"In '75 I was hanging out in Hermosa Beach because I was a foosball fanatic and there were about five places to play there. You could come down from L.A. and just dominate the tables. I was absolutely homeless and I met these folks who were building a recording studio on the corner of Hermosa and Pier called Media Art. I just walked in off of the street one day and thought, 'I should get involved with this.' I helped them build the studio and they let me live there.
"One thing leads to another and I became the staff engineer at the studio as the owners gradually lost interest. We had a dirt-cheap lease so we could offer really great rates. The equipment was basic analog eight-track (which we later upgraded to 16- and eventually 24-track; our eight-track had recorded Jimi Hendrix, the 16 was later sold to Eddie Van Halen) and it was great for rock 'n' roll, but mostly we got really awful light-rock or disco. Under those circumstances, any music with some guts or creativity - hard rock, metal, jazz - was a breath of fresh air. The jazz was fun: they would get their levels and go for it: no overdubbing and messing around. I hated tuning the drums for hours to get them to sound like an Elton John record for some of these light-rock sessions," he says.

Spot also wrote reviews and features for the local entertainment weekly, Easy Reader, and was a professional photographer specializing in skateboarding and rollerskating.

By '78 Spot (named after a softball incident) was producing demos after-hours on spec. Spot's reign of punk terror began when he produced a band of "neighborhood goons" called Black Flag. "By then I was really into roller skating and skateboarding on the Strand - if I wasn't in the studio I was skating - and I met those guys in the alleyways of Hermosa; they lived near the local skate shop Wild Wheels. I persuaded Black Flag to come in Media Art to record; we did a live session in October of '79 [five tracks were released as part of Everything Went Black in '82] that is some the best stuff they have ever done," he says.

Black Flag at the time was Greg Ginn on guitar (he formed SST to put out Black Flag records), Chuck Dukowski on bass, Robo on drums, and Keith Morris (later of Circle Jerks) on vocals. Whether those tracks are the band's finest is debatable amongst reasonable people, but they do rock awfully hard.

Somewhere between Black Sabbath and the Ramones, Flag attacks short (nothing over 2:07), brutish tunes with titles like "Revenge," "Depression" and "Wasted" with animalistic intensity and admirable economy. Ginn's guitar slashes and burns, Robo's drums keeps the vehicle between the lines, and Morris' vocals rant against various social and personal evils.