Black Flag / My Mother Wore Combat Boots
|November 25, 2013 | Found Images, Philosophy
This is a repost – my friends all know I was an early 80s hardcore kid and that I saw Black Flag a couple of times ( various lineups, and it could have been just the three shows I definitely remember in a wholly concrete way, or it could be as many as five gigs — that’s the way things were then, we were watching bands almost every single night, and I didn’t write anything down ), and I guess everyone else does too, because I’m getting asked about my opinion on the whole Black Flag vs. Flag vs. the is the album art brilliant or stupid thing all the goddamn time, and I’ll tell you the honest truth : I don’t really give a shit. ( oh, and now this – while Ron Reyes was the singer on the very first hardcore track I ever heard, respect due etc. etc., I really, really don’t care )
I hope everyone involved has a bunch of great tours, and, if it’s where they’re at right now, makes a bunch of new music, and gets to buy a big house with a pool, or, whatever, what I really mean is, gets the glory that they deserve. Me, I was there, and I like my rock n’ roll young. No reunion shows for me.
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December 29, 1981, Club 950 / Lucky Number, Chicago : Black Flag’s sixth show with new singer Henry Rollins. Getting older is a strange thing, ask anyone. When I look at this photo, I’m like, Oh, fuck yeah, that’s a show I’d go to – and then I have to remind myself, at a distance of almost 30 years, that I WAS there. This was the third punk gig I saw, a couple of days after my 15th birthday.
I went by myself. I didn’t know anyone, nor did I talk to anyone, but I had my look together, and I knew I belonged there : Black Flag shirt ( the classic black bars on a white T, which I ordered, cash through the mail, from Zed Records in California ), engineer boots, army jacket, shaved head. Regular kids, at that time, did not have short hair, and it was a funny, dichotomous thing to cause great joy in an old man barber – there was one on every block, back then, and I swear they were all called Louie – by asking for a crew cut ( Louie : “you want white-walls?” ), and then to walk down the street, freezing wind whipping my nearly-bare skull, where people would stop and stare as if I was an escaped mental patient. This was the effect I was going for, extra points if someone pointed and yelled.
There was still some 1977-Sex Pistols-safety-pin-pogo-punk style going on then, particularly among the older attendees ( you know, OLD : people in their early 20s ), but the hardcore kids checked each other out, which was the only way to learn anything. Where had these other kids found out about this? I took note of the bands written on people’s shirts and jackets. First up, a trio from Minneapolis called Hüsker Dü, who I had seen already, in September. They didn’t look like punks, but they ripped through a tight, frantic, no-pause set, and I thought they were fantastic. I still do. I don’t need to tell you that Black Flag was electric, life-changing. Look at the picture. Later, after taking the train down to 55th-Garfield, my bus never came, and I had to walk two miles to get home. When it’s that cold, the city is quiet, and you can really hear your ears ringing. Hunched over, hands in pockets, no gloves. Dumb. Keep moving, keep moving.
Anyhow, enough about me. This photo was taken by Mary-Colette Illarde, my friend Anthony’s Mother. I met both of them a couple of months after the 950 show and Anthony and I formed the first band either of us was in. Mary-Colette was a fixture on the scene, a “punk mom” who was at many of the shows I went to, ’81-’84. She took a lot of remarkable photos, some of which are collected in an article called My Mother Wore Combat Boots, in the new issue of the always-feature-packed lunatic Chicago mag Roctober. “( Danzig ) was not happy about it, I’ll never forget, he called her a ‘stupid shit’, Anthony recalls. She stared him down until he put on a fake smile. She stared down Glenn, which was pretty good!”