Business Disputes With Unicorn
Their distribution deal with Unicorn—which was associated with MCA Records—resulted in an initial pressing of 25,000 copies. MCA Records president Al Bergamo listened to the album prior to release and claimed that it was "anti-parent", although he never cited a specific lyric that led him to that conclusion. As a result, MCA refused to distribute the already-pressed-and-packaged album which bore an MCA Distributing Corp. logo on the lower right corner of the back cover. Black Flag members had to personally visit the pressing plant and apply a sticker over the MCA logo which read, "As a parent... I found it an anti-parent record"—thus essentially throwing Bergamo's words back in his face.
Longtime SST employee Joe Carducci has reported that the "anti-parent" statement was a red herring. In fact, according to Carducci, Unicorn Records was so poorly managed and so deeply in debt that MCA would lose money in distributing Damaged, regardless of its content, and was eager to sever its relationship with Unicorn by any possible pretext.
SST ended up distributing Damaged on its own; as a result, Unicorn filed lawsuit against Black Flag and SST, claiming breach of contract. Black Flag were suddenly enjoined from recording any more records under their own name, although SST were able to continue with its own release schedule, releasing The Minutemen's The Punch Line and the debuts of the Meat Puppets and Saccharine Trust. However, Unicorn would release a single of an updated "T.V. Party" before the legal trouble started, a recording (just as ironically) commissioned by MCA for the soundtrack to the film Repo Man.
The legal dispute between Black Flag and Unicorn tied the band up for almost two years, during which time they released Everything Went Black, a double album of pre-Rollins outtakes, under the names of the individual musicians and vocalists on the record. Unicorn ended up filing even more legal briefs, claiming that Black Flag had violated a court injunction against releasing new records. Ginn and Dukowski ended up doing several days in Los Angeles County Jail for contempt of court, but the case fizzled out soon afterward when Unicorn went out of business, freeing Black Flag of any further obligation to the label.
Read more about this topic: Damaged (Black Flag album)
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“It’s every man’s business to see justice done.””
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
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Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!”
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—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)