Dear Greg Ginn

I'm actually of the minority opinion that the Spot productions were the best of SST's run, and superior to subsequent slicker versions of those bands.

BTW, if there's a Husker book, I'd be curious why no one at City Pages got a call for research. The story has stayed interesting in recent years, as the Mould-Hart conflict continues its McClaren-Lydon path...

also, Nova Mob's "Last Days of Pompeii" was completely remixed and readied for release. However, Grant's label at the time, Pachyderm, didn't really see the owner's wife running off with the investor.

So much for Pachyderm.

Also, it was rumored that Bob was trying to secure the masters for their albums to be reissued on his own Granary Music, so that "somebody could finally get paid."

hmm. maybe i _should_ start a book...

Greg Ginn doesn't like YouTube

In recent months there have been a slew of takedowns under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on YouTube affecting numerous punk bands. Once a video has a copyright infringement claim against it, it is removed from the site.

Apparently SST Records -- owned by Greg Ginn and the home of punk legends like Black Flag, the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Lawndale and others -- has been utilizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to claim copyright infringement on a vast number of videos that utilize brief clips of music from Black Flag, including skateboard videos made by fans. Well, gosh, that's what copyright holders can do, though it does seem sort of mean.

However, SST has also claimed multiple copyright ownership of videos featuring bands which that have nothing to do with SST, including X, Fear, Sin 34, Lower Class Brats, Puzzled Panthers, and the Adolescents. Also affected, videos made by fans under Fair Use, utilizing snippets of songs.

What a dick

Greg Ginn is kind of a selfish douchenozzle, film at 11.

... and now he's let the entire SST catalog go out of print on vinyl. seriously, fuck this guy forever, he is a disgrace to the Black Flag legacy.

punk legends....Lawndale.

(love their Take 5 take, fwiw)

Greg, you can take care of the cats, I can take care of the label. Fuck, anyone can take care of the label. Anyone but yourself.

Can't hate. He's just a big old goof with shitty business ideas is all.

yeah hard to hate ginn.
on the one hand, why is the sst catalog such a mess? would be cool if he could just hand it off to someone/some other label who could handle it properly.
on the other hand, would the sst catalog exist w/o greg ginn? if he hadn't asked the minutemen to record a single, would we have all that amazing minutemen music?

yeah totally. it'd be nice if everybody that made a profound impact on music was a standup guy with airtight business practices but that ain't the world works, would rather have a fatally flawed SST than no SST at all.

What a dick

― You're a notch, I'm a legend (Bill Magill)

^^^

At least dude put the Saint Vitus stuff back into print on vinyl for a while. That was nice, after more than a decade of people wishing it would happen.

At least dude put the Saint Vitus stuff back into print on vinyl for a while. That was nice, after more than a decade of people wishing it would happen.

Yeah but that's the problem right there, isn't it? Ginn isn't completely clueless, he surely knew that Vitus was a significant cult act with a massive following among the doom cognoscenti. But he waited 10 years before finally throwing out a few crumbs to the rabble. Didn't even remaster the stuff or repackage it in any way. He doesn't care because it's not about him.

The whole thing with him and SST leaves me dismayed that the aural history of an entire punk subculture is in the hands of one man who seems to hate that it's bigger than him.

^

and if you've read any interviews with people in the scene he wasn't just a well meaning doofus with a bad business sense, he was actually a huge selfish prick by most accounts.

Really surprised that Greg Ginn won't give his music away to a multi-national corporation like Google to slap all over with ads. What an inconsiderate prick. Who'd have thunk it?

However, SST has also claimed multiple copyright ownership of videos featuring bands which that have nothing to do with SST, including X, Fear, Sin 34, Lower Class Brats, Puzzled Panthers, and the Adolescents. Also affected, videos made by fans under Fair Use, utilizing snippets of songs.

Well I personally love the image of Greg Ginn just sitting around browsing the netz one day and getting the idea to type the names of his favourite bands into the Youtube search engine and get them taken down. In fact, I might try to get some guns n roses videos taken down. And if that Lou Reed & Metallica stuff doesn't come under 'violent or Repulsive Content'....

Really surprised that Greg Ginn won't give his music away to a multi-national corporation like Google to slap all over with ads. What an inconsiderate prick. Who'd have thunk it?

You'd have a point there, if it were the case that Ginn was making significant efforts to market the SST back catalogue. But he clearly isn't.

For such a stoner, ginn is very unchill

for a guy whose musical legacy is black flag he's about as unchill as i'd expect tbh!

I love this idea that if you are not providing the market with exactly what it wants then you should be totally fine with people giving it away to Google to make money off. Or are we talking about some other Greg Ginn? I'm discussing the tight-assed, non-compromising freak from one of the most hardline self-controlling bands ever.

its homemade skate videos!

It's Black Flag! It's Google! Fuckin hell. Were you born yesterday?

Yes can you change my diaper and do 180 gram vinyl reissue of surviving you always by saccharine trust?

I love this idea that if you are not providing the market with exactly what it wants then you should be totally fine with people giving it away to Google to make money off.

I think I would feel differently about it if, say, this were Corey Rusk we were talking about. So Google is bad for making money off other people's art - no denying that - but I doubt Ginn has paid a royalty cheque in years.

I would presume many SST artists would be happy for their music to be out there, even if they're not directly making money off it (and even if Google is profiting off their art), because it gives them a profile - one that Ginn hasn't provided since he stopped pressing records and mothballed his legacy.

youtube is very punk imo

otm

I think the larger problem with Ginn is that I do get the sense he regards all the SST music as ”his” in some way even though he didn't create it

Also he's a total dick

not keeping sst releases in print is a real crime against punk music

Buy em second hand.

like think about it, simultaneously removing punk music from the internet & withholding creation of new physical punk music--u are decreasing the amount of punk music in the universe dude wtf!

& making a crucial subset of existing punk music more expensive/scarce

Buy em second hand.

― everything, Sunday, 2 October 2011 17:59 (4 hours ago)

lol, yeah, only $300 for the sole copy of Paganicons for sale on Discogs!

I think the larger problem with Ginn is that I do get the sense he regards all the SST music as ”his” in some way even though he didn't create it

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, October 2, 2011 1:51 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

that's like almost literally the definition of a record label

And if there's one thing punk rock was about it was adhering to the traditional definitions and models of everything.

Dude's just bitter because his garage is full of Jambang (and his other thirty projects) albums no one gives a shit about.

lol @ arguing about what is "punk" in 2011

Ginn has always been a bit of an opportunist. I mean I totally respect dudes legacy and appreciate what he made happen back in the 80s, but the shit he pulled with like St. Vitus really bums me out because a lot of that music deserves to be heard and out there, without having to have people shell out $300 for used vinyl.

Oh bullshit, touch & go and dischord have operated way different

To some dude

I'm too weird to have checked out the new Minutemen doc. Sincerely. It still hurts too much, so I sent my wife to check it out for me. She sez when Ginn hit the screen, the entire theater booed him.
Tom

― Tom Troccoli (ttrocc7007), Monday, April 18, 2005 3:53 PM

The screening was in San Pedro, so everyone was either once an SST artist, or is the relative or FRIEND of SST artists. Yup, the entire place was made up of SST bands.

― Tom Troccoli (ttrocc7007), Monday, April 18, 2005 5:00 PM

so what's the deal, did bands like sonic youth/dino jr just have the deep(er) pockets to regain control of their sst records? or did they sign better contracts back in the day? did sst bands sign contracts, or were all the deals made spiritually via toke sessions w/ greg?

Several artists formerly on the label, including Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets, sued SST to reclaim their master recordings, claiming unpaid royalties.[27]

i believe the other bands might have included soundgarden and bad brains

also:

Several artists left SST in the late 1980s. By 1987 Sonic Youth had grown disenchanted with the label. Guitarist Thurston Moore said, "SST's accounting was a bit suspect to us", and the group's other guitarist Lee Ranaldo criticized the label's "stoner administrative quality".[24] The band was also dissatisfied with Ginn's newer signings. Unhappy that income from their records was ultimately helping fund "lame-ass records", Sonic Youth unamicably left the label and signed with Enigma Records in 1988.[25] Dinosaur Jr left SST for Blanco y Negro Records in 1990. Frontman J Mascis said, "I like Greg Ginn and stuff, but they wouldn't pay you."[26]

lol at mascis. summing it up.

all the Bad Brains' SST stuff is still on the label iirc tho

maybe they're a touch more forgiving of stoned administrative decisions

Ginn is in my top 5 all time elec gtr soloists but for christ's sake THERE IS NO CD OF DOUBLE NICKELS WITH ALL THE TRACKS INCLUDED

yeah, insane.
seems like if anybody could convince ginn, it'd be mike watt. just wear him down, watt!

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc6/207822_10151069074089024_1508498336_n.jpg

It would have been great, wouldn't it?

Greg Ginn continues to be a total piece of shit:

https://i.postimg.cc/tgHSV15h/reyes.jpg

jfc

Reyes had Ginn at his 50th birthday party in 2010 and tried to work things out with him, but Ginn doesn’t seem to care

Because Ginn is demonstrably and verifiably a total piece of shit.

I mean no one is ever going to get paid, but at least cut the guy a break and not let him be known as "Chavo Pederast" based on some bad joke you thought of 40+ years ago.

Of all the people I interviewed for my BF book Ron was the one I worried about the most. Just an incredibly sweet guy who'd had a really hard time of it, and who was still scarred and upset by the experience and by shit like "Chavo Pederast".

that makes me sad to hear.

Now to find a gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/arts/music/black-flag-greg-ginn.html

Through a representative, Rollins “declined with great enthusiasm” to an interview request for this article.

haha

think this works: https://archive.is/VJLJb

thanks, I hate it

I haven't seen em but the videos going around make me think these kids actually kind of shred and this is easily the least-embarrassing Ginn-run Flag since 2003

fair enough! I also heard that from a friend who saw the new lineup recently, like last week

it's more the stuff like

Ginn blamed various distributors going bankrupt as the reason for lapses in the label’s ability to pay.

that makes me irrationally angry

"LAPSES"?!?!

Maybe Ginn could just send the young 'uns out without him and stay at home making fertilizer and not paying anyone

this is easily the least-embarrassing Ginn-run Flag since 2003

I haven't seen any of the videos but this is the sense I get too tbh

bring back Flag imo

keith morris 4eva

I'll second that, I never saw them because it looks like the only time they played the UK was not a v good time for me

yeah I would 100% see Flag, mostly to watch Dukowski play bass

Black Flag as School Of (Punk) Rock seems... fine with me? Greg Ginn has had plenty of bad, BAD musical ideas over the years. Touring with a bunch of young musicians to play the only good songs he ever wrote is not one of them.

wonder if he'll still be travelling in a coffin in the back of the van that he can use to smoke weed in and avoid his bandmates