NO IDOLS THROWBACK: SONGS OF PRAISE 001: Can't Decide
Due to it being the 40th anniversary of the release My War by Black Flag, I decided to share this post from way back in the pre-dark days of 2019. This essay was later added to Songs of Praise, a ‘zine (?) I self-published in the summer of 2021. If you’d like a copy, please drop me a line and I’ll gladly sell you one. Thanks.
Like many out there, I assume, music is something you just can't seem to shake no matter how hard you try. It’s an intangible force that lingers as the only constant companion upon your twisted journey throughout life. For the past year or so, I’ve found myself lying in bed in the middle of the night trying to battle the constant tingling shooting down my left side by tracing the constellation of songs and sounds that have unconsciously defined me. Some have warped my brain into making some of the worst decisions in my life while others have provided a lifeline when confounded by the mere concept of being. Digging to discover the importance of these watershed moments in sound can be both painful and hilarious for me, but it beats the Mad Libs-style record reviews and journalism I have been roboting my way through for what seems like forever. Consider this continuing series I am dubbing Songs Of Praise my Sister Lovers or The Day The Laughter Died, a misunderstood project done to please no one but the artist…just not as excellent and groundbreaking as the projects mentioned.
Sixth grade was a weird time for me, and panning back, it seems to be where the kernel of my identity formed. Early on in the school year, I somehow persuaded my older brother to start taking me down to his college radio show on Friday nights. While he scuttled over three turntables playing minute-long songs, I would usually lose myself in the record library. Some nights I’d pick a random letter from the alphabet, scan the entire section and write down the names of bands that looked interesting. When we got home, I would then look up their names in the fanzines he had at home and file away whatever info I could into a spiral notebook. It was also around this time, I became infatuated with Doctor Who and feverishly began collecting all the import editions of the books I could get at the local comic book shop and going to Sci-Fi conventions wearing a six-foot-long scarf around my scrawny neck.
As you would expect, other eleven-year-olds in the suburbs of New Jersey didn’t hold these same interests. And for the most part, I was fine with that. The only thing that concerned me was this indefinable feeling I would sometimes get in the pit of my stomach. For no specific reason, this sense of hopelessness and dread would spring up and shut me down forcing me to don a mask of static just to get through whatever crap came up in the average day of a kid presumably without a care in the world. But basically, I didn’t bother anyone with my problems and did not flaunt my freakishness. Nonetheless, this didn’t stop a gaggle of eighth-grade dudes in my ultra-rigid catholic school from using me as a receptacle for their unwarranted scorn. With their budding facial hair and unfocused physical energy, these might as well have been grown men harassing me. Luckily, they never made it past the stage of empty threats.
That is until one day during recess when a typical one-sided confrontation began between myself and one of these chocolate-milk mustache mouthbreathers. When it quickly became apparent he wanted to go beyond the typical name-calling and into actually beating the living snot out of me, I was at a loss. I had never been in a fistfight in my life and did not have the data on how to act. Confused as to what to do with the fear and rage building up inside of me while also knowing any attempt at physical retaliation towards this neanderthal would be a wasted and embarrassing effort, I took my right hand and dug deep into my left forearm causing immediate scarring and droplets of blood
(I did not come from a household where nail clipping was made a priority. My old man had a nail on his left big toe you could cut hard salami with)
Doing something this batshit crazy obviously made the kid back off and walk away before flashing me a look of bewilderment. The scarring began to hurt immediately, so I took myself to the nurses' office and as soon as she saw my arm, she asked what had happened. For some stupid reason, I told her the truth. “So,” she asked, “You decided to hurt yourself rather than harm another child?” To me, that sounded like the long and short of it so I responded, “Uh, yeah I guess.” Once I said that the nurse left the room and everything started to move in rapid succession with the nurse calling the principal’s secretary who then called the principal who then called my mother. I remember being confused when I was told my mother was coming to pick me up. I wasn’t physically ill, but if this whole episode ended with leaving school a few hours early, I’d roll with it. The ride home was awkwardly silent. My mom didn’t seem angry at me; just lost as to what to do.
Join the club!
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Once at home, I went straight to my room to read and probably listen to records on my brother’s stereo. When I heard my dad come through the door, a dread attached to a reason began to form in all the usual regions. How was he going to react to this story my mother was going to relay to him? Once I heard both of them enter their bedroom and shut the door, I moved down the steps and into the hallway to eavesdrop on the proceedings. All I could hear through the door was my dad’s well-known bellow pierce the air like crashes of thunder.
“Well, what is it? Is he crazy?”
“Does he have to go to some special school now or sumthin’?”
Was I crazy? This thought spun around my head after sneaking back upstairs to the fortress of the room I shared with my older brother. I know I was out of step with other children and laughed heartily at things others found to be disturbing. So, maybe that’s it! I’m crazy! Boom! Glad we figured that one out! Guess I’ll just wait for my parents to come up to my room to tell me I’m crazy. I suppose they’ll just send me somewhere to pop some pills and in no time, I’ll be playing football and watching The Dukes Of Hazzard like every other kid my age. The thing is though, once my parents left their room all I heard from my room was the TV switch on and my mom call in the usual Friday night order to the local sub shop. The whole incident was never discussed again.
If I was indeed crazy, I was in this struggle alone.
Sometime before the subs got picked up, my brother came home with his usual payday stash of records under his arm. On top of the pile was the new record by Black Flag, My War. Both in its time and the present day, the record is considered to be what rock critics call a ‘departure record’. Bored with the artistic oppression being dealt with within the American Hardcore punk scene they built, the band slowed down their usual frantic pace to trudge the depths of their tortured collective psyche to produce one of the most emotionally and musically challenging records of all time. Many die-hard punks hated the record but seeing I was just some little shit with no pony in the race of scene politics (yet) I could care less.
When the second song on the album “Can’t Decide” came on the stereo, the first warbles from guitarist Greg Ginn and the tumbles by drummer Bill Stevenson caught my attention, but it was when the vocals of Henry Rollins kicked in that I sat up and took notice.
“I can’t decide to spill my emotions or keep them inside”
”I always wear a smile/Because anything but a smile/Would make me have to explain/What they wouldn’t understand anyway”
”I conceal my feelings/So I won’t have to explain/What I can’t explain anyway”.
For a moment, I was creeped out. How did Black Flag beam into my head and transfer in such a succinct amount of words the ambivalence I felt at expressing how I truly felt? The amorphous tensions and emotions from just a few minutes ago now felt defined. Not only that, but I now knew others felt the same exact way that I did. And these were older people I didn’t know who came off way more fucking interesting than any of these dingdongs who wanted to beat me up.
From there, the idea of there being a vast body of folks I didn’t know who were just as sensitive, confused and angry as myself calmed my nerves. My kiddie-brained takeaway after listening to My War was, “If I was indeed crazy, at least these guys were too”. This was confirmed when my brother took me to see the band later that year. In between songs, Rollins made light of a mass shooting that happened at a McDonalds in California a few weeks prior. The crowd cheered after he made his dark quip.
Standing upon a folding chair, I surveyed the crowd hooting and hollering over this horrible occurrence. They were made up of various ages, races, sexes and hair colors. It was then I realized these were the actual people I believed existed somewhere out there when I first listened to My War.
And within that flash of an instant, I knew it.
I had found my tribe.