5-1-07

TDNY 401

Los Angeles

  Black Flag: Damaging the Southern California Image  

Intro

While reading and reflecting on Taylor Smith’s essay and presentation on The Beach Boys, I began thinking about how certain bands become representatives for their hometown. Bruce Springsteen was the poster boy of Asbury Park, New Jersey. Black Sabbath embodied working class Birmingham, England. When I thought about bands that have come from the Los Angeles area since The Beach Boys, it became clear that there was one band that stood out as not only the complete polar opposite of them in almost every way, but also portrayed L.A. and the southern California experience completely different. That band was Black Flag.

Black Flag was formed by guitarist Greg Ginn in 1976 in the same South Bay area of Los Angeles County that The Beach Boys hailed from. The band originally called themselves ‘Panic’ after the style of their songs which had very fast tempos and very short durations. Soon, however they found another band had already taken the name. At the suggestion of Ginn’s younger brother and band artist who went by ‘Raymond Pettibon’, they then donned the moniker Black Flag. Pettibon had designed a logo for them consisting of four vertical bars that looked like a rippling flag in the wind. Michael Azerrad notes the significance of the band’s new name,

“If a white flag means surrender, it was plain what a black flag meant; a black flag is also a recognized symbol of anarchy, not to mention the traditional emblem of pirates; it sounded a bit like their heroes Black Sabbath as well. Of course, the fact that Black Flag was also a popular insecticide didn’t hurt either. ‘We were comfortable with all the implications of the name,’ says Ginn, ‘as well as it just sounded, you know, heavy.’”[1]

This ‘heaviness’ was an essential part of both the Black Flag sound and image. Being influenced by bands like the Ramones, MC5, and Iggy Pop, Black Flag took punk rock to a new level and pioneered a sound that came to be called ‘hardcore’. Their music was an outlet to work out the tensions and issues that they encountered in their bland L.A. suburban existence. They did not identify with the surf culture championed by The Beach Boys. “Ginn disdained the conformity and materialism of surfing…he preferred to write poetry and do ham radio.”[2] In fact Black Flag’s music

“was a harsh wake-up call for the California dream: for all the perfect weather and affluent lifestyles, there was something gnawing at its youth. Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore – it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.”[3]

It wasn’t long until this sentiment was being voiced by other adolescents across the country. In 1979 Black Flag released their first EP called Nervous Breakdown which became the template for the national hardcore punk scene to follow. In January 1982 the band released Damaged their first full length LP with Greg Ginn and vocalist Henry Rollins becoming the most permanent members of the group.

“Damaged made a fairly big impact in Europe and England…who were fascinated by the revelation that there was a really radical punk rock scene developing in the beach communities of Southern California, which they previously looked on as an idyllic promised land, seemingly the last place where kids would flip a musical middle finger at society. ‘And it caused certain people to think, ‘Well, is this legitimate?’’ says Ginn. ‘There’s that element of ‘This is wrong, coming from this place. People like that should be coming from Birmingham, England. You guys have it good.’ But when you’re surrounded by Genesis fans, I don’t know how idyllic that is. When you’re surrounded by that materialistic kind of a thing and you’re looking for something deeper than that, then that’s not an ideal environment.”[4]

Not only was Black Flag’s music a stylistic middle finger to modern mainstream rock bands like Journey, Foghat, and Peter Frampton, but also a cultural one as well. In a way Black Flag had a mission to undo the work The Beach Boys had done in idealizing Southern California to the world. They had to let people know the new reality of living in LA in the 1980’s under Reaganomics.

Equality

The band was plagued with numerous lineup changes throughout their career, which also became a trend in hardcore bands to follow. It is interesting to notice that Black Flag reflected the racial diversity and open-mindedness of Los Angeles in their personnel changes. One could even call Black Flag an equal opportunity band. Singer Chavo Pederast (born Ron Reyes) was Puerto Rican, drummer ROBO (born Roberto Valverde) was Columbian, and producer Spot (born Glenn Lockett) was African American. Additionally, in their most prolific recording and touring years (1983-1985), female bassist Kira Roessler (who often played in a dress) held down the bottom end of the rhythm section.

Compared to The Beach Boys, Black Flag was an aural assault on the ears. There are no angelic choruses and high harmonized vocal melodies. There are no nice sounding guitars and keyboards. The Black Flag sound was characterized by loud, highly distorted guitars, vocals that were more screaming than singing, pounding bass and frenetic drumming. It was powerful and abrasive music, perhaps the foremost of its time. Chris Doherty, singer of Boston based hardcore band Gang Green recalls the hardcore style that Black Flag forged. He said “we weren’t singing, we were just screaming against authority and our parents and everything that was pissing us off in our lives.”[5] Just as The Beach Boys used their everyday activities as inspiration for songs, so did Black Flag; only times had changed in America.

            While in 1966 The Beach boys sang “God only knows what I’d be without you”[6], in 1980 Black Flag sang “I’ve got no values, might as well blow you away.”[7] Keith Morris, Black Flag’s first vocalist recalls how “the music we were performing, the lyrics that we were writing, had nothing to do with holding hands and smiling and skipping off into the sunset.”[8] They sang about their experience of boredom, depression, and alienation in L.A.’s suburban wasteland. With song titles such as ‘Depression’, ‘Nervous Breakdown’, ‘American Waste’, ‘You Bet We’ve Got Something Personal Against You!’, ‘Life of Pain’, ‘Thirsty and Miserable’ Black Flag shoved their discontent in the public’s face. Their songs were adolescent (and post-adolescent) angst and turmoil in musical form. Black Flag would often play with bands like Fear and X who had a similar loathing for the big city of L.A. The lyrics for X’s song “Los Angeles” describe either an immigrant or tourist who had to get out of L.A. because she couldn’t stand the racial, sexual, and class diversity of the place. Fear’s anti-L.A. “I Love Livin’ in the City” is a sarcastic rant about the dark and dirty side of the city, including lists of disgusting sights and smells one can encounter in the slums. However, they boys in Fear would much rather live in L.A. than New York City. In their song “New York’s Alright if You Like Saxophones”, vocalist Lee Ving (born Lee James Capalero) lists the things that he finds repulsive about New York, such as freezing to death or being pushed in front of the subway.

The roughness of the streets of Los Angeles would be a theme that would reappear in the L.A. glam metal scene in the mid to late 1980’s. It was a scene that was directly influenced by Black Flag and their contemporaries[9]. Bands like Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and Mötley Crüe often produced songs that spoke of the evils of life on the streets of Hollywood/L.A. The main themes dealt with corruption, violence, and filth of L.A. and the fate of those naive souls who were transformed through moving here. Unlike most L.A. punk and hardcore acts, the members of most metal bands were transplants to Southern California. For example, no member of the original lineup of Guns N’ Roses was born or raised in L.A. These songs were their own lived experiences as well as that of friends and bandmates who had migrated to Los Angeles from other parts of the country and had their eyes opened to the true grit of the big city. Poison’s tune “Fallen Angel” is about a disillusioned small town girl becoming a whore after arriving in the big city. Mötley Crüe’s track “Dr. Feelgood” is about a drug lord who is the one really running the city streets. Guns N’ Roses had songs like “Welcome to the Jungle”, “Paradise City”, and “Move to the City”. A close inspection of the lyrics to these particular songs is telling, especially given the fact vocalist/lyricist W. Axl Rose was born and raised in rural Lafayette, Indiana and moved to L.A. at 20 years old. Rock critic/journalist Chuck Klosterman believes however, that “Axl clearly loved the concept of Los Angeles, even if he constantly sang about how disgusting it was.”[10] Again, this is the love/hate relationship that the 70’s punks had with the place, and most likely reflects the views of many other citizens of the L.A. region.

One contemporary, Grammy award winning rock band who also shared a similar bifurcated attitude towards L.A. was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They also have roots in the Los Angeles punk scene as their bassist Flea (born Michael Balzary) played in the band Fear for a time before joining the Chili Peppers who formed in 1983. Lyrics to the songs “Under the Bridge”, “Californiacation”, and “Dani California” speak to the same ambivalences about their hometown that has been described above.

The live performance for Black Flag was meant as a site of a cathartic release, but after a while touring became exhausting to both band members and audience. On a tour in 1984 they coined the term for their theory of live performance as ‘the blasting concept’ which was an all out “sonic assault on the audience.”[11] A live concert could literally be punishing for attendees not only because of volume and duration of the performance, but also dealing with youths ‘slam dancing’ – a new and aggressive form of dancing forged in the clubs of Los Angeles that caused participants to collide in circular motions on the floor, often sustaining injuries.

There were many times in Los Angeles where hardcore punk shows would end with the police breaking up the event, and occasionally in a riot of violence or police brutality. Even just living in LA as a young ‘punk rocker’ in that time could be scary. In singer Henry Rollins’ journal from his years in Black Flag he writes

“I’m scared to walk around my neighborhood in L.A. I’m afraid of getting picked up by the pigs. I’ve had enough fucked up experiences at night with them. I’m afraid of getting picked up and getting the shit beaten out of me by the swine.”[12]

Black Flag was not the first band to draw Johnny Law’s attention in Los Angeles. Bands like Fear, The Circle Jerks, The Germs, and X had already been dealing with their abusive authority for a few years. Ginn even claimed that phones had been tapped and plainclothes officers had been following band members on occasion.

            Taylor spoke of the recording techniques that The Beach Boys used which made their music ‘sparkle’ like aural sunshine. Their songs were recorded and mixed in such a fashion that the final product lacked bass and low frequencies. For Black Flag however, the opposite effect was sought after and achieved. If The Beach Boys music sounded like sunshine, then the music of Black Flag is the sound of darkness. There was even darkness inherent in their chosen band name. They wanted a sound that was low, ‘heavy’, and ‘metallic’. This soundscape more accurately reflected their experience of living in the city of angels. Azerrad notes that as time went on, “[t]he sound got much more metallic and sludgy, with Ginn anchoring the music with bottom-heavy bass-and-guitar formations.”[13] Things were heavy as opposed to light; the members of Black Flag felt like they were being crushed by the weight of the city and its institutions and devices. The ‘metallic’ sound reflected the built environment of freeways and buildings, not the natural panorama of the beach and the ocean endorsed so highly by South Bay alumni The Beach Boys. Through this new sound, Black Flag were creating a voice for their own and subsequent generations.

Black Flag’s records were of a consistent low fidelity quality due mainly to their lack of a descent budget to record on the best and latest equipment. However, this rawness adds a heavy characteristic to their sound that might have been missing had they been able to record in a major studio with a big-name producer who would most likely have tried to sterilize their sound. Black Flag didn’t wait around for a major label to offer them a contract either. They knew if they wanted a record pressed they would have to do it themselves. Thus SST Records was born. SST stood for Solid State Transmitters because Ginn was an amateur at ham radio. SST became the model for underground labels across the country to emulate, such as Dischord, Frontier, Posh Boy, and New Alliance. SST released records by such influential bands as The Minutemen, the Descendents[14], Bad Brains, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr., among others.

Image

Black Flag portrayed a very somber image. The artwork on their flyers and record covers spoke to their suburban teenage angst and dissatisfaction. Guitarists Greg Ginn’s brother, under the pseudonym Raymond Pettibon, was the bands primary graphic artist. “Pettibon’s pen-and-ink artwork was a perfect visual analogue to the music it promoted – gritty, stark, violent, smart, provocative, and utterly American.”[15] Singer Henry Rollins reflected on the artistic image of Black Flag in a recent documentary called American Hardcore, where he said

“Black Flag had this austere, kind of, very earnest/serious thing about them that made you kind of respect it—be in awe of it. The band had a logo. The band had a look. The four bars. It was really all very overwhelming. And just had this intense take on things. They had a political agenda.”[16]

Flyers often included blatantly offensive material containing controversial images of public figures and taboo subjects that pushed the limits of convention and decency, which is part of what the hardcore subculture was about. The visual art of L.A. hardcore and punk flyers were

“all the craft of a hastily scribbled note left on the kitchen table by someone running out on an errand…Punk graphics…were hit-and-run because things were moving fast then and it was all about getting information across. Shows were organized, promoted, and presented in a matter of days…all were conceived and brought to fruition quickly and on minimal funds…In classic dada tradition, punks rejected the Academy and drew instead from ‘low’ sources: graffiti, underground comics, advertising, car culture, the tarot, blaxploitation, bondage and pornography, surf culture, fifties industrial films, Mad magazine, and the universe of American detritus that winds up in thrift stores. It all got tossed in the blender, and though the results were often visually crude, they were invariably witty.”[17]

On stage, the attire of Black Flag couldn’t be farther from the Pendletons

(and later, the Hawaiian print shirts) of The Beach Boys. Black Flag were so poor that they would receive bags of second hand clothes from Goodwill and Salvation Army type stores that guitarist Ginn’s father would buy for them by the pound for pennies. Hardcore ‘fashion’ “was basically typical suburban attire but ripped and dingy, topped with military short haircuts.”[18]

Greg Ginn expressed that the band was more than just an outlet for aggression when he said,

“[w]e do want to provide a physical and emotional release, but we also want to create an atmosphere where people are encouraged to think for themselves rather than accept what they’ve been told.”[19]

It is this ideology that has caused some to compare the Los Angeles hardcore movement of the late 70’s and early 80’s with the folk musicians of the mid-late 60’s. In her 1980 documentary on the LA punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, Penelope Spheeris interviewed Brendan Mullen owner of the short lived L.A. club the Masque, who stated

“Some of the better of the punk bands that developed into sort of like folk music. I don’t mean folk music as in traditional folk music, but the allegory can be drawn in the sixties when protestors used acoustic guitars. Now instead of acoustic guitars they have high speed, 300 beats a minuet speed rock. And, uh, yelling about the same things. About how their air is poisoned out there [points to downtown LA over his shoulder]. The air in utopia is poisoned. Ya know, the final joke.”[20]

Mullen seems to be right because even today underground punk scenes across the country tend to have some of the most radical stances on important political issues.

It would be hard to find a band so diametrically opposed to The Beach Boys than Black Flag. While they never attained the wide popularity of The Beach Boys, Black Flag have come to be a very influential band to both underground and mainstream artists. It is interesting to see that a band like Black Flag that formed in the same South Bay area of Los Angeles only 15 years after The Beach Boys could turn out so completely different. It shows that Los Angeles, and indeed the country was changing. American youth were disillusioned with the Reagan administration and the ‘American Dream’. Black Flag became spokespersons for Los Angeles and helped to modify how the world viewed the Southern California experience. They probably did not (and most likely could never) dissolve the cloud of sunny idealism that The Beach Boys formed over LA life, but they did poke some holes in it so that the world could peek in on some of the more harsh realities of living in the smog-choked, police enforced (sub)urban sprawl of the 1980’s.

American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986. DVD. Dir.

Paul Rachman. Writ. Steven Blush. Sony Pictures, 2007. 100 min.

Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. New York: Little, Brown and

Company, 2001.

Beach Boys, The. Pet Sounds. Capitol 26266, 1966.

Black Flag. The First Four Years. SST CD 021. 1983.

Decline of the Western Civilization, The. VHS. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Spheeris

Films, Inc., 1981. 100 min.

Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk. Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1999.

Daköta. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Rollins, Henry. Get In The Van: On the Road with Black Flag. Los Angeles:           

2.13.61 Publications, Inc. 1994, 2^nd ed. 2004.