Black Flag, Unfurled

American punk would not be the same without Black Flag.

The Hermosa Beach-spawned band not only inspired hordes of alienated ‘80s youths to vent their discontent, but also showed them how to do it themselves. Its furious music, wailing vocals, intense work ethic, sarcastic-to-shocking humor and egalitarian notions have come to represent the principles, if not usually the reality, of punk.

Formed in 1977, the group kicked up controversy on many fronts. Its anti-status-quo lyrics and provocative artwork (nuns in bondage and the like) were extreme for the times. Its blue-collar values were at odds with the more laid-back Hollywood punk scene, and its audiences could be alarmingly destructive. Black Flag’s tendency to experiment with jazz, spoken-word and noise alienated different fans at various points. The band endured a protracted early legal battle with an MCA Records affiliate, and relationships among the players were sometimes strained.

Still, the group gained followers all over the country through relentless touring, and it exposed listeners to some of its own favorite acts via its label SST Records, which in its late ‘80s heyday boasted such key alternative acts as Husker Du, the Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Bad Brains and Dinosaur Jr. Before breaking up in 1986, Black Flag had even begun to fuse metal and hard-core, foreshadowing punk’s next era.

But Black Flag never realized--or wanted, at least in founding member Greg Ginn’s case--the commercial success that followers such as the Offspring and Green Day found in the ‘90s. Singer Henry Rollins went on to a higher-profile solo career in music and spoken word, as well as in writing and publishing. The reclusive Ginn released several solo albums in the ‘90s and still quietly runs SST and affiliate Cruz Records in Long Beach.

While a reunion is as unlikely as Johnny Rotten wearing flared jeans, Black Flag--or at least its music and its nose for a good fight--is back, in a way.

“Rise Above: Twenty-Four Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three,” an album due in stores Tuesday from Sanctuary Records, features Rollins’ current band (a.k.a. Mother Superior) backing a wide array of guest vocalists--including Rollins himself, original Black Flag singer Keith Morris and bassist Chuck Dukowski, Iggy Pop, Exene Cervenka, Ice-T, Hank Williams III and Nick Oliveri from Queens of the Stone Age--on vintage Black Flag songs.

Its proceeds will benefit three youths who many believe were wrongly convicted in the 1993 murders of three 8-year-old boys in tiny West Memphis, Ark. The case has already inspired a 2000 benefit album and numerous fund-raising concerts, and it has been examined in two documentary films, “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hill” and “Paradise Lost 2: Revelations,” which HBO2 will air again on Oct. 15 and 16, respectively.

Launched with a menacing call-out by rapper Chuck D before Rollins’ blistering update of “Rise Above,” the album preserves the spirit of Black Flag. The metallic crunch on some tracks underscores the music’s timelessness, updating the sound while preserving its eccentric rhythms. And the variety of performers reflects how deeply Black Flag’s righteous fury touched a collective rebellious nerve.

“They were kind of like therapists, in a way,” Hank Williams III (who performs “No Values” on the album) says of the band. “Whenever my mom used to yell at me or tell me to go to my room, I’d just put on Black Flag and freak out.”

Named after an anarchy symbol, Black Flag initially consisted of Ginn, Dukowski, Morris and drummer Brian Migdol. Morris left in 1978 to form the equally seminal Circle Jerks, and by 1981, when Rollins joined, the group had gone through two more singers.

Ginn’s spastic, time-warped guitar style was the band’s hallmark, and it remains unique, a sonic expression of his own internal cadences. Other than that and the four-bar band logo created by his brother, artist Raymond Pettibon (who parlayed his vivid work on Black Flag covers and posters into a thriving career as an artist), Black Flag deliberately avoided creating an image.

The players’ inattention to fashion and refusal to identify with any single group put a distance between them and the Hollywood punk scene. They did play gigs in L.A., but they also held countless shows everywhere from garages to concert halls around the South Bay.

By taking their music away from the metropolis, Black Flag helped expand punk’s range into the suburbs. All that touring put them in the ranks of such hard-core Johnny Appleseeds as Canada’s D.O.A., who eventually made punk accessible to just about everyone, anywhere, who cared.

Yet for an act that had such an effect on one genre, its members certainly didn’t identify with it.

“We never felt any kinship with punk rock,” Rollins says. “I mean, the Sex Pistols--Greg and Chuck thought those guys were the biggest fakes.” That duo didn’t like anybody except such friend-bands as the Minutemen, Saccharine Trust, Redd Kross, Descendents, Husker Du, and D.O.A., along with Black Sabbath, Television, the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and John Coltrane.

In fact, Ginn thought of Black Flag’s music as updated blues. “That’s not something I would say all the time, because then you offend blues purists,” says Ginn, who is generally reluctant to analyze Black Flag’s effect beyond relating the facts and describing his own motivations.

He formed the group for fun, and because he didn’t like how progressive rock had brought neo-classical elements into mainstream ‘70s rock. Ginn thought rock should move back toward its blues base, and he believed there was a continuing need for the visceral experience provided by such groups as Black Sabbath.

“It’s not like 1-4-5 blues, but it’s coming from that open-emotion, raw-integrity thing,” Rollins says. “Dukowski used to say it’s like when a dog barks. It’s not trying to get signed; it’s just telling you how it is, in a very unrestrained way. That’s how [Ginn’s] songs are.”

To many disenfranchised listeners, a Black Flag song didn’t just describe a moment. It was the moment. Hilarious and harrowing tunes such as “Nervous Breakdown,” “Fix Me,” “Police Story” and “TV Party” bluntly and often with extreme irony expressed the boredom, frustration and harassment of chafing against a world of conformity and consumerism. And what is Ginn’s “Rise Above” but a spiritual that spits, rather than prays, in the face of adversity?

Jealous cowards try to control

Rise above we’re gonna rise above

They distort what we say

Rise above we’re gonna rise above

Try and stop what we do

Rise above

When they can’t do it themselves

We are tired of your abuse

Try to stop us it’s no use ...

Yet despite lyrics that decried police harassment, inattentive women and heroin use, along with pretty much anything remotely the norm, Ginn wasn’t trying to shock people. Like a blues performer, he was just telling stories. “The songs were pretty autobiographical and personal,” he says. “Not always about myself, but coming from situations [involving] either myself or people I knew.”

Rollins, who has been strongly dismissive of musicians who don’t move forward creatively, found it intense to revisit those situations two decades later as he oversaw the tribute album, even though he didn’t write the lyrics. Yet he also was enlightened by the experience. “Talk about putting a lot of stuff into a little bit of time!” he says. “Those songs are like a minute and a half, and it’s a meal in the size of a bonbon. It’s astounding.” The music’s emotional intensity also came back, Rollins says. “You start registering all that old stuff, and you see how thoroughly hectic and unrelenting those lyrics were.”

As was life in Black Flag. Rollins recalls that Ginn had them practicing even while touring. “We were a really good band because of [Greg and Chuck’s] work ethic,” Rollins says.

Yet that work ethic, and Black Flag’s emphasis on perfection, wasn’t part of punk, Ginn says. “We were looked down upon for considering [having our own] PA system important, for example,” he says. “The attitude was, ‘Why do you care? Why are you doing all this work? You should be hanging out.’ ”

Indeed, the focus on putting resources back into the music was singular to a fault. Some might even call it ironically dogmatic for a band so opposed to dogma. “We were very poor, all sleeping on the floor, with bugs in our hair,” Rollins says. “We were shoplifting for food, eating off people’s plate.”

In this dire environment, he says, the members often clashed. “It was not an easy bunch of people to mingle with. It was hard for us to be around each other. It was hard for us to be around ourselves.”

What really torpedoed Black Flag, however, was Ginn’s refusal to yield to changing times. By the mid-’80s, when the commercial possibilities of punk became apparent, some people around the band saw a career option, Ginn says. “That was kind of the end,” he adds.

In a world where “punk” has gone from cottage industry to registered trademark, where even Kurt Cobain lamented fame but still took that major-label ride, it might be tough to believe someone would actually shut down his band rather than see success destroy his ideals. Ginn acknowledges this. “When ‘It’s all about the music’ is an MTV slogan, it’s hard to talk about these things” without drawing cynicism, he says.

If not compromising meant Black Flag was doomed to mere underground-legend status, well, Ginn doesn’t seem too upset. Indeed, you get the feeling he’d be more distressed if his songs were selling, say, flared jeans.

“All of a sudden there was something to lose, and it brought in that thing of, ‘What do we have to hold onto?’ ” Ginn says of punk’s ‘80s paradigm shift. “Where I had always enjoyed being reckless about those things.”

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Black Flag’s Best

All the albums are on the SST label.

Damaged (1981). The definitive Cali hard-core album. Henry Rollins debuts here, with a roar to match Greg Ginn’s furious guitar work on such sardonic, defiant commentaries as “Rise Above,” “TV Party” and “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie.”

Who’s Got the 10 1/2 (1986). This live album mixes older material with selections from the less-than-stellar “Loose Nut,” but sharp playing and Rollins’ spoken-word bits make it worthwhile.

The First Four Years (1983). A collection of the band’s pre-Rollins singles and EPs shows how it all began.

Wasted ... Again (1987). Posthumous retrospective features highlights from the band’s history.

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Natalie Nichols is a regular contributor to Calendar.