Henry Rollins/Black Flag

Alright, but gets me thinking of this article I dug out a few years ago, some guy for the LA Times had interviewed Flag when they first burtst out and the LAPD was busting heads all over town at HC gigs.

Guy had contrasted American punk (read LA Hardcore) with English punk, talked about how the Flag and the Jerks were well spoken and polite, whereas the Clash and the Pistols were know for being as rude as they possibly could.

A nice dialectic, but I guess a false one, at least seeing Rollins there.

that kid's from dearborn!!! I wonder what happened to him. He mustve gone to some of those early negative approach shows.

I actually dont mind if rollins wants to be an asshole like he is in this interview, if that's what his hardkore persona was all about and the fans demanded on some level. Its this new smug "I can stand on stage and do horrible smug, obvious stand up comedy and then call it "spoken word" so its unassailable" thing that pisses me off.

but from the looks of his ebay buys and what he plays on his radio show he's got an awesome taste in music

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1_E34CTcY7k

I think Rollins has chilled out a lot. I wouldn't know personally, but the things I've read/hear seem to indicate that he's a pretty polite and nice dude these days.

I've interviewed him four or five times. He's extremely polite, nice, and a music geek like nobody you've ever talked to in your goddamn life. At the end of our last conversation, he spent like a half hour asking me about early '70s Miles.

This made me laugh a lot.

nice

That's awesome.

Classic

sweet how ginn ends end right where he started, hair-wise

A+++

bookmarked thread

Spot looks great.

Spot and Pettibon still look exactly like they did 30+ yrs ago!

These were posted on a thread i made on another board so may as well post them here
http://www.brianwalsby.com/comics/blackflagandme.jpg

http://www.brianwalsby.com/comics/life-after-black-flag-1.jpg

http://www.brianwalsby.com/comics/life-after-black-flag-two.jpg

unaccustomed as i am to self-promotion, and hoping this doesn't break ilx rules at all, can i slip a tiny plug in here for my Black Flag biography, Spray Paint The Walls, about to be released by Omnibus? you can read an extract at the Quietus here - http://thequietus.com/articles/03049-an-extract-from-stevie-chick-s-spray-paint-the-walls-the-story-of-black-flag - if yr interested...

nice, stevie! i would read this book.

thanks scott!

Hehe very cool to see this come to fruition after all the legwork you put in to getting the interviews!

i know, it feels like YEARS since we visited you in the OC...

Time to come back!

nice, stevie! i would read this book.

― scott seward, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 7:16 AM

looking forward to this!

I don't think there's any band that's more entertaining to read about than black flag

the flag stuff from that rollins biog is a hoot

lol, I grew up in Manhattan Beach, so this was great to read. I was about 6 months old when this concert took place, so I missed it sadly. This was a legendary story, though. Both Morris and Ginn went to my high school (as did most of the Descendants, I believe). I think there's like a great unwritten screenplay about late 70s punk/beach town culture clashes. Maybe I need to write it. Anyway -- I will read this book! Black Flag is totally fun to read about.

lol polliwog park

they used to have this amazing play structure called "The Sunken Galleon" there. oh man, it was so dangerous. can't believe I didn't die on that thing.

stevie i am going to buy and read yr book, exciting!

tyler have you read "enter naomi" by joe carducci? there's some good stuff in there in the vein of what you're talking about

there is stuff about the sunken galleon in Carducci's book?! kidding -- i haven't read it but I should. i talked to Ginn once for my high school newspaper ... it didn't go very well!

Dude, Stevie, that extract is amazing. You can feel the dichotomies writhing as they are forced to stare each other in the face, then you notice that one face is full of blood.

I will buy the hell out of this book.

thank you all for the kind words and promises of purchase, dudes - and tyler, i second matt's recommendation of 'enter naomi', which is a really great personal take on that whole era (buy my book 1st tho!). was a great thrill to visit polliwog while researching the book, and soak up the pleasant valley sunday vibe that the Flag doubtless shattered that afternoon...

Great stuff Stevie, I'm in. When does it come out in the UK?

should be out now, but i think there have been slight delays - its still a pre-order on amazon... i have yet to see a copy!

it is in stock on amazon! also, i'll be doing a reading/q&a at filthy mcnasty's on tuesday november 10th, as part of the Talking Music Revolutions Volume Four: The Metal Years event, alongside such awesome writers as Carol Clerk, John Robb, Joel McIver, Tommy Udo and Suzanne Moore, so come along if yr in London that night.

thus endeth my plugging...

Suzanne Moore

wait what

I am totally going to buy this book btw

yeah i'm hoping its *the suzanna moore (its not my do so i don't know fo' sho). also i was just informed joel has a parents evening that night and now can't make it, but it'll still be cool!

suzanne

This is LONG overdue and I'm giddily excited about this. Will also 'buy the hell' out of this book.

hey stevie just wanted to let you know that on another board i go to there was a thread about your book that i didn't start! the buzz is building :)

haha LINK PLS MATT!!!

google is on to you

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/spray_paint_the_walls.gif

thumbs up from carducci!!

1 guessed/predicted in Rock and the Pop Narcotic that regarding Black Flag there was never enough sales for the real publishing industry to ever write a check to get to the bottom of the band's story. Back in the late 1980s when I wrote R&TPN only Faber & Faber was even issuing original music titles, and indeed they were the only publisher to take a look at my manuscript. But the 80s/90s roll-out of Tower Books, Barnes & Noble, and Borders did spur a short golden age of the music section in book stores. That's over now. But Omnibus in the UK, which once had the only book on Black Sabbath in print, now issues the first comprehensive book about Black Flag, first in the UK, soon here. Spray Paint the Walls is very well reported and assembled by Brit music writer Stevie Chick, author of the better of the recent Sonic Youth books. Neither Greg Ginn nor Henry Rollins sat for interviews but their voices are included from earlier interviews, and more importantly Chuck Dukowski spoke to Chick - a first I believe. The story, laid out from the band's earliest practices in 1976 to its end ten years later, makes a far more dramatic book than the usual shelf-fillers with their stretch to make the empty stories of various chart-toppers sound exciting and crucial and against the odds. I read a rough draft; I'm sure most of the minor Anglocentric miscomprehensions of timelines, causalities and geography are still in it but the book is powerful because it does the story justice. And those miscomprehensions are shared by most American music writers as well so what the hell...

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/merch/global/kindle-turing-widget-photo_020509._V251249236_.jpg Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Finished the book this morning, have to say Stevie, nice work indeed, really, really enjoyed it, so much great info.

aw thanks mares nest... really glad you enjoyed it.

still looking forward to reading this -- soon! in the meantime, i tracked down a recording of that Polliwog Park show! http://ow.ly/Mv0M Neat ....

that show is nuts... the bootleg is essential, perhaps more for the banter between the roadies and the guy who put the show on than the music, but 'wasted' SLAYS

Yep, made me go back and dig out the albums, was rooting around in the loft yesterday looking for James Parker's book, Planet Joe and Get In The Van.

It ain't that cheap!

But they have the s/t Saint Vitus

Cool that they repressed the Screaming Trees LPs, I know Mark hated their SST output but I love those records

Last time I talked to Mould, some time back, before Hart died (maybe around the time some official HD merch suddenly became available?) he implied that it was still a matter of him and Hart being at an impasse, that was the biggest thing. I don't know if he meant in terms of money, getting paid or paying or what. I'm not even sure Mould's account of anything is necessarily trustworthy; he may have stubbornly been waiting to buy out Hart? That might not matter now, so it's also possible he just can't be bothered now that there's no money to be made, which may be why he is allegedly punting it over to Greg. Any case, if I learned that Bob or Greg had the rights and masters to those records and were just sitting on them, I wouldn't be shocked.

Been after that saint vitus s/t for years. Everytime i tried to buy via discogs the seller would say they couldnt find it. So even though its a tad expensive I decided I better get it. So thanks for the tip

and yes, SST trees stuff is amazing. I think Gary Lee at least still loves them.

my favourite stuff by them

If you’re so inclined, you’ll find some of the more offbeat things SST released technically back in the hands of those who made them, but they’ve only got the rights, not the masters. I’m talking about Scott Colby’s Slide of Hands (which is great, by the way, Henry Kaiser’s SST output, stuff like that. Also, it was in the press kit, if not the liner notes, for AT’s reissue of Kill from the Heart that they remastered it from a clean vinyl copy because the tapes were gone.

*Slide of Hand (and I missed a closing bracket there).

Its notable that the SST album Soundgarden reissued was remixed and had different artwork to the SST release, which I think might have been a legal workaround.

I assumed the artwork was just a case of them not having the original art files (Craig Ibarra was in the art department and might have been there at the time, someone ask him!) so deciding to recreate it with a contemporary sheen instead. As for the remix, aren’t they on record as never been completely satisfied with how the original sounded (because it was recorded with a mobile rig and not in a ‘proper’ studio by a guy who’d worked with Black Flag towards the end)? I know they edited “Flower” to fix a missed drum hit.

On a Steve Hoffman forum discussion it says --

Several artists formerly on the label, including Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets, sued SST to reclaim their master recordings, claiming unpaid royalties.
The source for that information is cited as being from page 496 of an unidentified Michael Azerrad book, but I assume it's referring to Our Band Could Be Your Life

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/greg-ginn-sst-and-rescuing-bands-catalogs.298972/

I interviewed Steve Earle once, and he told me that when he left MCA records he did an audit and found that they owed him a million dollars in royalties, or something like that, but it would have taken 3/4 of that money and two years of his time to squeeze it out of them, so he wrote it off. Honestly, I have no idea how many copies these records have sold. I do know it took decades for the Sex Pistols record to officially go platinum. (Barely) related, I talked to Gordon Gano once, and he told me the first Violent Femmes record was, at least at the time, supposedly the only record to have ever gone platinum without having been on the top 200.

AI Overview

https://p7.hiclipart.com/preview/341/656/896/thumb-signal-smiley-emoticon-clip-art-lovely-smile.jpg

That graphic is more like AI Overlord.

tb; dnw

I've seen some guys from 3rd tier SST bands asking on the big SST facebook page asking "Hey so how much trouble would I get in if I put our albums up on spotify? SST doesn't answer emails"
Maybe Greg isn't too concerned with like Tar Babies or Always August getting 95 cents a year off streaming.

Tar Babies begat Tortoise to some degree so think they'd be of interest. They played the Mule Club the band God's Brixton venue so presumably toured Europe and the U.K. that was before my hitching days so not sure where.
I saw that gig and enjoyed it I think I got a CD later on the strength of having seen them. Seemed to do a maverick take on hard-core akin to the Meat Puppets but using funk instead of bluegrass. So would love to have access to their music.

Are Always August not on Spotify and places I think I heard a podcast on them recently possibly You Don't Know Mojack so sought out some of their music. Maybe it was just YouTube I listened on. Had heard the name and that they were referred to as psychedelic. But podcast was talking about use of improvisation throughout.

I think I might pick up s remastered cd if such a thing existed.

Those SST bands should just pretend they re-recorded it ala Taylor Swift and throw their work up on Bandcamp and streaming.

Largeness With (w)holes is up indeed

Tim Harding from Always August was with SST for ages, well into the ’90s with his jazz band Hotel X.

I do know it took decades for the Sex Pistols record to officially go platinum.

It always blows my mind that the Ramones debut didn't even go gold until 2014!

The Ramones debut wasn't available on CD by itself until 2001, having up til then in the CD era been bundled with Leave Home on the first volume of All The Stuff & More.

On a similar note, I noticed the Dead Boys have basically reissued their 2 studio albums with alt mixes and comp titles.

are those the new ones with the AI singer?

Husker Du was so dysfunctional that even their merch site that went live a few years ago shut down relatively quickly.

It stuns me that Mike Watt remains loyal to Greg Ginn. SST needs to be liquidated

Young, Loud and Snotty is done alt French released early mix done by Bob Clearmountain.

We Have Come for your Children I think is a modern mix made from original tracks.

Neither are released with their exact original title or artwork.

Bob also played bass on Young Loud and Snotty.

It stuns me that Mike Watt remains loyal to Greg Ginn.

Mike Watt is an astonishingly, heartbreakingly loyal dude, just absolutely one of the loveliest of people, and that extends to being indulgent and forgiving of a guy like Ginn. Also, a lot of the people within that circle who have grudges against Ginn also begrudgingly respect what he managed to build, no matter how dysfunctional it became (and no matter how much the credit belonged to others within the SST sphere, too).

"Black Flag" on the bill for Coachella 2026 (also Iggy Pop, Suicidal Tendencies, Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter etc)