Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  Up until that point, as far as New York punk rock shit, I experienced the late ’70s between Max’s Kansas City and CBGB. There were a lot of drug and dope fiends in the New York scene. The New York Dolls had broken up, but Johnny Thunders was still playing a lot. One of my first memories of Max’s was Johnny Thunders stumbling down the steps from the upstairs dressing room, with a syringe still hanging out of his arm, going up to the bouncers, “Are we up yet?” As a kid, you don’t realize the level of wrongness in that.

  There was a punk band called the Blessed—they were in their late teens, which was really young on that circuit. Back then, there really was only one other kid even close to my age, his name was “Excessive.” He was like 15 or 16. But he pretty much stopped hanging out around that time. Some other bands around back then were this black punk band, Pure Hell, and also Shrapnel. Before the younger kids started hanging out and coming to Stimulators and Bad Brains gigs, I used to hang with a lot of the old-school punks and some of them throwback junkie-punk types. There weren’t that many punk rockers back then. It was just people who knew what was up with the music, the clubs, and the scene. This was back before the Luscious Jackson girls, the Beastie Boys, and that whole crew started hanging out. Neneh Cherry and her friends used to hang with us back then, too. I used to chill with a lot of the fuck-ups that were around.

  From Howie Pyro: “I lived a couple doors down from [Harley] for a bit in ’79 when we were playing together a bunch at Max’s. I remember talking [him] out of running away from home on the stoop once. [He] was incredibly well informed and I could always have an honest conversation with him, much like I could have a similar conversation with someone like Johnny Thunders who was eight or ten years my senior.

  “There was a time when my band, the Blessed, were the youngest people on the New York punk scene. It was unheard of for people 14, 15 or 16 to be in a “nightclub.” Not only unheard of, but illegal. And then Harley came along, way younger than us; we were pissed!

  “People may define Harley as simply a “Hardcore guy” because they are slow and closed-minded and can’t see beyond their fantasies of what they want him to be, and they’ll never ever understand that he was totally well versed in music and culture LONG before any of that happened. Not punk, hardcore, but all kinds of music and culture. He would have to be as he fucking invented so much of it!”

  One friend of mine who used to work at Max’s as a busboy, John Watson, was only a few years older than me, and he would check on me, see if I needed a soda or some shit. He was always cool. I think he was mostly “buggin’ out,” like why is this little kid here? But yeah, he was part of that first generation of New York Hardcore kids, before it was even called “NYHC.” He used to write graffiti, his tag was “JOHN 13”—you used to see that shit every-fucking-where.

  John remembers those mad Max’s days:

  “I came from the Bronx. I went down one night with some friends, we wound up at Max’s—the guys I was with were total mooks. I was maybe 16—I was fucking up real bad in school, so it was like a turning point in my life. The Bronx was real crazy, race riots and shit. We weren’t even up on real punk rock at that point—we knew about DEVO and the Talking Heads. So yeah, one night I went down to the Village and we went to Max’s Kansas City. We stuck out like sore thumbs. The next day I went back. I was hanging out in the restaurant downstairs, and I had like three bucks on me. I got some soup. It turned out they needed a busboy, and I got hired on the spot. I came back the next night, and that was it.

  “I remember telling my dad I got a job at Max’s, and he was impressed. He knew what was up with Max’s—he was a biker and used to hang out in the Village. I met Harley like a month later—he was like the only little kid in there. The Stimulators and Harley pretty much introduced the Beastie Boys and that whole crew of young kids to that whole scene. That was before Hardcore. People like Robbie CryptCrash, Doug Holland, Jimmy Gestapo, Reagan Youth—all of them. That was like ‘the beginning.’ The Bad Brains came to town, and that was kind of the beginning of New York Hardcore.”

  A few years later, like 1981 or ’82, me, Watson, Little Chris and a few other “Heads” started “The Church of Herb’s Quest.” That’s where Murphy’s Law got the song “Quest for Herb,” because we were always on the “quest for herb.” That was like our saying, our motto—the eternal quest for the “burning bush.”

  We used to all get together at John’s apartment on Norfolk Street. Everyone had to bring a 1/8 of an ounce of weed to get in the door. Watson, Little Chris, and I would get really cheap shit from our friend Manuel, this crazy like 6’5” Colombian dude. He also sold fat spliffs for like two bucks as well. So we’d have all the dirt weed, but then we had a few friends, who were dealers and growers, and we’d invite them, and they’d always bring the killer bud. So we’d have major smoke-outs. This one grower, Ron, me and John Bloodclot used to call him “Ron the Kali Man,” ’cause he always had the good shit. He and his wife were like old-school ’60s-’70s freaks that used to go to A7 and CBs in their hearse with tons of weed and blaze us all out. They brought us a nice pot plant, and that was the altar at the church over at Watson’s house. We had a green light bulb behind it, and there were just green lights, smoke, and reggae. Man, that shit used to get ridiculous—we were some straight-up Cheech and Chong-ass motherfuckers.

  DENMARK, 1978, BY JAN SNEUM

  But like I was saying before, in the Max’s days, before New York Hardcore, I used to hang with an older fuck-up punk rock crowd. I remember one party back in the day at Joey Ramone’s house. He was away on tour, and this chick was watching his apartment for him, so she threw a party there. I was there with all these older punks, and they were all getting fucked up…but at least they were shooting their drugs in the other room so I wouldn’t see it. I wasn’t even really aware of what was going on at the time… I mean, I was just a kid. There was also the art scene, with bands like the Contortions and Teenage Jesus, Bush Tetras and shit like the Talking Heads and the B-52’s. They were all lumped together as “new wave.” And people like my friends and me were like, “This is not the same shit!”

  From the late ’70s to the early ’80s there were so many clubs, and there was always something going on. Like I said, we had Max’s Kansas City, which was one of the first places I started hanging out. It had been there since the ’60s, and when I first started going there Tommy Dean ran it, and Peter Crowley booked the shows.

  Max’s and CBs were the beginning for me as far as New York punk. Max’s saw the beginning of Hardcore, but closed in 1981. The bouncers there were legendary—I know James Kontra from Virus ate shit going down those long-ass stairs leading to the front door face-first quite a few times at Stimulators shows. Sid Vicious used to gig there after the Sex Pistols fell apart. All the freaks hung out there. We had CBs, and the Mudd Club over on White Street. My friends and me all fucking hated the Mudd Club. There was also a little spot, TR3, down on West Broadway that did gigs for a while. My mom worked there as a bartender for a minute, and I saw some great shows. The Stimulators played there with the Bad Brains, and I saw D.O.A. play as a three-piece—Joe Shithead, Chuck Biscuits, and Randy Rampage—on their first U.S. tour.

  The Rock Lounge was another great place near TR3 and the Mudd Club, down by Canal Street. The Stimulators played there a few times, and I saw Suicide there, as well as the Plasmatics and lots of other bands. It eventually changed its name to the Reggae Lounge. There were other places that had punk and hardcore gigs from time to time, like the Peppermint Lounge up on West 45th Street, which was a famous club back in the early ’60s. Like most of the big clubs back then, the Mafia ran it. In 1980, they started doing punk and hardcore gigs there once in a while. That was the first place that I played after I left the Stimulators, with me on bass, Dave Hahn from the Mad on drums, Dave Stein from Even Worse on guitar, and John Berry from the Beastie Boys on vocals. We did the gig under the name Disco Smoothie. I remember meeting Billy Idol there when he was still in Gen
eration X. Black Flag did a great show with Henry Rollins. I even saw the fucking Anti-Nowhere League there.

  REIGNER, BY FRANK WHITE

  Club 57 at Irving Plaza, a Polish community center at Irving Place and 15th Street, that place was a big deal to play. The Stimulators gigged there with the Cramps in the summer of ’79. That was the first time I met Henry Rollins; he bought a Stimulators “Loud Fast Rules” 45 from us at the merch table. He still has it! We also played there with the Circle Jerks and the Necros. We even played there on my birthday: it was billed as “Harley’s Birthday Bash,” and Joey Ramone’s brother’s band, the Rattlers, played as well as a bunch of other bands. Joey came up and sang “Happy Birthday” to me.

  There were a lot of little places on and off throughout the years, like Trax, One Under, and Botany Rocks. The Stimulators played at most of those places—we played every-fucking-where.

  We even did a gig at a deli, called the Chew and Sip Deli. Johnny Stiff booked the gig. It was a deli during the day and they let him do shows there at night. I remember parties in basements on the Lower East Side that would get so crazy—pogo dancing and spilt beer everywhere—that you’d be covered in mud by the time you’d leave the fuckin’ place.

  Danceteria, which as much as it sucked ’cause there were so many club freaks and shitty music, was great, ’cause it was huge with like four floors of different types of shit going on. That place moved to a few different locations over the years, but the most famous one was on West 21st Street. It was in the club scene in the Madonna movie Desperately Seeking Susan. That place was nuts. You had the early days of B-boy shit going on one floor, you had the shitty new wave on one floor, and on the top floor there was the pre-goth shit, like “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” I used to run into people I’d known since the Stimulators days there, like Martin Rev from Suicide. In the early ’80s, they had a few hardcore shows there, but it didn’t last—there were too many fights, and people didn’t really know how to deal with the slamdancing.

  I remember back when Madonna used to hang there, back when she was just a dirty club skank. She was living at the music building on 38th Street at the time, before she was a rich-and-famous dirty skank. Yeah, that was a long time ago. I was just barely in my teens; the shit was pretty crazy.

  I played there with the Stimulators a few times back around 1980. We gigged there once with the L.A. band X, on their first trip to New York. But yeah, that place was a lot of fun, and there was so much shit going on in all these secret hidden little rooms with everybody fucked up out of their minds. We’d leave there so late, the sun would be on its way up, and people would be getting up and on their way to work around us. It was run by Rudolf Pieper and Jim Fouratt; Jim used to book Hurrah. The Stimulators played Hurrah with the Damned on 1980’s Machine Gun Etiquette tour.

  As far as I was concerned, when Sid Vicious died, that was the death of punk rock—that era was done. Hardcore was the next phase: the rebirth of it. I remember when different people turned up with shit that belonged to Sid and Nancy that had wound up missing from the room at the Chelsea Hotel, after Sid’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen’s murder.

  I actually have the key to room 100, the infamous room. This punk rock couple I knew were the first people to stay in the room after they reopened it and the police took the “Do Not Cross” tape off the door. I stayed with them, and kept the key after we stayed there. I know it was one of the keys that Sid and Nancy used ’cause there were only two of them for each room and they didn’t replace that shit back then.

  Things were so much sloppier as far as police investigations and collecting evidence. And besides, they were so sure it was Sid who killed her that it was pretty much an open-and-shut case from the get-go. I remember the night my friends and me stayed in the room. We were crawling around on the floor trying to find any bloodstains they might have missed during the cleanup. I found what I thought was one on the rug, so in true punk rock form, I licked it. I also remember lying on the floor under the bathroom sink so I could see what her last view was. A lot of people think there were other people involved in all of that. Sid was such a fuckin’ mess at that point, who knows? Dee Dee Ramone said he thought Sid did it, but everybody else I know doesn’t agree. A lot of people say they have a good idea who did, but that’s another story.

  But yeah, NYC was hard back then. Within its lawlessness, there was also a sense of total freedom and anarchy, kind of like the Wild West. You did take your chances back then if you were any kind of freak or punk. But I was lucky to be part of the generation that saw the Ramones, Dead Boys, Blondie, Dolls, Suicide, etc. I was on the scene before this whole Hardcore thing was even a thought. So, I’ll tell you the actual evolution of it—or rather, the “de-evolution” of it.

  PART 2: HARDCORE DE-EVOLUTION

  The first show I saw at CBGBs was in late 1973. It was a band from Texas called the Werewolves. They were pre-punk/proto-punk. The owner of CBs, Hilly Kristal, used to reminisce about that, and say: “You were just a kid.” I remember they weren’t going to let me in because I was so young, but my Aunt Denise was with me, and she hung there, so they let me in. From that day, I never paid to get in, ever. But the first real punk show I saw in NYC was at CBs—the Dead Boys.

  Back then, there were seats bolted into the floor all the way to the front of the stage, Years later, my friends and me would rip them all out. Yeah, the Dead Boys… it was sick! Stiv Bators came crawling out onto the stage, and then he threw a jar full of live “roaches and water bugs” into the crowd of people all seated in the front! Of course, they freaked. It was hysterical. They were mostly normal people who just went to a nightclub to see some live music, and had no fuckin’ idea what they were getting themselves into.

  As it turned out they weren’t roaches, they were crickets Stiv had bought earlier at a pet store, and for months after you could hear crickets at CBs.

  Later in the set, Stiv hoisted himself up to the ceiling with a noose around his ankles, and dropped repeatedly on his head into a pile of broken glass, over and over again. Well, needless to say, they had to eventually take him to the hospital to sew him back up before the second set—which they did do. Their guitarist called me “a young Sid” ’cause I told him to go fuck himself.

  Years later, I remember Cheetah telling me about walking into A7 one night in like 1980. He was like, “Man, I went in and some band was playing. There was like no one there, it was just like you and two of your friends, beating the shit out of each other on the dance floor! I remember thinking to myself, ‘These motherfuckers are crazy. Damn, I’m outta touch, I must be getting old.’” I also remember running into him one time in the ’90s, back when I was really out of control, and he was like, “Damn Harley, you’re fucking crazy, man. I thought we were bad back in the day, you’re fuckin’ nuts!”

  DEBBIE HARRY AND HARLEY, BY MARCIA RESNICK

  That was after a weekend I had at the St. Marks Hotel doing dope, smoking dust, and fucking my dominatrix girlfriend, literally all at the same time. The St. Marks Hotel was a total shithole back then—hookers, drag queens, drugs, one shower on each floor. You could rent the rooms by the hour or by the night. We had just copped, we got our room, I had my dope set up on the table next to the bed ready to be done. I was smoking dust while she was blowing me, then when I was fucking her I did the dope right as I was getting off and totally high on the dust.

  Not long after I overdosed. I woke up in the shower with her beating on my chest screaming, “You’re not gonna die on me!” Then my crazy ass got all horny and started trying to fuck her again even though I could barely function and had just been at death’s door. I eventually passed out. She was fuckin’ traumatized. When I got ugly, I got ugly.

  And if Cheetah fuckin’ Chrome says that you’re nuts, you know you’re fuckin’ bad, ’cause those dudes were crazy! But yeah man, the Dead Boys, those guys were fucking great live. I was lucky to see all that. As far as punk rock history, that shit was real.

  But like I sai
d, when Sid died, the way I saw it, it was kind of the end of that original punk rock era. Which is funny, ’cause at the time, the late ’70s, major labels had started to sign punk bands like the Clash, Generation X, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, and so many other bands that had been considered “punk” back then.

  But then the Sex Pistols fell apart, Nancy got killed and Sid died. It was like “the end of it.” All the labels started dropping the punk bands. I think the negative press scared off a lot of labels. Then all the British press like NME and Melody Maker declared, “punk rock is dead.” But for us, it wasn’t at all. And that’s when Hardcore started to happen in the States and also in the UK; the real like-minded bands over there like Discharge and the Exploited and Crass and so many others kept it going.

  You had a few hardcore old-school punk bands that kept it real, like the UK Subs and Cockney Rejects and a few other pre-Oi! bands happening overseas. In the States, it morphed from punk to hardcore punk, and then to be called straight-up Hardcore. The music got faster, the dancing got harder, the whole imagery got more intense.

  But it was a gradual change. It happened on the West Coast, the East Coast, the Midwest—everywhere—all at once. These bands had their own sound and style, their own identity. Everyone came in as an individual, but we were all part of the same scene. It wasn’t so conformist; there was still a pure connection to punk. 1979–1980 was when it started making that change from the original punk rock scene to the newer generation of kids. There was a whole crew of bands who proved that the spirit of punk wouldn’t die.