by Howie Abrams
Mark Andersen
So, they are in New York City having just been booted from England, and they are literally having their Christmas meal in a soup kitchen line. Back in DC, there’s this word-of-mouth building after The Damned show. But we’re in this place with a lot of these shiny white monuments built by slaves. This is a city that in my lifetime was profoundly segregated. Let’s just say there was an extra edge from some of the white folks towards this extraordinary African-American punk band. I mean, punks themselves were scary, but then the racial factor and Rasta is really scaring people, so it was very difficult for the band to find places to play. They were never officially “Banned in DC,” as the song goes, but it was something close to that.
John Joseph
H.R. in them days didn’t even really have dreads. When I met them they were so punk rock, but they were just starting to get into Rasta. In New York, everybody talks about punk rock and New York Hardcore or whatever. When the Bad Brains came to New York they created this whole thing you see today. It was all created by the Bad Brains. I watched them go from playing shows with fifty people not giving a fuck who the Bad Brains were, to playing to thousands—and it happened quick. I even saw them play with The Clash at Bonds—and even The Clash were like, “How the fuck do we go on after that?!”
H.R.
We wound up getting a break in New York from a dude named Jimmi Quidd who played in The Dots. We met Jimmi, and he said he knew of a recording studio, so we recorded our “Pay to Cum” single. Up until that point, people had asked me if I wanted to put out records, and I said, “No, the band is not ready yet,” but I knew Darryl, Earl and Gary had it in them. I just wanted us to be the best of all time, the best band that was ever created.
Alec MacKaye
Everybody got excited when somebody they knew made a record, and that’s how it was when Bad Brains recorded “Pay to Cum.” H.R. gave me a copy, and I was so excited. I took it home and was surprised that the production quality was so clean. I also thought that Earl had done some kind of trick. I couldn’t believe he could drum that fast. It just seemed impossible, and I remember drilling him like, “Come on, for real. You did not play this fast.” He’s just one of these guys that made it seem effortless. We called him Cool Earl. He never even broke a sweat, it seemed. I’m sure he was working hard back there, but he just looked undisturbed. I know nowadays people can do those kinds of things, but it was the fastest thing I had heard.
It became like a pastime for us to try and sing the lyrics at the same speed as H.R. I could never do it, but Henry Rollins came pretty close. He would jump up onstage and sing the whole song with them. They were untouchable in that way with their speed.
Earl Hudson
I came up with some tax refund money and put it towards getting that record made. We recorded it in New York and came back down to DC and pressed it up and got the cover made. H.R. and Gary would sit down and fold each one, and the rest of the band would take one single out at a time and place the vinyl inside. There were a limited number of copies. We only had about five hundred. We were selling those at shows and carrying on. That’s around the time when H.R. found Mo Sussman.
H.R.
Mo Sussman worked at a restaurant in Washington, DC, and we went to see him one day because a friend at Madam’s Organ told us there was a man who might be available for management. He took us into his office, and we let him know that we wanted him to be our manager. He was an honest person, but he didn’t exactly want to make our ideals a priority.
Alec MacKaye
I knew who Mo was, but I will never understand entirely how they ever got together with him. That was a totally bizarre episode in their careers as far as I’m concerned.
Mo Sussman | Early Bad Brains Manager
The Bad Brains popped up at Max’s Kansas City in New York, and I remembered that just earlier the Washington Post had done a story about the punk movement in DC, which featured them, so I wanted to meet the group. H.R. comes bounding into the restaurant and jumps into a chair across the bar, and I physically was forced back. I know that sounds like bullshit, but I physically was repelled by this aura that was around him to the point where I just had to settle myself down. What was that?! That’s a true story. I know people find it hard to believe, but my first introduction to H.R. was feeling his aura—feeling his power.
I knew right then and there that I had to do something with these guys, ’cause someone who has that power, there is something mystical involved in that. I had developed some music business contacts with CBS Records and EMI. In fact, my daughter Jennifer became very close to the president of EMI Records in London, who had helped with The Beatles. So I had the contacts to get the Bad Brains a record deal, but they didn’t believe they were quite ready yet. In my opinion they had it, but they weren’t ready. I did get them a gig at the 9:30 Club and showcased them for CBS Records, Warner Brothers and EMI. I had three or four record people there and I introduced the Bad Brains. I was quoted as saying, “They are going to be the black Beatles.”
Mark Andersen
Ironically, as they’re embracing this radical black-power, apocalyptic Christian faith, Mo Sussman says to them, “Hey, I wanna make you superstars!” And so this suit-and-tie guy offers them a lot of money to, you know, make it happen. They get some new equipment; he gets them a place to practice. There’s a farm out in Herndon that he basically turned over to them as their place to live, because they’re essentially homeless. But Mo says, “You gotta clean up your image. You gotta play the game!” Well, Joseph’s not very good at playing the game. It’s one of his great gifts—one of the things that is really inspirational about him. And it’s also, I’m sure, one of the things that made him so aggravating to the rest of the band. Because if there’s one thing you could count on, and I’m not saying this lightly: if you get a good deal going, Joseph’s going to fuck it up. Mo must have sunk $20,000 or more into the band, but the band is turning into Rastafarian outlaws in front of his eyes.
H.R.
He wanted me to wear spandex and Jockey tank top shirts, and I didn’t want to go on the stage with a leotard on. I didn’t want to fall for some fashion syndrome. I didn’t want that reaction. I thought those people wanted to hear good music, so we just delivered that good music.
Mo Sussman
I went, “Holy mackerel, this is really something,” but the record people didn’t get it. So after that, I held back on trying to make a contract work, but I knew we had something. We were going to be at CBGB, and we were staying at the Plaza Hotel. We’re having lunch on an outside patio across from the hotel, and this cute young girl was the waitress. She asks, “What do you guys do?” “Well, that’s the band,” I said, “the Bad Brains.” She said, “Oh, the Bad Brains. I’m going to see them tonight!” This cute, perky gal was actually going to see this band. There were some moments that reinforced that I was right on track.
Mark Andersen
Basically, they’re undergoing this transformation that brings them full bore into this extraordinary mating of PMA, punk rock and Rastafarianism. It immediately changes the way they look, and it adds even more of a radical and incredible focus to what they’re doing. It also, of course, led to trouble with Mo Sussman. Joseph and Mo had long discussions about how music is for the people. Joseph telling him, “You know, it should be free—like a gift from God.” And Mo is like, “Yeah but, you know, somebody’s gotta pay for your food, and somebody’s gotta pay for your rent, and for musical instruments.” And it just came to a head. Clearly, Joseph was not going to take the direction that Mo needed him to in order to make it big. Mo thought they could be big if they’d just listen to him. That’s when the Mo stuff falls apart.
Earl Hudson
I guess in the end, we were just too rebellious or something for Mo. We were still going through certain phases, and things like new wave came along, which gave us a new type of dressing
. That’s where wearing suits and ties for a bit came from, but we kind of dashed that aside and kept on doing what we were doing. Mo just wanted us to go commercial and make some money already.
John Joseph
Around that time, the late ’70s, New York City was fucking ready to explode. The city was broke, there had been the Son of Sam, there was the punk rock summer, the garbage strike, police corruption, the fucking blackout. But at the same time, with all the insanity that was going on, you had on a parallel track the most amazing art—and I mean art in a sense of punk rock—and all of this amazing stuff coming out of this city. That shit just kept going through all the muck, and punk rock managed to keep swimming in that river of shit that was NYC in the late ’70s. We were in the thick of the shit here, and I think that’s why when the Bad Brains came here, they just put a stamp on it like, “This is what it’s about, and this is the reaction we need to have to what we are experiencing.” They were here at that time, and they lived it.
Jack Rabid | The Big Takeover
The punk rock scene in New York, around ’78/’79 was in flux. The original 1973 to 1977 CBGB and Max’s bands had either broken up or graduated to playing theaters. Now you were seeing the Talking Heads at the Beacon Theatre, and Television was playing the Palladium. Patti Smith wasn’t playing anymore for the most part. This was a second wave of the club scene, and much like the original one, it started in small places. It centered around The Stimulators, The Mad, The Dots, The Blessed, and The Heartbreakers. That was fun, that little club scene with forty or fifty people attending every week. Anytime I knew those bands were playing, or the Misfits came in from New Jersey for one of their extremely rare shows—and to throw the Bad Brains into the mix was fantastic. The more they played, the more the legend of the Bad Brains spread.
Jimmy Gestapo
There was an incredible music scene here in New York then. We were out all the time, and there were shows all the time. In one night you could go to three or four different clubs to see bands. I had been introduced to this music by The Stimulators and the Dead Kennedys, and S.O.A. and Minor Threat, and I heard about these black guys, these amazing black guys. I literally was told about them while I was on my way to go see them. Sure enough, they were a bunch of amazing black guys playing amazing punk rock. They changed the whole New York scene, and it changed the game for everybody.
Jack Rabid
When they first came to New York, they were much slower in terms of tempo than where they ended up, but the songs were already incredibly fast by the standards of that time. They were basically jazz cats who landed on the planet and turned into the hardest, most extreme punk rock band you could think of. They made the Sex Pistols look like Menudo or something—although I loved the Sex Pistols. The only reason I knew about them was because a couple of other punk rockers told me, “Don’t argue with me. The next time you see their name in the Village Voice, just go to wherever it is they’re playing. Cancel anything else you were gonna do that night.”
John Joseph
After seeing H.R. that first time, he could have had me worshiping cocoa puffs. I would have done it. There’s a saying: “Whatever action a great man performs, common men follow.” His example, and the message behind the lyrics when you started opening them songs up—revolution, spiritual revolution, consciousness, positive mental attitude—was like some mystic punk and harder than all the rest. Nobody could fuckin’ touch him.
H.R.
In the early days we did not have our own equipment. We would just cruise around to different locations, and we would ask people if we could use their equipment, and I would sing my songs about PMA. When kids in the audience heard our group, they would kind of go snap, crackle, pop, and pandemonium would spread. I’m going up there and dancing all crazy, doing flips and cartwheels and diving off the stage into the audience. The backflips came from Jamaica. When I was two and three years old, I would stand on my bed, bounce up and down, and flip over. I went to the beach, and while I was under water, I was practicing flips and standing on my hands, and that’s how it started. Later I became a gymnast and a swimmer in school, and teachers would train us to do certain dives and one-and-a-halves and that kind of thing.
Ian MacKaye
Bob Marley and other reggae guys would talk about, “mash it up.” It was a reggae kind of saying. This is a ridiculous theory of mine, but I think H.R. probably said “mash it up,” but because of his accent, which had this Rasta inflection, the New York kids heard, “MOSH it up,” and their dancing became “moshing.” It’s just a theory, but I haven’t heard a better one. I know he would say, “mash it up,” so “MOSH it up.” I think that’s where the term “moshing” originated. I could be wrong.
H.R.
We didn’t know that “mashing it up” meant start tearing the club up. That’s what they thought we were saying. We weren’t saying that at all. I was just using the term to express exuberance and jubilance. Anyway, one day I was dancing and I dove out and everybody moved, and I landed flat on my face on the floor. Nobody was there to catch me.
Earl Hudson
It wasn’t rehearsed. That was just him. We said we were gonna be the hardest and the fastest, so you know, that was his athletic background coming out. You have to put it all out there. With everything you do in music, it’s coming from your soul and your heart, and you can’t be up there lollygagging and shit. We set this precedent.
Anthony Countey
When H.R. started singing, I just couldn’t believe it. He was so fucking good! It’s like the band expressed an absolute confidence in something extremely positive in the middle of a very dark thunderous occurrence. That was really stunning. And H.R. danced. The way he took Doc, Darryl and Earl’s music with his lyrics, and how he moved became the way the whole New York scene fucking moved. It was his enthusiasm that got us all enthusiastic. And there were some other great bands around. The Stimulators were a great band, but with the Bad Brains, it was just so locked down. It was so absolutely uncontrived and intense, and that uncontrived intensity became the whole scene. It was just different from everybody else. It had the same emotional references as some of the great, bigger rock bands—the Grateful Dead, the Stones—but somehow, it was fresh. They were black and their music was pure, and it wasn’t like anything you’d heard or seen before.
Michael Franti
I think what made H.R. so compelling was the mix of incredible anger and incredible love going on at the same time. You didn’t see many black people playing loud guitars at that time. You didn’t see black people on stage talking about militant social issues. You didn’t see a lot of black people with dreadlocks at that time. And to combine all those things—being louder, faster, angrier and having a cooler hairstyle than any other punk rock bands that were out there—was so unique and so strong. The only other thing I can compare it to, and it was years later, was the first time I saw Public Enemy. Feeling that same way . . . like this is so powerful and so strong and so together. The music is so unique, the voice is so angry, the performance is so tough that it scares people.
Jimmy Gestapo
I’m pretty sure it was at a Stimulators show that they opened. It was one of my first shows, first time on the dance floor. It wasn’t like it is now; it used to be just skanking in place, and it was the greatest thing. Someone picked up all the tables in Max’s, threw them into a pile and everybody started dancing. To see H.R. with the energy that he had, doing backflips and stuff in such a small space, never mind to be doing it at as the lead singer. I was used to seeing KISS, a bunch of poseurs. The music was so powerful, it drove you to do that and drove you to want to jump into stuff and run around. CBGB had theater seats bolted to the floor in front of the stage then, and I remember Harley Flanagan and I kicking the theater seats out. There was not that much space between the stage and the front row of the theater seats, so we just smashed them out. I don’t think they ever put them bac
k in after that.
John Joseph
New York then was pogoing to bands, looking like it was a fucking epileptic seizure. And H.R., if you watch the way that he moved onstage, he did that skank, just throwing himself, fucking rocking it. Plus, that whole creepy-crawling shit H.R. used to do onstage during the intro to “Big Take Over,” it was like this tribal dance and H.R. was the tribe leader. It was just this energy between the audience and the band.
Al Anderson | The Wailers, H.R. Band
I used to see him at the Mudd Club and CBGB and got to know him really well. We would smoke herb and talk about what it was like working with Bob, Peter and Bunny and being in Jamaica, because he’s part Jamaican. I thought his lyrical level was really high. It’s important to know that even this type of “ooh baby” shit he’s talking about was about what’s inside the heart and the struggles normal people have to go through day by day.
Michael Franti
The message that came across to a young person like me, was that there are a lot of things happening in the world where human beings are put second to corporations’ needs, or the needs of governments, or whoever is rich and in power. His message was about the empowerment of people, especially people that are oppressed. That really resonated with me because I was adopted, and I grew up in a family where I didn’t feel like I fit in. I felt: here’s somebody else in the world that felt the same way I did, that people left out should still have a voice.
Jimmy Gestapo
Once you get over hearing just the chaos of him singing and the energy, then you find out that there is also a message in it. When you’re a kid and you’re into punk, it’s like punks get fucked up and have fun. Then all of a sudden, you start to find out the political consciousness in the message of punk and hardcore. It doesn’t come across with some bands, but with them, there was a big message, and it definitely opened my head up to a lot of things.