Black Flag at Fortune Sound Club, January 1st, 2024: No Dead Dogs to Kick

Sorry, Ron. I went! 

I have friends who would not go see Black Flag tonight because of the way the band treated Ron Reyes on their 2013 tour, ejecting him from the band not long after they played Vancouver. If that alone wasn't enough -- given how nice a person Ron Reyes is -- they had a host of other reasons to add to the arguments for not going, too: child abuse allegations against founder and guitarist Greg Ginn, multiple weird lawsuits in their history ranging from the Negativland foibles to the attempts to cut FLAG off at the pole, which latter predictably backfired and made Ginn look like a weird, controlling dork (almost as if he somehow didn't see that coming!). Then there is the long list of albums released on SST that have gone out of print, with Ginn showing no interest in reissuing them, and -- well, one gathers there are other grievances against him out there. Probably a few people were put off at the threat of interminable Theremin improvisations! But however many reasons one could give, I could think of no way I wanted to ring out 2023 and ring in 2024 than to see Black Flag do a complete performance of their 1984 album My War, followed by a second set of various other hits. Almost as soon as I realized I would be alone this evening, that my wife had other plans, I bought a ticket, even though I like Ron a great deal. For all I knew, I rationalized, the show would suck, and I'd be able to say fairly in a review that not only did they treat Ron really badly, they actually aren't worth seeing! 

That is NOT what I have come here to say, but it coulda worked out that way, y'know? I could not bear witness unless I was there; sometimes you read enough about what a shmuck some guy is, you gotta see him for yourself. I mean, he might be a shmuck, but then again, how does that proverb go, "No one kicks a dead dog?" 

Not a dead dog in sight at the Fortune Sound Club last night. 

Before you judge me, y'all should understand how deep My War goes with me. True confession: in 1984 (or possibly 1985), when I was 16 (or possibly 17), when my parents were in bed upstairs, in the condo we were in in Maple Ridge, I would clear a space on the living room carpet and lip synch to My War, either in its entirety, or occasionally just focusing on side 2. I had to play it quietly enough as to not wake my parents overhead, making the most of what volume I could dare. There I was, quietly rolling around on the floor or performing other such theatricalities -- gesticulating, leaping, thrashing about, whatever I could do as long as it didn't thump too loudly, with a pencil clutched in my hand as a microphone, pretending to roar things like, "My life's a piece of shit that caught in my shoe" or "I think you stuck my friend with knives/ dragged them out so he could die/ one in his heart and three in each side... knives" (both from the sludgy side 2 epic, "Three Nights," which was probably my favourite song on the album after the amazing title track) 

I mean, the music was very fun, too, but lyrics like those tapped deep into all the hatred, negativity, fear, paranoia, mistrust, and alienation coursing through me at the time, given so little adequate voice otherwise -- because as Henry sings, "I conceal my feelings so I won't have to explain/ what I can't explain anyway." The spirit of sullen, uncommunicative, angry adolescence was never so potently screamed... or lip synched to. With the help of Black Flag, once a week or so, for a few months at least, I made no attempt to conceal those feelings. I gave them the most expressive, cathartic "voicing" as I could without actually using my voice. Alone on the carpet, I BECAME Rollins. Or what I imagined Rollins would be like (but pudgier). I tried to get behind every emotion on the album, to embody every song. Some of it was frighteningly dark (as with the murderific "I Love You" ), but the fear and discomfort such expressions provoked were part of the appeal. Like any teen male, I was fascinated with my darker emotions back then. There were a fair number of them expressed in my record collection, and for sheer cathartic/ emotive force, My War is second only, for me, to Zen Arcade (which seems a little less antisocial, a little less thuggish, if equally emotionally fierce. But I never lip synched to Zen Arcade, y'know? Or any other albums besides My War). 

At that point, I had never seen Black Flag. I had read descriptions about how intense they were live; and I'd even seen -- though I did not know what it was at the time -- a TV spot on a Vancouver station about how an American hardcore band was being hassled about crossing the border into Canada because their music was antisocial. I didn't get their name at that point, but was impressed to hear a youngish, head-shorn Rollins, before I knew his name, singing a line or two from "Rise Above" ("It IS kind of antisocial, though," I remember thinking, while loving it for just that reason). A year or two later, when I finally got Damaged, I was happy to have kept that moment filed in my memory: "Aha, THAT's who that band was!"

But seeing them never lined up. I had at least two chances to see Black Flag in Vancouver between 1984 and 1986, when I was at my peak fandom, but I lived in the suburbs, had no car, was underage, and had no friend to drive me to and fro. I was well-practiced at missing gigs. There was no bus that could be caught -- Maple Ridge only had a private coach line back then, and it stopped running before punk gigs finished. They would put extra Pacific Coach Lines on if Iron Maiden played, so I could (and did) see them, or other bigger concerts at the Pacific Coliseum (Judas Priest, the Kinks, Van Halen with David Lee, Black Sabbath, etc, catching the special late bus home on Hastings at 11:30 at night). But a punk show in some small club in Vancouver? Much as I wanted to, I had no way of making it happen.

I did see Greg Ginn take the stage with Ron Reyes the first time Reyes and Ginn reconciled, at the Rio Theatre, doing a birthday bash for Ron that also featured the Little Guitar Army, I, Braineater, the Modernettes, and the Jolts, back in 2010, I think it was. Ron has a fearsome voice, and it was really fun to hear him singing songs like "Jealous Again" and "Revenge." Black Flag was mostly really about Rollins for me, so I never spent that much time on the pre-Henry material, but of what I heard, I liked Jealous Again better than any of the other early stuff, and it was a treat to hear those songs being sung by the original singer... though for whatever reason - bad sound, bad seat, vituperative soundman, I don't know -- I could barely hear Greg Ginn's guitar that night...

That was not a problem tonight. Having gone, here are some observations and photographs (only one of which, when it comes to the band, is half-good, seen above; the light was NOT friendly to photographers). 

1. There should be a live album to document the extended guitar solos that Ginn offered for songs like "Can't Decide." I was right up front for what seemed a fifteen minute version of the song,with moshers colliding into my back and driving my thighs into the low-ish stage, but it was a treat not just to be able to dance to the song between collisions, with the help of particularly hooky basswork being offered by a bassist whose name I cannot confirm, but which seemed might be Cedar Austin -- but to see Ginn, head working in circles, eyes closed, generating these intense clusters of notes, lost in his inner space, playing his guitar like no other human being I can think of. I don't know that I've seen punk guitar solos delivered in a meditative way before; these almost were. Gone, y'know? For a change, like the man says. 

I wonder if Greg Ginn is a pothead? I would be unsurprised. The tie-dye version of the My War t-shirt is kind of hilarious. 

The thing about Ginn -- whatever else one might say about him -- there are few truly singular guitarists out there. Even Neil Young, as passionate and unique as he is, has tons of followers and imitators, but while I've said of a few people, "Hm, he's playing like he's Neil Young," never have I said of anyone, "Hm, he's playing like he's Greg Ginn." I doubt that anyone else really could. Eugene Chadbourne is another truly stand-alone figure whose work I love, and which bears some features of Ginn's, in fact -- intense outbursts of notes that form cloud-clusters together and interact, becoming their own strange shimmering things -- except you can tell that Eugene is grounded in a deep knowledge of technique and composition and CHOOSING to be weird, following *a* rule book of some sort, however generously interpreted or subverted (or perverted) it may be, while Ginn seems more like he's an autodidact, who (for all I know) might technically not be able to play any other way (which Eugene can, if he wants), but who plays HIS way like a master -- a guitarist who has apparently invented himself from whole cloth, doing it exactly his way from the outset. Without meaning it as an insult, I would be unsurprised to find that he couldn't read music; he seems almost too iconoclastic for that, too unprecedented, too sui generis. I might be wrong but he plays like a man who has no grasp of the rules that must be transcended, like they never, ever got to him, y'know? I want to make it seem a compliment; I mean it as one. Freest guitarist in punk? Often he enters his solos by way of lines of notes that, if I picked them out on my guitar, I would dismiss as "wrong" or "weird," but Ginn commits to them and uses them as a springboard into these sonic attacks like no-one else's, that abandon conventions of how notes should be timed or melodically linked, generating these crazy fields of sound that, crude and weird as they can be, also remind me of another virtuosic guitarist, Between Eternity and Nothingness-era John McLaughlin (!). There, I said it; who would expect to think of John McLaughlin at a punk show. Ginn is one of the most idiosyncratic guitarists out there, one of the only truly INTERESTING guitarists in punk.

If you're nodding along, here, you have good reason to see Black Flag on this tour. Be assured that there was no Theremin, nothing off The Process of Weeding Out -- no wholly instrumental stuff, nothing dismissible as "self-indulgent." Those sorts of words got thrown about a lot during the 2012-2013 tour with Ron, where all the critics I read praised Ron and shat on Ginn, but I always wondered if the critics doing this actually were fans of Ginn's way of doing things on guitar. Calling him self-indulgent, musically, kind of misses the point, that these are essentially free jazz solos in a punk context. Did they ENJOY his solos on In My Head, for example? Did they ever even listen to The Process of Weeding Out? I have done so, more than once, and while I don't spend a lot of time with that music now, I have enjoyed it a-plenty at points in my past. If that describes you, too, this tour is going to be right up your alley, as there were vast, expansive solos brought to several songs which seemed at least two or three times as long as the studio versions. This included the final tune, a ten minute, obscenitized version of "Louie Louie" that had my favourite lyrical misunderstanding of the night: when Mike sang "She's got the rag on," I thought, thinking of my absent wife and our floofy cat, that he was singing, "She's got the ragdoll." Which confused me for a couple of verses, actually. And besides, I've got the ragdoll while she's away... why is Mike singing about a cat? 

Anyhow, if you like Greg Ginn's guitar -- if you WANT to hear a fifteen minute "Can't Decide," twelve minutes of which are Ginn soloing over frenetic, tight bass-clusters... you really, really should go see Black Flag. If you just want tight, fast punk, there's plenty of that, too, especially in the second set, but the expanded explorations should really be the draw here (they were for me, so I was very satisfied; a very close approximation to what we saw is online, from Tokyo in November, but it was much more exciting to see this live than it is on Youtube...).

2. If you are contemplating catching them, you should also be aware that Ginn seemed very comfortable hanging out at the merch table, where he signed several records for people, using both his name and that of the other "member" of Black Flag on that record, Dale Nixon, which was actually a pseudonym for Ginn himself on bass. I overheard someone observe to Ginn, "I've had five copies of this record over the years," to which Ginn replied, "But now you've got a signed one." So he knows his market well; I haven't seen too many musicians do this sort of thing since COVID -- signing -- but he probably generated a couple extra hundred dollars by doing it. "He's signing/ I'm buying!" One wonders just how much merch was sold... the lineup for merch was bonkers at the night's start, but supplies seemed to be holding out when I visited the table at the mid-set break... (no one seemed to be showing interest in Ginn's OTHER project with Vallely, Good For You, though. I would have considered it but shot my wad on Black Flag merch instead).

Not only was Ginn obliging with signatures, he was actually kind of friendly-seeming, which I didn't expect, exactly. Since he was standing right fucking next to me at one point, I asked him briefly if he could name guitarists who influenced him (he said something about how there were too many to mention). I babbled at him about how unique he was -- "no one plays like you!" (he said something about how he was glad, because it wouldn't be worth doing otherwise) and when I just sort of sputtered about how beautiful it was to be hearing him, he came in for a fucking HUG!

So I hugged him. I did not think THAT would be happening... you don't figure Greg Ginn for a hugger. So there's that. 

3. The audience wasn't quite what I expected, either. Usually you go to punk shows and you see familiar faces, but I only recognized two people in the venue tonight, and only one from show-going (another was a European guy in a studded leather punk jacket who I ran into at a bookstore once and fell to chatting with).  You also expect that a band from the early 80s would draw an older crowd. Maybe it's just that the OG's of Vancouver are better friends to Ron Reyes than I was tonight -- maybe all the old punks who COULD have come to the show stayed home -- the usual suspects who came out in numbers for Dead Bob the other week. Instead, there was a huge contingent of weirdly good-looking, youthful kids, mostly no older than 25, of varied genders, who enthusiastically stage dived and crowd surfed and moshed through the set. There was a bit of a weird "lookit me" angle to some of their expressions, a self-aware vibe to what they were doing, but I should imagine that, with the number of cameras about, some of their hijinks got well-photographed. The kid with the backwards baseball cap giving two thumbs up and grinning... the dark haired smiling girl... the guy doing backflip rolls overhead into the audience... Maybe some of them had followed the band up from Seattle? I'd say the overall demographic was 20 years younger, on average, than what I witnessed at the Dead Bob show (where no one moshed at all, that I saw, unless you count Byron launching himself into the audience with his guitar). It was hard for me to fit my head around the idea of someone actually born in the 21st century nonetheless still wanting to stage dive to Black Flag -- kids who grew up seeing mosh pits on Youtube, you know? -- but by damn, they sure looked like they were having fun. 

I was not even tempted. 

4. Finally, I have to give credit to Mike V. His stardom as a skateboarder was apparently very significant to some of the audience, and indeed, I saw Black Flag skateboards in the room, which I presume were being sold as merch. But he's a fine vocalist for this band. He's somewhat Rollins-like in his delivery and has a kind of snarly, glowery way about him that perfectly suits the lyrics he's spitting out. He has charisma and a strong voice, though he moved the mic away from his mouth for what seemed the evening's loudest screams. He has a way of staring intensely at the audience that is scary and intimidating, but when some weird kid joined him onstage to sing "Louie Louie" and said something about (I think) dedicating the song to Jesus Christ (!?), Vallely didn't knock him back into the crowd or punch him out or such, but -- after taking the mic back -- ultimately laughed and hugged him and tried to get him to actually sing the chorus with him.  

The kid didn't, but he seemed happy enough to be up there, then dived back into the pit after a few minutes. 

The first set was entirely My War, as noted. The second set involved a lot of the early singles and Damaged-era material -- "Depression," "No Values," "Six Pack," "Revenge," and an updated version of "TV Party" with lyrics about people staring into their phones. "Wasted" and "Police Story" were notable in their absence. There were only a few digressions into later (post-My War) Black Flag, my favourite of which was probably "Black Coffee." There was an extended "Slip It In," as well, but it's one of the band's most disturbing songs, seeming quite misogynist; my favourite song off that album was "The Bars," but sadly, it did not get played. Loose Nut, Family Man, The Process of Weeding Out, and What The... all also went completely un-represented. In My Head popped up only once, in the form of "I Can See You," which is probably the weirdest song off that album. But even if many of the songs in the second set weren't favourites of mine, and I left wishing I'd heard "The Bars" or "Annihilate This Week" or the "In My Head" title track in their place, Ginn's guitar work was ALWAYS enjoyable, and Vallely fun to watch, stalking around, growling. A bit one-note in his performance, but, like, so was Rollins, kinda. I had never seen Black Flag in any format before last night. I left feeling totally satiated (and a bit sore).  

If you get a chance, you should go. Real good show. Sorry again, Ron. 

Black Flag tour dates, here.