http://m.vice.com/read/black-flag-anatomy-of-a-lawsuit
Legs McNeil wrote:Keith Morris and I have been pals for about a million years, ever since I crashed on his floor after another drunken night hanging out in LA during the 1970s. In the 80s, when I was working at SPIN, I borrowed a copy of Hardcore California (a book about the Southern California punk scene) from him and never returned it. I’d shudder whenever I came across the book. Last year I finally sent it back to him with my most sincere apologies, and that sort of rekindled our friendship. Since I’ve always been confused about Keith’s time in Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, and the whole California hardcore scene, I thought what better way to get some clarity than to interview Keith and let him explain it himself? We talked on the phone for four or five hours and Keith laid out the entire history of the hardcore scene. It probably helped that I started off by saying, “Talk to me like I’m a moron and don’t know any of this stuff.”
A month after we finished the interview, Greg Ginn, the guy who co-founded Black Flag with Morris, initiated a lawsuit against Keith, along with Dez Cadena, Chuck Dukowski, Bill Stevenson, and Stephen Egerton, because they have been touring under the name Flag, giving the fans a taste of true hardcore punk rock. Henry Rollins is also named in the lawsuit. Since Greg Ginn’s Black Flag has become a bloated, monotonous carcass of everything we hate about rock 'n' roll, Flag got together to pass the torch to a new generation of headbangers and shame Greg Ginn’s band by showing the world how the noise should be played.
As this lawsuit travels through the courts, take a few minutes, as we travel back to those dark days of the 1970s when the world was one giant macraméd happy face and teenage angst was drowning in the swill of the deadly folk rock, back when a few fuckups dared to challenge the status quo….
Read on...