Early '80s Californian Hardcore Bands: Black Flag vs. Suicidal Tendancies

I was a pretty big punk rocker in my youth. Sure, I listened to enough hip-hop and went to enough raves that I can reasonably lay some claim to that shit, too, but ultimately punk rock is/was my true love.

The problem with punk rock is that it's pretty backwards looking genre. For a subculture that's all about rebellion and tearing down the system, punk spends a lot of time locked into it's own little system, looking at things that have already happened, getting all fucking precious over it's history.

As tough as it is to admit, when you're really into punk rock, you're really as much of a nostalgia freak as neo-hippies and those fucking rockabilly kids. (Although you're much better dressed.) You spend almost all your time listening to music that came out twenty or thirty years ago, and no one can blame you.

Sure, there are some great punk bands currently in operation (Career Suicide, Fucked Up, Cairo Foster) and there were some great punk bands back when I was really "in the scene" (The Swarm, Haymaker, H2O, Rancid) but ultimately, the old shit is better. It's ridiculous to feed a young man a steady diet of The Blitz, Bad Brains and TSOL and then expect him to shit his pants over The Distillers and Social Code.

This week I decided to pit two of my adolescent favourites against each other.

The Main Event

In the red corner, with a career total of 19 members, from Redondo Beach, California, BLAAA-CK FLAAAAG!

The Flag are pretty much the most bad-ass band ever. If you haven't read Get in the Van, Henry Rollins' tour diaries from his days with the Flag, you've lived an unfulfilled life.

For those of you who don't know, the Flag toured almost non-stop for most of a decade, released 20 recordings in 10 years, launched the musical career of a Virginian ice cream parlor employee named Hank Garfield (better known as Henry Rollins) and are credited with creating a hardcore scene everywhere they played. And yes, they went through members like a Denny's goes through eggs.

The Flag was created in 1976 by guitarist Greg Ginn and vocalist Keith Morris. Ginn wanted the band to practice for several hours a day, Morris wanted to do a metric shit-tonne of drugs. The relationship soon soured and Morris went on to form The Circle Jerks, who would act as the Bird to the Flag's Magic.

The band would have two more singers between Morris and Rollins; Ron Reyes, who quit the band after getting freaked out by the violence that followed the band, and Dez Cadena, who would shred his vocal chords and become the bands rhythm guitarist.

The band had their first full-length album, Damaged, shelved for almost two years after a nasty break-up with MCA records, which also forced the band to stop releasing records under the name "Black Flag" for a year. Instead, their albums featured the band's four bar logo.

This is the video for "TV Party" off Damaged. After this point, the band started the slow slide away from punk rock and towards being a sort of improvisational metal band. By the time they released 1985's The Process of Weeding Out, the short, tight sing-a-long anthems of Damaged had been replaced by nine-minute instrumental freak outs. As I've gotten older, I've grown to appreciate the Flag's metal output, but this is still my idea of the Flag at their best; goofy, smart and violently angry all at once.

By the way, the production values on this baby are hilariously low and awesome. The whole thing looks like it was filmed for about 50 bucks. That's punk rock.


OK, now their opponents.


In the (Sureño) blue corner, from Venice Beach, California, with a career total of 21 members, SUUU-ic-IDAL TENNNNNN-dancies.

There are a lot of similarities between ST and the Flag. Both bands came from So Cal beach towns. Both bands were viewed with suspicion in the scene. (In fact, ST was voted "Worst Band/Biggest Assholes in a 1983 Flipside Magazine poll.) Both had a reputation for incredibly violent shows, although at ST shows the violence was in the pit, where as violence at Flag shows was mostly between the band and the crowd. Both bands had one dominant founding member who either fired or drove off other band mates with a shocking regularity. And mos importantly, both bands finished their career as metal bands. But where Black Flag's metal was an arty sludge, Suicidal played straight up thrash. 1987's Join the Army was a DRI-style crossover thrash album, and 1988's major label debut How I Will Laugh Tomorrow When I Can't Even Smile Today was pretty much a Metallica album.

There are a few really cool things about ST. They were arguably the first real skatecore band. They made some very heavy records and, most importantly, they made it semi-cool for white skateboard kids to dress like cholos. When I was 17 or 18 I spent three months dressing like a cholo as sort of an ST tribute. Nobody got it.

How down ST actually were depends on who you ask. I think it's pretty safe to say that at least some of the "ST are gangbangers" paranoia was at least partially based in racism. Their heavily Latino membership undoubtedly freaked people out. On the other hand, the logo for the Sureño V13 set did pop up in some of their early releases.

This is the video for "Institutionalized" off of their self-titled debut album. You've probably already seen it, but you should watch it again. This is the video that made me love this band.



OK motherfuckers. Get your vote on.