Joe Carducci: The last record, In My Head, is the record Greg was trying to make since Damaged.  Greg was frustrated with the band. Well, he was frustrated for other reasons too: everything was pent-up.  Damaged is an album full of songs written for one guitar but recorded with a two-guitar lineup- it doesn’t sound how it should. Everything Went Black is the way it should sound. My War and Slip It In are written for two guitars but recorded with one. So, their whole discography’s fucked up. I mean, we’re lucky the stuff exists considering the fucked-up situations.

The first flowering of American hardcore only lasted until 1983.  There’s only so long you can play as fast as possible while screaming about cops.  After a couple 45’s and maybe an album, most first generation hardcore bands broke up by ’83 or ’84.  The ones that didn’t had to change their sound; there isn’t a hardcore band in America that sounded the same in 1984 as they did in 1981 (this alone is pretty interesting, think about how many bands sound the same from say 2009 to 2019, never mind the troglodyte hardcore bands that have sounded the same for 25 years…).

When people say they listen to Black Flag, they usually mean the bands material from 1977-1981: the stuff recorded before Henry Rollins joined and Rollins’ first album with the band, Damaged.  This is the fun punk sing-a-long stuff, you know: REVENGE!!!  TV PARTY!!! WASTED!!!.

After the hardcore movement lost its initial momentum, the bands that were left then had to figure out a new direction.   “Going metal” was the most common decision, whether the midtempo groove that bands like SSD or Corrosion of Conformity adopted, or the crossover thrash of DRI and Gang Green.  Bad Brains showcased their jazz fusion roots more, slowed down their tempos, and upped their production values.  The Meat Puppets produced a more tuneful result once they slowed their cacophony down from 78rpm.  Black Flag’s approach was all of the above.  The tempos went down, vocal cords were no longer shredded raw, and there was certainly a lot of jazz fusion going down. And, by most accounts, Greg Ginn started smoking a lot of pot.  Later Flag records vary from extremely righteous to totally self-indulgent depending on how much herb you’ve smoked.

I like the Black Flag records from 1983 onward and think there are a lot of great songs on them.  Like Carducci says, considering the environment in and around the band, it’s fortunate that so much good music was released.  That said, “DRINKING BLACK COFFEE, BLACK COFFEE” is easily one of the stupidest rock song choruses I’ve ever heard in my life.  That’s the thing with later Flag, they’re not cool: it’s dork music.  Somehow from 1977 to 1981, a gangly nerd like Greg Ginn wrote a bunch of music that some of the dumbest jocks and surf nazis in Southern California used as a soundtrack for complete mayhem. These geeks hitched their horses to the punk wagon and somehow became righteous dudes.  But, add in Henry Rollins (a/k/a “Hank the Crank”), a military school misfit who kept snakes as pets, and suddenly the music stopped being so party hardy.

As the 80’s unrolled, Rollins started hanging out with transgressive, self-consciously HEAVY 80’s personalities like Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and Diamanda Galas and writing lyrics about pouring salt on slugs.  Retrospectively, looking at things as a grown-up,  most of that edgy 80’s culture, from Genesis P-Oridge to Nick Zedd, has aged pretty badly.  I understand having to make art like that to stay sane in the cesspool of the Reagan/Thatcher 80’s, but it doesn’t say much me to now. Someone like Greg Ginn’s brother Raymond Pettibon, waded through those murky waters with much more enduring results.

The best recording of the band in the Rollins era are the 1982 demos they recorded as a 5 piece with Chuck Biscuits on drums and Greg Ginn and Dez Cadena on guitar.  As Carducci notes, this is how the songs on My War and Slip It In were supposed to sound.  There are also plenty of great live recordings of the band from 1982 onward.  On the live albums, Rollins may go out of key, but he sounds more comfortable than in the studio.  Songs like “Sinking” are night and day in their studio and live versions. Additionally, going through this playlist, you’ll notice the production changes from album to album, especially on Rollins’ vocals.

1. Kicking and Sticking

One of the biggest criticisms of Rollins-era Flag, shared by both fans of the earlier iteration of the band and by Greg Ginn himself, is that later Flag takes itself too seriously.  “After Rollins joined the band,” said Ginn, “We couldn’t do songs with a sense of humor anymore; he got into the serious way-out poet thing.” Pre-Rollins songs like “TV Party,” “Wasted,” and “Six Pack” are bitingly funny satirical takes on the slacker lifestyle of the Southern California beach towns that the band hailed from. After he joined, that humor more or less vanished. It’s strange, because Henry Rollins is a funny person in real life, certainly something he shows in his various spoken word and media appearances.  Comedy Central even gave him a stand-up special about twenty years ago (spoiler: it’s not that funny). So, in light of all that, “Kicking and Sticking” makes the list because it is the only funny song Rollins ever wrote for Black Flag.  The way he delivers the couplet “Sitting and thinking, about smoking and drinking” never fails to make me chuckle.

2. My War

It’s painful to put anything from the My War album on this list, because the versions sound so inferior to the ones on the 1982 demos. The demo versions are so much fuller and full of life than the album versions, where Greg Ginn plays both guitar and bass (and much like Steve Jones’ bass playing on Never Mind the Bollocks, he just plays the root note of his guitar chords and eschews any rhythmic or melodic flourishes) and it never sounds like an actual band.  The actual song “My War” is so good, it doesn’t matter.  Every version of the song recorded by Black Flag, both live and in the studio is good. Though this version is probably the worst, due to Bill Stevenson’s hamfisted drumming.  He’s the only drummer in Black Flag who ever put tom-tom fills on the wrap around part of the song, and, boy, it sounds bad.

3. Loose Nut

If humor was phased out in Rollins-era Black Flag, sex was brought in.  As many histories of the band noted, getting a little post-show nookie was always a goal of the band, but the music didn’t reflect it until the bands later output.  So, for the band itself, the transition in their music may not have been noticeable (the run out grooves in the vinyl to 1981’s “Six Pack” single read: Torrance Tang, It’s happening”), but for outsiders the leap from material like “Depression” (sample lyric “There’s no girls who want to touch me, but I don’t need your fucking sympathy”) to songs like “Loose Nut” and “Slip It In” seemed jarring. Glen E. Friedman was a longtime fan of the band disillusioned by their new material: “You heard these long instrumentals and songs like “Slip It In”- It wasn’t the old Black Flag philosophy.  To talk graphically about sex was not their style. They were becoming campy and the metaphors were no longer interesting.”  Out of all these songs, to me, “Loose Nut” is the most undeniable.  Again, the 1982 demo version of “Slip It In” is amazing, like Cliff Burton-era Metallica smoking a dusted joint. Unfortunately, I can’t deal with the album version, sorry. But, “Loose Nut” is just such a great tune that it’s pretty much impossible to ruin it, even if you put some goofy EQ on the vocals.

4. In My Head

In My Head is easily the best album that Black Flag did after Damaged.  The previous records all had great songs, but also had lots of junk.  The sounds of a band trying to figure things out: how much art is too much, oh my god we’re getting laid, I just saw Apocalypse Now, I can actually play guitar.  On In My Head, they finally put all of that together and made an album that flows as a whole.  The only album I can compare it to sonically is Devotion by John McLaughlin. This is where Greg Ginn’s mutation of hardcore into some lost branch of jazz finally made sense. On the title track, Ginn showcases all his tricks, mixing eastern scales and a blues shuffle and somehow making it all sound totally natural. If Black Flag had continued like that the world would have been a better place.

5. I Can See You

The best of Black Flag’s later material sounds like no other music from its era, and not much music made afterwards.  If In My Head and the instrumental material seemed to point towards a new type of jazz/rock fusion, then “I Can See You” is a new kind of pop.  It’s simple, repetitive and catchy, and for once Rollins’ recitative singing style perfectly matches the music. His man-in-the-mirror lyrics serve as a nice comment on human relationships broken down to their most basic elements, or just act like a simple nursery rhyme, like good pop music should.

6.  Bastard In Love

Going back to songs like “Room 13” and “Life Of Pain” Greg Ginn has a history of writing wounded love songs. But, pairing the lyrics with revved up hardcore, some of the pathos got lost in the fury.  In a later relationship song like “Bastard In Love” you can hear and feel the emotions expressed much more clearly. The mid-tempo feel of the song sounds almost like a mid-60’s mod tune (an effect played up by Ginn’s guitar solo recalling Pete Townsend’s work on “I Can’t Explain”).  Imagine a whole Black Flag record like this in 1985 (and then a tour of all the liberal arts colleges with Husker Du and R.E.M.).

7. Wound Up

I think the biggest problem with post-Damaged Black Flag is they diluted their biggest strength as a band: their intensity.  Early Black Flag is a roller coaster ride; a song like “Revenge” explodes like a bomb in the listener’s brain.  I’m not saying they should have played textbook hardcore forever, there is plenty of intense music that has nothing to do with hardcore. Any of James Browns live albums at the Apollo blow away any hardcore band. But, for whatever reason, there are few later Black Flag songs that can match the intensity of the their first 4 years. But, “Wound Up” is one of those songs.

8. White Hot

It was really hard to narrow down the songs from In My Head, it just works so well as whole album. But, “White Hot” is another good example a song that uses odd elements but somehow makes them into a coherent song.  It’s also a good example of the production choices made on the album. Rollins’ vocals are drowning in reverb, no matter how fiercely he screams out “WHITE HOT,” he’s a distant voice crying out in space. You can’t understand the verses at all, his vocals are basically just a texture, but the guitar work is so good it doesn’t matter. Reviewing the album upon its release, New York Times critic Robert Palmer wrote, “Hearing the polyphony of shifting shapes that is the principal guitar motif in the brilliant ”White Hot” is like listening to the once-revolutionary guitar break from the Yardbirds’ mid-60’s hit ”Shapes of Things” while one’s turntable goes up in flames.”

9. Three Nights

Out of all the albums mentioned here, the production on My War is probably the worst.  It’s like they mastered the record off an old cassette or something.  However, on this song, the sound works.  The bass and drums might as well be programmed on a drum machine, they stick to simple quarter notes and stay in the background (both Carducci and Rollins have implied that Ginn did move on to drum machines in the 90’s because he was tired of dealing with other people).  The song is basically a duet between Ginn’s guitar and Rollins’ lyrics, it’s one of the first songs Rollins wrote with Black Flag.  Ginn overdubs multiple tracks of feedback and builds a soundscape for Rollins’ bad trip recitation that “I think you stuck my friend with knives, dragged him out so he could die.”  It’s the only song on My War where you could make a reasonable argument that it doesn’t sound better live, just because Ginn can’t play 3 guitars at once.

10. Can’t Decide

Another one off My War, another case of diminished expectations.  Both the 1982 demo version of this (great rhythm guitar by Dez) and live versions (Rollins screams on-key) are better than the studio version, but the songwriting is so good on this it doesn’t matter.  It’s probably the first Black Flag song that has a pre-chorus, and the lyrics and music work so well together, the way the single note chromatic passage on the verses lead into the pre-chorus chords is brilliant.