Clare Street

      "Thurston and I first met Raymond Pettibon in the early eighties during a trip to L.A., where I was visiting my parents. Someone told us about a house party in Hermosa Beach , where Black Flag was playing, so we drove down to South Bay, pulling up in front of a typical single-level house. the neighborhood was languid, slightly funky, as if it had tried and failed to become a beach resort, morphing instead into a shabby suburban neighborhood a walk away from the ocean. The house was small, the music ferocious, Henry Rollins in the kitchen, in full force, dressed in those signature small black shorts that I believe were technically an old-style nylon bathing suit. Slick with sweat, he was writhing around bumping into cabinets and people, at one point coming up to me and singing straight into my face.
       Coming from the New York downton scene, where people had no houses, or garages, and thus, no house parties, this was a completely new scene for us. The Black Flag show was one of the best gigs I'd seen before or since - scary, surreal, intimate. As the sound crashed and bounced off the refrigerator counter and shelves, and Henry Rollins twerked years before twerking existed, the performance fused hardcore punk with suburban sunlit banality, high theatre with the everyday, erasing any and all boundaries between band and audience."
                                          
Kim Gordon, 'Girl In A Band.'