In late 1981 or early ’82, my friend Steve moved to my neighborhood in Ann Arbor from Southern California with his mom, two older brothers and their stack of punk rock LPs. We bonded over skateboarding and the pulse-quickening, aggressive sounds of those records, which we would thrash around and air-guitar along to using tennis rackets, being grade schoolers at the time.
The music was a revelation, a blast of righteous fury against a trickle-down world teetering on the cusp of nuclear annihilation. Soon I would trade in my copies of Back in Black, Foreigner 4 and Tattoo You for the likes of Jealous Again, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables and Never Mind the Bollocks. A whole new world of possibilities had opened itself to me, and nothing would ever be the same.
I saw Black Flag several years later at what would turn out to be their second-to-last show before the band ceased to be a going concern. Much of what I remember of that show was like the reaction I had whenever I brought home a copy of any of their post-1981 releases: Why don’t they sound like Damaged anymore?
But I the more I sat with albums like Loose Nut, the more I became obsessed with Ginn’s combustible, crossed-wire jazz guitar attack and Henry’s go-for-broke dedication to character, the way he poured himself into the role and embodied the Black Flag aesthetic. Over the years, the band’s influence on countless other bands and genres became clear. I came to see that, in turning away from their hardcore roots in favor of following their muses, and in the band’s relentless determination and grimy work ethic, Black Flag both defined and transcended punk rock.
Here I rank Black Flag’s six LPs, from Damaged to In My Head, that mark their seminal core run. (No, I’m not counting the latest product branded under the Black Flag name and its embarrassing cover art. One day I may give it a spin, but I’m still not ready to be disappointed. If I’m wrong about this, let me know in the comments.)
Anyway. The process of weeding out:
6. Family Man, 1984
I know, I know: shocking that I ranked the half-spoken word, half-instrumental Family Man, an outlier in the catalog released in 1984, dead last. If I’m honest, I had never even listened to this LP until decades after it came out. But that doesn’t mean it’s without its virtues.
The A side reflects the fact that by this point, Henry had been busy filling journals while out on endless tours and had established himself on the spoken word and poetry circuits in L.A. Which is inspiring; we’re talking about a guy who just a few years earlier was scooping ice cream for a living. In fact, Family Man marks Rollins’ birth as a renaissance man. He has gone on to author several books on his 2.13.61 Publications imprint, been a bandleader (Rollins Band), a prolific spoken-word artist, film actor, television host, voiceover artist, and radio host.
I like his poems, particularly “Family Man,” a caustic condemnation of suburban normalcy and “Hollywood Diaries,” a macabre tale of a man who chops off his arms and sends it with a box of chocolates to the object of his affection that might be about ambition. Even “Let Your Fingers Do the Walking” is entertaining, even if it sounds more like song lyrics in their musicality and repetition.
Side A closes with “Armageddon Man,” which is also a line from the latter poem, and is the only track featuring all four members of the band performing. It’s essentially an extended instrumental built on a riff with Henry reciting one of his spoken word pieces over top, perhaps improvising some of it, foreshadowing what he would do a few years later with Rollins Band. Critics may complain about its length, clocking in at longer than 9 minutes, but I find it an interesting and successful union of the album’s dual concepts, with both Rollins and Ginn indulging their more experimental urges.
As for the instrumentals, you’ll have to be a fan of Ginn’s frenetic 12-tone playing style (if you’re not, I don’t know why you’re reading this). But as instrumental jamming goes, these tracks generally deliver, and they definitely showcase how good the Kira Roessler-Bill Stevenson rhythm section was.
Technically, Family Man is the first release to feature Kira on bass, though it’s probably safe to say most fans got their introduction to her playing in the more conventional Slip It In, which arrived a few months later in late 1984. But she earns her keep here, landing co-writing credits on two of the instrumentals and instantly locking in with Stevenson’s breakneck style.
Kira supplies some supple basslines on “Account for What?”, which sounds like prog jazz, while “Long Lost Dog of It,” which opens side B, is an abstract meditation that fades out just as it sounds like it might be gaining lift. Both “I Won’t Stick Any of You Unless and Until I Can Stick All of You!” and “The Pups are Doggin’ It” skate by on high-tempo, punky grooves and give Stevenson a platform to shine.
Most punk rockers in 1984 hated this release, which makes it punk AF in my book.
5. Loose Nut, 1985
Released in 1985, Loose Nut contains one of my favorite verses in all of Black Flag’s cannon and one that pretty well sums up their ethos: “I smash my fists / Into the wall / I can feel it / When I close my eyes.” It’s simple, declarative and visceral, and it exemplifies their strength in writing vividly economic songs exploring inner conflict.
It makes me uncomfortable rating this album so low, but they’ve all got to slot somewhere, and so here we are.
Loose Nut is a fine album, and I have little bad to say about it except that there are others I rate a little more highly — and also, it lacks any genuine Greg Ginn guitar feakouts. That said, it’s one of the band’s more consistent offerings front to end, an album full of mid-tempo rockers, some quite heavy, and some that perhaps get too repetitive and would’ve benefitted from a shorter song length. In the end, it comes across as Black Flag’s most straight-ahead rock album.
With its lyrics about being a “radical partyin’ machine,” “Annihilate This Week” continues the legacy of humorous songs a la “TV Party” and “Slip It In.” The title track is a highlight, blasting out of the gate with a punishing sonic assault and lyrics that split the difference between psychosis and horniness: “Loose nut in my head / a bolt of lightning between my legs / I can’t think straight my mind’s a mess / I only see straight when I’m being led.”
The band’s songwriting chops were in full display on Loose Nut, and the album benefits from the contributions of members not named Greg Ginn. Rollins chips in with some of the album’s finest and most adventurous tracks (“Sinking,” “I’m the One”), Kira gets her first co-writing credit for the up-tempo “Best One Yet” and the album closes with the stunning “Now She’s Black,” written by Stevenson. Some have compared it to something you might hear from ALL-era Descendents, and I can see that, and would love to hear them cover it, but Ginn’s doom-metal riffing and Henry’s scorched-earth vocal performance stamp it as the band’s own. It’s a killer track, a strong album-ender.
Another strong track, “Modern Man,” is an adaptation of a song co-written by former bassist Chuck Dukowski, this time from his days in ’70s sludge-rock band Würm. It’s one of the many songs Black Flag had been playing for a while; check out the version on the bootleg The Complete 1982 Demos with Dukowski playing bass.
Loose Nut was recorded during the same sessions at Total Access Recording that resulted in the instrumental The Process of Weeding Out EP and parts of In My Head.
4. My War, 1984
Ginn managed to push Dukowski out of Black Flag before the recording sessions began for My War (while somehow convincing him to become the band’s manager and stick around SST to book tours for its bands). Which brings us to Dale Nixon, the infamous pseudonym Ginn used on the album credits to disguise the fact he played bass on the band’s long-delayed and heavily anticipated follow-up to Damaged.
My War (whose title track was written by Dukowski) is easily the band’s rawest release, both in production and its spare musical sound. It was intensely polarizing at the time of its release because of songs that stretched well past the standard 1- or 2-minute mark established by its predecessor, because it had guitar solos, and especially because of side two, which contains three songs that each stretch past 6 minutes. Indeed, it would be difficult to slam dance to much of My War, and the album was anathema to many of the combat-boots set. It was a sign that, in the two-plus years since Damaged, when the band was legally barred from releasing new material under the Black Flag name, much had changed for the band. They had grown disillusioned with hardcore punk and its violence and rigid orthodoxy and were exploring new influences, including heavy metal and even jazz.
Today, the album is regarded as being hugely influential by bands like Mudhoney and The Melvins and the entire grunge oeuvre. Some have come to see it as the band’s finest recording.
I don’t, largely because of Ginn’s rather rote follow-the-lead-guitar bass playing and the lack of an ensemble feel. The band sounds a little thin without Dukowski’s powerful, industrial-strength bass playing and Dez Cadena’s rhythm guitar. In fact, The Complete 1982 Demos, a bootleg recorded with both Dukowski and Cadena that contains early versions of several My War songs, captures a superior version of this transition era of Black Flag.
That said, My War contains some truly killer tracks, led by the Dukowski-penned “I Love You,” which features another excellent breakneck Ginn intro, and the Rollins-penned “Forever Time” and its lyrics, “I feel I’m some kind of death machine / With skin and muscles and a heart that pumps my blood / Time, time, time, time.” The latter showcases Ginn’s growing fascination with stop-start dynamics and shifting time signatures.
Henry is in fine form throughout, and was steadily growing into his role not just as the frontman, but embodiment of the Black Flag persona itself. Even though he was mostly singing Ginn’s lyrics, which dealt with self-hatred, frustration, dysfunction and violence, Rollins makes the songs his own. He’s an open wound, menacing but ultimately vulnerable and pleading for help. Meanwhile, Ginn’s guitar playing here is gaining new swagger, especially on the Sabbath-esque riff at the heart of “Beat My Head Against the Wall” and the dissonant noise of “The Swinging Man,” which marks the band’s first foray into free jazz dissonance (with bonus points to Stevenson’s excellent drumming).
I can’t write about My War without mentioning the iconic Raymond Pettibon cover art. I have long believed NASA should stuff a copy into one of those unmanned probes we fill with artifacts of human civilization and launch into deep space in the hopes it is one day discovered by some alien race. What in the world would they make of it?
3. In My Head
I could almost make the case for In My Head as my favorite Flag release. I consider it psychedelic metal in sound — heavy, dark and atonal, still sounding like nothing else after all these years.
Its primary flaw is that it suffers from Ginn’s tinny, cold production, which sounds like he put thick pillows over all the mics. Henry’s vocals are buried in the mix, and Stevenson’s drums sound like they’re coming from the other room — kind of like the production David Bowie gave to Raw Power by The Stooges. It’s fun to imagine this album getting a proper remix, but this is Greg Ginn we’re talking about — stubborn gatekeeper to a vast SST catalog full of increasingly hard-to-find gems that he refuses, for whatever reason, to reissue or sell off rights.
The story goes that In My Head had its genesis as Ginn’s first instrumental solo release, but Rollins began scratching out lyrics while hanging out during the band’s marathon practice sessions, so instead it became the band’s swan song. (The excellent podcast You Don’t Know Mojack presents compelling evidence that by this time, Ginn had a plan to wind down the band as a going interest; the Metal Matters episode on this album is also quite good.) Ginn would fire Stevenson soon after the album’s release, replaced for the tour by Anthony Martinez. Kira, who would appear on the 1986 live album Who’s Got the 10-1/2? with Martinez on drums (it was recorded in late ’85), would depart soon after to finish her degree at UCLA, bringing this era of the band, and its strongest rhythm section, to a close.
Musically, In My Head is a fascinating and boundary-pushing mélange. With its mathematic harmonic scales offset by Rollins’ seething chorus, “Black Love” is creepy, off kilter and menacing. “White Hot” sounds perpetually on the verge of stumbling over its own top-heavy stop-start rhythm and Ginn’s molasses-thick riffing. Rollins is once again in feral form, singing “I wanna be that bullet that goes ripping through your skull” on the title track, and sounding positively creepy on “Crazy Girl” when he sings “My target is your eyes.”
Less acknowledged are the songs that close out side two on the LP version. “Drinking and Driving,” “Retired at 21” and the driving “Society’s Tease”— are effortless-sounding rave-ups that see the band exploring novel facets of non-hardcore punk rock. The album’s closer, the terrific, skittering “It’s All Up to You,” is one of the rare examples of a Black Flag song that fades out at the end, appropriately sending the band off into infamy. (The CD versions add the trippy “I Can See You” and “You Let Me Down.”)
If the band had run out of gas by this point, there was no sign of it on this record.
2. Slip It In, 1984
Slip It In is a sleeper in the Black Flag catalog, the album where the direction laid out just months earlier with the release of My War met with a rapidly improving musical dexterity — thanks in no small part to the arrival of Kira on bass. Musically, the band never sounded more potent.
The band around this time was listening to a lot of Ronnie James Dio, which is fun to think about, as are the tales about Rollins and Stevenson going for adrenaline-fueled runs together in the middle of the night during breaks at the recording studio. Naturally, Slip It In reflects an increased metal influence, especially on the demented album closer “You’re Not Evil,” with its background screams and whispers and Henry’s growls countering Ginn’s psychotic pull-cord arpeggios on the chorus, and the killer riffing and drumming of “Wound Up.”
One of the band’s most diverse albums stylistically, it contains echoes of the sludge of My War (“Rat’s Eyes”) and the last gasps of its hardcore roots (the relentless “My Ghetto” and the classic “Black Coffee”), part summation of where the band has been, part restless exploration, and all flex. With its gong intro and prog leanings, “Obliteration” underlines Ginn’s growing interest in instrumental music, and Henry by now was starting to take a more active role in writing lyrics, contributing the standout “The Bars” (with a Dukowski co-writing credit), perhaps the album’s best track. Kira is a revelation on bass, supplying slippery (sorry) intros and adding a dynamic new sophistication to the band.
I’ve gone this far without discussing the title track, which was problematic in its day (Kira herself has spoken about her own conflicted feelings about it as the group’s lone female member) and is only more so today in the #metoo era. Then again, maybe it’s about morning-after regret. Like the album cover, it’s clumsy and misogynistic, but also knowingly juvenile, meant as a joke in the vein of “TV Party.”
As an album opener, it’s also pretty hard to beat.
Ginn’s entry into the song sounds like the soundtrack to a spectacular car chase scene and channels the incendiary lead-in to “Rise Above.” He’s neither the cleanest nor most technical of virtuosos — a musician friend of mine once called Ginn as “the best bad guitarist” — but he’s a man with a vision and ideas and a sound all his own. Meanwhile, Henry and guest vocalist Suzi Gardner, who would later help launch the band L7, really go there, so to speak, and deliver a scorching piece of completely juvenile performance art caught on wax.
1. Damaged, 1981
In the interests of tension and surprise, I’d love to rank Slip It In or In My Head No. 1 on this list. These days I listen to them more, and the later albums like those ones were certainly more musically adventurous and varied. But in the end I cannot deny the gravitational pull of Damaged, the album that lit the fuse and cemented Black Flag’s status as legends.
Damaged is easily the best album to emerge from the ‘80s hardcore movement, a grenade blast of rebellion, angst and self-loathing conveyed in economical, pulse-quickening 2-minute songs. It stands head and shoulders above its peers because the band was just too talented, too well-rehearsed (Black Flag set a demanding practice schedule) and too invested in the project to let its songs become formulaic and rigid like so much of the hardcore genre.
Much of the album is comprised of songs like “Police Story” and “Depression” that had become standards by the time the band finally recorded its first full-length. It’s fleshed out with a few standout contributions from bassist Dukowski, including a remake of the song “Padded Cell” from his old ‘70s sludge rock band Würm, and a smattering of new songs. It was also the first recording to feature Rollins, formerly of the short-lived Washington D.C. hardcore band State of Alert, with former vocalist Dez Cadena moving to rhythm guitar and the indomitable Robo manning the drums.
This version of Greg Ginn’s band was a powerful one. Rollins, who joined the band mid-tour shortly before it hit the studio to record this album, lends a new ferocity and feral energy, even if his vocal range is less dynamic than previous frontmen Ron Reyes and Keith Morris. Dukowski brings a kind of caustic aesthetic to the bass that suits the material and perfectly complements Ginn’s meltdown playing style. His bass playing on the slow-to-fast intro to “No More” is a prime example.
The tracks “Rise Above” and “Police Story” were the closest Black Flag ever got to being political but retain a timeless quality. There are even “hits” in the form of “Six Pack” and “TV Party,” which contains now-outdated references to ‘80s shows like Dallas and Dynasty. What’s more, the seeds of the Sabbath-y sludgecore found on side two of My War were planted here on the tracks “Room 13” and “Damaged I.”
Taken in full, it’s a genre- and era-defining album that was totally at odds stylistically and temperamentally with the dawn of the Reagan ‘80s. Damaged constantly veers between the precipices of blowing up and melting down.
Damaged ignited a bitter legal battle with the label Unicorn, a division of MCA Records, after it objected to the “anti-parent” content of the record that would drain the band’s already barren coffers and briefly land Ginn and Dukowski in jail. It also prevented the band from releasing any new music under the Black Flag name until late in 1983, when Unicorn went bankrupt.
The following year, in 1984, the dam burst open. The band would never sound the same.
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