Jim Ruland’s new book, Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records, is practically a fait accompli. It follows his previous collaborations with the L.A. punks Bad Religion and Black Flag co-founder Keith Morris. It comes with a cute chapter-titling convention: “SST vs. ____.” The words that fill in the blank over 14 chapters together say a lot about the import of the story Ruland tells.

There’s “SST vs. Hollywood,” which tells how rock clubs rejected SST Records founder Greg Ginn’s pioneering hardcore punks Black Flag, forcing him to book their own shows. There’s “SST vs. MCA,” describing how the now-defunct major label signed Black Flag, then refused to issue Damaged, calling it “anti-parent.” In “SST vs. Unicorn,” there are details of the MCA subsidiary that tied Black Flag and SST in legal knots for two and a half years, which ended right as 1984 began and the label seized its own reins for good.

None of those chapters have the title “SST vs. Hüsker Dü,” but they sure could have. Instead, the label and band team up in the chapter covering 1983-84, which is titled “SST vs. Hardcore” because the latter’s fast-sharp-done rules were old hat as far as the label, and its most thrilling band, were concerned. But in the next chapter, “SST vs. College Radio,” the St. Paul trio are ready to move onto a major label, the first of many SST bands to make the jump.

You may have heard of some of the others: Soundgarden, whose SST release Ultramega OK was a pit stop on the way to a contract with A&M, a Grammy nomination for the album, and an opening spot for Guns N’ Roses, all within a year. Sonic Youth, whose radical alternative guitar tunings and proudly bohemian mien made the jump to a major within two years of leaving SST following two crucial albums, Evol (1986) and Sister (1987) — for many, still their peak period. Dinosaur Jr., whose second and third albums, You’re Living All Over Me (1987) and Bug (1988), had an unselfconscious reclaiming of classic-rock verities that would mark late-’80s indie-label rock as decisively as Black Flag’s pathbreaking hardcore punk had the first half. And, not least, the Meat Puppets: Arizona hippies playing kindly berserk country-rock.

The Meat Puppets wouldn’t earn any serious money until 1994, when they appeared on MTV Unplugged with Nirvana — a band that SST had passed on years seven years earlier. By that time, SST was in serious disarray, and so was the “alternative” explosion it begat. Ruland’s rubric allows him to lay out plainly just how central the Long Beach, California, punk label was to the entirety of ‘80s indie rock.

In the label’s heyday, its main acts — Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Meat Puppets, and Minutemen — all decisively dismissed the idea that “punk” had to do away with any rock before it. “If Black Flag had any sort of bad influence, I think it’s that we influenced a lot of bands to play faster and they just rushed into it,” Ginn lamented, adding, “whereas we practiced relentlessly every night, to build up our songs faster and faster, but with the full power behind them.”

Ginn was a loud-and-proud Deadhead; so was Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo. “We don’t just listen to Black Flag, and then that’s it,” Bob Mould protested to a fanzine in 1983. “I like listening to a lot of sixties stuff.” For a label with SST’s take-it-to-the-road-or-go-home ethos, no band could be more like kin. “In 1983, no one was burning up the miles or writing more material than Hüsker Dü,” Ruland writes. Mould declared, “If we had an easier time with lyrics, we’d have twenty songs a month, no problem.”

The band’s major statement on “the point-counterpoint of Mould’s introspective bombast and Grant Hart’s neoromanticism,” as Ruland dubs their dynamic, was the 1984 double-LP Zen Arcade, a conceptual work that, as Ruland puts it, “pays tribute to the sacrifice it takes to leave [home] without scorning those who stay.” The album’s intensity carried over to the band’s behavior — at one point, Henry Rollins, Black Flag’s scary-intense frontman, called someone and pled, “Hüsker Dü is here and they’re kind of driving me crazy.” They cut Zen as well as the “Eight Miles High” single in two days — inspiring the Minutemen to turn Double Nickels on the Dime into a double LP; both were released the same day. (Also in ’84, Black Flag cut Family Man in 48 hours — a theme.)

Ruland is sharp on the machinations that made Hüsker Dü a good bet for SST’s underground ethos — “Corporate Rock Still Sucks” was (and, Ruland reminds us, remains) a bumper sticker you can buy from the label’s website — to cross over to the bigger time. “For many college radio stations, Hüsker Dü was the perfect antidote to the afterburn of hardcore: a band that could play loud and fast in a format that was easier on the ear,” he writes. Their two 1985 albums, New Day Rising, released in January, and Flip Your Wig, out that September, sold 30,000 and 50,000 copies, respectively, by year’s end — the latter was the “top-selling record on the label by a considerable margin.”

Ray Farrell, hired that April to work on college-radio promotion, had helped to make Flip’s single “Makes No Sense at All” into a major campus hit; it also hit number one on the U.K. independent-label chart. The story of how Hüsker Dü gave Flip, their outright catchiest album, to SST instead of Warner Bros. has been told often: “They gave SST Flip Your Wig when Warners wanted it because they were writing so many songs and could impress upon Warners that they didn’t need them — and get a better deal,” Carducci said, though Hart hotly disputed it. But when the band goes to Warner, their departure gets the hasty label of “a cautionary tale,” and Grant Hart’s early solo work on SST is treated cursorily.

The dual release of Zen and Double necessitated that SST move into bigger office and storage spaces. It also necessitated more music: “Carducci wants another album already,” went Zen’s liner notes—Joe Carducci was one of the label’s partners. The outsized splash of that pair of double LPs, plus four Black Flag albums in 1984 alone, helped push the label’s sales upward, and, in kind, SST splurged. In 1987 and 1988, the imprint issued more than 140 titles altogether— more than the major labels did on a small fraction of the budget.

The avalanche of bands to track sometimes hampers Ruland’s storytelling. He can write indifferently (“As the saying goes, if it was easy, everyone would do it”), and there are chronicles of lesser-known SST releases, in the interest of completeness, that might have been better off as sidebars. But Ruland has been watching this world a long time and can be sharply insightful, particularly in the case of Sonic Youth, whom, he writes, “was deconstructing the myth of the guitar player as a super-gifted maestro with top-line gear and rewriting the rules of rock and roll” — a zingy assessment, both overall and in terms of the band’s particular appeal in 1986-87.

The late-’80s splurge had exactly the effect you’d imagine from a book about a label’s rise and fall. Ruland writes: “SST artists frequently visited the office in Carson … the warehouse … was always a popular spot with musicians, who marveled at the stacks and stacks of records, tapes, and CDs and were encouraged to help themselves. Some bands would show after a tour utterly destitute, without enough money to pay for gas to get home,” with Ginn paying one band in “marijuana instead of money.”

“The vibe around SST at the time was pretty exciting and really positive,” Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel told Ruland. “Ironically, the only person that we rarely had any personal contact with was Greg because he was often behind closed doors.”

Ah, Greg. The man who’d founded SST Records and who led Black Flag, its cornerstone group, Ginn was also a fearsome martinet, mandating constant practice and, according to many ex-members of Black Flag, got into the habit of “vibing [people] out” of the band. His bunker mentality was catching. When Kira Roessler, later an Oscar winner for her sound work on Mad Max: Fury Road, joined the band on bass in 1984, she’d injured her hand while practicing and was told by a doctor not to touch her instrument for six weeks. She was rehearsing again four days later. “My ego wouldn’t let me do it,” she said.

But Ginn progressively — more speedily, as the book traverses decades as it draws to a close — began to alienate everyone in his path. It began with his brother, Raymond Pettibon, the artist behind most of Black Flag’s iconic art. “One could argue that Black Flag’s graphic representation was more stylistically consistent than its music,” Ruland writes. “Pettibon contributed more than just flyers and album covers. His mordant wit and macabre style made Pettibon’s work instantly recognizable to fans who were familiar with it and seized the attention of those who weren’t.” But when his older brother Greg manipulated his art without approval, Pettibon left the fold — not the first and far from the last.

By the end of the ‘80s, SST’s spending spree caught up with it. In 1988, Jem Distributors, with whom SST did a lot of business, went under. By 1989, Jem and other distributors owed the label $1.5 million. When Curt Kirkwood of the Meat Puppets began snooping around, he discovered that some bands on the label were under contract and others, like his, had handshake deals. Moreover, Ginn’s publishing company “held the copyright to virtually every song SST had ever released,” Ruland writes. “Conversely, most SST artists didn’t own the rights to the music they had created.”

Things only got worse after Negativland lawsuits. Negativland was a group of “culture jammers,” in the phrase of member Don Joyce, who made provocative audio collages that both utilized and lampooned mass media. In February of 1988, after the Rochester, Minnesota, teenager David Brom murdered his family with an axe, the group had an SST PR man plant a story in a Minneapolis paper. (Ruland doesn’t identify which one.)

“One detail in the shocking tragedy seemed like it had been planted to provoke a media firestorm: Brom’s murderous rampage was instigated by an argument between Brom and his conservative Catholic father about music,” Ruland writes. After SST made the call, the word went out — falsely — that the music Brom and his father argued about was Negativland’s “Christianity Is Stupid,” from their 1987 album Escape from Noise. The story took flight: “For Negativland the hoax illustrated the fallibility of the news media and called into question the legitimacy of its practices. As the story gained traction, it became ‘abundantly clear that the major source for news is other news.’”

Then, in 1991, came the infamous U2 EP—Negativland cutting up an instantly notorious outtake of Casey Kasem, host of American Top 40, cursing out the Irish rock band during a show taping over cut-ups of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” One new employee told Ginn, “We’re gonna get sued by Casey Kasem, we’re gonna get sued by Island Records, we’re gonna get sued by U2,” and the boss responded, “We’re putting it out.”

One by one, each predicted lawsuit came true. And Ginn responded by having the label send Negativland “a one-page agreement stating that SST bore no responsibility in the matter and had the right to recoup damages from the band.” It was the last straw for many. “Ginn had been railing against ‘underresearched’ newspaper and magazine articles for years, but the more research journalists did, the more dirt they found. Bands had been complaining to journalists about SST’s business practices for years, and now the label’s ongoing fight with Negativland gave the media a reason to write about it.”

Though Negativland’s settlement, after 16 months, was that its losses to Island split would be 75/25 band-label, rather than half-and-half, the damage was done in the court of public opinion: “Each time a new article was published, Ginn came out looking like the bad guy.”

In documenting Ginn’s (and SST by extension) in his good, bad, and downright ugly moments, the book recaps a label that had many brushes with greatness. It also serves as a reminder that history can favorably forget painful stretches of mediocrity. SST technically still exists — although mostly as a vanity vehicle for Ginn’s own music — but the ideas of a “record label” or a “music industry” have moved on, leaving this book less as a cautionary tale and more of a time capsule.