With its raw power, sheer aggression and do-it-yourself ethic, Black Flag was the quintessential Southern California punk rock band. Although it has been more than a decade since the band's demise, its influence is still being felt, having given rise to punk poster boy Henry Rollins, the SST label and the band's frequently tattooed four-bar logo.

Formed in 1978, the Flag emerged out of the South Bay of Los Angeles with a line-up that included future Circle Jerks singer Keith Morris on vocals, guitar whiz and SST founder Greg Ginn on guitar and bassist and future SST Records executive Chuck Dukowski on bass. The band's first single, and still one of its best tracks, was the beach punk anti-anthem "Wasted," which featured the lyrics, "I was a hippie/I was a burnout/I was a dropout/I was out of my head," over a machine-gun-like backing track. That first line-up, however, didn't last long. Morris went off to form the Circle Jerks and was soon replaced by Chavo Pederast, who fronted the band on the Jealous Again EP, and later Dez Cadena. It wasn't until the addition of singer Henry Rollins that the Flag truly began to fly. Initially Rollins, then a muscle-bound skinhead, seemed more like a jock than a punk, but he soon proved his mettle on the 1981 album Damaged, which was to go through a major-label distributor before it was deemed anti-parent. Thanks to a lawsuit, the band was prevented from using their name for a few years. When the Flag emerged from the legal battle, the band had transformed their sound from raving punk to an assaultive metal-oriented style, complete with the band members sporting long hair.

The band recorded several potent albums before the Flag folded. Rollins launched his own band and became a spoken-word artist, while Ginn got Gone, his post-Flag outfit, before launching a less-than-successful solo career. While Rollins may have gained more notoriety fronting the Rollins Band, his best work remains the material he recorded with Black Flag.