In one sense, Greg Ginn has slowed his roll a bit since his fabled days powering hardcore frontiersmen Black Flag. “Louisiana is one of our favorite places,” he says. “We planned this tour around the Mardi Gras time in the rural areas around there.” That’s a different tack then his old band took; the prime motives behind Flag’s road itinerary seemed always to be the perpetual accretion of sheer mileage and the compulsion to spread its vital poison gospel to any corner of the world that would have it. Now, Ginn takes good time to appreciate the sights a bit: “Around this time down there,” he continues, “they have all these strange parades and fires on the water. It's great.”

That deference to cultural landscape in the realms of scheduling is where Ginn’s apparent methodological mellow streak stops, though. A definitive attribute of his old band’s essence still burns brightly within him, guiding the distinctly differing approaches of the two bands he’s bringing to town. “I’m not real big on the whole nostalgia thing, or playing old-school this, that or the other,” he says. He’s still hellbent on the same notion of forward movement that forced Flag’s evolution from being THE defining proto-hardcore band to becoming purveyors of monolithic avant-metal driven by his wigged-out atonal guitar leads. Ginn’s dedication to progress alienated a large majority of the fans Black Flag earned as the preeminent hick-pollinators of any era and still bedevils him now: “I like to be involved in new sounds and new ideas, though it's not the easiest way to market music in these times where there is so much nostalgia and so many reunions.”

Ergo his two current touring outfits: Jambang and The Taylor Texas Corrugators. Narrow-minded adherents to the neanderthal pubescent yawp Ginn accidentally helped forge three decades ago should stay home with their iTunes. The former sounds like a tonally more-full-blooded Krautrock experiment, replete with driving monochord structures and his hypermelodic improvised guitarwork. The latter, named for his newly-adopted hometown, lies akin to the acidheaded country-sprawl of his old pals Meat Puppets, only with the country/rock ratio flipped and with an upright piano. 

Unsurprisingly, Ginn still upholds the legendary work ethic that pushed Flag into pioneering musical and attitudinal territory, and that made his label, SST Records, arguably the most influential and diverse independent U.S. label of the past 30 years. SST released six records on the same day not long ago, all of which Ginn contributed to musically. Included in that glut was a new jam by his oldest active outfit, Gone - a group that was contemporaneous with late-era Black Flag, but has, of course, changed dramatically through the years to encompass massive polyrhythmic improvisations and electronic instrumentation. 

Ginn explains that his focused devotion to change led him to leave Los Angeles, a city to which he, his bands and SST will forever be inextricably linked, for tiny Taylor, a rural outpost of 13,000 located 30 miles outside Austin. “It was time for a change; I lived in California for most of my life,” he says. “Being in a small town is ideal - we have our studio here, and it's just a good place to work, a quiet place to get a lot of work done.” The centrality of his new home lends itself to maintaining his ideal touring schedule, as well.  Certainly, the local music of Texas has influenced him, as the twang-and-drang of the Corrugators attest; Ginn sees something integral in the scenes supporting the country and zydeco music around him that hits a familiar bell; it’s the closest thing he sees these days, in spirit and execution, to the early strains of hardcore. 

“Punk rock was developed by real people playing shows locally, without the notice of national radio or big print magazines. The sound reflected that; you had different people in different regions coming up with different sounds independently. In Texas, around where we live, there’s a lot of great music that’s unknown outside of a particular region. You wouldn’t realize until you spent time in Louisiana how popular and unique that indigenous music is. I like that, rather than stuff just being dictated by national media; it's important to still have local music that’s closely attached to a particular community.”

I have to say that my snotnosed little wrathful inner 14-year-old - an increasingly trustworthy sage these days - was doing joyous somersaults when I heard I’d be sharing a stage with Greg Ginn the night after my 30th birthday. It seems highly appropriate that the first bona-fide guitar hero I had after I’d initiated my fateful and life-altering relationship with the instrument is gonna help me ring in that symbolic and dread-inducing decade. As I doubtlessly face The Big Questions of Life that night, whose better brain could I pick in this soulless epoch than the progenitor of the modern DIY ethic, a man whose enterprises sought to invalidate the corporate music establishment of his day, and whose playing, for me and an entire subculture’s worth of guitarists, annihilated all that came before it? 

Greg Ginn remains independent, uncompromising and true to the principles that have made him inspirational to a generation of musicians, regardless of whether or not they themselves can sign off on the sonic results. To his credit, and our edification, Ginn also remains positive in an era when even esteemed record companies are failing left and right: “From the point of view of independent labels, when we started SST and Black Flag, it used to be a really closed system. Just a few huge labels was it - there weren’t many small labels, particularly in rock. Now it's pretty much all broken down, which is a really good thing. There are so many options for people to get their music out there. When it comes down to it, I’m just very grateful to play the music I want to play.” 

Jim McHugh

WHO	Jambang, Greg Ginn & the Taylor Texas Corrugators, Loadblower
WHERE	Farm 255
WHEN	Saturday, Mar. 7
HOW MUCH	$5