Flag? Rag!
Upside-down & backwards with the Nihilistics
Friday night I drove Keith Hartel (above) and myself to Clifton to see another Adrenalin OD show. We pre-gamed at Dingo’s Den, a biker-esque bar where a New York strip steak (with fries or mashed) sets you back a measly $18. Dingbatz (across the street, same owners) put me in mind of rock clubs–long, narrow, horseshoe bar up front, stage in the back, every square inch covered in band stickers–from my misspent youth. On a four-band bill AOD was up last, so I parked myself at the bar (I’d forgotten earplugs and it was painfully loud near the stage) and ordered the first in a series of seltzers with lime (I downed my two beers at Dingo’s Den). All night old scenesters and WFMU fans stopped by to say “Hello!” when they realized it was me, “Chris T.!” Few knew I hadn’t been on WFMU since 2016; some thought I still played with the Nihilistics (“They oughta put you back in!” went one indignant response when I broke the ancient news). Through W70, Fear Gods and The Fiendz the vinyl backdrop behind the stage read DINGBATZ. When AOD took the stage it’d been amended:
The Nihilistics never had a backdrop until fate intervened at one of our early shows. It might’ve been a VFW, it might’ve been an American Legion: either way, I went poking around in the basement before we played and liberated a huge (it must’ve been at least 6 feet wide) American flag moldering in a box. I spirited it home to discover it was a beautifully-constructed 48-star flag with embroidered stars on its blue field and red and white strips of fabric sewn together. I’d recently read or heard something about inverted U.S. flags serving as nautical distress signals and it gave me an idea: turn the flag upside-down and paint NIHILISTICS on it as our protest against Ronald Reagan and his American Cowboy bullshit. Mike Nicolosi (RIP) and I were into spray-painting T-shirts with custom carboard stencils but for the flag I used a set of slide-together brass alphabet stencils belonging to my mom. Spraying black Krylon, I repeated NIHILISTICS all over the flag. The upside-down flag became a fixture at our shows, hastily hung before we hit the stage.
As its creator I became guardian of the flag, taking it with me when I moved off Long Island and left the band. I carted it from Tenafly to Edgewater and eventually Hoboken, where I wore it to a Halloween party draped over me like a shroud, with a Scream (before there was a Scream) mask on my face:
The flag was deteriorating with age and misuse and at some point in the late ‘90s or early 2000s I offered it to Ron, who accepted. Last time we spoke about our old Nihilistics backdrop he wasn’t sure it was stashed somewhere or he threw it out because it was in tatters.
The upside-down U.S. flag as distress signal is in the news again, with the MAGA crowd appropriating it as “Stop the Steal” shorthand and a Supreme Court justice flying it over his home (while blaming his wife). Back in the early ‘80s I had a whole different problem in mind.
As they say, context is all.
