Finding Joseph I: An Oral History of H.R. from Bad Brains

by Howie Abrams

  Earl Hudson

  We were into all this progressive jazz, Return to Forever and Weather Report and cats like that. They had been playing really adamantly and fast, and that was our shit back then. But after a while, those dudes started going commercial and started to lose the power behind the music. That’s where Sid came in and introduced us to the punk rock. We were like, “Hell yeah, we want to do some of that stuff,” so we started to play punk. We came up with our own shit.

  Juan DeCosta | Childhood Friend

  I met H.R. through a buddy of mine, Ray Watts. He would always tell me, “You gotta meet my boys.” One day he said, “Let’s go over there and see this muthafucka, Paul.” I go over there and we get to talking, and we get to smoking a little weed. We was getting high and I was like, “I want to play some music for you.” I played this muthafucka some Iggy Pop and this dude throws me out of his house! He said, “I don’t want to hear that crazy shit.” I said, “Get the fuck outta here.” Three months later I go out to this house party and I see muthafuckin’ Bad Brains. These muthafuckas got on leopard pants and they’re turned-up like a muthafucka! I’m like, Is this the same guy that threw me out of his house?!

  H.R.

  Sid played us the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album. The band members were some of the most intriguing looking individuals I’d ever seen. They had black eyes and drool and mohawks and everything. Well, I listened to the music, and it was shocking. I guess you could call it awesome. It was outrageous. I asked Sid, “Where’s the group now?” He said, “Well, they broke up.” And then he played some Ramones for us, which I found absolutely incredible. They had this one song called “Rockaway Beach,” and it was really cool. Also, we heard their song “Bad Brain,” and we kinda clicked with that. We got our name from that. A few days later, I heard that the Ramones were going to be performing at the University of Maryland, and I had a chance to go. I could not believe it. The singer didn’t move around much. He just kind of stood there, but buddy, the audience was just jumping all around. I said, “Oh boy, look at this! I want this!”

  Sid McCray

  I dug the PMA thing on a surface level, but I didn’t really get into it. I was still into my destructive thing. I still had to run that course. I sung with the band for a little while, but I fizzled out because I saw H.R. was a much better singer. It wasn’t a competition thing; I just thought he was a better singer, more theatrical. And at that time, they saw Bob Marley and I wasn’t ready to see Bob Marley. I still had some running and tearin’ things up to do, so we split ways.

  Juan DeCosta

  I always thought that Sid was going to be the man ’cause Sid was really the rockstar back then out of all of them. Joe’s demeanor was a little quiet compared to Sid, but there was something about H.R. He had that muthafuckin’ attitude.

  H.R.

  We went to see Bob Marley at the Capital Centre, and that was it for me. I was just floored. It’s like the barrier . . . the walls, came tumbling down. My eyes were opened. I see all that hair, and I said, “No way! No way could an African have hair all the way down his back like that.” Some big old dreads. I was way upstairs in the back, and I said, “Darryl, Gary, Earl . . . I’m goin’ up front.” So I was trying to, you know, “Pardon me, excuse me, pardon me,” and I walked up to the front. It was a full house, and all the kids—elders, too—were wearing red, gold and green like one great big picnic. If you were inside the Capital Centre that night, you would have sworn the sun was shining. It felt like it was in the daylight. And the band played everything: jazz, rock and roll, funk and then some of the sweetest soul and reggae you ever heard in your life. It reminded me of Stevie Wonder, but to the next level—like to the outer limits, in a way. Like Stevie Wonder after having four or five cups of mushroom tea.

  William Banks

  The punk rock scene came into play with the reggae scene. Don’t forget, The Clash and them used to do reggae, too. So all these things go into H.R.’s mind. He really wanted to do the reggae for the peace and love and the vibe and the Jah thing, and then punk is on top of what he’s saying. I used to call it “dirt rock” back then. It didn’t have a scene or a title. That’s just the sound that we wanted to hear.

  H.R.

  I would say both reggae and punk are rebelling against those who rebel against the authenticity of the essence of love. But I think even more important than that is the conviction behind the unity of the two. With reggae, kids felt united with that kind of music because it was the sincerity, the earnestness and, of course, the African struggle. Bob Marley sang of a life that would give hope, and even spoke of dreams coming true for certain brothers and sisters who might be looking for a better way of life, a better way of living. Whether they were black, white, yellow, red or brown; had long hair or short hair; wore glasses or didn’t wear glasses; were skinny or fat. We wanted to be able to take hold of that during that time and actually become a vehicle or a chariot for our generation.

  Earl Hudson

  It’s a spiritual thing. When we were kids living in Jamaica, I remember while riding the bus, there was this cat on the sidewalk who had dreads—but we didn’t know what that was about—but through God’s affirmation, he led us into playing reggae music. It was just something that was meant to be, and that’s what we ended up playing along with punk rock music.

  Mark Andersen

  When H.R. first listened to the music that Sid was listening to, Darryl recalls that his reaction was, “This is madness. This is noise. What is this?” And Darryl was like, “No, you don’t understand. There is something here, let me explain it to you,” and he kind of broke it down for him. As H.R. recounted it, something in that moment caused something in the universe to slip into place for him. And all of a sudden, he turned to the others with a big smile and said, “Why don’t we play some punk rock, y’all?”

  That’s the birth of Bad Brains. They took all of that experience—the African-American middle-class experience in a city that not long ago was a segregated city, within their lifetime—and they are taking these musical influences and the skills that they developed from trying to play this complicated jazz fusion, and they are adding in the incredible energy and antiestablishment fervor. That passion. That’s punk rock. And what they created out of all of these pieces is something unprecedented. You can see its roots but it’s something entirely new at the same time. I think it was the mastermind alliance Napoleon Hill suggested, the ideas of Think and Grow Rich: the PMA, the intense focus, which, to H.R., looked exactly like what he would conceive a band to be. Four individuals pulling together the power of their minds, their hearts and all of their skills towards one objective with intense dedication, focus and concentration. That is what created this incredible entity called Bad Brains.

  Ian MacKaye | Minor Threat, Fugazi

  The way I recall that we got into punk or whatever . . . there was new wave, and there was punk. New wavers had become identified as being really sort of goofy: The B 52’s, Devo, that kind of stuff. When you said “punk,” a lot of people would think Sid Vicious—junkie, nihilistic, self-destructive. We weren’t like that, so we just said, “We’re hardcore.” Meaning: we didn’t need to get dressed up and pretend to be tough because we were tough. That was our thing. We were kids making music ’cause we just didn’t give a fuck about what other people thought. We knew we were not well-liked by the straight people or punks or new wave people. We just said, “Well, we don’t care. This is our music, and we’re just hardcore punks.” That’s how we started to use that term.

  Alec MacKaye

  When I found out what kind of music the Bad Brains started off listening to, the jazz fusion stuff, I was baffled by their decision. However, it told me that they saw punk rock as important and viable. Like a knife, they’re going to cut through some bullshit, so they selected that. For a lot of us who were getting into punk rock at that time, it had to do with the fact that it
was attainable and was something that we could do. They could have done anything they wanted to musically, within reason. They were talented musicians and had more sophisticated taste than some people, yet they picked punk rock. They trusted that vehicle. When I discovered that, it gave punk validation beyond just being “meathead music” that anybody could do.

  Mark Andersen

  In the beginning, they grabbed onto this punk rock thing with extraordinary fervor, the same way they grabbed onto the Napoleon Hill stuff. There was a book by Caroline Coon called 1988, which apparently they got a hold of and used to learn about the politics of the scene. I think they were particularly impacted by stories about The Clash, the way they went into the poorer areas of London and were in solidarity with the Jamaicans and other immigrants. How they melded reggae and punk rock together and were inspired and influenced by Bob Marley—who, of course, would become a huge inspiration for Joseph as well. That book became their template, and they took new names: Darryl became Darryl Cyanide, Gary became Dr. Know, Paul began to only use H.R. and I don’t know if Earl took on a name or not, but they were all punked up. Folks like Ian MacKaye and Henry Rollins remember the first time they saw them handing out fliers at a Cramps show in Georgetown, and they were just amazed, like, “Who on earth are these guys?” These are the wildest-looking punk guys we’ve ever seen, and they’re the only African-American folks there. The audacity, the vision and the courage of these guys was extraordinary. The spiky cuts, the ripped up jackets, the safety pins, the studs; all of this stuff was the initial approach of Bad Brains.

  Juan DeCosta

  Joe was sharp. He had his own style. He was different. It was sort of a little funky, British type of punk, rock and roll thing. It was so beyond its time back then. He was on the edge like a muthafucka back then. Joe was real comfortable in his skin. Back in them days, people were looking at him like, Who is this weird dude? Is he gay? What type of trip is he on? It never seemed to bother him. He just did not care, and I loved that about him. He just didn’t care about what people thought.

  Alec MacKaye

  They would be driving down Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown and H.R. was yelling at all these people in front of the Key Theatre in a British accent, “All of you are fucking poseurs!” That’s the first time I actually saw them. They were just a completely new take on what punk rock meant to me at that point, and, I think, for everybody in DC.

  Earl Hudson

  We had started rehearsing day and night. H.R. and Gary used to work at a bomb-making facility out in Virginia. Seriously, H.R. and Gary used to make bombs and missiles and shit, and I used to work at an electrical place. Darryl was going to electronics school, so after work, I’d go pick Darryl up at midnight or one in the morning, come back to the house and we’d rehearse until five in the morning or something like that. We did that for like a year straight and then started playing some shows. The first show was at our house. We had some kids come through there, and it was pretty cool. Then we started playing places like Madam’s Organ. That was a coalition type of thing with a lot of hippie cats who were into music. Joe was staying out there in the Adams Morgan area.

  Alec MAcKaye

  DC at that time, as far as major cities go, the infrastructure was not there, so there was a ton of crime. They never really recovered from the riots in ’68. 14th Street was all fucked up and half the buildings were still empty. It was more industrial in those times. It was very divided and I think it’s still pretty divided. Adams Morgan was much more marginal. In that neighborhood, if somebody wanted to go to McDonald’s at 18th and Columbia, you would get like four guys to go. Just to go to a McDonald’s that’s only about four blocks away. A lot could happen in four blocks, particularly with the way we were looking at the time. And something always did happen. It was tough. But generally, that happens to also be where art happens and music like punk rock happens. Places that will tolerate it are places that tend to have this complexity.

  Russell Braen | Music Manager, Madam’s Organ

  Back in the late ’70s, Adams Morgan was boarded up. It was what they called “redlined,” which meant that the banks weren’t loaning any money to any of the property owners there, with the idea that the banks would slowly get control of those properties. Everybody knew it was going to become a great big something. It is a tourist trap now. I was there last night, and it’s just insane. As the artists who were in that neighborhood, we worked our way out of that neighborhood by renovating those houses until we couldn’t afford to live there anymore. It was rough.

  H.R.

  The Madam’s Organ building is where we started. I lived in the apartment way up on the top floor. All the kids would group together out front where we would have little jam sessions. It was free to get in in those days, or you would give what you could afford—donations and contributions. They renovated the building, but in those days it was pretty run down. Also there were some Ethiopian restaurants. It was a post-riot neighborhood. The sixties riots came up in here, and most of the buildings were burned down or torn up. But through community effort and a lot of good-hearted people, little by little, they renovated the buildings and fixed them up—the landlords and the people from the community like us. They would have meetings every week, and people would put their two cents worth in and try and help out. It was more like an artist co-op in those days. Musicians ran it, musicians pulled it together and musicians would support musicians, artists, painters, sculptors, belly-dancers, rap artists, go-go artists and also brothers and sisters in the punk rock movement—or what we called in those days, “hardcore.” There were a few reggae bands, too, but not many. A lot of good bands played Madam’s Organ like S.O.A., Teen Idles, The Slickee Boys, D.O.A., and Trenchmouth.

  Alec MacKaye

  Everything was happening there. I have a huge amount of affection for the place now, and I see the gift of it. But at the time, it drove me nuts—half the shit that was going on in there. I wanted to have a punk rock revolution, and we put up with these old hippies because Madam’s Organ was where you could play. There wasn’t a real loving relationship at the time. They liked what we were doing, and we were putting up with them because they weren’t banning us, calling the police or throwing us out. It was a safe place in that way. Just a total stoner hippy situation.

  Russell Braen

  We never thought we would have so much history with the Bad Brains. We thought maybe they would play once or twice, but we ended up hitting it off really well. Partially because we were all wicked potheads and they were too. I remember after their first show, we had just harvested a bunch of ditch weed in West Virginia, and we were rolling these giant spliffs. We put towels under the doors of the room and I just remember seeing someone from the band leaning out the window of the house waving this baseball bat like, “Woo hoo.” That sort of sealed the deal. We were good with those guys after that. When they played, they usually would set up and Dr. Know would make sure his guitar was going good, and then they would just sort of start into the first song. The place would just burst into activity, like this rioting mass of people. Super high energy, super emotional. I remember once H.R. played this song about the mother of his son, Simeon, who had broken up with him not long before I met the band. He played that song with his full heart, and I remember being in tears. I was sort of embarrassed, but once the song ended, I looked around to my left and my right, and everyone else in the room was just in tears, too. H.R. ended up after that song curled up in a fetal position, half under a chair on the stage. I will never have a concert moment like that again. You know, it’s not one of the most famous songs or anything like that, but as far as the amount of raw emotion one man could put through a group of people, that was the highest I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Skeeter Thompson | Scream

  I don’t wanna get too into his drug use, but he did drugs, and he’d be fucking girls in stairways and he had this outlook like, live fast and die yo
ung. He had a presence about him. He could get just about any girl at the time.

  Juan Decosta

  Shit, everybody was getting high back then. You’d do a show; somebody would hit you off with something, then boom! The dude is performing, but it didn’t take anything away from what he was doing on that stage. He might have been high, but that man was on point. In them Madam’s Organ days, Bad Brains was already the greatest rock and roll band in the world.

  Russell Braen

  Those early shows at Max’s Kansas City, or CBGB and some of the Madam’s Organ shows, he took a hit of acid before those shows and got pretty high. I think it probably helped him with the intensity and the motion that he liked to get into. I remember one day we were sitting on the rooftop and he told me that he was never going to take LSD again, that it wasn’t right for his chosen religion. I totally respected that.

  H.R.

  It was there that I met Al Walker, and also Julian Cambridge, and [Ray] Chinna [Shim] and another brother named Naphtali. We would all meet there. I wasn’t dread in those days, and they had hipped me to a lot of reggae and Rasta, and it was there that the group and I began to learn about the ways of I and I6 people and Jah. They turned me onto a lot of different things, and I began to read my information. It is in this neighborhood that I began to learn about the authentic movement of the Rastafarians.