Eric fucked up the one guy, and Matt got away. All of a sudden, the cops pulled up. I ran, and Jimmy ran around the corner and dove under a parked car. They drove right past him, while other cops were coming on foot. They ran past him, and I got away. Needless to say, Eric got popped. I saw them pulling away with his drunk ass in the car, in his fuckin’ long johns and combat boots! The shit was fucked up, but it was hysterical. So that’s where that line “Don’t turn around if it’s not your affair” comes from.
The line “Overpower—Overcome” came from one fight we got into at a party in Canada. Bruno, after he kicked the shit out of a dude, picked the dude up over his head, and yelled, “Overpower! Overcome!” before he threw the dude down the stairs. “Survival of the Streets” included memories of living in C-Squat. Two lines in particular: “Wake up with the gun on my head” and “If the beast pulls the trigger, I’ll wind up dead.” The lyrics were real; it wasn’t made up. That’s how we were living.
We woke up one morning, and the first thing we saw was the cops kicking in our door and throwing guns to our heads! They were looking for a dude who was wanted for multiple murders, who had been staying in the building on and off. We’d just woken up, and we were getting ready to light up a spliff of Hawaiian purple bud. Louie, the singer from Antidote, was there too, and he threw the joint out the window in a panic. Once the cops realized we weren’t who they were looking for, they were like, “Don’t worry. If you see this guy, let us know.”
Sure enough, a few days later, I was lying there, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something glimmer through the window. I backed up, and said, “Who the fuck’s out there?!” I backed up and I picked up a stick. I saw this shape come into the window, and it was the guy they were looking for. Turns out I knew the kid from the neighborhood. The glimmering/shining thing turned out to be scissors in his hand.
In a lot of the songs, the messages are the same: the “don’t fuck with me” outlook on life. Like “It’s the Limit”: “Why you messing around with me/Pushin’ me around/Values changing, But I can’t get caught in it today/We won’t lose with what we’ve got/’Cause we’ll just sit and watch it all rot.” Then “Seekers of the Truth” was more of a metal song than it was a Hardcore song. We never intentionally tried to write anything metal or Hardcore. We just tried to write songs that we liked and were up to a certain standard.
A lot of the lyrics had undertones of spiritual knowledge, because the materialistic aspects of life are all going to crumble, and then we’re going to be left with nothing. “As this age progresses, and gets more and more degraded…” wasn’t just inspired by our street experiences, but also from reading the Bhagavad Gita.
The lyrics in “Hard Times” speak for themselves. It gets redundant to keep writing about that shit, but at that point in life, that’s how me, Eric and John were living. Again, that was the difference between Hardcore and metal; we wrote about real-life experiences. More or less, the whole album’s about the same goddamn thing! But the line “Cro-Mag, Skinhead, Breakout, Now” had particular meaning to me, ’cause I was a Cro-Mag evolving. I was a Skinhead and I knew it was time to break out of the life I was living.
John wrote the lyrics to “By Myself” but I went over them with him at the end. It was kind of one of the Cro-Mag “template songs”—one of the musical blueprints. “Don’t Tread On Me” was on those solo demo recordings that I did. It was one of the few songs that carried over from my days before I started playing with those guys. “Face the Facts” was one of our most Krishna consciousness-type songs. The first album didn’t have a lot of those overtones, but that song was leaning that way. It was one of the first songs that me and Parris wrote together.
The music for “Do Unto Others” was very Minor Threat-inspired, but with a New York style. It was written before I started down the road toward Krishna consciousness, and whatever other spiritual paths that crossed my way. So a lot of those songs were still rooted in my street experiences and my Skinhead-ness. “Do Unto Others” was written right as we were crossing those roads. John and I put that song together.
“Life of My Own” was one of our first songs. I feel that lyrically, it’s one of our most significant songs. Eric and me wrote it. The riffs came together when we were practicing in one of our early line-ups with Parris. We didn’t have a full band, so I was switching between drums and bass while we were auditioning others. I remember this guy Steve Psycho, who we started calling Stevie Love almost as a joke, because he really was a psycho. He tuned up his guitar and hit three notes. Those three notes sounded good to me, so I added another note, and turned it into “Life of My Own.” The album’s last song, “Signs of The Times,” is some Motörhead-style shit, but with our own unique twist. But you can definitely hear the influence.
For the cover, we wanted to use this painting from the Bhagavad Gita. It’s a mushroom cloud with all the “sinful” activities going on inside of it. When I say “sinful,” I mean as according to Hindus, Buddhists and so on—acts of violence against animals, children, and humanity, drugs, illicit sex, gambling; all the actions of man that are causing the world’s turmoil. Alex Morris, the original guitarist for Murphy’s Law, updated the art a little for us. He added dogs fighting, pornography, a punk rocker shooting drugs, a doctor dropping a baby in a garbage can, and a father beating his kid with a belt. And one part of it had two gay guys in it. Some people at the label who were gay got all pissed off but it also had straight people, pornography as well, strippers and so on. But it was too offensive for Profile Records, who distributed Rock Hotel Records. Too offensive for a hip-hop label, can you believe that?
It goes to show how long ago it all was. We insisted that they use the artwork, but they wouldn’t let us, so we said, “Fine, use it as the inner sleeve, and we’ll put a photograph of a nuclear explosion on the cover.” So they did. Profile printed the “controversial” art on the inner sleeve, like they said they would. But instead of printing the color art we’d given to them, they printed it in red—a color that completely blurred all the stuff they found offensive. It was so obvious that it was intentional. So we were like, “Yo, fuck that. If you’re gonna censor our shit, you better print ‘censored’ over it, so people know you censored it.” So after a short stalemate, that’s what they did. We ended up with that classic photo on the back cover, which was the most appropriate cover for that album.
That controversial artwork did get used on a 10” bootleg of the original demos that this kid in Switzerland made off the original cassette. It came out on a limited pressing; the cover was in black-and-white and it had a Hare Krishna mantra etched into the vinyl. They are hard to find: there were like five hundred with the Cro-Mags written in red, and five hundred with it written in green, and they’re numbered. I was pissed at first that it was bootlegged, but when the kid found out that Profile never paid us, he sent me all the money he made, as well as copies. He said he just loved that original recording so much, and it wasn’t available for people, so he wanted to make it available. I wish everyone who pressed my shit without telling me was that cool. Like I’ve still never seen a check from Profile, but that’s another story. I think that was Chris Williamson and Rock Hotel, or as we called it, “Rock Hell.”
One of the reasons we were one of the first Hardcore bands to break through, or cross over, was because MTV played our “We Gotta Know” video. That video turned on much of the country to Hardcore and/or slam dancing and mosh pits. Suicidal Tendencies was the only other Hardcore band that had a video on Headbangers Ball. People who were not involved with the Hardcore scene had never ever seen that kind of shit before.
I don’t think people realize just how many doors that video opened for other bands. When The Age of Quarrel came out in 1986, rock videos kind of sucked, and all of a sudden you have an MTV video with people throwing their bodies off stages, swinging fists around, kicking each other, people covered in tattoos with their heads shaved, screaming about really heavy shit. It was exciting to
watch.
It started to sink in that the Cro-Mags were beginning to make some waves when we started meeting big bands that were into us. Metallica came to see us at L’Amour in Brooklyn, and came backstage to hang out. That was the early stages of “crossover,” when metal bands started noticing Hardcore. Once again, it goes back to the “We Gotta Know” video. Jason Newsted had just joined the band, and James Hetfield was still a complete maniac. In fact, James walked up to some kid that was wearing a Megadeth shirt, ripped it off of him, and walked away! He grabbed it by the collar, ripped it down the front, and the kid was like, “I just had my shirt ripped off by James Hetfield!” It made his fuckin’ night.
We were selling out clubs like the Ritz—and that was as big as you were going to get for a Hardcore band. I was on the “house guest list.” I had a reserved table, and all that fake rock star bullshit you get when you’re halfway hot shit. I remember going to see Alice Cooper. After the show, I was upstairs, and he came walking through the crowd at the end of the night. I walked up to shake his hand and pay him respect—he’s a legend. So I was going to just give him his props, and as I walked up to him, he says, “I recognize you—you’re in the Cro-Mags.” I was shocked. But I was in all the metal magazines at the time. You’d open up a Kerrang! or whatever, and it would have Ratt on one page, and you’d flip it over, and there would be me with no shirt on, lookin’ like a fuckin’ gargoyle.
Bands like Pantera, years later, they gave us mad props. That shit meant a lot to me. When you live the life I’ve lived, take the little bit of skill that you have developed and get some recognition from that, it does feel like some kind of accomplishment because Dimebag Darrell was one of the sickest guitar players of our time, and he gave us mad props. Phil Anselmo came up and sang a song with us in Norway. Phil goes to me, “I feel like we were twin brothers, separated at birth. Without you, there would be no me.” We did have a connection, and Pantera is and was one of my favorite metal-style bands.
David Bowie was also very cool. I was on a Tin Machine music video shoot; me and a few of my friends got recruited on the street to be extras, offering us some money to be in the audience. I ended up doing a lot more at the shoot than just being in it; I helped with crowd control, and this and that. It was a good time. We hung out for the whole day. He wound up getting in touch a few times after that through my grandmother ’cause I didn’t have a phone. I’d give her number out if people needed to reach me. On MTV he actually said, “I’d like to say ‘What’s up’ to Harley of the Cro-Mags and his grandmum.”
Whenever he called, he’d stay on the phone with her for a while. I’d come out to see her, and she’d be like, “Oh your friend called, David.” I’m all, “David who?” “David Bowie!” she says, like it ain’t no big deal. One time he called and told my grandmother he was getting married before the media knew about it. The guy’s really down-to-earth.
So, when I got heavy into Hare Krishna, I showed up at Profile Records, where Chris Williamson’s Rock Hotel Records office was, and it happened to be on the day they were throwing a surprise birthday party for him. At that point, I got it into my head that I was done with music, the whole “material thing.” I showed up in my Hare Krishna robe, with a tilock on my forehead, which is the mud from the Ganges River that the Hare Krishnas wear on their foreheads, my head shaved, and bead bags. Chris was like, “What’s up?” I was like, “I have to tell you something, Chris. I’m renouncing rock ‘n’ roll.” Our record just came out, and he was like, “What?!” I was like, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be around this type of lifestyle.” All the things that someone who was on that path would say. He was like, “You can’t! You’re kidding me?!” He started having a panic attack. He was watching his golden goose take flight, right out the fuckin’ window! I was like, “I’m sorry. I hope you understand—maybe someday you will.”
By that point, I was walking toward the elevator, and he was like, “Harley, come on man, be serious!” The elevator door started closing, I looked at him, and I said, “Hare Krishna.” It couldn’t have been better timing, because they had just sung “Happy Birthday”! It was great, I dropped a bomb—on his fuckin’ birthday.
Mike Schnapp worked at Profile, and he remembers:
“I first met Harley when I worked for Rock Hotel/Profile Records from May 1986 through February 1987. I was hired to be the ‘promotion guy’ for Rock Hotel Records, kind of like Artie Fufkin from Spinal Tap.
“When they came back from opening for Motörhead for six weeks, Harley was not quite the same. I realized he spent a real lot of time with Lemmy on this tour. He really looked up to Lemmy, and I think Harley saw in Lemmy a man that lived his life like he wanted to—by his own rules and took no shit from nobody. The influence of Lemmy made Harley the tough guy even tougher.
“Another time, the Cro-Mags came back to New York from a six-week van tour, and as was customary, they all piled into the record label’s tiny office to tell us all the crazy stories that happened on the road. At the end of the workday, like 7 p.m., I was getting ready to go home, and I noticed Harley still hanging around—way after the rest of the band went to wherever they were living at the time. I told Harley I was going home, and asked if he needed a lift to wherever he was staying. He said that he didn’t know where he was staying. Whoever the last person he was living with was, he was not getting along with them and was out on his own, so he had no destination.
“I was living two blocks from the beach in Long Beach, Long Island at the time, about an hour drive from the Downtown streets. I told him that he could ride home with me and sleep in the extra room in the house. I lived with a few roommates and there was a really tiny extra room with a mattress and a window on the side of the house. Harley accepted the offer and we drove out to the beach. Harley didn’t know me very well, on a trusting level. A few days later, I found a big knife under my car seat. I guess he’d lived a life where he never knew if someone was going to try something on him, and needed protection.
“I came from a different place—a happy home with parents and no fears for my safety. He did not. I learned this, and came to appreciate that I had it easy and Harley didn’t. So with the way I learned that he grew up, he had to always be on the lookout for anybody who was going to fuck him over or harm him. Once we got to the beach house and sorted Harley out with a place to sleep I remember him going right into the room and shutting the door. The next morning, there’s Harley, standing in the living room looking happy, rested, mellow, chill and happy. Harley had always seemed to be the angriest person.
“He told me it was his best night of sleep ever! I didn’t get it at first, in a tiny room with just him and a mattress? I guess that for once, he wasn’t bothered by anybody, could just sleep in total privacy—as opposed to living in tight quarters on the Lower East Side, and also just coming off of a six-week van tour with no privacy. I asked him how he was feeling, and he just smiled and was so relaxed. He said that he left the window open and heard the waves from the beach, and said he never had that before in his life. That’s the way I lived. But for Harley, it was paradise for one night.”
Touring really was an escape for me. It was easier than regular life: I had food and a place to crash. But even when we were starting to gain a certain level of popularity, there was always all kinds of crazy shit going on—some of it I didn’t even know about. I had fucked up so many people in the past, I mean, I could tell you so many stories. I still had a reputation for being crazy. Motherfuckers used to threaten people with me and shit; there were even times when John and Parris pumped me up to go after motherfuckers, and a lot of time, it was straight-up bullshit.
Chapter Ten
‘THE AGE OF QUARREL’ TOUR
PHOTO BY JJ GONSON
The Cro-Mags played with everybody back in the day—almost every Hardcore band that was around, and as the shows got bigger and the whole “crossover” started, we played with tons of metal bands too, so many that I can’t even remember.
As we walked off, the photographer was still rolling around on the ground, trying to get his brains back together. Jock from GBH told me, “If you lived in England, you’d have a fucking Army!” Later that evening, they saw a Hell’s Angel stab someone on 7th Street and Avenue A, so between me and Eric laying an ass-beating on that photographer and then that Hell’s Angel, New York really lived up to everything they expected, I guess.
One night on that tour with GBH, me and Mackie and busted into a jam of Jimmy Castor Bunch’s “It’s Just Begun.” Doug started ripping into some sick leads—some of the sickest shit I ever heard him play—and we just jammed out for a good 15–20 minutes. There was hardly anyone there, so I could see clear through to the bar at the other end of the club. I could see GBH sitting there with their jaws open, drinks still in their hands. It turns out Lars from Rancid was there. He told me years later it was one of the sickest things he had ever seen—it was a straight-up funk-punk-metal-fusion jam.
Hard-Core: Life of My Own Page 21