Every punk agrees that Black Flag were an important band. Few can agree on what exactly made them so. Survey 10 people sporting tattoos of the four bars, and you’ll get at least 10 different opinions on which album is their greatest, whether their live records and demos are better than any of their proper albums, who was their best singer (or bassist or drummer), whether they were better with one guitarist or two, when they started to suck, and whether band mastermind Greg Ginn is a genius guitar player, a jazzbo wanker, or a genius jazzbo wanker. With Black Flag, dysfunction and debate are as much a part of the brand as lurid Raymond Petitbon artwork.
But amid all the division that engulfs the band, there remains no greater lightning rod than My War—the San Andreas Fault of hardcore, where, with a simple flip from Side 1 to Side 2, the fastest and most ferocious band in punk instantly transformed into the doomiest, most despairing band in metal. My War instantly drew a line between those who saw hardcore as a specific style of jackhammering rock music and those who viewed it as a broader philosophy of nihilism and negation—one that might very well be used to dismantle hardcore itself. By radically altering Black Flag’s musical DNA, My War realized their fundamental spirit of contrarianism.
Originally formed in Hermosa Beach, California, circa 1976, Black Flag (né Panic) didn’t just expand punk rock’s capacity for velocity and violence, they effectively extinguished the genre’s last vestiges of glam-schooled vamping and pub-rock reverence. For all their anti-rock-star posturing, first-wave punks like Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer nonetheless came equipped with showbizzy stage names and carefully cultivated aesthetics, and it didn’t take long for them to become icons themselves. Black Flag, by contrast, were T-shirt-and-jeans misfits who, early on, rejected the notion of the rock band as a tight-knit gang. By the time they made their recorded debut in 1978, they were already on their fourth bassist and second drummer; over the next two years, they’d cycle through three lead vocalists—Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, and Dez Cadena—each of whom lasted in the role just long enough to cut a pivotal EP and establish their respective faction of loyalists.
In effect, early Black Flag demonstrated that the person singing the song was less important than the energy and intent behind it, and the participatory response it elicited. And the band would find its longest-serving frontman through a veritable act of punk-rock karaoke: At a June 1981 gig at New York venue A7, Black Flag invited a fan-turned-friend onstage to sing “Clocked In”—an apt choice, given that he’d driven all the way from D.C., and had to make the five-hour trip back in time for his early morning shift at a local Häagen-Dazs. Cadena was contemplating a switch from lead vocals to rhythm guitar, so a few days later, the band summoned the ice-cream shop employee back to New York for a rehearsal. After a single session, Henry Garfield was invited to join Black Flag on their cross-country tour, for which he initially served as a roadie and Cadena’s understudy at the mic. Upon settling in L.A., he adopted a new, tougher-sounding surname, Rollins, and laid down vocal tracks to the songs that Ginn and bassist Chuck Dukowski had written for the band’s full-length debut, Damaged, an album that—from its shocking cover photo to its light-speed 33-second strikes to its anti-everything worldview—forever changed the word “hardcore” from an adjective to a noun.
