One of the guys who answered the ad was Robo , who brought his secret weapon, the cumbia, with him. Now it was time to find a real drummer and so we put an ad in the Pennysaver, your local weekly, throwaway newspaper. Now we were gonna start practicing, ya know? We’re gonna learn these songs! We’re not gonna flip-flop around like a fish on the deck of a boat! We went through three bass players before Chuck Dukowski joined, and that’s when Black Flag became a band, because Chuck Dukowski brought a work ethic. I played a little bit of bass, but not enough to amount to anything. I didn’t know how to play an instrument, but I wanted to learn. We were just a couple of guys that were going through this blindly. We weren’t part of the local music scene. Afterward, Greg said, “I gotta handful of songs. The three of us-Michael, Ginn, and me-drove up to the concert in my Chevy Impala. Michael had purchased some tickets for the Journey and Thin Lizzy concert at the Santa Monica Civic Center. That’s where the seeds of Black Flag were planted, in that record store in Hermosa Beach. He liked a majority of the stuff that I’d play, and the comments Greg would make would be right along with what I was thinking. You know, it was cool hanging out with him. Greg actually didn’t have any choice because I was the guy behind the counter, but I liked Greg. So after Michael and Erica left, I’d take off the Joni Mitchell and put on Uriah Heap and Deep Purple, ya know, just anything loud and abrasive. I need to be listening to Black Sabbath, I need to be listening to Raw Power by Iggy and the Stooges, I need to be listening to the New York Dolls, and I need to be listening to power trios blasting off, trying to remove my skull! What was happening, as this music was being played, was the seeds of my musical rebellion were starting to come to fruition. They were always playing Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles and the first three Springsteen records and Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks in the record store, and I wasn’t real excited about listening to them. You know, they’d get lunch or beer or cigarettes, and I would be left to run the record store while Greg Ginn hung around, waiting for his sister. So Greg Ginn would walk down to the record store with his sister-and Erica and Michael would go off to do whatever young lovers do-hold hands and watch the seagulls fly or the surfers on Hermosa Beach. The gentleman who owned the record store, Michael, had a mad crush on Erica. The way that I met Greg Ginn was through his younger sister, Erica, while I was working at this record store, Rubicon, on Pier Avenue in Hermosa Beach in 1975. Since Greg Ginn’s Black Flag has become a bloated, monotonous carcass of everything we hate about rock & roll, Flag got together to pass the torch to a new generation of headbangers and shame Greg Ginn’s band by showing the world how the noise should be played.Īs this lawsuit travels through the courts, take a few minutes, as we travel back to those dark days of the 1970s when the world was one giant macraméd happy face and teenage angst was drowning in the swill of the deadly folk rock, back when a few fuckups dared to challenge the status quo…. Henry Rollins is also named in the lawsuit. It probably helped that I started off by saying, “Talk to me like I’m a moron and don’t know any of this stuff.”Ī month after we finished the interview, Greg Ginn, the guy who co-founded Black Flag with Morris, initiated a lawsuit against Keith, along with Dez Cadena, Chuck Dukowski, Bill Stevenson, and Stephen Egerton, because they have been touring under the name Flag, giving the fans a taste of true hardcore punk rock. Since I’ve always been confused about Keith’s time in Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and the whole California hardcore scene, I thought what better way to get some clarity than to interview Keith and let him explain it himself? We talked on the phone for four or five hours and Keith laid out the entire history of the hardcore scene. Last year I finally sent it back to him with my most sincere apologies, and that sort of rekindled our friendship. I’d shudder whenever I came across the book. In the 80s, when I was working at SPIN, I borrowed a copy of Hardcore California (a book about the Southern California punk scene) from him and never returned it. Keith Morris and I have been pals for about a million years, ever since I crashed on his floor after another drunken night hanging out in LA during the 1970s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |