Each punk agrees that Black Flag have been an essential band. Few can agree on what precisely made them so. Survey 10 folks sporting tattoos of the 4 bars, and also you’ll get at the very least 10 totally different opinions on which album is their biggest, whether or not their reside information 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, once 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 paintings.
However amid all of the division that engulfs the band, there stays no better lightning rod than My Conflict—the San Andreas Fault of hardcore, the place, with a easy flip from Aspect 1 to Aspect 2, the quickest and most ferocious band in punk immediately remodeled into the doomiest, most despairing band in steel. My Conflict immediately drew a line between those that noticed hardcore as a particular model of jackhammering rock music and people who considered it as a broader philosophy of nihilism and negation—one that may very nicely be used to dismantle hardcore itself. By radically altering Black Flag’s musical DNA, My Conflict realized their basic spirit of contrarianism.
Initially fashioned in Hermosa Seaside, California, circa 1976, Black Flag (né Panic) didn’t simply broaden 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 outfitted with showbizzy stage names and punctiliously cultivated aesthetics, and it didn’t take lengthy for them to grow to be icons themselves. Black Flag, against this, 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 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 music was much less essential than the power and intent behind it, and the participatory response it elicited. And the band would discover its longest-serving frontman by 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, provided 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 change 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 affix 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—ceaselessly modified the phrase “hardcore” from an adjective to a noun.