Taking Sides: Keith Morris vs. Ron "Chavo Pederast" Reyes vs. Dez Cadena vs. Henry Rollins -- BLACK FLAG VOCALIST SMACKDOWN!

And I still like the quality of Keith's voice the best .. but it's the Ginn that matters.

but is not the beauty of music the inseparableness of evil from which cannot it be unentwined?.

I'll have to check out Vida.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ttrocc7007/

Just started reading your D. Boon tribute page, Tom. I didn't know you wrote for the Squealer! How did that hook-up happen?
http://home.earthlink.net/~ttrocc7007/id5.html

Also, I'm hoping this turns out to be good:
Minutemen documentary is done

Nope! The music itself, and that means ALL music is an act of CREATION, violence is an act of DESTRUCTION.

i am not joking one bloody morsel! i am seriouser than even the most painful torturings. and my coldness 'rocks' the house.

yikes, was the audience all made up of members of former SST bands?

My favorite version of Flag was in-between "Damaged" and "My War" -- when Dez and Greg and Chuck were all still in the band, before Rollins had become such an out of control caricature (when the tattoo bill was still under a thousand bucks). When there were two guitarists in the band, Ginn was just so totlaly free jazz nuts hair flying madman, people literally lept the fuck back from the stage not out of fear of getting hair whipped, but 'cause you'd swear he was doing some Haitian possession ritual or something (sorry, I just watched Maya Deren's "Divine Horsemen" with my girl the other day).

Tom's Minutemen/ etc. pages are truly a great read and I really liked TTD when I saw them live -- but then again, I'm someone who wore Grateful Dead shirts to punk rock shows backintheday, and I liked Oktoberfaktion and Saccharine Trust as well (live anyway).

Ohhh, and back to D. -- to this day, Glenn Branca's comment in that "Forced Exposure" interview that he thinks the FBI offed D. Boon strikes a chord with me. Sure it's a bit ridonkulous, but still....

Yeah I don't really believe it but part of me wants to in a weird way to "make sense of" something that was and still is really tough to understand. It's just my little brain grasping at straws, really.

--Mike

http://rootsradicaluk.blogspot.com

Cool thread.

http://rootsradicaluk.blogspot.com

Cool thread. Nice one.

Mentioning Ginn and John Coltrane in the same sentance is absurd. a closer comparison would be Sonny Sharrock, but that' still off board. I'm sure he would tell you that himself.

Greg Ginn wrote some great punk rock tunes. However he's not a free-form jazzbo, nor a great soloist.

Regarding the qualities of the vocalists, I've seen most of them perform, and Rollins doing black flag material owns all of them Keith Morris does the best "Gimmie, Gimmie, Gimmie" - but he can't bring the rage like Rollins can. Of course, I'd rather watch 100 circle jerks shows than watch Rollins sing "low self opinion" but that's another story.

This was a great thread.

Nervous Breakdown was one of the best things Black Flag ever released, but Rollins gets shortchanged. Morris's version of the Damaged tracks absolutely do not compare. Keith was perfect for the time, but that total nihilistic eye-bulging, red in the face, vein popping Damaged era shit couldn't have been done properly by anyone but Rollins.

I agree. I prefer the later Rollins stuff too.

but that total nihilistic eye-bulging, red in the face, vein popping Damaged era shit couldn't have been done properly by anyone but Rollins.

exactly. as the music shifted from lean and wiry to beefy and gnarled it required a new front man, a new archetype.

dez cadena by a country mile.

― gygax! (gygax!), Sunday, January 2, 2005 7:04 PM (5 years ago)

OTM. gygax! was the first person to rep for dez until Tom Trocolli and his dog chimed in. RIP gygax!

I remember the Hernandez Bros repping for Dez as the best as well fwiw

Thanks for the bump! This thread is a fuckin goldmine.

I can tell you with ALL honesty that there were nights I was convinced without any doubt that Ginn was one of the top 10 most creative LEAD guitarists (he can't play rhythm real well) I have ever heard,

Tom Troccoli OTM.

i interviewed tom for my flag book last year, he had some fantastic stories

Way late to the party but I couldn't find another thread on this : The Off Eps record is ripping my tits off. Great fun to these weathered ears.

they play london next week, i CANNOT wait

Why can't I do anything without being yelled at?

I think all their singers have been pretty good vocal choices for what they were doing at the time they had them, though you could probably argue that each was an odd personality choice for that time as well.