Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  I was inside by this point. Me and one of Stigmata’s crew got a few Skinheads dusted and left them fucked up and passed out on the floor in the back of the club. Every time the Skinheads would yell out “Sieg Heil,” we’d yell out “Seagal!” or “Chuck Norris!” back at them! We were in ball-break mode, but still, the situation wasn’t cool. There were all these Nazis and the neighborhood was starting to notice what was going on at the club. I remember two black teenagers, a guy and a girl, walked in the front door all pretending to rock out, laughing at all the Skinheads. At that point, there was no one at the door—all the boneheads were up by the stage going off to some whack-ass band, Sieg Heiling and stage diving and shit. The guy who promoted the shit immediately ran up, grabbed them and said, “Private party,” and escorted them out the door before the Skinheads noticed. Then a few other neighborhood teenagers walked in and started looking around. At first, everyone on the block just thought it was a like a punk rock show or something. But by this point they were starting to notice it wasn’t.

  It was Stigmata’s time to play, so they did. I remember when I was walking to the stage area, I saw the two Skinheads that I’d smoked dust with still all fucked up. One was still passed out on the floor, the other one was trying to figure out what was going on. They were totally fucked up. Stigmata did their thing, and I went up and sang “Life of My Own” and “Hard Times” with them, and all the Skinheads went crazy. Bound For Glory then played, we got paid and split. At that point the show was winding down. All the Skinheads were starting to scatter from the area and run back to their cars, just as bottles started crashing to the left and to the right of the club. It was about to jump off—we were ready to go so we got the fuck out of there.

  I don’t know if any of those Skinhead assholes got jumped or what happened after we left, but I was glad when we got the fuck out. And I was pissed at Bob ’cause I think he knew more about the gig than he told the rest of the band. To the rest of them, it was just a gig, they didn’t fuckin’ know. He knew Bound For Glory was playing and all that shit.

  I had never heard of them or any of the other bands, and I thought they were all kind of whack. You know, the kind of bands where the guys are really struggling to play some real simple shit and they’re just barely able to manage. It was funny after all the tough-guy shit, all the bravado, and then they get up there and try to do something, and it was just so musically unsound and technically weak—bad wannabe Skrewdriver-type bands, mixed with bad Hardcore, and childlike skills. These big guys struggling with their bar chords. These were guys more comfortable kicking someone in the face or goose-stepping at a Nazi rally. They were big oafish children, struggling to play some whack-ass shit that had zero musicality. It was as if they thought that screaming, “Nigger! Nigger!” or “Sieg Heil!” or “White Power!” through the lyrics of each song was enough to validate it. To them, it was serious. They were selling all kinds of swastika pins and Nazi paraphernalia at the merch table. To me, the whole shit was comical—except for the fact that if you were unlucky enough to be caught alone by some of those guys in the wrong situation, you might get jumped.

  But the whole thing was fuckin’ ridiculous. There was even a midget running around Sieg Heiling and shit. A Nazi midget, I shit you not. But that was the first time I saw Stigmata, and it was a very strange and fucked-up trip to say the least. From then on, Stigmata and me were pretty fuckin’ tight. I wound up staying up there for a while at some friends of their parents’ house. I bounced around that area for a while—couch-surfing, crashing in basements, and whatnot. After that, I wound up bouncing back and forth between the city and Albany. Around that time, I bumped into Parris on the street in NYC. We spoke briefly. It was a little tense at first. He was very standoffish but then seemed to share similar feelings about the whole turn of events. At the time I just wanted to know that I spoke my mind and I did consider him my friend and wanted him to know that, and clear the air. We did and it was cool.

  When I went back out to the West Coast, I had over five grand in an envelope in my pocket, with a fucking rubber band around it. I flew back out and was staying with this chick in Santa Cruz for a little while, and then she kicked me out. So I hitchhiked to San Francisco with all my bags, my bass, and five Gs in my back pocket. Some hippie chick in a Volkswagen bus picked me up, blasting old Sabbath, and we smoked kind bud the whole way to San Francisco. I was such a mess at one point, I showed up at my friend’s house with everything I owned in a shopping cart, with a cow’s skull tied to the front—like a Texas good ol’ boy pulling up in a Cadillac with bull horns on the hood, except it was a shopping cart. I was real down-and-out. It was my friend Eddie’s house; he and a few friends had a big-ass three-floor house right by Golden Gate Park, and they let me stay in the little room underneath the stairs where you’d normally keep your vacuum.

  At one point, I was as broke as shit, and I got busted shoplifting food at a supermarket. I didn’t have any ID, so the kids I was with ran back to the house and came back with three of my CD covers as ID! I was sitting in this holding area in the back of the store, and the store cops were looking at me all confused. They were like, “This is your ID?” I was holding up the pictures from The Age of Quarrel, Best Wishes, and Alpha Omega, and was like, “See? Look at the picture and my tattoos, this is me!” They were like “You’re kidding, right? This is all the ID you got?” I was like, “Well, yeah. Look, you see what I stole. It ain’t like I’m stealing jewelry, sunglasses, or some frivolous shit. I’m hungry and I’m broke; I’m stealing enough to eat!” One of the store cops was looking at the CDs and looking at me. It turns out her son was a metalhead. He had friends in bands, and she felt bad for me. She was like, “Why ain’t you gigging? You got records out.” I was just like, “Shit happens. The band broke up and I’m going through hard times now.” So they said, “Just don’t come back to this store, okay?” Then the last thing the lady cop said to me was, “What was the name of your band again? I want to see if my son’s heard of them.”

  At one point I was staying at this apartment on lower Lower Haight, where there were just a bunch of fuck-ups crashing all over the place. Total mess/drug pad, fuck-ups living in every room, and me crashing on the couch. I had this meat hook that I used to carry at the time that I always kept inside my pocket. I was sleeping with my leather jacket over me as my blanket, and I woke up to this big lumberjack-looking dude in the apartment, swinging a fucking sword around! He was screaming I don’t know what about. Everyone was pinned against the couches and walls, scared as fuck. I went into “defense mode,” and put the leather jacket over my hands. At that point, I had the meat hook out underneath the jacket and I’m like, “Dude, what the fuck?” He was yelling, “Don’t make me use this thing!” So I was thinking, when he swings the thing, I’m going to catch the blade with my leather jacket, I’m going to hook him, and pull whatever I fuckin’ hook, whether it’s his neck, face, or arm; I’m just going to grab something.

  So I was heading at him like a matador, except the leather jacket was over my hands, because I didn’t want to get cut by this straight-up cavalry sword. So he started backing away from me. We were on the second floor, and as I was backing him toward the stairs, I saw a baseball bat. As he got to the top of the stairs, I lunged at him, kicked him, and sent him down. I grabbed the baseball bat as I was chasing him down the steps, and then I just pounced on him with the bat. I started fucking this dude up real bad, and kicked him out the front gate. At that point, I let him get up, and he was like, “Motherfucker, give me my sword back!” I said, “Fuck you! You don’t come in here and start waving a sword around!” Then he was like, “All right, I’m going to go get my gun, you wait right here!” And I was like, “What motherfucker?! Don’t tell me you’re going to get a gun ’cause you’re not going to take two fuckin’ steps away from here!” I started cracking him again and again, and a homeless dude, who was kind of big, grabbed my arm as I was getting ready to crack him in the head with the bat, and was like
, “Stop! Enough’s enough.” So I went back inside and shut the gate. I went upstairs, and everybody else was still pinned against the walls, like, “What the fuck happened?!”

  My boy Rex Everything—whose real name is Nick Oliveri, he played bass in the Dwarves and later Queens of the Stone Age—was one of the people that was in the apartment when that happened. He was a fuckin’ mess too. I knew him through this mutual fuck-up friend of ours, Beau. Beau had “White Power” tattooed on the back of his arms from when he was in prison, and a dot tattooed between his eyes; he was an old-school S.F. Skinhead who was always in and out of jail. He actually went to jail the last time for running over a bunch of people at Burning Man. He got all fucked up on acid and crystal meth, stole a Jeep or some shit, and accidentally ran some people over. Beau was the one who got me back on the meth wagon. But I was a mess anyway. He didn’t force me, he just offered…

  So, back to the guy with the sword: I don’t know if Rex was there for this, but the next morning I woke up, and the dude that I just fucked up real bad the night before was sitting in the fucking chair across from me! I was pretending to be asleep, but actually looking around and trying to assess the situation. There was no one else there, just me with him sitting there looking at me. I think someone walked into one of the other rooms, shut the door, and that’s what woke me up. So I was looking at him, peeking from under my jacket that I used as my blanket. My eyes looked shut but I could see through my lashes. This was the same guy who was saying he was gonna shoot me last night, right before I beat the shit out of him with a bat! And here he was sitting across from me looking at me sleeping! I thought, “Well, I’m alive, he hasn’t done anything to me yet, so I guess that’s not why he’s here.” Because he could have snuffed me when I was sleeping, unless he was waiting for me to get up. So I got up, and was like, “So, what’s up?” And he said, “I’m really sorry, I know I was out of line. Can I have my sword back?” And before I knew it, he broke out some kind bud, smoked a bowl with me and another dude who happened to walk in at that time, and took us out for breakfast! It was just one of the insane things that happened on Lower Haight. So I gave him his sword back.

  Around the time, I briefly flew back to New York and produced a record for that Albany band Stigmata. This kid Bob Ocolinni had signed them—he had a rich family, so he started a record label as a pet project, Train Wreck Records. And basically, it was that: a train wreck. I was a train wreck, the label was a train wreck, the whole shit was a fucking train wreck. They flew me back for a minute, and paid me a decent chunk of change to produce the record. In all honesty, I was so fucked up on drugs when we were recording that album. One of the guys who owned the studio was also the engineer. I had his people delivering bundles of dope to the studio. I was popping pills all day, smoking dust—I was a fuckin’ mess. But somehow or another, they will all tell you that I did help bring out a lot of good shit from those guys musically. I mean, they were already good, but I helped them shape their songs a bit, and edited a lot of parts. They were writing these songs with 20 parts; every song was an epic. But I was like, “Guys, you’re trying to stuff 20 pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag, and it’s just not going to work. You’ve got to trim some of these parts—less is more.” I finally figured that out after doing Alpha Omega. It was Jason Bittner’s first album, the drummer now in Shadows Fall.

  So I finished that record, went back to California, and spent all the money I made on that trip on drugs. I basically O.D.’d a few times, and had all kinds of crazy shit go down, as I burned through all that loot. I was an ugly scumbag of a mess. Some time around when I was working on the Stigmata album, one of those dudes was in New York City with a friend of his, and I decided to take them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “show them some culture.” But first, we were up in the park walking around and I was getting high right there in public barely even trying to be discreet. I had my jacket hanging over my shoulder, I was shooting heroin under it while we walked near the reservoir, joggers jogging by us, people walking past us, pushing strollers, not even noticing.

  See, that’s the thing with drugs and me—when I was a mess, I was a blatant mess, and I really didn’t give a fuck. I’m really amazed that I didn’t end up in jail, just for my blatant disregard for law and common sense. It’s embarrassing that I was that far gone.

  So anyway, we got to the museum, and I was all fucked up and sick as a dog, vomiting everywhere; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was puking in the trash receptacles! Trying to be discreet, when nobody was looking, I was like, “Blaaah!” You know the rooms with the knights on horses where they’ve got all the tapestries and banners? I was pulling tapestries and curtains over to the side and throwing up behind antique tapestries! We went through pretty much the whole museum, with me vomiting everywhere. And mind you, the two guys that I was with were straight edge. For all I know, I could have thrown up on Marie Antoinette’s bedroom furniture or rug. Yeah, I’ve vomited in some great places.

  When I got back to the West Coast, I burned through the Stigmata/Train Wreck money pretty fast. I’m not proud of it. In fact I’m amazed that I lived through it. I stayed with with crazy-ass Beau who was all into crystal meth, smack, and S&M. We had no electricity. Sometimes I’d come back to the house, and I’d be like, “Beau, you in there?” to the door of his room. I wouldn’t hear shit, so I’d be hanging out, writing lyrics, drawing by candle-light, or whatever, just tweaking out. And all of a sudden, you’d hear a muffled whimper or some shit come from his room. Or you’d think you’d hear a slap, and you’d be like, “Did I just hear something?” Then you’d be like, “Nah, I’m imagining shit.” Then like a half-hour later, I’d hear another one. Or a whimper and then a smack, and I’d be like, “Oh, Beau’s home!” An hour later, he and his girl would come out of his room—he’d have a big smile on his face, and she’d be all embarrassed, and like not making eye contact with me. He was such a freak—we got into a lot of trouble while I was there.

  I was a total mess at that point; every now and then, I’d pull myself together enough and find someone to take me in for a while. At one point, I was staying in this shitty crack house dope-den welfare hotel on Mission Street, I think it was called the Hotel Thor. These Pakistanis ran it. The fucking whole place stank of curry, crack, and brown tar dope getting cooked. It was such a pathetic existence of a life I was living at that point, I would have probably been better off dead—but then I wouldn’t be here now or have my family or any of the good things that have happened in my life since then.

  I was in a state of depression, and the drugs helped me stay in it. I was trying to get better, as far as wanting to get off drugs at least half the time. And I would, for a few days or a week or so here or there, but I was just too depressed, and one thing would lead to another, and then, back into the abyss, the death spiral into emptiness, nothing, nowhere-ness.

  Of course, I was all into Alice in Chains and Nine Inch Nails, all that fucking depressed drug music. But even as fucked up as I was, there was this wheat grass juice stand on Mission, and I’d still make sure to get a shot of wheat grass juice every day, ’cause I figured, “Hey, at least wheat grass juice is equal to eating tons of vegetables,” since I wasn’t eating at all practically. I’d have little moments of clarity or inspiration; I’d go to music stores and pretend I was gonna buy shit, and just play instruments. I’d hang out as long as I could, and then leave. I actually got offered gigs while I was in stores playing—I got offered gigs doing sessions for different producers. But I’d be all fucked up and miss the session, ’cause I wouldn’t know what day it was and I’d realize a day or two later, or I’d lose their business card or whatever.

  It was around that time that I joined a band as the singer. It was with these kids I had met when I first rolled into town: Eddie, Rob, and Raif. Since they already had a bassist and a drummer, all they needed was a singer, so I said, “Fuck it, I’ll sing.” They didn’t have a name for the band, so I came up with one: Naked Love Ch
urch! They had a few songs, and were actually good, in a crazy psychedelic meets Helmet/Melvins/Stooges even Doors-ish grunge-y weird way. We did a bunch of gigs and I did a lot of partying. We started to gain a little bit of local popularity. Two of the guys were college students, and one worked at a bar and a club, so they were pulling all their friends to see us, and it started to gain a buzz. I would never write lyrics; I just had themes and I’d go out and just freak the fuck out, and make shit up onstage. Some of those shows were fuckin’ off the hook. I was just going crazy, running around the club, climbing the walls, running across bars, diving across shit, and fucking with people while we were playing. It was great; I’d make up the words as I was going. I was creating melodies and I’d base the lyrics on whatever theme I was on or whatever I was thinking of at that moment. That shit used to drive the other guys nuts, but free-styling was my thing. We were gigging with bands like Release, who were popular in San Francisco at the time. I kinda scared the other guys in the band with my erratic behavior. I mean, those guys partied, but I was nuts to the point of almost having a death wish. Some of them went on to start a band called Hetch Hetchy. Those were the guys whose room I lived in under the stairs. Great guys.

  I stayed at like 20 different places while I was in San Francisco. At one point I stayed with this crazy crackhead fuck who had a big talking parrot, and his roommate made speed in his room, out of whatever the fuck you make speed out of. It was ugly. I even lived with Steve DePace from Flipper for a little while. He was one of the few people out there who had their shit together and wasn’t all fucked up. We jammed, but it didn’t pan out. I was winding up in some very fucked-up situations and places. Eventually, I got the phone number of my friend Joey, who used to be in Verbal Abuse, an old San Francisco Hardcore band. He was living in L.A., and I told him how I knew this one chick that was a bank teller, and was trying to get her to help me rob the bank. I had a map drawn, with all the cameras marked. I was off the deep end.