Black Flag

^^^^^^^It's excellent, I've listened to it many times over the years.

Just listening now, excellent.

^^^^^There is a bit where he visits Jimmy Pursey that's odd.

Nearly finished now

Very compelling, very dark. Hard to imagine a group I’d want to be in less than Black Flag during this era.

I listened to it again last night. I'd forgot how funny and misanthropic it is.

The amount of casual violence is quite shocking.

Decline of Western Civilization part 1

I'd never seen this before . I think one of the sequels was about heavy metal.






LA Punk

Mick Farren, New Musical Express, 11 April 1981

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA is always preceded by its own legend. There is no way you can avoid that legend if you grew up with the price of a cinema seat or within reach of a television set.

Early in the twentieth century game, the sprawl of Los Angeles made sure that it was the entertainment capital of the western world. From Chandler to CHiPs, we have all been softened up for the palms and the freeways the sun, fun and surf, the convertibles, and the hot nights. No other region in history has been so heavily promoted to us as the ultimate consumer paradise, a capitalist utopia where you can have a golden tan and sensationally meaningful relationship with the sex symbol of your choice.

Southern California does have a lot going for it. The climate is idyllic. Some of the scenic visuals, when you can see them through the smog, are breathtaking. Even the slums and the barrios, the meanest of the LA mean streets, are softened by a profusion of semi tropical vegetation. The general attitude is one of mild and mellow hedonism (although there are outbreaks of mass murder). The economy is still comparatively healthy, though the price of this continuing prosperity and the affluent Californian lifestyle is that the air in this paradise is poisoned.

There is also another preoccupation beneath the palms. The bulk of predictions indicate that Los Angeles is due for a major earthquake, maybe major enough to shake the whole city clean off the Pacific shelf, sometime within the twentieth century. With only nineteen years left to go, there is understandable unease. Parallels are intriguing: Atlantis, Pompeii, Sodom, Gomorrah. People make jokes about investing in prime Arizona beachfront property, but they're from out of town.


*

Partly from choice and partly from force of circumstance, I am spending a lot of time in a beat-up, grey Buick Riviera. There is hardly any effective public transport in LA, but since the Buick is, there it's no hardship. Los Angeles has advanced cruising to a high art. It's a city that makes more provision for cars than for human beings.
We have the radio on, but it is a constant source of puzzlement and occasionally of distress. Time warp isn't the right expression. It's more like a culture warp. It's as though the new wave had never happened. I hear Blondie's 'The Tide is High' a couple of times, the Clash's 'I Fought The Law'. The closest thing to a modern sounding record that gets played on a regular basis is Pat Benatar's 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot'. Otherwise it's nonstop Eddie Rabbit, Stevie Wonder, Delbert McClinton or Styx. Not even Costello gets a look in. Rod Stewart's 'Passion' is played so much that it could drive you crazy. All this is in a city with more radio stations that the whole of the UK.

It's the same when we get out of the car. The Sidewalk Of The Stars along Hollywood Boulevard is the trashy tourist souvenir strip. I'm wondering if I want a Jayne Mansfield souvenir bathtowel for the people back home. A spotty California kid with lank, straw coloured, shoulder length hair and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt is talking to his mate who's working on the checkout. They're discussing how the Starwood, one of Hollywood's longest established rock clubs, has been temporarily closed because of problems with fire department regulations.

The kid in the Led Zeppelin T-shirt seems to think that the Starwood got what it had coming. "Too many punkers."

This statement comes as something of a surprise. I've been in town now for forty-eight hours and have yet to see anyone who could even loosely be described as a punker. It's almost as though a whole section is missing out of the street scene, a section that's a totally integral part of the passing pavement in London, Paris or New York. There are no hip young persons, no shape throwers, no post modernists, no neo-rockabilly rebels, no Chrissie Hynde clones, not even a mod left over from the last revival. Everyone looks like they've just stepped out of a soap opera. If the whole point of my trip hadn't been to check out the surf punks and beach bands like Black Flag, Fear or The Circle Jerks, I would have to assume that somehow the upheavals of the 1976-7 and all that came afterwards had somehow bypassed LA, that it had held off the new wave.

The one thing I have been seeing is a lot of cops. Outside, the Los Angeles Police Department is conducting a three week, high profile, high saturation, anti-crime campaign. It consists mainly of police motorcyclists riding around in shining Harley Davidson Electroglides in gangs of ten or a dozen, looking like highly groomed Hells Angels. I wonder if there is a correlation between this and the lack of flamboyant youth on the streets, and later learn that there is indeed. The surf punks stick to their own kind and their own turf. They are contained hemmed-in phenomenon. I also learn that, to a degree, LA really has held off the new wave, I shouldn't have been surprised. Isn't California the place where they made a cult out of overcoming waves?


*

An LA punk gig is a disturbing blast from the past. It's the Roxy Club in 1976, something from the heyday of Eater, Johnny Moped or the original Damned. The area in front of the stage is a set piece of mindless mayhem. They call it "slamming in the pit". A few call it The Slam, but they're the kind who seem anxious for a dance craze. I suppose it is a dance. If not, it's something altogether new, spontaneous and pure, random, motiveless violence to a background of super fast rock and roll.
Slamming has a certain similarity to the old fashioned pogo. There's the same nihilist lack of grace or style; the same frenetic, eyepopping energy that denotes either extreme youth or a methedrine connection; the same tribal, mutually destructive headbanging. The essential difference is that, where the pogo was basically vertical - you went up and down and only landed on the person next to you maybe fifty percent of the time - the slammer is in the horizontal mode. You hurtle from side to side, elbows out, fists flailing and collide with the people around one hundred percent of the time.

To the untrained observer, "slamming in the pit" in front of an LA punk rock stage is almost indistinguishable from a freeform teen brawl. The line between brawl and slam is thin. If the kids make it to the stage and trash the band and its equipment if a young woman in the crowd has the clothes stripped from her body, if an unsuspecting hippie has his hair torn out or if the cops burst in, it is probably a brawl. If not, it's just slamming. Like I said, the pogo, only horizontal.

Los Angeles seems to be governed by a natural law that states that if something qualifies as a phenoxena, someone will sure as hell make a movie about it. Penelope Spheeris is the producer/director of a full length, 100 minute feature titled The Decline (Of Western Civilization) which does for the LA punks what Let It Be did for the Beatles. After spending a year and a half in the project, getting down with the denizens of beach punk communities like the Church or Skinhead Manor, following the major bands as they play at joints like the Hong Kong Cafe, the Masque, the Arena, Club 88 and the Fleetwood, interviewing the editors of the now defunct Slash magazine and probing into the psychological make-up of street and beach kids, she has managed to put together what is by far the most lucid and visually integrated punk documentary that I've yet seen.

This is understandable. Ms. Spheeris is a pro film maker with a solid track record. She graduated from record company promo films to shorts for Saturday Night Live, movie projects with Richard Pryor and Lily Tomlin. In 1978, just before starting work on The Decline, she directed Albert Brooks in the critically acclaimed, but financially disastrous Real Life.

The picture she paints of the LA punk scene is bleak in its isolated nihilism. These Angelino kids have no truck with the Clash's chic third world liberation fantasies. Their only conscious borrowing from the past is Nazi regalia and the old Manson family "creepy-crawl" slogan. Fuelled on speed, barbiturates and beer, they use irrational, fist swinging aggression as their only emotional outlet. In every live music sequence, the idea of fun, over and above slamming, is to hulk oneself headfirst into uncompromising two fisted bouncers.

No political consciousness has filtered through to these kids. Their hatred is immediate and directed at the most available targets: parents, hippies, the polyester and soap opera people of Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

"Beverly Hills, Century City
Everything's so nice and pretty
All the people look the same
Don't they know that they're so lame"
– 'Beverly Hills', The Circle Jerks.

They even hate the commercial new wave - "powerpop queers in narrow ties", and see everyone from Deborah Harry to the Go-Gos and The Cretones as treacherous sellouts to the record moguls who want to rot our brains with Barry Manilow. Above all, though, they hate the L.A.P.D. and, by all accounts, Los Angeles' Finest hate them right back. Police harassment seems endemic in the surf punk picture. Club owners are warned not to book the hard core punk bands, bottle and rock throwing melees have spread onto the streets after cops have attempted to break up concerts in progress. Street punks seem subject to continuous rousting and Black Flag claim to have had their equipment impounded at gun point.


*

I pick up the LA Times and on page 23 I find a confirmation of a lot of what I've heard and seen. It's a report of how two cops were injured in a mini-riot after police closed down a Subhumans/Black Flag/China White show at the Polish Hall on Crenshaw Boulevard. All three bands are solid favourites with the hard core skinhead and the mohican surf punks from Huntington Beach Chuck Dukowski, Black Flag's shaven headed bass player, is despite it all, philosophical.
"I wouldn't blame the police for being there, just for severely over reacting. Once they start beating kids up, the kids go crazy and destroy everything. The cops call up every club we play and try to discourage them from booking us. They even told a TV documentary team that if they showed up at one of our gigs they'd all be killed."

Black Flag, along with X, are the apparent front runners of the bands competing for the tiny LA atrocity market. X have a deal with Slash Records. X are the most immediately accessible of the field, but the twinned vocals of John Doe and Exene have a tendency to sound uncomfortably close, even with the worst identikit punkrock backing, to those of Grace Slick and Marty Balin in the early Jefferson Airplane. They even have teen appeal in the figure of guitarist Billy Zoom, a young Eddie Cochran on speed, who is tailor made for Sixteen Magazine.

Black Flag, on the other hand, are cut from sterner stuff. There is some argument over whether their name refers to the anarchist flag or to a top selling brand of aerosol roach killer. If anything, they resemble a very early Clash. Frontman Ron Reyes(suddenly dumped from the band and replaced by Shaun Pederast) was pretty much the Hispanic Joe Strummer except there is no Bernie Rhodes pumping half digested hippie Marxism at him. Black Flag seem to still be locked into primitive, vacant nihilism. They are the darlings of the violent slammers. Their shows are a nonstop bodycheck confrontation with the front rows. In the days of The Damned it was a hail of gob that hit the stage – now these LA clowns simply hurl themselves across the spotlights. They have the same mindless brutality, the same preoccupation with self mutilation and self disfigurement at the grosser elements of British 'Red Punk'.

The unique point about Black Flag is that they play very, very fast. In the way that the Ramones took the minimal figures of the original Stooges and doubled the speed, Black Flag have lifted the Ramones' house style and doubled the speed once again. The energy they use moves out of high and into psychotic. The noise is so headlong that it sounds as though it is constantly about to fall out of control. Fortunately the speed also means that their songs are over very quickly. Black Flag come in bursts, like machine gun fire or, in fact, more like a cartoon. The frames are squirted at you a few at a time. It suddenly all makes sense - the blank eyed violence, the random, motiveless, smashing into each other, the slam; it's all straight out of Tom and Jerry.

These Californian children are turning themselves into cartoon characters and hurting themselves and each other. No one really cares.


*

Despite the constantly promoted, laid back, hedonist lifestyle and all the loony tune fads, Southern California is essentially a very conservative place. The men who hold the power there, multi-millionaires like Ted Cummings, a 72-year-old supermarket magnate, Artie Deutsch, the heir to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Al Bloomingdale, who invented Diner's Club, and oil baron Henry Salvatori, are now the men holding the power on this half of the planet. They are the men who backed Reagan, Reagan's "crowd", the natural heirs to the Orange County ring who stood in the shadows behind Richard Nixon a decade ago.
These individuals treat business as something to hold sacred. They take the attitude of aggressive pioneers who only understood a slash and burn economy. Business is not something that cares to bother itself about environment, social programmes for the poor or minorities, individual rights or the rights of small overseas nations. Business is the business of making money by whatever means necessary.

"We've had enough of what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine." This is from an official of the Flor Corp, a major corporate centre of Reagan support.

"That's what's been going for the last 50 years. We should go back to 'what's mine is mine and what's yours is yours and if your step over the line, I'll blow your brains out.' That's the western way.

It's the Californian way, and if they have any say in it, it'll be the way of the world. They know they are the hope of capitalism.


*

Eugene is one of the punk stars of Spheeris' Decline. His head is shaved: "Short hair is just the clean cut American way. Man, it's just cool."
In another incarnation he could have been a blonde surfer. He has the features. His family were probably wealthy, but he claims he doesn't know them. He doesn't know why he gets violent, particularly when he's at a show.

".. just to get the aggression out .. You know.. cuz they're fuckin' ... I don't know.. That's why I do it, just to get aggression out... all this fuckin' pent-up shit."

Michael, also known as his X-Head, has a large cross burned into his hair. he likes fighting. He claims it's the only thing he's good at.

"A lot of people are afraid of me, but that's just like they go by appearance. I guess I'm a scary looking person."

Neither Eugene or X-Head bother too much about either Reagan or the men behind him except that they are probably somewhere on the list of things that they hate. It's a pity really. The way that Reagan's going, Eugene and X-Head could find themselves drafted, processed through basic training and dumped down on some South American pampas or sierra to be shot at by guerrillas with AK47s bought off the Sandinistas, while their cassette player dumps out 'Manimal" by The Germs. Sadly, Eugene and X-Head don't have what you'd call a political consciousness.


*

Back in the Buick we are on our way to Madame Wong's West. Madame Esther Wong has been heavily hyped in the media as the dragon lady of LA punk rock and her original Chinatown joint as where "it all started". In fact, it turns out that Esther Wong actually dislikes high volume and violent excess and energy. Kids who start slamming are thrown out and she maintains a blacklist that includes all the more rabid punk acts like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, China White, Flesheaters and Fear (the gay band that perversely goes in for violent queer baiting). Her booking policy seems to favour the clean, the safe, the soporific and the dinky.
Madame Wong's West is her venture into upmarket Hollywood trendsetting. The trouble is that when we arrive nobody seems to be setting any trends at all. The place is about one quarter filled with listless, rather badly dressed kids who are either playing Missile Command or watching, without too much enthusiasm, a limp bunch of low power poppers called Sumner, who have a little going for them except a female violin and keyboard player who looks like a Dolly Parton doll.

Also checking out the band is the perennial entrepreneur Kim Fowley. Fowley has been stalking this same rock jungle since he foisted 'Alley Cop' by The Hollywood Argyles on the world in the early '60s. Along with disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer, Fowley seems to occupy the role of some sort of gauleiter of the LA avant garde, a link between the street and the executive suite. Both are vigorously detested by the surf punks as running dogs of the showbiz establishment. The Wild Samoans sum up the attitude:

'8pm and Rodney's on the air
He's beating off in Joan Jett's hair.'

If any individual can be fingered as the embodiment of the LA punks it has to be Darby Crash. Black Flag may have the cult following, but Crash is the stuff of legend. Unfortunately, in this case legend was all too quick to catch up. In the same week of December that Lennon was gunned down, Darby Crash died of a heroin overdose.

Although he would have denied it, he was in the direct tradition of self destructive rock'n'roll, the child of Sid Vicious, the grandson of Iggy Pop. Imagine a flabby, dough-featured, slightly overweight LA kid with dull eyes and statutory Mohican, something of a klutz, even, hiding behind a fearsome, beach-droog exterior. He mumbles and stumbles on a combination of speed, heroin and gin. In the film Decline, as the lead singer of The Germs, he takes rock'n'roll incompetence to new peaks. Too out of it to form words, he howls and grunts and falls gracelessly from PA stacks hard onto the stage. As he tries to stagger to his feet hands reach out from the crowd and draw on his back and face with felt-tip pens. He's oblivious. It's a matter of screw art as long as he can't feel the pain. Later, in an untypically tidy kitchen, he plays with a furry pet tarantula while his girlfriend tells of a phot session with a Mexican corpse they discovered in the backyard. Behind them a posterior of the London Evening Standard shrieks the news of Sid's Vicious overdose.

Loose talk would indicate that Darby Crash's death wasn't just an accidental OD. Most accounts leave little doubt that it was a carefully orchestrated suicide. At very least, it has to prove that when there's a rage to be expressed, it will come out as self-destruction if other avenues of expression are closed. A number of people I spoke to saw Crash's death as a sought-after achievement, even the realisation of a dream. California dreaming has come a long way, baby.


*

Twice in less than two weeks I've seen this trashy B-feature monster movie called Horror of Party Beach on one or another channel's late, late show. It begins to seem like something more than a coincidence, what Carl Jung used to call synchronicity; it's like when you hear a work for the first time in you life and then you hear it five times in the next forty-eight hours.
Horror Of Party Beach was made in 1964. Its plot is minimal. A pre-Beach Boys surf band with DA haircuts and Pendleton shirts is playing on the back of a flatbed truck for a crowd of California sun bunnies. Each time a couple of them slip away from the party to make out on a more secluded bit of beach a huge, black, rubbery seaweed thing slimes out of the sea and eats them alive - probably as a punishment for their teen immorality.

Of course in the end, the teens all get together, discover the monster's weakness and zap it, but that's not the real point.

Increasingly, from where I'm sitting, it starts to see that Horror of Party Beach is some sort of parable for what's going on in Southern California. Something nasty is lurking on the fringes of Reaganland. The children of this polluted capitalist utopia are being dragged by a grim, black anger into the nihilist world of Darby Crash. They are being infected with inarticulate rage against everything that has been sold to them as good and desirable since the time they could crawl.

It's easy to sit back in either New York or London and dismiss the surf punk wave as some isolated rerun of 1976/7/8. Certainly, from the outside, it sure as hell does look like that. These are, however, not street kids without hope or prospects looking to survive in some out of date crumbling city. These are the children of the best that capitalism can offer. They come from the solid upper middle suburbs of LA, Mirada, Anaheim, Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and Fullerton. With their pools and their manicured lawns, their three car garages and Mexican gardens, these places are the strongholds of the American dream. It's the world of The Graduate and Mrs Robinson. It's these people who have invested their votes and, in some cases, even their money to make sure that Reagan and his right wing new deal will protect and preserve this lotusland from all the pressures of change. Somewhere along the way, though, something went wrong with the next generation. They want nothing more than to throw it all away, to trash it and burn it. It's like Jim Morrison' line in 'The End' was a kind of prophecy; 'All the children are insane"'.

There's a terrible isolation about these kids. Many of them are, by all accounts, close to asexual. Certainly the demonstration of any emotion except anger is close to taboo. Los Angeles itself is a uniquely isolated place with everyone moving around in the armoured womb of their Chevy or their Datsun. No cross current of ideas disturbs the singlemindedness of Southern California punks. There are no political activists to inspire musicians to a different kind of sloganeering. There is no cross fertilization with the next bunch of underdogs (in LA, the Chicano low riders with their Salsa music and baroque custom cars); the only contact between Chicano and punk is strictly on a battle-ground footing.

There isn't even any help forthcoming from the music industry. Even though it's the entertainment capital of the world, there is no space for experimentation of creative courage in LA. In the music business, conservatism also rules. In their hearts they know that Neil Diamond is what is really good for us.

Black Flag may, as a result of publicity, make it as far as New York, even London. X may sell a few records, but the majority of these Reaganland kids have no way out. They have short-circuited, they are locked into a going-nowhere spiral of hostility. They hate so hard that they have no space to grow. They are so busy defining their rebellion that they have developed a tunnel vision that excludes any fresh ideas. They are, after all, the children of conservative parents. Lacking a way to move up many, like Darby Crash, will sink into self destructive oblivion.

If LA goes ahead with its plans to host the 1984 Olympic Games, professional terrorist watchers predict that the city would be the optimum target for the detonation of the first home-made atom bomb by some group of crazies.

Between that and the earthquake, LA lives in a state of "if the left one don't get you, the right one will."

© Mick Farren, 1981