Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  There was a little bar there on 2nd or 3rd Street near Houston, so I was backing away, trying to see who was coming at me. And as they started to make their move toward me, I turned around and just hauled ass. They jumped into their van and sped after me, so I started running the wrong way down every one-way street I could. I started zig-zagging, cutting a left on this corner, a right on the next one, so the van couldn’t follow me. Then I ducked down and hid behind a bunch of garbage cans.

  Right when I did that, I was like, “Oh shit, Petey is still back there!” So I picked up two 40-ounce bottles and ran back, not knowing what the fuck I was running into. I went back, still in “stealth mode.” I actually lost one shoe in the fight, so there I was running with one fucking shoe on. My adrenaline was pumped: I was ready to bounce this fuckin’ bottle off someone’s head and smash the other one across someone’s face. I was fully fuckin’ ready, running up quietly. I ran up and found Pete in front of the bar—they were already gone. Pete had only been hit a few times, because really they were after me. A few people I knew were sitting in a car and saw it happen, but panicked and didn’t do shit. It was over so fast. My boy Doug Crosby was in the bar; he was so pissed he wasn’t there to help us, he was flipping. I had a knot on the back of my head from one of the hammers that got through and a trickle of blood running down my neck, but other than that, I was fine. I went over to Doug Holland’s apartment and spent the night there.

  It’s one of those things that for years after, there were a few other people I was convinced had something to do with it. And I was gonna go after them. But enough years went by, the shit didn’t happen. If it was meant for me to get back at them, it would have happened 30 years ago. It would have happened when it mattered. And as it turned out, a couple of the guys who I thought were in on it weren’t, so it was a good thing I didn’t act out on it. I might have fucked up the wrong people, so all in all it’s a good thing.

  For years, John had me believing Paul Bearer from Sheer Terror had something to do with it. Of course when I eventually confronted him about it, he nearly shit his pants, the fuckin’ coward that he is. He denied it and denied it and pleaded and nearly fuckin’ cried. The whole shit was fucked up. It was a hard time for me in some ways. Getting involved with this Krishna consciousness thing, it was sort of saving me from myself on one level, but on another level it was causing a new type of problem within the NYHC scene.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘THE AGE OF QUARREL’

  CRO-MAGS, BY STACIA TIMONERE

  Let’s talk about The Age of Quarrel. Some would call it one of the most, if not the most, influential NYHC and “Crossover” albums. It was recorded and mixed in under one hundred hours, over a 14-day period in January/February 1986 at Eastside Sound by Steve Remote and Chris Williamson, our manager and so-called “producer.” But it was really Steve.

  We loaded in our gear and set up January 11, started tracking the next day; we recorded all the basic tracks in two days. That took us about 16 hours. Additional overdubs and mixing were done over 12 sessions, and we were completed by February 21.

  Me, Doug, Mackie, and Parris all played together live in the same room, and John was in a different room tracking scratch vocals. Then he did his vocal tracks over in the main room. No click tracks, totally old-school. We just played like it was a gig or a rehearsal.

  I blew out my bass amp the day we started recording. So rather than getting another amp for the session, Chris Williamson said “Play direct, and we’ll overdub your bass later.” Against my protests that’s what we did; I wound up playing direct and I got a real shitty bass sound, which made me play my runs and fills real half-heartedly. They claimed I would do the tracks over or that they would re-amp the direct signal. Of course that never happened, so the bass sound sucks. I never got a chance to re-record my parts. I think I played better on the demo. John was sick when he was doing his vocals. He didn’t even sound like himself.

  Nonetheless, The Age of Quarrel is considered by many to be a classic album and I am grateful and proud of that. But I know it could have been better.

  Most of the songs on The Age of Quarrel were written either at my aunt’s house on 12th Street and Avenue A, at the building where Richard Hell, Ginsberg, and all those people lived, or at my aunt’s house on Staten Island, where she moved later. Parris would come out there. I’d also go up to his house on East End Avenue on 82nd Street. I only stayed on Staten Island with her for a short time, ’cause I got in a fight with her then-boyfriend, and went after him with a machete! The cops came and it was a big problem, so needless to say I had to move.

  One time while I was still staying there, Eric Casanova and Little Chris came out there to hang, and they were all drunk and probably tripping or high on glue. But either way, they started kicking out windows on the Staten Island Ferry. They didn’t put cops on the ferry back then—they got them a few years later when some dude freaked out with a machete and started fucking people up. But anyway, when the ferry arrived on Staten Island with Eric and Chris, they just stayed in the water until the cops arrived, and they arrested Eric and Chris. I was still kind of a fuckin’ nut back then. The three of us were terrible, it was like the Little Rascals had grown up and gone bad—real bad.

  When I was out on Staten Island, I’d sit in my room all fucked up, huffing glue, and blasting Venom, Skrewdriver, Cockney Rejects, and Hardcore shit. One time, I was high on glue and I tried to walk into the store across the street where I used to buy the shit. I walked in and grabbed the entire box of glue from behind the glass counter. I remember thinking, “They won’t notice me if I just do it and don’t pay them no mind.” But there was no one else in the store but me, the Pakistani guy behind the counter, and his wife!

  I just walked over, walked behind the counter, slid the glass case open, and grabbed the whole fucking box. He started yelling some shit like “Hey you, what are you doing?!” I turned around and said, “What the fuck are you gonna do?” and threw the entire box at his face, besides the few tubes I kept in my hand. The glue tubes went flying everywhere when the box hit him in the face. He started screaming at me and his wife was flipping out. I told him, “Shut the fuck up—I’ll burn your fucking store down!” And I walked out. I went back upstairs and sat on my fire escape, huffing glue and blasting music. The whole while, I was taunting the storeowner, who I could see from my fire escape through his store window—giving him the finger, and huffing my bag.

  I was a belligerent maniac, and didn’t care. I mean, there was a police station just a few blocks away, and I just didn’t give a fuck. I was so high already, I honestly thought that if I walked in there casually and just grabbed the whole box right in front of them, that they wouldn’t notice me, even though there were no other customers in the store. Damn, glue really fucks up your brain and makes you do some evil and stupid shit.

  I wrote some of my favorite riffs around that time period—it was just from the level of intensity in my life, I guess. The songs had most of the ingredients that would be used in future Cro-Mags songs, the same kind of chromatic chord progressions—a Discharge-meets-Motörhead with maybe a bit Venom kinda vibe to it.

  CRO-MAGS, BY STACIA TIMONERE

  Most of that album’s songs, Parris and me worked on together. We were the songwriters of the band. But honestly, I have to say that none of the songs would have sounded the way they wound up sounding had it not been for a little bit of everybody. It was just the chemistry of all those people. I mean, I’ve played with a lot of people over the years. I can play with almost anybody, and I write songs that sound like the Cro-Mags. Just like Lemmy can play with anybody and write songs that sound like Motörhead. But that initial sound, as far as the standard that was set, came from that group of people together.

  The title The Age of Quarrel comes from Bhagavad Gita. This age we’re living in is referred to as “the iron age of quarrel and hypocrisy.” It’s the final age of the four ages, before the annihilation of the universes.


  One day, I was going in to record the album, and I was coming from a matinee at CBs where there had been a major brawl, and my friend Bags had bitten this dude’s thumb off! He looked up at me, with blood all over his face, and screamed, “Harley! Get me out of here!!” I’m like, “Oh great, everybody knows my name, and I’m attached to this mess.” So I grabbed the asshole and started running down the street.

  He was pulling pieces of fuckin’ skin out of his teeth. He literally bit the dude’s thumb off in a fight, and spat it in the drainage pipe on the side of the street right in front of CBs, so that shit was gone. It wasn’t even a sew-it-on type job.

  We were running and I got him into the 2nd Street apartment of Robbie CryptCrash and his then-wife, Michelle. I ran him in there, and I said, “Do not let this fucking asshole out of your sight! Do not let him outside, the cops are everywhere.” You can’t miss the motherfucker—he’s got a scorpion tattoo all the way up his neck to his ear, on his back he had a big skull made out of naked bitches, on his arm he had “Worship Shit” tattooed backwards, and on his chest he had “I Eat Pussy” tattooed. The guy was a fuckin’ mess. I think he got out of jail just prior to that. He was drunk, and the guy he fucked up started trying to gouge his eyes, so the thumb came off.

  PHOTOS BY KEN SALERNO

  When you’re fighting, shit happens; I almost bit a guy’s finger off once. Fortunately for the guy, I have a missing tooth on that side of my mouth, so his thumb slipped into the missing spot, and I just kind of gnawed all the meat around the bone off. But like I was saying about my friend, I was like, “Don’t let this motherfucker out of the house.” He was being so belligerent. With what just happened, I knew the cops were looking for him all over the neighborhood. So I left him there and I went from that back to the studio to finish recording.

  It was just another day in my fucking life. Of course, they were not able to keep his out-of-his-mind ass restrained, because everybody was so afraid of him except for me and a few of my friends. He went back out on the street, got caught, and went to jail for a considerable amount of time.

  This kind of shit made the lyrics on The Age of Quarrel raw, real reality. “We Gotta Know” had some of the first lyrics that John contributed, those and “Face the Facts”: “Strugglin’ in the streets just trying to survive/Searchin’ for the truth is just keepin’ us alive”—that’s pretty much where John and me were at that point. He was just beginning his spiritual quest. You’ve got young people that are confused, making mistakes and looking for the truth, looking for answers. The lyrics are powerful. “We Gotta Know” was written when we were practicing at Westbeth, a big tenement and artist complex on the Westside highway where a lot of our friends lived, including the Ice Men, Front Line, and Gabby Abularach, who years later would play on Alpha Omega.

  It came together like this: the Bad Brains had not played the song “I Against I” in years; this was before it was on their I Against I album. But my friend Dave Hahn, their old manager, had a copy of it on tape. When I’d go to his house, I’d listen to it, and I still remembered the song. But I didn’t remember it well enough to cover it, which I wanted to do. So I wanted to write a song that was as nasty and vicious. At the time, Mackie and the Bad Brains had been turning me on to a lot of fusion shit, and I had started picking up on a lot of it on my own, whether it was Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, or Weather Report. A lot of it had big open chords with crazy drum fills over them. Though some of the parts sounded really complicated, sometimes they’d actually be very simple.

  HARLEY, ADAM YAUCH, AND FRIEND, PERSONAL COLLECTION; HARLEY, MOM AND FRIENDS AT MAX’S, PERSONAL COLLECTION; PHOTO BY DAVE PARSONS MIR.

  HANGING ON ST. MARKS PLACE, BY DAVE PARSONS MIR; TRIPPING ON LSD, BY DAVE PARSONS MIR; HARLEY AND GRANDFATHER, CONEY ISLAND, PERSONAL COLLECTION; STORIES & ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARLEY, ORIGINAL COVER.

  HARLEY PLAYING WITH STIMULATORS, BY GLEN FRIEDMAN; STIMULATORS NEWSPAPER CLIPPING; OLD EAST VILLAGE LANDSCAPE, BY BROOKE SMITH.

  HARLEY PLAYING WITH STIMULATORS, BY GLEN FRIEDMAN; SID VICIOUS STIMULATORS POSTER, PERSONAL COLLECTION; TR3 FLYER, PERSONAL COLLECTION; STIMULATORS LOUD FAST RULES, PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  HARLEY AND NICK, BY GLEN FRIEDMAN; DENISE AND HARLEY AT MAX’S, PERSONAL COLLECTION; HARLEY AND LITTLE CHRIS WANDRES, PERSONAL COLLECTION; HARLEY AND NICK CASH, 999, BY DIANE GOLDNER; STIMULATORS FLYER, PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  CRO-MAGS AT CBGB, BY DAVID WALLING; HARLEY WITH LEMMY, BY FRANK WHITE; CRO-MAGS AT THE RITZ, NYC, BY JJ GONSON; JORGE ROSADO AND HARLEY, BY STEVEN J. MESSINA; PHOTO BY NAKI.CO.

  C-SQUAT, BY STEVE BUTCHER; GARRY SULLIVAN, PHIL ANSELMO, HARLEY, ROCKY GEORGE AND JEFF HANNEMAN, PERSONAL COLLECTION; SAMSARA STICKER; WHITE DEVIL FLYER; HARLEY AND ROCKY GEORGE, BY BJ PAPAS; BELFAST FLYER, FEATURING THE SAINTS, THE OUTCASTS, ETC…

  PHOTO BY BJ PAPAS; RENZO GRACIE, HARLEY AND BOYS, PERSONAL COLLECTION; HARLEY AND HARLEY JR., CBGB, BY JOHN GIUSTINIANI; L’AMOUR, BROOKLYN, BY FRANK WHITE; HARDCORE SAMURAI, HARLEY AND BUDINO DI NATALE, PERSONAL COLLECTION; BLACKBELT CEREMONY WITH RENZO GRACIE, PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  JONAH ODIN, HARLEY AND HARLEY KARSTEN, 2016, PERSONAL COLLECTION; PHOTO BY FRANK WHITE; IF YOU’RE NOT BLEEDING, YOU’RE NOT PLAYING HARD ENOUGH, PERSONAL COLLECTION.

  The intro to “We Gotta Know” was my dumbed-down version of a fusion idea: holding a few big notes, and filling up that space with those big drum fills. But if you really listen to the main chunk of the song, it’s inspired by the end part of “I Against I” that Doc does the lead over.

  The guys were on a piss break during practice, everybody was out of the room. It was like a maze in there—Westbeth is a huge building with rehearsal studios, recording studios, and art studios—so it took a while. By the time they came back, I was like, “Yo, check this out guys.” I played the opening chords to Mackie, and I said, “Do some crazy shit over this; just fill it up.” Mackie always had a funky bounce to his playing, so that on top of my chords made for an inspired attack or groove. That was one of our most famous songs, and it came together in five minutes! And even back then, we had parts with double kick drums, which had never been done ever on a Hardcore record at that point.

  “World Peace” was one of the first songs me and Parris collaborated on. He came up with most of the riffs and we arranged it together. It was a Cro-Mags version of a Motörhead-type song; we just repeated all the parts twice, and had the breakdown at the end. It was probably the fifth or sixth set of lyrics I ever wrote.

  “Show You No Mercy” is another song about LES street fighting. John wrote most of the lyrics to that one. In that song are lines that referred to people and situations that were happening at the time. “Show you no mercy at all/Gonna kick you when you’re taking your fall” had a lot to do with that fight that took place in front of CBs.

  “Malfunction” I always felt was like a peek into John’s psyche. He says in the chorus, “I’m tryin’ and I’m lyin’ but I just can’t get through to you.” But that’s him—he tries, and if that doesn’t work, he lies! It’s such a Freudian slip. It’s such a great song; it’s one of the first metal-style songs from a Hardcore band. It has a bit of a “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” influence in that particular part of the song.

  “Street Justice”: “If it really doesn’t matter why do you care?/Don’t turn around if it’s not your affair.” One night on Avenue A, Eric Casanova beat on Matt from this band called Hellbent. I think it was over a girl. Either way, Eric was real drunk. At some point in the night, he had ripped his pants all the way in half from like right under the belt loop in the back to right under the zipper in the front. While he was beating Matt’s ass, he ripped the last shred of material holding his pants together. So Matt started running, and Eric was chasing him up 8th Street toward 1st Avenue. His pants were ripped in half, so they balled up around both his ankles! He had on long johns, his combat boots, and his suspenders that were on his jeans, dragging behind him leaving sparks as he ran. He looked like a fucking maniac. He was chasing a
fter Matt, who begged him to stop. Jimmy and me were tagging along, just to keep an eye on Eric, ’cause he was so shitfaced.

  As we got around the corner, a group of college-type yuppies were standing there. They didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but they saw Eric chasing Matt. So one of them said, “Hey dudes, don’t fight…”—all like trying to intervene. Eric turned around and cracked that guy in the face, at which point the guy’s friends had no idea what was going on. Matt kept running, and Eric kept beating up this guy. Jimmy and me came running up. I grabbed a milk crate from in front of the store and started beating those people with it. Jimmy knocked some dude down the stairs into the basement of the store, and started kicking him as he was trying to come back up. So in a matter of seconds, me and Jimmy are fucking up like five people!