The massively important hardcore institution Black Flag has been through many, many incarnations over the years, and its strangest might be the one happening right now. The only constant member of Black Flag over the band’s entire existence is guitarist and founder Greg Ginn, a man who has seemingly alienated everyone who ever knew him. Earlier this year, the 71-year-old Ginn unveiled an entirely new version of Black Flag, in which all the other members are in their early twenties. He’s older than all of his bandmates combined. It’s weird.
The new-look Gen Z version of Black Flag played their first show in Bulgaria back in June, and the videos were truly disorienting. But the Black Flag name still evidently carries weight, and the band will play next year’s Coachella. Now, Ginn has agreed to speak about this new Black Flag reboot in a New York Times feature, even though he considers it “distasteful” to explain himself.
Ginn says that he didn’t have some grand design with the latest version of Black Flag. Instead, the band needed a change when Mike Vallely, their most recent lead singer, quit earlier this year,. Ginn figured that the members of the next Black Flag incarnation should live near him. (Ginn currently resides in the small town of Thorndale, Texas, outside Austin.) When he put out a call for new members, younger people were the ones who showed up: “It really just ended up that way. I was open to anybody, and I got a lot of responses, but I think when people hear us play, they’ll realize that they’re just the best people to do it, music-wise.”
But Ginn did recruit new singer Max Zanelly, a 22-year-old waitress who he noticed singing along forcefully in the front row of a Black Flag show. She’d never been in a band before and Ginn says, “She was the only person I could imagine doing it.” Zanelly says, “I was just like, ‘OK, [expletive] it.’ Like, when is an opportunity like this going to come in my life ever again?… The first day at practice, was like, ‘Yo, I’ve never screamed into a mic before.’ I remember driving home from my waitressing job and losing my voice in the car because I would be screaming the Black Flag songs.”
Bryce Weston, the 22-year-old drummer for the new Black Flag, taught drumming classes at the School Of Rock before he got the gig. He says, “It was cool being able to go back and tell my students, ‘I’m now the drummer for this band I was teaching you the songs of, like, a year ago.”
Greg Ginn says that he’s “not on the social medias,” so he hasn’t seen any of the obvious backlash to this new Black Flag lineup. He still trotted out the familiar line of anyone who gets lambasted on social media: “I mainly listen to people that come to our shows, and I care about what they think. Because there’s always somebody in their mom’s basement on a keyboard that knows how to run the world.”
Former Black Flag bassist Kira Roessler tells The New York Times, “Especially as old punk rockers, what is resistance now? Is Black Flag going on tour rebellion and resistance the way it was then? Or is it a [expletive] Elvis impersonation?” Former singer Henry Rollins, meanwhile, “declined with great enthusiasm” to comment.
The Times feature addresses some of the other reasons that people don’t like Greg Ginn. With respect to all the reports of unpaid royalties from Ginn’s label SST Records, once a hugely important part of the underground, Ginn blames label distributors and says, “All I’ve tried to do is not go bankrupt, and keep going.” As for Ginn’s ex-wife’s 2014 accusations of child abuse, Ginn claims that a court ruled for him to keep custody, and his lawyer denies that those allegations “were ever sustained by the court.” The result of the case is sealed from the public. Read time Times feature here.
