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SST was formed to put out the first Black Flag record. Basically, there wasn't anyone else to do it. I felt that what I was doing with Black Flag was very worthwhile, and I wanted to get it out there.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.

I mean Black Flag happened. I was lucky. I don't think I could have put together something with one percent of that oomph on my own.

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.

After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band.

People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the band's existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. I'm sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared.

The Minutemen were seen as more of an art thing than Black Flag, although I didn't see them that way. It confused people when we put out Saccharine Trust, too.

I was there during the first elections in South Africa. I watched them take down the apartheid flag and raise the new flag.