Scam #9: DAMAGED - The Story of Black Flag's Classic First Album

by Erica Dawn Lyle

Erick Lyle's SCAM zine has once again pushed past the constraints of "zinedom." Disguised as a zine, this is in fact a superior piece of long-form journalism documenting the history of Black Flag and the atmosphere around the creation of their legendary first album, Damaged. Lyle interviews all members of the band exhaustively, as well as those around the band, and refers to both official and unofficial histories to help explain the social context from which the band appeared in Los Angeles in the late 1970s. Finally, he closes with a skeptical consideration of the band's music and aesthetic becoming part of the canon of Los Angeles art, being used to speak for a city that he feels rejected them wholesale.

28 pages, Unknown Binding

First published September 1, 2012

About the author

Erica Dawn Lyle is a writer, experimental musician, curator, and cultural instigator who lives in New York and Florida. Formerly the touring guitar player for Riot Grrl punk legends, Bikini Kill, as a solo performer, she has released musical collaborations with Bernadette Mayer, Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Kathleen Hanna, Brontez Purnell, and many more. The author of several books, she has been a frequent contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and other publications. Her artist books are in the permanent collection at MOMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, Yale's Beinecke Library, the University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, The Getty Museum, The Hammer Museum, and other institutions, and her writings, papers, and correspondence are permanently held and viewable at the Erica Dawn Lyle archive at University of Miami. In collaboration with her partner, Midnight Piper Forman, she is currently at work on Our Place In The Sun, a speculative fiction film about climate collapse and gender transition in Florida that has screened as a work in progress at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and California School of The Arts in Valencia, CA. Her most recent book is The Knight of Cups (Belladonna Press, 2023).

Reviews

[Jeffrey Bumiller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this little zine in a record store in Philadelphia for $3.00. I picked it up because I had a long drive ahead of me and figured it would keep me occupied. I honestly wasn't expecting very much from it because I arrogantly assumed I'd heard this story a thousand times and wouldn't have anything interesting revealed to me (see Get in the Van, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and countless other accounts.) Well, I was pleasantly surprised, this little zine packs in a lot of information and does so in an almost academic way with footnotes and deep analysis of events; info culled from various interviews with band members and other eyewitnesses. Great Stuff, Erick Lyle has done a great service to this pivotal, monumental album.

[Mason Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, to the point reporting about the circumstances surrounding the recording of Black Flag's "Damaged" album, in zine form. Fun stuff, like a mini-version of one of the Continuum 33 1/3 books.