It took me a long time to really get the MC5. I mean, I snapped up Kick Out the Jams when I came across it at Recycled Records because it was, y'know, a fabled "proto-punk" classic of the Velvets, Stooges sort (and I knew I liked them)(the copy I found had a large round sticker with a cartoon of a safety pin that read "PUNK"). But when I got it home I found it kind of a surprise, kind of a letdown; a really noisy live album that sounded closer to early heavy metal than "punk," the political content which Dave Marsh et al always made so much about (comparing them to The Clash) sounded minimal, and the damn thing was so clattering and noisy and almost sloppy-sounding that it was hard to even pick out the good stuff. I was puzzled, because so far I had loved all these critically-acclaimed punk progenitors, but Kick Out the Jams didn't quite do it for me.
I think maybe a year later I came across Back in the USA. And I had problems with that one, too. It was sooooo tight that the band sound constipated, and there was no bottom, the sound so thin it was like listening to a transistor radio (I'm not a fan of "arty" production - I want rock records to ROCK). Some of the songs were really good, though. A couple years after that I also picked up the Babes in Arms collection. Again, some cool stuff there but again, I still wanted my socks knocked off and it wasn't happening. In the end, I liked the MC5 okay, but I didn't love them. And since I loved the Stooges, Dolls, Velvets, I wanted to love the MC5.
Various things happened over the years. Dave Marsh's "The MC5: Back On Shakin' Street" helped me believe that there was still something in the MC5 that I needed to connect with, and introduced me to "Black To Comm" - even if all he did was describe it. Clinton Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids helped me understand the 5's free-jazz aspirations, and made them more interesting. I picked up a few bootlegs along the way - all disappointing, all had their moments.
Then Wayne Kramer's great solo album The Hard Stuff came out. I loved his version of "Poison" ("his" version is an odd way to put it, since he wrote the song in the first place). Honestly, I felt The Hard Stuff was a realization of what the 5 had been striving for. But it helped me to understand that concept - that they had been striving for something - and achieving it, too, at least part of the time. I became a big Kramer fan and followed his career in the 90's.
Another big step to understanding was the MC5 retrospective in Addicted to Noise in the late 90's. ATN may have been full of shit much of the time, but this issue was superb. And the centerpiece was a long, long interview with Kramer where he spoke of the Detroit music scene, the MC5, the politics of the 60's, at length, with great honesty and insight. He freely admitted the band's many mistakes, but also articulated, again, what they had tried to do.
Great kudos also go to Perfect Sound Forever's MC5 tribute, which helped me understand even further, and helped me really perceive the 5's influences and the context of the band and their music. (I contributed a piece on Wayne's solo albums.)
Oh, and I finally, finally got High Time, which I think is the one 5 album where they finally cooked it up right and made a consistent, and good-sounding, album. Can't believe I neglected that one all those years.
So nowadays, I do love the MC5. But I love them more for their story than for their records. This is not to say they didn't make some good records (none of them are bad). I think what it points to is that the 5 (and Kramer, Thompson and Davis freely admit to this in interviews in Brett Callwood's rough but loving MC5: Sonically Speaking), that the MC5 were basically a live band. They perfected a live show that was, by all accounts, overpowering - the equal of anything any of their brethren (such as role models The Who) were dishing out (perhaps even the superior of many). But, unlike The Who, who had the benefit of entering the studio with a rock-solid producer and engineer from day one (Shel Talmy and Glyn Johns), allowing them to learn how to put themselves across effectively on vinyl. Yes, Kit Lambert fucked up the records that followed until the band finally put their foot down, but they learned enough that even Lambert couldn't ruin them the way Landau did the 5.
The problem this created for them is that a great live show can't be recorded, really. In other words, Kick Out the Jams probably was a total mindfuck if you were standing in front of the stage that night in late 1968, but the resultant album almost couldn't help but turn out something of a muddy mess (which it is - but admittedly a glorious one) once pressed into black grooves. Maybe a sharp engineer like, again, Glyn Johns, could have polished it into the equal of Live At Leeds (I have heard numerous live Who recordings from the same era as KOTJ, and many of those are muddy and messy as well. But The Who had better sound people, better equipment, and were a more disciplined group as well - another thing I suspect the 5 would freely admit).
In the case of album # 2, they fucked themselves by making what was probably the worst choice of producer they possibly could. Now look, I happen to like Springsteen (he's overrated - that doesn't mean he isn't good) and Landau did a good job with him - ten years later. If he'd given Back in the USA the kind of sound he gave Bruce on Darkness and The River, Back would at least sounded decent, not like the tinny shriek that it came out.
But it still wouldn't have served them. Landau saw only one side of the band as valid (ass-kicking, basic rock and roll) and had no use for the other side (sprawling, free jazz-influenced science-fiction rock). In so doing he did the band a great disservice, because the MC5 were about both those sides, and each side informed the other. By stripping away the part of the band that made "Starship" and "Black To Comm," he also stripped away the part that made "Kick Out the Jams" and "Ramblin' Rose" so exciting. All they had learned from James Brown and Sun Ra was left behind. The surviving band members, I should note, all have good things to say about Landau as a person and seem to agree that he did his best and did what he thought was right. Nonetheless, he was a disastrous choice for them. They should've taken a tip from the Stooges and gotten Don Gallucci.
What makes album #3 their best is that it manages to restore what Landau took away (energy free-form-freakout) while managing to also retain the handful of good things Landau brought to them (discipline, being in tune and in time). The songs are among their smartest and sharpest and they still manage to capture their passion and imagination. Its just a damn shame the band had to fall apart almost immediately after, since the surviving relics of the post-5 activities of the band members indicate they all still had it, and, had they not succumbed to drugs and despair, they no doubt would have gotten the hit records they so yearned for.
But they did. And so the story ended. It saddens me that I never even got to see a good reunion tour, thanks to the too-early demise of Tyner and Smith, and, since I missed DKT/MC5, I didn't even get to see a good tribute tour, though I hope that Kramer and Thompson will still do something in the future.
So, my hats off to the 5. It took a while, but now, I do get them. And I do love them. And I love that Kramer and Thompson (and John Sinclair, too) are all still out there, fighting the good fight as best they can. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.
Essential Recordings
`66 Breakout (quasi-legal boot of the 5 in their early days - a must for "Black To Comm") Kick Out the Jams Back in the USA High Time Starship: Live at Sturgis Armory June 1968 (an essential bootleg for getting a larger picture of the 5's live show than KOTJ can give) Live at the Saginaw Civic Centre, Jan. 1, 1970 (another essential bootleg - pretty decent sound and you get to hear what the songs from Back in the USA were really supposed to sound like) Michigan Brand Nuggets a bootleg collection of singles from 60's-era Michigan acts. The early Bob Seger cuts are awesome! The 5, represented here by a powerful single version of "Borderline", sound revelatory in this context.
One day I hope they'll do a boxed set with all three albums and this stuff as well. It would be an essential box.
The Stooges were not listed in the original two editions of The Rolling Stone Record Guide. Here's how it should have read. Reprinted without permission from "Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed" by Paul Trynka:
Rock music stripped down to its most vital essentials, The Stooges still sounds fresher and more extreme than most of the punk and alternative material it has inspired over the decades. The lyrics reject intellectualism for a documentary depiction of boredom and anomie, delivered deadpan over an imposing, monumental backing. It sounds simple, but each element of the monolithic structure has been hoisted into place with painstaking care, most notably Ron Asheton's precise, memorable riffs on songs like "No Fun," "1969," "I Wanna Be Your Dog," and "Not Right."
For their second release, Asheton's guitar playing progressed from charming primitivism to something much more powerful and concise. Thanks to inspired production from onetime "Louie Louie" organist Don Gallucci, who decreed that the band would perform their customary set as if playing live, Fun House captured all the elemental power of The Stooges in full flow. Yet while the album revels in exquisitely dumb riffs -- "Loose," "1970" -- there's a confident, sophisticated swagger to the sound too. When Steve MacKay weighs in on saxophone five songs in, on "1970," the aural onslaught is as thrilling as rock`n'roll ever gets.
Raw Power is a desperate, final assault on a music industry that had proved impervious to The Stooges charms, a last gasp that, the lyrics told us, was irrevocably doomed. On a cranked-up Les Paul, bad-boy guitarist James Williamson brought a new Detroit aggression to the sound, sounding more manic, if more conventional, than his predecessor. Ron Asheton, demoted to bass, became one of the instruments greatest exponents, even if his comrades cared so little about the rhythm section that they didn't bother to record them properly. The album followed a strict structure suggested by manager Tony DeFries. Despire DeFries' efforts, the album was a mess, with guitar piled on guitar, screamed, semi-coherent lyrics, and those inaudible drums. But it was a magnificent, inspiring mess, its confusion the perfect metaphor for its makers increasingly deranged state. In 1996, Iggy remixed the album.
(Note: as far as I'm concerned, Robert Christgau summed up the remix best: Strict constructionists and lo-fi snobs charge indignantly that by remixing his own album Iggy has made a mockery of history and done irreparable damage to a priceless work of art. This is really stupid. Before it was anointed the Platonic idea of rock and roll by desperate young men who didn't have much else to choose from, first-generation Iggyphiles charged just as indignantly that David Bowie had mixed the real thing way too thin--as Iggy observes, this classic-by-comparison always sounded "weedy" (although, not to insult a valued colleague, "David's" version was also "very creative"). So the pumped bass and vocals Iggy has uncovered on the original tapes, which were supposed to coexist with their high-end screech to begin with, are a quantum improvement. Plus you can finally hear the celeste on "Penetration"--sounds great! Only the slow ones, which like all of Iggy's slow ones are not as good as his fast ones, stand between a statement of principle and a priceless work of art. A-)
(originally written by Billy Altman for the Rolling Stone Record Guide, 1979. Replaced in the 2nd edition with a hatchet job by Dave Marsh. Reprinted without permission)
Of all the groups to emerge from the West Coast in the late Sixties, only The Doors succeeded in consistently getting their often disturbing messages across to the core of America through both hit albums and singles. And the fact that they were able to do so without compromising their stance or their art only makes their accomplishments that much more incredible.
Various themes and images ran through all of the Doors albums - deserted houses, strangers, endless highways, unsolvable mysteries, accents on sensuality and sexuality - and the group's intent was there even on the very first track of The Doors, their initial LP; "Break On Through (To The Other Side)." With Jim Morrison's vision leading the way, a vision that encompassed notions of both good and evil as viable alternatives in terms of human action and that was continually obsessed with exploration and search, The Doors played unique music: Ray Manzarek's keyboards, Robbie Krieger's guitar amd John Densmore's drums weaving around in support of the specific needs of each song. Investigations were never really completed in The Doors music - the probe was the thing - and though many of The Doors lengthy works ("The End," "When the Music's Over," "The Soft Parade") weren't wholly successful, they were admirable and fascinating, exemplary of the group's desire to further its horizons.
After The Doors and Strange Days, The Doors went into a moderately subdued period with Waiting for the Sun and The Soft Parade ... Morrison Hotel, steeped in blues, saw a resurgence of the band's power. L.A. Woman, was the final record with Morrison. Arguably the group's finest album ... it forms a rather detailed composite sketch of everything that helped make The Doors such an intriguing band: blues and rock forged together, poetry mingled with standard rock lyrics, and a solid dose of inquiries into the unexplainable puzzles of life.
In 1983, around the same time I was discovering The Velvets, I picked up an issue of local free music rag BAM. Gracing the cover were the sullen faces of Black Flag, a band I knew by reputation more than anything else. "The Truth About Black Flag" it declared.
So I dutifully read the article/interview on the bus ride home, and instantly came away respecting Black Flag more than any other band around. Here was a band that was actually talking about the real world. They came off as relentlessly intelligent and with unwavering integrity. Also it was clear that this was a band that was not bound by any "punk" or "hardcore" orthodoxy with regards to their music, their appearance, or their image. It was this article, more than anything else, that got me paying attention to what was happening, or mutating out of, punk/hardcore music in the early 80s (which in retrospect, in 1983, was quite a lot).
Allmusic sums it up nicely:
In many ways, Black Flag was the definitive Los Angeles hardcore punk band. Although their music flirted with heavy metal and experimental noise and jazz more than that of most hardcore bands, they defined the image and the aesthetic. Through their ceaseless touring, the band cultivated the American underground punk scene; every year, Black Flag played in every area of the U.S., influencing countless numbers of bands. Although their recording career was hampered by a draining lawsuit, which was followed by a seemingly endless stream of independently released records, the band was unquestionably one of the most influential American post-punk bands. A full decade and a half before the fusion of punk and metal became popular, Black Flag created a ferocious, edgy, and ironic amalgam of underground aesthetics and gut-pounding metal. Their lyrics alluded to social criticism and a political viewpoint, but it was all conveyed as seething, cynical angst, which was occasionally very funny. Furthermore, Black Flag demonstrated an affection for bohemia -- both in terms of musical experimentation and a fondness for poetry -- that reiterated the band's underground roots and prevented it from becoming nothing but a heavy metal group. And it didn't matter who was in the band -- throughout the years, the lineup changed numerous times -- because the Black Flag name and four-bar logo became punk institutions.
In the end, I found and still find I respected Black Flag as artists more than I actually dug their music. I've got the files in a zip for a compilation, and have for a couple years, but still haven't decided if I wanna burn the CD. Hardcore just isn't a major part of my listening. But my hat's off to Black Flag. They started, and nurtured, a lot.
PS: Here's the BAM Article - reprinted without permission:
Black Flag
Mark Leviton, BAM, 12 August 1983
LET'S FACE IT – much of what passes for music in our country is, in fact, nothing more than product, the worthless, soulless result of greed and stupidity. The sights are set low, and the history of rock and roll is awash with things that just don't matter. They don't come from the heart and they don't touch any hearts. They glitter for a minute and are gone. Black Flag is another story.
Perhaps the most vilified, hated and harassed band in recent memory, Black Flag's entire career, virtually, has been circumscribed by how the police and media portray them. Not even the Sex Pistols had such difficulty releasing records and playing live for such a length of time. Many people associate them with a particularly virulent and violent kind of music punk rock. The group's cultural impact outstripped their ability to directly reach people early on, making for some pretty awful artistic assessments and legal complications. Yep, for a while there it seemed like Black Flag had a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, so much so that no less a publication than BAM once ran an article titled "Black Flag Violence Must Stop."
There are those who insist that Black Flag got the reputation they earned and deserved, and attracted the kind of police attention decent folk better pray is available when the punk rock scum trod the earth in their neighborhoods. Others have defended the group, saying they have no responsibility for the behavior of their audiences, or that they accurately reflect the violence of the times, or that their brand of radical music will smash capitalism, or whatever. And through it all, Black Flag have struggled to be heard. They have not always found anyone willing to listen. So the Black Flag mythology became bigger than reality.
The four current members of Black Flag – guitarist and main songwriter Greg Ginn, bass player Chuck Dukowski, singer Henry Rollins and drummer Bill Stevenson – live and work out of the Redondo Beach headquarters of the label they co-founded, SST Records. Their office/home is a remarkably cluttered environment, full of record boxes, wall posters, phones on the floor and signs like "This is Henry's stuff – Don't Even Think Of Touching It."
I always wanted to interview this band. Their music was so powerful, so basic, and yet at times so out of control (it seemed), that I was immediately attracted. But I was always put off by their violent reputation, even when I attended a show and nothing happened. From what I had seen of Dukowski on various TV news programs and onstage, he was one of the most intimidating people around, intelligent and scary at the same time. As it turned out, I conducted the interview sitting on a couch between the remarkably soft-spoken Ginn and Dukowski, who at times I thought was boring a hole through my head with his eyes. I stuttered a lot. Across from me sat Stevenson, their newest member. He spoke with the kind of enthusiasm I associate with high school seniors contemplating a stolen bottle of bourbon. Henry Rollins also sat across from me, but spent most of the interview listening to cassettes on headphones. I was, however, fascinated by his tattoos, some of the most aesthetically interesting in the universe.
Black Flag was formed in 1977, originally called Panic; they played quick, high-energy material inspired most of all by the Ramones' debut album. The first Black Flag release, and the first SST Records release, was a 1978 EP featuring four songs, the longest of which was 2:05 and the shortest a scant 51 seconds. The band at that time consisted of Ginn, Dukowski (then known as Gary McDaniel), a drummer called Robo and vocalist Keith Morris, sometimes known as Johnny "Bob" Goldstein and destined to lead another seminal LA band, the Circle Jerks. Keith was originally to be the drummer, but Greg talked him out of it, much in the way Malcolm McLaren talked John Lydon into becoming Johnny Rotten: "The whole thing is the people's attitude, what they want to put across emotionally rather than how good their voice is," Greg told Flipside magazine years later.
Seeing Keith Morris onstage with BF was an experience all right, one I had in '78 at a Riverside club called the Squeeze. The songs were so short, just massive bursts of energy really, that it seemed like they played dozens in the first fifteen minutes. Morris ricocheted around the stage like a wounded beast, screaming into the microphone while an absolute storm of sound emanated from the three-piece behind him. The maximum amount of roar, the least complicated lyrics. Their howl of disgust was both perverse and liberating; "I can't go to work!/The boss is a jerk!/ Ain't got time for the school/The fuckers are fools!/l'm going to explode/I've had it!" The show got my juices flowing with its total lack of interest in the politeness inherent in being onstage. Like other garage bands before them, Black Flag simply brought their garage onstage with them and had fun.
Keith left the band, however, to be replaced by Ron Reyes, also known as Chavo Pederast. The band began to record their rehearsals, and started at-tacking the burgeoning club circuits of Orange County and LA – many new clubs had opened, and were booking "punk" groups, and others were experimenting. Black Flag played the Bla-Bla Cafe, the Whisky, Hong Kong Cafe, Club 88 and so forth while the pogo dance spread and transmogrified into "the slam." An informal blacklist was started by club owners, who shared information about which bands "attracted troublemakers." Local news stations and newspapers ran sensationalized stories about punk rockers, and the police broke up shows occasionally. Shows at various halls were arranged to avoid dealing with the clubs that got more and more jittery. Greg wrote a song called 'No Values' that said, in part, "I've got no values/Nothing to say/I've got no values/Might as well blow you away. . /I might find some satisfaction/If I destroy everything you've built." If there was any irony to be found in those lines, most failed to notice.
The band built up an especially large following at a club near their home called the Fleetwood, and they were filmed there as a part of the feature film The Decline of Western Civilization. The songs 'White Minority', 'Depression' and 'Revenge' (dedicated to the police) were included in the finished film, released two years later. Ron Reyes sang, "Don't tell me about tomorrow/Don't tell me what I'll get/I can't think of progress when/Just around the comer/ There's a bed of cold pavement waiting for me," while fans jumped on and off the stage and flailed on the dance floor, or "the pit" as it came to be known. "Sure, the fights were quite pointless, but they were determined to happen," wrote BF's stage manager, Spot.
Black Flag were living in a converted church, and an interview segment filmed there is included in Decline. Dukowski is asked why he shaved his hair into a mohawk and he replies, "Because I'm searching." And what, the interviewer asks, is he searching for? "I don't know. But I'll know when I find it." Ron shows the cameras the closet he's living in, paying $16 a month rent. Greg is asked what Black Flag, the name, stands for. He says, with a typically uneasy smile, "Anarchy."
Reyes walked off stage at the Fleetwood one night ("No food, love, beer drove Chavo crazy" wrote Dukowski later), but was coaxed back long enough to contribute the vocals to Jealous Again, a 6-track 12-inch EP which was released later, after Reyes had been replaced by Dez Cadena. The police were pulling over people with BF stickers on their cars, and the situation at the church got hotter. It was searched for drugs, and the police officials kept the band members within eyesight. To make a not-too-left-field analogy, this period corresponds to the Haight-Ashbury period when the major bands, such as the Grateful Dead, were being busted for drugs. Just as major magazines flocked to San Francisco to report on the depraved hippie culture, so did their 1980s counterparts come to Los Angeles to rant and rave about the "Clockwork Orange-style" violence in clubs and on the streets. Black Flag were treated like the James Gang – if they were anywhere near a problem, they were blamed for it. Their biggest sin, it seems, was in not defending themselves by putting down the violence directly. Somehow bands were expected to "stop" the violence at their shows, return to the polite audience/band relationships of the pre-punk era of the '70s.
Los Angeles was, if you believed the papers, a combat zone. I read numerous stories about knifings, deaths, people being beaten up, all tagged as a result of punk rock. That many of the stories turned out to be untrue when examined didn't seem to cause a large number of retractions. True, if you went "slamming in the pit," you were likely to get bruised, but at all the hardcore punk shows I attended it was easy to stay away from that action if you wanted to. Just being in the room was enough! The exhilaration and power of shows by Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Adolescents, Dickies, Fear, Gears and so many others transformed the LA scene. At a Black Flag show, the rules of authority seemingly no longer applied, and anything could happen. For some it was liberating. Others were frightened. But the feeling of freedom was the opposite of the "negativity" the media said was in-herent in punk. While the "skinny-tie new wave" bands staked out their territory and started making serious money, the punk bands remained destitute even while they drew thousands – and no wonder, since the shows normally in-volved five to eight bands on the same bill, and costly extra security arrangements were mandated.
With Dez, the group released two 45s, the three-song Six Pack (which featured on its cover a Raymond Pettibone drawing of a punk grinning after painting himself, literally, into a corner) and a version of 'Louie Louie' that sounded not unlike a hurricane and was part of a large project titled 'Police Story'. By this time, BF were actually getting airplay, and their first American tour had turned them into punk standard-bearers, on the East Coast especially. Their sound also spread to England, where they were accepted as the only group that could stand up against U.K. punk. Their sound got tighter and more ferocious. Cadena was a great ranter, screaming (as a preface to a recording of 'I've Heard It Before') "Don't need it! Authority! Bullshit! I know what I'm doing! I may be wrong, but I've got to get it done!"
A fan from Washington, D.C. named Henry Rollins was added to the line-up, and Dez continued on guitar and vocals. Rollins was what they called "straight edge": he didn't take drugs, drink or smoke. Still, he was one scary-looking guy, with his almost shaven skull, sandpaper voice and remarkable facial grimace. He could cut through a crowd. When Dez left Black Flag and joined Redd Kross, Rollins forged on as lead throat.
The first full Black Flag album, Damaged, was recorded in 1981. The record was to be distributed by Daphna Edwards' Unicorn Records, then through MCA when Unicorn made a deal with them. But when MCA's Al Bergamo heard the record, full of extreme velocities and the usual BF tirades about confusion, survival and tough times, he refused to release it. "As a parent of two children," he said, "I found it an anti-parent record, past the point of good taste. It certainly wasn't like Bob Dylan or Simon & Garfunkel." Black Flag and Unicorn got plenty of publicity, but lost their chance to get the national distribution that could have made Black Flag available everywhere for the first time.
Unicorn pulled the record from MCA and began independent distribution. Edwards told every writer in town that she'd sold 100,000 copies in the first three weeks, and some papers even printed the figure, although it was clearly inflated. At this writing, litigation is still flying fast and furious between Black Flag and Unicorn, each accusing the other of various misdeeds and misrepresentations. Black Flag is under a restraining order, and cannot release anything under their name. SST Records did issue a compilation of out-takes from the Morris, Reyes and Cadena periods, but nowhere on the jacket does the name Black Flag appear, and even the four parallel bars that serve as BF's symbol are whited out. In fact, Black Flag's contract with Unicorn, which the band claims is invalid in any case, was recently in danger of being auctioned off to the highest bidder as a result of a judgement a pressing plant had gotten against Unicorn.
So Black Flag play live, rehearse a lot and wait for their attorney Walter Hurst to extricate them from their legal problems. Bill Stevenson has replaced Robo in the drum chair, but the sound drives on. Henry and Chuck have let their hair grow (a trend begun by Cadena, who had both long hair and beard), an alteration of image that leaves many of their skinhead followers confused and hostile.
And with that introduction out of the way, it's time to let Black Flag speak for themselves. Greg Ginn starts things off. "We don't push a philosophy, a party line. We do not 'stand' for anarchy. Four individuals do not have a single political viewpoint. We may change members, but we have continuity. There is a basic Black Flag 'thing'. I feel it, but I can't define it. Chuck and I, who've been in the band the longest, could possibly leave and there could still be a real Black Flag. The possibility's remote, but the chemistry could stay. 'Black Flag' does not depend on particular individuals, I don't think. Maybe it's genetic."
"Everyone in the band is different in upbringing, in education, but we have lot of common ground," adds Chuck who once studied psychobiology in college and had his share of success in the "straight" world of school and work.
"We try to practice about five hours day, to improve our music, because we're never satisfied with what we're doing," says Greg. When we rehearse we're learning how to... destroy better, I guess."
"Since I've been playing with Black Flag," says Bill, "It's always been, 'Well that was okay for now, but it's got to be better.' We have to concentrate on not breaking our instruments! In my head I have this thing – we all have it – we want to make mountains fall down when we play. Totally serious. We want to be hired to demolish buildings. You try to get better, but also you're so frustrated you want to put your fist through the wall, and kill everyone."
"The intensity of performance is directly related to the precision of performance," says Chuck. "It's like a knife, the sharper it is the better it cuts."
"It's something less tangible than just singing or playing better, it's power," Greg continues. "I wish we had more records out so we could point to what we've done, but we're years behind in recording and showing the public what we want to do with the basic . . . groove of the music. We aim at an ideal. We set up one thing, which people get into, but instead of doing the 'reasonable thing' and playing that to death, we do something new and risk negative, reactions. We play seven- and eight-minute songs now, which forces audiences who think of us as exclusively two-minute songs to realize BF has changed. And they can get violent about that."
"If they attached a lot of importance to the length of a song, then this so-called new form upsets them. We constantly alienate people," says Chuck.
But doesn't Black Flag draw the same audience they always did, already pre-sold on their type of music? "Bullshit!" shouts Henry. "All right, that's it, lock the door, we're gonna kill this guy. We get negativity because we do something. Other bands I shouldn't name – they all suck. How can you even get mad enough to hate them? We do something that makes people love or hate us real hard."
"Some people feel we've sold out –we're going heavy metal, we're growing our hair, we cut our hair, we're playing this or that ... the cultural impact of having long hair or beards at this point is real strong," Greg reflects. "Henry can show you the scars he got for having long hair."
"Long hair doesn't matter, short hair doesn't matter, but there's a need in some people to run down anything they haven't done," says Chuck. "If they have short hair, then they want that and nothing else to be cool. The same story over and over."
"People don't think enough for themselves," says Greg. "When people get into us on a superficial level of style, what we look like, we just say, wrong. We don't practice like this on our music so you can so easily label us."
"The minute they tell me I'm good because I fit into one of their little molds, I want to break their mold and go my other way," agrees Bill. "I'm not good because I'm fast, or punk, or heavy metal, or anything."
"We have been real extreme at times," Greg admits, "and brought out intolerance and exposed it."
"If there's no dialogue about values," says Chuck, "and there are people pushing to have ascendence, to say there's only one correct way to be ... if the dialogue went away then one group would have won. It's healthy to have arguments. I have real qualms even with those people who say they'll learn from the past and therefore their thing will be the ultimate way of thinking. How we're going to solve the problems of the world is not the relevant thing, because eventually the solution becomes the problem and it all starts up again. You need things constantly pitted against each other."
"See, a lot of our politics is in our sound, but not just on the surface," says Greg. "If we were satisfied with our musical status quo, politics would be expressed in that lack of change. Our actions – our music, that is – remains our expression. There is no one solution, musically, politically or ideologically. People who hear our music over a period of time may become less convinced of the necessity to be prejudiced against certain groups of people, even though we may not deal directly with that in our lyrics. This is part of our impact. A preachy political song can have less impact than your actions, and sometimes it's on a real spiritual, subsconscious level. The basic philosophy is inside how you do it. And we do analyze our impact from time to time. We don't have a frivolous attitude. It's important to us that we be a positive influence."
"Super on-the-edge people, criminals, on drugs, come up and say, 'Yeah, you guys are great, you know how fucked up everything is, and I'm gonna kill someone now," Bill relates. "And we've had straight-line guys from school saying, 'That was very enlightening'. People just keep doing what they're doing, but after they hear us they do it harder."
"I don't think it's random, but if you try to control every action, then all you can do is water it down to nothing," states Greg. "We're not just looking for a random reaction, of any kind. We're not trying to shock."
Chuck adds, "You know, you can whip up a lot of energy, and give people an escape by saying, 'Okay, everyone with black tennis shoes is the enemy and must be destroyed'. You'd get a great response. On a cultural level, if there were 1,000 people and the 20 with black tennis shoes were murdered, and word got out that anyone caught in black tennis shoes would die, then the companies making the shoes would get bombed, and it would make quite a splash, have quite an impact. Yet we're not aiming at that kind of thing. We've been hurt by what's been written about us, because we want anybody to see us play. You were saying at a Black Flag show 'anything goes,' not just this one thing, but anything. There's a constant pressure to change anything to this."
"At any of our performances for a long time, we've drawn all sorts of people," Greg says. "I know there are some still afraid to come see us, but really there's no basis for it. If there ever was, there certainly isn't now. The crowds are used to the fact that at a Black Flag show there are going to be short hairs, long hairs, heavy metal people, everybody. Nothing's happened for years, literally, but the media haven't caught up.
"One of the bands we have signed to SST, St. Vitus, were afraid to come to one of our shows because they had long hair. In fact, they wrote to me about it and told me about their band, but weren't sure we weren't religiously against anyone with long hair. So I went to see them, and really liked them. Now they're playing gigs with us without incident."
Right now in LA, the heavy metal crowds and the punk crowds are getting closer, with "mixed" bills at such places as the Troubadour. Again, any trouble is traced to what is supposed to be a "natural antagonism" between the factions, but Greg Ginn is convinced it isn't there. The SST label is likewise signing both "punk" and "metal" groups without distinction. When I suggested to them that there must be some trade-off, some compromise on their independent status, in running the label and trying to reach millions of people, Chuck vigorously disagrees. "There are more alternatives than you think. It doesn't just come down to whether you're a big or small label. We want to remain independent and get bigger."
"You've got everyone with opinions about how to do it," says Greg. "Some think you have to stick to a particular kind of record, others that you should think about getting airplay first ... we try to do what we think is best, regardless. Some people consider themselves artists and want to be isolated from the world, but what's so valuable about art is the perspective it gives you on the 'real world.' Black Flag is involved, not isolated. We never made a decision to remain 'outsiders'. We resist becoming the band everyone says we are."
"There will always be people who make junk jewelry and those who make original, creative stuff," says Chuck. "But most will use the same symbolic material over and over again."
"A lot of people in rock get into it for bullshit reasons," says Greg. "Is David Lee Roth a singer because he needs to express himself? What's his reason?"
"The one thing I've learned from all the garbage we've been involved in," continues Chuck, "is the baser the motives the higher the motives cited. I don't mind it so much when someone owns up and says, 'I'm in it for the money and the women'. In religious symbology it's a bigger evil to commit evil in the uniform of good than just do something evil. It's like you stack one more sin on top of the other."
"The way we do things is foreign to most of the public," Greg explains. "Ninety-nine percent can't understand why we wouldn't want to play music like Journey and be more successful. They don't understand it, and therefore sometimes want to destroy it."
"Or maybe they have a vested interest in the other point of view, that anybody who doesn't play like Journey should be eliminated," Chuck suggests. "But guess what? We're going to keep on doing what we have been."
And, he might have added, nothing seems likely to stop them. Black Flag – the myth, the reality, the music – has mattered. Even if they never played another note, they've challenged the musical status quo, in Southern California, in the United States, and around the world. No one can take that away from them.
(this is an excerpt from a Salon.com article by Patrick Smith, July 2004. Reprinted without permission i.e. I stole it)
Self-consciousness, maybe, is the hallmark of a dying art. Surely it's the case with what eventually became known as "alternative rock," a genre whose tailspin into artistic banality is unprecedented in the history of
popular culture. Back in the day, we called it "indie" or "underground," until such adjectives grew wildly out of
sync with its mainstream embrace. Today, bankrolled by billion-dollar labels and obsessed with little more than its own self-image, alt-rock drones on, a cadre of slicked-up sound-alikes whose smirks and snarls look up from compact discs across the country and around the world.
If I had to choose The Moment upon which I gave up on rock 'n' roll -- and it, perhaps, on itself -- it was probably the day in 1994 when Kurt Cobain shot himself. Peter Jennings was reading an obit during "World News Tonight"; I could vaguely recollect the name until he next said "Nirvana," and then I thought, Oh, right, them. A mainstream outfit as far as I knew; cock-rock stuff, wasn't it? As a kid who'd gone through high school in the early 1980s, strung out on hardcore punk, sure, I'd heard Nirvana's songs. And I hated them. They were everything punk rock had taught me to hate -- mangy, overindulgent and bloated with noisy self-assurance.
The 1980s were an intensely prolific decade for rock, a reality seldom acknowledged anymore. Indeed, one of the most annoying examples of pop-culture revisionism has been the focus on '80s camp. If you ever endured a half-hour of Fox's travesty of reminiscence, "That '80s Show," you'll know what I'm talking about. Rhino Records similarly went bottom-scraping when it gave us "Like, Omigod! The '80s Pop Culture Box (Totally)," showcasing the dregs of those nascent days of MTV -- including Toni Basil's "Mickey" and Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me With Science," as if these artists, in hand with Duran Duran and Kajagoogoo, were the essence of the era's talent. Truth is, we laughed at A Flock of Seagulls as much then as we do now.
Behind the coiffures and kitsch was a far more intriguing and vital scene. The only trick was knowing where to find it. Indie bands of this era, often led by teenagers, perfected the art of creative self-sufficiency. Radio play was solely on college stations, usually late at night. Acts like Minor Threat, Black Flag and the Misfits -- promoted mainly through word-of-mouth advertising and a handful of independently published fanzines -- became legendary. They toured in station wagons, lugged their own equipment from the stage, and slept on the couches and floors of fans. Handbills advertised concerts. Imagine a group of kids from Boston
renting a car and driving to a Grange hall in the western Massachusetts hamlet of Greenfield to see a show. Imagine hundreds of kids. Concerts were never more than a few dollars and musicians mingled with the crowd, holding impromptu interviews with zine writers and breaking down the artist/audience barrier at every level.
On one hand, it was easy to brush off hardcore as a semi-musical novelty. After all, how much subtlety could be excavated from a half-minute, hundred-decibel onslaught? But lurking beneath, one could sometimes locate complexity and nuance. Hell, the Bad Brains were Rastafarians who broke up their sets with reggae and fusion. Talent could be a dirty word in the hardcore world, a slap against all its egalitarian impudence, but still you'd stumble on it. Listen to Scream's "Still Screaming," for instance, with its acoustic timeouts and cascading refrains, or the clever metaphorical songwriting of Jello Biafra, twitchy frontman of the Dead Kennedys.
For the most part, however, and as in-your-face innovations tend to go, the hardcore framework proved a fast-arcing artistic smother. Successes of the grass-roots ethos aside, it was all coming full circle, the heretofore cutting edge hemmed into a whole new typecast of post-adolescent screamers and I-can-play-it-faster guitarists.
(from a Salon.com article by By Patrick Smith, June 28, 2004 - reprinted without permission)
...just as punk rock appeared doomed to a legacy of broken guitar strings and blown-out amps -- but not so entirely that a band with the right ideas couldn't make gold from the pile -- along came three weird guys from Minnesota. Led by guitarist/vocalist Bob Mould and drummer/vocalist Grant Hart, ably assisted by bassist Greg Norton, Hüsker Dü took the volume and do-it-yourself credo of their contemporaries, swirled in a generous measure of melodic hooks and '60s-era psychedelia, and pushed the boundaries of punk into unprecedented territory.
Not that Mould, Hart or Norton acknowledged such confines to begin with, never exactly pleased with their classification as a punk outfit. For one thing, they just didn't look the part: These were big, sweaty, chain-smoking men who obviously hadn't shaved or showered in a while. Norton, trimmest and most dapper of the threesome, wore a handlebar mustache. Wrote Terry Katzman, the Hüskers' first sound engineer and
friend still, "Hüsker Dü seemingly defined the punk ethos... without necessarily embracing or endorsing it."
Sure, they'd been at it since '79, and the band's first LP had been a sweat-bucket thrash fest called "Land Speed Record," but even at breakneck velocity there was something ineffably refined and just, well, different about Hüsker Dü. If pressed to explain, one might break out 1982's "Everything Falls Apart." Amid Side 1's hypsersonic avalanche is planted a cover of Donovan's 1966 hit "Sunshine Superman." Trite, perhaps, on the face of it, until you hear how tellingly and astonishingly un-ironic is the remake, without so much as a note's worth of smirk or parody.
While the blending of power/pop extremes was nothing the Velvet Underground, or even the Beatles, hadn't done years earlier, the Hüskers pulled it off in a way that transcended gimmickry, and did so on such terrain –- the American hardcore punk scene –- where nobody saw it coming or even believed it possible. Mould and Hart would, in a way, finish the job Reed and the others tinkered with one-dimensionally almost two
decades earlier, compounding their kindergarten melodies with equally hefty injections of hippie love and heavy-metal thunder.
Before their stormy demise in late 1987, the band would release six full-length albums, two EPs, and a catalog of singles and extras. But the pinnacle of all that output was a double LP called "Zen Arcade," first delivered to stores in July 1984, by California-based SST Records. "The most important and relevant double album to be released since the Beatles' 'White Album,'" bragged SST's press release. Such lofty hyperbole would be preposterous, until you consider the full context -- or lack thereof -- of the underground in 1984. Eleven years later, Spin magazine would award "Zen Arcade" the No. 4 spot on its ranking of the hundred best-ever
"alternative" records. Rolling Stone, in its laughably manic list of the best of the '80s, gave it lip service at No. 33. Not the choicest of praise, until you remember that not only this band, but their entire musical domain, lived and died far below the mainstream waterline.
Hüsker Dü could make you cry, but just for good measure they would rupture your eardrums in the process. Depressive? Angry? Delirious with angst? Conventional gauges of intensity are, at last, irrelevant. Hüsker Dü were all of those things, but they didn't brood. "In time I came to think of Hüsker music as the shadowy underside of REM's child-eye vision of love and loss," says Terri Sutton in the liner notes to "Dü Hüskers," a 1993 tribute disc to "Zen Arcade," on which 23 Minneapolis bands replay the entire album, start-to-finish
(one of two full-length tributes paid to the Dü, by the way). "Their games of hide and seek took place not in some lilac-scented Eden, but under the opaque ice of six-month Minnesotan winter."
(Zen Arcade) is the album Nirvana and Pearl Jam only wish they could have made: intelligent, clamorous, and hashing out more torment and passion in four sides than all the grungers and headbangers since -- all without a hint of heavy-metal pretension. It's amazing to think anyone could concoct a 14-minute bombast of guitar leads and layered feedback -- "Reocurring Dreams," Side 4 -- and have it not come out self-consciously. And when the 40-second whine at the end of "Dreams" is at last pinched off, the album trembling to a
close in a congealed, numbing squeal, the silence that follows is palpable, painful and disconcerting. Not until
you've stopped to catch your breath is it apparent that your notions of punk are forever changed.
"Zen Arcade" was not the only Hüsker jewel, though its scope and expanse hold it forever above the others. Six months after "Zen" sold more than 20,000 copies –- an unbelievable number for a record with no corporate endorsement –- came "New Day Rising," which woke the country from its winter freeze in
January 1985. Along with "Metal Circus," a seven-song EP precursor to "Zen," these three records represent, possibly, the most potent 1-2-3 punch in the annals of indie music.
Warner Bros. would sign the band for its last two projects, a move that had critics either nodding proudly -- "I told you so" -- or sucking their teeth nervously. Major label signings are commonplace today, even for upstart acts piped to the masses via the feeding tubes of MTV, but in the 1980s underground it was not only rare but controversial. Fans waited anxiously to see if the new contract would nurture Hüsker Dü's enduring genius, or seal its fate as the first alt-rock dinosaur band. As it happened, Hüsker Dü never sold its soul to the cigar chompers at Warner Bros., but nonetheless its final two albums were enormously anticlimactic.
