Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  A lot of shit happened that would cause Rocky not to dig him. He straight-up told me, “I really hate that guy. I try not to say that about people but I really don’t like that guy at all.” I was like, “Damn!” ’cause Rocky doesn’t talk shit like that. But Parris wasn’t the same kid I grew up with—the one we used to call “Kevin”—that’s for sure. He’d changed a lot. Most people say the opposite about me. They say, “That asshole hasn’t changed at all!”

  I loved playing with Rocky and touring together. He always roomed with me, and whenever he was in town, he’d stay with me. But sometimes that motherfucker would get crazy drunk on tour and go wild.

  One time, me and Rocky and got into a fistfight in our hotel room. We fuckin’ went at it! It was one of those crazy/funny tour nights. He was being a belligerent madman that night, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I was trying to get to sleep, and I tried to throw him out of my hotel room. He charged at me like a bull, and Rocky’s a big man—he plays hockey and shit. He slammed me against the wall, and I was pinned with my feet dangling! I proceeded to grab him by the back of the head, pulled him down, kneed him in the face on reflex, and pounded on him.

  But it wasn’t doing shit, so I grabbed his arm and started cranking on it. Then my girlfriend and our roadie, Eric, jumped on me. They were like, “Harley, stop! You can’t hurt his arms, he needs those to play!” So I put a “sleeper hold” on him, and put his ass to sleep, stomped out of the room, and found somewhere else to crash. The next morning, I went down to the hotel lobby, and didn’t know what to expect. Rocky was looking all pissed off and mean. I said, “Rocky, no matter what happened last night, you’re like a brother to me. I will always love you and respect you. If you feel like you gotta punch me in my face right now because of what happened last night, go ahead. I won’t even take it personal, ’cause I hope that you’ll still be my friend.” And I put out my hand. He didn’t even shake my hand, he picked me off the ground and gave me a big-ass hug! And then we laughed our asses off and kept hugging and walked off together. Parris was in shock, watching us make up after we had a straight-up fistfight the night before. But Rocky and me are brothers and always will be ’til the end.

  Around this time, we ran into some jerkoffs we’d met before: Earth Crisis. At that point, we’d been touring and did this one festival where Earth Crisis played. I saw them there. I was with my girlfriend and every time they saw us, they’d all tense up, and I was just like, “These dicks were fuckin’ sticking their hands in buckets of my piss all night.” I don’t give a fuck about them.

  But Parris was “rock starring” them, being kind of arrogant. I don’t know if he was drinking a lot, but he was with this chick that he was trying to impress, and he was talkin’ a lot of shit. “Fuck you guys, you ain’t shit. You’re playing on the fuckin’ small stage, we’re playing on the big stage. Who’s hot shit now?” He was rubbing it in their faces. I don’t know, I wasn’t there for the majority of it. I was off having fun with my woman. I kept hearing that he was going out of his way to be a dick to them. Anyway, we were eating breakfast in the hotel the next day, this fancy-ass hotel, and I saw them walk by. I didn’t even look up. The next thing I know, they’re outside, Parris is outside, and my girlfriend says, “Oh shit! Parris just hit Karl! Oh shit! They just jumped Parris!” It happened that fast, within seconds. I ran to the door—it was a revolving door, so it was moving slow. By the time it revolved and I got out, Parris was standing there walking like a zombie—all discombobulated, with his hand on his face. And there was blood gushing out of his face. I thought his nose was broken; I didn’t know the extent of the damage.

  It turns out that he punched the singer. Keep in mind, those guys were all pretty small, but it doesn’t matter how small people are. The seven fuckin’ dwarves will fuck you up if it’s all seven of them! He punched the singer, and before he even had a chance to recoil his arm from the punch, he got cracked in the face with an apple juice bottle. That pretty much opened up the side of his cheek, to where you could stick your fingers through it. When he went down—I was still running to the door and trying to get through it, it was a big, slow revolving door and I couldn’t get through it fast enough—they grabbed him by his hair, bounced his head off the cement a few times, kicked him around, and then started to walk away. The whole shit went down in a matter of seconds. They knocked out a bunch of his teeth; he needed his face completely stitched up. I started running after them. I didn’t even have time to evaluate the damage because my instincts were “go to war.”

  They all jumped in their van and started driving away. As they were driving, I ran up and punched the side window as hard as I could, and the bass player laughed, like, “Yeah! What are you going to do?” I started chasing after the van, and unbeknownst to me, they were driving into what becomes a dead end. So, all of a sudden, the van turns around, and starts coming back at me. There I was thinking, “These motherfuckers think they’re gonna come and fuck me up now? Bullshit, they just picked the wrong one!”

  From being in so many street altercations throughout my life, I have a knack for finding a weapon when there are none. So, I picked up this metal pipe that was about three feet long, and it had another attached piece of metal at the end of it—it looked like some medieval weapon. So the van was coming, and it stopped in front of me. I faced off with the thing, like I was getting ready to take on the van. I was holding the shit back like an axe, I swung it and I sunk it into the hood of the van, and then ripped it out. Then I swung it again, and cracked the center of their windshield, right down the middle. At that point, everyone in the van was fuckin’ panicking. Those motherfuckers looked like Godzilla was attacking them! You’ve never seen eight or nine people look like such pussies over one person. I’ve got no problem saying it: those dudes are fuckin’ pussies, total bitches.

  So I was like, “I better step to the side before the driver panics, steps on the gas, and runs me over.” So I stepped aside, and whack! I hit the side of the window, and it shattered. Next I took out the back window, then “Pow,” smashed the other back window. I ran to the other side and they started to screech off, so I took out another window. I was fuckin’ killing this van. You’d think that these dudes who had enough balls to jump Parris—four of them on one—would at least have the balls to deal with me. But no, not one of them. Those motherfuckers ain’t nothing but cowards. They can jump a motherfucker but they ain’t got no balls.

  They escaped. It was fucked-up. Parris had to go to the hospital and spend a few days. But I was so pissed at him for starting the shit that none of us were as sympathetic as we should’ve been. It was like, “Yo, how long are you gonna be a dick before something happens, dude? And now we’re supposed to feel bad?” By that point, we were fed up. So while he was in the hospital, we all went to Amsterdam and Prague. We were like, “Fuck this shit.” That didn’t have to happen at all, and then we had to cancel shows. So yeah, we felt bad, but we were really pissed as well. There have always been fights at Hardcore shows, especially at our shows. It sucks, but it does make for some crazy stories. But that one did not start or end well. Parris was never a fighter, not back in the day, not in his life, ever. I’ll never understand when it was he started thinking he was a tough guy.

  While we’re on the subject of tour brawls and riots, there’s one that made the papers! We played with Pantera in Norway, and my girlfriend and I got into a bar brawl. That was funny: her, and me, and In My Eyes, this straight edge band. Phil Anselmo came up and sang “Down But Not Out” with us that night. I was hanging out in the dressing room before we were supposed to go on—I think Phil was there too—and all of a sudden, one of the guys from In My Eyes came running into the room, and said, “Harley, quick, your girl needs you, now!”

  I went running downstairs, and I saw that dudes surrounded her and there was some shit going down, voices were getting raised, and she was in the middle of it. I ran up and was like, “Which one?” She pointed to the guy in front of her. I didn’
t even hesitate, I just punched him right square in his face, grabbed him by the back of his head, bounced it off the table, and began kneeing him in his face. Then the whole bar erupted. The guys in In My Eyes were skinny dudes. You don’t look at them and think, “These guys are brawlers.” But those guys were up on the table, breaking chairs over people’s heads! It was impressive. My girlfriend, who was like five feet tall and 90 pounds, was up on the bar swinging a Mag flashlight, and cracked some dude’s head open. That brawl made the papers the next day. I guess they’re just not used to that kind of shit in Norway.

  Garry Sullivan recalls: “We were playing with Pantera in Oslo. Harley and me were together on the side of the stage close to Dimebag, VIP area! I speak a little Japanese and understand the culture a bit. I lived for two years in Osaka. So we’re watching Pantera tear some ass! Then they finish a song. Then Phil Anselmo looks directly at Harley and says ‘Harley Flanagan is in the house! This man is my Senpai!’ It’s as if I got hit by a bolt of lightning what Phil said, because I knew this Japanese term well! This is called the Senpai and Kohai theory. I was like, ‘Holy shit! Phil Anselmo just gave Harley the most highest honorable compliment a person, warrior can give!’ Let me break down to you what Phil Anselmo meant. In Japanese history through the Samurai, Shogun era and to this day, Phil Anselmo explained that Harley is the higher warrior and he can never be as high as Harley, which makes Phil the Kohai, the lower rank. Making Harley the Senpai. But Phil is in his own right is a Senpai to many from Pantera, but never to Harley.”

  There was also one really bad incident in San Francisco, where me and my girlfriend took on a mob! I literally held off 20 or more cats with a “tire buddy,” used for testing the air pressure in your tires. But it’s really just for beating people up; I don’t care what anybody says. Truck drivers don’t buy those things to test their air pressure. It’s a wooden stick with a piece of metal at the end of it, with a leather strap to put around your wrist. You can’t tell me that’s for testing anything except for someone’s skull. Regardless, during that brief period of the tour we were playing under the name Samsara, we pulled into San Francisco after a long drive. We pulled up to this club that we were playing at; I think me and my girl had been arguing. Everybody was in a shitty mood. It was a long drive. Somehow, Parris wound up getting into some verbal conflict with a kid at the show. I never really got the whole lowdown because over the years, I’ve learned that everything that Parris told me was not always necessarily the truth. It was just to get me to react.

  He came and said, “You see that motherfucker over there? That dude was trying to step to me in the promoter’s office, saying how his boy’s band has to go on after us.” Parris was like, “I pretty much told him, ‘Whatever you want. We’re here just to play.’ And he started to get all hard rock on me. So I just walked out of the room, and came to tell you.” Anyway, that’s what he told me. Now those guys were billed to go on before us, but that wasn’t even the point. I didn’t like the attitude that went with it. And I’m not someone who takes kindly to people stepping to me or to my friends. So I went up to the kid, who was about my size, a little taller, but maybe not as thick I guess. I was like, “Yo, fuck this dickhead. Who the fuck does he think he is, stepping to us and telling us when we are going on? When it says it right fucking there on the flyer and in the papers?” Besides all that, I felt like “Yo, San Francisco was like home away from home for me. I was hanging out on the San Francisco Hardcore scene back in the fucking day before this motherfucker was even floating in his daddy’s nut sack.”

  This kid wasn’t even a thought in his mom’s brain when I was going to shows out there, living at the Vats, hanging at the Compound, going to the On Broadway, Tool and Die, and all that shit. I thought the shit was really disrespectful this punk-ass motherfucker was trying to flex on us. So, you know how when you smack somebody on the back of the neck, you give them like a “red neck,” but then you grip them on the neck and walk off with them? So I walked him off and I’m like, “Dude, what the fuck bro? Why are you talking shit to my boy? You’ve got something you want to say?”

  It turned out the guy was in some gang, unbeknownst to me. When I walked off with him, he started looking around and seeing all his friends, kind of eyeballing them. They were watching us. I guess this dude had a bit of a rep around there, so everybody was watching his next move. I could feel the tension and the vibe, so as soon as he started trying to run his mouth and start flexing, I immediately head-butted him in the face, picked him off the ground, and slammed him into the floor. I looked around at his friends—who at that point were big-eyed and didn’t look like they knew what to do—and I started talking mad shit to them. I had him on all fours, so he was in the worst fuckin’ position in the world, and I’m like, “You think you’re some kind of badass? You look more like a bitch to me!” And I smacked him in the back of his head, and “humped” him in his ass to humiliate him, like Pele Landis did against Jorge “Macaco” Patino, in their first match back in 1996; some of you old-school MMA fans might recall that one. It was a classic bout, with a lot of trash talk, insults, and dirty shit. Then I kicked him in his ass, and smacked him in the back of the head as he ran out the door.

  Hey, when motherfuckers step to me, I go ghetto on them. I don’t give a fuck; don’t fuck with me. Anyway, after the show, the buzz around the club was like, “Yo, that dude’s in such and such gang, blah blah blah.” So we’re hanging in front of the club, we’d already loaded up our gear by this point. I was like, “Yo Parris, guys, let’s roll.” I’m ready to break out, the show was over, and we’d been hangin’ out long enough. I had a feeling shit might still jump off, but Parris was standing around with his arms crossed, trying to look like a hard-ass, looking around all like, “We ain’t going nowhere.” And at that point, anything could still happen. I was aware of this from having been in enough shit to know.

  So I had my good ol’ tire buddy up my sleeve, and I was standing there talking to this dude between two vans in the parking area of the club, when all of a sudden, this mob of people came around the corner. I was only seeing 20 or 30 people coming toward the van; I had tunnel vision by that point. The tire buddy immediately pops out of my sleeve. One of them is like, “There he is!” They started bum-rushing me, and I started swinging this thing back and forth so fast that if anybody would have so much as stepped forward, their head would’ve gotten taken the fuck off. So nobody wanted to be that “first guy.” The whole time, I’m going, “Who wants to die, motherfuckers?! Who wants it first?!” I went into barbarian mode. When your adrenaline gets pumping to that point, you really do feel like you can take on whatever’s coming. There wasn’t even time for fear.

  So they weren’t able to move on me at that point. In desperation, since they couldn’t get at us, one of them spit, and it hit my girlfriend, who was right next to me. I was trying to hold her behind me, while swinging the fucking tire buddy like it’s a sword. She fuckin’ lunged past me, screaming, “Motherfucker!” and tried to run into the mob, swinging her fists! All of a sudden, an arm reached over my shoulder and just grabbed her and dragged her back. It was this mad fucking cool kid, “The Drunk Monk.” He was trying to help us, even though all those motherfuckers were coming after us. And that was his hometown! But straight-up, either that kid from the club was in the wrong, Parris was lying, or there was just some kind of miscommunication, that turned into a misunderstanding, that turned into a little bit of abuse, that turned into a mini-riot!

  Anyway, at that point, they noticed Parris. One of them who was holding a bat turned his head and yelled, “There goes the other one!” Parris was jetting up the hill, running away from the whole shit, even though he kind of set the whole thing off. They all turned and started chasing him, I guess ’cause they couldn’t get at my girl and me. I ran around the van, and up the hill, got between them and Parris, and held them back temporarily, while Parris’ ass kept hauling ass up the hill trying to get the fuck out of there. By then, there we
re like 30 kids behind me running up the hill. I don’t know who’s running after me to jump in, and who was running after us to watch—with the exception, of course, of the ones carrying weapons. They were obviously trying to fuck me up, and there were like eight guys or so in front of me that had been chasing Parris. So after I ran around the parked van, I cracked one of them and started running. Then they started chasing me up the hill! I was running, and every time I saw one of them getting ahead of the pack, I’d slow down just enough for him to catch up to me, and then I’d try to take his fuckin’ head off. I wanted to take out as many people as I could.

  While all this shit was happening, one of our roadies, Nelson, saw the shit going on, and came running down the hill to jump in. Nelson was this older Chinese/Kung Fu dude, who’d been doing Fu Jao Pai—“The Tiger Claw system”—for like over 20 years, and he will fuck shit up. Motherfuckers didn’t know if he was with us or what ’cause he kind of came out of nowhere. But every cat he approached backed the fuck away from him, weapon or not. You could tell that he meant serious “I will kill you” type of business. You could see it in his eyes. Anyway, more of them started coming, and it was a pretty big crew. And other people started gathering; people started coming out of their stores and bars. The street started filling up, because as I said, this was turning into a mini-riot.

  Meanwhile, while all this shit was going down, our other roadie, Eric—I don’t even know how he was able to jump in our van, but he did, and put the shit in reverse. It had a U-Haul trailer on it, and somehow, he got it out of the alley, and started cruising up the hill I was running up. At that point, they were smashing the windows of the van with bricks and bottles. They didn’t even wanna fuck Rocky up just ’cause he was all Suicidal-down. They were yelling, “Yo, Suicidal, you’re cool man, but you gotta quit that band.” I guess they didn’t want beef with Suicidal and V13 and whatever, but the whole shit was retarded. But I saw that Rocky was still out there. So I jumped out of the van, and went running back into the fucking mob to get him.