The Battle Scars of Black Flag
Was Greg Ginn testing our patience with My War?
When John Lydon reemerged with something even more sinister than the Sex Pistols with Public Image Ltd.’s Metal Box in 1979, he seemed to reinvent himself with an epic album but soon, he was tumbling downward as his new band was collapsing around him in the early ‘80s.
That’s the same exact place Greg Ginn found himself right around then with his band Black Flag.
As the Pistols defined UK punk early on, starting out in ‘76, Black Flag defined West Coast punk and hardcore music, thanks in large part to Ginn, an electronics tinkerer who started the 80’s equivalent of Sun/Chess Records, SST, with a soon-formidable line-up of bands. Ginn’s guitar theatrics and grievance-filled songwriting prowess propelled Flag, but his singular vision also meant that band members came and went at will. By the time that they put their groundbreaking debut album Damaged in 1981, they’d gone through about a dozen band members and three other singers before he looped in Henry Rollins, the best yeller that Flag would ever have. Their previous singer Dez Cadena was still in the group, playing rhythm guitar while Ginn spewed out wild, mind-bending leads and Cadena could also shout along with Rollins on the albums’ anti-authority anthems. Powered by the rhythm section of drummer Robo and bassist Chuck Dukowski, the quintet seemed unstoppable, until they weren’t.
Much like Springsteen between Born to Run and Darkness at the Edge of Town, Flag were hamstrung by lawsuits (from a deal with MCA/Unicorn) where the band couldn’t follow up on their momentum with a new album for years though the Damaged line-up, now with Chuck Biscuits on drums, would lay down what would be called 1982 Demos, including songs that would appear on their next two albums though the versions there would never officially see the light of day (though they’re easily found online).
In the meantime, Ginn’s SST roster wasn’t sitting around waiting for Flag to re-emerge but instead making their own powerful statements. San Pedro trio the Minutemen were the second act on the label and made distinctive punk music mixed with jazz and funk. Minneapolis’ Hüsker Dü was another trio who had not only powerhouse musicians but also a pair of distinct, insistent songwriters. By ‘83, the two bands were coming into their own, with Minutemen putting out the 1-2 punch of What Makes A Man Start Fires? and Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat while Dü unleashed Metal Circus. The next year, each band would explode with sprawling double albums that would hurl them past the hardcore/punk crowd, with the dire concept album Zen Arcade and the wonderfully goofy supposed answer record Double Nickels on the Dime, both out that July and both recognized rightly as indie classics. Also in ‘84, yet another trio, Phoenix’s Meat Puppets, would meld punk, country and psychedelic music into previously unimaginable brew, producing the pastoral/lyrical/hysterical Meat Puppets II. In the middle of these triumphs on his own label, Ginn was no doubt hungry to deliver an album himself in ‘84 and he did, shortly before all of them, but that also meant that he risked being overshadowed by his own roster.
As for Flag itself, they also lost and tossed most of its members, with everyone but Ginn and Rollins out of the picture. Former Descendents drummer Bill Stevenson was recruited but by the time they were finally ready to record their follow-up album, My War, at the end of ‘83, they still didn’t have a bassist, so Ginn had to fill in under the pseudonym Dale Nixon, unable to admit that he couldn’t fill the role otherwise though he’d tease the name later and supposedly the same nom-de-plume would get used by other musicians trying to be cagey.
Along with the smaller band, My War’s stripped down songs lack the humor, biting satire and anthem-chants of the previous album, plus now Ginn’s guitar solos were less surprising — more structured instead of spewing out madness all over the place. Also, where Ginn excelled in mini-rants which rarely topped two or three minutes, here the end pieces all cross the five minute mark, leaving a grand total of only nine songs, compared to 15 on Damaged, and relying on Dukowski for two songs and Rollins co-writing almost half the material. Nevertheless, by this point, Flag were already legends so anything that they were coming out with would be a major hardcore statement, for better or worse, or both. Even if Ginn didn’t wanna admit it, there was a lot at stake with this second album.
Dukowski’s title track is a good blast off point and Rollins proves that he can still spit bile with the best of them. While Damaged embodied a fuck-up mind (see the skinhead punching out a mirror on the cover), My War also made its intentions clear with its title: a personalized battle, even accusing the listener right off (“you’re one of them!”). Continuing on an anti-social jag, Ginn’s “Can’t Decide” has his bass and guitar intertwined around each other at first as Rollins details how his alienation keeps him paralyzed though the words could just as well describe Ginn’s own indecision and inertia about the band though he readily answers back against that with the frothing solo in the middle and a more blistering one near the end.
Building on the the whole idea of futility, “Beat My Head Against the Wall” starts out slower and ominous before putting the pedal to the metal about frustration and decelerates again and again for this bit of wisdom- “swimming/in the mainstream/is, such a lame dream/no method to/the madness.” Only a wild burst of guitar screams near the middle offer any way out or hope. By now, Ginn’s laid out the path of disappointment and resentment for the first half of side one and OK, it’s a little easy to read into here how pissed he was about the lawsuit and forced time out of the studio but it’s a dodge to think that it didn’t affect his work in any way.
Dukowski is drafted in again to provide another stunning tune, “I Love You,” which is probably the last sentiment you’d have on your bingo card for Flag. And yes, as you’d figure, the sentiment isn’t a Hallmark moment but what he crafts here isn’t just an anti-love song but also a slasher film in miniature and maybe his strongest, most powerful work. Rollins rides in on some of Ginn’s most bad-ass riffing, yelling out, “I put my fist through the door/Hate myself for you” just in case you were worried that they’d get all mushy. “Suspicion rules my very soul” keeps along with the boiling anger we’re used to here but then he ominously adds, “my knife is sharp” and we know he ain’t using a metaphor here. Most unsettling here is that when Rollins keeps coming back to sing “I love you,” we hear a faint echo of himself in the background, as if it’s guiding his unsettling, obsessed thoughts and sometimes carefully, frighteningly stretching out each and every word. The knife keeps reappearing, as if he can’t shake it and his disturbing ideas. After a nice atonal Ginn solo, Rollins the narrator waits for his partner, hiding, and, well, you can imagine that it doesn’t go well. Even in the horrific climax, he still can’t shake his feelings for his loved one as the song tumbles to its end and he’s left alone. You might recall Jack Nicholson’s chilling portrayal of Jack Torrence in The Shining, also stalking to kill his loved one and also all alone at the end (as a giant icicle). Like the old song says, you always hurt the one you love.
The Ginn/Rollins co-write “Forever Time” then begins with an exciting start/stop rhythms that keep popping up later, leading to Rollins’ screams and a thrillingly paced ride but after “I Love You,” it’s a bit of a let down, not really extending the whole anger theme here much though the line “I feel I’m some kind of death machine/With skin and muscles and a heart” is priceless and something that the likes of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails would savor later.
Ending off side one is a ‘newer,’ post-’82 Ginn-Rollins collab and you can bet that “Swinging Man” isn’t about a party guy. After Stevenson rattle the cymbals leading to a jerky Minutemen-like rhythm, we’re treated to some of Rollins’ most blood-curdling screams on the album and in a rare bit of yucks here, we hear that the title character is “hanging around.” Later though, lines like “A needle in my brain, a needle in my vein” seem to tie drugs into the picture. By the exciting middle section, Stevenson lays down a marching beat while Rollins howls and Ginn peels out flying high-speed flecks of noise all at the same time. Ginn lays out later to make room for his funky bass as Rollins caps it off with another blood-curdling wail. You gotta hand it to these boys- they know desperation.
By then, Flag’s given you a good, entertaining 20 minutes of music but after Damaged, you’d have expected more maybe and it wasn’t quite not up to the heights of their label mates by then. Also kind of ironic that the highlights came from Dukowski, a band member that Ginn canned.
And then kids, we come to the difficult part, so strap in. Side two especially of My War shows how enthralled Ginn was with certain Birmingham metal gods. The problem was that sounding like Black Sabbath didn’t mean that Ginn could easily recreate what made Sab so stellar, including Tony Iommi’s killer riffs, Geezer Butler’s doomy, horror show lyrics and Ozzy’s high-pitched theatrical howl, all of which serve this kind of music better (you could also hear the seeds of the second half of My War on the menacing “Damaged I” from that same album). Still, the Sab connection really wasn’t that far off already: the downtrodden outlook and lyrics, hard guitar chording and yowls were already part of Flag’s DNA. The big difference here then is that the pace is slowed to a crawl. The anger’s turned to gloom and the atmosphere goes dark and dreary.
Stevenson starts out “Nothing Left Inside,” another Ginn/Rollins tune, with a good military beat but Ginn’s monomaniacal strums and occasional squeals drag things down while Rollins is at half volume, toning down his voice considerably. We get it, Hank, you’re feeling empty, but do we have to hear about that for about seven minutes? Sure, it’s intentionally painful and sounds like a bad trip, but we get the point after a couple of minutes.
Thumping drum booms and dotting bass lines start out another Ginn/Rollins post-’82 tune “Three Nights” and the pace is pretty much the same as before though it has a more sinister tone, sounding like the Stooges’ “Dirt” but nowhere as compelling, with Rollins voice buried now. Hey, how about another six minutes of slithering? You want it, you got it, with Rollins going on about his depression and lines that he probably thought were deeper than they were like “My life is a piece of a shit that got caught in my shoe/And I’ve been grinding that stink into the dirt.” Later, he whispers sinisterly over his yowls, making things at least a little more interesting but done much more convincingly on the other side with “I Love You,” not to mention “Damaged I,” which he also co-wrote.
And how about capping things off with yet another six minutes of writhing? Flag’s got you covered again, unfortunately. “Scream” begins with… thumping drum booms and dotting bass lines, again? By now, is Ginn just fucking with us or trying our patience or keeping us in the same hell hole or maybe this side’s a big sludge suite? A line like “Supposed to act mature/I’ve got better things to do/Than listen to you” is trying to sound rebellious, right? Still it’s not as bad as later when we get “I might be a big baby/But I’ll scream in your ear” which you’d charitably hope is a parody of hardcore though it doesn’t seem to be, plus Ginn’s solo blast is a pale half-speed imitation of his glories that we’ve heard before. At least, Rollins’ seething and screeching gives the words some sustenance. And hey, if you need a palate cleanser, you can just play the first side again.
Now let’s take a moment to go back and compare My War to the ‘82 Demos. Go ahead and do a quick search online… I promise that it’ll be worth it. Notice that the tunes are rawer and more exciting and also include some songs that made it onto later Flag albums. Even if Ginn didn’t have the same line-up to use, he made the decision to redo the tunes in a relatively more formal way for My War and it ain’t an improvement.
With all that said, Ginn still deserves his due. Even with less juice than on Damaged, he was still one of hardcore’s wildest, most unpredictable guitarists. And say what you will about My War, but he had enough integrity not to make it a copy of the last album, even if the results aren’t as stellar. Plus, you can hate on the second half all you want, as I did, but side one is still a strong statement regardless. Actually, the doom metal on side two also made an impression on other punk acts like D.R.I. and the Misfits (who would later boast Flag members). And as mentioned before, Flag already established themselves as major players in the scene so any twists or turns they provided in their music would resound throughout the scene regardless.
As for the album artwork, Raymond Pettibon outdid himself again. The later day unlikely darling of the art world, not to mention Ginn’s brother and the original bassist in the band that became Black Flag, always had a flair for providing unsettling artwork for SST covers and the bands’ flyers, which is where the image here originated. Believed maybe to be a puppet clutching a knife, as always, he had a knack for unsettling symbolism to match the music and maybe it mirrors the trauma of “I Love You.” Whatever deep, dark meaning that Pettibon put in there, it suits the album and captures its terror even before we hear the music. And the image is certified art by the way- MOMA lists it in their collections of works and Sotherby’s will be happy to sell you a lithograph print poster of it for a cool $700.
And Ginn sure as hell provided lots of twists and turns until Flag fell apart only two years later. In between, he wisely got a real bassist, the great, underrated Kira Roessler, and put out a mostly spoken word album (Family Man), an instrumental EP (The Process of Weeding Out), two live albums and three solid ‘regular’ studio albums (Slip It In, Loose Nut, In My Head), making for a pretty unpredictable discography.
Unfortunately, after a few reunion shows with Cadena and Robo in 2003, Ginn rehired Flag’s second singer Ron Reyes and a new rhythm section ten years later for a forgettable ‘reunion’ album and brief tour. At that time too, original singer Keith Morris, Dukowski, Cadena and Stevenson toured together as ‘Flag.’ Rollins meanwhile would become a multimedia cult star, doing film, TV, spoken word, stand-up as well as forming the Rollins Band before deciding to retire from music in 2021.
After Reyes was gone again in 2013, Ginn drafted professional skateboarder Mike Vallely (who was in on the 2003 reunion) as the band’s latest, and current, singer, which makes him number five. And bringing things full circle, as of late, Black Flag has been doing a My War tour, performing the whole album in order, including all of the excruciating second side.
And again, we gotta wonder, is Ginn just fucking with us or trying our patience again?
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This Pettibon cover image is … perfect.
Agreed! Should have added that in.