Get in the Van

Rollins kept tour diaries during his years as the frontman of Black Flag — the most important and most brutal American hardcore punk band — and published them without sanitizing. The van, the floors of strangers' apartments, the violence at shows, the poverty, the relentless touring schedule, the physical and psychological cost of doing it all without any institutional support, without a label, without a manager, without anyone's permission. This is not the mythology of punk. It is the sweat and the blood and the exhaustion of what the DIY ethos actually costs when you commit to it completely — the price of total artistic independence paid in sleep deprivation and split lips and the specific loneliness of a van moving through the American night. The essential companion to Our Band Could Be Your Life — that book analyzes the underground from outside, this one documents it from inside a body that lived it. The most unmediated document of what it actually felt like to make something real outside the mainstream, written in real time by someone who was too committed to stop.