COAST TO COAST, BITCHES...

VANCOUVER, BC
BIKES AND PUNKS

A rather riotous border crossing behind me, yet my heightened need for sleep and massive headache still on board, I entered Vancouver at 11pm on Saturday night. Honestly folks, I don’t party like you do. I drive long hours on Saturday nights. I call people at absurd hours of the evening and ask them to let me into their homes so that I can go straight to sleep and then allow them to get back to their Saturday evening. That is a party to me; disrupting somebody else’s good time (kidding, but it happened).

As bad as that sounds it wasn’t all that bad. Larissa is a friend of a friend, Juls, who I met last year right after my home had been broken into and vandalized, and right before I moved into the warehouse (more on that some other day). Juls keeps on turning me on to these really fucking rad people across the country that either have The Bars tattooed on them, or are just cool as fuck people in general. So, Juls turned me on to Larissa; Vancouver scene stalwart. Larissa turned out to be VERY FUCKING COOL.

Larissa met me at her doorstep, let me into her home, made me feel totally welcome, and then went back to her party. I went straight to sleep. Larissa never came home so the next morning when I awoke at like 6am, I had this sort of major WHERE THE FUCK AM I (?) Moment. If you remember, I wasn’t really in the best of mindsets when I arrived at the border, and was even less conscious when Larissa allowed me into her house, so it seemed rather okay that I had no clue where I was when I woke up. And, so, I sat up and did what anybody would do; I called my mom (haha).

Anyway, my adventure to Vancouver was two-fold; (1) to photograph a handful of people at Scratch Records (a very cool record store in downtown Vancouver) and (2) to interview Ron Reyes (aka Chavo Pederast). While on this trip I have slated interviews with a few former Black Flaggers, and some people just close to the band, and Ron was to be my second (Dez was my first) interview, and supposedly the first interview he has given on his Black Flag years since he left the band. HONORED..? HELL YEAH I WAS HONORED..!

In 1982 or 83, just as I was getting into Punk Rock, I picked up Jealous Again at a record shop in York, PA. I didn’t know much about Black Flag, except for what I had heard about them through some skater kids at a local, abandoned skatepark. So, I bought it, brought it home, put it on the old record player that my brother gave me, and I wasn’t sure what to think. Honestly, I had never heard anything quite like it, and, again, honestly, I didn’t really know anything liked it existed. AND I WAS BLOWN THE FUCK AWAY. There wasn’t a second’s hesitation; This was what I wanted to be. Fuck the Clash, the Cars, even DEVO (just for a minute though), Black Flag, and the plethora of records that I bought afterwards, was my point of entry into American Hardcore Punk.

And, so, predictably, Ron Reyes (called Chavo Pederast on the record) sang intense and aggressive lullabies to me in the form of Jealous Again, Depression, White Minority and the others. Ron’s words and delivery were like the first words that I heard after coming out of a 16 year sleep, and that feeling never left me.

It may sound a bit “fan boy” of me, but I never saw Ron Reyes as a guru or anything. Even recently when I contacted him it was purely a respectful partnership. While he only lasted 6 months in Black Flag, what music he recorded, and the image he portrayed in Decline of Western Civilization, was really what made me like American Punk so much. Mostly, I wanted to gain Ron’s perspective on where Black Flag was headed when he was in the band, since it earned its greatest audiences under their 3rd vocalist, Dez Cadena.

Did Ron see Black Flag headed for near-legendary status…? That was what I wanted to know. And after an hour and a half interview with Ron I walked away realizing that unless Ginn had a revelation somewhere along the way, nobody ever thought in terms of status down-the-road. They were more worried about surviving to play their next show.

I gave Ron a ride home. He is a family man now, and he is just now coming to terms with his time in Black Flag. As he mentioned to me a few hours earlier, “Stewart, if you would have approached me about this last year I would have said that I wasn’t interested,” and now he is. And that is cool by me. Not only did I get to finally meet a man that changed my destiny as a run-amuk teenager, but he was just an amazing person in general; a very 3-dimensional man.

So as I dropped him off at his home and continued back to Larissa’s house for dinner, I felt that if everything else were to fall through I was happy just having met Ron and talked to him about everything from Punk Rock to graphic design. It was an amazing experience.

The next morning I packed up my stuff, loaded it into the car, and met up with Larissa and Dunkin at the coffee shop. I bid them both farewell as I prepared to meet up with Stefan once again in Seattle. Off to the border where my car was searched again (don’t the US and Canada exchange information), and made a valiant shot down the 5. Along the way I receive a text, “Stewart, I will be in touch. You have a great project. Ron.” Amazing.