Hi everyone!
Another midweek, another cafe/lounge.
Got a little something from my favorite Black Flag lineup – Rollins/Ginn/Roessler/Cadena – although this is one where Rollins is elsewhere. What happens when punks spend a lot of time listening to free jazz? Well, you get something like this:
This was released after their Family Man LP, which featured one side of instrumentals, and another side of Henry Rollins doing what amounted to a poetry reading. YouTube used to have a video from a live gig around 1985, where stuff like this was being played. The dudes in the pit did not quite know whether they should mosh, throw beer bottles, or just leave. Personally, I found that era of Black Flag to be refreshing. They’d break up in 1986. Greg Ginn has his own iteration of Black Flag, that’s just him and whoever he can get to play the classics. Ya do what ya gotta do, I guess.
Since I seem to be stuck in 1985, here’s the intro from Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising LP. I’ll follow it up with Brave Men Run (In My Family).
Kim Gordon was and still is in a class all by herself. By this point in Sonic Youth’s career, No Wave was very much in the rear-view mirror, increasingly a distant landmark. Their critical and commercial breakthroughs were just ahead of them. This is the sort of music I’d easily play while driving through the Mojave Desert. In fact I have done just that – the last time as a was heading from the LA metro area to the Midwest in the middle of summer in a car w/no functioning air conditioner. Good times. The tape I made of this album gained a sort of surreal quality through that Mojave leg of that trip. They were a great band while they lasted. I seriously doubt they’ll ever record or tour together again. The circumstances surrounding the Moore/Gordon divorce would make any reunion unspeakably awkward. Kim Gordon has a heck of a solo career going, and that’s a good thing.
The bar is open and the jukebox is still working. Hang in there.
Cheers!