The L.A. man behind the music that defined the 1980s

The June 29, 1980, version of this paper spoiled Angelenos’ Sunday morning by dropping a dire warning on their doorsteps: The punks had arrived, they usually had been murderous.

Audiences at punk exhibits “mug one another,” Patrick Goldstein reported. “Accounts of reckless violence, vandalism and even mutilation at some space rock golf equipment learn like studies from a struggle zone.”

On the heart of this alleged chaos was the band Black Flag, whose exhibits had change into a magnet for police crackdowns since its formation in Hermosa Seaside in 1979. They introduced a few of that scrutiny onto themselves: Founder and guitarist Greg Ginn finagled a slot at a family-friendly competition at Manhattan Seaside by saying they had been a Fleetwood Mac cowl band, then delivered a sometimes loud, profane set. However the media’s pearl-clutching was disproportionate to the hazard. Ginn wasn’t making an attempt to sow anarchy, simply find the areas that wouldn’t reject punk outright.

In “What I See,” his full of life, lavishly assembled assortment of Black Flag pictures, Glen E. Friedman remembers the violence as wholly on the police facet of the ledger. Promoters referred to as within the LAPD, scared by “overwhelming crowds that had been displaying up that usually appeared threatening to them.” The band goaded the cops with songs akin to “Police Story,” and its fury is palpable all through the e book — even rehearsals appear to be barnburners. However the response — SWAT groups, billy golf equipment, helicopters — was absurdly disproportionate.

“Company Rock Sucks,” Jim Ruland’s nicely researched historical past of Ginn and the label he based, SST Data, places some context across the absurdity. And it’s an exhilarating story within the early going, the story of a tradition being stubbornly constructed from the bottom up. In its Nineteen Eighties heyday, SST launched not less than a dozen canonical rock albums that had been notable for his or her rejection of conference. Black Flag’s piercing hardcore and Sabbathy sludge shared little with the Minutemen’s springy, spiky punk-jazz fusion, the Meat Puppets’ Useless-like excursions or Hüsker Dü’s mix of pop savvy and stun guitar. However collectively, they made SST the last decade’s preeminent indie label. As Ruland writes: “Ginn was all in favour of punk rock as an idea — a inventive name to arms — not as a selected type of music.”

In that regard, it’s somewhat disappointing that Ruland — a fiction author who’s additionally co-authored two earlier books on Southern California punk — typically sticks to label historical past and doesn’t make a stronger argument on his topic’s behalf. SST’s accomplishment wasn’t simply signing a number of tolerating bands; it turned the wellspring and prime mover for a lot of Gen X tradition and the indie rock that adopted. Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins exemplified a era’s bitter, antiestablishment, closely ironic posture. The second facet of its 1984 album, “My Conflict,” was a grunge touchstone. Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth gave the ‘90s alt-rock explosion its melodic textbook. Negativland set a template for anticorporate pranking and tradition jamming. The touring paths that indie bands throughout the nation took — and nonetheless take — had been largely developed at SST’s Torrance workplaces. Its advertisements and assessment copies fueled a era of zines and their writers.

Jim Ruland’s newest e book is “Company Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Data”

(Clair McAllister)

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A lot of this sprang from Ginn — or extra exactly, from his resentment of authority and establishments. Past the police bullying and hyperbolic media consideration, Black Flag’s recording profession was stalled by an prolonged authorized squabble with MCA Data after an exec dubbed 1981’s “Broken” an “antiparent file.” (The band made that right into a literal badge of honor, slapping stickers with the quote on copies of the LP.) Ruland’s chapter titles are framed as confrontations led by the label — “SST vs. the Media,” “SST vs. Hardcore” — however the battles had been typically Ginn’s.

Nonetheless, Ginn wasn’t anyone’s concept of the chief of a cultural motion. He grew up obsessive about ham radio and different engineering-geek phenomena. (SST was initially a small electronics outfit, brief for “solid-state transmitters.”) He spoke little as a musician or label chief — and by no means to Ruland, who was advised, “I retired from interviews a very long time in the past.” In “What I See,” Ginn is normally dressed as if he’d simply come off a shift assistant managing a Kroger’s.

Rollins with Black Flag at Vex, Boyle Heights, 1983. From “Company Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Data.”

(©Wild Don Lewis)

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What made Ginn, Black Flag and SST so distressing to outsiders was partly a matter of aesthetics. Cowl artwork and present flyers designed by Ginn’s brother, Raymond Pettibon, featured feverish, provocative imagery obsessive about intercourse and demise. It was additionally a matter of timing. The soporific Reagan period made the music and lyrics SST trafficked in appear an energetic risk. The notorious 1982 punk-rock episode of “Quincy, M.E.,” plainly impressed by information protection of Black Flag from The Instances and elsewhere, was so decided to depict the scene as violent and nihilistic that Jack Klugman’s no-nonsense Quincy took the exceptional step of defending the ‘60s counterculture to make punk appear all the more serious.

SST’s contempt for law-and-order conservatism didn’t precisely make them what we’d take into account progressive as we speak. Ladies and other people of colour had been scarce; Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler curtailed her restoration from a hand damage for concern of being booted from the band, resulting in everlasting harm. Songs like Black Flag’s “Slip It In” had been overtly misogynistic. Cowl artwork and SST letterhead flirted with Nazi rhetoric. Unhealthy Brains frontman H.R. was identified for homophobic outbursts. The label got here grotesquely near releasing a Charles Manson album.

Ruland ably catalogs these ups and downs — and deserves a lot credit score for preserving the narrative afloat by means of the ‘90s and early aughts, nicely after the label had exhausted no matter authority the zeitgeist had conferred on it. He does assume a readership that is aware of the bands nicely, which makes for limp music criticism at instances. (One Black Flag album “suffers from an total lack of high quality.”) However he additionally delivers a potent cautionary story about enterprise beliefs gone bitter. After bands both broke up (Black Flag), met tragic demises (Minutemen) or jumped to majors (Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth), Ginn struggled. He held bands to onerous contracts and have become unreliable about royalty funds. He obtained into an prolonged authorized squabble with Negativland that solely made him look petty and hypocritical. He handed on Nirvana however signed scads of mediocre acts that diluted the model.

All of which makes Ruland’s title double-edged: Company rock sucks, as SST’s slogan put it, as a result of it’s litigious and exploits an financial system of scale that mistreats particular person artists. By the early ‘90s, nonetheless, you needed to squint to see what distinguished Ginn from the fits SST railed in opposition to.

“Every little thing about Greg is unfathomable,” the late Screaming Bushes frontman Mark Lanegan advised Ruland. “He is a big enigma.”

The ultimate pages of the e book are primarily devoted to expressions of disappointment in Ginn, who now makes use of SST virtually solely as a car for his personal tasks. He’s out of contact with Pettibon, stays standoffish with artists and resists releasing masters that might gas reissues for middle-aged Gen Xers desirous to spend money on their nostalgia. (Ruland speculates many tapes are misplaced or irreparably broken.)

In actual fact, it could be that the world SST created doesn’t imply a lot past Gen X nostalgia now. An bold artist now not wants a file label, nonetheless defiantly anticorporate, to get consideration; promoting out, as soon as a stigma, is now an ambition. However earlier than SST — and Ginn — strayed from their founding beliefs, they served as proof {that a} neighborhood didn’t have to advertise tribalism or meet purity checks — and that anyone must thumb their nostril at conservative pieties. These rules are enduring.

Athitakis is a author in Phoenix and writer of “The New Midwest.”