“One short phone call, it was all over”: What led to the break-up of Black Flag?
When 20-year-old Henry Garfield was recruited to join Black Flag as the band’s new singer in 1981, he promptly left behind his old life in Washington, DC, for a new one in Hollywood, and like a lot of performers who’ve made the pilgrimage to Tinseltown, he also changed his name, becoming Henry Rollins.
Rollins had no expectations of walking into a world of glitz and glamour fronting one of the most notoriously boundary-pushing and antagonistic outfits in LA, but he wasn’t fully prepared for what the Black Flag lifestyle entailed: not just dealing with the violence in the punk clubs or run-ins with cops, but the level of expectations from his new bandmates. “I thought I was a hard worker,” Rollins told the zine Scam in 2012, “But I had no idea what hard work meant until I joined the band with [Greg] Ginn and [Chuck] Dukowski”.
For a long time, pretty much their entire original run, in fact, Black Flag were barely getting by financially. Even as their profile grew and Ginn’s record label, SST, became one of the revered names in hardcore, the struggle to turn this rusty pirate ship of a band into a smooth-sailing vessel remained an impossible mission, and it invariably led to a lot of tension and, eventually, personnel turnover.
It also, weirdly, created a prolific streak of recording and touring across 1984 and 1985, as Ginn seemed manically dedicated to experimenting with the Black Flag formula and sound, refusing to repeat himself creatively or push any crowd-pleasing buttons. In retrospect, later albums like Loose Nut and In My Head are quite fascinating art-metal records with virtually no connection to the band’s more straightforward hardcore roots. But commercially, in their own time, they landed in no man’s land; too weird for the hair metal kids and too noodly for the skate punks.
Things finally reached a head in 1986, right around the time one of SST’s most successful bands, Husker Du, jumped ship to Warner Brothers, one of the earliest indicators of the titanic shift that would lead to the all-out invasion of he mainstream by underground bands in the early ‘90s. According to an interview Ginn gave in 2003, “The underground made a transformation, and I didn’t think that [Black Flag] was rooted enough to go through that without it having a negative impact on us”.
In other words, Ginn looked into his crystal ball, saw where things were headed, and decided to take Black Flag out to pasture before the industry got to them first, calling Rollins in August 1986 to announce his decision. “He told me he was quitting the band,” Rollins later wrote in his memoir Get in the Van, “I thought that was strange considering it was his band and all.
“So in one short phone call, it was all over”.
Henry Rollins
Some people who’d been in Black Flag’s social circle in the mid-‘80s felt like Ginn might have had other motivations for pulling the plug, including some level of jealousy and/or contempt for Rollins and the attention the frontman was generating. Dave Markey, who played in a support band on Black Flag’s final tour in 1986, told Scam that “Rollins and Ginn had maybe two conversations on that whole tour,” and that “Henry became such a powerful image that it dissolved the band”.
Ginn never acknowledged the jealousy angle, but did suggest that Henry was a hindrance as much as a help. “The lyrical range of the group was limited to some extent after Damaged,” he said, referring to Rollins’ debut album with the band, “It became increasingly difficult to get the band to do songs which didn’t fit into Henry’s increasingly narrow ‘persona’.”
For Rollins’ part, he told Scam that, as of 2012 at least, he held “zero good memories” of his five years in the seminal punk band. Black Flag remained on ice for over 20 years, and while Ginn did form a new version of the band in 2013, he also had to launch simultaneous lawsuits against Rollins and several other former bandmates over use of the Black Flag name and logo, a sad case of old men still carrying grudges from their youth, rather than sharing in what they’d accomplished together.
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