Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  It was the weekend, so there were bottles everywhere, garbage cans full of trash. Back then, everyone drank in the street—it wasn’t like you really got in trouble for it. So I picked up a 40-ounce bottle and smashed it against the dude’s face. Then I picked up two more bottles and smashed those against his face—from like three feet away! They were just exploding off his head. At that point, I was fucking both these dudes up so bad. Some bystander grabbed me from behind, in like a bear hug. I started reverse-headbutting the dude trying to get him in the face, figuring I’m going to cave in his nose and shake him off. I looked over my shoulder, and this dude was huge—my head was basically hitting him in the chest! He was an old guy, but like 6’5”. He looked like an old Marine.

  Meanwhile, one of the dudes was getting up off the floor. His face was mangled, it’s just a mess—blood every-fucking-where. He’s getting up off the ground wiping the blood with his arm and his sleeve and starts coming toward me looking all crazy. I shook the old man off me, right as this dude came charging at me. I picked up one of those square-shaped Jack Daniels or Jim Beam bottles, and the top of it was broken. So I held it by the bottom in my palm. As he came at me, I drove it into his face; I fed it to him. The dude’s face just opened up in more ways than you can imagine, because it was nothing but sharp glass. That’s what also opened up my hand—I cut my hand between my thumb and my index finger, and that shit was just spouting blood. I don’t know if you’ve seen anyone cut a vein, but the blood pulses out. It was squirting like three feet in the air!

  So by that point, I was still fighting. I went running inside the St. Marks Bar and Grill, and I was like, “Give me a fuckin’ bat or something!” The guy goes to hand it to me, sees all the blood coming out of my hand, and didn’t want to give it to me.

  So I snatched two beer bottles off the bar and go running back outside, and while this dude was still wobbling with blood gushing out of his face, I came running out of the bar, and just, bam—nailed him with one bottle, and then, bam, the other bottle. And these were half-full beer bottles. Again, I dropped him, and at that point one of the girls I was with grabbed me by my arm and started dragging me away, because I probably would’ve bled to death if I didn’t make it to the hospital.

  It did cut a main vein in my hand. I was holding my hand over my head, because you’re supposed to elevate the wound as high above your heart and head as you can. And the guys I fucked up were basically on their hands and knees, crawling around with blood coming out of their faces in fuckin’ puddles on the ground underneath them. The fight started on 8th Street and 1st Avenue, and I fought these guys halfway down 8th Street to Avenue A, then back up to the corner of 8th Street and 1st Avenue, and then all the way to 7th Street and 1st, and then back over to that corner of St. Marks. The fight must have lasted a good ten minutes. No cops were around. They got me to the hospital, and I wound up with 20-something stitches in my hand. In the hospital, I was crying because I was like, “I fucked up the tour!” I called Parris, and he couldn’t even understand what was going on, because I was crying, like, “I’m so sorry, I fucked it all up!” I felt responsible for wrecking it for everybody, not just myself, but for Parris, Doug and Pete. But luckily, the tour went on as planned, even though it probably shouldn’t have.

  To this day, I still have no feeling at all in my right thumb. I could stick a knitting needle through that area of skin and I wouldn’t notice. There was a lot of nerve damage. I had to play L’Amour two days later! You’ll see pictures from that tour: my hand was bandaged up, and I bled through it most of the start of that tour—the stitches were coming open, tearing, and popping. And then, coming home that night from the hospital, I got in a fuckin’ car accident! Everybody was fine, but the car got totaled. It was a shitty night.

  We toured with Destruction. That was when shit was still going good for us. But our fans used to fuck with them real bad, and I gotta say, a lot of metalheads got their asses kicked on that tour. Every night, the guitarist from Destruction would do a solo, and he’d be up there doing his Yngwie Malmsteen thing—or “Yanggy Shanggy” as we used to call him—all rocking out with his bullet belt and Flying V. One night, this Skinhead jumped up onstage, took the guitar cord, broke it off in his guitar, and skipped off the stage! He didn’t just unplug the guitar—he broke the cord off in the guitar. It was so cold.

  One time we played with them in Florida, and were parked outside this outdoor venue. We were sitting in the Winnebago, watching Skinheads pouring in from every-fucking-where. This is around the time when the Nazi Skinhead thing was starting to really jump off—and in Florida, it was out of control. I remember being onstage, and there was this insane circle pit going on, and you’d just see an occasional metalhead get sucked into it, disappear, and a few “circles” later, would get bounced out, looking all disheveled. A lotta crazy shit happened on that tour as far as brawls and stupid goofy shit.

  After that tour, we kept at it. We were never making money, it didn’t matter how big the show was or how many gigs we did in a row. There was always an excuse as to why we weren’t making money. It’s not like we were greedy; we were poor. We were unhappy with Chris and his Rock Hotel/Profile arrangement. He was keeping us in the dark about everything. He had this one clause in the contract, saying he could spend band money without accounting to us for it ’cause as he and his lawyer explained, “Well, say I can’t reach you guys. I can’t wait ’til I hear from you if I have to spend money out of the band fund to make arrangements, or rent vans, or gear, or flight, and do this or that. Nothing will ever get done if I have to okay everything with you guys.” So as long as it was in the band’s “interest,” he could basically spend our money.

  Do you know this guy was going to Hawaii on our expense, back when John was in the band? Telling us, “Hey guys, I may have us a gig in Hawaii. I’m working it out with a promoter over there. No one’s ever done it before but I’m gonna bring you guys over there.” He was spending our fucking money going there to do all this shit. And of course, those gigs were probably never even being booked at all—at least they never happened.

  We were just dumb kids—some Hardcore kids from Avenue A he had totally fucking taken advantage of. We were young and dumb.

  Not all was well within the band by this point. There were a few reasons the band split further after Best Wishes. First, we had signed such a shitty record deal with Chris and Profile. Chris had a subsidiary label under Profile; he had his lawyer represent us against Profile. But really, it was us against him. We didn’t realize that’s what his subsidiary label deal was: him locking us into a deal with him as the label and the management. The way he made it sound, “They’re going to give me my own label and a budget, which means I’ll be able to do everything you need.” But he was just using us, along with bands like Leeway, Murphy’s Law, and Wargasm, as a way of starting his own subsidiary rock label, Rock Hotel Records, under Profile. That’s how we got bamboozled into that. He got us ’cause he was also throwing us some bigger shows. Things started going bad with Profile and Chris, and they in turn started taking it out on the Rock Hotel bands.

  But before things went shitty with Chris, he introduced us to Michael Alago, who signed Metallica. Michael was a big fan of the Cro-Mags, and remained a big fan after John left the band. He started showing interest in signing us to the label he was working with at the time, which I think was Elektra. Anyway, after things went bad with Chris, Michael still showed interest in working with the band. So we got a hot-shit lawyer, who was quite expensive, but had worked with the Beastie Boys: Ken Anderson. He started negotiating with Profile to get us out of the deal, and they would not budge. The negotiating dragged on and on. We wound up running up a bill of over $100,000. There was not a shot in hell that we’d ever get the money to get out of that hole.

  At that point, all kinds of other drama went down between Chris and Doug Holland. Doug started taking a turn for the worse with drugs, and he wound up out of the band. I don’t think we fired hi
m. He just kind of faded out of the picture—he didn’t want to gig or tour. So Parris and me started looking at other guys, and wound up getting this young metalhead kid from Queens named Rob Buckley, who lived not too far from my grandmother. Parris didn’t like the guy at first, but I thought Rob was a good guitarist. A lot of the songs that wound up on Alpha Omega came from Rob and me doodling at his house. He and Parris then bonded really tight for half a second. I stopped spending as much time with them, as I was hustling, trying to survive, sellin’ weed in Central Park and shit.

  So we had most of the Alpha Omega riffs together. But looking back, Rob’s influence was definitely not good for the Cro-Mags. He was a great player but he was too metal. We did a tour with him on guitar and Dave DiCenso on drums. We still had our old road crew—Red, Squint, and Rich—but we were still trying to move forward. We hooked up with Dave DiCenso through Tom Soares, who was a great engineer. Dave came from Boston, and would come down to do gigs and practice. He was a sick fucking drummer, really versatile and could play just about any kind of music, but he was a metalhead at heart. He hit so fucking hard—one of my all-time favorite drummers I have played with.

  Our fallout with Chris was bad, and the tension continued to increase—all the years of playing, line-up changes, the fucked-up management situation, and the record deal going south. Parris and me were worn out. That’s basically what happened. We just got worn the fuck out. Parris was becoming a control freak. I guess he figured someone had to take charge, but he changed a lot. And I started to lose my mind. The band basically imploded and I started turning back to some of my old ways, like drinking and eating mushrooms. At that point, I had been disillusioned with the Hare Krishna movement. I had seen a lot of shady things go down in the movement. John’s so-called guru had been kicked out of the movement for being a pedophile, and a whole bunch of other gurus had been kicked out for stealing money or being undercover homosexuals and pedophiles and whatnot.

  John started accusing a bunch of devotees of being drug dealers and shit, but they were all his friends. He even claimed that he was getting weed from a few of them. They went on to say that he ripped them off. Then this one devotee, Vakresvara, a Prabhupada disciple, said he walked in on John fagging out with some other devotee at the temple in Puerto Rico—either giving or getting a blowjob, I’m not sure. And there were other people saying a lotta weird shit about him.

  But there was all kinds of weird shit going on in the movement at the time. It started to feel just as fucked-up, corrupt, political, and full of shit as all the other religions. I found out about all kinds of supposed conspiracies too, people wanting to kill Prabhupada; it was just shady shit. Then John started doing blow; I was kind of like, “Where the fuck is all the faith?” And I guess I started to lose my faith and lose my way a bit in the process.

  Chapter Twelve

  PART 1: “ALPHA OMEGA” THE BEGINNING AND THE END — BLOODCLOT RETURNS

  ALPHA OMEGA TOUR – GERMANY, BY BERND BOHRMANN

  As much as we tried to get out of our contract with Profile, they wouldn’t release us. We were also trying to lose our manager Chris Williamson—which was a nightmare—and then the whole Elektra/Alago/legal debt fiasco exploded. It proved to be the end, or at least the end of an era. After a short tour with Wargasm, Parris and Rob abandoned ship.

  At that point, my friendship and working relationship with Parris was worn the fuck out. I think we’d just been through too much shit, and he was ready to make a break from it and from me. So he was like, “I’m quitting, the band’s breaking up. Rob and me are gonna do something else. I’m giving up on the Cro-Mags.” I freaked! I was like, “What the fuck! I’m not giving up! We went through all this shit with members leaving, Chris fucking us over, and now you? What am I supposed to do? Get stuck with this $100,000 debt?” He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Well, all you have to do is not play as the Cro-Mags, and you won’t owe that money.” At that point, his intentions were to take all those songs that we’d worked on as a trio, and record them. So I was like, “Fuck these motherfuckers. I’m gonna record the goddamn songs myself.”

  They wanted to cut my throat and record the material that I wrote with them, and say, “Fuck you, you can have nothing. You can have a $100,000 debt, and fuck the name Cro-Mags”? At least that’s how I felt at the time.

  I know I can be a difficult person to deal with at times, and at that particular time I had a lot of pressure on me, not just from friends of the band, but from fans. I was fronting this “Hardcore” band that was getting further and further away from what we used to do, and from what our fans expected. And truthfully I was feeling the pressure. We still sounded good; the vibe was just changing so much.

  I’d be looking into the crowd and some of the fans didn’t get it, especially the diehard Cro-Mags fans. You had all of these people staring at us like, “Who the fuck are these metalheads up there with Harley?” A lotta people didn’t recognize Parris, ’cause like I said, his hair had got real long. We didn’t have Pete or Doug anymore. We’d be doing shows, and motherfuckers would be shouting, “Harley, Harley!” They weren’t even screaming “Cro-Mags” anymore ’cause I was the only thing that they recognized left in the band.

  We sounded good, but it sure as shit wasn’t The Age of Quarrel or even Best Wishes, and the Cro-Mags fans knew it. That Hardcore vibe and look was long gone.

  Rob and his guitar tech were total metalheads; so was Dave. It was cool, but I remember several occasions when Rob and his tech were kind of being dicks to some of the Hardcore Cro-Mags fans when they were drinking after the show. It was the first time they’d ever been on tour, so they didn’t really know how to act, especially around Hardcore kids, Skinheads and diehard Cro-Mags fans. Our roadies Bleu and Squint wanted to beat their asses. And on more than a few nights, Skinheads wanted to serve them an ass-beating and they didn’t even realize it ’cause they were all drunk and shit, and coming off like cocky smartasses. A few of those van rides got ugly after shit like that. It must’ve sounded like the Buddy Rich bus ride tapes—I went off on them.

  It was fucked up ’cause I had been hanging with Parris since the early ’80s, and I loved playing with him. He was a sick guitarist and he really was my boy; at least I thought he was. But he started to act like a snob. And I think that Rob rubbed off on him. Rob never fit in. The funny shit is, when he first joined, Parris didn’t like him at all. But then they bonded, and that was it. Rob was never into Hardcore; he didn’t know shit about it. The truth is, I’d lost interest in a lot of the people and bands on the New York scene. But I still had a lot of friends on the scene, not just in New York but throughout the States and worldwide. It had been my life, and I still considered it my home.

  Parris was really moving away from it too. He got into hanging out at rock and Goth-type bars and trendy clubs—the “cool people” scene. All I know is, shit was changing, and looking back Rob should have never been considered for the gig ’cause he had so little in common with us, or our fans. We based our decision on his playing, and he was the best who tried out at the time.

  When Hardcore kids came up to him at shows and asked him if he liked this band or that band, he’d be like, “I don’t listen to Hardcore, I never did, and I don’t like much of what I’ve heard.” It might have been true, and that’s cool. But the way he’d say it sounded really obnoxious, like, “Why is this fucking guy even here?”

  A couple things happened on our short tour that completely freaked out Rob and his guitar tech buddy. It freaked out Parris and Dave as well, but it was business as usual for me, Squint, Bleu, etc. As usual, there were several brawls and high-intensity situations. But there was one incident where some dickheads tried to rob our merch truck while my boys were on call. And let’s just say that people were left twitching on the ground and bleeding, needing serious medical attention. The kind of bad shit that you don’t want to see, be a part of, or be near—the van screeching out of town, running red lights, etc. And so, them metal b
oys that were rolling with us were fucking freaked. They weren’t used to being around shit like that, or shit like that happening at shows. But this wasn’t our first day at the beach. So anyway, after that tour Parris and Rob decided to break out. They thought I was a dick or whatever.

  Well, whether that’s true or not, I had no intention of going out like that. By the grace of God, the law firm we owed all that money to went out of business. So the debt no longer existed. I had also become friendly with Ken Anderson, the lawyer who represented us during the Profile bullshit, and he kept working with me.

  Around that time, I talked with some German booking agents, Marc and Ute from M.A.D. They were like, “Harley, what’s happening with the Cro-Mags?” They were all on fire about trying to bring the band over. I explained to them the situation and all the drama and that the “band” was really just me at this point. They told me, “Pull a line-up together and we’ll bring it over.” They introduced me to the guys from Century Media Records, and the label was interested in signing me as the Cro-Mags. At that point, I owned the name exclusively.

  So I started negotiating a deal with Century Media, and jamming with an old friend, Gabby Abularach, who I knew since the early ’80s. Gabby had been around the original NYHC scene. He lived at Westbeth and used to go see the Bad Brains, the Stimulators, and the Mad. He was friends with Frontline and Mackie and all of those guys; his brother was the guitarist for the Icemen. He didn’t look like a Hardcore dude, but after playing with those other two, I’d play with this fuckin’ guy in a second! He learned all the stuff with no problem.