Black Flag"Damaged"LP OOP Orig Unicorn Parental Sticker Henry Rollins No Barcode

$

70

Black Flag "Damaged" LP Unicorn/SST (US) 

Vinyl is VG+, Jacket is VG

Original Press

Includes Parental Warning Sticker

No Barcode

Track Listing:

Damaged is the debut studio album by the American hardcore punk band Black Flag. It was released on December 5, 1981 through SST Records.

Over the years since the album's original release it has been recognized as a punk classic and one of the most influential punk records ever made by appearing on a number of "best of" lists by punk fans and critics alike. In 2003, the album was ranked number 340 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Pitchfork Media also ranked it number 25 on its list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1980s.

Background

Black Flag had made at least two aborted attempts to record a full-length album since the release of its first extended play Nervous Breakdown, with singers Keith Morris, Ron Reyes, and Dez Cadena; some of the Reyes sessions became the Jealous Again EP, while selections from two of many Cadena sessions became the Six Pack EP and the "Louie Louie"/"Damaged I" single; other session outtakes would later comprise the Everything Went Black double album. At the time of the recording, Cadena had moved to rhythm guitar (a position he had initially intended to take when Reyes was still in the band) and 20-year-old Washington, DC expatriate Henry Rollins had become the band's new lead singer weeks before the sessions occurred. Unlike Reyes, who had never sung in a studio before and Cadena, who had not even sung at all before joining the band, Rollins already had one recording credit to his name with the short-lived DC hardcore punk band State of Alert, who recorded No Policy, an EP released earlier that year on Dischord Records.

The band recorded their backing tracks without Rollins, who overdubbed vocals with band members Greg Ginn (guitar) and Chuck Dukowski (bass) coaching him afterward. The most complicated vocal tracks ended up being Dukowski's "What I See", which was supposed to have an improvised speech in the song's bridge but ended up having one written out by Dukowski when Rollins could not come up with anything that he was satisfied with, and "T.V. Party", which featured backing vocals from the entire band.

The album was recorded at Unicorn Studios, on Santa Monica Blvd in West Hollywood. The band was living and rehearsing in another part of the building that housed Unicorn Studios prior to the sessions.

Drummer Robo was wearing bracelets on his left wrist that rattled when he played; the rattling, whenever he would hit his snare drum, especially when he hit downbeats on it, became part of the sound.

The version of "Rise Above" on the album was recorded at an earlier session with Rollins and was intended purely for a single release. Another version was recorded during the album sessions but the band abandoned it & decided to include the single version instead.

The closing track, "Damaged I", is technically Rollins' first writing credit with the band. In his book Get in the Van, Rollins reports that he used to improvise the lyrics every night when the song was performed live. Two takes of the vocal were done, and the first was used.

Cover art

The cover art, taken by punk photographer Ed Colver, features Rollins putting his fist through a mirror. The effect was made by cracking the mirror with a hammer, while the "blood" on Rollins' wrist is a mixture of red ink and coffee. The photograph has been described as "iconic" in the pages of Artforum.

Business disputes with Unicorn

Their distribution deal with Unicorn—which was associated with MCA Records—resulted in an initial pressing of 25,000 copies. MCA Records president Al Bergamo listened to the album prior to release and claimed that it was "anti-parent", although he never cited a specific lyric that led him to that conclusion. As a result, MCA refused to distribute the already-pressed-and-packaged album which bore an MCA Distributing Corp. logo on the lower right corner of the back cover. Black Flag members had to personally visit the pressing plant and apply a sticker over the MCA logo which read, "As a parent... I found it an anti-parent record"—thus essentially throwing Bergamo's words back in his face.

Longtime SST employee Joe Carducci has reported that the "anti-parent" statement was a red herring. In fact, according to Carducci, Unicorn Records was so poorly managed and so deeply in debt that MCA would lose money in distributing Damaged, regardless of its content, and was eager to sever its relationship with Unicorn by any possible pretext.

SST ended up distributing Damaged on its own; as a result, Unicorn filed lawsuit against Black Flag and SST, claiming breach of contract. Black Flag were suddenly enjoined from recording any more records under their own name, although SST were able to continue with its own release schedule, releasing The Minutemen's The Punch Line and the debuts of the Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust. However, Unicorn would release a single of an updated "T.V. Party" before the legal trouble started, a recording (just as ironically) commissioned by MCA for the soundtrack to the film Repo Man.

The legal dispute between Black Flag and Unicorn tied the band up for almost two years, during which time they released Everything Went Black, a double album of pre-Rollins outtakes, under the names of the individual musicians and vocalists on the record. Unicorn ended up filing even more legal briefs, claiming that Black Flag had violated a court injunction against releasing new records. Ginn and Dukowski ended up doing several days in Los Angeles County Jail for contempt of court, but the case fizzled out soon afterward when Unicorn went out of business, freeing Black Flag of any further obligation to the label.

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