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mark's Collection

Black Flag   06/04/1982

Eastside Club, Philadelphia, PA
Source cam on stage. low gen ntsc vhs > Panasonic AG-1980 > Canopus ADVC300 > Firewire > DV/PC > DVD
Media DVD   1 disc
Tech Notes BC - hothcanada
Tribute To American Hardcore
DVD Series


Vol. 2 Revised



Black Flag
Date: 1982-06-04
Venue: (voltarized) *2009 Upgrade* Philadelphia, PA
Sets: 51min+
Media: DVDR
Number: 1
Source: cam on stage. low gen ntsc vhs > Panasonic AG-1980 > Canopus ADVC300 > Firewire > DV/PC > DVD
Quality: A
Notes:


Video: 8000Kb/s CBR
Audio: LPCM 1536Kb/s


Definitive as of 2009-04.


(51:33)

instrumental
TV Party
I've Heard It Before
Depression
Scream
Jealous Again
No Values
Life Of Pain
American Waste
Clocked In
What I See
Padded Cell
Damaged I
Revenge
I've Got To Run
My Rules
Six Pack
Fix Me
Rise Above



In December 2006 flylow & I upped this show for the first time.
The source tape, a dub off BC's vhs copy was sent to captcrunch for transfer & authoring.

In spring of 2007 we knocked off a generation with the original Tribute To American Hardcore Vol. 2 edition, which was BC's tape transferred by yours truly on a Toshiba stand-alone recorder.

For this 2009 revised & upgraded edition (surely the last!), BC's taped was shipped off to voltarized to see what type of result a professional-quality capture rig might yield. What came back was far better than anything that could've been expected, in fact, it's hard to believe this was the same tape used on the original vol. 2 because there's absolutely no comparison as far as the overall quality goes (see screen comparisons in post 1). This is nothing short of a colossal upgrade, one that renders our previous efforts well past the point of redundancy.


The show itself --- what more can be said?
I've always looked at this video as the defining visual document of the American Hardcore era, the most intense, memorable and best filmed performance of a complete gig from the time.

This is the first of three upgraded 2009 dvd releases from the "Damaged" tour. Hartford '82 & Los Angeles '82 (w/ Minutemen set) will follow shortly.

-hoth





Excerpts from James Parker's Henry Rollins biography, "Turned On" :


Unofficial footage of Black Flag live in an Elks Hall in Philadelphia, filmed on 4 June 1982, three days after (Thurston) Moore & Gira saw them, shows just how far he has come. Rollins now looks extreme - scrawny, heavily tattooed on his left side, jagged with stimulation. Some line has clearly been crossed. Entrenched in the SST experience, Rollins has gone native; he is dressed in a derelict's saggy trousers and a white t-shirt with cut-off sleeves; his hair is a mat of loose black curls, a scrubby beard blurs his jawline. He flings himself into every pocket of the music with a kind of wretchedness, self-hate twisting his bones in their sockets. Black Flag sounded immense - furious, layered, very tight, funky in a shattered way : the fresh presence of a young surfer named Emil on the drums has lent them more of a groove, his snare working as a hinge on which great slabs of guitar gape wide and slam shut. Every player does his part - Cadena a shadowly dark-eyed presence behind Dukowski, stage left, at the apogee of his Jesus-joined-the-Angels (Hell's) period, with hair to his shoulders, bandana and beard; Dukowski himself vengefully scattering alarm, his eyes picking out people in the crowd, mouth working in a unheard fury; to Rollins' right, Ginn's head is tossing restlessly in his private universe of rhythm, shaken from side to side as if he refuses to understand what is happening. Even from the wavering, marginal perspective of a hand-held camera you can taste the atmosphere, heavy and charged - a world of negative possibilities blooming slow, black and orchid-like under the pressure of the music. There are staticky exchanges of fists and flashes of blood. Rollins himself gets into a couple of scuffles - a drunk stagediver in a Hawaiian shirt, a repeat offender, blunders into Greg Ginn one too many times, and when he finally crawls onstage, glassy-eyed and sacrificial, Rollins obliges by climbing on top and pounding him nastily. The band, fully absorbed in the intro to "Life Of Pain", those notes that climb and shimmer like towers of dark quartz rising out of the desert, play on......


.....Rollins stands up, his fist still a cocked weapon of bone, and carries on. Later, during "Damaged I", a hand reaches out of the crowd and smacks him in the face, once, twice...Rollins leans over the pit with a sick smile, leans into the attack, taking blow after blow, his mind a weird fuse that suddenly hits powder as he snaps into action with a series of straight lefts - a head jolts back in the crowd, repeatedly.

......The song starts on its last legs and goes from there, the band crushing it while Rollins goes freeform, screaming, "LOOK AT ME! LOOK! AT! ME!", gobbling the mike to peel the scream right off the back of his throat. "I HATE...ME! I HATE MYSELF!", writhing on the floor wrapped in the mike cord, a twisted birth in it's umbilical toils - Rollins is in his zone, and suddenly Cadena, Dukowski and Ginn are lined up behind him in a barely moving rank, churning the riff - chung-ka-CHUNNNNG! - sentinels of this massive, enraged dreariness. At each chord Dukowski bangs his bass with his fist, and it swings off him like a flap of flesh off an open wound. The legendary Flag stamina...They play "Damaged" until it is wrung dry, every note squeezed lifeless, and then hit the hi-speed classics: "Revenge", "Rise Above". What does it feel like to play this shit, to carry this weight? Dez Cadena : "All you know that's going on is the music. You don't even know about the other guys onstage. You don't feel alone though. You feel like everybody probably is with you, but you feel at the same time...separated. And you are communicating with people, and people are enjoying what you're doing, and you're feeling that, but there seems to be some transparent film in the way. You're reaching people, but at the same time you're separated. I can't explain that". Live In Philadelphia 1982. A videotape. Go and find it.
Trades Allowed Yes
Ratings Show: A    Sound: A-
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Owned by mark · Last Updated May 23, 2023