Greg Ginn had originally planned the sixth Black Flag album as a solo turn, but reneged and recast it as what would be Black Flag’s final album (unless you count 2013’s atrocious What The…, which we can’t quite bring ourselves to do). Dukowski’s paranoia was well-founded, as it turned out by the time Flag recorded his signature song, Ginn had swindled Chuck out of the band he loved and put him in an administerial role running SST Records, playing all the bass-lines on the album himself under the credit ‘Dale Nixon’. Their second album opened with its title track, a roiling, paranoid thrash penned by Dukowski, with Rollins accusing all around him – even his friends – of being “one of them”, over a circular riff that led to several ultra-heavy breakdowns, wherein Rollins tapped into his inner anguish and bayed like a wolf. It took Black Flag three years to follow up Damaged, time they spent in a draining legal battle with SST Records’ erstwhile distributors Universal, during which time they were forbidden from releasing any material (a compilation of previously recorded Flag out-takes, Everything Went Black, slipped out during this period, to keep the band afloat, an effort that earned Ginn and bassist Chuck Dukowski a night in chokey). Wisely, Henry’s resisted indulging in any of Greg Ginn’s ill-advised Black Flag reunions of recent years, though when he and his Rollins Band took the Flag catalogue on the road in aid of the West Memphis Three early last decade, the vein-bulging bellow-machine proved that he’d long since made every one of these songs his own.
But Rollins was no mere slab of meat he explored his burgeoning interest in poetry and spoken word on his half of Flag’s 1984 LP Family Man, which balanced a side of seething, scarifying Rollins spiel with a side of equally seething Black Flag instrumentals, while the infamy of fronting the premier American punk-rock group of their era saw Rollins become something of an intellectual pin-up for America’s underground rock press. But Rollins wasn’t only the Californian hardcore punk pioneers’ longest-serving frontman he led the group through their greatest triumphs, their most high-profile era, and even, by the end, wrested a little control over the group from their infamously irascible founding guitarist Greg Ginn – an act that was rewarded by Ginn’s pulling the plug on the group in 1986.ĭuring his five-year tenure with Flag, Rollins bulked up and decorated his freshly pumped muscles with copious tattoos, learning to hold his own with Flag’s brutal, violent followers as they did battle in the moshpit.
0 kommentar(er)
