I Left My Wallet in El Segundo

Yesterday I did what every good father does: I took my two little daughters to the Denver Gay Pride Festival. Actually, that was purely an accident; we were going to the library, and the fest was in the adjoining park, and my little girls can sense balloon availability from a hundred yards, and once they're onto that scent, there's no dissuading them from their mission to acquire one. So we got the balloons, signed some petitions, and perused the array of dry goods being peddled. It was hotter than fuck outside yesterday, and I'm not usually too keen on wading through crowds anyway, so I issued the order to exit the festival, whereupon I noticed a booth for a group called the Lambda Alliance which was manned by two middle-aged guys.

I stopped in my tracks and muttered to myself, "Holy fuck, they let those boy-fuckers have a booth here? Is there a 'Catholic Priests For Tight Assholes' booth here too? Why is not an angry mob descending upon these dickwads with a flame-thrower? Shit, I'll get it started!" Then I slowly remembered that the boy-fucker organization is in fact NAMBLA, not Lambda. Sorry for the mix-up there, fellas.

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I had the strange not-quite-pleasure recently of becoming acquainted with a recording of Black Flag's last show, Detroit, 27 June 1986. Yeah, Black Flag is one of my all-time favorite bands and all that shit, but it would be hard to understate how bad their later material is, particularly the In My Head album. Black Flag's records were widely regarded as not being able to capture the live power of the band; they tend to be over-produced and sound like a Budgie tribute band or some such. Therefore, for the past 20 years or so, I'd been kind of operating under the impression that it was only the recorded version of the In My Head-era stuff that was trés lame, and that it must have translated better in the live show.

Well friends, it pains me somewhat as your reliable Black Flag archivist to inform you that if the aforementioned '86 recording is any indication, the live versions of these songs sucked rotten goat ass too. I guess I can kinda see what they're going for with those songs, and it was indeed a quixotic effort to get past the punk-rock orthodoxy of the day, but man, the shit is just embarassingly bad. It's so weird to me that a band that was so ferocious and awesome just a couple years earlier had so quickly morphed into such audio kitty litter.

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