Henry Rollins/Black Flag

"Fuck, that's Henry Rollins!" I say.

And it was. He was doing the world's most unfunny stand-up on Comedy Central. After I realized who it was, though, it became the most hilarious thing I had ever seen - I mean, why is Henry Rollins doing stand-up? Why does he do poetry readings? He's like the naughty librarian in bad films, he puts on his glasses and he goes on stage and chats and acts normal, then he takes them off and stomps around and screams like the Incredible Hulk.

I really like the song Liar and I don't know why. I remember the Rollins Band performing it on the Grammys, and me and my dad watching it. He watched it in utmost fascination, and when it was done, said, "Hmm. That was interesting". Which is the most diverse musical comment I've ever gotten out of my dad regarding a post-1977 band ever, so I was impressed. I think I like him much better in theory than I do in reality.

Oh, and he's the only person I've ever met who frightened me. Not that he wasn't a nice enough seeming guy, but he was enormous and I met him in a gym for christ's sake - "Oh, there's Henry Rollins, doing bench presses, let's go talk to him!" Uh, let's not. His neck is like twice the size of his head.

His ethos is so ultra-macho that it goes over the top and becomes silly and cartoonish. He's sort of like the butch version of Axl Rose with less interesting songs. His songs are okay, but they all take themselves so seriously that I simply can't. I like a little bit of his spoken word stuff and his publishing company has put out some good books, but for the life of me I cannot take him seriously.

His music, however, is turgid, overbearing, and not what I want to listen to. At all.

he's like a comic book superhero. his veins are silly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_3g4QPojMc

his people skills have gotten better i think

love the stevenson belch at the end lol

That poor guy probably still has nightmares about that night.

his people skills have gotten better i think
-- latebloomer, Saturday, February 23, 2008 7:12 PM (3 hours ago)

One would fucking hope.

I've not previously had much wrong with Rollins' and his schtick, Damaged was the first hardcore album I ever bought, and it's still second-best. I've never gotten on his case for much, not for the self-important spoken word crap, nor his self-contradicting coffee-generation anti-drug shit, but seeing that clip makes me think maybe he's just a fucking asshole after all.

the other thing that occurs to me is that while I don't have much issue with the Minutemen, most of the other bands from the SST roster that Henry recites just weren't very good, and the poor kid's apathy and ignorance of them was entirely justified

Keep in mind, though, that Henry was just about 22 or 23 there, and the lead singer of a pretty dogmatic punk band. I'd be disappointed if wasn't acting like an asshole.

Alright, but gets me thinking of this article I dug out a few years ago, some guy for the LA Times had interviewed Flag when they first burtst out and the LAPD was busting heads all over town at HC gigs.

Guy had contrasted American punk (read LA Hardcore) with English punk, talked about how the Flag and the Jerks were well spoken and polite, whereas the Clash and the Pistols were know for being as rude as they possibly could.

A nice dialectic, but I guess a false one, at least seeing Rollins there.

that kid's from dearborn!!! I wonder what happened to him. He mustve gone to some of those early negative approach shows.

I actually dont mind if rollins wants to be an asshole like he is in this interview, if that's what his hardkore persona was all about and the fans demanded on some level. Its this new smug "I can stand on stage and do horrible smug, obvious stand up comedy and then call it "spoken word" so its unassailable" thing that pisses me off.

but from the looks of his ebay buys and what he plays on his radio show he's got an awesome taste in music

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1_E34CTcY7k

I think Rollins has chilled out a lot. I wouldn't know personally, but the things I've read/hear seem to indicate that he's a pretty polite and nice dude these days.

I've interviewed him four or five times. He's extremely polite, nice, and a music geek like nobody you've ever talked to in your goddamn life. At the end of our last conversation, he spent like a half hour asking me about early '70s Miles.

This made me laugh a lot.

nice

That's awesome.

Classic

sweet how ginn ends end right where he started, hair-wise

A+++

bookmarked thread

Spot looks great.

Spot and Pettibon still look exactly like they did 30+ yrs ago!

These were posted on a thread i made on another board so may as well post them here
http://www.brianwalsby.com/comics/blackflagandme.jpg

http://www.brianwalsby.com/comics/life-after-black-flag-1.jpg

http://www.brianwalsby.com/comics/life-after-black-flag-two.jpg

unaccustomed as i am to self-promotion, and hoping this doesn't break ilx rules at all, can i slip a tiny plug in here for my Black Flag biography, Spray Paint The Walls, about to be released by Omnibus? you can read an extract at the Quietus here - http://thequietus.com/articles/03049-an-extract-from-stevie-chick-s-spray-paint-the-walls-the-story-of-black-flag - if yr interested...

nice, stevie! i would read this book.

thanks scott!

Hehe very cool to see this come to fruition after all the legwork you put in to getting the interviews!

i know, it feels like YEARS since we visited you in the OC...

Time to come back!

nice, stevie! i would read this book.

― scott seward, Tuesday, November 3, 2009 7:16 AM

looking forward to this!

I don't think there's any band that's more entertaining to read about than black flag

the flag stuff from that rollins biog is a hoot

lol, I grew up in Manhattan Beach, so this was great to read. I was about 6 months old when this concert took place, so I missed it sadly. This was a legendary story, though. Both Morris and Ginn went to my high school (as did most of the Descendants, I believe). I think there's like a great unwritten screenplay about late 70s punk/beach town culture clashes. Maybe I need to write it. Anyway -- I will read this book! Black Flag is totally fun to read about.

lol polliwog park

they used to have this amazing play structure called "The Sunken Galleon" there. oh man, it was so dangerous. can't believe I didn't die on that thing.

stevie i am going to buy and read yr book, exciting!

tyler have you read "enter naomi" by joe carducci? there's some good stuff in there in the vein of what you're talking about

there is stuff about the sunken galleon in Carducci's book?! kidding -- i haven't read it but I should. i talked to Ginn once for my high school newspaper ... it didn't go very well!

I cannot think of anyone worse to be owner of much of the best of US underground music of their era.

I remember telling Joe Carducci that it was criminal that that catalogue was mouldering away, that no-one was remastering those CDs, that the archives were just disintegrating and Ginn doesn't give a shit, and Joe told me he thought the CDs sounded just fine.

Joe thinks the CDs sound fine or Joe said Greg thinks they do?

Joe thinks they sound fine, or thought, in 2009 or so, when I was doing my Flag book.

The Husker Du CDs generaly sound awful, though. And the SST CD of You're Living All Over Me had a 2-second gap between Kracked and Sludgefeast.

And there was still a market for CDs when we spoke and I was like, even if you're not interested in preserving this legacy surely Greg realises he is leaving money on the table here (that he would never share with the artists anyway) (but maybe that's the issue - if he remastered/reissued/gussied-up the rereleases, he might come under fire from artists who still want their royalties and now won't be fobbed off by being told the money is being used for the next Zoogz Rift LP).

yeah I wish I'd bought more Husker Du records when they weren't so expensive. I only have Flip Your Wig on vinyl, all their other albums I have on CD

I picked up my copy of Zen Arcade, pristine double LP, from the record shop round the corner from me in 1992 for £5 [FIVE POUNDS]. It's not so pristine now, I'll admit, but it still wipes the floor with the CD my brother bought later. Those SST HD CDs sound so tinny, in a way the vinyl really doesn't.

My Zen Arcade lp had the address of the British office on the back. Coincidentally my brother lived at the far end of the same road. It was a very long road. I think I walked down to the street number at one point and didn't see an office or anything there. May have missed its existence.

Where was the office? Was it in Bounds Green? I know Southern Distro were there back in the 90s.

208 Bravington Road in Queen’s Park.

Oh wow - what a strange bit of London to choose as their lair.

It’s possible it was only an address to receive their post and they did actual business elsewhere.

AI Overview

Henry Rollins is working on a secretive project in Nashville, Tennessee that's not a museum. The project is expected to launch in Nashville, and Rollins has invested his life savings into it.
What's the project?
Rollins has described the project as "the biggest chunk of meat that I've torn off the bone yet".
He's been working on it with his manager, Heidi May, for a couple of years.
The project won't involve live performance.
Rollins has said that the project will "make people smile until their faces hurt".
Where's the project located?
The project is likely located in Chestnut Hill, near the Nashville City Cemetery.
In August 2022, an LLC affiliated with Rollins bought a building at 1024-1026 Third Ave. S. for $2.7 million. The building previously housed an HVAC company.

the largest Planet Fitness on earth...

I remember years and years ago interviewing Dean Wareham, back when the Galaxie 500 stuff was out of print, and asking about all the rights issues and why Rough Trade was making the albums unavailable etc., and I was surprised when he told me he and the band actually already had the rights and masters and just hadn't gotten around to them yet. I have no idea what the story is with all the SST stuff, but clearly some bands have gotten their stuff back and re-released it, right? Meat Puppets, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, Soundgarden...

Dinosaur Jr too. probably not a coincidence that these are mostly the bigger bands that probably have more money for lawyers

although Alternative Tentacles and now Superior Viaduct have managed to reissue Kill From The Heart by the Dicks in the last decade or so, so who knows

Its notable that the SST album Soundgarden reissued was remixed and had different artwork to the SST release, which I think might have been a legal workaround. With Meat Puppets - every time I've spoken to them about it, they've been vague, but I think they sorted something prior to the Ryko reissues in the 90s. With Sonic Youth I think they just dared to reissue once they had the might of Universal behind them - but I think Thurston was pretty cut up over what happened there, and there's a reference to it on that Experimental JetSet song Screaming Skull ("Sister's there") (and that song had extra lyrics by Dave Markey, who very much got screwed over by SST). But regarding Husker Du, every time I've spoken to Bob about it he's very much now at a place where those records are Greg's, and Bob doesn't have the energy or inclination for the big legal fight to reclaim them. SST are now repressing a lot of their back catalogue on vinyl, but I get the sense they're straight represses, not remastered or anything (not that I think the vinyl needs touching up or anything).

Can someone even buy a new physical SST St. Vitus record? kinda sad, if not.

Here, for eg, is the newly pressed SST vinyl currently in stock at juno, a great UK online record store, for a sense of what they're currently keeping in print: https://www.juno.co.uk/labels/SST+US/?media_type=vinyl

It ain't that cheap!

But they have the s/t Saint Vitus

Cool that they repressed the Screaming Trees LPs, I know Mark hated their SST output but I love those records

Last time I talked to Mould, some time back, before Hart died (maybe around the time some official HD merch suddenly became available?) he implied that it was still a matter of him and Hart being at an impasse, that was the biggest thing. I don't know if he meant in terms of money, getting paid or paying or what. I'm not even sure Mould's account of anything is necessarily trustworthy; he may have stubbornly been waiting to buy out Hart? That might not matter now, so it's also possible he just can't be bothered now that there's no money to be made, which may be why he is allegedly punting it over to Greg. Any case, if I learned that Bob or Greg had the rights and masters to those records and were just sitting on them, I wouldn't be shocked.

Been after that saint vitus s/t for years. Everytime i tried to buy via discogs the seller would say they couldnt find it. So even though its a tad expensive I decided I better get it. So thanks for the tip

and yes, SST trees stuff is amazing. I think Gary Lee at least still loves them.

my favourite stuff by them

If you’re so inclined, you’ll find some of the more offbeat things SST released technically back in the hands of those who made them, but they’ve only got the rights, not the masters. I’m talking about Scott Colby’s Slide of Hands (which is great, by the way, Henry Kaiser’s SST output, stuff like that. Also, it was in the press kit, if not the liner notes, for AT’s reissue of Kill from the Heart that they remastered it from a clean vinyl copy because the tapes were gone.

*Slide of Hand (and I missed a closing bracket there).

Its notable that the SST album Soundgarden reissued was remixed and had different artwork to the SST release, which I think might have been a legal workaround.

I assumed the artwork was just a case of them not having the original art files (Craig Ibarra was in the art department and might have been there at the time, someone ask him!) so deciding to recreate it with a contemporary sheen instead. As for the remix, aren’t they on record as never been completely satisfied with how the original sounded (because it was recorded with a mobile rig and not in a ‘proper’ studio by a guy who’d worked with Black Flag towards the end)? I know they edited “Flower” to fix a missed drum hit.

On a Steve Hoffman forum discussion it says --

Several artists formerly on the label, including Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets, sued SST to reclaim their master recordings, claiming unpaid royalties.
The source for that information is cited as being from page 496 of an unidentified Michael Azerrad book, but I assume it's referring to Our Band Could Be Your Life

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/greg-ginn-sst-and-rescuing-bands-catalogs.298972/

I interviewed Steve Earle once, and he told me that when he left MCA records he did an audit and found that they owed him a million dollars in royalties, or something like that, but it would have taken 3/4 of that money and two years of his time to squeeze it out of them, so he wrote it off. Honestly, I have no idea how many copies these records have sold. I do know it took decades for the Sex Pistols record to officially go platinum. (Barely) related, I talked to Gordon Gano once, and he told me the first Violent Femmes record was, at least at the time, supposedly the only record to have ever gone platinum without having been on the top 200.

AI Overview

https://p7.hiclipart.com/preview/341/656/896/thumb-signal-smiley-emoticon-clip-art-lovely-smile.jpg

That graphic is more like AI Overlord.

tb; dnw

I've seen some guys from 3rd tier SST bands asking on the big SST facebook page asking "Hey so how much trouble would I get in if I put our albums up on spotify? SST doesn't answer emails"
Maybe Greg isn't too concerned with like Tar Babies or Always August getting 95 cents a year off streaming.

Tar Babies begat Tortoise to some degree so think they'd be of interest. They played the Mule Club the band God's Brixton venue so presumably toured Europe and the U.K. that was before my hitching days so not sure where.
I saw that gig and enjoyed it I think I got a CD later on the strength of having seen them. Seemed to do a maverick take on hard-core akin to the Meat Puppets but using funk instead of bluegrass. So would love to have access to their music.

Are Always August not on Spotify and places I think I heard a podcast on them recently possibly You Don't Know Mojack so sought out some of their music. Maybe it was just YouTube I listened on. Had heard the name and that they were referred to as psychedelic. But podcast was talking about use of improvisation throughout.

I think I might pick up s remastered cd if such a thing existed.

Those SST bands should just pretend they re-recorded it ala Taylor Swift and throw their work up on Bandcamp and streaming.

Largeness With (w)holes is up indeed

Tim Harding from Always August was with SST for ages, well into the ’90s with his jazz band Hotel X.

I do know it took decades for the Sex Pistols record to officially go platinum.

It always blows my mind that the Ramones debut didn't even go gold until 2014!

The Ramones debut wasn't available on CD by itself until 2001, having up til then in the CD era been bundled with Leave Home on the first volume of All The Stuff & More.

On a similar note, I noticed the Dead Boys have basically reissued their 2 studio albums with alt mixes and comp titles.

are those the new ones with the AI singer?

Husker Du was so dysfunctional that even their merch site that went live a few years ago shut down relatively quickly.

It stuns me that Mike Watt remains loyal to Greg Ginn. SST needs to be liquidated

Young, Loud and Snotty is done alt French released early mix done by Bob Clearmountain.

We Have Come for your Children I think is a modern mix made from original tracks.

Neither are released with their exact original title or artwork.

Bob also played bass on Young Loud and Snotty.

It stuns me that Mike Watt remains loyal to Greg Ginn.

Mike Watt is an astonishingly, heartbreakingly loyal dude, just absolutely one of the loveliest of people, and that extends to being indulgent and forgiving of a guy like Ginn. Also, a lot of the people within that circle who have grudges against Ginn also begrudgingly respect what he managed to build, no matter how dysfunctional it became (and no matter how much the credit belonged to others within the SST sphere, too).

"Black Flag" on the bill for Coachella 2026 (also Iggy Pop, Suicidal Tendencies, Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter etc)