Police Story
The eruption of a new scene based around the beach communities of Los Angeles
helped contribute to the downfall of the increasingly fragmented Hollywood punk scene.
Black Flag acted as a bridge between the two scenes, playing both in Orange County and at
older venues in Hollywood. They started out in a rented church in Hermosa Beach, which
became one of the focal points for a new wave of more intense bands. Joe Nolte of the Last
began living at the Church in mid-1979, and caught the flavor of it in a September journal
entry:
“When I got home this evening there were cop cars surrounding the Church. I opened
the door and almost got my guts blown away by a police shotgun. They were after some
armed jewel thief. Fifteen minutes later they found and killed him. Another typical day
at the Church.”
Black Flag soon became synonymous with chaos and police violence in LA. Formed in
1977 by Greg Ginn and Keith Morris, and soon joined by bassist Chuck Dukowski, the
band recorded its first EP, Nervous Breakdown, in January of ’78. Ginn’s brother Ray, under
the name Raymond Pettibon, designed the famous Black Flag logo of vertical bars and
did the cover art for the record. Pettibon would go on to become one of the most famous
illustrators in the punk scene and a legendary underground artist, doing the art for most of
the Black Flag records as well as for the Minutemen and other bands on his brother’s label,
SST Records.
Keith Morris’ partying ethic was legendary, and he was a wild
frontman at every show. The Black Flag song Wasted, which became
a more popular song for Morris’ next band the Circle Jerks, was an
autobiographical assessment of Morris’ life at the time. In fact, after the
dust had settled from the Elks Lodge police riot earlier in the year, it was
ascertained that Morris had likely been the cause of it all. A wedding
was taking place in a downstairs ballroom, and Morris stopped the bride
and groom in the lobby. He demanded the groom say the pledge of
allegiance or sing the national anthem, leading someone in the wedding
party to call the cops.
Black Flag played a show at the Starwood that Mike Saunders of the Angry Samoans
remembered fondly in Forced Exposure:
“Greg Ginn would just be standing there on stage at the beginning like a very normal,
mild-mannered person, and Keith Morris would be crawling around the floor, drooling,
with beer foaming out of his mouth, of course. And Dukowski would be close behind and
21
they would all be gnawing on Greg’s feet, and he would have this worried sick look on his
face like ‘What have I got myself into? Why am I baby-sitting these maniacs?’”1
The Hollywood and South Bay bands began making more forays down into Orange
County, to venues like the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Fleetwood and other spots that cropped
up. The striking difference between Hollywood and the burgeoning Orange County scene
was the beach kids were much tougher, stronger, and more violent than their decadent
Tinseltown counterparts. The slam dancing was way more intense, with the vertical pogoing and jostling of the ’77 era giving way to violent flailing and whirling motion. People
were out to hurt other people. They were surfers and skaters and neighborhood delinquents,
and it was the introduction of a highly physical element to the punk scene. The news media
embellished it further, as Joe Nolte noted in his journal entry on Sept. 4, 1979.
“There was an interesting article in the Orange County supplement to the L.A. Times:
it was all about ‘Punk gangs’ of hundreds of kids terrorizing Huntington Beach. It told
about one kid being asked by police whether or not he had any scars, pulling out a razor and
slashing his wrists. It also told how these ‘followers of Sid Vicious’ went around beating up
old ladies, etc. Sounds like fun.”
Jack Grisham of TSOL (True Sounds Of Liberty)
remembers the Huntington Beach crowd:
“The guys we were running with were killing people.
We grew up in a fucked neighborhood, and to them punk
rock wasn’t a game, they were killing people. Most of them
are dead or in prison now. Our drummer dropped out of
school in ninth grade. We weren’t going to hold jobs – we
were going to end up in prison. And that’s exactly what
happened. Dead, prison, or mental institutions, that’s
exactly what happened to this band.”
Grisham embodied almost all the aspects of the
different schools of LA punk – theatrical, aggressive,
physical, a chameleon – and there weren’t many roles he
didn’t try on. What was most impressive was that he could carry them all off. A number
of musicians – like Mike Ness of Social Distortion – from that era did some hard time for
various drug offenses, robberies, violence, etc., and Grisham eventually did his. In his case,
he claims he got convicted of the only two crimes he hadn’t done in his life. These days
Grisham looks back in wonder and some disgust, feeling like Alex in Clockwork Orange
after being “cured”.
“We were animals, we were fucking animals. And other people would see us and say
fuck them, they’re fags, they’re thieves, they’re robbers…And we were. It literally makes me
sick to my stomach to think about the person I was.”
On the other hand, the distinction that Grisham makes is that the band kept its criminal
activity and negative behavior separate from the punk scene. As TSOL, they had a positive
message and treated everyone else in the scene supportively. As individuals out on the
streets, they were terrorists. Not many other punks were so good about compartmentalizing
their lives. It wasn’t the case at the very beginning, though by 1981 the band was distancing
themselves from their earlier behavior. Grisham told Flipside in May 1981, in reference to
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misguided kids that were getting into fights in the name of TSOL:
“These kids don’t understand, back in the Fleetwood days we were involved in some...
just... the worst gang fights, and usually we came out on top, but we just got sick of it. Fights
where people got knifed and stuff and it’s just foolish: ‘That guy called me a name so I’ll kill
him’, not very smart, ya know?”2
One of the bands that developed along with Black Flag out of the Hermosa Church
scene was Red Cross, who got their start as 12-14 year olds playing junior high school punk.
After a couple of years, they were forced to change their name by the medical Red Cross,
and became Redd Kross. In an interview in 1982 while they were still under the original
name, zine writer Al Flipside joked that some people were still under the impression that
Steve McDonald was 12. Steve replied:
“Fuck, I’m 14, they’re living in the past.”
Various early line-ups of Red Cross were like a who’s who of LA
punk luminaries. Greg Hetson, later of the Circle Jerks and Bad Religion,
was their first guitarist. Lucky Lehrer played drums once, before being
deemed too good a drummer and leaving with Hetson to join the Circle
Jerks. They were also a notable breeding ground for Black Flag singers,
first losing drummer Ron “Chavo Pederast” Reyes to Black Flag, and
then guitarist Dez Cadena to them a year later.
“The only person stolen was Dez,” said Steve McDonald in 1982.
“Ron we were glad to have out of the band, and he was already out of
the band really. We didn’t even want a band then because it was such a
disaster with Ron, he was such an asshole.”3
In spite of the increasing popularity of punk in greater LA, it was a series of fragmented
scenes and the South Bay was still pretty much a place where everyone knew everyone. The
Descendents played their first gig at the church as a trio, before Milo Aukerman joined the
band and they became one of the most goofy and popular punk bands of the Eighties. Ron
Reyes and Greg Hetson came back to the Church one day talking up a show in Orange
County at the Renaissance Café that the Descendents had been supposed to play, where
a new band called Agent Orange had made a strong impression. Each new discovery of
bands and scenes beyond the twenty or so punks who knew each other in Hermosa was a
revelation. The next day, Joe Nolte recorded his surprise at the scene at the Church when
he arrived home.
“I cannot begin to describe the feeling: to have lived as a ‘minority’ in a town where
you personally knew everyone who looked like you within a twelve mile radius; and to
come straggling home from work one cold and windy night, open the front door, and see
over fifty teenaged kids with spiked hair hanging out. I suppose I hadn’t realized the true
significance of the Huntington Beach phenomenon… Regardless, I was now staring at it.
Michele (Alessi) had invited a Huntington Beach band called the Screws to play in our
room. They played, the H.B.-ers wormed, and a suitably inebriated time was had by all. It
was akin to a shot of adrenaline… These hitherto unlooked-for punks, new blood, so many
and so young… it was very inspiring. I began to think there might be hope for the scene
after all.”
Unfortunately the police weren’t feeling so charitable, and the harassment of punks
23
continued unabated. At a Mars Studio show that autumn, Nolte described the situation.
“A fair amount of people showed up, and since no booze was allowed inside everyone
hung out in the alley and got drunk. After a while I got inebriated to the point of incapacity
and went around smashing every beer bottle in sight, forged a few hand stamps, etc. Finally
Black Flag was ready, so we all went in. Then the cops showed up and arrested the owner of
the Studio for not having a permit. Black Flag were hesitant, so everybody yelled for them
to go ahead and play. They got ten seconds into the first song before all the power went off,
including the lights. C’est la vie. We all tumbled outside to raise hell. Me and Medea (Greg
Ginn’s girlfriend, whose infamous crash pad was immortalized in the Black Flag song Room
13) started setting flyers on fire. A helicopter flew by with its searchlight on so everybody
posed. A black and white came down the alley while one cop declared us an illegal assembly.
Then some irate guy stormed out of his house and tried to pick a fight. Raymond Pettibon
jumped him (to my consternation – he was my ride home), a couple of other people joined
in, the guy started swinging a big board, and for a while it looked like all hell was gonna
break loose. Then the cops jumped in, so I grabbed Ray and steered him toward the car,
while the guy ran inside to ‘call his gang’.”
In the autumn of 1979, Keith Morris left Black Flag. By most accounts of the many
members of the band over the years, Black Flag was Ginn’s band and if you didn’t subscribe
to Ginn’s work ethic or vision, you had a limited life span with the band. With Keith
Morris, the whole band grew weary of his overindulgence.
“If we weren’t learning new songs, it was my fault,” Morris said. “I was constantly losing
arguments. I felt like the only reason I was in this band was to take orders. I wasn’t kicked
out, I just left. They did a show with Chavo a week later – it was like everyone knew this
was bound to happen. I started the Circle Jerks a week after that.”4
The Circle Jerks were one of the most important missionaries of the hardcore gospel.
Unlike Black Flag, their shows in California weren’t plagued by police violence, and across
the nation they didn’t draw every thrill-seeking Tom, Dick, and Harry out of the woodwork
like the Dead Kennedys did. They drew moderately large crowds everywhere they played,
and managed to do their shows without many headline-grabbing incidents. Best of all, they
were just a lot of fun.
Who else sang manically about vasectomies? (I had an operation/ a statement of our
time/ they tied my balls together…/ operation/ operation/ snip and tie/ snip and tie) And their
cranked-up version of Wasted that Morris took from Black Flag made the original sound
like a beer hippie tune. One of the only objections among their peers was that they were
shameless plagiarists. According to “Falling James” Moreland of the Leaving Trains, Live
Fast Die Young was written by his friend Ken Salter when they were in a high school band
called the Mongrels from 1978-79. Greg Hetson was in the band for two weeks, long
enough to pilfer the tune. Mike Saunders of the Angry Samoans formed a side band in
1980 called the Lurchers, and the first bass player was Roger Rogerson of the Circle Jerks.
It didn’t work out because three of the first four practices Rogerson showed up on the
wrong day.
“We were doing one Angry Samoans song plus Gimme Sopor plus Gas Chamber and
Not of this Earth before the Samoans did them,” Saunders told Forced Exposure in 1983.
“When Roger moved on he remembered most of the chords to Gimme Sopor from the one
24
classic Keith Morris, beer in one hand, mike in the other
photo:Dixon Coulbourn
or two times he had shown to practice. So he was like ‘Yeah, I’m going to be clever and
steal this song. It’s never been done.’ Except he fucked up the chords, he didn’t get them
right, though he probably improved the song and it became World Up My Ass. The first time
Todd (Homer, bass guitarist) heard the song was by surprise. Todd had written the song, it
was his masterpiece of the first three years in the band. It was some little club like Blackies
with fifty people there and the Circle Jerks broke into the song. He goes ‘They’re playin’ my
fuckin’ song!’ He grabbed Roger into a headlock and dragged him off the stage yelling “You
stole my fuckin’ song! You stole my fuckin’ song!’ For at least a solid year whenever Todd
would be at a gig that Roger was at, Todd would threaten Roger in an alley with physical
dismemberment.”5
The Angry Samoans played a controversial role in the LA scene as a result of their
ongoing feud with Rodney Bingenheimer, the lone DJ in town who was playing the
recordings of bands from the fledgling punk scene. There was a big rift over the issue,
because some saw Bingenheimer as one of the most important people in promoting the
scene, and others resented him as someone playing God over who made it and who didn’t.
The Samoans did one of their typically brutal songs about him called Get Off The Air, which
did not endear them to the Bingenheimer defenders. In addition, the Samoans were from
the San Fernando Valley – as were Fear and the Dickies – and unlike the other two bands
25
never quite seemed to overcome their outsider status. They felt that they shared a good
sense of humor with their Valley peers, and were a little annoyed that the scene couldn’t
handle poking fun at its sacred cows. Along with Black Flag, they were also one of the
earliest LA bands that went on to become part of the hardcore era of punk, forming in
October of 1978.
The Angry Samoans put out
an EP under the name of the
Queer Pills in 1980, which they
didn’t think was good enough to
release under their own name but
thought might be a clever way to
trick Bingenheimer into playing
one of their songs. Al Flipside
told the band that Rodney called
him up after receiving the Hitler’s
Cock EP and said ‘God, Al,
listen to this good record I got
this week.’ Somehow word got
through to Bingenheimer that
he was being set up and he never
played it, though the Samoans
had told virtually no one outside
the band about the deception.
“The closest he got to being
fooled was when he had his little
disco setup at the Starwood,” said
Mike Saunders, Angry Samoans
photo: Brian Trudell
Gregg Turner. “My girlfriend at
the time and two of her friends went up to Rodney with an unmarked test pressing of
our first record and said ‘Rodney, I’m from the group the Young Punk Girls from Orange
County. We love you. We look at your picture before we go to sleep at night. And there’s a
song about you on side two, the last track. It’s really good. It talks all about how much we
like you.’ He goes, ‘Oh yea, about me? Young Punk Girls uh?’ He cued it up and everything
and it looked about ten times like the fucker was ready to play it, but he never did.”6
While other bands gained momentum, Black Flag struggled with singer turnover. The
first hint of the muscular kind of frontman that the band was later to become identified
with, Ron Reyes stepped into the band during one of the most chaotic periods of violence
at shows. The shows at the Fleetwood tended to be a level of violent madness the likes of
which had never been seen before. Ambulances regularly rolled up. Mass brawls were the
norm. The Huntington Beach punks, who invented the form of slam dancing known as the
HB Strut, had found an outlet for their testosterone that no organized team sport could
match. Kyle Nixon, an early promoter in Seattle and member of the punk band Solger,
recalled first getting to know Black Flag while Reyes was singing. After meeting them
earlier in 1980 in Seattle and befriending them so that the band snuck him into the over21 club they were playing at, Nixon talked to them about doing an all-ages show in May
26
with the Subhumans. The enterprising Nixon, who never let lack of money stop him from
putting on shows, recalled in a Dementlieu interview:
“We started working on a plan to get them back to Seattle. It was on May 2nd – that
was when they came back. What happened then is we’d gone
out, me and my crew, to call Crass – in the middle of the night
because they were in England. We went out to my buddy’s mom’s
real estate office, and we were just gonna break in there and use
their telephone because we didn’t wanna pay for a long distance
telephone call. We went over there, started to break in, but the
door was open, so we just walked in there. They had a jug of wine
in the refrigerator, so we drank some wine and then we stole the
Xerox machine.
“We took the Xerox machine, carried it out – it took all of us
to carry the sucker out – and we put it in the back of the station wagon. When we pulled
out there was a cop sitting across the street and we’re all shitting our pants, trying to be
cool. We took it up to Tom’s place, where Black Flag stayed last time, and he said, ‘No way,
get this thing outta here,’ so I took it home, put it in my garage, made the flyer for the show
on it, and then I sold the machine to Black Flag for $200. I needed to come up with some
money, and they were willing to pay $200 for it, so they paid for the hall by buying the
machine. I found a guy with this really nice sound system that he brought in, and he saw all
these kids – all underage – drinking, drunk off their gourds, no security – I hired no, zero,
security – and he just said, ‘I’m out of here.’ So Chris Utting from the Vains – he was in the
Muffs later – said he’d bring his band’s practice PA, but he wanted to charge me the same
amount that the guy with the real nice sound system was gonna charge me, and that pissed
Greg (Ginn) and Gary (Chuck Dukowski) off big time. They were just pissed, and they
said, ‘No way, that’s just totally fucked, bending us over a barrel like this.’
“Ron Reyes and one of the guys from the Vains had an argument in the bathroom, and
when Ron was up there singing, a guy named John, who was friends with the Vains, threw
a quarter and hit Ron just under the eye. That just set off...fisticuffs...people flying on the
stage...people flying off the stage. People just started going crazy because there was so much
tension, so many people were drunk, and there was no security, no one to pull people apart.
I’m seventeen and I’m hammered – ripped – and I’m sitting back and enjoying the mayhem.
It was like the show to end all shows. The police came, and the fire department came, and
they closed the show down. Some kids destroyed the stairwell to the public defender’s office
that was in the same building. They tried to sue me over that and I said that the contract
I’d signed with them was worthless because I was seventeen, and my signature was nothing.
That upset them, but I had ’em... I wasn’t legally able to sign that contract.”7
Reyes tried to live up to the reputation of Keith Morris – in Seattle while staying with
Nixon, Reyes stood up in the middle of a theater they were watching a movie at and started
pissing – but the chaos of Black Flag got to be too much for even him. In the middle of
a Fleetwood show three weeks later on May 23, he suddenly announced ‘I’ve had enough
of this shit, I quit!’ and walked off the stage. Months after Reyes quit, Black Flag was still
looking for a singer. Throughout the summer they were playing shows with Keith Morris
stepping in, Brendan Mullen from the Masque, or pretty much anyone that wanted to
27
get up on stage on a given night and commandeer the mike. Before a trip to Vancouver,
Dukowski suggested at the Church one afternoon that Dez Cadena come along and be
their new singer. Though Red Cross was a five piece for the first time, and showing a great
leap forward in maturity with Cadena beefing up their guitar sound, the offer was too good
for Cadena to pass up.
Cadena came on board with Black Flag during the summer of 1980, which was the
brightest time in the history of LA punk. The band itself was at its best, with a little snappier
tempo than came before or after. Cadena’s tough vocals were well suited to Black Flag,
especially since they came from a lanky, long-haired Christ-like guy who didn’t fit any punk
stereotypes. The lightning speed of the Circle Jerks and other new bands influenced Black
Flag to play even harder, and to differentiate the style from older punk the word “hardcore”
increasingly became the tag for the modern sound.
Aside from the beach scene and the remains of the Hollywood scene, bands started
cropping up from random inland Orange County suburbs as well. Some of the best punk
bands to come out of LA came from inland, like the Adolescents, Social Distortion, and
Agent Orange. It was the apartment of Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness that the
Adolescents immortalized in their song Kids of the Black Hole.
Kids in a fast lane living for todayy
No rules to abide by and no rules to obey
Sex, drugs, and fun is their only thought and care
Another swig of brew another overnight affair
House of the filthy/ House not a home
House of destruction/ Where the lurkers roamed
House that belonged/ To all the homeless kids
Kids of the black hole
Mike Ness was a huge Rolling Stones fan, and Social Distortion
was much more rooted in 70’s punk and rock and roll than many of their
more thrashy contemporaries. Unfortunately Ness felt there was no need
to wait until he was a rock star to start living like one, and he was a mess
almost from the start. The Adolescents’ take on his lifestyle was dead on,
and Social Distortion songs like Lude Boy were fairly autobiographical.
Despite Ness’ problems, the band kept proving themselves to be one of
the best in LA, especially with their first full-length album Mommy’s
Little Monster. During a visit to New York, a drunken Ness threw a
bottle from the crowd at an Agnostic Front show and hit guitarist
Vinnie Stigma in the knee. He was chased outside by the whole crowd,
got hit by a taxi, and was stomped repeatedly by everyone.
Jack Rabid, publisher of the music zine Big Takeover, remembers:
“He was fucked up so much then. He was funny, though. I remember staying out in LA
with my girlfriend Sumishta, and Mike was such a junkie at that time. He’d ask to borrow
ten bucks, with the most innocent, puppy dog face, and we’d just laugh and say ‘no, Mike,
you’re going to spend it on drugs and not pay us back’. He could look so innocent, and deny
it so earnestly, but you knew that was exactly what it was for.”
The drugs and alcohol caught up to Ness before too long, though, and he found himself
28
Mike Ness, Social Distortion
photo:©2013 Marie Kanger-Born
29
in and out of jail after 1983. Sporadically playing shows throughout California and Arizona
for the next four years, the revolving door of band members and Ness’ problems kept Social
Distortion from doing another album. For the legions of fans they had garnered with
Mommy’s Little Monster, this was inexplicable. For those who were familiar with Ness, it
was no surprise. During their 1982 Another State of Mind tour, Social Distortion and Youth
Brigade filled in for Black Flag at a big show at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC,
which also featured Double O, the Faith, and the Effigies. Ness did himself no favors with
the DC crowd by spending much of the night mocking straight edge.
Venues began to open up again in the summer of ’80, and for the first time there was a
scene that encompassed a good deal of the variety that was LA. The Starwood in Hollywood,
off limits to punks for the past year, was booking large doses of hardcore punk.
In Chinatown the Hong Kong Cafe held numerous shows, and in predominantly
Chicano East LA, the Vex was born. Jimmy Alvarado, an East LA native and Flipside
contributor, recalls:
“The Vex was a club created by Joe ‘Vex’ Suquette and Willie Herron, a member of
Los Illegals and famous artist/muralist. Its first location was at a place called Self-Help
Graphics, then it moved down the street to the Paramount Ballroom, then someplace closer
downtown and finally to the former Copacabana discotheque on Soto Street, where they
added a second room for bands before the place was finally closed down after someone
got shot or stabbed. Like the greater LA scene, there seems to be a prevailing myth that
the East LA punk scene was limited to a very small number of bands centered around an
artists collective known as ASCO – Los Illegals, the Brat and the Odd Squad. You may
find an occasional mention of Thee Undertakers and the Stains, but such mentions are rare
outside of old punk fanzines. The truth is that, even at the beginning, there were more than
those three bands active early on – the Violent Children, Wild Kingdom, and the Warriors
come to mind – and throughout the 80’s a very vibrant scene was
happening with all kinds of bands from all over the east side of the
county making noise.”
The Vex quickly became one of the centers of the LA hardcore
punk scene in the beginning, though it fell off as soon as more clubs
began opening up back toward the beach. Fewer punks were willing
to venture out east. Jimmy Alvarado notes:
“People were afraid to go to shows in South Central or East
Los Angeles – traditionally black and Latino enclaves, respectively
– but had no concerns about heading out to Venice or Hollywood or
downtown LA, which are at least just as dangerous, if not more so.”
Michele Alessi, an early Flipside contributor, recalls a sense of
wonder that none of her crowd gave such things any thought.
“Back then, I never thought about it being dangerous to go to the Vex. What I find
crazy is, while in the process of dating some flyers, I discovered the addresses to some of
these clubs and I can’t believe we even went to these places for a gig! Bard’s Apollo was
deep in South Central! When you are a kid from the wealthier suburbs, you are pretty naive
and don’t know this or that place is really dangerous.”
The interesting thing LA had going for it more than any other city was the extremely
30
strong involvement of Mexican-Americans and other Latinos in the scene. There were
those bands who very openly identified themselves with Chicano culture like the Plugz,
the Brat, and Los Illegals, and early bands like the Zeros who didn’t but were still entirely
comprised of Mexican-Americans.
“I think the ‘fuck you’ attitude of punk was great for Latinos,” Tito Larriva of the Plugz
observed. “You could assimilate into a new culture that was evolving without compromising
who you were, or having to be segregated.”
Larriva also proved to have more of a DIY ethic than a lot of his punk peers from the
early LA scene. With Yolanda Ferrer and Richard Duardo, he formed Fatima Records
in 1979 and put out the first Plugz single. Fatima went on to release the Plugz’ Electrify
Me and Better Luck albums, as well as The Brat’s first and only self-titled album. Larriva
recalled, “I looked in the yellow pages and found the Alberti pressing plant. Manufacturing
each single cost 29 cents, and sleeves cost a penny. It was a mom and pop organization, with
two Latinos in the back pressing records by hand in what looked like a tortilla press. We
ordered 500 right off.”
As well known as Black Flag was throughout the punk world by the end of 1980, they
had yet to do national tours like the Dead Kennedys and DOA. The situation in LA forced
them to pick up and hit the road in 1981. Like their predecessors, by contacting local punk
bands everywhere they went, they helped establish the underground network in out-ofthe-way places that made it easier for bands after them to tour. Black Flag also made a
mark on some of their peers who would prove to be equally influential. The band made it
to New York in March of 1981, where they played a show at the Peppermint Lounge with
Mission of Burma opening. Peter Prescott of Mission of Burma recalled that show having
an influence on the Burma sound.
“We started playing faster. Because a lot of other bands that maybe had our influences
got more atmospheric. We didn’t really do that. We didn’t really have to, because Martin
Swope handled that. And Roger could make atmospheres, but I think we put the hammer
down after that and played harder.”8
Toward the end of this tour, Black Flag signed on Henry Rollins – who had been
known in DC as Henry Garfield to that point – from the Washington, DC band State of
Alert as their fourth official vocalist in as many years. Cadena was burning out on singing
and wanted to just play guitar. While the dual guitar power of Ginn and Cadena only gave
the band more wallop, and Rollins brought a ferocious intensity as a frontman, some of
their fans to that point were less than happy about the kind of sudience the new line-up
attracted. Kyle Nixon of Solger remembered:
“Henry came along, and his personality and build was really very macho, and Dez’s
build, the build of the Black Flag guys is scrawny, white middle class or working class
schmoes. That said to any loser out there that you can put out a powerful thing without
being some tough guy, but when you look at Henry he was like this macho guy. He totally
changed the look of the band and all of a sudden these meatheads would show up and start
smacking people around and it just got really...not fun.”
The constant presence of police diminished as time went on and the powers-that-be
realized that punks were not about to overthrow LA overnight. Still, the cops had a habit
31
of coming out for the larger punk gatherings. In January of 1983, a huge show took place
at the S.I.R. Studio on Sunset Boulevard, with TSOL, Social Distortion, Redd Kross, and
Toxic Reasons playing. There were two thousand people inside and another few hundred
outside. A punk threw a bottle at a passing police car, causing the police to shut down
Sunset Strip for two blocks on either side of the venue, call for reinforcements, and bring
in helicopters and fire engines. This was, after all, the same LAPD that had brought out
bazookas to blow the Symbionese Liberation Army to smithereens while Patty Hearst was
on the run with them. Overkill was their mantra.
The scene played itself in a predictable way, as if all the characters had cues. A few
punks smashed windows and lit fires, and the cops got set to respond. In the middle of
TSOL’s set, the audience was warned the police were coming in and the lights went on. Jack
Grisham from TSOL offered the only new twist to the drama, telling the crowd:
“Stick together. If a cop comes at you, hit the floor and go limp. Everybody sit down.”
In a tribute to how much people respected Grisham, all two thousand members of the
audience sat down on the floor. There were few other people in the punk scene who could
have achieved such a feat. The band played three more songs, but the power was yanked
during Abolish Government. Half of the crowd managed to get out, only to meet battalions
of nightsticks outside, before the building was sealed off by police. Inside the police treated
the punks like fur hunters going after baby seals, clubbing away with unbridled enthusiasm.
The riot inside and out went on for almost two hours, with police barricades going up in
flames and a lot of injuries. In the media reports, police blamed “punks throwing rocks and
bottles at each other” for their intervention.
Grisham downplayed the effect of his charisma on the crowd, because he so often went
out of his way to make sure no one idolized him. One of the mottoes of TSOL was “ignore
heroes”, and Grisham never wanted people doing things simply because he told them to.
“It wasn’t like a power trip thing, people mistake it. It was like if you go over to your
friend’s house, and you’re watching TV, and you say, hey, I got an idea. Let’s build a bomb
and take it out in the front yard and blow that shit up. And you’re like, yeah, okay! So we’d
be playing a show and I’d say something like hey, I got an idea, let’s take these tables and set
them on fire. And everyone would go, yeah! That’s what it was, it was like sitting around
with your friends, it was real comfortable, there was nothing behind it whatsoever. At the
S.I.R. show it was like, yeah, let’s all sit down and then they’ll have to drag us out. It was
just funny.”
After the straightforward punk of their debut release, TSOL began challenging hardcore
audiences with their second release, Dance with Me. Much was made of the “horror rock”
graphics of the album and accompanying songs like Dance with Me and Code Blue, and
many were quick to lump them in with bands like 45 Grave and Christian Death. The
album was one of the best punk albums to come out of LA at the time, yet few saw that
it was entirely in keeping with the style that Grisham has often described as “punk rock
show tunes”. Their musical evolutiom was very similar to that of the Damned, and it was
their answer to Machine Gun Etiquette. Most of the album was high octane TSOL, with
better songwriting than their first efforts, and some truly inspired offspeed songs like I’m
Tired of Life. For a bunch of hard-living punk derelicts in Huntington Beach, the band was
surprisingly adventurous musically. This wasn’t something the slam happy beach crowd
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was known for. Grisham recalls that it seemed natural at the time, drawing from all their
diverse influences.
“Just a mix of whatever! I mean what the fuck, just a mix of bad stage show, watching
too many musicals, just that whole trip. To get TSOL you cross the MC5 with Alice
Cooper with Siouxsie and the Banshees, you mix all this stuff up, the campy stage show...
There were bands I liked, but they were our peers. The Germs were friends. So it was more
the early English punk rock that influenced us – the Damned, Sham 69, Siouxsie and the
Banshees, Adam and the Ants. The early Adam and the Ants was a big influence on TSOL.
Magazine, the Buzzcocks, all that. Real campy. It was like getting your ass kicked by a gay
guy in a dress, that was us.”
“That’s kind of what we grew up with,” says Grisham. “When we grew up, punk rock
to us was a real wide spectrum of stuff. It was a free kind of trip – the deal with punk rock,
was punk rock was Black Flag and punk rock was three kids banging on pots and pans
screaming ‘fuck’ at their mother. Punk rock was the Go-Go’s, and punk rock was the Bad
Brains. It was such a big mix of stuff, and it was all just classified as punk rock. So when we
started playing, that’s what we did. It was like, hey, we can make a song like this and this is
still punk. We can make a fast song and this is still punk. So that was our sound, that was
what we did. It was punk to experiment. To us, selling out would be making the same song
Ron Emory of TSOL, 1982
photo: courtesy TSOL
over and over and over again because we knew it would sell records.”
Fans respecting the authority of a band wasn’t too common in LA either, but Grisham
was known for commanding that beyond the incident at the S.I.R. riot. At a show in Santa
Barbara, the club was concerned about slamming/diving fans wrecking the PA, so Grisham
made the fans bring a long table to the front to dive off it. At the Florentine, Grisham let
everyone up on stage and when the band’s equipment seemed in jeopardy, he asked them
all to get down. They did.
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Unless you knew the truth of Grisham’s multiple personalities,
it seemed like the singer changed every time they released a record
until they kicked him out and the singer did actually change, which
confused things even further. There was Jack Greggors, Jack Grisham,
Jack Lalage, Alex Morgon...all who turned out to be the one and the
same Jack Grisham.
“I just like changing my name, it throws people off,” Grisham
told Flipside in early 1982. “I get these letters saying ‘who the fuck
are you trying to fool, asshole?’ It’s real funny. Like this one fanzine
in San Francisco said ‘another good band bites the dust’ and they say ‘the cause for this is
the new lead singer who is some asshole…’ and they go on and on burning me, saying I’m
an ass, and they don’t know it’s myself. Gotta fuck around some way, can’t burn people by
being a punk rock anymore, so gotta do something else! Wear silk scarves to a punk show
to burn the punk rocks. I don’t go out that much because I usually just do stuff to terrorize
around here.”9
Almost two decades later, after the original band reformed and got embroiled in lawsuits
with the later band, Grisham had only one regret about his spontaneous behavior.
“I changed my name on every record to show people it didn’t matter who was in the
band. That’s a bold move, saying ‘fuck you, I don’t care’. We were an anti-hero rock band.
It kinda fucked me up, when we finally got the new singer. Everybody just thought I’d
changed my name again. There was all this confusion, people would say, well, there’s this
one on this record and this one on that, how do we know which one was you? If I’d just
kept my real name, there would have been a much more clear distinction between the two
bands.”
Posh Boy, a label owned by Robbie Fields that signed a lot of the best Orange County
bands, released TSOL’s first EP and gained a reputation throughout the LA scene for
releasing great material but never paying the bands. Grisham confronted Fields at the
Galaxie Roller Rink a year after the record came out, and not satisfied with his excuses, gave
him a beating. They stayed friends, strangely enough, though the band went on to record
Dance with Me on Frontier in 1981. Their departure from Frontier wasn’t done under the
best of circumstances, either, issuing a public trashing of respected label head Lisa Fancher.
“That was induced by many ounces of alcohol,” remembered Grisham ruefully in 1982.
“We were gargling straight gin before the interview so… that got us into a bit of trouble.
The only one thing that upset me about Lisa was, I like her, I like the way she does things
and gets the bands out and gives them good artistic freedom and everything but on our ad
it was like a big ‘punk rock sucks’ ad. I’m sure if she wouldn’t have applied it like that the
records would have done better. It’s too early, if you say to someone ‘punk rock sucks’ they’ll
say ‘yeah, it sure does’ but if you say ‘Ozzy Osbourne, don’t buy this shit’ everyone will go
buy it. Other than that she was real nice about paying us money and everything.”10
As Grisham noted, punk was still so marginalized that few from the mainstream were
going to embrace an “anti-punk” punk band, and telling your hardcore audience that “punk
rock sucks” was hardly going to get them to embrace your new sound. Adding keyboards to
their next album, Beneath the Shadows, they emulated the musical evolution of the Damned,
while still maintaining an energetic sound. The album won them a lot of new fans, even if it
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was another head-twister to fans hoping for a safe thrash record, and it got them respect in
some quarters for daring to go out on such a limb. Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü commented
that no one would have guessed that the same band that did Property is Theft would have
evolved to writing a song like Soft Focus in such a short time. TSOL was one of the most
popular bands in LA in ’82 and ’83, drawing up to three thousand people to their gigs and
headlining at the Hollywood Palladium. No one but the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag
could command those sort of crowds at the time.
After releasing Beneath the Shadows, they managed one last national tour before sacking
Grisham later in ’83. During that tour, the band played Gildersleeves in New York.
“We’d gotten there and we didn’t get paid the night before or something,” recalled
Grisham, “so we’d ripped off a case of Ancient Age, a whole case of booze. Our manager
Mike Vraney and everybody had taken off, so here’s this case of booze and this bum is
sitting down against the wall and he’s drinking NightTrain or whatever. So I grabbed a
bottle of Ancient Age and uncorked it, and I had my hair in long braids at the time, I had
this little Indian braid thing going. I went and sat down next to this bum and said ‘How are
ya doin’? What are ya drinkin’?’ He goes, ‘Well, I got this,’ and I go “Well, I got this.’ So,
we start sharing the bottle. I started to get a couple of drinks in me, and I got an idea. I sent
Ron Emory over to get cups and the whole case of Ancient Age and we set up a fucking
soup line in front of Gildersleeves pouring Ancient Age! And I’m not shitting you, there
was about two hundred bums in an orderly line! One of them came up and tried to grab
the bottle from them and they beat him down. So, our manager gets back and here’s two
hundred fucking bums saying, ‘Stay away from our home. This is our man’s motorhome.’
They’re all guarding the gear, and they’re all fucked up. There’s one who’s got a shoe on
top of his fucking head, out in the middle of the street. Vraney was so pissed off. He’s
screaming, ‘That was my fucking booze!’” 11
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