By Mitchell Schneider
Bam Magazine, January 30, 1981
Ever watch someone who was minding their own business get taunted, punched, gang-beaten to the floor, stomped on and subsequently bloodied? If you were at the Starwood January 6 for the Black Flag show, chances are you might have witnessed this and more violence erupt wildly on the dance floor as the band played on.
Black Flag, as you may already know, is a popular punk quartet from Huntington Beach. Their rabid collection of fans, most of whom you would call skinhead-surf-punks and most of whom appear to range in age from 12 to 19, are given to Hitler youth crewcuts, swastikas, red bandannas wrapped around their heads, and chains around their boots. At the Starwood, some of them were also given to gang-beating anyone who didn't look like them.
Sitting in the venue's upstairs level which overlooks the dance floor, I looked down at the flash riots with total horror, disbelief and anger. This was boot-in-the-face ultra-violence right out of Clockwork Orange, but this wasn't a film. What follows are some notes I scribbled on a few napkins:
1) A blond-haired, straight-looking kid standing at the foot of the stage gets punched repeatedly in the back by two skinheads. He turns around, puzzled. Gets jumped by four skinheads who jab their fists into his head as they knock him down. Bouncers break it up.
2) A collegiate-looking guy standing alone in the middle of the crowd gets surrounded by three or four skinheads and is knocked to the floor. The house spotlight falls on the trouble, band stops playing, makes no comment. Bouncers pry skinheads from the guy who emerges with his face covered with blood. (He suffered a two-inch gash above his right eye, a bouncer would later tell me.) The guy is removed from crowd by bouncer. Music begins.
3) Another guy standing toward the back of the dance floor is dragged by skinheads to middle of the floor, brutally hitting him along the way and ripping his shirt off. His girlfriend tries to pull him the other way but she gets swept into the melee. Houselight again falls on the fight. Girl is crying. The band stops playing, again makes no comment. Bouncers to the rescue.
Before Black Flag's gig stuttered to a close some 25 harrowing minutes after it began, I spotted at least two more fights - skinheads clashing once with a Starwood bouncer, and next with a longhair whose face was so bloodied he was promptly removed from from the mess.
We may live in wild times but this is not my idea of an evening out. I'll venture to guess it isn't yours either.
Initially, I didn't want to write this piece because Black Flag's circle of jerks - if not the band itself - stand to reap some publicity value from it, thus advancing their "cause." But this sort of thing should be documented somewhere because unsuspecting people may be risking personal harm at a Black Flag performance - people who may hear the group's music on Rodney Bingenheimer's KROQ show and then venture to a gig totally unprepared for the ultra-violence.
As for Black Flag, their hardcore brand of punk has its virtues - it's hammered out so quickly and funnily you really can't help but chuckle at its absurdity - although I appreciate it purely on a nostalgic level. What disturbs me is the violence at their gigs, and according to some Hollywood punks who feel alienated on their own turf, the disturbances are increasing; apparently, the spitting at the bands, the slamming on the dance floor and jumping onto the stage is not enough for the Huntington Beach creeps.
Although Black Flag don't encourage the violence, they don't discourage it, much less really acknowledge it onstage. Which is not only wrong but profoundly evil.
I think artists should take some kind of responsibility for their art, especially when they're up there onstage rendering the soundtrack by which their fans are attacking others for no reason other than the way they look. At the Starwood, Black Flag didn't once ask the crowd to calm down. The group, I suspect is afraid to break its wall of cool, its distance. Some have suggested that Black Flag don't say anything on stage because they're afraid they'll get their asses kicked by their own followers (who incidentally are so cool they don't have to applaud). But I doubt it. "We gotta keep up our image," I could almost hear the group's members saying under their breaths. In a recent Flipside interview with Black Flag, the band claims they don't discourage the violence because they're really not interested in authority. What cowards. Art is a responsibility, if not a burden: England's fine Sham 69 broke up as a result of the massive brutalities incurred by fans at their gigs.
Maybe it'll take someone getting stabbed at one of Black Flag's gigs to change the group's feelings about not asking their fans to quit the nonsense. Whether or not a stabbing would happen is of course uncertain. But at the Starwood January 6, the prospects of such violence seemed, as the Stones sang in "Gimme Shelter," just a shot away.
"There's been all sorts of stuff in the media, really ridiculous stuff," says Black Flag's soft spoken songwriter and guitarist, Greg Ginn. "everybody's done their punk-rock violence story. You don't hear them doing a story about the bar on the corner where they might have 100 people in there and have more fights than we have at a gig with 2000."
Ginn and the others don't deny, however, that the audiences at their performances can be volatile and more than a little "physical" - a word they prefer to "violent." Bassist Chuck Dukowski says the band provides "aggressive release, a wild situation where you can get away from the padded cell control with everybody trying to keep you safe, the motto being "We'll protect you from yourself and everyone else, just obey us and we'll keep you out of trouble." You've got the whole day-to-day bullshit going on. You want to go out and blow off some steam, so you get nuts and bash around a little. Can you have that plus a controlled situation, with no chance of anything happening that might be even the slightest bit ugly? That's impossible. If you control a situation to the point where nothing wrong can happen, nothing good can happen either." .....Black Flag's popularity among hardcore punks and the merely curious has skyrocketed. Their notoriety with police departments around the country has also grown, and hardly a gig goes by without the men in blue appearing to look things over. In "The Decline," the singer Chavo Pederast (who has since been replaced by Dez Cadena) dedicates a vicious song called "Revenge" to the L.A.P.D.
"We've been tossed around like a hot potato by various halls and promoters," Ginn claims. "they know that they can make money, but there's the police problem. but there's enough money in it now where we can always find a place to play. Somebody'll do it for so much money.
......Black Flag has found enemies not only in Adam Ant and the police but in the media, with many reporters taking the band to task for not doing anything to stop the violence that takes place at their concerts. Perhaps the strongest words came in a January BAM commentary titled "Black Flag Violence Must Stop!" Writer Mitchell Schneider called the band's actions- or rather non-actions- "profoundly evil" - and went on to say, "the band claims they don't discourage the violence because they're really not interested in authority. What cowards. Art is a responsibility, if not a burden...."
The group responds to such charges with some heated words of their own. "That was the lowest piece of journalism I've ever seen," declares Spot. Adds Dukowski, "You know where that guy got his information? On the receiving end of a joint."
Frequent reports indicate that anyone with long hair stands a strong chance of getting beaten by hyperactive slamdancers at a Black Flag concert. Ginn readily admits that many of his group's fans are "fascistic," but he says that in comparison, Black Flag fans are at least as tolerant of other people as any other group's followers.
"There all all kinds of people with longhair that go to our gigs," Ginn says. "you can stay away from it. but if we went to a Van Halen gig, how long do you think we would last? Just because I've got short hair some guy would pick a fight with me. But anybody can go to our gigs. There are things that have happened in the past but it's not really common. You can stay out of all the dancing if you want."
"That's not as fun," Dukowski adds, "but it is a choice."
Ginn still feels that Black Flag has no responsibility to make an effort to stop the fighting in their audiences. "We think it's wrong to go onstage and take the traditional position of power and tell people what to do. That's part of our basic philosophy. In the BAM piece, it sounded like "they're afraid to speak up against it. We've always told people how we feel, and it's been printed all over the fanzines. But we're not going to tell people what to do. That's just not our place."
THE END