Each punk agrees that Black Flag have been an vital band. Few can agree on what precisely made them so. Survey 10 folks sporting tattoos of the 4 bars, and also you’ll get a minimum of 10 completely different opinions on which album is their biggest, whether or not their reside data and demos are higher than any of their correct albums, who was their greatest singer (or bassist or drummer), whether or not they have been higher with one guitarist or two, after they began to suck, and whether or not band mastermind Greg Ginn is a genius guitar participant, a jazzbo wanker, or a genius jazzbo wanker. With Black Flag, dysfunction and debate are as a lot part of the model as lurid Raymond Petitbon art work.
However amid all of the division that engulfs the band, there stays no higher lightning rod than My Struggle—the San Andreas Fault of hardcore, the place, with a easy flip from Facet 1 to Facet 2, the quickest and most ferocious band in punk immediately reworked into the doomiest, most despairing band in steel. My Struggle immediately drew a line between those that noticed hardcore as a selected type of jackhammering rock music and those that considered it as a broader philosophy of nihilism and negation—one which may very nicely be used to dismantle hardcore itself. By radically altering Black Flag’s musical DNA, My Struggle realized their elementary spirit of contrarianism.
Initially fashioned in Hermosa Seashore, California, circa 1976, Black Flag (né Panic) didn’t simply increase punk rock’s capability for velocity and violence, they successfully extinguished the style’s final vestiges of glam-schooled vamping and pub-rock reverence. For all their anti-rock-star posturing, first-wave punks like Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer nonetheless got here geared up with showbizzy stage names and thoroughly cultivated aesthetics, and it didn’t take lengthy for them to develop into icons themselves. Black Flag, in contrast, have been T-shirt-and-jeans misfits who, early on, rejected the notion of the rock band as a tight-knit gang. By the point they made their recorded debut in 1978, they have been already on their fourth bassist and second drummer; over the following two years, they’d cycle by means of three lead vocalists—Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, and Dez Cadena—every of whom lasted within the position simply lengthy sufficient to chop a pivotal EP and set up their respective faction of loyalists.
In impact, early Black Flag demonstrated that the individual singing the tune was much less vital than the vitality and intent behind it, and the participatory response it elicited. And the band would discover its longest-serving frontman by means of a veritable act of punk-rock karaoke: At a June 1981 gig at New York venue A7, Black Flag invited a fan-turned-friend onstage to sing “Clocked In”—an apt alternative, on condition that he’d pushed all the best way from D.C., and needed to make the five-hour journey again in time for his early morning shift at a neighborhood Häagen-Dazs. Cadena was considering a swap from lead vocals to rhythm guitar, so a couple of days later, the band summoned the ice-cream store worker again to New York for a rehearsal. After a single session, Henry Garfield was invited to hitch Black Flag on their cross-country tour, for which he initially served as a roadie and Cadena’s understudy on the mic. Upon settling in L.A., he adopted a brand new, tougher-sounding surname, Rollins, and laid down vocal tracks to the songs that Ginn and bassist Chuck Dukowski had written for the band’s full-length debut, Broken, an album that—from its stunning cowl photograph to its light-speed 33-second strikes to its anti-everything worldview—eternally modified the phrase “hardcore” from an adjective to a noun.
