Keith Morris Says Hi

After side 2 of My War, I gave up on Black Flag. At that point in my narrow musical worldview, heaviosity was a crime better left unheard. I could get my ears around side 1, with some work, but damn it, where was my "Rise Above"? Sludgy riff monsters were unforgivable and best left on the dust heap of one's personal listening history. Forward, righteous soldier, to one thousand more three-chord toetappers. Thus, all the subsequent Flag records blurred together and all these years later, I realized I couldn't tell one from another. And who were all those singers? And when did they get that little girl on bass? And wasn't Bill Stevenson the Descendents' drummer? I had no clarity on these issues, and damn it, and I wanted clarity. Enter Stevie Chick's (even "authors" have punk pseudonyms now) Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag, which answered my questions and even got me to download the rest of the catalogue. And that's the good news.

The book chronicles the early transitional years from Panic to Black Flag, and provides some insight into the Ginn family, a talented and eccentric bunch by all accounts, and clearly establishes Ginn as the driving force (and later slavemaster) and mastermind that got the boys out of the church, on to some stages and into the van. And while in the final years the man wears the big black hat, it's striking how many folks he screwed over still sing his praises. Unfortunately, he refused to be interviewed for this book (as did Rollins, Dez and Stevenson, apparently), so Chick is left to scour the fanzine archives for quotes from those folks. The decision she makes, sadly, to fill that void, is to load up on lengthy interviews with the likes of household names Dave Markey and Tom Troccoli. A good editor would have cut pages of heartfelt quotations from these folks, but this editor was having boyfriend problems, as typos and redundancies are the rule, which I could live with (but really, 20 bucks for a paperback and you can't clean up the typos?) if I didn't have to wade through another long Kira Roessler passage. But no index? Really? No Pettibon pix?

But if it's information (for the non-insider- I have no idea how much she gets wrong) you seek and you're just looking to fill in some gaps and to get inspired to pull out Damaged again (which I did on several occasions and I'm sorry but it holds up incredibly well, even for the middle-aged) this will do that. Call this a lost opportunity. I have no idea who Stevie Chick is, but perhaps a different biographer with ties closer to the band could have gotten more folks to talk. Maybe not. Ginn isn't going to speak to anybody, and it sounds like Rollins probably won't either. So the writing is second-rate and the editor screwed the pooch and there are gaping holes in terms of voices, but I got the information I needed. Perhaps I should have just read Our Band Could Be Your Life again, but then my local heroes at the magazine shop wouldn't have that slow Thursday afternoon sale, so call it community building. By the way, the SST site has all these records for nine bucks. I'm going to pull out Everything Went Black right now, with In My Head on deck. My family will be in the other room, watching Spongebob. I suggest you go straight to The First Four Years- that shit never gets old.