Dear Greg Ginn

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

superstore
society
lemonheads
sst

http://www.kosmikradiation.com/blackflag_ginn.jpg

I would put that DeadFlag sticker on my Cadillac.

^^ otm

Greg is everywhere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l1qCczGgSxw

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/l1qCczGgSxw"; frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

That's my farewell. See ya.
where did i go wrong?

Remove the s in https

Funny, I got woken up this morning by a text from a friend who auditioned with Ginn for the bass slot in Black Flag just last night.

thats henry kaiser, no?

Definitely Henry Kaiser. I loved it when he randomly popped up in Antarctica busting out a solo in that Herzog doc (I think they're friends, and Kaiser is a massive sub-aqua geek).

loved his cover of needle and the damage done on The Bridge (that was him, yeah?)

I'm just not getting the response I got to asking on the Watt list about the chance of remasters. Surely the remaster would enhance the Spot production while updating to better fit the current state of the medium? & improve the transfer on at least a couple of titles.

Instead of which I was informed that no remasters were needed because Spot's production was so great.
That might be but does the remaster actually effect the production , surely just the transfer of what is on the tape that the final mix is on. Whether things would actually need to be remixed to better suit th emedium rather than the medium they were actually recorded for is a different matter surely? Nott sure to what extent they would need that anyway.
Just got it in my head that Neubauten took th eactual medium into account when they transfered their back catalogue to cd when they set up Potomak & not sure how much that applies to the SSt stuff. Assume it must apply to some extent to any recorded sound and its replication in(through?) whatever sound medium.

Anyway would love to have cds of the material I'm aafter with best possible sound, decent volume, clarity etc etc by somebody who knows the medium and isn't simply going to over compress etc.

getting as in understanding in first line

Instead of which I was informed that no remasters were needed because Spot's production was so great.

This makes no sense

Remasters from the original tapes would certainly help, as (allegedly) a lot of the CD releases on SST were 'mastered' from vinyl as a cost-saving measure.

Whether they need a remix is a different story: I'm actually a fan of that 'shitty' Spot production sound. It doesn't work in every case, but in my mind I just can't divorce it from the songs on those records. They're all part and parcel. It'd be interesting to hear different mixes, but I don't know if it would be the same thing to me.

I don't think either of these things are going to happen, though, unless we get lucky and some first-rate musical archivists (*cough"numerogroup*cough*) do the decent thing and manage to negotiate the rights for a stellar reissue programme. I mean, every time I see raves about this or that long-lost one-shot deal on Drag City or whatever I sigh, knowing that the SST catalogue is prime for this kind of deal.

(*cough"numerogroup*cough*)

Closer than you think, apparently ...

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