'My face started to swell pretty bad. Hell, that was only the first night (at the Vex). We had to come back and play this fucking dump again the next night' - Henry Rollins. Portraits of a band on the edge...On July 4, 1983, Los Angeles hardcore punk band Black Flag invaded the terrace of the Federal Building on Wilshire Blvd. Young punk-with-a-camera Michael Pearson captured indelible colour images of the band exploding like fireworks against a backdrop of California skies, palm trees, rippling U.S. flags, and the Marlboro cowboy. Behind the frenzy of band members Rollins, Ginn, Dukowski, and Stevenson loomed the imposing modernist infinity of the Wilshire Federal Building, landmark home of the IRS and the FBI. Later that month, Pearson caught Black Flag again, this time with suffocating intimacy at the infamous and truly dangerous hole-in-the-wall Vex club. Seen for the first time in MY WAR ON WILSHIRE, Pearson's snapshots preserve a precarious and vivid moment in Black Flag's campaign of conflict portraits of a band confronting reality at the breaking point.
