If you were a teenager, or perhaps a bit older, living in Southern California in the yawing years straddling 1980, there were just a handful of acceptable radio stations to listen to. At the low end of the dial were KMET and KLOS, which were heavy on classic rock—bands such as The Who, Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Chicago, Boston, and other stadium rockers. While these stations were popular, increasingly the music they played seemed irrelevant.
At the opposing end of the dial was KROQ, a raising radio force, playing a core of English bands, new wave, punk, and more edgy (but mostly danceable) bands.
Someplace between here and there was the actual youth culture of Southern California. Not quite cool enough to be English and not quite old enough to be hermetically sealed into the music of an older generation.
Then, as now, there was economic and political malaise. A former actor and Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, was stumping to bring “morning back to America,” and the youth culture couldn’t separate Reagan from his knuckle-dragging movie co-star, Bonzo the monkey.
Just south of Los Angeles, in the gritty neighborhoods of Lawndale, Torrance, South Bay, and Gardena, and just under the flight path of LAX, there was an epicenter of growing youth dissatisfaction. Not cool enough to live seaside in Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, or Manhattan Beach; not faux hip enough to listen to KROQ and too jaded to find solace in album-oriented radio championed by KLOS and KMET. These youth began to form their own bands that melded the energy of punk and heavy metal, often tinged with political, sexual, and social angst. Southern California was virgin territory seeking a sound and bands such as Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, D.O.A., Red Kross, Subhumans, and Black Flag in particular planted their flag in that vacuum.
It wasn’t simply sound and fury, but an entire aesthetic system that took hold.
Between the years 1978 and 1986, Raymond Pettibon (a.k.a., Raymond Pettibone; St. Pettibone; Chuck Higby; Ray Dylan; Raymond Ginn) produced an aggressive trove of graphic works for those seminal Southern California punk bands, providing them with visual identity that mirrored the sound they were inflicting.
To market the albums, SST Records—which was founded by Pettibon’s brother and Black Flag guitarist, Greg Ginn—was formed when no other labels would take the bands on. It was with Ginn's foresight that Pettibon’s artwork first began to appear on the covers of SST’s bands album covers, gig flyers, and later t-shirts, stickers, and skate decks, all at a time prior to Pettibon thinking of himself as an artist and long before he began showing in commercial art galleries.
“The flyers were one of the best things about working with SST,” recalls the lanky Pettibon at his Redondo Beach studio. “It’s more of a general audience when it goes on a telephone pole. It’s not something that you can buy in a store or see on TV. You see it at a glance and you can’t switch it off.”
And make no mistake—some of Pettibon’s pen-and-ink drawings are strong enough to make you reach for the off button: themes include castration, dismemberment, suicide, murder. Working in a style reminiscent of religious tract handouts, Pettibon shows one-shot images of disturbed pockets of humanity that are at times humorous, violent, and macabre: a panel with a pair of men fighting with knives is headed with the caption, “Your girlfriend called me chicken.” A skeleton standing on a stage tells an audience, “Life is a joke,” with a caption underneath that says, “This is the punch line.”
“[My drawings] are violent,” Pettibon, 24, admits. “And that’s dictated by the medium, in that I just use one frame. You can’t tell a whole story with all kinds of exposition. It’s like taking one frame out of a movie or one crucial scene out of a book at a critical point. You can’t really be subtle.”
—from “Black Flag Cover is Pure Pettibon,” by Jeff Spurrier, Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1984
Many of the images for the gig flyers were drawn from the pages of the forty-seven artists’ books by Pettibon that were published by SST. In addition to flyers for Black Flag’s gigs, Pettibon’s artwork graces flyers for bands such as Angst, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys, Descendents, D.O.A., Fear, Flipper, Germs, Go-Go’s, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, Ramones, Redd Kross, Saccharine Trust, Stains, Subhumans, Throbbing Gristle, TSOL, Wasted Youth, Youth Gone Mad, and others. Pettibon is also credited with both conceiving the band’s name—a riff on the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath and the legendary Black Flag insecticide—as well as designing Black Flag’s iconic four black bar “flag” logo.
Post 1986, Pettibon was commissioned to produce covers for the Sonic Youth, Foo Fighters, and various bands that have included Pettibon himself as a musician such as Blank, Super Session, and Sür Drone.
Beginning with Raymond Pettibon’s first artists’ book, Captive Chains, published in 1978, several of the works presented here contain a myriad body of explicit, graphic, sexual, and violent material not suitable for children or those faint of mind. Famously, the announcement card for Pettibon’s first New York City one-man exhibition, held at the Semaphore Gallery in March 1986, read: “I am the wrench in people’s lives, really fixing them up.”
Pettibon’s cult-like following in the art world began soon after the appearance of his earliest album covers, artists’ books, and flyers. The present, wide-ranging collection reflects this history and proves Jeff Spurrier’s and Pettibon’s predictions from forty years ago:
There are already a number of “serious” Pettibon collectors, and it’s inevitable that when punk is history, the art of Raymond Pettibon will be considered an essential chapter.
“It’ll happen like it did in the ‘60s with the psychedelic posters,” [Pettibon] predicts. “Once these kids start growing up and making money, it’ll be a way of recapturing their past. But at that point the art becomes dead. It’s just artifacts.”
—from “Black Flag Cover is Pure Pettibon,” by Jeff Spurrier, Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1984
