Every punk agrees that Black Flag were an important band. Few can agree on what exactly made them so. Survey 10 people sporting tattoos of the four bars, and you’ll get at least 10 different opinions on which album is their greatest, whether their live records and demos are better than any of their proper albums, who was their best singer (or bassist or drummer), whether they were better with one guitarist or two, when they started to suck, and whether band mastermind Greg Ginn is a genius guitar player, a jazzbo wanker, or a genius jazzbo wanker. With Black Flag, dysfunction and debate are as much a part of the brand as lurid Raymond Petitbon artwork.
But amid all the division that engulfs the band, there remains no greater lightning rod than My War—the San Andreas Fault of hardcore, where, with a simple flip from Side 1 to Side 2, the fastest and most ferocious band in punk instantly transformed into the doomiest, most despairing band in metal. My War instantly drew a line between those who saw hardcore as a specific style of jackhammering rock music and those who viewed it as a broader philosophy of nihilism and negation—one that might very well be used to dismantle hardcore itself. By radically altering Black Flag’s musical DNA, My War realized their fundamental spirit of contrarianism.
Originally formed in Hermosa Beach, California, circa 1976, Black Flag (né Panic) didn’t just expand punk rock’s capacity for velocity and violence, they effectively extinguished the genre’s last vestiges of glam-schooled vamping and pub-rock reverence. For all their anti-rock-star posturing, first-wave punks like Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer nonetheless came equipped with showbizzy stage names and carefully cultivated aesthetics, and it didn’t take long for them to become icons themselves. Black Flag, by contrast, were T-shirt-and-jeans misfits who, early on, rejected the notion of the rock band as a tight-knit gang. By the time they made their recorded debut in 1978, they were already on their fourth bassist and second drummer; over the next two years, they’d cycle through three lead vocalists—Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, and Dez Cadena—each of whom lasted in the role just long enough to cut a pivotal EP and establish their respective faction of loyalists.
In effect, early Black Flag demonstrated that the person singing the song was less important than the energy and intent behind it, and the participatory response it elicited. And the band would find its longest-serving frontman through a veritable act of punk-rock karaoke: At a June 1981 gig at New York venue A7, Black Flag invited a fan-turned-friend onstage to sing “Clocked In”—an apt choice, given that he’d driven all the way from D.C., and had to make the five-hour trip back in time for his early morning shift at a local Häagen-Dazs. Cadena was contemplating a switch from lead vocals to rhythm guitar, so a few days later, the band summoned the ice-cream shop employee back to New York for a rehearsal. After a single session, Henry Garfield was invited to join Black Flag on their cross-country tour, for which he initially served as a roadie and Cadena’s understudy at the mic. Upon settling in L.A., he adopted a new, tougher-sounding surname, Rollins, and laid down vocal tracks to the songs that Ginn and bassist Chuck Dukowski had written for the band’s full-length debut, Damaged, an album that—from its shocking cover photo to its light-speed 33-second strikes to its anti-everything worldview—forever changed the word “hardcore” from an adjective to a noun.
After years of personnel shake-ups, unforgiving DIY tours, militaristic practice regimens, extreme poverty, and chronic harassment from the LAPD, Damaged was poised to become the moment where all of Black Flag’s hard work would finally pay off, thanks in part to a new national distribution deal between Ginn and Dukowski’s SST imprint and the MCA-affiliated label Unicorn. Instead, the album attracted pre-release pushback from MCA’s president over the “anti-parent” lyrical content and, upon its arrival in November 1981, a legal falling-out with Unicorn that resulted in the band being barred from releasing music under the Black Flag name while various lawsuits and countersuits played out in the courts. (Ginn and Dukowski tried to get around Unicorn’s injunction by releasing a compilation of pre-Rollins demos, Everything Went Black, on SST in 1982 without the band’s name on the cover; a judge ruled they had violated the court order and sent them to jail for five days.) What’s more, Damaged had only been out for a few weeks when the new Rollins-led five-piece iteration of the band started to crack—after a December 1981 tour of the UK, their Colombian-born drummer, Roberto “Robo” Valverde, was denied re-entry to the U.S. due to visa issues and forced to return to his home country.
It would take more than legal roadblocks to stop a band as hell-bent as Black Flag. In 1982, with D.O.A.’s Chuck Biscuits behind the kit, the group laid down a blistering set of road-tested new material in which they began to wiggle out of hardcore’s straitjacket and indulge overt displays of Stooges and Sabbath worship. Those recordings should stand as one of the greatest punk-rock albums of all time, made by the most powerful iteration of Black Flag ever—but they were never officially released and thus relegated to mythical bootleg status. Over the next year, Biscuits and Cadena would leave the band, while tensions between Ginn and Dukowski would prompt the latter to walk (though he remained involved as SST’s de facto booking agent). By the time Unicorn’s bankruptcy liberated Black Flag from their lawsuit woes in late 1983, the band was a shell of its former self, with only Rollins, Ginn, and ex-Descendents drummer Bill Stevenson reporting for duty.
Not only had the composition of Black Flag changed dramatically during their blackout period, so had the entire hardcore landscape that Damaged had cemented. By 1984, hardcore was mutating as rapidly and radically as rock’n’roll in the late ’60s, and Black Flag’s closest SST peers were exploring musical realms far beyond the circle pit, with the Minutemen pulling jazz and funk into the mix, the Meat Puppets drifting into peyote-speckled country, and Hüsker Dü feeding British Invasion pop and psychedelia into their buzzsaw attack. Black Flag were likewise feeling suffocated by hardcore’s stylistic rigidity and devolutionary ethos—yet, as the genre’s most visible ambassadors, they arguably faced the greatest pressure to stay in their lane. “I didn’t want to find a formula and just stick with it, which in rock music is the way to be really successful,” Ginn explained in a 2013 interview. “[In] the early punk scene, there was a certain strain of ‘You shouldn’t practice; you should just bang it out, and we’ll be fine.’ And that’s something I always went against the grain about.”
In the van, the band were more likely to be cranking King Crimson and Hawkwind than Agnostic Front; in his tour diary, Get in the Van, Rollins recounts the time Cadena pranked a room full of mohawked European punks by putting on a ZZ Top tape and telling them it was the new Exploited record. “Black Flag was never a punk band,” Rollins would tell the L.A. Times in 1987. “Black Flag was never part of a movement. See, punk bands can’t do this or that kind of music; there’s punk ethics, punk rules, punk dress codes—and there’s always some punk-rock cop in the crowd to enforce them. Who makes the rules?” Black Flag’s next move wouldn’t be a simple reinvention, but an act of retribution against the scene they had cultivated, which now dared to dictate the speed of their songs and the length of their hair.
As Black Flag’s experience touring Damaged through North America and Europe demonstrated, when you make it your life’s work to exorcise your rage and discontent from the stage, it’s inevitable that some of that antipathy gets redirected right back at you. At Black Flag shows, the standard punk practice of hocking loogies at the band was upgraded to broken beer bottles, lit cigars, folding chairs, and cups of piss—and this was from the people who paid money to see them, never mind the Nazi skinheads who crashed their gigs looking for a brawl. As the frontman, Rollins bore the brunt of the abuse, necessitating a degree of mental and physical preparation—a combination of weightlifting, over-caffeination, and extended periods of seclusion—that increasingly estranged the clean-living singer from his pot-smoking bandmates. While the rest of the group slept on the floor of the band’s practice room, Rollins took up residence in Ginn’s parents’ backyard study, a dank, dusty space he dubbed “the Shed,” where he spent solitary hours decompressing and drafting his earliest attempts at Black Flag lyrics and spoken-word monologues.
Black Flag shows were a battleground, and with My War, Rollins took the fight on record. On Damaged, Rollins inherited a batch of songs that Black Flag had already beaten into shape with Cadena at the mic. The bulk of My War was also written by Ginn, with some parting-gift song contributions from Dukowski. But the evolving sound of My War reflected Rollins’ own physical transformation into a punk-rock Conan the Barbarian—a hulking, muscle-bound, long-haired warrior sporting tiny shorts and wielding the mic like a sword.
Dukowski wrote My War’s storming title track to air out his simmering grievances with Ginn, but once Rollins got his hands on it, the war was all his. Rollins transformed the song into a one-size-fits-all assault against all the forces bearing down on him at the time: the cops who followed him around town, the judges who sidelined his band, the punks who spit in his face. The song’s progression mirrors the band’s escape from legal purgatory, with a tense intro that pressure-builds like a caged animal breaking through a locked gate. “My War” is no defiant “Rise Above”-style call to arms, but rather a paranoid screed from a band that trusted no one. As the song starts to disintegrate in its dying moments, Rollins repeatedly screams, “You’re one of them! You’re one of them!” to everyone and no one in particular, sounding very much like someone who spent most of his private time holed up in a dark, isolated backyard bunker.
For its first 20 minutes, My War feels like a logical extension of Damaged—i.e., a more refined follow-up to a primeval debut. Ginn’s serrated riffs and Rollins’ jugular-bursting delivery are still in full effect, but the shout-it-out gang-vocal camaraderie is gone and the tempos are more controlled and complex. The sludgy-to-speedy shifts of “Beat My Head Against the Wall” propel a song that’s rooted in the same anti-normie critique as “TV Party” but stripped of the novelty shout-outs to Hill Street Blues, while “The Swinging Man” fuses the group’s unbridled aggression with the Minutemen’s polyrhythmic mojo. But even though Damaged and My War were both produced by Glen “Spot” Lockett (SST’s in-house Martin Hannett), the album’s methodology and sonic signatures were drastically different.
To certain purists, My War isn’t a proper Black Flag album at all, because it’s less a document of a band in action than a studio-engineered simulacrum of one. Eager to get the group back in record-store racks after the extended absence, Ginn opted to play all the bass parts himself under the pseudonym of “Dale Nixon” rather than wait to recruit a proper replacement for Dukowski. And much of the recording took place in the band’s rehearsal space at Total Access Studios, where the thick shag-carpeted walls yielded a drier, more chiseled, yet thundering sound—call it proto-Albini—compared to the relentless firehose spray of Damaged. As such, it was the first Black Flag recording to really embrace improvisation and three-dimensional space—a natural exploratory impulse from a group that, musically and legally, had been backed into a corner. As Stevenson said in a 1985 interview with Suburban Punk zine: “In the past year and a half, the band has been kinda like when a fish gets trapped in the tide pool and the water goes out, only in a public sense. And I saw that channelled into Henry’s poetry…. As for me and Greg, we spent our hours jamming and learning new rhythm techniques and new musical techniques. We’d spend hours and hours just playing and Henry would be off doing his writing. That was our way of blowing off steam from all the legal hassles.”
For all his hardcore bona fides, Stevenson was also a huge fan of Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward, and he seized every opportunity to unload rack-tom fills that pan from speaker to speaker as if you were hitching a ride on his drumsticks. And where Dukowski’s bass practically served as a lead instrument on Damaged, My War rippers like “Can’t Decide” and “I Love You” gave Ginn more room to indulge his love of the Grateful Dead and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, countering the songs’ runaway-train momentum with contorted chord progressions and counterintuitive zag-zig solos. But if My War’s first side pokes and prods at the musical parameters of hardcore, the flipside steamrolls all over them.
When you drop the needle on Side 2’s opener, “Nothing Left Inside,” you’re greeted with a steady, stalking drumbeat that, 12 seconds in, plunges you into a slow-motion apocalypse that churns and burns for the next six minutes, like a post-hardcore “When the Levee Breaks.” It’s followed by another pair of six-minute metallic grinds—“Three Nights” and “Scream”—that effectively answer the question: What if you made the first 20 seconds of “Iron Man” the entire song? At the time, Black Flag weren’t the only underground rock band surrendering to sludge, but where Bay Area freaks Flipper delivered their dirges with absurdist art-prank irreverence and L.A. doom prophets Saint Vitus faithfully embraced the majesty of ’70s metal, Side 2 was less Black Sabbath than Bleak Sabbath, an unrepentantly ugly union of skull-crushing riffs and soul-crushing rants—the sound of fear and self-loathing in Los Angeles.
As well as an abrupt musical break from Black Flag’s past, Side 2 was the endgame manifestation of a thematic thread that ran all the way back to their very first single, “Nervous Breakdown.” Long before mental health became a talking point, Black Flag were burrowing deep into the darkest corners of the psyche: Amid Damaged’s rabble-rousing anti-authoritarian anthems were unflinching examinations of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. On My War’s Side 2, the music slowed down to more accurately reflect the paralyzing angst and animus coursing through Rollins’ free-associative diatribes. If the cover of Damaged was Rollins punching his fist into a mirror, here, he’s punching himself in the face. “I want to make you feel like you make me feel,” Rollins declares. Mission accomplished.
All the while, Ginn and Stevenson trudge forward like unsympathetic bystanders to his anguish, offering no relief or resolution. One oppressive, cement-shoed song ends and another one just like it begins with cruel, clockwork efficiency, a doom-metal Groundhog Day. The closest thing to a moment of levity comes when the haunting, multi-vocal-tracked madness of “Three Nights” (the one where Rollins compares his life to shit stuck on a shoe) comes to an end and “Scream” commences with the exact same dripping-faucet drumbeat, like some perverse practical joke. Even the crudest hardcore records imply the presence of a stage-crushing mob angling to shout every lyric into the lead singer’s outstretched mic; My War is the sound of Rollins locked in the Shed, imprisoned by Ginn’s wall of noise, raging at enemies real or imagined, and screaming himself into hallucinatory hysterics. On Damaged, Rollins famously signed off by screaming, “Damaged! My damage! No one comes in! Stay out!” On My War’s second side, he pulls you inside and refuses to let you leave.
Black Flag started playing My War songs live on their 1982-83 tours, and as Rollins would later tell Musician magazine, “People really bummed. You know, ‘faggot hippie,’ the full can of beer in the head, the fights, all that shit.” Reviews were equally merciless. At the time of its release, Maximum Rocknroll described Side 2 as “sheer torture”; years later, The Trouser Press Record Guide decried its “sheer awfulness,” while the AllMusic Guide would call it “a pretentious mess of a record with a totally worthless second side.”
My War opened up a chasm many followers weren’t willing to cross back in 1984, but others would find rapture in the rupture, which continues to reverberate through under- and overground rock to this day. For the subset of punk kids who came of age in the mid-’80s but never got rid of their Black Sabbath records (a cohort that included Kurt Cobain, Mark Arm, and Buzz Osborne), seeing Black Flag on the My War tour was their version of watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Side 2 would become as profound an influence on the gloomy sound of grunge as crappy Pacific Northwest weather, as well as the catalyst for the parallel stoner-rock scene that would produce Sleep, Kyuss, and Queens of the Stone Age. But the album’s long-tail impact extended far beyond the ’90s, connecting everyone from mainstream-crossover metal acts like Mastodon to self-flagellating punks like Pissed Jeans to modern-day misanthropes like Chat Pile. At this point, My War’s legion of followers practically constitutes its own rogue religion, enshrined in tribute songs, academic papers, band names, and—in the case of former Neurosis guitarist Scott Kelly—neck tattoos.
My War kicked off a furiously productive stretch for Black Flag that would see them release four more albums over the course of 1984-85, joined by new bassist Kira Roessler. But while the band continued to challenge punk orthodoxy—with forays into spoken word, extended jazzy jams, and melodic hard rock fist-pumpers that wouldn’t sound out of place on a KISS record—nothing they did afterward yielded the lingering seismic impact of My War.
