The 'Damaged' Cycle

Years ago, I lived in a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a two-story remnant from the 1920s that had been converted into apartments, and then painted the most offensive shade of yellow, so that it looked like a block of cheese. It could be said my roommate and I were the most boring people living there. Behind us was the transsexual drug dealer who chased one of his/her underage houseboys down the street with a screwdriver late one night. Upstairs was a creepy older man with thick, grimy glasses who resembled an R. Crumb character and never wore a shirt. (He ended up being found dead in that apartment after I moved out.) And across the hall from him was a very large white trash family whose mother had a constant stream of mechanic boyfriends. One of her five sons was a teenage boy who, for about a month, listened to Black Flag’s Damaged pretty much on repeat.

Damaged was the first Black Flag album I heard as a teenager and I only picked up the cassette because the cover looked awesome. But now when I think of the album, the memories are of that house and my bedroom below his, the kick drum thumping through the ceiling, Henry Rollins’ vocals muffled but still unmistakably pissed. Somehow I came to appreciate the album more that way, reacquainting myself with the first anxiety-filled guitar line of “Rise Above” and the off-time urgency of “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie.” Damaged always seemed unfuckwithable.

So when I listened to Rise Above, Dirty Projectors’ “reimagining” of the 1981 classic, out this past Tuesday, my first thought was: You don’t fuck with Black Flag. And then: Who does this guy think he is? And then: Is that a flute?

But then I read that Dave Longstreth, who is essentially Dirty Projectors, found the cassette case for Damaged in his parents’ closet with no cassette in it, and basically constructed the lyrics from memory, and it reminded me of that house and that teenage boy.

Longstreth’s two previous albums, 2005’s The Getty Address and last year’s New Attitude EP, were bizarre, colorful genre-skippers that either grew on you or really didn’t. Likewise, Rise Above is a challenging listen, especially for purists. It takes the broken, desperate savaging of Damaged and reinterprets it as something modern. Added strings make it orchestral and Longstreth’s soulful rubber band voice, along with accompanying female vocals, render it less a cover album and more a memory exercise where vocals have replaced guitars. I recently asked Longstreth what the hell he was thinking.

Austin Chronicle: The first thing I envisioned when I listened to the album was a Black Flag musical. Is that an insult or a compliment?
Dave Longstreth: Wait, a Black Flag ... musical?

AC: Yeah.
DL: [Silence]

AC: You found the cassette in your parents' house. Was there a feeling of nostalgia?
DL: Not really. It had to do more with, like, personal meaning. Damaged was an album I listened to to pieces, and I felt I could be a part of this remembrance and identity. The process of recreating it was more like an excavation, not so much about nostalgia.

AC: It's safe to say Rise Above sounds nothing like Damaged, which, for its time, epitomized anger and frustration. Do you feel it was a successful reimagining?
DL: I think so. You can't put it in the dichotomy of being angry and not angry. Rise Above definitely has anger. I don't know ... talking about emotions in music is like talking about the color of the ocean. I was just trying to recreate it as note-for-note as a I could. The more times you play [the songs] the more times you notice little things.

AC: You seem to like themes. Do you feel you work better with a concept?
DL: I think it's the nature of my attention span and it helps me to relate.

AC: You left a few songs out. How did you decide on the order?
DL: "T.V. Party" I just didn't want to do and "Life of Pain" I forgot about and ... what else was there? The two "Damaged" songs? They were late on side B and I just kind of forgot about them. I just wanted to do what felt right.

AC: Has anyone from the band heard it?
DL: Yeah, we sent an official package to the SST offices and it came back with the signature of one "G. Gunn." A friend of ours knows Chuck Dukowski and is going to invite him to the show in L.A.

AC: Henry Rollins will be in town the same night. Have you invited him to the show yet?
DL: Sure, I'd invite him to the show. But ... I don't think he'd be into it.

See if Rollins shows up when Dirty Projectors rise above Wednesday, September 19 at Emo's.