Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  Parris and me finally picked up where we had left off. So there we were, it was 1983. I was in full-on Skinhead mode. But this time I was serious about starting the Cro-Mags. When we started jamming, I’d already written “Do Unto Others,” “Don’t Tread On Me,” “Everybody’s Gonna Die,” and “By Myself,” as well as the songs that wound up on my solo recordings like “Why Don’t U,” “Wake Up” and “Dead End Kids.” That became the template for the sound and the direction we were heading. Parris had a lot of riffs for the songs. Eric Casanova co-wrote a lot of the words that ended up on The Age of Quarrel.

  In the beginning, we were kind of basing our style around Motörhead, Bad Brains, and other stuff we were into. But it already had its own sound. We just needed a drummer who could cut it. We wound up recruiting Mackie Jayson from another local band, Frontline. He was also playing in this other band, Urban Blight. He was definitely one of the best drummers around. He was a huge Bad Brains fan; I remember he used to sit and watch Earl Hudson at every show they did back then. And I have to say, next to Earl, he was definitely one of the best drummers—if not the best—on the Hardcore scene.

  Mackie was into a few punk bands like the Damned, but he was into all kinds of crazy fusion stuff too, like Lenny White, and all the D.C. go-go bands. He turned me on to some good shit back in the day. One of my favorites of that time was Lenny White’s The Adventure of Astral Pirates. I bought it off the sidewalk in front of Gem Spa on St. Marks in like ’84. He pointed it out and said, “That album is badass!” He was right! We used to bug out on Al Di Meola and Return to Forever Romantic Warrior and shit. Even though I was a Hardcore Skinhead, I was into music. We were all serious about playing—we weren’t just a strict Hardcore band that couldn’t play. I was listening to all this crazy stuff ’cause I wanted to become a better player. And with Mackie, the rhythm section was complete.

  Eric would have been such a great frontman if he would have stayed. He was so hyperactive; he had too much energy. He never stopped moving. We’d be hanging out on a stoop or a bench, and he’d be “popping and locking” even while he was sitting down. It was hysterical.

  Eric would get so pumped up live. The songs would start, and he would just bust right through all the words at once, and finish all the verses and choruses in the first verse before the parts would even come up. Then he’d get done with the words and we’d look at each other like, “Huh?” We’d be playing the rest of the song and he’d already have sung all the words, so he’d either start repeating parts over again, or break dancing and doing B-boy shit onstage. It was funny, but it used to drive me nuts though, ’cause me and Parris took the shit real serious. He’d be blasting through the songs quicker than the rest of us, and Mackie would be forgetting parts and laughing at Parris and me. I’d get all flustered and he’d just laugh.

  But despite all of that, we were pretty tight, especially for our age. I was always writing songs and coming up with riffs. I mean, even when I was living in the squat and had no electricity and no way to record song ideas, I would bum a quarter and call Parris’ house. When the machine would pick up, I’d be like, “Don’t pick up the phone! I want you to learn this riff!” Then I’d hum a whole fuckin’ song or a riff to him. Next time I’d see him, he’d fuckin’ know them! That’s how possessed we were about that band and the music. We had tons of riffs and song ideas. We’d weed through them and keep the best ones, switch parts around, and combine parts with parts from other songs. “Malfunction” started as a song called “Back to Square One” ’til we took it apart, thus the line “Now it’s time to go back to square one.”

  Unfortunately, Eric would leave the band pretty early on, ’cause he had a kid. After he left the band, he moved to Canada with his girlfriend. They both got into Krishna consciousness and he eventually wound up going to India and so on.

  After Eric split, we auditioned John Bloodclot—who had just split the Krishnas for like the third time—as well as Roger Miret. John wound up getting the gig. Not ’cause he was better, he was just more persistent. He was always hounding Mackie and me about the gig. Mackie and him were pretty tight, and besides, Roger was already in Agnostic Front. I guess things worked out the way they were supposed to. But I still always wonder what would have happened had we got Roger. There would have been less headaches. And the band might have stayed together.

  The last one to join the band before we recorded The Age of Quarrel was Doug Holland. When he joined, the album was already written. Doug was the most experienced one in the band musically besides me. His first band was the Apprehended. Doug also formed Kraut, and their first gig was with the Clash—what kind of a first gig is that! They had also gigged with a lot of the early bands that came to New York, like the Exploited when they first came over in like ’82, and they did a bunch of shows with GBH in ’83.

  Doug introduced a lot of the Queens kids to the LES; that whole ’80s Astoria scene was pretty much brought in by him, and then by Dave Insurgent from Reagan Youth. Doug used to drive into the city in this big 1969 International mail truck with all these kids from Queens. He used to see the Stimulators at Max’s and gave us a lot of the credit for inspiring him to start the Apprehended and then Kraut.

  Doug moved to Norfolk Street with Jack Rabid, who had moved to the city from Summit, NJ. Jack was a huge Stimulators fan, a DJ, the publisher of the fanzine The Big Takeover, and the drummer for Even Worse. Then Doug moved to 3rd Street, the Hell’s Angels block. Back then that area was still really nuts.

  Doug was friendly with Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols, who stayed with him for a short while. He became a bartender at A7, and then he got Jimmy Gestapo and Raybeez jobs working the door. When the Cro-Mags started, Doug used to tell me, “You guys sound really good, you just need a lead guitarist.” Then finally one day after the gig we did with the Bad Brains at the Rock Hotel on Jane Street, I was walking off the stage, and there was Doug on the side of the stage with his usual smirk. I walked off and again he was like, “You guys sound really good, you just need a lead guitarist.” I laughed and said, “Fuck you motherfucker, you wanna play lead guitar or what?” And that was pretty much that. He left Kraut and joined the Cro-Mags.

  Back in those days, John and me lived in squats together, and did whatever we had to do to get by. He kinda took me under his wing in the get-over/hustle department. He was a good hustler. His nickname, Bloodclot, came from a few different things. He had been in a band called Bloodclot, but that ain’t why the name stuck. It came from the fact that he was a big-time get-over, that’s why it stuck.

  Not long after my return to New York, I bumped into one of my “old pals” from Canada, Orbit. Right here on the streets of NYC, on St. Marks Place! I was with Bloodclot, who knew about those guys who fucked me up in Canada. So we walked up to Orbit, right by Gem Spa. He looked a little nervous, and put his hand in his pocket, like he might have a knife or some shit. I said, “What’s up, Orbit?” He was smiling all nervously, like, “Hey Harley, how you doing?” We started fucking him up right there on St. Marks Place. I blasted him and John threw a kick at him. He started backing away, trying to act like he had a knife. He had an empty sheath in his hand. We started closing in on him to go in for the kill, and the fuckin’ cops came rolling down the block. As they got to us, they bleeped their sirens, got out of their car, and basically broke it up. They told him to go one way and us to go the other way. We went running around the block, and while we were running we saw our friend Louie, the original singer from Antidote. John yelled, “Yo! We just saw this dude that fucked Harley up in Canada!” We started running to catch up to him and we did, on 10th and 3rd.

  Louie ran up behind Orbit, jumped up and kicked him with both feet—I had never seen any shit like that! He landed with both feet on the dude’s back, like some crazy WWF-type shit, and put him to the ground. Hard. I ran up behind them and kicked Orbit square in the face as hard as I fucking could, like I was trying to kick a fucking field goal. I kicked that fucker so hard, if his hea
d wasn’t attached to his neck, it woulda wound up like fuckin’ blocks away! But since it was attached to his neck, it just kinda flopped around while I kicked it. We started laying an ass-beating on him. And he was trying to cover up his face and half-assedly rolling around. He was like, “I thought we were all cool?!” And I was like, “Yeah, well… welcome to New York, motherfucker!”

  By then, we got his bomber jacket pulled over his face so he couldn’t really see or defend himself, and he was getting kicked and hit by all three of us. He was getting the shit beat out of him, and I was saying shit like “Let’s cut his fucking ear off, and send it to Yob!”

  Again, a cop car pulled up, bleeped its siren, pulled over, and said, “Break it up. What’s going on here?” John immediately launched into the cops, “Yo, him and his boys jumped my little brother when he was 14.” Louie is all flipping out too: “Yo, they jumped my little brother!” They’re both going off, and Orbit was just standing there all discombobulated and fucked-up looking. They saw the knife sheath and were like, “Where’s the knife?” Orbit said, “Some cops confiscated it earlier today, officer. I didn’t know it was an illegal knife.” The sheath was for a double-edged old-school-style commando knife; you know, with the button snap on the sheath for your thumb. The cops were basically like, “All right you guys, break it up. You guys go this way, and you guys go that way.”

  See, that’s how it was back then. So they sent us on our way. The funny thing is, if you get into a fight on 3rd Avenue now, there will be like fuckin’ 12 cop cars, everybody will get taken away, and there will be a big scene. People don’t get it. Street justice, that shit was real. It was NYC. Needless to say, that was the last I ever heard of Orbit and Yob.

  PART 2 – THE SCENE / NYHC / NY SKINS

  In the early ’80s, there was a lot of violence coming out of the Skinhead scene in NYC. Anywhere there was a Hardcore scene, you had a Skinhead scene. And it was starting to get pretty ugly. Shows were starting to get crazy. But it didn’t start out that way. In the beginning, it was really all about the music and the style.

  For instance, even though all the Skinheads that got attention from the media were white-power Nazis, in New York some of the worst Nazi-type “Skinheads” were black and Puerto Rican! This one black chick, Lefty, used to come up from D.C., covered in swastika tattoos. I guess we were all just crazy, with an ironic, twisted sense of humor here. Half of the Skrewdriver fans in New York were Puerto Ricans, Jews, and blacks. None of us took it very seriously. Most of us were high on drugs and just bugging. It was people from other places that took that shit seriously.

  I remember one time, the singer from this band Genocide getting his ass kicked at A7 because he was talking some Nazi shit, and he pissed off this chick Lazar. So we were kicking this dude’s ass for being a “Nazi,” meanwhile I was beating him with a swastika belt buckle! It was all just completely stupid shit. No one really gave a shit at first—it was just nihilism, chaos, craziness, and aggression. The funny shit is, Lazar got knocked out by my friend Djinji Brown for calling him a nigger. I was like, “Well, you kinda had that one coming, Lazar.”

  It was a totally dysfunctional scene, and for the most part—at least in the old days—it was like one big dysfunctional family. I feel that the bad rap and the bad write-ups about Skinheads generated more of the racist stereotype. Maximum RockNRoll caused that shit to catch on with the dumbasses, who really didn’t know shit—motherfuckers in the ’burbs and bumblefuck middle-of-nowhere. In a lot of ways Maximum RockNRoll was at the root of that so-called Nazi scene blowing up in America, ’cause of the shit they were always writing about us—and it spread. How ironic, huh?

  The more shit they talked, the more we laughed. We kind of enjoyed being the bad guys of Hardcore. But we didn’t know the effect it was having, or that people were reading this shit worldwide. And not only that, they believed in it. For a while, there was a Skinhead problem on the scene in NYC with fighting and shit. But there was no “Nazi problem.” There were only a couple of real Nazis on the scene, and they got their asses kicked off—like this one schmuck we called the Nazi Garbage Man. The real white-power guys, they didn’t last too long here. I mean who? Bobby Snotz? C’mon, nobody beat him up ’cause he was like what, 90 pounds soaking wet and five feet tall? I mean, we used to have scraps with the local Rican gangs all the time, and we were mostly white boys, but not all of us, that’s for sure.

  There were Spanish and black and even Jewish Skinheads here. Back in the day when Sid Vicious wore a swastika, no one freaked out; it was just for shock value. We didn’t take all that shit so seriously. If it freaked people out and pissed them off, it was punk! That was the punk rock attitude. I mean, I once wore an SS uniform to CBs ’cause this dude loaned it to me, and I goose-stepped up and down St. Marks Place with 20 or so Skinheads—but it was just to freak people out. It was more for shock than anything else.

  Maximum RockNRoll was really the only monthly publication that was about Hardcore. A lot of the editors then were ex-hippie radical leftovers. It was San Francisco-based, so everything was politically correct. Everything radical, anarchist, pro-everything, against-everything—you name it. So on the scene, you had people that didn’t like me, Roger, or different New York Skinheads, and you’d have motherfuckers writing letters in, talking crazy shit about us. In all honesty, a lot of it was complete and utter nonsense. Some of it was based on a little bit of truth—they’d write about fights that happened—but they’d always get their facts all screwed up. And a lot of people wrote in letters in our defense, but somehow those never got printed. It was always the ones condemning us and talking shit that got printed. They seemed to like having us as a scapegoat.

  It was usually such total bullshit that we didn’t take it seriously. But then as we started getting out of the city with our bands and touring, we started realizing people in other cities and countries who didn’t know any better took that shit like it was CNN. But the fact is, you never saw Nazi Skinhead rallies in New York or any of that shit. I mean, I ran around with a Nazi flag as a Superman cape one time—it was more just to piss people off then anything else, and to spite Maximum RockNRoll. All the real Nazi skinheads and all that Klan-type shit mostly went down in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, not here.

  I always used to crack up at that shit—a bunch of goons out in the middle of the woods somewhere Sieg Heiling at trees! Motherfuckers didn’t have to deal with or know any black or Spanish people. New York was too mixed and diverse for that shit.

  But me and my friends weren’t like the punk rockers of the past or the peace punks who used to get jumped. We used to fuck people up.

  One night, 33 of us—it’s funny that it was exactly 33, but 33 of us Skinheads from the LES and C-Squat, uptown, Jersey, and some visiting from Maryland and D.C., were all piled into two vans, cruising around and getting into shit all night long. All of us tripping balls. At one point, we pulled over by Danceteria, and everyone was in the vans except Lefty from D.C. and this big dude Skinhead Mike from Maryland who was always with her; they were nuts and were both covered in swastika tattoos. They were standing in front of the door to Danceteria next to the doormen, the bouncers, and all the people on line that were trying to get in, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Mike spun around and lays out one of the doormen with a pair of brass knuckles! Immediately, we all jump out of the vans and start fucking people up. The bouncers all ran inside the club and pulled the doors shut and we all jumped back in the vans and peeled out.

  We were like, “Yo Mike, what happened?” He was like, “I don’t know, I think someone said something about Skinheads, so I hit him. I think it was him, but it might have been someone else.” He was so fucking crazy. We were all high on windowpane gel acid and tripping our balls off. So we all went up to Central Park, it was the middle of the night, and we started robbing drug dealers. It was a crazy night.

  By this time, the New York scene was a lot bigger—more and more people from other areas and the subu
rbs started coming around. Some of them were super cool, but some of them were real assholes, coming to the LES acting like hard-asses and fronting like they were from here. They’d start shit with the local Puerto Ricans and make us look real bad to the neighborhood, and usually get their asses kicked by the locals anyway.

  I remember Billy Psycho got himself shot in the leg one night running his mouth on Avenue A. He called some black guy a nigger, and, well, shit happens. It was still a tough neighborhood, and sometimes these new cats would act up thinking they were running shit, and they’d get fucked up.

  People still got shot and stabbed in that ’hood back then. For instance, I remember there was this crazy homeless-type dude that used to hang out, named Juan. He didn’t really talk, he just whistled and made weird sounds. But he was really funny. He always had a plastic cup, and he’d ask people for beer in his cup by whistling, doing little dances, and then handing out his cup and signing that he wanted some beer. Then he’d bow! He was harmless. Darryl always got a kick out of him. One night, he was being his usual crazy self, and someone shot him in the chest. He died right there. The guy just walked off, and didn’t get caught or anything.

  But as for the number of people hanging out, the scene was jumping. There was A7 on 7th Street and Avenue A, at the corner on Avenue A and 8th Street there was a pizza parlor where we all used to hang out and play pinball and Spy Hunter (that years later became the bar Alcatraz), and all up and down Avenue A and B. There were bars that we drank at like the Park Inn, the Holiday Lounge; I can’t even remember all of them. There was C-Squat, Norfolk Street, Apt X, Robby CryptCrash’s place on Second Street, Natz from Virus/The Undead/Cop Shoot Cop’s apartment, and a few other spots where we all hung.

  That neighborhood was full of freaks. There was this one dude who used to hang out around St. Marks/Avenue A area on weekends who used to pay punk rock chicks to walk on him. The harder they walked and stomped on him, the more he liked it, especially when they had combat boots on. He used to do shit like roll himself up in dirty rugs, ones he would find on the street, and lay them across the sidewalk by the garbage cans in front of buildings—vertically across the sidewalks, so when people would walk down the street they would step on him thinking he was a rug that had been thrown out. So on busy weekends people would be all drunk and there’d be all kinds of people walking up and down 8th Street, and he’d be laying there all night getting walked on in the rug, unbeknownst to the people walking on him. So whenever I’d see a rug laying across the sidewalk, me and my friends would kick it real hard as we’d walk by.