This is part of an article/interview with Black Flag which discusses their reaction/opinion on violence at their shows. This is another one of those long Damage articles, so I've only included the relevant parts.

Black Flag:  Soundtrack for Armageddon

By Jeffrey Bale

Damage #11, December 1980

Chuck: The thing that broke (punk) wide open for that area was that it's real physical music, and a lot of your skateboarders and surfers are into things on a real physical level. The most influential local ones got into it; the rest followed suit, and the thing just spread like wildfire.

Dez: A lot of those guys used to skateboard while listening to the Sex Pistols.

A number of other factors facilitated the expansion of punk from its original home in the city to outlying areas- coverage of punk records in major skateboard and surfing magazines; the sensationalizing of punk rock in the conventional media, a willingness to embrace something new just to avoid boredom, youthful rebelliousness and, perhaps as important, the excitement generated by earlier OC bands like Black Flag, Middle Class, The Crowd, The Simpletones and Red Cross.  As a result, the beach punk scene is currently alive and kicking, figuratively and literally.

Yet though the hardcore style spread far and wide, the radical, anti-establishment ideas that were behind the original punk explosion did not seem to affect the attitudes of many of these newly-converted jocks who continue to behave as before. With the rapid growth of the OC scene, and the consequent increase in the size of Black Flag's audience, it was inevitable that some thick-headed morons would be among their fans.  This was to have unfortunate repercussions.  After booking the band once or twice, a number of club owners decided to ban them from playing future dates at their venues.  Although in most cases this resulted from over reaction on the part of conservative entrepreneurs who were unable to distinguish wild but harmless pogoing from real rioting, at other gigs a few head-cases committed acts of mindless violence and trashed furnishing in both restrictive and progressive clubs alike.  The group's refusal to make any effort to control their fans, even those few who go far beyond the bounds of sane behavior, had led many to conclude that they are agitators or worse, that they condone or attempt to catalyze fascistic aggression.  In the past, this possibility has even worried some of their biggest fans, myself included.

So what do they really stand for and how do they feel about the excesses of their audiences?  As Greg is quick to emphasize, the name Black Flag was chosen because it is a symbol of anarchy.  It has nothing whatever to do with insect spray.  In line with this orientation, the band's purpose is to create chaos, to provide an atmosphere in which people can abandon, at least temporarily, social constraints and inhibitions that normally restrain independent thought and action.  Beyond this, they did not set out to make overt socio-political statements.

Greg: Mainly, our music is personal. You're familiar with our songs, most of them describe our reactions to things that happen to us.

Damage: Yes, but most of them reveal dissatisfaction, anger and a sense of frustration with existing conditions, like "I've had it."

Chuck: The main thing is we don't wanna get bogged down in standard political dogmas. We don't have songs explicitly urging people to smash the state or anything.

Damage: It's a logical extension, though, because fucked-up systems are the source of most of the problems that affect us.

Greg: In answer to that, I will say this: We are anti-fascist and our music reflects that.  We don't like rules.

Chuck: We're against all of them.

Greg: I don't wanna live by somebody's punk rules or any other kind of rules.  Some people always try to set up rules for others.

Obviously, any band that is so opposed to rules themselves would be behaving hypocritically if they tried to establish rules for their fans to follow.  Therein lies their dilemma.

What are the "beach punks" really like?  There seem to be a lot of psychopaths who have been attracted to that scene because they feel that within it violence is acceptable, even commendable.

Greg: Exactly, but we don't support that sort of behavior.  A lot of our fans are really cool, though. If all of them were idiots, we'd quit.  There's only a small minority of idiots, but they're always the most visible.

Dez: They stand out like a sore thumb.

Chuck: There always were some idiots into the punk scene, even in the early days.  In Hollywood they just didn't have as much muscle; the early people weren't jocks.  These guys now are strong, they're really in good physical shape and if they wanna thump, they can do the job efficiently.

Greg: Out of the two-three hundred people at a gig, there might be twenty assholes who wanna run things and control things.  The important thing is not to generalize about the scene, anymore, it's just too big.  But there are people in our audience with an ideology that is the opposite of ours.

Damage: That puts you guys in an awkward position. A lot of those kids look up to you.  You're in a position to influence them in certain ways.  Don't you feel some responsibility to educate these kids?

Dez: The thing is, you can't even talk to some of those people.

Chuck: We don't wanna dictate to them anyway.  Our message is, fuckin' let go, go crazy, because if you do that you're not gonna have time for this other crap, which is real stiff and based on the preconceived notion of what's cool.  But I'm not a pacifist, I think aggression is healthy.

Damage: Yeah but it depends on who it's directed against.

Ted (Falconi, of Flipper): The problem is that no one is exposing these kids to progressive ideas... the Huntington Beach crowd should be sikked on Bank of America rather than bashing each other.

Chuck: I won't argue with that, but it is actually the healthiest audience, even though there is some mindlessness.  It's the best audience around, the youngest, the most aggressive and the most volatile. Because of that, they're the most attractive for me to play to.  They're not a bunch of neutralized zombies.

Damage: Like most of those new wave yo-yo's. (general laughter)

Chuck: I'd rather have disrupter violence than restrictionary violence.

Greg: I think our attitude comes across in our music, but we're gonna work on trying to make what we're saying more apparent.

Damage: I hope that helps, but I have strong doubts about whether intelligent lyrics have the power to change people's consciousness in and of themselves, especially since, as Chuck freely admits, "ideas don't seem to come through that well on stage."

(The article then continues on as a profile of the band's change in line-up etc., so I've stopped here. - Michele).

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