Black Flag

Guitarist Greg Ginn formed Black Flag in 1976 in Hermosa Beach with Keith Morris on vocals. After their first single, Nervous Breakdown (SST, January 1978) which featured the micro-manifesto Wasted, Morris left the group to start Circle Jerks, and Ginn replaced him with Chavo Pederast, from Redd Kross. With Chuck Dukowski on bass and Robo on drums, the group recorded the EP Jealous Again (SST, 1980) in the blistering and bombastic style of beach punk, which at this point is still derivative of the Sex Pistols (White Minority, Jealous Again).

Having settled their lineup around brash singer Henry Rollins and rhythm guitarist Dez Cadena, Black Flag released their first album, Damaged (SST, 1981), one of the crowning achievements of beach punk, and an epileptic record that revolutionized rock music in California.
This work opens with Rise Above, an anthem shouted with unrestrained ferocity over the rock-and-roll convulsions of Ginn and Cadena (particularly on the song's famous anti-police slogan "we are tired of your abuse/ try to stop us it's no use"). Six Pack is hurled into an apoplectic slam dance by Ginn's scorching riffs and Dukowski's homicidal assaults. On the sarcastic TV Party, the clapping and choruses of beat music are used instead, but with the bass "hiccups" typical of the Pistols. The other standout tracks are Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie, a compelling litany set to the Ramones' classic "trot step," and Damaged II, with a streak of distorted Ginn virtuosities. Overall, the album is a cavalcade of chaotic thrash (Police Truck, Depression) and brash cacophonies (Thirsty And Miserable) that assaults and stuns with its relentless din.
Rollins's despaired singing is the most enduring symbol of Black Flag`s sound. His broken, stammering, terrified screams, as in the psychic collapse of Damaged I, act as a hallucinatory testament to psychological depression in the California metropolis, immersed in a low-budget horror-film atmosphere of dismembered melodies, demented rhythms, slashing guitars, and cannibalistic vocalizations. A sense of emptiness and debasement of character emerges from the landscape of a California that increasingly resembles Eliot's "The Waste Land." His manic personality, devoted to martyrdom (which is also manifest in his activity as an underground poet) makes him the obvious "hero" of the band. But it is Ginn - a guitar virtuoso, able to use it as a jackhammer, as an auger, as a helicopter blade, as a starter motor, and as a machine gun - who is the lynchpin of the band: his guitar playing, the most imaginative, erudite, titanic, and captivating of the era, makes him the Jimmy Page of punk.

After two years of inactivity due to the arrest of Ginn and Dukowski, the band returned with My War (SST, 1983), an entirely different record dominated by Ginn's personality, which the danse macabre of My War and the rock and roll of Can't Decide leave unresolved, and in which the slow, perverse blues rituals of Nothing Left Inside (one of their masterpieces), Three Nights, and Scream coined a new genre, inspired by (if anyone) Black Sabbath and Saint Vitus, which Melvins would make famous. In essence, this album invented both doom metal and mathcore a decade in advance.

Slip It In (SST, 1984) establishes Ginn's free-form guitar stylings (Obliteration) and the vocalist's verbosity (Rat's Eyes, You're Not Evil), while also indulging in excesses of heavy metal machismo (see the title-track's live orgasm). But the band's sound, that of Black Coffee, Wound Up, and The Bars, has mostly morphed into a hard and fast rock-and-roll, enlivened by Ginn's virtuosic solos and Rollins's animalistic singing.

Family Man (SST, 1984), with one side comprised of instrumental pieces by Ginn and the other of spoken monologues by Rollins, confirmed their ideological schism.

Bringing the band back into vogue are the three albums of the following year. Loose Nut (SST, 1985) is their heaviest effort, with Annihilate This Week, a cadenced choral anthem; This Is Good, Rollins' demented frenzy set to Ginn's jazz-dissonant rhythm; and two sarcastic Pistols-esque harangues, Loose Nut and Bastard In Love. In My Head (SST, 1985) contains Paralyzed and Drinking And Driving, a major episode in Rollins' caricatural saga of street nihilism with an exceptional solo by Ginn.

The EP Process Of Weeding Out (SST, 1985), perhaps the best record of their career, is entirely instrumental, a fusion of garage-rock jams and free jazz improvisation. This work is Ginn's satori - a tornado of feedback, hissing, fuzz, atonal progressions, Hendrixian glissandos, and Ulmer-esque "harmolodics" (the title track) - and bassist Kira's finest hour (Your Last Affront). Hypnotic and explosive, Ginn's jazz-punk stands among rock's great achievements. Side projects October Faction and Gone would stem from this record.

Rollins went on to form the Rollins Band.