Happy Birthday, "Damaged." How Black Flag's Debut Met Its Match in the Sony Walkman

When Black Flag’s first album dropped 44 years ago, the Walkman had just hit. Has there been a better pairing of medium and message since?

Black Flag outside Unicorn Studios during the recording of “Damaged,” photo by Glen Friedman, 1981.

In 1990 I lived at “The Embassy,” a dingy group house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The house got its name because most of the band Nation of Ulysses lived there. It wasn’t an embassy and they weren’t diplomats, but that’s another story.

One afternoon I was hanging out with Tim Green, one of the band’s guitarists, when we heard the sound of gentle strumming coming from outside. Poking our heads out his window, we saw an idyllic scene on the neighboring balcony: A crew of happy, clean-cut young professionals kicking off the evening with an acoustic guitar and a bottle of white wine.

I don’t remember a word passing between Tim and I, but each of us knew exactly what to do. Crouching down low, we hefted one of his massive stereo speakers out onto the balcony, rotated it 90 degrees to aim directly at our neighbors, and commando crawled back inside.

We were, of course, perfectly visible; their balcony was so close they could’ve practically handed us a glass of wine. But that’s not what happened. Instead, we turned on Tim’s stereo, put Black Flag’s Damaged on the turntable, and turned the volume up to full.

Party = over.

Now that I’m the middle-aged guy sipping pinot gris, I’m not exactly proud of this moment. But some things haven’t changed: Damaged is still the perfect soundtrack for shitty and antisocial acts, for pissing off neighbors, breaking bottles in alleys, driving too fast late at night. The album is just as jarring as it was back then: Chaotic and unhinged, fairly dripping with repulsion, self-hatred, and mordant humor. It may be an album for and by losers, but for those 34 minutes and 58 seconds they’re winners, sort of.

Black Flag’s first long-player may not be the first hardcore album and it may not be the best (Middle Class Out of Vogue? Germs (GI)?). But it’s one of those records—up there with Black Sabbath and Kind of Blue—whose approach singlehandedly sparked an entire genre. As much as the songs themselves shred, it’s how the record sounds that makes it stick. And as luck would have it, it dropped just as a new way to experience music arrived on the scene.

Presumably not listening to Black Flag. Walkman ad, 1981

For those of us of a certain age, June of 1980 is one of those before/after moments: the month the Sony Walkman hit the United States.

With no exaggeration, I’m hard-pressed to name another technology that so utterly transformed the experience of the everyday. The Walkman made it not only possible but fashionable to shut out the rest of the world, imbuing activities as prosaic as riding the bus with cinematic gravitas. If it wasn’t technically the first portable playback device, but it was the one that changed everything. Even priced at $200—roughly $713 today—it quickly became the must-have gadget of the year.

Just as impactful, the Walkman helped usher in the age of the playlist. The ability to experience the world through someone else’s soundtrack—especially if that person was a romantic interest—took on a social currency that’s difficult to appreciate today. A mixtape was a physical thing, an artifact someone had labored over.

Sony created their own version, featuring such rippers as Eric Clapton’s “Forever Man,” T-Square’s “Jungle Strut,” and Dvorak’s Symphony Number 8. It’s safe to say that Damaged wasn’t on the marketing team’s radar, which I’d argue is one hell of a missed opportunity: The album was practically tailor-made for the new device. As ugly as Dvorak’s opus is beautiful, as scabrous as T-Square is peppy, Damaged is total and unrelenting—the perfect sonic template for shutting out the world—and it sounds best cranked through tiny headphones, plastic earpieces digging painfully through the foam surrounds.

A rare photo of the interior of Unicorn. Image taken from “Enter Naomi” by Joe Carducci.

The Sound of Fucked

Damaged was recorded at the now-defunct Unicorn Studios in West Hollywood. While little photo documentation of the interior exists, the place has been described as “claustrophobic”—the band were also living there at the time—and you hear it in the rattle of drummer Robo’s bracelets and the hum leaking from shoddy amplifiers. Even more than the first-gen punk albums that’d shocked sensibilities just a few years earlier—Never Mind the Bollocks, Pink Flag, hell, even Ramones—Damaged actually puts you in the room. You smell the beer-soaked carpeting and the sour tang of sweat. It’s feral, it’s corrosive, and above all it’s honest.

Damaged is a recording in the classic sense, capturing a moment and encoding it directly onto magnetic tape. Let’s be clear: There’s no shortage of albums recorded this way (see: nearly every jazz recording, ever). But in this case, the document perfectly suited the mediums of the cassette (hissy, compressed) and miniature headphones (immersive, uncompromising). What you hear is what you get: A band of borderline (or perhaps in Greg Ginn’s case, over-the-border) sociopaths playing like their lives depend on it. There’s no artifice, no reverb or echo or “production values.” Damaged is—to borrow a phrase from the band Born Against—“the rebel sound of shit and failure,” anchored by the flatulent thud of Chuck Dukowski’s bass and the raw squall of Ginn’s guitar—played then as now through solid state amplifiers, a uniquely perverse and punishing choice (I speak here from personal experience).

Beginnings and Endings

Today, December 5th, Damaged is 44 years old. Last month, a feature in The New York Times detailed Greg Ginn’s latest reboot of the Black Flag “brand,” for lack of a better term. Now aged 71, the guitarist has recruited collaborators with a collective age of 65. In addition to being the first woman ever to front Black Flag, 22-year-old singer Max Zanelly has never before even been in a band.

Time will tell how this latest incarnation fares; as of this writing, they’ve only played a single show—in Sofia, Bulgaria, last June. For now at least, Damaged remains Black Flag’s defining statement. It may be an artifact—like the Walkman and the cassette tape—but I dare you to tell me it sounds dated.

Now go put it on and fuck up your neighbor’s day.