Popular conception associates Black Flag with Henry Rollins, but make no mistake — legal or otherwise — it’s Greg Ginn’s baby. He founded the band, he owned their label, and he outlasted all his singers. And after Hank’s confrontational magnetism helped establish the band as hardcore’s leading light, Ginn moved Black Flag into more confounding channels. Shortly after detonating the hectic, violent Damaged on the scene, the band was slapped with an injunction from their label, Unicorn Records. (Unicorn was refusing to release the record, so Ginn put it out on his own SST Records.) When the legal smoke cleared, Black Flag had an astounding three records ready to go: a rapid succession of sludge-touched releases. Songs routinely crept over the six-minute mark, with long stretches devoted to Ginn’s ghastly noodling; Family Man was split evenly between Rollins’s poetry and Ginn’s Sharrockian fusion instrumentals. 1985 brought an instrumental EP (The Process Of Weeding Out) and two more full-lengths. Loose Nut harkened, in part, to a more traditional hardcore sound. In My Head was a sparkling alloy of punk loathing and heavy-metal atmosphere. But while the sound was meshing, the band wasn’t: Ginn kicked out the rhythm section (drummer and founding member of Descendents Bill Stephenson and bassist Kira Roessler). Ginn’s new instrumental combo Gone served as the opening act on Black Flag’s 1986 tour. When the tour finished, he decided that the Flag had progressed as far as possible (plus, he and Rollins couldn’t stand each other). So he quit. For good measure, he broke up Gone that same year. His bandmates jumped to the brand-new Rollins Band, just one of many Henry’s ventures on his way to becoming alt-rock’s favorite grumpy uncle. Ginn continued running his various labels, but in the late ’80s SST stalwarts like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. jumped ship after a crowded, Stax-in-1969 release schedule and charges of shoddy accounting. In 2003, Ginn assembled a throwback version of Black Flag (including former singer Dez Cadena and drummer Julio “Robo” Valencia) for a few benefit shows. A decade later, longtime fans were faced with two less-than-ideal versions of the band. The first was Ginn’s, featuring Ron Reyes — the band’s second singer — on vocals. The second was just called FLAG, and it boasted the original singer (Circle Jerks’ Keith Morris) and their first permanent bassist, Chuck Dukowski. Ginn filed a trademark infringement action against FLAG and also Rollins, who had registered some Black Flag marks with the U.S. Patent Office the year before. The injunction was shot down shortly before Ginn’s Black Flag released What The…, a serviceable hardcore exercise that boasted a whopping 22 tracks and maybe the worst album cover of the year. The same month the album was released, Reyes got canned in the middle of a show.