Black Flag >> Try to stop us

I can't believe it's still California Month, tremor #65:

Black Flag - "Rise Above"

(SST Records, 1981)

This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Greg Ginn's breakneck 9-second guitar solo is one of the funniest and coolest things I've ever heard.  Who says punk bands can't do guitar solos?  I got into Black Flag backwards, having been a huge Rollins Band fan in the early to mid '90s.  Being too young to have experienced any of Black Flag's infamous shows in the '80s I've had to piece together an opinion about them from varied sources.  I would say overall I think they're quite overrated, but they definitely changed underground music dramatically.  I bought Damaged on cassette thru SST mailorder in summer of 1996, and got it on CD ten or so years later.  This is really the only Black Flag album that I can enthusiastically sit through, since I'm not a punk fan at all.  And I definitely get bored by the tedious metallic knuckle-dragging of their later LPs.  I specified "summer of 1996" above because a few months before that, I bought, read, and then tore up, page by page, a Henry Rollins book, because I was so fed up with the dude's self-righteous attitude.  In '93, I got a free white ROLLINS BAND sticker from The Mushroom and cut up the letters so that it made the phrase "NO SINBAD" (as in, the painfully unfunny comedian).  For some reason, I had this on the window in my room for many years.  The band posters I had on my wall / ceiling at this time included Faith No More (The Real Thing), Pantera (Vulgar Display Of Power), Public Enemy (Fear Of A Black Planet), Red Hot Chili Peppers (Mother's Milk), the Judgment Night soundtrack, etc.  And a life-size poster of David Robinson on my door, no joke.  So anyway, no matter what one's opinion of Henry Garfield (Rollins) is, "Rise Above" is just a phenomenal song that will always make the ol' neurons fire.  Even the possibly-comatose Mitch McConnell would go on an adrenaline-fueled rampage after hearing it.  I guess this song goes out to the Occupy Wall Street people, though they're hurting their own cause by this point with all their shenanigans.  I think this song is a good way to finish up the whole California Month thing, though it's not very representative of my overall musical likings.

Irony was always one of Black Flag's biggest weapons:

Here are some songs I ran out of time or energy to post during these epic California Months:

Concrete Blonde - "Scene Of A Perfect Crime" & "Dance Along The Edge"
American Music Club - "Last Harbor"

Fu Manchu - "Wurkin'"

The Black Watch - "Come Inside"

BPeople - "Time"

Bad Religion - "Suffer"

Idaho - "Sliding Past," "Save," & "Forever"

Deion Sanders - "Must Be The Money"

Tearist - some song or other

Richard Cheese - "Bullet The Blue Sky" (U2 cover)

Whirl (now called Whirr) - "Leave"

Pennywise - "The Secret"

Social Distortion - "Let It Be Me" & "Mommy's Little Monster"
Rollins Band - "Do It" (Pink Fairies cover)
The Kids Of Widney High - "Every Girl's My Girlfriend"
Red House Painters - "Drop" & "Down Through"
Fantômas - some song or other
Mellow Man Ace - "Hip Hop Creature"
They Eat Their Own - "Like A Drug"

...and may more

Planets with similar climates: Unwound - "New Energy" (1995), Suicidal Tendencies - "You Can't Bring Me Down" (1990), Fugazi - "Merchandise" (1989), Pennywise - "The Secret" (1991).