The Enduring Sorrow of Hardcore Legacy
Last of a three-part substack rendering for a musical obsessive in light of Black Flag, Flag, Punk Rock Bowling, winners, losers, holding it and folding it.
“I think I have enough to do it now, Eugene.”
He was talking about having scored just enough heroin to make good on his promise to subsequently do himself in. You see he had, paradoxically, a crippling addiction to crack but figured the only way out, was OUT. For which he had secured the heroin.
He looked at me, narrowing his eyes. Like he had just told me a secret.
So I had to play it like Pascal's Wager. He was either serious, or he wasn’t serious. If he wasn’t serious, and I did nothing, no harm, no foul. If he wasn’t serious and I did something what was I then? A mark?
More importantly, if he was serious and I did nothing, then he would be the dead man he so avidly seemed to want to be. If he was serious and I did something though, then what? A guy who wanted to die would be forced to live?
By the time I had an answer he was already dead though, that is, dead after his fourth attempt, in a row, with the only question remaining being very much along the lines of what the fuck?
This…dragged my head back and forth over a landscape whose primary conclusion had tried to answer the question: what constitutes aging well when aging was something you’d never thought you’d do?
Which was the same thing I thought in a week that saw a “Nazi” being beaten up and driven out of a Punk Rock Bowling festival while FLAG played. That is, the band of former Black Flag members playing Black Flag tunes, all on the cusp of the reconstituted Black Flag, featuring the septuagenarian founder Greg Ginn and three 20-somethings he got to round out his new Black Flag “crew”, going on tour.
This on the edge of last week’s substack dragged my head back and forth over a landscape whose primary conclusion had tried to answer the question: what constitutes aging well when aging was something you’d never thought you’d do?
“I don’t know,” said Olga De Volga, RIP, from The Lewd. “I see myself doing Vegas lounge stuff when I get old.” For which she was relentlessly mocked by MRR’s Tim Yohannon, also RIP. From a hardcore perspective I understood his contempt. From an aesthetic perspective I understood hers.
Because in the same way that Judaism is more than just a religion, hardcore was more than just music and it’s overriding emphasis on integrity as being a necessary component of its aesthetic, made De Volga’s comment so trenchant. Did any of us making hardcore music in 1981 really want to be singing about hating our parents in 2025?
Nah. Much better to be doing a Vegas style review of the greatest hits of your disaffected youth and who better to do this with than…um…well, everyone who was making hardcore music in 1981. That’s where the aforementioned “sorrow” comes in.
The same sort of sorrow that attends anything else you might end up doing just for cash.
Just to be clear, this is not a preamble to shaking someone’s hustle. If I could make $50,000 a show singing “Human Farm” in 2025, I most assuredly would be singing “Human Farm” in 2025, without the slightest dint of shame. To quote Dr. Dre, “your city is the bomb, if your city makes it pay”, emphasis mine.
If the fan base’s dearth of real is enough to attract them to the shadows of what once was great, who would I be to object? Despite it all feeling so empty and hollow. Like a rockabilly car show. Or electroclash.
Keith Morris, Dez Cadena and Chuck Dukowski, all in FLAG, were major components in making me the man I am today. Morris when, through his good graces, Whipping Boy played their first show ever with the Circle Jerks back in 1981. Cadena on a Whipping Boy tour with DC3 in 1986, and Dukowski with Black Face just about a decade ago.
Moreover, despite drawing a treasure trove of, apparently, well-deserved contempt Greg Ginn, the former founder of both SST Records and Black Flag, was always nice to me. He paid upfront to release OXBOW’s Serenade in Red, he even paid out one royalty check for records sold. He came to the shows. He took me to 7-11. What else could I ask for?
But there’s something about it all that just feels ineffably sad to me who had been listening to that Hermosa Beach thing since 1979. Black Flag at Irving Plaza in New York, with Dez as vocalist and, according to his telling, Henry Rollins as roadie.
In fact the cash thing is the only thing that makes it not sad. When I think of the things that I’ve done for cash, it all makes sense. When I think of how I want to see myself on my way to being a septuagenarian it really doesn’t though.
“I can’t tell if Eugene doesn’t give a shit,” said former boss and now convicted felon Carlos Watson. “Or is just acting like he doesn’t give a shit.” This was said to the Chairwoman of his Board of Directors and reported back to me after the first of many times I was at loggerheads with the man.
From his vantage point, all of the cash I was being paid justified him expecting me to care more than I did, him not having figured out what another boss of mine, Andy Grove at Intel, had figured out decades earlier: “Even tons of money won’t make an unhappy person happy.”
The hardcore kid in me, consequently, was on steady fuck-you with the fraudster Watson, and so it was that I was laying it down for authenticity. Of which there are plenty of old head examples.
Agnostic Front, a first or second generation hardcore band, curiously created by all of the negative press MRR and Yohannon had graced them with when they started, is still killing it. Legacy songs, sure, but new songs, new tours, books, films, and an aesthetic that builds on what they started with.
Same with the Cro-Mags. Even Ian MacKaye’s post-hardcore career has been a marvel not just with Fugazi but The Evens, who were pretty great as well. Bad Brains, even with their repeated self-sabotaging, are still releasing music that expands over and beyond why they were there in the first place. For them, I would guess, not just us.
But standing in front of a poster for a show at a SoCal skate ramp venue I commented on how it was nice to see some of the old vintage posters.
The promoter laughed. “That’s for a show coming up next week!”
I stood corrected. And then sad. And it doesn’t get, or feel better when Johnny Rotten in a broadside at the reformed Sex Pistols, also supports Trump. Or when he and one of the last existing Ramones threaten to fight each other at some TV punk rock event. Or when the Alex Jones-influenced Exene Cervenka denies school shootings and then announces a tour with X. Or when the Sex Pistols announce a tour.
Sad y’all didn’t plan better but maybe this is the actual plan. The new old Vegas lounge deal that De Volga talked about. If the fan base’s dearth of real is enough to attract them to the shadows of what once was great, who would I be to object?
Despite it all feeling so empty and hollow. Like a rockabilly car show. Or electroclash.
Everything changes. Everything dies. Nothing stays good for ever. But if you’re going to be alive, best to be so in the way that most fulfills the dictates of your soul even if that involves no longer being alive. Or being a cover band that covers your own band.
As for the audience well what can you say to them if not some old guy shit like “you shoulda seen them before.” But I like Rollins for an end note here. In the midst of all of the mania connected to FLAG, Black Flag, OFF, Black Face, the lawsuits and associated agita, someone tracked Rollins down and asked him to render an opinion on all of the later generation strangeness.
Eventually they asked him very specifically about the group I had, for the briefest of moments, formed with Black Flag’s (and now FLAG’s) bass player Chuck Dukowski. In a masterstroke of political mindfulness Rollins surfed right on by it: “haven’t heard it yet.”
Truer words had never been spoken.
So, see them all play if you must. But in the full wake-up of the venue house lights being turned on, get a good look around and ask yourself if you have had enough to do it now. No? Well, what about now?
TICKETS?!?!? GET YOUR TICKETS HEEEEERRRRREEEE…..
And if books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
And if you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.