Greg Ginn: Josh Homme’s rock and roll anti-hero
Punk is all about attitude; you don’t need to look further than the Sex Pistols to prove that. The music can often come second to the swagger and aesthetic. After all, bleeding all over your guitar looks much cooler than just playing it. But Greg Ginn doesn’t just want to look cool; he embodies punk in every aspect, good and bad.
Given the ever-changing landscape of society and culture, many of us now will have inner battles with a problematic figure—an artist whose work we admire despite their personal controversies. For Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, that figure is Black Flag guitarist and songwriter Greg Ginn. Known for his groundbreaking guitar work, Ginn’s legacy is marred by allegations of domestic abuse and sexual harassment.
Homme, who cites Ginn as one of his favourite guitarists, recognises the complexities of admiring an artist with such a history, noting, “If I’m influenced by [Black Flag’s] Greg Ginn, it’s not to be Greg Ginn.” However, while emulation might be off the cards, inspiration in some ways still resounds.
In 1976, Ginn founded Black Flag in Hermosa Beach, California. As the band’s sole consistent member, he played lead guitar and wrote the majority of their songs. Today, Black Flag is regarded as one of the most significant bands of the 20th century, pioneering hardcore punk and laying the groundwork for the genre to rise to prominence on a global scale.
Ginn didn’t initially gravitate toward music, though. Growing up in Hermosa Beach, he spent his youth tinkering with electronics and upcycling HAM radios. His passion for music was sparked when he donated money to the local radio station KPFA. As a thank you, the station sent him a copy of David Ackles’ American Gothic, an album that ignited a creative spark within him and ultimately altered the trajectory of music history. At 19, Ginn picked up his brother’s acoustic guitar and began, as he later described to Blaring Out with Eric Blair, “banging on it”, setting the foundation for his influential musical journey.
Initially called Panic, the band’s original lineup included Ginn’s younger brother on drums. Their first gig was at a house party, shortly after listening to Iggy and The Stooges‘ ‘Search And Destroy’ on the radio. The spark was lit. The band had beer cans thrown at them, a fight broke out, and punk music was never the same. Partying was an equal part of playing; Homme would soon play this forward.
But back in January 1978, Ginn and his band were just ready to start recording, hoping to transmit that mania in a studio, always late at night when the recording rates were the cheapest. Panic, undeterred, played as loud as they could in an attempt to drown out the sound of a cover band playing in the bar below the studio.
The aesthetic also proved inspiring to Homme. One of the most instantly recognisable band logos of all time, Black Flag’s simple four vertical black bars on a white background would become synonymous with hardcore punk. Designed by Ginn’s brother, the artist Raymond Pettibon, with the black representing anarchy and the bars representing a waving motion.
From that moment on, Black Flag would be the embodiment of anarchy: raw, unfiltered and standing against authority. As Pettibon puts it in the mini-documentary The Art of Punk by Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art: “I didn’t go to design school. 90 percent of motherfuckers would’ve come up with the same thing.” But they didn’t, and that subversion of simplicity also abounds in Queens of the Stone Age.
Famously, Ginn never used distortion or effect pedals. The distortion on Black Flag’s 1979 EP, Nervous Breakdown, was a result of the intensity and volume that Ginn played at. Nervous Breakdown was also the first record the band put out on their seminal record label SST (Solid State Tuners) Records. By the time Black Flag broke up in 1986, the label was ready to add more bands to its roster. From humble beginnings as a mail-order business that sold modified World War II radio equipment, set up by a 12-year-old Ginn, the label would eventually sign two bands that changed the course of rock music: Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.
That sense of originality from simple is what made Homme the musician he is today. “By 1989, it seemed like punk rock had sort of died, and I thought Nirvana were picking up where Black Flag and GBH had left off,” Homme explained. “I remember thinking I didn’t want my band to sound anything like Nirvana because they had set the bar so high. I didn’t want to get too close.” So, following Ginn’s lead, he decided to do his own thing, and he didn’t overthink it.
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