only a diseased mind would want to read this book

pdf, with thanks to the original sharer

Good News: Black Flag gets to play

Bad News: They have to do a disco set so the police can dance

We would go out on our flyer-pasting missions in Robo’s little white Ford Cortina. We’d have the bucket with the paste, we’d have a few hundred flyers, and after all the flyers were posted, like three of four hours, we’d go home to sleep ... To me my work was the equivalent of a band like Black Flag or any other band who was righteously self protective of recordings. I would give them original art and it would come back to me scrawled upon and taped over or whited out, and I’d always ask nicely, ‘Could you please make a copy of this first and then do that?’ Their master tapes were deemed sacrosanct, while my work was seen as completely disposable.

The kids don't need anything but the craziest, insanest, raunchiest shit

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T: The problem is that rock and roll and politics don't mix because you reach a point where you have to give up one for the other. I just think they're all going to reach that point and it'll be interesting to see which side they go for; especially the Dils, because they really do believe in that bullshit . . . it may be bullshit but they really do believe in it .

NO: What do you think they would do if they started making a lot of money, if they started getting really famous?

T: Well, that's what I mean . Their Politics become hearsay ... it doesn't mean anything after a while. They 're rock and roll. It's entertainment.

C: The point was made clear to me when I went to see the Dils at Base's hall and there were posters on the wall saying "Welcome to the workers paradise" and it cost $4 to get in.

Paul Morrissey: I like fantasy & entertainment but it seems nobody puts real life into films. There was a friend of mine who was manager at a porno theatre in New York & they were just showing porno. It was the first early full porno they were having in Manhattan & he had some friend of his who was sort of a poet or something, who was the ticket-taker. Somehow this guy who had no business running a porno theater got the job. So he was the manager, and his friend the poet didn't come in one day to sell the tickets & he said 'Where'd you go yesterday, you didn't come in,' & he said, 'Oh, I had to go to that new film that just opened EASY RIDER.' And I was there and I said 'You went to see what? Why did you go to see that?' … He said 'Oh, I wanted to see my generation on screen,' and I thought that was preposterous, because that film really had nothing to do with even the ten year period within it was made … maybe 10 or 15 years earlier … the beatniks or something. But it just dawned on me. I said 'If you want to see your generation on screen, go inside the theater, in that porno up there, that's your generation.'

"Manson is welcome to my whole family, dead or alive"

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Pettibon wasn’t above laughing at his own marketing efforts. Here’s how he prefaced a psychedelic-themed issue of Tripping Corpse: “Why is Pettibon, who’s been associated with punk up until now, doing a magazine like this? In one word, money. M-O-N-E-Y. You see there are more hippies than punks. Indeed, marijuana is the biggest cash crop in California, my home state, and as we all know, hippies like to look at drawings while they hallucinate.” - artinamerica

some readers will leaf through the book to pick out the dirty parts

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If everything goes right I will maneuver Picasso into painting me. I'll teach that sick old fucker some new positions of my own if I have to. Bring his raggedy Cubist cock dragging n' kicking into the real world

waking up covered in vomit. a wasted life

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Visually, the sleeve contained all the classic components that would make the Flag’s cover artwork so distinctive and instantly recognisable, the band’s name printed large beside the rippling flag logo that had begun appearing all over Los Angeles and the South Bay. The sleeve featured a Raymond Pettibon illustration depicting, in nervy and anxious pen strokes, an aggravated figure wielding his fists with threatening menace, another man in the foreground thrusting a chair to fend him off; the tiled floor and blackboard on the wall suggest the location is some conflation of a schoolroom and an asylum cell. The illustration’s mood is one of wound-up tension on the edge of brutal release. This was a dynamic also shared by the songs contained within.

"Is that an M16, soldier, or are you just glad to see me?"

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"Many Vietnamese prostitutes stuff razor blades in a place you wouldn't believe. Masturbation (to a healthy blonde) is much safer." - Bob Hope. They call Jill St. John's cot 'The Brass Bed.' She has even serviced a friendly Gook General or two. And in return, aren't we fighting for the movies ever so much more than for the girls we left behind? Too many of us have good buddies that lost their dicks for their country to bust a stitch on that one. If she lifted her skirt any higher you'd see the jungle rot that she caught in the General's quarters. Back Stateside her backside stayed dripping for two months, so she applied for a Purple Heart. Mucho red tape later, Governor Reagan finally gave her his.

A musky smell, all animal, it fills my nostrils and ignites ideas

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The In My Head sleeve would mark the end of Raymond Pettibon’s relationship with SST, following Raymond’s discovery that his original artwork had been cut up for use in Black Flag promotional materials, which he felt was an intolerable disrespect to his work. Years later, he still feels negatively about his experiences with SST. “As far as I’m concerned, SST is not even a part of my past,” he told American Hardcore author Steven Blush, in 2001. “I was never paid for any of that stuff. I’m written out of their history… I don’t want to get into this, because it just continues something I don’t want to be a part of now, and didn’t really want to be a part of then. Who gives a fuck about cover art? The people who do couldn’t name one important real artist if their lives depended on it. Rock’n’roll is such a powerful medium, your work can be in galleries and museums around the world, and still it comes back to a record album.”

"I feel defiled, not enrichened, by Warren Beatty's sperm."

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“I was running from the police after one Black Flag show,” remembers photographer Glen E. Friedman, “and I got hit in the face with a baseball bat. I got beat up by these guys, whose car windows had been smashed in by some other punks. I thought I was running from the police, but I was running from these guys. Of all people, the soft-spoken Raymond Pettibon came to my rescue, and said, ‘Hey, this guy’s not who you’re looking for, he didn’t do anything wrong!’ And I was literally lying in the middle of the street, trying to stand up, after being knocked in the head with a baseball bat.”

"I've given about 10 fuzz the clap this month"

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The Black Flag logo was merely the first public flowering of young Raymond Ginn’s very particular artistic talents. He’d grown up in the South Bay while the automobile ‘Kustom Kulture’, led by Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, was in full bloom, and was forever drawing cars and hot rods. When allowed, he would pore over his father’s collection of macabre Fifties horror comic books, relics from before the Comics Code Authority expunged any lurid gore from the funny pages, following the publication of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s inflammatory argument for censorship of comic books, Seduction Of The Innocent. The violent imagery of these comic books would echo throughout Ginn’s own later work, which would similarly court controversy and censorship. As for the bleak sense of humour present in the same illustrations, Raymond was also a fan of Mad magazine, the satirical comic book that rendered American pop culture in irreverent and cynical black and white caricature.

she has done the things you only read about in novels

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“I remember one flyer in particular, which they plastered all over the place,” says Steven McDonald, the youngest member of the community that soon congregated at the church. “It was a Raymond Pettibon image of a cop with a moustache – a classic Tom Of Finland ‘gay cop’ image – offering a little boy in a beanie cap some candy, with some really dark, funny, clever text beside it, the kind of image that Pettibon later became very famous for. Plastering those images all around the South Bay was, I think, definitely throwing the first punch.”

that much jealousy is dangerous to men used to getting what they want

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It’s fair to say Raymond’s startlingly cold, bleak wit carried a punch ill suited to the lighter, pithier zings such cartoons typically practised. He would find a clearer, more natural and even more unsettling voice as he moved away from cartooning, onto subsequent works that preserved the compacted narrative tension of a single-frame strip as works of fine art. These pieces – a violent flood of which poured untrammelled from his ever-present notebook – foregrounded images echoing hard-bitten noir comics, recreated in Raymond’s slashes of blackest ink, and juxtaposed with hand-lettered captions that often spoke in the voice of the principal character, or some omniscient, wise narrator, little snatches of prose that obliquely suggested background for the story unfolding in the illustration. This context was often jarring, suggesting a deeper, more disturbing, more perverse layer of meaning to the image than originally suggested.

I got kicked out of P.E. for refusing to use a bra

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That awkward, shameful distance between reality and facade provided fertile ground for Raymond's pen; this was where he located the cold, uncomfortable truths that coursed through his artwork. Disillusionment and the theft of innocence were common themes and dynamics within Raymond's work, along with a sense that the world of authority and 'justice' existing outside the comic frame was every bit as morally fractured, disturbed, murky and shameful as the dark black ink scenario contained within it. His drawings suggested that noir was everywhere, lurking within every shadow, within the hearts of all, only ever barely repressed. Pettibon's illustrations would prove a perfect fit with Black Flag's music in terms of intensity, violently assaulting the senses and the sensibility, provoking and unsettling people. Plastered on walls and lamp posts and telegraph poles around the south bay and as far into Los Angeles as the group and their friends would venture, these illustrations - crudely overlaid with information about the next gig - helped build Black Flag's notoriety easily as much as expanding their fan base. The vandalism of their publicity campaigns, meanwhile, placed them in direct opposition with the authorities.

you grow up fast: always with your eyes wide open

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Pettibon approached his art with a seriousness that equalled Greg’s unflinching commitment to Black Flag. Tom Troccoli remembered that whenever he visited the Ginn house, “Raymond would be sitting there in his weird reclining chair, with his pasteboard in front of him, drawing cartoon after cartoon after cartoon, while watching whatever was on TV, while his mother was screaming at him, trying to get his attention.” Pettibon’s artwork drew heavily on his father’s vast, chaotically stocked and wildly eclectic library for inspiration, from the torrid pulp novel covers, the gory and perverse comic books, but also from classical texts, from great literature.

sex is everywhere all the time and you can't escape

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It was no more trouble being a catholic than it had been being a methodist. It was so much more exciting that I wished I'd converted at a younger age. I have sinned both ways, and you don't know sexual fulfillment until you have sinned as a catholic.

"This Book is Hot, Blow-Torch Hot" - Phenix City Daily News

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Our vegetarian commune treats its vegetables with sperm, prayer, acid rock, and loving kindness. When they don't respond we know we are out of tune and that we must unselfishly sacrifice another. A blood sacrifice. A pig sacrifice. A hitchhiker sacrifice. A runaway sacrifice. A pretty girl sacrifice. Or would you rather starve to death?

"You don't live in a Johnny Mercer song, sister, not with me."

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Arion Press turns to pulp fiction with the novel South of Heaven by Jim Thompson, known as “The King of the Pulps”, but also an original writer of the first rank. Artist Raymond Pettibon illustrates this edition with forty-four drawings, printed on red sheets interleaved in the text. Pettibon is one of the hottest contemporary American artists, whose lurid images have intrigued art collectors and curators ever since he emerged from the eighties punk scene. Nearly all of Pettibon’s artworks contain texts or captions. Some are quotations but most are his own highly creative writings. For South of Heaven he has used excerpts cunningly chosen and elided from the book, combined with his own improvisations on themes in the novel.

It doesn't take 500 pages to tell this story

 

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As I get older, I find I'm spending more time in art galleries and starting to appreciate some art ... but I still live by Lux's view of art .. 'I don't know about art, but I know what I like. I'll be surfing on the swamp on a Saturday night.' And I imagine that many of you garagepunkers here on the hideout might share Lux's view. But here's some art that you might appreciate, an exhibit by Raymond Pettibon, brother of Gregg Ginn of Black Flag. Raymond is the guy behind the scenes who created the iconic Black Flag logo that has been 'borrowed' by many. It's the 4 vertical black bars ... you've all seen it. Raymond also did TONS of punk posters, LP covers, fliers etc back in the day. - What Wave Dave

as natural as anything in Los Angeles ever is

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His repertory of atomic explosions, hippies, vixens, cowboys, dismembered bodies, old cars and liquor bottles describes a morning-after portrait of America in extremis. The affect is world-weary but slyly comic. The pervasive nastiness and unfettered id belong to the worlds of Joan Crawford and low-budget horror films: to camp as much as to punk. Surfers, Gumby and Vavoom, the wide-mouthed character from the old animated series "Felix the Cat," are Pettibon's occasional surrogate self-portraits. Old Vargas pinups and beefcake nudes traced from magazine advertisements or superhero comics give to some of the pictures an ambiguous, once-upon-a-time, bleak eroticism.- NY Times

when you pick a flower you make a hippie cry

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On the West Coast, his work had wallpapered walls and telephone poles since the dawn of Punk. His work was a great gift, going far beyond the droll Rock & Roll iconography so painfully present at the time. His drawing embodied what my suburban friends and I believed to be the Punk ideal: unruly, snide and bleak. Even his draftsmanship wreaked of sarcasm and gloom. His output consisted entirely of drawings with captions. During the Eighties he self-published close to one hundred photocopied collections of his grim renderings - Steven Cerio 

"mom says I have to wait til I'm 12 to smoke"

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I remember the first time I did Charlie Manson, someone said, “What are you drawing this hippie for? How uncool is that?” And then here it is, over 20 years later, and the same stupid-ass mistakes are being made. One thing it comes down to is that everyone is eventually a teenager, no matter when they’re born. Everyone is still going to go through this kind of rite of passage. Like punk—I believed in it for about two weeks somewhere between the ages of 15 and 18. But there are teenagers nowadays who are actually killing people because they’re wide-eyed idealists about straight edge. I mean, Jesus, what a hell of a battle that must be. You know, at least in the ‘60s there was a war going on. There were tens of thousands of your peers dying, and millions of Vietnamese, at least that was a real battle. I mean, what the fuck is a battle to punk rockers? Against long hair? Jesus. It’s a really decadent mockery, when you think of it.