Hippies vs. Punks: Black Flag's My War

My War was a big deal when it came out in early 1984 because it represented a U-turn. Black Flag, more than any other band, created the sound that by the early 1980s had become synonymous with Punk, and that sound was California Hardcore. With My War, Black Flag moved away from the short, fast songs of the seminal Damaged (1981) debut LP, an album that most of my fellow undergraduate friends at Berkeley seemed to own, to longer, slower, brooding compositions punctuated by Greg Ginn guitar solos. The principal members of the band, guitarist Ginn and vocalist Henry Rollins, grew their hair out long while most of us were buzzing our locks off with electric shears for the first time.

The impression created was one of surrender, of retreat to old, spent Hippie forms. This was confusing to fans, like myself, who were just beginning to embrace Hardcore Punk.

I had dutifully made a trip to the record store and purchased a copy of My War when it first appeared, and had -- along with my wife (who was then my live-in girlfriend), cousin and a couple of friends -- gone to see Black Flag promote the album when they performed at the Stone in San Francisco. This wasn't the show captured on the Live '84 album, or maybe it was; I can't rightly remember. The one we saw, as I recall it, was in the early spring or might have even been in February, just prior to the release of the record. I remember it was a cold, dark evening. And I remember that Bob Dylan's Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) was being pumped through the PA. (I don't think I caught the pun, though I appreciated hearing the album. I too was in the habit at the time of marrying on mix tapes Hardcore music with pre-electric Dylan.)

When the Black Flag came on stage, the presence of a petite girl bass player, Kira Roessler, and the shaggy Hippie heads of Ginn and Rollins, along with the shirtless, beefy, hirsute Bill Stevenson was jarring. I don't know why but it seemed self-indulgent to me. I guess I thought of Hardcore as part of a movement, and here were the founders getting way out ahead of or doing an end-around the faithful.

There were a lot of dewy, downy high school Nazi Punks from the suburbs ready to slam to "Spray Paint" and "TV Party." And things started well enough, with a fast-moving pit circulating to "My War" and some of the other tracks featured on the first side of the album, before hitting the sand with the side-two material (which Christgau dismissed as the "Three dirges that waste side two").

I remember being offended by Rollins' "Rock God" preening. During one of those  "dirges" he pulled down around his thighs the tight black running shorts he wore and displayed his genitals and gyrated his hips in front of the face of a milk-fed, flannel-clad Punk who was jammed against the lip of the stage.

I don't know if we left early or if we stuck it out for the whole show. But I do remember in the subsequent months making an effort to couple with My War and try to get my head around what Ginn was up to. Usually, depending on what my course schedule was for the semester, I would have an early afternoon hole in the school day. I would return to an empty apartment -- the girlfriend, still on campus in class or at work -- and eat lunch, drink coffee and listen to music. It was then, free of the distractions of the evening and cohabitation, that I could really figure music out.

And I did try with My War at least a few times. There was one sunny afternoon that I almost got there, almost "achieved climax." It was with one the "Three dirges that waste side two." But in the end, I never went back to My War. I never bought another Black Flag album.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four was the year that Black Flag would be toppled from its Hardcore pinnacle by three other SST Records bands -- Meat Puppets, Minutemen and Hüsker Dü. Basically, My War was the beginning of the end for Black Flag, even though the band would amazingly release four LPs in 1984.

What makes my immersion in My War this past week so interesting is that immediately upon hearing the album for the first time in many years -- if not three decades -- I knew it was good. Gone was any resistance to the material or difficulty in comprehension. The record makes perfect sense, particularly compelling is Greg Ginn's guitar sound. Something has happened in thirty years. What I tried to accept and could not at the age of 19 is now "music to my ears" at 50.

And what is that?

It has something to do with time itself. What psychedelic ballroom bands like Quicksilver Messenger Service achieved was a sonic mirror of time -- how it meanders and eddies, how there are concentrated pockets and empty gaps; what the athlete knows as "time within time." The second side of My War brings this home beautifully, and that is why I'm sure it will be played for a very long time.

Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat

George Hurley's liner note that accompanied "Dreams Are Free, Motherfucker! on Ballot Result (1986) -- the song originally appeared on Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat (1983) -- was something to the effect of "Try believing this one."

Meaning of course that dreams are not free. But I appreciate Henry Rollins' insistence that they are. Without dreams we couldn't sleep; we'd be dead. Dreams give us our direction, our hope; that they are bought and sold is a sad truth. But it is imperative that we act as if our dreams are free and our own.

Every song on this eight-track EP is timeless, from the first cut, "Self-Referenced" -- "[H]ow can I believe in books/When my heart lies to me?/I'm full of shit! -- to the last, "Little Man With a Gun in His Hand."

The story is that Buzz or Howl was recorded for $50, which has to be the most meaningful $50 ever spent.

If you want to understand the Minutemen, the uniqueness and power of the band, the majesty of the music, take 16 minutes and listen to the YouTube above.

Nihilism #3

Nihilism #2 was devoted to a Richmond Fontaine song, how "Allison Johnson" was a perfect projection of the nihilist mind -- a mind unconscious of its own nihilism, yes; but nonetheless a beautiful expression of the essential nothingness of being.

Tonight, it's "Making It Back," the concluding song of what might be the finest Richmond Fontaine record, The Fitzgerald (2005):

3 AM and the bottles are lined up in rows on the floor again
'Summer in Siam' plays on repeat again we never get sick of it
Now that I'm home again
In the kitchen with you
There's no one else I can talk to
The lights are all covered and dim and there's nothing but a gentle ease here
'Summer in Siam' plays and you and me and our whole place, we're okay
Now that I'm in your arms again

This is a beautiful love song dedicated to the joys of being flat-out drunk wasted with your wife/lover/girlfriend/partner/woman listening in the secure comfort of the low-watt light of night's end to The Pogues. It is a wonderful feeling. I have experienced it. Willy Vlautin nails it. There is no doubt about it.

But once you have given up on romance and you live alone, "Making It Back" means making do with your self. This is nihilism. Strength is all there is. The strength of the self.

Or to quote from that heroic poem of the zenith of Grunge, Rollins Band's "Low Self Opinion":

The hatred you project
Does nothing to protect you
You leave yourself so exposed
You want to open up
When someone says
Lighten up
You find all your doors closed
Get yourself a break from self rejection
Try some introspection
And you just might find
It's not so bad and anyway
At the end of the day
All you have is yourself and your mind

The End of Silence (1992) was an album I listened to religiously when it was released, and I continued to listen to it throughout the 1990s. I don't know how much of its material was written prior to the murder of Rollins' buddy Joe Cole, but I always interpreted the record as a deconstruction of the tough guy "Search & Destroy" persona Rollins had assiduously developed and marketed.

I was wedded to the tough-guy myth throughout the 1990s. Street fighter, construction worker, independent scholar -- all the paperback fictions -- Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac. But the toughest tough guy is the one who takes apart the sacred idea of toughness.

Remember, it is Jacobi who coins the term "nihilism" in order to characterize Kant's critical philosophy, a system perpetually open, never able to be shut, forever overflowing with meaning produced by a striving, self-reflecting consciousness.

Hippies vs. Punks: Duty Now for the Future

Feeling despondent about being dragged into another war in the Middle East? I am. Except this time around it's even worst than the last because our commander-in-chief is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and I supported him in the last two presidential campaigns.

All the big lies from the Bush II era are back. And the overall message is that there is no hope. You can put a black man in the White House, a child of a single mother, a one-time community organizer from the working-class metropolis of Chicago; you can knock on doors, donate your measly scraps of legal tender, elect who you think is the best candidate, and it won't make a shit of difference. No doubt about it. The verdict is in. We have no future except the future of more lies leading to more wars, suffering, death.

These were my thoughts heading out at lunch for a walk in the late August sunshine. I had my iPod on song shuffle. "Blockhead" began playing. "Yes!" I thought. "That's the answer!"

Last week I was rescued from a birthday chocolate cake slough of despond by Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978). What was called for was Devo's second album, Duty Now for the Future (1979), at high volume. Our future might be a grim Terminator landscape of drones monitoring and destroying us from above but at least, for the time being, there's recorded music.

In the early 1990s I read a book about artificial intelligence that contained a Marvin Minsky quote in its introduction that I've always remembered. It went something like this: "Don't talk to me of the illegal drug use in this country until we have a discussion about all the music CDs being sold every year."

Ah, yes. And I read this at a time before Windows 95. I had just seen up close the effect Apple Macs had on the publishing industry in New York City. They radically altered the traditional production department at magazines, newspapers and book publishers, wiping out paste-up artists, keypunchers, proofreaders and copy editors. What did Minsky have to say about the iPod when it appeared ten years later? Now everyone is AI enhanced with ear buds affixed almost constantly (at least in public).

Duty Now for the Future was ahead of its time. I remember listening to it as a lower division undergraduate one dark and rainy Friday night in the late fall early 1980s and thinking, "There's something about this that I can't get a handle on, something queer." And nothing captures better what I was experiencing then than "Smart Patrol"/"Mr DNA."

Like Are We Not Men? Duty Now for the Future is guitar driven. But what to make of all those synthesizers? I think that's where I was getting caught up. Now, thirty years later, it sounds completely normal and appropriate. And it completely kicks ass. No wonder Henry Rollins spent some sweat equity in the 1990s to put out the album for the first time in CD format in the United States.

As first two albums go, Devo shapes up equal to or better than such Punk/Post-Punk avatars as Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Wire, The Clash, Public Image Ltd and (if you allow me to toss in 2 Tone) The Specials -- all groups who had amazingly strong first and second records.

Tonight walking home up the hill from downtown into my urban neighborhood of young hipsters, everyone out on a sunny Friday after work drinking, smoking, enjoying themselves, seemingly oblivious to the huge dialectical shift underway: our "deep politics" are now laid bare and war -- the machinery of war -- is exposed.

Our duty now for the future is to withhold our support for such a system. No more being seduced by mellifluous Barack Obama corporate Democrats.