by Howie Abrams
Alvarez Tolsen
There were a lot of Rastas uptown on Columbia Road, and they used to come see shows at Madam’s Organ. Guys like Chinna used to hang around and go up to the house where they were practicing. Chinna will talk to you for hours about the spirits and reggae and how to eat and what to do. Smoke weed and play music all day—that was his philosophy. And I guess H.R. picked up on it. His book changed from Think and Grow Rich to the Bible. He started carrying the Bible around.
Earl Hudson
We always went to church as kids, so we always knew who the true and living God is: Jesus. And through meeting certain bredrens and being conscious of certain things, and knowing where certain history lies, we came into knowing about Rasta.
Julian Cambridge | Friend, Musician
I witnessed him with the PMA book, then a Bible and his diet. I watched him go from the mohawk to PMA to Rasta to whatever he’s doing now. I was one of the first people he met that was involved in Rasta business. To be a true Rastaman, you have to believe that Haile Selassie is God. H.R. went on and did his thing. I didn’t introduce him to the faith and all that. It started like a snowball, and he took it from there. It was for him to accept it or not. We started off by being musicians and eating food and smoking weed, and we knew all these other musicians who were Rastas back then. It just went from there to here—what we have now.
Russell Braen
The Bible became very important to H.R. He was struggling to touch base with history, and with being a black man in a basically white scene. Some of the Rastafarians in Adams Morgan at the time, Chinna and some of the others, helped H.R. find that there was some space there for him to be spiritual in. He wanted to have more meaning than just the music business. He was really struggling to come up with something. Even PMA, I don’t think, was doing enough for him at that point.
Mark Andersen
Essentially, H.R. goes toward this particular expression of the Bible. It’s not just mainstream Christianity as we know it. He goes to Rasta, which is not only connected deeply to
reggae music but to the specific black power liberation theology. It is a radical stand on behalf of the dispossessed. It’s challenging the system. It’s fire on Babylon. You want the system to fall. It fits perfectly in a way with punk rock. Looking back, it was tailor-made to be the salvation for H.R., and he takes to it—like he has taken to everything else—with this incredible fervor. It was something that would change his life for good. In the short term, it helps him kick heroin, but it also turns the band in a direction that, I think it’s fair to say, would undermine if not destroy their immediate commercial potential. But it took them to a deeper, higher and more powerful place. Joseph turned his life over to Rastafari. He grabbed onto it like a life preserver in a stormy sea. On top of the PMA stuff, he brought in the Rastafarian aspect, which brought an even harder-edged, more radical edge to the politics. This sense of the apocalypse coming, and imminent revolution, was essential to taking that last little step to making the Bad Brains that band which was just unparalleled.
Questlove
I never associated Bad Brains with things you normally associated with punk or fast music. Just the fact that they introduced Rastafari and dub and true roots reggae to that genre is absolutely unreal. I now understand why so many fans are into both genres. It led them to investigate and discover music they had never known before. I have always seen it as “spiritual rabble-rousing.” I know there’s anger, but there can be a strong spiritual association. It’s passion. I mean, you see that in some black Baptist churches; you see that same passion. Music is probably the most pure, spiritual execution that a human being can use to communicate.
Ian MacKaye
DC already had a pretty thriving underground scene. The Razz were a very important band, The Slickee Boys were important, The Penetrators were very important, and there was Snitch, who ended up becoming Black Market Baby. There were a lot of these arty, new wave rock bands, too, like Urban Verbs, and Tony Perkins and the Psychotics. But Bad Brains were coming out of somewhere totally different. You would hear these reports about these guys walking around Georgetown handing out fliers. Bad Brains: are they a band or what? I think maybe they had done one show at that point. I believe it was June of ’79, and I went to the Bayou, which was a rock club down on K Street in Georgetown, to see The Damned. It was the first time they had been to Washington, DC. I was seventeen and had to use a fake ID to bullshit my way into the club. Bad Brains were opening for The Damned, and we were, like, “Wow, these are the guys we’ve been seeing around,” and they were phenomenal! We were just like, “Whoa, all right. These guys are from here.” We had seen bands like The Slickee Boys, and we’d seen other local bands, but Bad Brains just took it to another level. We were so blown away by them. The Damned liked them so much they invited them to come tour England with them. This was the original incarnation of punk, so H.R. was a very Johnny Rotten kind of guy. At that point, we had seen pictures of punks and we had heard the records, but we had no idea how they moved. There was no video or film. Obviously, no computers—nothing to look at. You just hadn’t seen anything, so actually seeing people move was pretty phenomenal. H.R.’s charisma was undeniable onstage. It was just mind-blowing, and he was just so animated in terms of running back and forth across the stage. I’m not sure if he jumped off the balcony that night, but I know I saw him at The Bayou other times when he jumped off the balcony. Gary was in his full Dr. Know regalia. He had full scrubs on with blood all over them. Darryl was still called Darryl Cyanide, and he had bleached blonde hair. Just their presence—they weren’t asking for nothing. They were just telling us what was up. As a kid, you see the arena rock world where opening bands are usually the subject of people booing them off the stage like, “Bring on Van Halen” or whoever the headliner is. Openers are largely treated like the small acts before the main ones, and with the early punk shows, you still kind of had that. So with The Damned opening slot, most bands would have been chewed up, like a feeding frenzy for the audience. Bad Brains: this was just not the case. They had a spot, and they were going to do it. They were obviously working hard. That really sent a message to us like, that’s a band that’s from here and they’re better than any band we’ve seen up to that point.
Alec MacKaye
Their sound had a lot of rock ’n’ roll in there. I remember them playing Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” and several amazing covers that just came out of nowhere, that were not what you would expect necessarily. Because punk rock was about turning away from all of that, but they were incorporating this rock ’n’ roll sound, and the speed was what was adding so much; there was this brutal sound. They were loud, and they were accurate and they were just unbelievably fast, and H.R.’s singing in particular, was all that everybody could talk about.
John Stabb | Government Issue
H.R. had almost like a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins thing mixed with punk rock. Just a phenomenal, incredibly powerful force onstage, and he was a huge influence on a lot of people. He definitely influenced the hell out of Henry Rollins and Minor Threat and all that stuff. For G.I., when I first put out Legless Bull, my goal at the time was to put out a record that’s faster than the Bad Brains. Yeah, it may have been faster, but that doesn’t mean it was better. H.R. jumping and doing all this stuff with intensity, and the stops and starts and tightness of the band, it can never be replaced. They were like God’s gift to DC at the time.
Michael Franti
His vocal stylings were very unique. He was like a jazz saxophonist, taking things from really high to down low, all over the place, and sometimes atonal to the music. It didn’t have to be perfect pitch all the time. It was always about this energy and this veracity of getting the message out.
H.R.
We wanted to have an original sound. Earl, Darryl, Gary and I wanted to do something that no other group had thought about doing. These brothers were slapping ou
t these rhythms, and it touched me in such a way that I knew we were ready to deliver our message, which was love, hard work and the best music in creation.
Alec MacKaye
They didn’t do things quite the way a lot of other bands might do things, which would be to try to incorporate themselves into the existing DC scene. Bad Brains seemed to just arrive. Not arrived like, “Hello. We’re here,” but they came in like gangbusters, blazing into it. They were never apologetic, more like take no prisoners—all the time really full tilt. Which was kind of frustrating for some bands that want to have more of a community, I guess. They really had their own approach and just set themselves apart. They didn’t wait around for people to help them out and do things. They were like, “Who’s got what we need? We’ll go there.”
Ian MacKaye
There were all these issues in rock music at the time, and in England there was this racist stuff that the National Front kind of got involved with. Some pretty well-known musicians had taken a position which was consistent with the National Front. So there was a Rock Against Racism show in England with The Clash and a bunch of bands, and the idea was to show that musicians would rock against racism. H.R. was really interested in that. I think he also took note that ninety-five percent of the people at the Rock Against Racism show were white because it was punk rock. He got this idea to do shows in a project in DC called Valley Green. He had some kind of connection there, and H.R. said, “We’re gonna do our own Rock Against Racism shows, but we’re just gonna go play to black people.”
Lucian Perkins | PhotoJournalist
We had President Carter at the time, we had the Iranian hostage situation, and you had Ronald Reagan ready to be ushered in. You had a city in Washington, DC, that was extremely divided between the whites and the blacks. You had Marion Barry as the mayor. DC at that time was very divisive and a lot of people never ventured outside their own neighborhoods. Going to Valley Green was almost like walking into a different country, going from Northwest Washington to Southeast Washington. It was one of the poorer areas in the country, much less Washington, DC.
Ian MacKaye
It was the Bad Brains and Trenchmouth in 1979. And then in 1980, we did it again, but this time it was the Bad Brains, Teen Idles and The Untouchables. It was a courtyard and they just ran an extension cord out of an apartment window for power. It was all the kids in the neighborhood, and these little kids were just going crazy in the front, and the older kids kinda grittin’ in the back. It was a pretty crazy experience. His idea was to just take the music to the people. Those kids found us ridiculous. We looked funny. We were punk rockers, and our music was probably indecipherable to them—just fast and crazy.
Alec MacKaye
The Untouchables are playing, and there’s this kid next to me. As soon as the first song is done, the kid was like, “Hey, you finished?” And I was like, “Uh, no, we’ve got more songs,” and he was like, “Oh, okay.” Then after the second song, he was like, “You guys finished yet?” I say, “No, man, we’ve got like fifteen songs,” or whatever. Finally, we’re done and I was like, “We’re done,” and he goes, “Okay, can I play my radio over the microphone?” He just came up, got his boombox next to the microphone, pressed play on the radio and everybody went bananas! Until then, people were just standing there watching us. I remember people standing about five feet away from me, and the little kids coming up and touching my bleached hair. For the Bad Brains, there was never a question about this being the wrong kind of venue or anything like that. They were just comfortable doing the thing they were doing, wherever they were doing it. What H.R. had in mind with Rock Against Racism was the simplest thing: There’s a racial divide, let’s close it. I grew up in DC and always loved my city, and this was a moment of like, there’s a little gap here and it helped close that gap. It wasn’t ten thousand people, it was just a handful of people, but it made a difference. His idea was achieved.
Lucian Perkins
It was a scene of contrast. You had poor inner-city folks, with a group of white suburban kids dressed up as punk rockers. You couldn’t have dreamed of anything more surreal in a scene. On some level, each side was very curious about the other, and it was interesting watching people try to size each other up and try to figure out what was going on. And the kids from Valley Green did not like the music at all. It was so alien to what they listened to. Most of them didn’t know what to make of it. But on a certain level, I think everybody had a good time. It was a clash of cultures, but I think everybody came away with something. A lot of them had never seen a white person—literally—and I think it shook up a lot of stereotypes.
Alec MacKaye
H.R. was interested in what we were doing and not just a little bit. He wanted to know what people were up to. He was really into conversation in a way that I didn’t expect. I thought he was incredibly cool, and he didn’t have to talk to me or anything. My brother had an old Duster with a tape deck, but he didn’t have speakers in the back, so we had regular speakers that we wired up. You had to hold them on your lap. I was sitting in the back seat with H.R. and we’re listening to the Bad Brains tape, and it’s just blowing our minds. When it’s done, H.R. turns to me and goes, “What about you guys? Do you have the tape yet? Let’s listen to yours.” He was very inclusive and interested in what everybody was doing at work, and he leaned towards things that were complex. I feel like that’s why Madam’s Organ got pulled into all this. Part of why they had music there was because they needed rent money, and part of why people played there was because there were no rules. But H.R. had an affinity towards the people there, and was interested in all of their crazy ideas. That’s a curious mind; someone who wants to know about the world.
Ian MacKaye
That was a pretty incredible time. For me, the Bad Brains around 1980 were the greatest band in the world, and in many ways, are still the greatest band in the world to me. They were just that good. And H.R. was such a visionary kind of guy. He was always about, “Let’s do it. We can do it. Let’s do this.” Everything was always, “We can do this.” I don’t know if I would ever call H.R. a hardcore punk. I would say the music was pretty inspirational for people. It played a role in terms of the precision and speed and impact of it. If you listen to Minor Threat, it is a different form. We were definitely inspired by them, clearly. We saw them play and we were like, “Wow, let’s do that.” So I think that they were heavily inspirational to us, but we were never peers. In a way, it’s like they were elders for us. S.O.A. and Minor Threat and Government Issue and Youth Brigade and all those bands; we sort of saw ourselves as peers. I think the Bad Brains were in a slightly different place. They were from a different world. They were a little older and they had different motivations.
5. Banned In DC 1979-1981
DC was pretty cool. It was the Reagan years and there was always news about the President and things going on in the White House. The threat of World War III was constant, too. Really, we just heard that there were a lot more places to play in New York.
-H.R.
Ian MacKaye
The guys often talk about there having been nowhere to play in DC. That might be the case if you want to be a working musician and you want to make a living from your music. You’ve got to go to New York or LA. In DC, it’s almost impossible to make a living by playing gigs. So part of world domination is you finish with your town, and you go to the next one. I remember very clearly seeing them at The Childe Harold, which was a club in Dupont Circle, and I remember being outside after the show hanging out. Mo had bought the band a van and Earl was sitting in the driver’s seat, and I said, “What are you guys up to?” And they said, “Oh, we’re moving to New York.” I was shocked! “You’re moving to New York? You’re gonna leave Washington?! How can you leave Washington?!” I just think that was their next move, and that’s what they did. They were just trying to be ambitious.
Earl Hudson
They wanted to bring us over to England, so our next move as Bad Brains was to go and conquer New York. We go up to New York primarily to fly out of there to go over to England. To help get the money for the plane tickets, I sold my drums, and we met some friends up in New York who were going to help us with additional money. We got the money up and we had a friend of ours who was kind of managing us. He happened to have this little vial, but it didn’t have anything in there. Maybe it was from before we flew over to England, but anyway, we made it over to England and we’re at the airport going through customs. The customs people found this little vial, which had probably been used for some cocaine or whatever, and they said, “No, you guys are not coming in here.” The cats from The Damned were there trying to get us in, but customs took our passports from us and put us back on a plane to New York. We had two customized guitars that were somehow stolen between us arriving and going back, plus I had sold my drums, so we’re back on a plane, with no passports and no gear. We didn’t get our passports back until we landed back in New York.
That’s how that went. We were living in New York after we got back, and we didn’t have any money. Living off of shows and a bag of chips a day and whatever. A couple of times eating at the Salvation Army until a show came up. It wasn’t easy, man. We stayed in New York for a while and just kicked it using equipment from this other band, The Stimulators, who were friends of ours.