Garfield quickly earned a reputation as a fighter at shows. “I was like nineteen and a young man all full of steam and getting in a lot of fights at shows, willingly, gratefully,” he says. “Loved to get in the dust-ups. It was like rams on the side of the mountain. I wasn’t very good but I enjoyed it very much.”
He eventually worked his way up to manager of the Häagen-Dazs shop in Georgetown and was making enough money to have his own apartment, a stereo, and plenty of records. It was a pretty cushy life for a twenty-year-old. But that was all about to change.
One day a friend handed Garfield and MacKaye Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP, the one they’d read about in the L.A. punk fanzine Slash. It was a revelation. A few months later, in December ’80 MacKaye heard that Black Flag was going to be playing D.C.’s 9:30 Club, so he called SST, got Chuck Dukowski on the phone, and offered the band a place to stay—his parents’ house. They took him up on it. Garfield and all his punk buddies jumped at the chance to meet the band in person. “We’re like, ‘Whoa, you can go over there and touch the mighty Black Flag,’ ” he says. “We got to spend time with them. Here’s a band whose set blew you away, whose record blew you away, and they’re really cool people and you’re talking to a real live rock band who tours, who you admire. And that was a big deal.”
Dukowski took a shine to Garfield and gave him a tape of music the band had been working on. The songs connected heavily with Garfield, yet he couldn’t help feeling he could sing them better than Cadena did. Dukowski kept in touch with Garfield, writing letters, hipping him to bands like Black Sabbath and the Stooges, calling from the road and shooting the breeze about music and what was happening in the D.C. scene.
Black Flag returned to the East Coast later that spring, and Garfield drove up to New York to catch their show. Arriving hours early, he hung out with Ginn and Dukowski all day, caught their Irving Plaza show, then accompanied them to an unannounced late-night gig at hardcore mecca 7A. It was now the wee hours of the morning and Garfield, realizing he had to get back to D.C. in time to open the ice-cream store at 9 A.M., requested the I-hate-my-job screed “Clocked In.”
“And right before they went to play, I thought, ‘Well, I know how to sing this song,’ and went, ‘Dez!’—gesturing toward the mike—‘Can I sing?’ ” he says. “And he went, ‘Fuck yeah!’ So I kind of jumped up onstage and everyone else in Black Flag was like, ‘All right, Henry’s going to sing. Cool!’ And they launch into the song and I sang the song like I thought it should be sung. I went for it with extreme aggression. And everyone in the crowd was like, ‘Whoaaaa.’ I got an immediate reaction. I watched people in the crowd go, ‘Fuck yeah!’ I remember looking over at Dukowski, who’s looking over at me, going, ‘Yeah. This is happening.’ ” Dukowski had just recognized that Garfield might be the lead singer they’d been looking for.
The song finished, Garfield dashed offstage, hopped into his beat-up old Volkswagen, and drove straight back to Washington.
A couple of days later, Garfield got a call at the ice-cream store: it was Dez Cadena, inviting him to come up to New York and jam. They’d cover the train fare. Garfield was a little puzzled. “I thought they were still up there and bored and wanted one of their buddies to come hang out with them,” he says. Cadena said he was switching to guitar and the band needed a new singer.
Garfield was staggered. “I’m like, ‘Holy shit. Am I being asked to audition for Black Flag?’ ” he says. “What a huge, monstrous proposition to a barely twenty-year-old guy with an extremely normal background. So I went, ‘I’m on my way.’ ”
Garfield knew about Ginn’s and Dukowski’s wide-ranging musical tastes and had ingratiated himself by introducing them to exotica like Washington, D.C.’s unique go-go music. In doing so, Garfield had shown he had the stylistic range to develop with the band and move on from hardcore’s already stifling loud-fast equation. “Henry,” says Ginn, “was somebody who we felt could break out of that narrow mode.”
Garfield made a 6 A.M. train the following morning and was soon standing in a dingy East Village rehearsal room with a microphone in his hand. “They said, ‘OK, what do you want to play?’ ” he says. “And I remember looking at Greg Ginn and saying, ‘Police Story.’ ” Then they ran through virtually every song in their set, with Garfield simply improvising to songs he didn’t know. Then they did it all over again.
“OK, time for a band meeting,” Dukowski announced. “You sit here,” he ordered Garfield. When they came back after a few minutes, Dukowski said simply, “OK.” “OK what?” Garfield replied. “OK, YOU WANT TO JOIN THIS BAND OR WHAT?” Dukowski thundered.
Garfield was stunned. Then he accepted. They sent him back to D.C. with a folder full of lyrics that he was to learn by the time they hooked up on tour in Detroit.
When he got home, he called his trusted friend Ian MacKaye and asked his advice. “Ian, should I do this?” Garfield asked.
“Henry,” MacKaye simply replied, “go.”
Garfield quit his job, left his apartment, sold his records and his car, and bought a bus ticket to Detroit.
Cadena wanted to finish out the tour as vocalist, so Garfield hauled equipment, watched the band at work, and sang at sound check and during the encores all the way back to Los Angeles. Much to Garfield’s relief, Cadena liked his singing. “It was my favorite band, and all of a sudden I’m the singer,” he says. “It was like winning the lottery.”
But being in Black Flag was not always a day at the beach. The third day of the tour, at Tut’s in Chicago, Dukowski picked up his bass and brained a bouncer who was beating up a girl. Garfield was shocked. “That was a very bad time,” he remembers. “The bouncer got stitched up and made it back to the set while we were still playing, wanting to throw down. We barely got out of there…. I’d been in Black Flag forty-eight hours at that time. ‘OK, so this is what it’s going to be.’ And it was.”
Garfield set out doing what so many come to California to do: reinvent himself. One of the first things he did upon arrival in L.A. was to get the Black Flag bars tattooed on his shoulder; and as a way of distancing himself from his troubled family life, he now called himself Henry Rollins, after a fake name he and MacKaye used to use.
Rollins was now in a much different world. For instance, there was Mugger, who worked at SST and roadied for the band. Mugger was a tough teenage runaway who was often so broke he’d have to eat dog food and bread, wadded up into a ball and downed very fast. This was not the type of fellow Rollins grew up with in Glover Park. “I stupidly asked Mugger—we were going to go out in the fall on tour—I go, ‘Mugger, how are you going to go on the road with us?’ ” Rollins says. “He’s like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, you’ll be in school.’ And he started laughing. He says, ‘Henry, I dropped out of school in sixth grade.’ ”
HENRY ROLLINS, GREG GINN, AND CHUCK DUKOWSKI AT AN AUGUST 1981 SHOW AT THE NOTORIOUS CUCKOO’S NEST IN COSTA MESA—ONE OF ROLLINS’S FIRST BLACK FLAG SHOWS EVER.
© 1981 GLEN E. FRIEDMAN. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE BURNING FLAGS PRESS BOOK, FUCK YOU HEROES
Band practices were attended by teenage runaways and other young people living on the fringe. “These people I started meeting, these punk rock kids, were dope-smoking, heroin-checking-out, ‘lude-dropping people who didn’t go to school,” says Rollins. “They lived on the street or scammed here or there.”
The new experiences continued for Rollins after his inaugural tour with Black Flag, a short trip up the California coast that autumn, when they came home to find that they’d been kicked out of their Torrance offices and had to stay with some “lazy slacker hippie punks” at an overcrowded crash pad in Hollywood. And once the police figured out Rollins was in Black Flag, he got the full treatment. “I got hassled three nights a week,” Rollins says. “And it was scary. They’d come out of the car and twist your arm behind your back and say things like, ‘Did you just call me a faggot?’ I’d go, ‘No, sir, I didn’t say anything.’ ‘Did you call
me a motherfucker?’ ‘No.’ ‘You want to fight me?’ ‘No, sir.’
“That really scared me,” Rollins adds. “It freaked me out that an adult would do that. Then I learned that cops do all kinds of shit. My little eyes were opened big time.”
Rollins also had to get used to the powerful, diverse personalities within the band. Ginn, a slow, deliberate speaker some seven years Rollins’s senior, was “the introspective, quieter guy with immense power, but not showing his cards,” Rollins says. “You have no idea how he thinks, what he thinks, what occurs to him. He’s a super enigmatic guy to me.”
Ginn was also a hard worker, “very principled, with the most monster work ethic of any single human being I’ve ever encountered in my life to this day,” says Rollins. “If it took twenty hours, he did twenty hours. You’d say, ‘Greg, aren’t you tired?’ And he go, ‘Yeah.’ He would never, ever complain.”
Ginn’s strong, silent temperament was attractive and inspiring, especially to Rollins, who had learned to idolize such types back at Bullis. Those around Ginn would feel honored if he spoke even a few words to them, but the flip side to that distance was Ginn’s ability to dispense a devastatingly cold shoulder. “The silent treatment was the worst,” Rollins recalls. “You never got yelled at; you just kind of got scowled at.” In Black Flag, adds SST’s Joe Carducci, “everything was withheld and communicated sort of telepathically in bad vibes.”
Chuck Dukowski was something else altogether. Dukowski was “super charismatic—this guy had lightning bolts of ideas and rhetoric and hot air just coming off him,” Rollins says. “I don’t mean hot air like he was just talking, but always throwing out ideas, always asking questions, wanting to know everything—‘What are you reading?’ ‘Why did you like that book?’ ‘What would you do if someone tried to kill you?’ Really intense shit. ‘Would you eat raw meat to survive?’ ‘Would you fuck naked outside in public if you had to, to live?’ He was this bass-wielding Nietzschean, just an explosive character.
“One of Dukowski’s things was give everybody guns and a lot of people are going to die and after a while it will all get sorted out,” says Rollins. “That’s the kind of rhetoric Dukowski would spew in interviews. It was like, ‘Chuck, whoa…’ And he would start laughing hysterically, like in this weird high-pitched laughter. I think he was more just abstracting his rage.”
Dukowski, although not a technically gifted bassist, played with unbelievable intensity, throwing every molecule of his being into every note; he had simply willed himself into becoming a compelling musician. While Ginn was the band’s fearless leader, Dukowski, with his restless intellect and 24-7 dedication to the band, was its revolutionary theoretician and spiritual mainspring—a regular mohawked Mephistopheles. Dukowski set about indoctrinating Rollins into the Black Flag mind-set, goading him to the same intensity. Dukowski recognized that with some discipline and intellectual underpinning, his protégé was capable of some dizzying heights.
At a 1982 show in Tulsa, two people showed up. Rollins was downhearted, but Dukowski straightened him out, telling him that although there might be only a couple of people there, they came to see Black Flag and it’s not their fault nobody else came—you should play your guts out anytime anywhere and it doesn’t matter how many people are there. That night Rollins dutifully gave it everything he had.
At one point Dukowski urged Rollins to try LSD. “It will help you not be such an asshole,” Rollins recalls Dukowski telling him. Rollins was opposed to drugs, but his desire to fit into the band and please Dukowski and Ginn overruled his principles. As Rollins puts it, Dukowski “was such a big influence on me. If he said to jump off a roof, I would say, ‘Which roof?’ ” Rollins eventually began taking large quantities of acid on later Black Flag tours, using it to skin-dive into the deepest, darkest depths of his soul and bring some disturbing discoveries back to the surface.
Black Flag had tried recording material for their first album with Ron Reyes, who turned out to be studio-shy, then tried again with Cadena, but it didn’t come out to their satisfaction. The third time, with Rollins, proved to be a charm.
Ginn disdained most hardcore because it didn’t swing—the rhythms were straight up and down, with no lateral hip shake. To preserve the subtle but all-important swinging quality, he’d start the band playing new songs at a slow tempo, establishing a groove, and then gradually speeding it up at each practice, making sure to maintain that groove even at escape-velocity tempos. Very quickly Rollins abandoned the spitfire bark he’d used with S.O.A. and began to swing with the rest of the band. Just a few months after he’d joined, he’d already begun to redefine the sound not only of Black Flag but of hardcore itself.
Released in January ’82, Damaged is a key hardcore document, perhaps the key hardcore document. It boiled over with rage on several fronts: police harassment, materialism, alcohol abuse, the stultifying effects of consumer culture, and, on just about every track on the album, a particularly virulent strain of self-lacerating angst—all against a savage, brutal backdrop that welded apoplectic punk rock to the anomie of dark Seventies metal like Black Sabbath.
The songs took fleeting but intense feelings and impulses and exploded them into entire all-consuming realities. So when Ginn wrote a chorus like “Depression’s got a hold of me / Depression’s gonna kill me,” it sounded like the whole world was going to end. “That was Black Flag: when you lose your shit,” says Rollins. The music was the same way—blitzkrieg assaults so completely overwhelming, so consuming and intense that for the duration of the song, it’s hard to imagine ever listening to anything else.
Hardcore’s distinctive mix of persecution and bravado crystallized perfectly in the refrain of the opening “Rise Above,” as definitive a hardcore anthem as will ever be penned: “We are tired of your abuse! / Try to stop us, it’s no use!” goes the rabble-rousing chorus. But most songs are avowals of suicidal alienation, first-person portraits of confused, desperate characters just about to explode—“I want to live! I wish I was dead!” Rollins rants on “What I See.” Occasional humor made the anguish both more believable and more horrific, as in the sarcastic “TV Party”—“We’ve got nothing better to do / Than watch TV and have a couple of brews,” sings a charmingly off-key guy chorus over a goofy quasi-surf backing track.
Musically, the six-minute “Damaged I” is an anomaly—loud but not fast, it is based on a slowly trudging guitar riff with Rollins ad-libbing a psychodrama about being ordered around and abused, then retreating into a protective mental shell. The last sounds of the song—and the record—are Rollins barking, “No one comes in! STAY OUT!” It’s hard not to read it as straight autobiography.
Today Damaged is easily assimilated as hardcore, but at the time there was little precedent for music of such scathing violence. Yet Ginn’s explanation was typically matter-of-fact: “People work all day and they want a release,” he told the L.A. Times. “They want a way to deal with all the frustrations that build up. We try to provide that in our music.”
The album—and Rollins in particular—introduced an unforgiving introspection and a downright militaristic self-discipline. Perhaps because he was trying to make sense of his childhood traumas, Rollins threw himself headlong into Ginn’s psychological pain research. Rollins harbored huge amounts of anger and resentment, and Black Flag’s violent music unleashed his pent-up aggressions in a raging torrent.
Ginn and Dukowski had finally found their boy. “What I was doing kind of matched the vibe of the music,” Rollins explains. “The music was intense and, well, I was as intense as you needed.”
With his tattoos, skinhead, square jaw, and hoarse, martial bellow, Rollins became a poster boy for hardcore—unlike the older Dukowski and Ginn, Rollins looked like he could have been an HB’er. And like so many punks, parental and societal neglect had left him angry and alienated as hell. As the band plugged in and tuned up, Rollins would stalk the stage like a caged animal, dressed only in black athletic shorts, glowering and grin
ding his teeth (to get pumped up before a show, he’d squeeze a treasured number thirteen pool ball he’d taken from a club in San Antonio). Then the band would throw down the hammer, and the entire room would turn into a chaotic whirlpool of human flesh, its chance collisions oblivious to the rhythm of the music. Rollins’s copious sheen of sweat would rain down on the first few rows in a continuous shower while his anguished howling tore through Ginn’s electric assault like a blowtorch through a steel fence.
Robo played as if he were fending off attacks from his drums and cymbals. Dukowski tore sounds from his bass with utmost vengeance, doubling over and grimacing with the effort, banging his head and screaming at the audience, far from any microphone, while his fingers pummeled the strings like pistons. Ginn played in a spread-legged stance, making occasional lunges like a fencer, shaking his head from side to side as if in disbelief of his own ecstacy while his guitar barked like a junkyard dog, utterly unencumbered by anything that would make it sound melodious.
Opening for the Ramones at the Hollywood Palladium in the fall of ’82, Black Flag suffered from bad sound, but as one reviewer put it, “Rollins still carried the show with his truly menacing persona. He spit out the lyrics, convulsing to the beat, grinding his hips blatantly. Such a gruesome and intimidating display of rock aggression and frustration was hardly endearing, but like a high-speed car crash, you couldn’t keep your eyes—or ears—off them.” Another writer observed that Rollins was “a cross between Jim Morrison and Ted Nugent. No wonder the kids eat him up.” A larger-than-usual contingent of L.A.’s finest guarded the venue, blocking off some surrounding streets, as helicopters hovered overhead. The show went off without incident.
The media, from local fanzines all the way up to the Los Angeles Times, had the field day with the band’s notoriety. One skateboard magazine claimed the band had “detonated explosive riots at numerous gigs,” which was an exaggeration, although a show at the Polish Hall in Hollywood resulted in a bout of bottle and chair throwing that caused $4,000 in damage to the building as well as one arrest and two injured cops.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 4