Watch rare footage of Black Flag playing ‘Process of Weeding Out’ in 1984
Formed in 1976, Black Flag bought a touch of avant-garde to punk music. Blending the classic CBGBs sound with frenetic, atonal guitar solos and frequent tempo shifts, the group crafted something equally nihilistic and explorative. Their anarchical sound gave birth to joyous and occasionally brutal live performances where there was no guarantee of safety – especially not for Henry Rollins, who often found himself on the knobbly end of some disgruntled and puritanical punk’s fist. Here, we’ve bought you some rare live footage of the band performing ‘Weeding Out’ during a San Francisco gig in 1984.
The above footage was captured for Live ’84, a live album released by Black Flag on SST Records. The recording, made during the band’s performance at the Stone Nightclub in San Fransisco, features tracks from My War Ship and Slip It In. The album was originally released on cassette along with Slip It In, but the footage went out of print. These days, the only copies that survive are likely to be those that were bootlegged from the original.
By 1984, Black Flag had started absorbing a wider palette of musical influences, including The Jimi Hendrix Experience and modal jazz maestro John Coltrane. This may have been fine with San Fran punks, but it didn’t go down at all well in the UK. The same year this footage was captured, Black Flag performed at London’s Marquee Club as part of their third European tour. Recalling the concert in his tour diary (per Spin archives), Rollins wrote: “The club is a small, low ceiling-type place. We sound-checked in the afternoon. Everything sounded real good. We were really looking forward to the show that night. I really like playing in London, because the crowd is uptight and they make me play hard.”
Rollins wasn’t the only one feeling antagonistic: “Bill (then the drummer for Black Flag) and I were amped. We were walking around, looking at each other, and grinning. ‘Let’s kill everyone.’ ‘Ok. You know, that’s real funny. I was thinking the same thing.’ You know, that kind of trip. Sometimes, like when you’re in London, you open your mouth to say something, but the only words that seem to come out are ‘destroy’ and ‘kill everyone now.’
This footage sees Black Flag equally bent on destruction. Guitarist Gregg Ginn made the brave choice of hammering out the kind of psych-tinged madness you’d expect of Hendrix or John McLaughlin of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Considering the room would have been packed with post-hardcore fans (famously averse to twiddly guitar solos), it was a pretty brave decision. But then again, Black Flag liked nothing more than rubbing people the wrong way. Make sure you check out the footage above if you haven’t already.
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