Album: Black Flag, Who's Got the 10 1/2?, 1986
Acquired: Probably purchased at Tracks at Ward Corner in the spring of 1987
Best Track: "The Best One Yet"
Lasting Memory: Dave Harris and Bob Villaflor threatened to destroy this tape when I insisted on playing it on the AP Room boom box during an off-season lifting season for wrestling.
Man, they just didn't get how Henry Rollins and Greg Ginn were the absolute best at putting what us teens were feeling into words and music.
Neither did I frankly.
Dave and Bob hated this live album because the music sounds terrible and the songs are just all angry rants. I liked the album because it is noisy and strident. In the final analysis -- because I'll never redo this -- they hated Who's Got because of what it tried to be but wasn't and I liked the album because of what it really was but couldn't grasp at the time.
But the primary reason I picked up Who's Got is because I had heard it a bunch of times while riding around with Dave Baez and some other guys in Dave's tricked out 1986 Jeep Cherokee looking for something, anything to do.
I can't honestly say that the tunes, as I then understood them, spoke to or for me or my friends. I was never alienated or disaffected or in trouble enough to be a true punk. I just felt a little bit of angst and ennui.
But then I was never physically gifted enough to be a star athlete, either. I won more wrestling matches than I lost, but I never stood on the top platform at the end of any major tournaments. Nor was I valedictorian material. My GPA ranked me eighth or ninth out of the 114 members of Norfolk Catholic's graduating class of 1988. Julie Laab, seated to my right on the stage of Chrysler Hall, was valedictorian. Oh, the almost pain and ignominy of my almost traumatic teen years.
Listening to Black Flag with my 37-year-old ears and trunkful of life experience rather than my 17-year-old ears and plastic grocery bagful of life experience, it now strikes me that Who's Got and the other songs of Black Flag actually did speak to and for me pretty well in the late 1980s. The songs are anthems of almostness and of confusion more than anger over the changes one goes through during the transition from teenager to adult.
I'm giving Black Flag exactly as much credit as they deserve. "Bastard in Love" is almost the bitter rumination on why dating rarely leads to a happy lifelong committed relationship that I first heard it to be. I now recognize that the song is much more a captured moment from a varsity game of Pull the Pretty Girl's Hair on the Playground, Run, and Wonder Why She Thinks You Have Cooties. Similarly, "My War" with its repeated "My War!/You're one of them/ Said you were my friend/ But you're one of them!" is almost the revolutionary rejection of societal norms it is put forth as being. In truth, it is much more of a temper tantrum aimed at someone you're sharing a lunchroom table with even though you swore in the parking lot before A period that you would hate him for life.
Those emotions and the words are exactly what a mostly mentally okay, mostly physically and financially secure teenager was feeling and saying when I was in high school. So good for Black Flag to tapping into that and giving voice to it.
One bit of pathos from Black Flag that does ring true after all these years is the passage from "Modern Man" that goes "Punish your future/ To spite your past." My friend Paul, who had a very messed up home and personal life, chose that as his senior yearbook quote. I don't know if he was allowed to use it because I never received my 1988 yearbook. A printer's error delayed delivery until after graduation, and my apathy prevented me from ever inquiring about how to get a copy once they were delivered.
I lost touch with Paul right after graduation. Hope he turned out okay.
For the record, and on a much lighter note, my senior quote was from Ricky Nelson's "Garden Party":
Well it's all right now
Learned my lesson well
If you can't please everyone
Then you've got to please yourself
I should also mention that over the years, Who's Got has become something of a living situation transition marker for me. I have distinct memories of playing it right before I moved out of my freshman dorm at Virginia Tech. I also played it, with no forethought and for the first time in many years, when I moved out of a group house in D.C. in 1998 and when I was packing up to move back down to Virginia Beach in 2006. It's good music to do physical labor to because it is energetic and you don't have to pay much attention to it.
Keeping that tradition alive, I have just listened to Who's Got after putting the finishing touches on my, James', and Sara's move to a most excellent townhouse in the far reaches of central Virginia Beach. You want Town Center? We got your real town center right here. Sure is hard to get to, though. (And you may have to zoom out on the maps to get the jokes. And for those of you not familiar, Town Center is a recently three-quarters completed Potemkin village walking mall without proper sidewalks. Still funny? No? But it really is, because .... Um, because .... Aw, screw it.)
Up Next: Luka Bloom, The Acoustic Motorbike, 1992
Word Count to Date: 5,921
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