Can you tell us why Black Flag split up?
Henry Rollins: “Because we didn’t get along any more.”
Is that all you’re gonna say about it?
Henry Rollins: “That’s it! Why did you get divorced from your wife? Because you don’t get along any more, right? Me and Ginn got divorced.
People break up, it happens.”221
While the manner in which Greg Ginn called an end to Black Flag threw Henry Rollins off guard, there weren’t many who were surprised that the group had decided to part ways. Black Flag had made no secret of the dire cost of the path they’d chosen for their group, of how ultimately enervating and discouraging their adversarial relationships with their audience and with the authorities could be. Those closer to the group, meanwhile, had sensed a change of atmosphere within the group and within the wider SST community; had begun to notice Greg’s growing distaste for his frontman, and how much more the guitarist seemed to enjoying playing with his ‘other’ band, Gone, than the group he’d led now for over eight years.
“I felt like it wasn’t going to be the same any more,” reflected Ginn, to Punk Planet ‘zine in 1997, of his decision to split the group. “I really liked what we’d done, but what was going to be the next step? I felt like I was up against too much, I felt like we couldn’t go out on a limb, because there was too much to lose.” Referring to Henry’s desire to make another album in the mould of In My Head, he added, “I saw I couldn’t fight everybody, and I wanted to leave when I could be proud of everything. I feel lucky that I have never had to pick up a guitar or bass and play something I didn’t want to play. I never wanted to be a musician, I just wanted to play music - my own music.”222
“Greg Ginn had a lot of turmoil with people,” says Mugger today. “Like the CEO of a big corporation, he expected a lot out of people, and I don’t think that he was getting what he wanted out of his musicians, he thought he could do more with a new band, with other people. So I wasn’t surprised. I think that in his mind he wanted a certain type of output for his music, and he wasn’t able to get it from Black Flag. These people aren’t under any contract, it’s not like David Beckham playing for LA Galaxy, where you can yell at him or whatever. It was a loose assembly of people, what’s he going to do? How much can you motivate a person, how much can you piss off a person? In his mind, he couldn’t do a lot, you know? So he had to disassemble it.”223
There was also a sense that Black Flag wasn’t Greg Ginn’s band any more, certainly not in the way it had been in the pre-Damaged years, or even back when he and Chuck had first welcomed Henry aboard. He’d been able to flex his authority over the group in recent years, dispatching Chuck, then Bill, then Kira, when he felt another direction was necessary. By the time Greg’s tolerance for Henry reached its end, however, Henry’s own identity was so entwined with that of Black Flag that he couldn’t be so easily dispatched. The balance of power within the group had shifted, and their charismatic vocalist - whose duties had speedily expanded to include songwriting, and who had latterly cultivated an identity for himself outside of Black Flag, with his writing and his spoken-word performances — seemed, by 1986, to have at least as much a say in the group’s direction as the Flag’s founder and guitarist.
“Maybe he got a little bit carried away towards the end,” Ginn said, as diplomatically as he could manage, of Rollins’ tenure with Black Flag, when interviewed by Eric Blair in 2003. “In a way we were blessed in the first three singers were really good, but they didn’t have that rockstar, ‘I am the lead singer’ thing. In that sense, Black Flag was a band of the people, you know? Because we were just regular people... It was the first band I played in, and I didn’t consider myself this or that. And we had singers that didn’t consider themselves anything special, they just played the music that we liked. Whereas with Henry, he evolved more into the ‘lead singer’ role, the prototype of David Lee Roth or whatever, jumping around...”
Ginn denied that he felt sour grapes over Henry becoming the focus of the band, but in the same breath tried to downplay Henry’s contribution to Black Flag. “You always hear about people in bands resenting the singer getting attention, but that just comes with the territory, you know? If you want that attention, then you should sing. It’s just natural that people think of the singer as maybe representing a group. Of course, a lot of people who play music, they know that that’s kind of ridiculous, usually it’s the band practising, working on songs, and then the singer comes in and practises once a week, or something like that. The reality of it is, a lot of times the singers have less to do with the group than other members.”224
Certainly, having taken the decision to split Black Flag — although the exact wording Rollins recalls for their final conversation almost suggests he was willing to abandon the group to the singer — Ginn was swift to draw a line underneath their relationship, and cut off as many ties as he could. “When the band split up, Greg told me, ‘I want you out of my parents’ house’,” Rollins told Steven Blush. “I said, ‘I wouldn’t think of staying there’. Greg will always think I have it in for him and don’t like him, but I have nothing but respect for him. I don’t care what he says about me. The fact that I keep in touch with his parents really bums him out.”225
Following Black Flag’s split, Ginn took Gone back on the road, for a back-breaking tour that saw the group play a slew of record stores across America, at Black Flag pace. Around this time, he also began to take an interest in electronic music and drum machines, and even worked 10 minutes or so of his drum-machine music into Gone’s sets. This gesture towards the technological advances that, at the time, looked like they might replace guitars and other traditional instruments and techniques as the dominant format for popular music, was not encouraged by those surrounding the group. Indeed, his own roadie refused to carry Ginn’s drum-machine equipment to the shows in protest; with typical brusque forward motion, Ginn chose instead to lug the gear in himself.
Gone released a second album, Gone II - But Never Too Gone!, late in 1986, continuing their voyage into the murky depths of jazz-addled, punk-informed instrumental bleak funk. However, later sustaining a finger injury while pursuing his newest obsession, basketball, Ginn was forced to quit playing guitar for an extended period, during which this incarnation of Gone dissolved. Ginn’s attentions had refocused to the SST label, anyway, which was feeling the effects of the recent collapse of record distributor JEM.
In a 1989 interview with Sound Choice magazine, Ginn offered that SST had “lost over $100,000 last year”, as a result of collapses within the independent music distribution industry. “Systematic also went under last year, and they owed SST significant amounts. It made life difficult. I think JEM owed something like $5 million to their creditors. The three owners all had limos. I don’t even have a car. It’s like a whole ‘nother world. We’ve always operated very conservatively, financially. Knowing the history of the music business, you have to be prepared for this sort of thing.”226
In the interview, Ginn characterised SST in context of a major-label culture that was routinely dropping artists who couldn’t sell 300,000 records, unable to make a profit on a release that offered a more modest turnover. By comparison, SST offered its artists total creative freedom. This was not merely a sop to the egos of the artists the label signed, this was indeed the entire point of SST Records; Greg Ginn released the records he wanted to hear, which were invariably the records his artists wished to make. “When I buy a record I like to know that the musicians are communicating, not that it’s through filter of the record company, and the record company got them to include these types of songs. I’m not particularly interested in that kind of ‘expression’.”
In the years immediately following Black Flag’s demise, the label signed more and more artists, and released such epochal underground rock albums as Sonic Youth’s Sister, Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me, and Bad Brains’ I Against I. It released early albums by groups who would, in the decade that followed, follow in the wake of the underground’s ‘crossover’ moment — the success of a Seattle, Washington punk group named Nirvana — and sign to major labels convinced that gold lay in them thar troughs of rock’s swarming subterranea: groups like Seattle’s Soundgarden, Bostonians Buffalo Tom, and a wild garage-psych quartet from Ellensburg, Washington named The Screaming Trees.
SST mainstays, meanwhile, continued to release music on the label. The Meat Puppets further pursued their innovative, idiosyncratic path through country, psychedelia and rock’n’roll, with the well-received Up On The Sun, Mirage and Huevos albums, before signing to major label London Records in 1990, where they would be mostly neglected, until Nirvana performed three tracks from their II album on MTV Unplugged in 1993, and the Puppets’ contemporaneous Too High To Die got a brief flourish in its promotional budget. The reunited Descendents signed to SST and had their back catalogue rereleased, as The Minutemen’s New Alliance label was merged with SST, the imprint thereafter dedicated to experimental and avant-garde releases.
Mike Watt returned with a new group, fIREHOSE, releasing a series of full-lengths on SST. Following the messy demise of Hüsker Dü, after 1986’s Candy Apple Grey and its double-LP follow-up, 1987’s Warehouse: Songs And Stories, drummer Grant Hart returned to SST, where he cut a solo album, Intolerance. In the Sound Choice interview, Ginn described Hüsker Dü’s tenure with Warner Bros as a failure, and opined “we could have done it just as well, and maybe better, and the band would be very well-off financially, and it wouldn’t have cost them so much, and they would have got a better return”.
Saint Vitus, meanwhile, continued to release albums of marvellously doomy, proto-stoner metal, records that were initially unheralded, but soon won a cult audience that included musicians who would draw influence from Vitus’ creepy crawl metal for their own post-Sabbath riffage. Joe Carducci, who’d remained a vocal supporter for the group, returned briefly to the SST offices while work was underway on Saint Vitus’ masterful Born Too Late LP, in 1987. “They were set up in another new office, this time in Long Beach,” Carducci remembers, “and I sat and talked to Greg. I was talking about Rock And The Pop Narcotic - I think he was paranoid about the book - and we were just talking about music, and the problems inherent in the band format. And he was resisting the idea that you needed other people playing; he wasn’t making his machine music yet, but he was thinking about it. Underneath the conversation, I got a sense that he didn’t really want to maintain a relationship with me. And it’s sort of been proven, he does like to turn the page.”227
Looking back on his years at SST, and the Black Flag era, Carducci reflects that “there were compromises that, in an ideal situation, Greg would never have made. Ideally, Black Flag would have left SST after the early singles; he didn’t want Black Flag to be on SST, for Damaged, or thereafter. He thought that Black Flag deserved, demanded a major label’s help. His original plan, when he turned Black Flag away from the populist period of Damaged, was for parts of what became My War and Slip It In to have become the follow-up album, with Chuck Biscuits on drums, the five-piece line-up.”
Carducci sighs at the thought of this mythical post-Damaged LP, what it might have sounded like, and what the impact may have been, had it been released via a competent major label. “That would have made Metallica a pointless exercise, because Black Flag would have been such a powerhouse that any metaller would have responded. I wish that album had come out; that’s the price of the Unicorn debacle, I guess. Greg thought that SST should be a refuge for stuff that didn’t have an outlet anywhere else; then the other bands wouldn’t look to it to guide their careers. If you think, later, that they were releasing too many records, well... Maybe that was his answer to being looked at too much by individual bands as their ‘saviour’, their guru; to drive them all away, and then let wheels fall off, and it’ll just lay and rust in a field, up on blocks.”
SST Records pressed up and distributed a phenomenal amount of releases in the years immediately following Black Flag’s demise. Their first release of 1986 was the self-titled first full-length from New York acid-rockers Das Damen, who would release three unjustly unsung albums of Dinosaur-flavoured psychedelia, leaving the label following 1988’s glorious Triskaidekaphobe LP. Das Damen’s debut was the 40th release for SST; in 1989, New York jazz-skronk noisers Mofungo cut their final album for the label, its catalogue number, SST 240, speaking of the torrent of material SST had released in the intervening three years. Amid the wheat, there was plenty of chaff, albums by groups who never ‘went’ anywhere, who ‘failed’ even by the paltry standards of underground rock in the pre-Nirvana era. “I see blogs where people are putting the history of the label together, and that’s hard to do,” says Carducci. “A German fanzine put together a catalogue of 300 titles, but there’s still some holes in it, and I myself don’t know what those records are.”
A 1991 EP titled U2, by subversive San Francisco sound collagists Negativland, almost halted this slew of releases permanently. The lead track was an off-kilter synth-oddity cover of the Irish rockers’ ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’, over which the group layered illicitly sampled bloopers by an uncharacteristically foul-mouthed Casey Kasem — host of American radio’s national Top 40 rundown, and also voice of Shaggy from TV’s Scooby Doo — screwing up a number of radio intros, losing his temper with his producer and, most deliciously, bad-mouthing U2 with phrases such as, “These guys are from England, who gives a shit?”
Ginn himself had little time for U2, declaring them “a very negative, blood-sucking type of group, which is normal for most rock groups” in the Sound Choice interview. Doubtless, his opinion dimmed further when their label, Island Records, sued Negativland and SST, alleging the release — which featured the word “U2” very prominently on its sleeve — would be mistaken by U2 fans, awaiting their forthcoming Achtung Baby album, as a legitimate new release from the group. It was another messy lawsuit for the label, which ended with SST removing the EP from shelves and destroying its remaining stock; SST would later sue Negativland themselves, when the group reprinted confidential details from the case alongside a rerelease of the U2 EP, in their magazine/CD Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral 2.
In the aftermath of Black Flag’s dissolution, Henry Rollins wasted no time forming a new group, and returning to the studio. In October of 1986, Rollins hooked up with an old friend from DC, former Enzymes guitarist Chris Haskett, then living in England. Rollins flew over and cut a mini-LP, Drive By Shooting, with Haskett and a spur of the moment rhythm section, as Henrietta Collins & The Wifebeaters. The playful set included a cover of Wire’s ‘Ex-Lion Tamer’, which shared its sentiments with Black Flag’s ‘TV Party’, along with a rewrite of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ as psychopath’s anthem ‘I Have Come To Kill You’, a jaunty surf-rock title track in praise of random homicide, and a molten and terrifying spoken-word-versus-amp-drone piece entitled ‘Hey Henrietta’, which opened with Henry barking to himself, “Hey Henry, what would you do if I told you that my father was a wife-beating, child-hating racist sexist bastard, he was a motherfucker, and I went to his house with a gun and I blew his God-damned head off? Well I think I’d say, ALL RIGHT!”
The same session yielded Hot Animal Machine, a full-length album released in 1987 on Texas Hotel Records, a small Santa Monica label run out of a record store, and credited to Henry Rollins. The 11-track set occupied the same dark emotional space as the last couple of Flag releases, but while Haskett was a fine rock’n’roll guitarist, he rarely sent the music swinging in the violent volte faces Ginn relished. There was much promise in this first solo album proper, however, particularly the album’s two-part title track split between full-pent punk-metal and squalling, free-form angst-rock, a 1-2 punch that echoed Damaged’s twin title tracks, and highlighted the ferocity of Henry’s bleak and violent spoken-word spiels. Covers of Suicide’s ‘Ghost Rider’, Richard Berry’s ‘Crazy Lover’ and an atonal assault on the Velvets’ ‘Move Right In’ also impressed.
However, Rollins Band - as they were hereafter known - wouldn’t truly gel until they installed a fresh rhythm section for the Ian MacKaye produced Life Time album in 1987. Rollins recruited drummer Sim Cain and bassist Andrew Weiss from the freshly dissolved Gone and, together with heroic sound man Theo Van Rock, the group began to fashion a black and muscular noise that blended heavy, metallic riffage with a jazzy, funk-informed rhythm section, and the molten furnace rage of Rollins’ ranting vocals. They were a particularly fierce live prospect, borne out by several in-concert releases from early in their career, including an inspiring half-hour jam through their Velvets cover on the CD release of 1989’s Hard Volume album.
Along with his new group, Henry busied himself with his publishing company, 21361, which printed up a torrent of Rollins prose in titles like Hallucinations Of Grandeur, Art To Choke Hearts, and the chokingly bleak and malevolent 1000 Ways To Die. For many punkers, exploring Rollins’ literary works served as a gateway to discovering the authors who had inspired Henry, such as Chuck Bukowski, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby Jr. Meanwhile, 21361 broadened its remit, publishing the likes of X singer Exene Cervenka, Suicide frontman Alan Vega, Vietnamvet poet Bill Shields, and Rollins’ regular spoken-word tourmate Don Bajema, along with a volume of Nick Cave’s poetry and Glen E. Friedman’s photography.
In addition, Henry’s spoken-word career was flourishing, as he released concert albums of his performances, and began to tour Europe and beyond. In contrast with his often unrelenting and harsh prose work, Rollins’ spoken-word performance mellowed his uncompromising world view and biting sarcasm just enough to allow the audience to laugh along with his frustrated observations. It was on stage, during these performances, that Rollins’ natural charisma rose to the surface, developing an engaging, often self-deprecating, powerfully honest storytelling demeanour, drawing rueful humour from tales of mind-numbing tour dementia and no-budget international travel, and Rollins’ enduringly bemused interaction with the flabby and moronic peoples of the world.
“His persona with Black Flag and his poetry was so melodramatic and over the top and angst-ridden, it always seemed sort of like a put-on,” says Mark Arm. “It didn’t seem like the whole picture, and so it was excellent to see his spoken-word performances, where he did tell humorous stories, and for him to publish all those books. It kind of rounded out the cartoon character of ‘Henry Rollins’.
“Mudhoney crossed paths with Rollins Band a number of times,” Arm continues. “The first time was when we played a show with the Beasts Of Bourbon, supporting Rollins Band in Bremen, Germany. Rollins Band had shown up kind of late, so they missed the Beasts. But I remember looking over to the side of the stage, and there was Henry Rollins, stretching out and working out while we were playing. He was all, ‘That was great man, I was working out to you guys!’ [laughs]. We played the Reading Festival in 1992, and we arrived the day before we were due to play, and Rollins Band were playing that day. We stayed in the lounge of the hotel, getting shit-faced and saying, ‘We should probably go over to the festival, right? Maybe see something?’ As we’re leaving, Henry’s coming back in, and our bassist, Matt Lukin, starts trying to say some shit to him, and Henry just cuts him off, and says, ‘You still drinkin’?’ That just shut Matt up [laughs], and the rest of us were rolling on the ground.”228
By 1991, Rollins had found an apartment in Venice, CA, which he shared with former Black Flag roadie Joe Cole. The pair were fast friends, tighter than brothers, sharing a uniquely fractured take upon the world, and so glad to have met someone else who felt the way they did. And while both had come to this lonely world view thanks to darkness and abuse in their past, what they shared most of all was a very particular sense of humour, through the lens of which they were able to gaze upon the world in a state of detached hilarity.
“Everything the other one said was awesome,” said Rollins in 1992, during a spoken-word performance where he described their friendship in the third person. “People used to tell them, why don’t you guys just get it over with and fuck each other, OK? The two would laugh at them, and know that these people had no idea how cool the other one was. They would watch really stupid movies for their comedic impact, anything with Sylvester Stallone, the more serious the movie the more the boys would laugh. They worked very hard in the living room, aping celebrity Sylvester Stallone’s sagging face. They dissected the movie Over The Top as one dissects Moby Dick or Ulysses; they got down every nuance of Sly’s tortured face. They believed they were the funniest, coolest, most awesome guys on the planet. Together, they were invincible walls of mirth; they did so much cool shit, you would never be able to finish a book about the two of them. The epic movie could never be made, because Lawrence Of Arabia was four hours, and it was too long for theatrical release; this one would have to be about 50 hours, and no one would take it on. And you couldn’t release a film called, The Two Most Awesome Dudes That Ever Was.”229
On the night of December 10, 1991, a few weeks after Cole had moved in, he and Rollins started back home to their apartment in Venice after a night spent gooning about in the audience of a show by Courtney Love’s group, Hole, at the Whisky A-Go-Go. They stopped off at the video store en route, to pick up a copy of Rocky V, preparing for another night guffawing at Mr Stallone’s expense; as they approached the apartment, however, two figures stepped out from behind a bush and pointed guns in their faces, ordering them down on the ground. Moments later, they led the burglars into the house, Rollins realising that “once we were taken in, we were going to be marched into the back room, told to kneel down on the ground, and be shot, execution style, in the back of their head”.
As they entered the apartment, Rollins heard a scuffle and a gunshot; in the confusion, he dashed away, ran a couple of blocks to a phone box and called the police. “Thirty seconds later, a plainclothes cop car comes racing up the road towards me, orders that I go to the side of the curb, and put my hands on my head,” remembered Rollins. “They arrest me, throw me in the back of a car, drive me up to my own house, and keep me there for 20 minutes and make fag jokes outside the car, pointing at me and calling me ‘sweetie’.”
Talking to the policemen as politely and deferentially as he could, Rollins requested that they venture into the apartment, to see if Joe was OK. “Oh, he’s dead,” replied one cop, nonchalantly, before taking Rollins to the police station, where they would hold him overnight. On his release the next morning, Rollins returned to the apartment with a friend, to clear up the mess; as they brushed past the flies to mop up the large pools of Joe Cole’s blood that gathered on floor, television reporters arrived, and badgered Rollins for comments on his best friend’s murder. That night, Rollins collected Joe Cole’s address book, and, like he had for D. Boon five years earlier, began calling people to tell them the awful news.
Joe Cole had been a beloved figure on the underground rock scene, a treasured friend to many, and boyfriend of Babes In Toyland bassist Michelle Leon. Joe had lately been working as roadie for Sonic Youth, appearing throughout Dave Markey’s documentary of their 1991 European tour, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. He also harboured dreams of making music of his own, and had formed a group with Markey, called Pipe.
“I often reread Joe’s book of tour journals from that last Black Flag tour,” says Markey, of Planet Joe, which he’d been working on before his death, and was later published by 21361. “It reminds me of him... Half of Joe was just, like, mad love, and the other half was like, ‘I wanna fucking die, I hate life’. And who can’t relate to that? That’s the duality that is the human experience. He tried to commit suicide a few times, but he couldn’t do it, you know? Then he got to a place where he was realising how special life is, where he was finally growing... And boom, his life was taken from him. Joe was a great guy, a sweetheart. He wanted to be an artist, and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. He wanted to be a musician... He picked up the bass, started playing it, and in no time at all he’d worked himself up into a really good musician. I think Joe was just starting to come into his own, just before his life was taken from him.
“The morning Joe was killed, I had a dream where Joe came to me and was hugging me. He was saying goodbye, he was saying, ‘I’m leaving.’ And I started crying, in the dream, asking him, what’s going on? It was almost like a scene from Twin Peaks, with all this stuff happening in the dream, all this electricity, all this noise, and just this feeling of violence, of doom. I woke from this dream in tears, shivering. I went into the bathroom, washed my face, and I was crying. What was going on? What was the dream about? And the phone rang; it was my friend Morgan, and she was crying. And I said to her, ‘It’s Joe, isn’t it?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, you heard?’ And I said ‘No, I just had a dream, he came to me and said goodbye.’
“Joe and I at the time were kind of on the outs,” Markey adds. “Our band had fallen apart. But that was just the kind of guy Joe was, he wasn’t going to leave before he came and said goodbye to me.”
The murder of Joe Cole could have destroyed Henry Rollins, but he chose instead to lose himself in his work, to vent his anger and grief through a stamina-straining schedule that would soon become legendary. The wound still open and raw, Rollins would revisit loss in his spoken-word routines and in press interviews, admitting with typically unsettling candour that a Tupperware dish of Cole’s remains sat in his refrigerator.
His spoken-word routines, however, drew some cold comfort about the preciousness of life from the loss of Joe. “I think there’s just no time for drinking Jack Daniel’s poison, there’s no time for hanging yourself, there’s no time for blowing your brains out, there’s no time for heroin,” he mused. “As bad as life is - people like Daryl Gates, people training you to be a racist moron - life is fuckin’ awesome, man. Because the alternative - going to a funeral, looking at a little plastic box that contains your friend - sucks. So all of you in here are just like me in one way: you’re all breathing. And that’s the coolest, man, and you have to go with that. Because that’s the only break you get: you get to live tomorrow, you get to go on, you get to move forward. And it might not seem like much, but for me, right now, it’s all I’m hanging on to, it’s all I’ve got going, and it’s what I’m going to stick with.”
In 1992, Rollins Band delivered what would prove to be their definitive album, The End Of Silence. It was their first release for Imago records, which partnered the group with producer Andy Wallace, whose previous credits included mixing, engineering and production work on such landmark rock albums as Slayer’s Reign In Blood, Sepultura’s Arise, and Nirvana’s Nevermind.
It was the success of Nirvana’s album - which, by The End Of Silence’s release date of February 25, 1992, had already displaced Michael Jackson atop the American album charts - that, to some degree, helped pave Henry Rollins’ path towards the mainstream. While Nevermind’s genius stroke had been to polish Nirvana’s melodic punk-rock to a sheen that could slip past the corporate gatekeepers who barred the SST generation from the radio-waves and television sets, the group’s roots lay in the hardcore scene; their debut album, 1989’s Bleach, fused punk and metal to distil a murky, sluggish noise that seemed hewn in the image of My War’s ‘Can’t Decide’. Moreover, Nirvana were at pains, in interviews and elsewhere, to acknowledge their influences, a practice that would lead a generation of mallrats to discover American rock’s underground scene, tracing Nirvana’s roots back to groups like The Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü and, of course, Black Flag.
The ‘perfect storm’ of Nirvana’s rise, along with Rollins’ steadily growing career in other media, helped make The End Of Silence Henry’s most successful release yet. But it was a deserved success: on this album, his Band played a graceful but emotive heavy metal, an intellectual, physical squall that was experimental but visceral, playing with voluminous energy and power. Moreover, Rollins’ lyrics mined the black seam of anguish and trauma that had fuelled his work with the Flag, but with renewed focus, and a hitherto undetected sense of humour and can-do positivity.
The album opened with the anthemic ‘Low Self Opinion’, a funk scourge wherein Rollins excoriated those who sold themselves short, who allowed their lack of confidence to sour their every opportunity and friendship. Like some fire-breathing, muscle-bound therapist, Rollins barked with focus and fierce intent, the song a brief crossover success. Elsewhere, ‘Tearing’ explored dysfunctional relationships to a synapse-frying metal riff, winning over the heavy heartlands as the song won rotation on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, while more molten and intense tracks like ‘Obscene’ and the molasses-slow ‘What Do You Do’ further explored this mire of interpersonal warfare, with a purposeful riffage that played out its violent psychodramas over ear-frying sonics.
The subject matter of The End Of Silence, then, proved similar to that of the last few Black Flag albums, while Rollins Band’s adventurous musical approach similarly fused jazz, funk, metal and black noise, albeit in a more muscular and, ultimately, audience-pleasing fashion. Wallace, meanwhile, facilitated some impressive sonic excursions, such as the guttural, animalistic breakdowns of ‘Obscene’, while he ably presented Rollins’ vocals as anything other than the monochrome bark they sometimes resembled on later Flag albums.
Within these tracks lay the ethos for the Henry Rollins his fans would get to know in the years that followed: ‘Grip’ was an advice column penned by a drill sergeant with little pity for the weak-of-heart-or-flesh, ‘Another Life’ a disdainful anti-drugs rant with an unintentionally comedic mid-song breakdown where Rollins ranted at some hallucinated simian, roaring “Bad monkey! Monkey see, monkey do! Monkey will destroy you!”. More to the point, The End Of Silence saw Rollins refine themes he’d been tussling with since joining the Flag, the epic ‘Blues Jam’ an utterly pulverising 12-minute slog through Rollins’ voluminous dark side.
The closing ‘Just Like You’, meanwhile, reached some sense of peace over Rollins’ enduring problematic relationship with authoritarian figures like his father, like the soldiers at Bullis, like Greg Ginn. Revisiting the master/slave dynamic he’d dramatised so chillingly on ‘Damaged I’, Rollins broodingly murmured about “Eighteen years of fear / Eighteen years of humiliation” over an eerie, psychedelic guitar lick, and foreboding tom-tom rolls. In the subsequent 10 or so minutes, Rollins and his band engaged in a violent confrontation with this composite authority figure, Rollins realising, during the melee, that he himself has been cast in this authoritarian role, that a part of what he hates lives on within him. It is this powerful, psychological quality to the song that gives an electrifying edge to its final noiseout, Rollins howling “Just like you” with murderous revulsion, caught in Freudian tumult, sounding - in the track and, indeed, the album’s closing seconds, as cathartic sounds of instrumental destruction abound through the speakers - broken, animalistic, but ultimately triumphant.
In the albums that would follow, Rollins would pull back from this introspective pell-mell, the matter seemingly resolved, at least as well as it could be on wax. Rollins Band would subsequently tour with the Lollapalooza festival, and an influential trip around the world alongside Beastie Boys, introducing the group’s sweat-drenched, pulverising rock to a new audience perhaps unfamiliar with Black Flag, hardcore, SST and all that. Their next album, 1994’s Weight, would see Weiss replaced by Melvin Gibbs, a bassist of impressive pedigree who’d previously collaborated with avant-jazz godheads like John Zorn, Sonny Sharrock and Arto Lindsay. The group would film an iconic video clip for ‘Liar’ (a cold-hearted take on the sexually despicable typical male), directed by Anton Corbijn, and featuring Rollins as a cop, a superhero and, finally, daubed head to toe in red body paint, to personify the demonic truth lying beneath the platitudinous surface.
The same year, Rollins made his first movie, The Chase, starring Charlie Sheen as an escaped convict hunted by a cop, played by Rollins; while the picture wasn’t successful, it did help increase his profile, as did a television commercial he filmed for clothing store Gap, and a print ad for Apple Computers. Some carped that Rollins was ‘selling out’, in the ‘punk’ parlance of the times; Rollins, however, would merely chuckle mirthlessly, cite the years of penury spent touring the world, thanklessly, with Black Flag, and note that many of those who accused rockers like him of ‘selling out’ did so from the comfort of their parents’ homes. He would also point out that revenues from the movies and commercials went back into funding 21361, and his new record label, Infinite Zero, founded with producer and label mogul Rick Rubin, which was dedicated to rereleasing great music that had gone out of print, including albums by The Gun Club, Flipper, and James Chance &The Contortions.
In 1994, Rollins published the first edition of Get In The Van, collecting together his tour journals and publishing them in a large-format hardback that included hundreds of photographs, posters and flyers from Rollins’ time with Black Flag. The journal entries were included mostly verbatim, with Rollins sparing himself no blushes — indeed, much of the book’s impact was derived from the honesty of Henry’s reactions to all he encountered, capturing his own moments of weakness, of selfishness, of anger, alongside those of the Flag’s adversaries.
In Henry’s first-person spiel, the eternal struggle of Black Flag’s experience was, finally and explicitly, revealed to the public: their clashes with the cops, the violent confrontations in their own mosh pits and, at least fleetingly, the turmoil within the group that led to their ultimate dissolution. But while Rollins’ text conjured for the reader the grim, pepper-spray fragranced reality of Black Flag’s mission, it ultimately portrayed the group in heroic light, and none more than Greg Ginn, to whom Rollins remained - in print at least - deferential, and grateful for offering him the opportunity to be all he could be, on the road with the Flag.
The post-Nirvana gold rush was similarly a golden time for SST, boosting the sales figures for the label’s landmark titles, now recognised as more than just the cream of the hardcore punk scene, but as masterpieces in their own right that transcended the genres they’d been assigned to. In an attempt to make the most of this wave of interest, the label went so far as to open a store on the Sunset Strip, the SST Superstore, which hawked a wealth of the label’s wares.
A photograph taken inside the store by Dave Markey depicts racks of SST vinyl and CDs for sale - with album sleeves hanging from the ceiling like mobiles - alongside other merchandise, including black surfing shorts with the logo of Ginn’s new SST offshoot label, Cruz, stitched on the hem, stickers displaying the label’s latest rabble-rousing slogan, “Destroy Corporate Rock”, and black baseball caps that lampooned the ‘Parental Advice’ profanity disclaimers the Parents Music Resource Centre had dictated that so-called ‘offensive’ records must display: the SST version commanded, “Fuck parental advice”, above the label’s logo.
“In the photograph, that’s Pat Smear working behind the counter,” adds Markey. The picture was taken a few weeks before the former Germs guitarist was recruited by Kurt Cobain, to serve as second guitarist for what would prove to be Nirvana’s final tours. “Pat was working for Greg Ginn on minimum wage, when Kurt called, which was ridiculous... The store was on Sunset Strip, right opposite Tower Records, and according to Pat they did maybe $50 a day tops in business.” The superstore would be commemorated in the Sonic Youth song ‘Screaming Skull’, from their 1994 album Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star, which took “SST Superstore” as its hookline, name-checking celebrity checkout clerk Pat Smear, and noting that their Sister album, released on SST, was available there. A demo version of the song, which was written by leader Thurston Moore and Sonics friend Dave Markey on the latter’s sofa, suggested that the Youth’s exit from SST had not been amicable, including extra lyrics such as “Fuckin’ Greg G, suckin’ on a big D”230.
Ginn, meanwhile, was back making music, using SST and his nascent Cruz imprint to release a slew of different albums by various projects, including his free-noise-jazz outfit Mojack (alongside members of SST act Bazooka), acid-rock act Confront James (with Ginn playing bass and guitar, accompanied by 20-year-old vocalist Richard Ray), and a number of releases under his own name, including three albums and two EPs between 1993 and 1994. On these solo releases, Ginn played all the instruments himself, leaving drumming duties to an electronic drum machine that punched out digital polkas over which Ginn pounded punkish riffs, in addition to yelling his vocals over the top. Song titles such as ‘Pig MF’, ‘Short Fuse’ and ‘Crawling Inside’ set the tone but, the squalling latter track aside, these releases weren’t vintage Ginn. As a vocalist, he made a great guitarist.
Ginn did not welcome the publication of Get In The Van, which was curious since, more than anything, the release brought Black Flag back into the public eye, and must have stimulated sales of the Flag back catalogue. Instead, its release again stirred up the negativity he felt towards his former frontman; in a 1997 interview with Punk Planet, Ginn seethed that, “Henry’s label and publishing company are all about, ‘How do I look if I put out this record or book?’ Every record, every book, is by someone ‘cool’, so he can benefit from that. Get In The Van? It’s all false. I don’t need to read that stuff to know it’s inaccurate.”231
While Ginn was busy sabotaging his own arguments by admitting he hadn’t read Henry’s book in the same breath that he was declaring it dishonest, Rollins was goaded into a response that finally voiced the resentment he felt towards his former bandmate and mentor. “I did what I was told, and in the end of the day, I was told what I was doing was bad,” Henry responded. “Greg said, ‘This isn’t your band.’ Nobody knew that better than me. ‘You’re ruining this band.’ Why, because I’m the only one who won’t leave? Do you know why everybody left? Because of Greg. Did Chuck Dukowski tell you how he left the group in tears? Did Bill Stevenson tell you how he left, crying and screaming? Did Greg ever tell you how many times he was too high to turn his equipment on? This is the stuff you never hear about - I kept that stuff out of Get In The Van. There is all kinds of shit I kept out of that book that is pretty unflattering about our lead man.”
Indeed, the most puzzling thing about Ginn’s ongoing enmity towards Rollins and his tour journals is the fact that Get In The Van is mostly uncritical of the guitarist. Get In The Van portrayed Black Flag’s epic expedition across America as some righteous crusade, a fierce, extended battle against censorious fascists, moronic authority figures, and vile, abusive cops, with the Flag on the side of right. In Rollins’ text, Ginn is their mercurial leader, the super-talented guitarist without whom none of these vainglorious adventures, and none of this magnificent music, would have happened. Get In The Van portrays Ginn in particular as a complex and, perhaps, conflicted figure, but one who is ultimately heroic.
Certainly, Rollins displayed little evidence of the self-aggrandisement of which Ginn accused his former frontman. In the years that followed, Rollins pursued a humility with relation to his contribution to the band’s legacy that ran to almost absurd lengths, often describing the Flag’s First Four Years compilation - collecting together EP and compilation tracks from the pre-Rollins incarnations of the group - as their greatest release. As recently as a 2008 interview, Henry was asserting that “what makes Black Flag stick around is nothing I have anything to do with. I was a fan and I joined. It was a combination of Greg Ginn’s amazing guitar playing and lyrics, so I can take no credit for it.”232
Given his role as vocalist on the Damaged album alone, comments such as these were acts of almost Herculean self-deprecation on Rollins’ part. Still, there’s no doubt that, if Greg Ginn had read them, they would still have left him in an inexplicable fury.
Following the success of Get In The Van, Henry Rollins began plans to release Dave Markey’s Reality 86’d movie, shot during the final Black Flag tour. In the intervening years, Markey had filmed a number of music videos, and completed work on 1991: The Year Punk Broke, his loose and charming document of Sonic Youth’s European tour of that year, in the company of the likes of Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr. and Babes In Toyland. Having now managed to buy his own editing equipment, he’d set about cutting the footage from the 1986 tour together, into the warmly impressionistic, insightful jumble it would subsequently resemble.
“Henry wanted to put it out on video, when he released Get In The Van,” says Markey. “Reality 86’d is a harmless little concert movie, you know?”
Nevertheless, when he heard that Markey was planning to finally release his movie — which includes footage of Gone in full flight, operating as a devastatingly impressive punk-funk outfit, rocking to their own twisted Mahavishnu groove — Greg Ginn stepped in and stopped the project. Some years later, when Markey released his acclaimed cult movie Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, a campy punk parody of The Runaways’ story that starred Jeff and Steven from Redd Kross and featured Black Flag music on the soundtrack, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, Ginn threatened to sue Markey’s production company, We Got Power films.
“I’d already pressed up 3,000 copies, all the artwork was done,” says Markey. “He cost me five, ten thousand dollars. I had to destroy the DVDs, change the artwork. After that, I worried what I would do, if I ever saw him again. Worried for me, because I didn’t want to go to jail. And this was someone I went way back with, was friends with, and had worked with. Cut to the future, and people are threatening to sue you, over work that’s been showing at cinemas and available on video, with their knowledge, for two decades...
“I have really mixed emotions about all of this,” he offers. Markey prefers to look to the future, which, for the film-maker, looks brighter than ever. The summer that I met with Markey for this book, he was in the midst of promotional work for his latest movie, The Reinactors. A documentary film that explores the bizarre culture of ‘professional’ celebrity impersonators who operate on the Hollywood Hall of Fame, it has won Markey the best reviews of a starred career.
For a number of years following the Flag’s split, Chuck Dukowski remained on at SST Records, working hard to maintain the label he’d built with Ginn. Still, Chuck harboured a sense of betrayal over how he’d been vibed out of the group, and how Greg had employed him to do his dirty work following Chuck’s demotion to Black Flag’s manager. “I really regret that I didn’t see through Greg’s manoeuvring,” says Chuck today, of how he was edged out of the group. “I think my will was just broken. There was something that happened, things turned. Henry described Black Flag then as being like a cult and I think there’s an element of truth to that. Greg is a destructive person. There is nothing left of the SST we built. There is no one left: every partner, every bandmate, all the bands, all gone. I think that Greg is pathologically competitive and that is his downfall. He cuts off his nose to spite his face.”233
After releasing a number of albums with his post-Flag operations, including a second album with his SST super-group October Faction, and five full-lengths with SWA, a group he formed with Merrill Ward of Overkill, Chuck finally exited SST Records in the Nineties. Today, he runs his own label, Nice & Friendly Records, through which he has released two albums’ worth of fiercely free acid-rock with the Chuck Dukowski Sextet. A family affair, the Sextet are fronted by Chuck’s wife, artist Lora Norton, whose vocals locate a potent, unique place equidistant between early Grace Slick and Kristin Hersh at her most hypnotic; their guitarist, 19-year-old Milo Gonzalez, fires off bursts of post-Hendrix drone and scree, a mind-mangling psych-scrawl that identifies the Sextet as operating within a similar universe to skronk-rockers Comets On Fire. Their 2007 release Reverse The Polarity is particularly recommended.
Of the legacy of Black Flag, the group he helped steer to their position as iconoclastic - if reluctant - leaders of the hardcore groundswell, Chuck says he is “conscious of it. It’s unavoidable really, people approach me when I go out with my family and tell me what a great impact I’ve had on them, and every day I get notes from people all over the world on the internet. My part in living those moments was played with complete commitment, sincerity and to the fullest possible intensity, and that is why I think it had an impact. I’m proud of my contribution: we made some great music, and are an example and inspiration for others trying to realise their unique vision in life. That is what I set out to do with my life. I’m a musician,” he adds, finally. “I have tried to quit playing live or at least in a band at different times in my life, and it always makes me really unhappy. The creative impulse pursues me, and forces me to make music.”
Following his exit from Black Flag, Bill Stevenson refocused his efforts upon the reformed Descendents who, with the newly collegedup Milo returned as frontman, released three more commendably oddball blasts of the purest pop-punk, before Milo again left the group to pursue his science career following 1987’s All LP. Bill and his fellow musicians hooked up with a couple of new vocalists, forming a new group named All, with whom he toured and recorded before Milo returned once again, in 1996, and The Descendents scored a remarkable comeback with that year’s Everything Sucks album, by which time they’d left SST and signed to Epitaph Records, the label run by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz.
In addition, Bill has pursued a successful production career, founding his Blasting Room studio in Fort Collins, Colorado, and working with such groups as NOFX, The Ataris and Rise Against, all of whom owe a debt to the fine pop-punk blueprint he forged with The Descendents. Currently, Stevenson plays drums for The Lemonheads, with whom he has just recorded a covers album, Varshons, with plans to complete that group’s ninth set of original material in the near future. It’s a safe bet he still enjoys fishing.
“Bill’s one of those ‘heart of gold’ types who deserves everything,” says Kira Roessler, “and I hope he’s getting it.”234
Following her exit from Black Flag, Kira finally completed her degree at UCLA. “A little while after I got out of school, I was having trouble finding work, and I was offered some work by someone in Connecticut, in the computer field,” she remembers. “I was afraid my nephews in California were gonna forget me, because they were very young. So I started recording these bedtime stories, and I would record bass duets underlying my voice... That way they could hear my voice, and remember me. But that also became a creative conduit. Because I didn’t have an outlet, and I didn’t expect to find one in Connecticut.
“When D. Boon died, Mike didn’t want to play any more, and he didn’t wanna leave his room, really. But things between us were really good, so I was able to be the one distraction in his life that was going on. And I wanted to play music with him, I wanted him to play; I was afraid of him stopping playing. So I suggested we just jam, and that’s how Dos started.”
Their bass-duo group, Dos continue to this day, even though Kira and Mike have parted, amicably, as husband and wife. The summer that I interviewed them both in California, the duo were working on the mixes for what will become their fourth full-length. Kira returned to California in 1989, and later forged a career in Hollywood, working as a dialogue editor. Recently, she worked on What We Do Is Secret, a biopic on the fast life and short times of Germs frontman Darby Crash, helping youthful LA punk-rock group The Bronx, who were appearing in the movie as the ersatz Black Flag.
“I got to meet Pat Smear,” smiles Bronx guitarist Joby Ford, of their experience on the movie. “We were cast to play Black Flag at a show The Germs were playing at, at the Fleetwood. We sat around for 13 hours, and I got accused of stealing my own guitar, because I play the same Perspex guitar Greg Ginn played in Black Flag, and they had made a prop for me, but Pat had told me to bring my own guitar. The prop guy was, ‘You’re stealing our guitar!’”
“We had Kira play bass with us, for the sound recording,” adds drummer Jorma Vik. “The dynamic was so weird, we played the song over and over, and she was like,’ No! You’ve got to slow it down! Feel the groove!’ There was a weird tension in the room, and I talked to Pat about it, said, ‘It’s real uncomfortable in there.’ That’s when I realised, that’s exactly how Black Flag was! We got really stoked on it.”235
Joe Carducci now lives in Wyoming, where he runs his publishing company, Redoubt Press, and continues to work on screenplays and future books, along with contributing to respected arts and culture magazine Arthur. “I’m still in touch with Mugger and Chuck and Bill Stevenson and Spot,” he says, “and we often talk about Greg, and SST, and what we might have done better. Other people who talk down SST often don’t know the whole story... The internecine complaints people have about those times aren’t nice to hear, because they lose the sense of who the real criminals were back then.”
Mugger, meanwhile, lives in Long Beach with his family, in a plush house paid for by judicious investments. “I never went to school, I stopped going to school when I was about 14. But I felt that I had to do something else, and when I was about 22, I quit SST. They bought me out for enough money that I didn’t really have to work, and I went to school at that point, studying business and economics at Cal State Long Beach, and I got a Master’s degree. I started to get involved in computers, but now I work for a company called DirecTV. I’m trying to learn new things, because Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski and Joe Carducci taught me to want to be that entrepreneur that’s going to go out and do things that are different.
“It was like a family,” he says, of SST, “but we weren’t bonded by blood. And so these people started to not like each other, and because of their upbringing — East Coast, West Coast, surfer, pot-smoker, whatever — it started to cause a lot of tension.”236 Mugger has yet to share his tales of wild derring-do on the road with Black Flag with his own young sons. “I told them I used to tour with a band, but, y’know, my son is 12... He’ll find out, but at this point I try to keep it away from him. I wouldn’t like it if he turned up with a Black Flag tattoo... [laughs] If he went to MIT or UCLA and graduated, he could do whatever he wanted. If he’s in a band and he’s doing great things, producing music and being creative, he can do whatever he wants. But if he just comes home, with a tattoo and no purpose, I would be bummed out.”
Ron Reyes still lives in Vancouver. “The funny thing is, Henry Rollins has got more grey hair than I do, my hair’s mostly still black, and it’s mostly still there, so that’s cool,” he laughs. “I just went a different route. I met a girl, and we got married... Henry Rollins was singing against the Family Man, and his well-stocked garage, and I wanted to embrace that. Diane and I were just ageing punk-rockers, who decided to get married, and didn’t know what our next step would be, and had no clue how we were going to do it, but decided to just do it together. Twenty-two years later, we’ve got four kids. And that was really all I wanted and needed, so that defined me for who I was, for what felt like the next hundred years: just being a Family Man, loving my kids, loving my wife.
“I’d started this band called Crash Bang Crunch Pop, and that was my favourite of all the things I ever did, because everything else that I’d done was singing other people’s songs, and in that band I decided, I’m just gonna be Ron Reyes, I’m just gonna sing silly pop songs, because that’s what I like. Greg Ginn signed us to Cruz Records, we recorded an album that never actually came out, we started touring. And that little bit of touring, away from my wife, was not comfortable for me. There was a lot of temptation - and it is what it is, you can be just some stupid little garage punk-rock band, and the temptations are there, and they present themselves wholeheartedly. And I felt that, if I was going to continue with it, I couldn’t guarantee I was going to be able to stay pure, and that really concerned me, because I’d started something with my wife that I knew transcended any of this other stuff, that would be more fulfilling. I had a sense that, you know what? It’s time to quit.”237
In the mid-Nineties, Ron and his wife became born-again Christians. “God just really captured my attention,” he says. “And that’s been fantastic, it’s been a wonderful, exciting thing. But it’s also been something I didn’t handle that well, in the early stages. Following Christ, wanting to attain this level of purity, of holiness... It’s virtually impossible. It can become a bit of a drag, if you try to impose regulations and rules on people that are very difficult to live by. I went though this stage where I was zealous, in some ways. And as part of that, I really wanted to distance myself, certainly from my punk-rock past, certainly from the ‘Chavo Pederast’ thing… I was involved in youth ministry at my church, but I didn’t want to put myself or the church in a position where they had to explain why their youth pastor once had a pseudonym that had something to do with paedophilia. Years later, me and Greg talked about that; Greg didn’t come right out and apologise, and I didn’t expect him to, but he did say that next time they press up Jealous Again they’d change the sleeve and put my real name on it. I don’t know if he’s done that or not, because I haven’t talked to him in a couple of years, but... No hard feelings.
“There was a time when I was very uncomfortable with my past, and really had no desire to talk about that, to go through it and relive it. But I’ve become a lot more at peace, with God, and who I am now, and this has all been part of my journey. I’m a lot more at peace with it, and now my daughters and sons are interested in punk-rock. I have some repenting to do, my poor kids had to put up with a very intense religious dad for a couple of years. And that’s a shame, because that’s not what it’s about, to be a follower of Christ. But, you know, a lot of us really don’t get that, and some of us learn the hard way, and some of us never learn, but that’s the way it is. It’s about learning that nobody’s perfect. Like Black Flag: there was always that straining for a level of excellence. And that was great, but that came from Greg, it was something that came very naturally to him. We could all use a little more passion in our lives. But when it becomes a controlling thing, then that’s not good.”
Dez Cadena played with a number of groups throughout the Eighties and Nineties, including Vida, with Tom Troccoli, and the DC3, his own group, who cut four albums for SST. “Of all those people,” says Joe Carducci, “Dez was the one who was a natural musician, who made music for pleasure. But in a way, it wasn’t a period for ‘natural musicians’, and they were not able to put bands together that were important contributions. DC3 was pretty good, here and there, but they never quite made the impact they should have.” Nevertheless, Dez Cadena remains on the road today, as guitarist and singer with a revivified Misfits, the Californian punk group formerly led by Glen Danzig, whose horror-themed punk rock made them contemporaries of the Flag.
Keith Morris, meanwhile, continued as frontman for The Circle Jerks, until the group went on hiatus in 1989, as guitarist Greg Hetson focused his efforts on Bad Religion, a politicised Californian hardcore band who were contemporaries of the Flag, and who enjoyed a career renaissance throughout the Nineties and onwards. The Circle Jerks reformed in the mid-Nineties, recording an album for major label Mercury Records, and continue to tour the world. In addition, he worked at V2 Records until 2007, as an A&R director helping groups like The Datsuns, The Blood Brothers and The Icarus Line, appearing onstage with the latter at SXSW 2003, performing ‘Wasted’. During the final of several interviews Keith gave for this book, he was preparing for a brief tour of Mexico, as panic about the swine flu epidemic was at its height.
Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor global pandemics can halt this tiny, profane force of nature. Morris was almost bested by ill health, however. In 2000, he was diagnosed with diabetes, and to defeat the debilitating effects of the disease, he is on a heavy regime of daily medication. “I came down with a cold that lasted eight weeks, he remembers. “I thought I had pneumonia, so I went to a doctor, and he thought it might be tuberculosis, or AIDS-related pneumonia-type symptoms. That night, I tripped and fell in the street and broke the rib in my back, and the next morning I went to my chiropractor. I was down to about 80-85 pounds, and he was freaking out. ‘Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? You’re dying.’ He had a registered nurse take my blood, and he said my blood panel was great - no hepatitis, no HIV, liver and kidneys functioning perfect. The only thing that was glaring was the glucose level, which was at 344. Normally you’re between 70 and 120. The first thing they said was, no more sugar. No nuts, no bread, no fruit. I said, ‘I gotta have fruit - how can you survive without fruit?’ I have to inject myself with insulin three times a day.”238
During this period, Keith struggled to pay his medical bills, and a number of his friends and contemporaries in the punk scene held concerts in his benefit. Raymond Pettibon also came to Keith’s assistance; since his exit from SST, Pettibon’s career had skyrocketed, following his contribution to the controversial Helter Skelter exhibition at Los Angeles’ Museum Of Contemporary Art in 1992, his work now widely respected, hung in galleries around the world, and swapping hands between collectors for vast sums of money. Pettibon offered Morris original artwork from his archives, the early Xerox flyers for Black Flag’s first shows, if he needed the money he could get from selling them. “Which I wouldn’t ever do,” adds Morris, still evidently touched by his friend’s gesture. “He’s still such a good friend, after all these years.”
By 2000, Morris was again in contact with Raymond’s brother, Greg, discussing a possible Black Flag reunion, featuring the two. “Greg said he didn’t want to play Black Flag songs,” remembers Morris. “I said, ‘Greg, I got a bunch of songs, you got a bunch of songs, you sit in this recording studio and all you do is sit with your guitar and record everything you play, and then put it out on SST. You got no editor, no producer, nobody standing over your shoulder, saying, “Look man, you’ve got a couple of guitar riffs that are totally happening, but the rest of it is unlistenable”. Now maybe you’re this big independent record tycoon, and you can get away with doing whatever you want, because it’s your music, and you get to put it out, and if five people buy it and think it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever heard, then so be it. But let’s put Black Flag back together; we’ll talk about taking a handful of your new songs, and using them as the starting point, and then take it from there.’
“I played him a bunch of my songs, and he really liked them. They weren’t punk rock, they were more just like kinda classic rock: Aerosmith, Jane’s Addiction, with a few Beatles riffs here and there, slowed down, grungey, psychedelic. At the end of it, I said, ‘Greg, I’ve been here for about four hours, we’ve talked, I’ve had a really good time, we’ve got a really good starting point... Give me a call, tell me when you want me to come back, and we’ll start up, we’ll get creative, and we’ll start doing some stuff.’ I never got the call back.”
The original incarnation of Rollins Band dissolved in 1997, Rollins replacing the entire group with the members of Mother Superior, a leonine young heavy-rock group from Los Angeles whose debut album, 1996’s The Heavy Soul Experience, had been produced by Ian MacKaye. This rejigged Rollins Band fully embraced the straight-ahead heavy rock Henry had adored in his youth, their first album together, 2000’s Get Some Go Again, containing a cover of ‘Are You Ready?’ by his beloved Thin Lizzy.
Rollins’ pursuit of his multimedia career remained as dogged as ever, his CV including stints as voice actor for villains in Batman cartoons, a regular radio show, Harmony In My Head, on Los Angeles’ airwaves, a show on KCRW, cameo appearances in movies and television, and his own television show, The Henry Rollins Show, on cable channel IFC. Following George W. Bush’s election to the presidency in 2000, and the 9/11 attacks and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rollins became increasingly politically outspoken, touring with the USO in 2003, and filmed PSAs in support of the Iraq And Afghanistan Veterans Of America in 2008.
His most visible activism, however, has been on behalf of the West Memphis Three, three teenagers convicted of murdering three children in 1993, a judgement clouded by allegations of perjury and improper DNA testing, with many arguing that the trio were wrongfully convicted. In response to their plight, in 2002 Henry organised a benefit album, Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs To Benefit The West Memphis Three, which featured the Mother Superior-era Rollins Band covering 24 Black Flag classics, with Rollins sharing vocals with a welter of punk icons and up-and-comers. Guests included Iggy Pop, who delivered a feral ‘Fix Me’, Mars Volta singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala, who sang ‘I’ve Had It’ like an unhinged banshee, and Motörhead frontman Lemmy, who marmalised ‘Thirsty & Miserable’. The album also featured a number of original Black Flag members: Kira Roessler added vocals to ‘Annihilate This Week’, Chuck Dukowski barked brilliantly through his ‘What I See’, and Keith Morris returned for ‘Nervous Breakdown’.
While Morris was working on his contribution to the West Memphis Three album, however, he was also rehearsing for another, separate Black Flag reunion, led by Greg Ginn. “I was with The Circle Jerks, on the last show of a tour,” remembers Morris. “We were playing over by the LA Coliseum, at a Cypress Hill-organised festival called the Smoke Out. We’re one of the first bands to arrive, because that’s the kind of guys we are. I was cornered by Paul Tollet and Rick Van Santen, who were the two main guys at Goldenvoice, and they said, ‘Keith, we have a proposition for you. We’re going to put on a couple of Black Flag shows at the Hollywood Palladium, and we need for you to be a part of it, a major part of it…’
“Paul pulled up his pant leg and showed me all these flea bites he had on his leg. They said Greg was housing stray cats that he was finding down on the streets in Long Beach, and was working with a cat rescue mission. I have no problem with that, I like cats, I’m not afraid of fleas. But I was told, beware, there’s quite a few cats in the space where you’re going. I thought, OK, nothing that a little extra garlic won’t solve; you can ward off fleas just like you can ward off vampires. They said, we need you to be the co-ordinator. I had no problem with that, because I wanted to do it. With all of these bands reforming, all of the new interest in these bands that had enjoyed a minimal amount of success originally... I only rehearsed twice, and it was ugly. It was brutal, it was stupid, it was a waste of time. It was also an amazing learning experience.
“But I was so fucking excited... It was Black Flag! I was fucking shaking in my shoes, quivering with anticipation. Like, dude, Greg Ginn? Fuckin’ Robo? Chuck the Duke, the four of us out onstage? We’re gonna do some serious fuckin’ damage, we’re gonna fuckin’ kill people! We’re gonna come out, and we’re gonna take all these new fuckin’ boy band, major label, corporate, get-on-a-bus, stay-in-a-hotel, Xbox-playing, Red-Bull-drinkin’ fuckin’ kids and we’re gonna tear ‘em a new asshole. We could go up there with half the fuckin’ enthusiasm and still lay waste to the majority of these bands. That’s very egotistical of me, and right now I don’t know if I could walk through a door, my head is so big... I’d heard that Goldenvoice wanted us to get back together, they were going to offer us ten million dollars, and we were going to do a world tour, take a break, and then go out and do half the world again. I guess what they were planning on was the big festivals over in Europe, us being on Lollapalooza, even a Warped Tour. We had two nights booked at the Hollywood Palladium, 8,000 people. I went down there to rehearse.
“The first night was completely ridiculous, it was like something out of Spinal Tap. I’m standing there, being friendly with Greg, trying to rekindle a friendship, a long-lost friendship, and making friends with the drummer. In the background is a karaoke Black Flag CD playing, but the tempos are just, like, elderly, like a band in retirement. So I was, like, ‘Greg, what’s the deal with these tempos, why are they so slow? There’s no energy here, no fucking spark, no passion.’ And Greg’s response was, ‘Keith, when we recorded those songs we were playing them too fast!’ And I’m, like, ouch. OK, what have I got myself into?”
Morris’ involvement with the reunion soon ceased, and his relationship with Greg devolved amid arguments over paying Keith’s expenses for driving over to Long Beach for the rehearsals, accusations that Keith was spreading rumours about the rehearsals, and disagreements about the form the concert should take. All the while, Morris kept tracking other members down to perform at what he imagined would be a historic celebration of the First Four Years of the group. “I even talked with Henry,” says Keith. “He said, ‘You know what? I owe my career to Greg Ginn’ - Henry worships everything Greg has ever done, he has made a temple out of all that, and that’s totally fuckin’ cool, because I love Henry. [But] Henry said, ‘I can’t go back down that path’.”
Keith was ultimately informed by Goldenvoice that his services were not required for the Palladium show. “I’m one of the founding members, you know?” he says. “I was out there, I got beat up a few times, I got hit with a few bottles and cans, I got in the van, for fucking little or no money. I did it out of love, and because it was what I wanted to do. With the reunion, I came to the realisation that it was really good that I left when I left, because all of the accusations that followed my leaving, all of the finger-pointing, still continued. There was still all of the negativity. There was a reason for the Flag being Black.”
Keith focused his efforts on rehearsing with Rollins Band, for an American tour of the Rise Above album, Keith and Henry sharing vocal duties during epic sets that spanned the Flag discography. Ginn had donated his songs to the Rise Above album, but later said, “It’s studio musicians playing Black Flag songs, so basically it has no balls,” adding that if he organised a Black Flag tribute album, “I would get people who could play Black Flag songs right.”239
For Morris, however, working with Rollins Band was a dream. “I’d come in the room, and those guys were like, ‘Let’s go! It’s so fuckin’ cool that you’re here, let’s do this!’ And then they’d start playing, and it was almost magical, like, fuck, why am I dealing with Greg Ginn, when I could do this? Every show on that tour was pretty much sold out. It presented a lot of younger people that never got the opportunity to see Black Flag, or at least to see something that resembled Black Flag. But Ginn was really pissed off. Henry was going to ask Greg to be a part of it, and Greg, unless he was in charge, didn’t want to be a part of it.”
Working on the Rise Above album saw Rollins once again confront his years with Black Flag. “There are a lot of things I miss,” he wrote in Broken Summers, a book collecting his journal entries during this period. “I really liked playing with Greg onstage. I think about it still. For over a decade, I have had intense dreams of playing with him again. The dreams are always depressing though. One is that we’re playing and there’s hardly anyone there, and we’re not all that good and people are leaving between songs. Still, though, I think about what it would be like to go out there with Greg again and do it. I miss him, even though I never really knew him all that well.”240
In September 2003, Greg Ginn’s Black Flag played two consecutive shows at the Hollywood Palladium, following a secret warm-up show in Long Beach. “Two nights before it went down, Rick Goldenvoice called me,” says Keith, “saying, ‘I’ll put you on the guest list, you can show up, and if you want to get up on stage and sing a few songs, feel free.’ I said, ‘I hope you have a great time, I hope everybody that shows up there has an amazing time; I won’t be there.’ And from what I heard, the only guy who had anything good to say about it was Rick Rubin. He said that Greg’s guitar playing was amazing...”
The Palladium shows opened with a set featuring Ginn and Dez Cadena on guitars, as skateboarder Mike Vallely (who’d played support with his punk band, Mike V & The Rats) yelled through the entirety of My War, with pre-recorded bass lines played by an offstage tape recorder, marking the stage debut of ‘Dale Nixon’. Next up, Ginn and Cadena were joined by drummer Robo (who had latterly been playing drums alongside Cadena in the reformed Misfits) and bassist C’el Revuelta, as Cadena roared through a clutch of songs from his era with the group, closing out with ‘Louie, Louie’. The group played two further sets, Robo leaving the stage, and C’el returning only after a bunch more songs with ‘Dale Nixon’ playing, the group closing out the set with another run through ‘Louie, Louie’.
Reviews for the shows were, at best, ambivalent. The LA Times reported that “although the players enthusiastically leaned into the songs, things didn’t feel right without singers Keith Morris and Chavo Pederast, or co-founding bassist Chuck Dukowski... not all the tunes had aged well, and the moment proved less electrifying than it should have been.”241 Five years later, Greg Ginn defended the show in the pages of LA Weekly, arguing that “it was really good to play with people I hadn’t played with in a long time, and I was able to encourage people to adopt cats. We raised about $95,000 for six organizations. That goes a long way.”242
Questioned about the show’s critics, Greg responded, “I don’t like hanging around cynical people. They’d never do something for a cat, so they can’t understand that.”
It’s unlikely that the criticisms of Black Flag’s Palladium reunion registered all that deeply with Greg Ginn. In many ways, the shows served as a reclamation of the group he’d founded, from the frontman he felt had usurped the group, and their songs, and their history. That the Palladium shows disappointed so many - and even a cursory Google of the event turns up many more negative reviews on blogs and webpages throughout the internet - is immaterial: the reunions presented Greg Ginn’s ideal of what Black Flag had been and were, and as far as he was concerned, this perspective was the only one that counted. That the ultimate line-up was also shaped by his inability to successfully renew relationships with the absent ex-members, was similarly in the spirit and ethos of Black Flag, a group that never knew an ideal situation in its life span, that had fought valiantly with the best materials they had at hand.
Perhaps the Palladium shows signified for Ginn an opportunity to finally bury Black Flag once and for all, Keith opining that “Greg has basically closed the lid on the coffin, and nailed it shut”. If Ginn had now, finally, turned his back on his history with Black Flag, he certainly hasn’t abandoned music. During the period I was working on and researching this book, SST - relocated with Ginn to Austin, Texas - was in the resurgent, at least as an outlet for Ginn’s output. Recently, he has released a double CD of collaborations between a new version of Gone and Bad Brains’ vocalist HR, 2007’s The Original Trilogy; two full-lengths with his ornery old-timey group The Texas Taylor Corrugators; two albums with his experimental noise outfit Mojack; and copious releases by seamy subterranean side projects like Hor and Fastgato. In the spring of 2009, he appeared at industry festival SXSW, in Austin, leading his latest group, Jambang, whose high-tech shows aim to fuse futuristic musical and technical approaches with the open-ended jamming ethos of his beloved Grateful Dead.
Today, Greg Ginn cuts a wilful, single-minded path through music, knowing that another, hastily assembled Black Flag reunion could generate as much money as he could ever want, if he were so inclined. That he isn’t, and continues to resist such offers, is a testament to that wilfulness, to the endurance of the individualistic spark within him, which compelled him to form Panic to make the music he wanted to perform, an instinct that thrives on in the music he makes today, even if it lacks the broad appeal of Black Flag’s discography. The music of Jambang might not resemble the righteous ramalama of ‘Nervous Breakdown’, but it is propelled by exactly the same sentiments and ethos and energy. Black Flag, meanwhile, remains Ginn’s group - he wrote the lion’s share of the songs, he was the single constant throughout their every incarnation, and every evolution they went through in their brief existence first occurred on the fret-board of his blood-flecked guitar neck.
But, like any other group worth writing a book about, Black Flag are more than the sum of their parts. The sheer number of musicians who drifted in and out of Black Flag’s ranks has become a running joke now, Ginn himself jibing that “you could troll a $100 bill through just about any trailer park and get pretty close to a quorum of Black Flag members”.243 This doesn’t, however, obscure the fact that the group featured four separate, very different frontmen, who nevertheless established equally different personas for themselves, influencing the character of the group’s music during their tenure. Each recorded bona-fide punkrock anthems that remain classic to this day, which belong to those singers entirely, even if they didn’t write the words. Henry Rollins never sang ‘Nervous Breakdown’ anywhere near as good as Keith in his prime; Keith could never have delivered so chilling a performance as ‘Damaged I’.
Same with the musicians, Robo’s metronomic off-kilter clatter at odds with Bill’s polymorphous rhythms, Kira’s studied and perfected runs the antithesis of Chuck’s hectic helter-skelter. So much diversity within a single group, and yet each and every incarnation has a valid claim to being the definitive. And while Greg Ginn was the creative core of all this activity, enabling their flights of breath-stealing punk-rock genius, he could never have achieved any of this without their help. He certainly hasn’t, since splitting the group. Reunion or no, those songs, those albums, remain. “The Circle Jerks still play ‘Nervous Breakdown’ live to this day,” says Keith Morris, “and no matter what I do I’m going to end up singing that song for the rest of my life. My friend Bob Forrest of Thelonious Monster used to get me to sing that song with him onstage, and he said, ‘That’s one song you’re not going to be able to ever get away from.’ It’s not a bad song to be stuck with, to be honest,” Keith laughs. “It’s a song that just about anybody could relate to, at some point in their life.”