Hermosa Beach, CA · hardcore punk · punk

Black Flag

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The band that effectively invented American hardcore's touring model — Greg Ginn's atonal guitar still sounds like nothing else from 1981.

Black Flag started in Hermosa Beach in 1976 under the name Panic, founded by guitarist Greg Ginn and singer Keith Morris. Morris had been slated to play drums, but Ginn moved him to vocals after hearing his energy and charisma. The band struggled early on to keep a steady bassist, a gap that helped shape Ginn's guitar-heavy, self-reliant sound.

Musically the band mixed the stripped-down drive of the Ramones with atonal, jagged guitar soloing closer to Johnny Thunders, later adding abrupt tempo shifts and touches of free jazz and contemporary classical music. Where their peers played fast three-chord songs, Black Flag stretched into longer, slower, more complex arrangements, and interspersed records and shows with instrumentals.

The band went through a rotating cast of singers, including Morris, Chavo Pederast, Dez Cadena and, from 1981, Henry Rollins, each bringing lyrics fixed on isolation, neurosis, poverty and paranoia delivered with an anti-authoritarian edge. Damaged, released with Rollins on vocals, set much of the template for American hardcore, and Raymond Pettibon's four-bar logo and artwork became just as recognisable as the songs.

Nearly everything the band released came out on Ginn's own label, SST Records. Constant touring across the United States and Canada, with occasional dates in Europe, built the small-venue circuit that later independent bands relied on, and helped make Black Flag one of the defining influences on punk subculture both in America and abroad.

The band broke up in 1986 and reunited briefly in 2003 and again in 2013, releasing What The..., its first studio album in nearly three decades. A legal dispute split the reunion in two: one lineup kept the Black Flag name under Ginn, the other continued as FLAG with Morris, Chuck Dukowski and Bill Stevenson. Ginn announced a further Black Flag reunion in 2019.

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