Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag
“Spray Paint the Walls tells Black Flag’s story from the inside, drawing on exclusive interviews with the group’s members, their contemporaries, and the bands they inspired. It’s the story of Henry Rollins, and his journey from fan to iconic frontman. And it’s the story of Greg Ginn, who turned his electronics company into one of the world’s most influential independent record labels while leading Black Flag from punk’s three-chord frenzy into heavy metal and free-jazz. Featuring over 30 photos of the band from Glen E. Friedman, Edward Colver, and others.”
Check out this excerpt of the band’s biography, written by music journalist Stevie Chick.
Excerpt taken from
Chapter 3: Spray Paint the Walls
Greg Ginn had originally booked the second Black Flag gig for Saturday, February 17, at a movie theatre in San Pedro. “We rented it out,” remembers Keith, “told ’em we were just going to have a party, that there were gonna be three or four bands, and they were totally into it. But they reneged and changed their minds when we told them we wanted to remove the front row of seats, so there was a space where people could jump around, and get excited, and feel like they were at a show rather than sitting there with their arms folded, eating popcorn and drinking coke, like they were watching a movie in a movie theatre. But the guys at the movie theatre said we couldn’t do that.”
The refusal came the week before the show was due to go down. “We went outside to think, trying to come up with an alternative. Then one of the guys noticed that there was a community centre called the Teen Post about a block away. So we went down there and said we wanted to arrange a ‘teen dance’…”
The Teen Post was a holdover from a Sixties government programme to revitalise this rundown neighbourhood, and to give the local kids something else to do, other than join a gang. “It was in an ethnic neighbourhood, kinda beat down and poor,” says Watt. “If even the Square John white people didn’t understand punk, then these cats really knew nothing about it. One guy came down from Hollywood, and he had ‘White Riot’ written on the back of his jacket! Nobody in Pedro would do that, because we knew the neighbourhood… I understand the context of that song, too. Joe Strummer wasn’t a white supremacist or anything, but you could see how it might be misinterpreted.
“The punk kids ended up wrecking the bathroom at the place, and they wrote on the walls,” sighs Watt. “That sort of stuff happened at the clubs up in Hollywood, not down here. I guess it was a protest against rock’n’roll, or something, the ‘rock’n’roll club’ concept. But this was not a rock’n’roll club. The idea of charging at the door, even – the locals just wanted to see what was going on. I remember Randy, the guitarist from The Alley Cats, asking some neighbourhood cat, ‘Hey, it’s five dollars,’ and the guy pulled a knife out. ‘What? In my town, my neighbourhood, do you think I gotta pay?’”
Boon and Watt’s group, The Reactionaries, opened the show, a rock’n’roll quartet featuring the duo on bass and guitar, with George Hurley on drums, and Martin Tamburovich on vocals. “D. Boon was wearing a Beatles suit,” laughs Joe Nolte, “those weird shiny collarless things they wore in ’63. D. Boon, wearing a Beatles suit, jumping up and down like Pete Townshend… It was the funniest God-damn thing I’ve seen in my life! And the music, it was Sixties-damaged and totally entertaining.”
Nolte was in the audience not only in his role as a friend and charter Black Flag fan, but also to support his younger brother David, whose group The Descendents would be making their onstage debut that night, as a trio with David on bass and vocals, Frank Navetta on vocals and guitar, and Frank’s fishing buddy Billy Stevenson on drums.
“By late 1978, Bill Stevenson doesn’t know what to think about this punk-rock thing, but he’s up for whatever,” laughs Joe. “He’s being real annoying, bothering Dave and Frank, who are working on their ‘Descendents’ thing, which, at the time, is just them sitting around with their acoustic guitars. Just for fun, they gave Bill a home-recorded demo they’d made. Bill took the tape and added lots of amazing pop vocal harmonies to it, and totally blew their minds. And so Bill, all of a sudden, is a Descendent, and all of a sudden The Descendents are going to be a real band.”
On that February night in Pedro, The Descendents made for quite a sight: Stevenson had recently broken his collar-bone, and so manned the traps while cemented in a cast, while Navetta proudly took to the stage in his fishing boots. This 1979 incarnation of the group would be shortlived, David Nolte’s commitments to The Last necessitating his exit from the group shortly after the Pedro show, replaced by bassist/vocalist Tony Lombardo. As 1979 dawned, The Last had, on the advice of their new manager, withdrawn from live performance, in preparation for recording their debut album for Bomp!. Standing, or perhaps swaying, in the audience at the Teen Post, however, and having just thrilled to The Descendents’ triumphant first set, Nolte felt the itch to perform. “I looked up to the stage, having had two or 20 beers or whatever, and saw Black Flag’s equipment onstage,” he remembers. “I looked to my left, to my brother David, and to the right, to my drummer Jack Reynolds, and I thought, I’ve got a rough version of The Last standing with me right here.”
In a gesture firmly in the DIY spirit of the evening’s entertainment, Joe led David and Jack through the audience, climbed onstage and spoke briefly to Greg Ginn, before grabbing Black Flag’s gear and powering through an impromptu two-song set, playing both sides of The Last’s debut single. “We ran through both songs real fast, threw down our instruments and walked off,” laughs Joe. “D. Boon said to me, years later, that it was an epiphany moment for him, normal guys just walking out of the audience and playing. He said it really underscored that you didn’t have to be a ‘rock star’ to perform. He realised he didn’t have to wear a Beatles suit to be onstage, and supposedly that was the germ for his idea of a whole new type of band, for what The Minutemen became. The audience was largely people we knew, and because we only played two songs, it was too brief for them to throw anything at us. Our album ended up sounding too ‘nice’, but live, we kicked ass. Pop music to kill each other by. We fit the mood of the evening.”
As the last feedback drones of The Last’s set drifted away, Black Flag took the stage and began their set. For Joe Nolte, this first incarnation of Black Flag was a primal, urgent, glorious thing, and the Pedro show was a prime example of the kind of power and intensity they could muster onstage. “It was very aggro. It was about getting close to the edge of sanity, near the maelstrom of potential chaos. It gives you tremendous energy, when you’re playing, if you get a sense that things are about to fall apart. I’ve never surfed, but that’s what I imagine it’s like: hanging on for dear life. It was that thing that Black Flag did so well: the sound of danger.”
“It was the greatest,” laughs Watt, left reeling after his first taste of the group. “Oh MAN, they were good. Smokin’. Later on, after the show, I asked Keith about the songs, and he told me Greg wrote ’em, and I couldn’t believe it. Because he sang them like he fuckin’ wrote ’em; the way Keith sang them was, like, ‘wow’. His voice, his mannerisms, he was so into it. And the band, man, what a sound… Greg wasn’t really playing lead guitar yet, it was mainly just the rhythm, the riff, but it was fantastic. Gary, on bass, was so physical, just real inspiring. Even Robo… I’m a big fan of Robo.
“The show was packed, but there was no violence,” Watt adds. “Sometimes there’d be fights at later gigs, but that came more from the cops, or bouncers who didn’t understand the situation and escalated things. Flag never promoted violence, they were into making music, and it was a visceral thing, people felt it, the way they played it they felt it.” Of the spirited dancing, the pogoing and the slam-dancing, Watt admits “some of that stuff got really intense. But it’s like any little kid game, like tackle football or some shit. You’re into it because it gets your blood running; nobody’s really mean, and nobody’s killing anybody, but you do get some pent-up shit out, and it’s hilarious.”
Later that night, Boon and Watt helped the Hermosa contingent load up their gear, and bade them farewell as their cars trundled off for the northbound freeway. As the homebound convoy hammered on towards Hermosa, Joe Nolte reflected on what he describes as “a fun little night. The Flag had gone down well that night, and there had been enough like-minded people in the audience, people who were up for punk rock. But though we were all still buzzing on the experience, no one was behaving like rock stars,” he adds. No one in the Flag’s circle had any sense that the night was in any way epochal. “We were still new groups,” he laughs. “It was only Black Flag’s second show.”
Back in Pedro, though, the impact of the evening’s events, and of Black Flag’s headlining performance, was only beginning to register for Boon and Watt. “It was very empowering to us,” says Watt now, though its immediate effect was to cause the duo to re-examine the music they had been playing as The Reactionaries, their gleefully ham-fisted approximations of classic rock.
“We were embarrassed by The Reactionaries, really, but we knew we had to try something, to get to what lay beyond it. Because, coming from such stupid arena-rock shit, like us, we were bound to do some awkward, embarrassing shit. There was this incredibly talented punk group we saw, a band called The Urinals, and they chose their roles in the group by drawing straws. They had no taint from arena rock; maybe they knew the music, but they weren’t learning the songs. They were fresh from the start. But we had copied the records, so it was in us, kinda. We had to go through the reactionary shit.
“But man, the Flag was really intensely influential on us. We learned so much from them. We would never have formed The Minutemen if we hadn’t discovered the punk scene. But I also don’t think we’d have formed The Minutemen, to have gotten beyond what we were doing as The Reactionaries, if we hadn’t met Black Flag.”
Be sure to grab a copy of Spray Paint the Walls to read the rest!
Featured image credit: Spot
