Michael Azerrad is the author of the books Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, and Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. His writings on music and musicians have appeared in numerous magazines, including Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, Spin, and the New York Times. He lives in New York City.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991By Michael Azerrad

Little Brown and Company

Copyright © 2002 Michael Azerrad
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316787536

Chapter One

BLACK FLAG

FLIPSIDE INTERVIEWER: DO YOU MAKE A PROFIT?
GREG GINN: WE TRY TO EAT.

It’s not surprising that the indie movement largely started in SouthernCalifornia?after all, it had the infrastructure: Slash andFlipside fanzines started in 1977, and indie labels like Frontier andPosh Boy and Dangerhouse started soon afterward. KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimerplayed the region’s punk music on his show; listeners could buy what they heardthanks to various area distributors and record shops and see the bands at placeslike the Masque, the Starwood, the Whisky, the Fleetwood, and various impromptuvenues. And there were great bands like the Germs, Fear, the Dickies, the Dils,X, and countless others. No other region in the country had quite as good asetup.

But by 1979 the original punk scene had almost completely died out. Hipsters hadmoved on to arty post-punk bands like the Fall, Gang of Four, and Joy Division.They were replaced by a bunch of toughs coming in from outlying suburbs who wereonly beginning to discover punk’s speed, power, and aggression. They didn’t carethat punk rock was already being dismissed as a spent force, kid bands playingat being the Ramones a few years too late. Dispensing with all pretension, thesekids boiled the music down to its essence, then revved up the tempos to thespeed of a pencil impatiently tapping on a school desk, and called the result”hardcore.” As writer Barney Hoskyns put it, this new music was “younger, fasterand angrier, full of the pent-up rage of dysfunctional Orange County adolescentswho’d had enough of living in a bland Republican paradise.”

Fairly quickly, hardcore spread around the country and coalesced into a smallbut robust community. Just as “hip-hop” was an umbrella term for the music, art,fashion, and dance of a then nascent urban subculture, so was “hardcore.”Hardcore artwork was all stark, cartoonish imagery, rough-hewn photocopiedcollage, and violently scrawled lettering; fashion was basically typicalsuburban attire but ripped and dingy, topped with militarily short haircuts; thepreferred mode of terpsichorean expression was a new thing called slam dancing,in which participants simply bashed into one another like human bumper cars.

Hardcore punk drew a line in the sand between older avant-rock fans and a newbunch of kids who were coming up. On one side were those who considered themusic (and its fans) loud, ugly, and incoherent; to the folks on the other side,hardcore was the only music that mattered. A rare generational divide in rockmusic had arisen. And that’s when exciting things happen.

Black Flag was more than just the flagship band of the Southern Californiahardcore scene. It was more than even the flagship band of American hardcoreitself. They were required listening for anyone who was interested inunderground music. And by virtue of their relentless touring, the band did morethan any other to blaze a trail through America that all kinds of bands couldfollow. Not only did they establish punk rock beachheads in literally everycorner of the country; they inspired countless other bands to form and startdoing it for themselves. The band’s selfless work ethic was a model for thedecade ahead, overcoming indifference, lack of venues, poverty, even policeharassment.

Black Flag was among the first bands to suggest that if you didn’t like “thesystem,” you should simply create one of your own. And indeed, Black Flagguitarist Greg Ginn also founded and ran Black Flag’s label, SST Records. Ginntook his label from a cash-strapped, cop-hassled storefront operation to easilythe most influential and popular underground indie of the Eighties, releasingclassics by the likes of Bad Brains, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, HuskerDu;, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, and many more.

SST and Black Flag in particular hit a deep and molten vein in American culture.Their fans were just as disaffected from the mainstream as the bands were.”Black Flag, like a lot of these bands, were playing for the people who maybefelt jilted by things or left out by things,” says the band’s fourth leadsinger, Henry Rollins. “When you say, ‘Be all you can be,’ I know you’re nottalking to me, motherfucker. I know I’m not joining the navy and I know yourlaws don’t mean shit to me because the hypocrisy that welds them all together, Icannot abide. There’s a lot of people with a lot of fury in thiscountry?America is seething at all times. It’s like a Gaza Strip that’s threethousand miles long.”

Greg Ginn never really liked rock music as a kid. “I considered it kind ofstupid,” he says. “I considered it just trying to interject some kind oflegitimacy into making three-minute pop commercials, basically.” Ginn didn’teven own any records until he was eighteen and received David Ackles’s 1972art-folk masterpiece American Gothic as a premium for subscribing to alocal public radio station. The record opened a new world for Ginn; a year laterhe began playing acoustic guitar as a “tension release” after studying economicsall day at UCLA.

Ginn had spent his early childhood with his parents and four brothers andsisters in a small farming community outside Bakersfield, California. His fatherearned a meager schoolteacher’s salary, so Ginn got used to cramped surroundingsand living on limited means. “I never had new clothes,” says Ginn. “My dad wouldgo to Salvation Army, Goodwill, and he would consider those expensive thriftstores?’Salvation Army, that’s expensive!’ He would find the cheaper places.”

In 1962, when Ginn was eight, the family moved to Hermosa Beach, California, inthe solidly white middle-class South Bay area a couple of dozen miles south ofLos Angeles. Hermosa Beach had been a beatnik mecca in the Fifties, but by thetime Ginn got there, it was a haven for surfers (and inspired Jan & Dean’s 1963classic “Surf City”).

But while his peers were into hanging ten, Ginn disdained the conformity andmaterialism of surfing; a very tall, very quiet kid, he preferred to writepoetry and do ham radio. A generation later he would have been a computer nerd.At the age of twelve, he published an amateur radio fanzine called TheNovice and founded Solid State Tuners (SST), a mailorder business sellingmodified World War II surplus radio equipment; it became a small but thrivingbusiness that Ginn ran well into his twenties.

After learning to play an acoustic, Ginn picked up an electric guitar and beganwriting aggressive, vaguely blues-based songs, but only for himself. “I wasnever the stereotypical teenager,” Ginn said, “sitting in his room and dreamingof becoming a rock star, so I just played what I liked and thought was good.”Ginn’s music had nothing to do with the musical climate of the mid-Seventies,especially in Hermosa Beach, where everybody seemed to be into the Britishpomp-rock band Genesis. “The general perception was that rock was technical andclean and ‘We can’t do it like we did it in the Sixties,'” he said. “I wished itwas more like the Sixties!”

It’s no wonder Ginn got excited when he began reading in the VillageVoice about a new music called “punk rock” that was coming out of New Yorkclubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. Even before he heard a note, he was surepunk was what he was looking for. “I looked at punk rock as a break in theconformity that was going on,” says Ginn. “There wasn’t a specific sound inearly punk rock and there wasn’t a specific look or anything like that?itseemed to be a place where anybody could go who didn’t fit into the conventionalrock mode.”

Ginn sent away for the classic “Little Johnny Jewel” single by the New York bandTelevision on tiny Ork Records. The music was powerful, brilliant, and it hadnothing to do with Genesis or the slick corporate rock that dominated the musicindustry in the mid-Seventies; this music was organic in the way it was played,recorded, and, just as important, how it was popularized. It was hardly”three-minute pop commercials.”

Ginn was hooked.

By then Ginn had developed extraordinarily wide-ranging musical tastes. He dugMotown, disco, country artists like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, and adored allkinds of jazz, from big band to early fusion; in the Seventies he was a regularat Hermosa Beach’s fabled jazz club the Lighthouse, where he witnessed legendslike Yusef Lateef and Mose Allison. But besides his beloved B.B. King, there wasonly one group that Ginn adored more than any other. “The Grateful Dead?ifthere’s one favorite band I have, it’s probably that,” says Ginn. “I saw themmaybe seventy-five times.”

But because Ginn was only a novice guitarist, none of those influences camethrough in his playing; he was simply making music to work off energy andfrustration, and as generations of beginners before him had discovered, thequickest shortcut to a cool guitar sound was nasty, brutish distortion. Then,when he saw the Ramones play, Ginn “got a speed rush,” he said, “and decided toturn it up a notch.” The next logical step was to form a band.

In late ’76 a mutual friend introduced Ginn to a hard-partying loudmouth namedKeith Morris; the two hit it off and decided to start a band. Morris wanted toplay drums, but Ginn was convinced Morris should sing. Morris protested that hedidn’t write lyrics and, besides, he was no Freddie Mercury. But punk had showedGinn you didn’t need gold-plated tonsils to rock, and Morris eventually agreed.They drafted a few of Morris’s friends?”scruffy beach rat types who were moreinterested in getting laid and finding drugs than really playing,” Morrissaid and began rehearsing in Ginn’s tiny house by the beach. In honor of theirhectic tempos, they called the band Panic.

There was precious little punk rock to emulate at the time, so the band pickedup the aggressive sounds they heard in Black Sabbath, the Stooges, and the MC5,only faster. “Our statement was that we were going to be loud and abrasive,”said Morris. “We were going to have fun and we weren’t going to be like anythingyou’ve heard before. We might look like Deadheads?at that point we had longhair, but the Ramones did, too?but we meant business.” They played parties tonearly universal disdain.

They soon moved their practices to Ginn’s space at the Church, a dilapidatedhouse of worship in Hermosa Beach that had been converted into workshops forartists but was in effect a hangout for runaways and misfits. They got kickedout for making too much noise and found a new rehearsal space in the spring of’77. They practiced every day, but since their bass player usually flaked out onrehearsals, Ginn had to carry much of the rhythm on his own and began developinga simple, heavily rhythmic style that never outpaced his limited technique.

A band called Wurm also practiced in the Church, and the two bands began playingparties together. Wurm’s bassist, an intense, sharpwitted guy named GaryMcDaniel, liked Panic’s aggressive, cathartic approach and began sitting in withthem. McDaniel and Ginn connected immediately. “He would always have a lot oftheories on life, on this and that?he was a thinking person,” says Ginn. “Hedidn’t want to fit into the regular society thing, but not the hippie thing,either.”

Like Ginn, McDaniel, who went by the stage name Chuck Dukowski, was repulsed bymellow folkies like James Taylor and effete art-rockers. He was a student at UCSanta Barbara when he saw the Ramones. “I had never seen a band play so fast,”he said. “Suddenly you could point to a band and say, ‘If they can do it, whycan’t we?'”

For their first couple of years, Panic played exclusively at parties and youthcenters around the South Bay because the Masque, the key L.A. punk club, refusedto book them. “They said it wasn’t cool to live in Hermosa Beach,” Ginn claimed,which is a way of saying that the band’s suburban T-shirt, sneakers, and jeanslook flew in the face of the consumptive safety-pin and leather jacket pose ofthe Anglophilic L.A. punks. By necessity, Panic developed a knack for findingoffbeat places to stage their explosive, anarchic performances, often sharingbills with Orange County punk bands, relatively affluent suburbanites who couldafford things like renting halls and PA systems.

The party circuit had a very tangible effect on the band’s music. “That’s wherewe really developed the idea of playing as many songs in as little time aspossible,” says Ginn, “because it was always almost like clockwork?you couldplay for twenty minutes before the police would show up. So we knew that we hada certain amount of time: don’t make any noise until you start playing and thenjust go hard and long until they show up.”

Their first proper show was at a Moose Lodge in nearby Redondo Beach. During thefirst set, Morris began swinging an American flag around, much to thedispleasure of the assembled Moose. He was ejected from the building, but hedonned a longhaired wig and sneaked back in to sing the second set. Eventuallythe band progressed to playing shows at the Fleetwood in Redondo Beach, wherethey built up such a substantial following that the Hollywood clubs couldn’tignore them anymore, ef-fecting a sea change in L.A. punk.

Early on Ginn met a cheery fellow known as Spot, who wrote record reviews for aHermosa Beach paper. Ginn would sometimes stop by the vegetarian restaurantwhere Spot worked and shoot the breeze about music. “He was a nerd,” Spotrecalls. “He was just an awkward nerd who was very opinionated. Couldn’t imaginehim ever being in a band.” Later Spot became assistant engineer at local studioMedia Art, which boasted cheap hourly rates and sixteen-track recording. WhenGinn asked him to record his band, Spot agreed, figuring it would be a nicebreak from the usual watery pop-folk. “They only had six songs,” Spot recalls.”They could play their entire set in ten minutes.

“They were just goons and geeks,” he adds. “Definitely not the beautifulpeople.”

In January ’78 Panic recorded eight songs at Media Art, with Spot assistantengineering. But nobody wanted to touch the band’s raging slab of aggro-punkexcept L.A.’s garage-pop revivalists Bomp Records, who had already releasedsingles by L.A. punk bands like the Weirdos and the Zeros. But by late 1978 Bompstill hadn’t formally agreed to release the record. So Ginn, figuring he hadenough business expertise from SST Electronics and his UCLA economics studies,simply did it himself.

“I just looked in the phone book under record pressing plants and there was onethere,” says Ginn, “and so I just took it in to them and I knew about printingbecause I had always done catalogs and [The Novice] so we just did asleeve that was folded in a plastic bag. And then got the singles made and putin there.” Ginn got his younger brother, who went by the name Raymond Pettibon,to do the cover, an unsettling pen-and-ink illustration of a teacher keeping astudent at bay with a chair, like a lion tamer.

A few months earlier they had discovered that another band already had the namePanic. Pettibon suggested “Black Flag” and designed a logo for the band, astylized rippling flag made up of four vertical black rectangles. If a whiteflag means surrender, it was plain what a black flag meant; a black flag is alsoa recognized symbol for anarchy, not to mention the traditional emblem ofpirates; it sounded a bit like their heroes Black Sabbath as well. Of course,the fact that Black Flag was also a popular insecticide didn’t hurt either. “Wewere comfortable with all the implications of the name,” says Ginn, “aswell as it just sounded, you know, heavy.”

In January ’79 Ginn released the four-song Nervous Breakdown EP, SSTRecords catalog #001. It could well be their best recording; it was definitelythe one by which everything after it would be measured. “It set thetemplate?this is what it is,” Ginn said. “After that, people couldn’t arguewith me as to what Black Flag was or wasn’t.”

With music and lyrics by Ginn, the record is rude, scuzzy, and totallyexhilarating. With his sardonic, Johnny Rottenesque delivery, Morris inflatesthe torment of teen angst into full-blown insanity: “I’m crazy and I’m hurt /Head on my shoulders goin’ berserk,” he whines on the title track; same for thedesperate “Fix Me” (“Fix me, fix my head / Fix me please, I don’t want to bedead”).

Drummer Brian Migdol left the band and was replaced by Roberto Valverde, betterknown as Robo, who originally hailed from Colombia. “A real sweet guy and superenigmatic,” recalls future Black Flag singer Henry Rollins. “He had a very shadypast which he would not talk about.” The rumor that made the rounds was thatValverde had been a soldier in the notoriously corrupt Colombian army.

In July ’79 the band played an infamous show at a spring family outing atManhattan Beach’s Polliwog Park, having told town officials they were a regularrock band. It didn’t take very long for the assembled moms and dads to figuredifferently. “People threw everything from insults to watermelons, beer cans,ice, and sandwiches at us,” wrote Dukowski in the liner notes to theEverything Went Black compilation. “Parents emptied their ice chests sothat their families could throw their lunches…. Afterwards I enjoyed a lunchof delicatessen sandwiches which I found still in their wrappers.”

Continues…
Excerpted from Our Band Could Be Your Lifeby Michael Azerrad Copyright © 2002 by Michael Azerrad. Excerpted by permission.
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