The word that comes to mind with BLACK FLAG is ritual. The importance of keeping up with a routine until it becomes a habit and then a way of life. Setting a direction, but not a destination, and just going, pressing on. So it made sense to me that I would engage in a reading ritual with this text. It’s hard enough to find that it’s cost-prohibitive to purchase. Many libraries do not carry it. But, the Harold Washington Library Center of the Chicago Public Library system has it on closed reserve, so you better believe I spent a few hours reading it on a summer afternoon this July. Though I couldn’t finish it in a single sitting as I had planned, a few hundred quick snaps of the remaining spreads meant I could finish it at my leisure on my phone over the next few days. Maybe not the way it was intended to be ingested, but I set a goal and I followed through with it until I reached completion.
For years, I’d resisted reading it on principle because of Greg Ginn’s comments in We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews. (Two colons in a book title, what a flex!) In a retrospective on his band, Ginn said he hadn’t read Get in the Van and didn’t need to because Henry had falsely written himself into the hard times of BLACK FLAG in the pages of the book. According to Ginn, those hard times happened before Henry joined up with southern California’s most influential band, so all of the stories in Get in the Van can be safely disregarded. Also, the “shed” in the Ginn family’s backyard was “constructed like a house” and so Henry talking about living in it doesn’t seem impressive to Ginn. For years, I accepted this received wisdom and thought it made me a more discerning BLACK FLAG fan because I didn’t go on the Henry Rollins deep dive. I knew better! Ron Reyes was the best BLACK FLAG vocalist and “Damaged” was the beginning of the end, right? Right? Right…? Even if I agreed with Ginn for a while, I really did myself a disservice by skipping over this book if for no other reason than because I was missing out on the Glen Friedman, Ed Colver, and Naomi Petersen photos throughout its pages. (The recent-ish Glen Friedman book of BLACK FLAG photos is a mandatory purchase.) And that Rollins guy does have a way with words now and then.
Aside from ritual, another concept synonymous with BLACK FLAG is police harassment. Rollins makes that abundantly clear in his journal, though most of the most intense police activity the band suffered isn’t directly described in these pages, as he wasn’t journaling in the earliest days he shared with the band. It makes me wonder whether Greg Ginn ever kept a journal or anything else related to the band’s history. I’d love to read a book of the notes he must have taken to prepare for and engage in the 1981 trial with Unicorn Records. Rollins’ tales of the constant harassment from cops in Redondo Beach for just walking down the street are a lot. The agency Rollins has is an interesting thing to consider. It’s like he couldn’t be around people so he just had to be alone all the time. Still, he felt trapped, and that suffocating loneliness really crawls into these pages in the entries where he is locked in the shed’s vacancy for weeks at a time.
Rollins tracks the end of BLACK FLAG and the beginning of his spoken word career in the pages of this text. Its greatest value is in the sheer monotony of touring, not any kind of insight on Hank’s part. I mean maybe you can learn something about the experience of human misery but that’s not the takeaway I had. Take this comment about Ian MacKaye from when BLACK FLAG dropped by Washington, D.C., in 1985: It must drive Ian crazy, making him drive me all over the place. He doesn’t seem to mind. Ian is one of those types of people — genuinely nice and considerate of his pals. He always impresses me in that way as well as many others too. Ian is one of those rare types who takes time for others. He does it about 99% more than I do. I am one of the most inconsiderate people I have ever seen — ever (p. 184). That last line captures a lot of the ideas in this book, frankly. Shining moments of clarity blinking through the darkness of self-hatred and misanthropy.
It’s more that this is a document of the USHC scene as it transitioned from its first to its second wave. From a distance, it’s clear that he was not into it as much as many of the people reading this book might have been. The mockery of BL’AST is a perfect example of this tension. On the other hand, the critique of pretty much every band in this book makes me reflect on the misguided idea that I once held—that I had to share the opinions of bands I liked with regard to their musical preferences and influences. What do I mean by this? I mean thinking I couldn’t like U2 because Rollins once dogged them in a standup bit, saying they used “the same bass line for 25 years.” It doesn’t even matter whether that accusation is true; it’s a hot take from someone whose music I enjoyed, so I had to take it as gospel. (This is a bad example because I don’t actually like U2 anyway, regardless of what anyone thinks.) So, I don’t have to dislike BL’AST just because Rollins bagged on them when they were taking off. Anyway, people who like BLACK FLAG but not BL’AST at this point are just being particular. That said, I relished Rollins’ take on the gig they did with VENOM in New Jersey in 1986. His words cannot diminish my enjoyment of the early VENOM singles and albums. I also cannot help but laugh at this review. “What bullshit. VENOM suck. They are so full of shit. What a bad joke. They don’t sweat and they probably don’t even fuck” (p. 232). Deadly. Moments like these are the true gems in this book. I mean “they don’t sweat” from a band as hard-working as BLACK FLAG is brutal. By the same token, “They probably don’t even fuck” (emphasis mine) is incredible. Like, why is he hedging on this take? The mind reels. Still though, asking for autographs from a punk band, which is a recurring event in these pages, just seems silly. It must have been strange and difficult to navigate the tension between being successful enough to live off the band and not have a “real” job waiting for you at home. It gave the people at BLACK FLAG shows a skewed idea of how comfortable the lives of the band members were. For that matter, consider the passages about Rollins and other band or crew members riding in the U-Haul trailer between gigs while sitting on amps and gear in complete darkness. Given how frequently they did so, it’s incredible that only D. Boon went out that way…
For all the obsession over different eras and releases of BLACK FLAG after the release of American Hardcore (the 2006 movie, not the 2001 book), it’s a little surprising that there wasn’t a band on No Way, Grave Mistake, Sorry State, etc. called JEALOUS COWARDS with an EP titled “Try to Control.” That, or a band that dressed in ’80s era Häagen-Dazs shirts and invited an enthusiastic fan to sing a cover of “Clocked In” at the end of every show. Really, even if they had done these things, or taken an even more obsessed eye to the critical aspects of the band, they would never measure up. Part of that has to do with how time marches on. The other part, though, is the singer of your band probably isn’t pen pals with NICK CAVE and DIAMANDA GALAS and members of EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN, or whoever their modern analogues might be. You just aren’t that interesting.
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