anything wrong!’ And I was literally lying in the middle of the street, trying to stand up, after being knocked in the head with a baseball bat.”92
“Politically speaking, I don’t really know who was the aggressor in these confrontations,” says Steven McDonald, “but shit used to happen. It was my opportunity to participate in youth culture; the last time it had happened prior to that was the hippie movement in the Sixties, the cops battling youth culture on the Sunset Strip. But to unite a group of people you need to have a common enemy, and the LAPD became our enemy. And Black Flag certainly found a way to unite people, and kinda cash in on it.”
For Joe Carducci - initially observing the police’s tactics from afar in San Francisco, where he was working in record distribution, and later experiencing it close up, as part of the Black Flag family - the LAPD’s violent overreaction to the punk scene was simply a fascistic show of force. “They got all this SWAT team paramilitary equipment after the Watts riots, and they never got to use any of it. I think they were just testing out their equipment on the punk-rock scene, because nothing really called for it. They wanted to make an overwhelming show of strength. And the Elk’s Lodge riot began a run of several years of it.”93
Black Flag’s subsequent shows throughout the fall of 1980 would often provoke brutal police intervention. “The police were a terrible problem and generated a huge amount of the violence themselves,” remembers Chuck Dukowski. “Many, many shows had no real problem until the police came and beat everyone up. They took their skills from the Sixties riots and used them on us. It was child’s play for them; we were just a few hundred instead of thousands. We looked weird, public sympathy was not with us. At a certain point, we got to joking about it, the ridiculousness of it. We would just load our gear and wouldn’t be allowed to play. Over and over.”94
Although he was aware of the crowds such publicity-attracting conflicts would draw, for Chuck the police attention was mostly a drag, and a distraction. “There’s a lot of talk about the violence at Flag shows,” he says, “and there was violence. But I think it’s important to remember that people also had a great time at our shows. That’s why we were popular - we were a formidable live band.”
This was a point the band would unequivocally prove throughout their fall tour, which they provocatively titled ‘The Creepy Crawl’, in reference to the burglary and vandalism missions undertaken by members of the Manson Family, who, led by their psychotic figurehead, Charles Manson, would break into the houses of monied Los Angelenos, stealing their property, daubing their rooms with animals’ blood, and urinating on the floors. Charles Manson’s bloody tear through Hollywood society terrorised the rock cognoscenti of the day, and culminated in the brutal murder of actress Sharon Tate - pregnant with director Roman Polanski’s unborn child - and several of her party guests in the Polanski home.
Along with the growing bloodshed in Vietnam, and The Rolling Stones’ disastrous show at Altamont Speedway (where fan Meredith Hunter was murdered by Hell’s Angels the group had hired to police the free concert), Manson’s rise signalled the end of the hippie age. His mythos was appropriated by many punks, aware of both his grisly and compelling story, and his ability to provoke the hippie generation by even the merest invocation. “Charles Manson is one of America’s great poets,” argues legendary punk performer Lydia Lunch, “if you’ve ever heard any of his parole problems. He had a small problem with killing other people, but if he could have channelled his poetry, maybe there’d still be a few more Hollywood superstars around today. I’d say Manson had a big impact on everyone of my generation.”95
Raymond Pettibon, Black Flag’s dark artistic genius, found much inspiration in the Manson mythos for his artwork, and for Black Flag’s gig posters and flyers. His illustration for Black Flag’s October 8 show at the Whisky A-Go-Go featured a blonde woman sidling up to a black-eyed Manson, with an ‘X’ carved into his forehead; the accompanying text read, “Charlie, you better be good. It wasn’t easy getting in here, you know.” At the bottom of the poster, Pettibon had scrawled, in blood-dripping text, “Creepy crawl the Whisky”. Black Flag understood the potency of invoking Manson to advertise their performance at the venerated hippie landmark, and gleefully drew a parallel between their punk audience invading the Whisky dance floor, and the Manson family slipping into the homes of the wealthy hippies.
“That was compelling, very potent iconography Raymond pulled out,” remembered Chuck, to Mojo’s Jay Babcock, “and really, pretty revolutionary at the time. It’s like, okay, you wanna get confrontational with that generation? Step up with something like that and people freak out. And even though Manson’s got long hair, the punk audience accepted the images and their power.”96 That Daryl Gates had been in charge of the LAPD as they struggled to capture Manson and his minions in the Sixties just made the gesture all the more provocative.
“The virile sensuality of the hippie-gone-psycho was immediately powerful, and I enjoyed the newness and culturally local aspects of it in the Black Flag context,” says Chuck, now. “Ray tapped the imagery and the emotional well was deep in the culture. Immediately it caused a surge of interest. That said, I was not an admirer of Charlie.”
An early Creepy Crawl occurred at the Hideaway club in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, on Friday September 19, advertised with a Raymond Pettibon illustration of a pair of hands murderously brandishing a pair of gardening shears. $4 bought you admission to a bill that included performances by The Descendents, The Stains, Circle Jerks, Geza X and The Mommymen, and Black Flag. However, thanks to the LAPD’s intervention, the Flag hardly got to play a note. “Outside in the streets were hundreds of police, closing off entire blocks of the city,” remembers Glen E. Friedman. “Black Flag had just got onstage, when the police got there, and it was an insane mob scene, just totally unbelievable.”
A couple of weeks later, on Saturday October 4, the Flag played at North Park Lions Club in San Diego, a show that was recorded by a bootlegger, on primitive equipment. The cheap tape recorder captured a combustive show; as the group lean into the set’s fourth song, ‘I’ve Heard It Before’, Greg’s guitar swarms and swirls like a police siren. Dez leans into the microphone and barks to the audience, “I think the cops are outside…”
Four nights later, Black Flag were set to play their two prestigious, high-profile sets at the Whisky, in the company of Canadian friends DOA, a show that also ended in a riot, as the police cordoned off the Sunset Strip, and the LA County Sheriffs prevented the groups from playing their second sets of the night. “The first show came off pretty much without a hitch,” remembers Friedman, “but by the time of the second show, Sunset Boulevard was all closed off. We watched the riot as it happened, from upstairs, and it was just total insanity: police really worried that kids were getting out of control, they were afraid of punk rock. Like Chuck says, it was a new thing challenging their authority.
“Cops were beating the fuck out of kids, putting their faces into the ground, handcuffing them to newspaper vending machines on the sidewalk. I have to tell you, we were in awe... And then, of course, you’d have one drunk punk who’d throw a glass bottle at a cop car going by, because it was an easy target. Like, why not? There’s more of us than there are of them now, let’s have some fun here, we can run away, get away.
“During the show, I was on stage, behind the drum kit, when the whole band had already left, except for the roadies tearing down the equipment. They’d only gotten to play a couple of songs, and they’d pushed everyone out of the hole through one back exit. I explained I was taking pictures for this group, and they just dragged me by my camera, threw me to the ground, and said ‘Get the fuck out of here.’ That same night, a friend of mine got her leg broken by police, because they were just trampling on people. They would hit people with their billy clubs, to scare people away. They were saying, ‘Never come back here, don’t go to these shows.’”
For Friedman, the police harassment wasn’t enough to discourage him from taking his camera to every Black Flag show he could. “I was just completely floored by them, the sound of Greg’s guitar,” he says. “I can’t tell you how inspired and excited I was by this sound that was perfectly matching the angst I had in my own head, you know? Just to release it. Even when I was photographing a show, very often I used to just kneel down right next to Greg’s amp, so I had his guitar blasting into my ears, at full volume, for most of the show, and then occasionally I would take pictures. Or I would just sit there down the front, not taking pictures.”
Black Flag’s next big show was at BACE’s Hall, on Friday, October 24. Anticipating more of the same police harassment at this show, and tiring of the predictability of the gig’s early closure, they invited a camera crew from respected NBC news magazine show Tomorrow to film the concert, for a proposed show focusing on the punk scene, thinking this might discourage the police from attacking the audience, or at least that their violent behaviour might be exposed to mainstream audiences.
“Sure enough,” Chuck told Mojo’s Jay Babcock, “when we showed up for soundcheck, the cops already had their command post set up across the street. They had helicopters already circling the whole time we were loading in and setting it up. They were just looking for any excuse to jump on that shit. Nothing rough was going on inside in terms of malicious violence, but boom there they are, the police. They came in and they copied their strategies from the Romans and busted with the phalanx. I didn’t stop playing. Why? You know they’re gonna turn the damn shit off anyway. I said, ‘Fuck this.’ We didn’t stop. And I don’t think we should have stopped.”
In the audience that night was Brendan Mullen, who’d begun booking shows at BACE’s himself, with an eye to developing the venue into the third Masque club. “It happened all the time,” he sighs. “I’d find a new venue, try to get it going, until some other totally inexperienced wankin’ wannabe punk promoter would book the same venue on other nights, and fuck it up with cops and building management so they’d ban all live shows for good, including my professional punk promoter’s ass.” Also on the bill were UXA, and a thrashy HB band called The Screws, whose following, says Mullen, consisted of “skinhead gnarlers strutting the place with boners to start shit”.
Of the “shit”, which eventually and inevitably and decidedly splattered the fans that evening, Mullen says Black Flag “provoked it. I was hovering around the lobby when a battalion of helmeted riot cops pulled up. I recognised head cop right away; we’d had previous discussions during shows I’d promoted at this venue. I’d made handshake deals that he’d leave me alone if I got security to halt teens from openly brown-baggin’ booze on the sidewalk and throwing up in the parking lot. Another contractual restriction was cutting the shows by 12am with all bands and production staff out of the building by 1am.
“‘Tonight has absolutely nothing to do with me,’ I said, noticing half the security people hadn’t shown up, and those who did were useless to stop hordes of HB kids from sprawling all over the sidewalk and parking lot, conspicuously chug-a-lugging away from open containers and smashing their empties against the wall. Kids had also been ripping out booths and other fixtures when building management panicked and called cops in. They’d lived through Fear and the DK’s, whose shit-faced audiences left a right mess, but that was easily cleaned up next day for an extra 50 bucks, plus the never-returnable damage deposit, but at least no one got hurt. Tonight was different. Some of these HB fuckers were up for it. And Black Flag knew it before they went on.”
Among the various tribes rubbing nervy shoulders at BACE’s that night was a group of Orange County skateboarders, including Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Steve Alba. The group broke into the venue via a side window and, wrote Alba, “almost immediately, we get into a fight with a whole bunch of skinheads who were just getting into the scene”.
“The head cop said, ‘You better say something, do something fast,’” says Mullen, “‘cause we’re goin’ in there...’ I tried to reason with him, saying it was a newbie inexperienced promoter. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘they’re almost over... only a couple of songs left on their set. As soon as they’re done, these kids are going to vamoose back to the ‘burbs. Go in there now, and it’s gonna be a total riot, and someone might get killed.’ It worked; the cop said, ‘OK, we’ll be back in 20 minutes. But if they don’t cut it by then, we’re goin’ in with baseball bats’.”
Acting as stage manager for the group that night was their producer/engineer friend, Spot. “Outside the hall was a state of near pandemonium,” he wrote, “with hundreds of punks milling about, dozens of cops wanting to shut the place down, photographers, reporters, and TV cameras waiting for the inevitable riot. Inside the hall existed a state of real pandemonium, which I was trying to hold together. At one point I was given the thankless job of announcing that, ‘The LAPD riot squad is outside and we have to shut it down! Black Flag will not be able to play!’ To which I was showered with angry ‘Fuck You!’s, beer cans and bottles with or without their contents, and hundreds of warm slimy globules of spit. I then thought, maybe I can talk the cops out of stopping the show. I pushed through the thick sweaty crowd and under the icy, quivering light of the circling helicopter I somehow managed to convince the officer in command to let Black Flag play a short set. Which they did. The cops then came inside and joined the party.”97
“The Flag finished up their set five or 10 minutes later,” remembers Brendan, “and then launched into an insanely long version of ‘Louie Louie’. The band was finishing up this encore when cops returned. ‘Brendan, you told me this was all over in 20 minutes...’ I said, ‘Well, this is the last song. They’re done...’ ‘Well, they don’t look very much like they’re done to me.’
“Just as they finished up, the promoter mentioned to the band that cops were outside. One of ‘em got on the mic, hollering shit like, ‘The fuckin’ pigs are outside, man, trying to shut us down... Are we gonna take it? What are we gonna do ‘bout it?’ I contend Black Flag knew exactly what the consequences would be when they launched into some of the same songs they’d already played. And so, head cop pushed me out of the way, and his mob dived in to the hall. Once they chased all the kids out with billy clubs (I didn’t see ‘em hit anyone), there was a seething mass of angry, riled-up kids all over the parking lot and the sidewalk. Hell broke loose after a few of them began lobbing bottles at cops when told to disperse.”
“Tension was building as the police went on tactical alert,” wrote Alba. “The punks were ‘Sieg Heil’-saluting the LAPD, trying to goad the cops into attacking. The police commander blew the whistle to clear the area. All hell broke loose, like the riot scene in the movie Quadrophenia, cops beating down everybody in sight with billy clubs, shotguns, mace, water-hoses, you name it. Some girl next to me got a club to the head and blood spurted out like a geyser. I went down to help her and WHACK! I got struck across the back with a baton.
“I started running and throwing shopping carts behind me to evade my police captors. In the fog of war, broken bottles were flying everywhere. Car windows were being smashed in with bricks and bandanna-wrapped engineer boots. People were fighting and scuffling around. It was like a war with no bullets. Instead, it was punches, kicks, bites, tears, knives, rocks, batons, sticks, shopping carts, trash and debris, egg cartons, mirrors broken off cars, antennas snapped off Mercedes... you name it! It was all around you. But you know what... It was fun!”
Flipside magazine had sent a reporter to cover the show, and his review focused on the riot, and the police’s heavy-handed tactics. “Everyone was getting pissed off because the three rent-a-cops at the front door were spraying mace into their eyes,” he wrote. “We walked in and the place was already halfway trashed. Black Flag had a soundcheck and began to play, they were sounding great but it was already midnight, and the cops were getting restless. The newsmen were outside and the poseurs were too, posing for the camera as always. Black Flag was playing one of their best songs, ‘Police Story’, appropriate for the occasion. The cops came in and were pushing everybody out, busting some heads while doing it and it was crazy. Anyway, the cops chased everyone away, and we left. You’ve seen one riot, you’ve seen ‘em all!”98
Soon after the show, Brendan Mullen invited Greg Ginn as a guest on a radio show he hosted on Los Angeles station KPFK. “I thought we would discuss the BACE’s show, and its implications,” remembers Brendan. “Greg surprised the hell out of me by insisting the kids should have thrown bottles at cops, that the cops deserved it. ‘But Greg, you’d already done your show... And you can’t say those kids weren’t totally trashing the place... And there was no security to stop ‘em! What the fuck were these ageing Bulgarians supposed to do, stand there and let the Screws’ crowd trash their social club? And you take total advantage of that by winding these HB boneheads up even more than they already were...?’ Greg got really angry and unflinchingly dogmatic. I guess it was a classic situation, of a moderate trying to talk to an extremist.”
The BACE’s Hall show had ended up a violent, disastrous mess, but at least the NBC cameras had been rolling long enough to capture the violence of the police, collecting evidence in support of Black Flag’s claims that they were being persecuted by the LAPD. For the Tomorrow show’s segment on Black Flag and the punk-rock violence, the producers invited Chuck Dukowski to their studios, to be interviewed by the show’s co-host, Rona Barrett.
The segment’s opening montage - splicing electrifying footage of the Flag alongside photographs of bleeding post-mosh punkers, on which the cameras would jump-cut zoom, for lurid ‘effect’ - set the tabloid tone for the piece, as did Barrett’s sensationalist introduction. “It is here in Los Angeles where punk has taken on hardly harmless and distinctly violent proportion,” Barrett explained, in an adenoidal voice-over. “A band from Hermosa Beach California, called Black Flag, has earned a reputation as a group with a particularly violent following.”
Sans commentary, the footage continued, grainy and shadowy and monochrome, as the SWAT and LAPD storm troopers surged into the venue in great numbers, and swept across the screen, chasing punks outside, their batons swinging and their white helmets glinting in the darkness. The NBC cameras scanned the aftermath of the riot inside the hall, broken wood and glass and debris all around, before fading to a final shot of a discarded can of Budweiser lying in the gutter, suggesting (in rather hackneyed fashion) that it was drunk punks who were really to blame for the violence at BACE’s Hall, and not the armed and invasive police (though anyone with an ounce of experience in these matters knows it takes gallons of Budweiser to achieve even the tiniest hint of inebriation).
The show then cut to Barrett, leading a discussion between a concerned parent, a young female punk-rocker, and Chuck Dukowski. In a sleeveless orange top, and with his hair cut into a Mohawk, Chuck resembled the stereotype of a punk-rocker enough to slightly unnerve the presenter and, doubtless, much of her audience at home, but he responded to Barrett’s sensationalist questions with a seriousness they possibly didn’t deserve. He was earnest and polite, but always focused on getting his point of view across as eruditely and clearly as possible, to a questioner he doubtless knew was unlikely or unwilling to understand, Black Flag’s own Spock delivering his logic with a calm, wryly raised eyebrow. Chuck’s performance on the show suggests actor John Cusack may have used it as his model for the scene in Cameron Crowe’s 1989 romcom Say Anything, where Cusack’s heart-of-gold outsider Lloyd Dobler tries to bridge the generation gap between him and his new girlfriend’s monied, establishment father and friends.
Leading in immediately from the footage, Barrett addressed Chuck in disingenuously concerned tones. “Can you tell me what was just happening there?” she asked. “Blood on the floor, and what was this ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil’? That to me brings up the Nazi movement. Is the punk movement part of the Nazi movement?
“No,” answered Chuck, evenly. “It’s the police that’s the Nazi movement. The police came, no provocation whatsoever, we made an effort to stop the gig. They came in, there were no exits, a phalanx of armed officers came through and beat the living crap out of a lot of kids, and told them never to come back.”
“Why are the police against you?”
“I think that it’s probably because they’re scared, that it represents change, change scares anyone who’s part of the existing structure, families... The status quo.”
“There’s been a great deal of violence attached to the concerts of Black Flag,” continued Barrett. “Who’s responsible for that? Do you think the kids come because they want, they know they’re going to get involved with something that’s dangerous?”
“They go there for the intensity of the event,” replied Chuck. “It’s a tribal event, and it’s alive. It’s very aggressive and very violent music, it’s an outlet. The actual violence is controlled, there are very few fights. I’m up there on stage, I don’t see that many fights. I’ll see more fights in the bar across the street every day. But the action at the gig is violent, very aggressive; people come there to get drained, to let that out. It’s a desperate world, y’know, and maybe four years from now it’s all gonna be gone. Yet people want to go on living, they still go on and make plans, maybe they’re going to have kids, whatever. But living at the back of their heads,” he added, tapping his own shaven temples, “is that desperation. And the only way to make yourself feel better, is to be so drained that it goes away.”
At this point, Barrett addressed what was clearly, for her, the ‘elephant in the room’, Chuck’s appearance. “I don’t see many people walk around with a tomahawk kind of a hairdo,” she offered, “and you might say many people don’t walk around with my hairdo. The point is, what do your folks say about all this?”
“Well, they’d be much happier if I was busy breeding, right?” Chuck replied, prompting a nervous chuckle from Barrett. “My parents, at the same time they admire me for doing this, because they didn’t do anything.”
“The Nazi swastika scares me, too, a little bit, because it represents something to another generation…”
“The whole thing with all of that,” explained Chuck, “the symbols and the leather and the chains, it’s an effort to alienate the past, OK? And what scares the police so much about it, is that it’s a militaristic uniform for change, or for just plain rebellion; rather than holding a flower out to the cops, the kid’s got spikes on his arms and a leather jacket, and he looks like if there were 50 more of them, they’d be very, very dangerous.”
“So in other words, it’s one authority sort of threatening another authority…?”
“It’s people thinking for themselves, and authority being threatened by that.”
Drawing the segment to a close, Barrett asked, “In five years from now, you’ll still be disrupting…?”
“Who knows, maybe I’ll have a house and 10 kids? I can’t really look into the future that far…”
“You can’t look five years from now?” asked Barrett, incredulously.
“Well, I can look,” Chuck replied. “But who knows?”
“I never gave a shit about establishing a dialogue with establishment figures,” says Chuck, today, of such media appearances. “I did want to get my/our points across to set the record straight, and saw TV as a great way to get over on the pigs. Rona Barrett was not important to me; the viewers - and representing for all of the people who felt like us and had been misrepresented and mistreated - were important. I didn’t care about ‘converting’ Rona Barrett to our cause, I assumed she would go with the hysteria. Countenance was not the point. I just saw it as a way to cut through directly to people in their homes. The mainstream was taking us seriously, and their reactions were ample testimony. It was important to take that reaction and try to get some truth through.”
The segment, Black Flag’s first national television coverage, would set the tone for the mainstream news media’s approach to this strange new youth subculture, later echoed in hysterical programmes like We Destroy The Family. A five-part documentary on punk rock’s deleterious effects on the establishment screened by Los Angeles’ KABC News in 1982, We Destroy The Family makes for, by turns, hilarious and chilling viewing today [it is readily available on YouTube], intercutting performance footage of Fear (at their most unimaginatively provocative, yelling, ‘Kill your mother and father!’ as cameras filmed a soundcheck) with interviews with punk kids, and the parents who have disowned them. The kids, for the most part, seem intelligent and heroically well-adjusted; their parents, meanwhile, appear shrill, histrionic and intolerant of offspring who scupper their dreams of resembling the families on television commercials, and blaming them for the dysfunction of their households.
“This is a story about parents and punks, and some families in trouble,” narrated presenter Paul Moyer, gravely. Noting the music’s British roots, Moyer adds, “What was once an expression of working-class rage is now pre-packaged individually for teens with a yen for rebellion. Punk may well be dead in London and New York, but it is alive and well in the suburbs.”
The show’s first case study was the Hodge family, who lived in an opulent Californian suburb; the segment opens with a shot of their eminently comfortable family home, mother Carolyn playing piano under the approving gaze of father Ron, while children Ron Junior and Rhonda watch on, bored, from a nearby landing. Clearly, the true malign influence within this family must be a father so egotistical that he chooses to name both his son and daughter after himself, but Moyers sides with the parents, who accuse punk rock of leading their kids away from the American Dream.
“They were going to put me in a mental hospital for a while,” offered a shaven-headed Ron Jr, “because I didn’t want to live here. They thought I was crazy or something, because I changed.”
“The punk movement seems very anti-parent, but especially anti-mother,” said their mother, Carolyn, who, in addition to threatening to send her son to a mental institution, has read her daughter’s journal against her wishes, and questions Rhonda on specific, embarrassing diary entries before the television cameras, taking pride in pointing out that “I read it in your own handwriting.” Later, Carolyn will explain, in self-pitying tones, that, “There is such a thing as diminished love. And believe me, we’re experiencing it.”
The series closed out with footage from a group session led by therapist Serena Dank, a self-proclaimed expert in punk kids, where parents aired their concerns and grievances about their children. “After watching this little therapy session, it’s important to remember this is not the first generation to bring parents to tears,” added Moyer. “Teenagers have always had a special talent for that. And you have to ask yourself, are these kids troubled because they’re punks, or are they troubled because some teens are always troubled?” It’s the most insightful thing the narrator says during the whole broadcast, and is only slightly undone by the selection of Kim Wilde’s faux-punk pop hit ‘Kids In America’ on the soundtrack.
Not all parents were so hysterical, so noncomprehending and unsupportive, of their offspring electing to be punks. The Ginns, for example, took great pride in Greg’s musical excursions, and opened their home up to Black Flag and their friends whenever they needed a hot shower and somewhere to stay, or a meal from Regis’s tabletop larder of bargain food purchases. The elder Ginn approached clothes shopping with a similar eye for a bargain, visiting thrift stores and purchasing cheap second-hand clothing by the pound.
“We all wore clothes that Regis bought from the thrift store,” remembers Tom Troccoli. “You know the little alligator on Lacoste designer shirts? He would draw the Black Flag bars on ‘no brand’ polo shirts he got from the Goodwill or the Salvation Army, as a little fashion statement. I always joke how the actual trend-setter for punk-rock fashion in the middle Eighties is Regis Ginn, because he was the one who was buying us all of our clothes. We’d go over there and see what fit, and just wear it.”99
“I used to sleep at the Ginn house,” adds Mugger, “and go over and shower there. I helped out Greg’s brothers and sisters put together their houses, whatever I could do. Maybe once a year, I still go visit Mrs Ginn and say ‘Hi’, because her and Mr Ginn, I look on them as my family. They supported the group; they gave us money, they were very accepting of all of us. They’re avant garde, they’re artistic themselves, very smart and very supportive and very giving people. Mr Ginn would give you the shirt that he was wearing... He had an MG sports car, an old one, because he flew planes over Europe during World War II and was really into English cars. Every day, I’d go over there and do chores or whatever, and he’d throw me the keys and say, ‘Here, take the MG, Mugger’. All right bro!”100
Ozzie Cadena similarly observed his son’s exploits with an unquestioning sense of pride. “Black Flag would always get these headlines,” Dez told Eric Blair, “for causing riots. Really, it was the cops showing up, and beating on the kids; they were causing the riots. Some gigs, we’d play one note and they’d pull the plug, and people would riot. So there was all this press, not about our music, but the riots.
“So my dad was doing a jazz show down in Hermosa Beach, and one of his contemporaries, one of his musicians, who had a son who was into punk rock, said ‘I don’t understand this music, my kid likes it, it’s a bunch of noise. Ozzie, your kid’s doing this music, what do you think about this stuff?’ The guy wanted dad to agree with him, and say it was a bunch of garbage, but actually he said, ‘It might be a bunch of noise to us, but he’s travelling around the country, and he’s young, and more power to him’. So in other words, the family liked to stick up for me.”101
For Glen E. Friedman, the LAPD’s overreaction and persecution of the punk-rock scene galvanised his belief in the music and the bands, and in what he was doing. As so often proves to be the case, the strong-arm tactics of the police only succeeded in radicalising their targets, rather than scaring them ‘straight’. The cops had hoped to stamp the punk rockers out, but they would not be defeated; indeed, the conflict had the opposite effect, encouraging new recruits to join a punk-rock scene that was fast growing out of control.
“I’m a skateboarder from the Seventies,” he says. “I’ve always been harassed by police, and chased by police, and paranoid of police, because I know they abuse their power. They’ve done it to me since I was 12 years old, throwing me out of cars, telling me to get the fuck out of the schoolyard, and questioning me. I never did anything wrong at all, beyond maybe a little bit of trespassing... But I wasn’t robbing anyone, why were they harassing us? Because they wanted to instil fear, so they could have control over you for the rest of your life. Which they were kind of successful at, because to this day, whenever I see a police car in my rear view mirror I get very nervous. My wife is all, you’re old now, they don’t care about you! But I’ve had experiences, you know? I’ve had my life threatened by police, literally. They were just inspiring us further, with their cruelty. They were inspiring us to become better people, because we saw how evil they were, and how abusive. As kids, we could see the police were abusing their powers, and that’s what made us that much stronger.
“No adult could understand skateboarding, because it wasn’t around when they were young, there was no such thing. And when it came to punk rock, no real venues would allow it, so it was kids putting their own shows, young people promoting it themselves. It was completely organic and new, like nothing else. And that’s what made it so incredible, and volatile, and intense, and so scary to the authorities.
“Once the police start coming, once you start getting attention on the nightly news, it makes you think you’re even more important than you are,” he laughs. “It’s like, wow, maybe we are really doing something, maybe we are changing the way people are thinking about some things. It was during those times, those early riots, when literally entire portions of neighbourhoods were shut down, because Black Flag was playing. They hadn’t even appeared in a major magazine yet; they were never written about in Rolling Stone or Creem, and yet here they were, apparently a credible enough threat to the status quo that the cops would be called out to shut them down.
“We felt empowered in one way, and emasculated in another. The police were giving the scene credibility, saying it’s so much of a threat that they have to come shut it down. But then, by getting your life threatened by these fascist pigs, it just gets you more and more angry; it opens up your mind. How do you even explain it to people? People wouldn’t even believe me. My parents said, ‘Why are the police coming after you? I don’t believe you. Get a badge number, we’ll start reporting this, if the police are really coming after you.’ My stepfather was a lawyer at the time, a criminal lawyer in fact, and I said, ‘You know what? They’re covering their badges! You can’t see them!’ And he said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ He couldn’t even believe it.
“The police were trying to rid the streets of anything that looked ugly,” concludes Friedman. “Craig Stecyk says that, beginning in 1980, when Los Angeles knew the Olympic games were coming in 1984, there was a concerted effort to crack down on anything that would detract from the beautiful façade of California. Before the Olympics came, they started cleaning the streets of anything that wasn’t suntanned and blonde.”
As the notoriety surrounding Black Flag increased, the group’s violence-scarred shows invited much debate within punk-rock circles, particularly in the pages of the fanzines. San Francisco free paper BAM (Bay Area Music) delivered one of the more hysterical responses, with a feature published in January 1981 entitled ‘The Black Flag Violence Must Stop’, which railed at the destructive tsunami that seemed to trail the group, and their Huntington Beach fans who, writer Mitchell Schneider noted, “are given to Hitler Youth crewcuts, swastikas, red bandannas wrapped around their heads, and chains around their boots.”102
Schneider chronicled the violence he saw at a Black Flag gig at the Starwood with growing unease and disgust, adding, “We may live in wild times but this is not my idea of an evening out. I’ll venture to guess it isn’t yours either... I didn’t want to write this piece because Black Flag’s circle of jerks stand to reap some publicity value from it, thus advancing their ‘cause’. But this sort of thing should be documented somewhere, because unsuspecting people may be risking personal harm at a Black Flag performance, people who may hear the group’s music on Rodney Bingenheimer’s KROQ show and then venture to a gig totally unprepared for the ultra-violence. Although Black Flag don’t encourage the violence, they don’t discourage it, much less really acknowledge it on stage. Which is not only wrong, but profoundly evil.”
Of course, telling their audiences what to do had always been anathema to Greg Ginn, the sort of authority Black Flag’s anarchic attack sought to entirely negate. “I used to write songs by myself,” he told Flipside. “I never thought I’d get a band together. I couldn’t find people that wanted to play what I wanted. But I still wrote songs... The motivation is to express something.”
“Do you think they get the message?” asked the interviewer.
“There isn’t any message,” Greg replied. “We don’t want to get on stage and be authority figures and tell people what to do, we feel that that’s wrong. We want to get up on stage to create an atmosphere where people can think for themselves. They’re not always gonna do the right things... It would be real easy for us to get up there to control the audience, so we’d have nice places to play all the time, but that contradicts our whole way of thinking. If we have to be authority figures, we might as well not be there at all.”