Essay notes - Documentary - Art of punk – Black Flag – Art + Music

Keith Morris: Art, creativity, music, noise, flyers, posters, tshirts, tattoos. 4 bars – black flag.

Henry Rollins: When I saw the black flag logo, it did something to me but we had the same gut punch like reaction like wow, that’s, that’s heavy man, we saw the logo before we saw the band, it was the logo that affected me first, and it was quite impactful.

Flea: when you have the feeling of danger and this sense of commitment to art, like art and action coming together, and very rarely has to happen, it’s like a thing of a moment that’s very powerful, a sincere expression that can never happen again. People can pay homage to it, but it can never happen again, not that.
And they were such and artistically deep band, there were so much love and art in it you know? You can feel the work and the effort and intensity in the character and poetry.

Henry Rollins: One thing was that we were getting watered with whatever mediocre, whatever Eagles Hotel California, it was belated for us that you know when the Ramones came out, and the damned came out, we started hearing by the sex pistols, that’s what we wanted to do. 

Henry Rollins: the black flag had this amazing luck, they’ve got this great music, but they’ve got the guitar player’s brother Raymond who is this astonishingly, talented artist.

Keith Morris: you have this person, making the suggestion, that this is what we should call our band. And then all of a sudden, somebody else steps up, and that person standing up would be Raymond Pattibon presenting the logo with the name

Rapmond Patibone: *introduces himself* Hi, My name is Raymond Pattibone and I designed this thing

Blacks flag logo originated by one Raymond Pattibone, the amazing artist that became synonymous with unrest, chaos, rebellion and those pushing against anything you got.

Henry Rollins: And so many years ago, *wonders*’I’m so stupid*, I asked him (Raymond Pattibone) I used to live on his mother’s floor, so I used to see Ray all the time. We’re sitting in his mother’s sitting room, he’s drawing away and I’m like waiting for band practice to start or something, and I said um’ ‘what’s the black flag logo, what is it’ ‘It’s a flag’ *waving his hand*. Ray said: it’s like waving. And I’m like ‘ah yes, okay thanks’.

Flea: Black flag was an art band, they’re like a hard deep heavy art band, they didn’t play by any rules, and they did whatever they wanted, they played fast they played slow, they did everything, they moved they changed the whole entire time.

We used to collect black flag’s flyers on the east coast, a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox (photocopier) you know these distorted, smudgy, copy of a copy, these horrible looking but you’re like .. mannn *looks astonished and points at a poster*.

Henry Rollins: this band had a real edge, with this amazing logo, every cop in LA remembers that logo when Darryl Gates was a chief police and this artwork, he was such a manipulator, he knows what’s going to cause a ripple and cause unrest so he puts those Manson images up there. You can’t just put a portrait of Charles Manson especially on the way that he’s depicting him like as Jesus Christ, nailed to a cross. Do you know how much ? just ? How much grief you’re going to get from everyone on how much it’s “offensive”. And so Ray knew what he was doing to put Charles Manson on a punk rock flyer in Southern California, it has a lot of contextual tendrils that go out and legitimately upset people cause health infectors there’s nothing to laugh about. But here’s Ray kind of going like *have it*

Of course we wrote that, and multiple Manson flyer, it’s like we became a thing, and we used to use some of Manson’s terminology on the flyers, and it was a heavy thing that black flag was courting. But you’d get in a world of trouble for the flyer. I’ll be it Ray would give you 3 images to choose from and we’d go out put that on the flyer so it’s our choice what to put on our flyer, he didn’t make the flyer, he’d make the imagery, we’d make the layout. But the artwork you’d be like, wow, this is breath taking. You know this is not just going make people bring come to the show, it’s going to get us beat up if we put this up. And if you look at the punk rock flyer history at least in LA people were quickly trying to clone Ray’s Artwork. We’d be like aa there’s a Ray’s clone, oh another one, there’s a bunch of them.

Flea: I remember like black flag’s poster with the devil’s face on it and seen it all over Hollywood, just looking at it and be like ‘something’s going on here’ and its really intense and those flyers got me like something’s going on here that I don’t know anything about and its romantic, and its mysterious and heavy, I don’t know what it is but I want to know.

Keith morris: There used to be these piles of artworks, black and white, black and blue and white, and we’d be able to look like wow, you know just a zero win on an image, there was a lot of grind, a lot of sweat, there was a lot of darkness there was a lot of like twisted ideas

Flea: It was revolutionary, people were freaking out. Dedicating their lives to this art.

Henry Rollins: we were changing things, and we saw it from the church groups that protested us, the cops that used to come up to our shows and camp out outside our sst, we knew we were making a difference, and while I don’t think we were important, I knew we were up to something, and nothing made us think that we were a big deal at all, but we knew we making ripples on this calm water pool.