Black Flag’s Ginn Gets Back on Track

Greg Ginn still moves to his own peculiar rhythm. The guitarist and songwriter says he has no regrets about abruptly disbanding the pioneering Los Angeles punk act Black Flag in 1986 or about his virtual disappearance from the rock scene in the years since.

“I never got into music to be a professional musician,” says Ginn, speaking by phone from outside Seattle during his first long, national tour since the Black Flag days. He performs in Los Angeles for the first time in eight years on Thursday at the Whisky.

“I’ve always been very fortunate to play the music I want,” he says. “I feel I have to work very hard to stay in that position, to not get trapped into things because of money or conventional views of success.”

It has been singer-poet Henry Rollins who has enjoyed the most mileage from his years in Black Flag, even if it was Ginn who composed all the music, wrote most of the lyrics and created the raucous, jazzbo-punk style that’s still influential today.

For the last eight years, Ginn says, he has simply preferred to make his music in private, while running his growing SST Records label and playing lots of basketball.

About two years ago he began jamming with bassist Steve Sharp and drummer Gregory Moore. Out of that has come an unexpectedly prolific recording output from Ginn--five albums so far, released both under his own name and as an instrumental band called Gone.

His newest album, “All the Dirt That’s Fit to Print,” was just released.

“That’s pretty much the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “I’m always recording, pretty much on a daily basis.”

The current tour has had the trio performing mostly new material, while sometimes mixing in a handful of old Black Flag songs, including “Nervous Breakdown” and “Jealous Again,” all sung by Ginn.

The legacy of his old group is not something Ginn spends much time thinking about. He says that Black Flag ended when he began to feel his creative freedom threatened by other expectations within the group.

“I felt that they wanted more conventional measurements of success--and the values had changed,” he says. “I could no longer keep experimenting like I had thought we had.”

While it lasted, Black Flag was at the heart of an underground South Bay music and art scene that launched such important local bands as the Minutemen and such visual artists as Raymond Pettibon, Ginn’s brother.

At the same time, Lawndale-based SST Records, the small independent label he created to release Black Flag’s singles, served as an early vehicle for Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, the Meat Puppets and other acts of lasting influence.

Ginn has mixed feelings about what has been done with the do-it-yourself example set by Black Flag and SST, which helped pave the way for the acceptance of hard-edged underground rock from the likes of Nirvana. “I like when people take the influence and do something good with it,” he says. “But if they just take something and commercialize it and cheapen it, I’m not proud of that.”

Too much of what’s come in the newest wave of alternative rock, he says, is “weak, conservative music.” And the struggle of bands in the ‘80s--finding their own club gigs, traveling endlessly in crowded vans on low budgets--is sometimes forgotten.

“There’s a lot more opportunity, but at the same time there’s been a certain amount of stagnation that’s set in, inevitably,” Ginn says. “It’s taken for granted and there’s less a sense of self-reliance.”

* Greg Ginn, with Rig and Transition, plays tonight at the Whisky, 8901 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 8 p.m. $10. (310) 652-4202.