Black Flag - Damaged

Pitchfork 92

As the last song on Damaged begins, Henry Rollins introduces himself. “My name’s Henry and you’re here with me now,” he says. Then he growls, as he does on and off throughout the rest of the song. “I don’t even care about self-destruction anymore.” The song ends, and he’s nearly breathless. “Damaged, my damage!” He sounds like he’s gone through several lifetimes of torture. “No one comes in. Stay out!” It’s 1981 and he is 20 years old.

Rollins joined Black Flag less than a year earlier when he was just a fan who viewed them as hardcore punk godheads. In his memoir, Get in the Van, Rollins wrote of watching the band perform: “It was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen,” he said. “All the songs were abrupt and crushing. Short bursts of unbelievable intensity. It was like they were trying to break themselves into pieces with the music.” At that point, Dez Cadena was the vocalist, with bassist Chuck Dukowski and guitarist Greg Ginn handling the songwriting. When Cadena decided to move to rhythm guitar, Rollins was recruited to try out. Offered the spot, he accepted, and quit his day job managing a D.C. Häagen-Dazs store to move to California to be the new lead singer of Black Flag.

In the trifecta of early ’80s hardcore, alongside Minor Threat and Bad Brains, Black Flag crystallized what hardcore could do at its most crowd-pleasing. Minor Threat was more existential, and Bad Brains more romantic. Black Flag took the ethos of fast and loud and made it into a lifestyle. Though they’d achieved success as a band before Rollins, it’s the tone of his voice, simultaneously conveying anger and empathy, that elevates Damaged to its rightful position as a cornerstone document in the history of punk.

Thirty-five years on, Damaged still sounds absolutely berserk. Though made up of what is easily identifiable as “songs,” the record is at its most formidable when it becomes chaotic. Bassist Chuck Dukowski’s bass sounds like rubbing two giant sticks together to start a fire. His playing often feels like the way a Cro-Magnon man might approach rhythm, harsh and mean. Guitarist Greg Ginn is a wizard, playing his guitar like it’s a dental drill. With Cadena keeping some semblance of structure, Ginn shreds riffs apart, extending them into mini-solos across half a verse. He’s closer in spirit to Jerry Garcia or Sonny Sharrock than other hardcore guitarists. His playing is violently virtuosic, sliding between wild, fuzzed-out abandon and the immaculate conception of the chug that makes hardcore so exciting. While Cadena and Black Flag’s parochial drummer Robo establish a basic lifeline of stability, Ginn throws paint on the canvas straight from the bucket.

Damaged does have its semi-traditional moments, and they all suffer from the band trying too hard. Consider the fairly crappy pogoing punk number “TV Party,” something of a cult classic for its singalong chorus. It’s perfectly banal, this dumb little song taking potshots at normies who want to “watch TV and have a couple of brews,” which may or may not have posed a threat to the way of life of Black Flag and their fans. But on an album that is otherwise adventurous, sarcastically shouting out “The Jeffersons” and “Hill Street Blues” is an unnecessary tug back to earth. These are bad details. The more they seem like feral animals, the better.

They’re at their scuzzy best on songs like “Spray Paint,” which is just 32 seconds long. It begins with a second or two of feedback, like an engine revving, before taking off. “It feels good to say what I want/It feels good to knock things down/It feels good to see the disgust in their eyes,” Rollins sings. When the chorus hits, Robo stomps the crash cymbal, and the band screams the refrain: “Spray paint the walls!” They’re the kids of Lord of the Flies with guitars instead of spears.

So thank god for Henry Rollins, a beacon. Previous singers of Black Flag are cult favorites, but none could penetrate through the wall of sound like him. His desperation is the centerpiece of the album, pleading with you—with himself—for release from pain song after song. His clarity of tone balances out Ginn and Dukowski, and he acts as a sort of ringleader pulling in tentative listeners and converting them into fans. On songs when he’s hurting, particularly “Damaged I,” he can be hard to listen to, but he is always impossible to ignore, like an actor dying in convincingly dramatic fashion on screen.

It’s the album’s inherent violence—both self-inflicted (as suggested by the cover image of Rollins punching out his reflection in a mirror), and that which is brought to bear upon well-deserving abusers—that makes the album’s hate and danger so attractive. Hardcore has continued to evolve, and the adrenaline offered by Damaged has been absorbed wholesale by hundreds of other groups. Straight edge hardcore groups utilized Black Flag’s scorched-earth approach, abandoning subtlety for unadorned aggression. Grindcore and thrash bands traded heaviness for speed; listening to them is like cheering on a car race. From Los Crudos to G.L.O.S.S., bands have narrowed the rage present in the lyrics of Damaged and used them to motivate political action, where Black Flag just kind of seemed to be bothered by unfairness.

When Damaged emerged, though, it was an anomaly. In the 1981 LA Times review of the album, Robert Hilburn compared the band to melodic punk rock group X five separate times. Though he loved the album, he noted, “The group’s grinding guitar attack … still lacks the brightness of X’s often rockabilly-accented arrangements.” That may seem like an absurd comparison now, but in 1981, the cultural and sonic space between a poppy band like X and one like Black Flag was not so large. The many shades of grey in between had yet to be defined in detail. Damaged was such a leap forward for punk, the only point of reference was miles behind.

That’s changed. Hardcore was just beginning in the early ’80s, evolving out of punk rock. This was a time before the genre splintered in a million fractions, and they were essentially all contained with Damaged: trash, grindcore, youth crew. None of those really existed in ’81, whereas now they all have a deep canon of often absolutely brutal-sounding records. We’re not yet at the place where a record like Damaged sounds quaint, but Black Flag have a lot more competition in their bid for catharsis through intensity now. And even forgetting hardcore entirely, rap is often the place wild teens look for thrills.

I first heard Damaged in the mid-’90s, when I was 12 or 13. Every song was an anthem. Black Flag railed against “them”; for me, that equaled teachers, parents, jocks. Authority is authority is authority—smash it all. now, as an adult, would I find it as remarkable as I did then? Listening to Damaged now sometimes feels as much an anthropological experience as much as a visceral one. There is a certain pleasure in reverse engineering the album’s controlled chaos. Over time, Black Flag has achieved a mythological status, and searching for the source of their timeless potency can lead to a wormhole of ephemera. Their music alone may not have sustained such fervid devotion.

In a sense, then, Damaged has survived more as a historical living document than as a piece of art. Should it be considered as it was written in the early Reagan years on the cusp of a technological revolution? Just like a well-armed militia has a very different meaning now than in 1776, perhaps the way we heard Damaged has, and should, change. Hardcore, at its most potent, has always dealt with problems pertinent to the time and place we live now. Most of the hatred expressed on Damaged is vague, “They hate us/We hate them.” The utility of that unspecificity may have run its course. We don’t live in forever, we live in a very volatile now.

Perhaps the best way to experience Black Flag was as Rollins once did: in concert, something Damaged can only imitate. Head to YouTube for a show in Hartford in 1982 and watch a shirtless, scruffy, and jacked Rollins roll around on the floor, arching his back like getting he’s getting zapped back from the dead. Dukowski smacks the bass strings more than he plays them. It’s basically impossible to see what Ginn is actually doing, his hands up and down on the strings, back and forth on his guitar neck, like he’s playing some kind of demented game of catch. The audience sings the words, comes up on stage, hangs out there. No one in the band minds. Or maybe they don’t even notice, zoned out on their own planet. Watch them play in Philadelphia in 1982. Rollins keeps getting punched by a member of the crowd. He leans into it. After a few rounds of getting hit, Rollins clocks the daylights out of him. It’s a real baptism by fire. For the wrong listener, Damaged may be just noise. But for the right one, perhaps it is too.