Remembering Black Flag-era Greg Ginn and a show with real bite
By Jim Phillips
June 12, 2008
Semi-legendary punk guitarist and record label magnate Greg Ginn is playing in Athens Saturday.
This reviewer has seen Ginn perform only once, and that was more than 20 years ago. The incident sheds no real light on his career or musical development, but it makes a darn cute story, so pay attention.
I, and a colleague from the Cleveland factory where I was working, had made a date to see Black Flag — Ginn’s groundbreaking punk band — at a little dive bar in Kent, Ohio. The time would have been early to mid-’80s; I’m guessing 1984.
I was only in my 20s, but when I walked through the door of the tiny club, I was like the second oldest guy in the room, after the bartender. It was an all-ages show, and most of the crowd appeared to be pasty white males around 14.
At the first guitar chord, these kids started launching themselves through the air in multiple directions. I think they called this moshing. I called it pretty doggone annoying.
Fairly heavy children were falling on top of me, and slamming their shaved crania into my ribs. This made me irritable, and probably contributed to what happened next.
As the show progressed, I quickly developed an irrational hatred for the band’s lead singer, Henry Rollins.
First off, I thought he was doing a bad Jim Morrison imitation.
To make things worse, he started ripping out ceiling tiles from above the stage, showering the audience with white dust. This probably wasn’t really asbestos, but after pulling a 50-hour week in a plant where I had to inhale about 100 different toxic chemicals on a daily basis, I was a mite cranky on the issue of airborne carcinogens.
I decided to lock into Rollins’ eyes with my icy Rasputin gaze, and crush his mind in an evil willpower stare-down.
It took me about two minutes to get his attention. He immediately hopped off the stage, and waded through bouncing youngsters to where I was standing.
First he mocked me verbally. Lacking any witty comebacks – or an amplified microphone – I treated him with the godlike indifference that has since become my personal trademark.
Not getting any reaction, Rollins then started licking the side of my face, like a big dog. When I continued to display only haughty disdain, he bit me – and I promise, I am not making this up – on my butt.
This caused me intense emotional distress. I was wearing a snappy pants-and-jacket combo made of lightweight black aviator fabric, with zippers everywhere, that my fashion-crazed girlfriend had recently picked out for me.
The idea that this big West Coast monkey might have just chomped a hole in the seat of my cool new trousers made me see red, I can tell you. The only thing that kept me from knocking him out was the fact that he was about 220 pounds of solid, weight-lifting muscle, built like a brick Humvee. As Rudy Vallee once observed, one of the great tragedies of life is that the men most in need of a beating are always enormous.
I also had to take into account the likelihood that if I raised a hand against Rollins, I would promptly be pogo-ed to death by 50 enraged teenagers.
Anyway, he and I both got bored and the show went on. Ginn played great, as he was wont to do in those days. He was one of the truly original punk guitar stylists, on a par with Robert Quine; his playing was harsh, precise, and almost mathematically ugly. At his best, he made the electric guitar frightening again, a la Link Wray.
I am also grateful to him for starting SST Records, whose early releases, along with those of the Slash label, helped keep me breathing through the Reagan era.
As for what he’s doing these days, I’m a little perplexed. Apparently Ginn, after putting his label in storage for years, has now upped sticks and moved its headquarters to Taylor, Texas. He has also released a couple of slapdash albums, by outfits called “Greg Ginn and the Taylor Texas Corrugators” and “Jambang.”
A piece of promotional material describes the music on the Corrugators’ album, “Goof Off Experts,” as “western swing.”
I have to assume this was written by someone who has never actually heard a note of western swing, but thought the phrase was evocative. I would describe the CD as a semi-pleasant, mid-tempo rock guitar wank. Oh, all right — make that a guitar “excursion.”
“Jambang” is described in the promo package as “a combination of electronica and rock ambiance.” It doesn’t sound hugely different from the Corrugators, just a bit synth-ier.
Neither record is what you would call exactly horrible, but neither one really required the talents of a Greg Ginn to create it.
Ginn shows a little defensiveness about his new direction; in an interview from the Austin Chronicle included in his promo package, he says he’s proud of Black Flag’s music, but is “really not interested in playing monkey for anybody,” by “regurgitating” his old tunes. Fair enough. Those old tunes were a lot better, though.
Ginn’s new bands are set to play Jackie O’s Saturday night.
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