I hung out with them before the show and then again after the show. There was so much commotion. I think De Niro was backstage and Warhol was there. It was the Who’s Who of whoever the fuck I didn’t know and honestly didn’t care. I was a punk rocker and I was there to see the Clash. Their road manager Johnny Green mentioned me in his book A Riot of Our Own—“I made a point of barging into the glitterati, spilling their drinks, as I tried to clear the dressing room. Harley sat grim-faced. He wasn’t glitterati, he was gutterati. He looked like he was in the band. He looked like it was his dressing room, his theatre. He didn’t respond to pleasantness or threats, so for sheer bottle he was allowed to stay. He was 13. More streetwise than the whole of Glasgow.”
There were a lot of cameras going off and at one point I remember someone said, “Hey kid, turn around,” and that’s when about 20 camera flashes went off—I was standing in between Joe Strummer and Andy Warhol. I didn’t even realize Warhol was in the picture or give a fuck who he was. And in the Clash photo book, The Clash Before and After by Pennie Smith, there’s a picture of me and Mick Jones backstage and Joe Strummer brushing his teeth in the sink.
When it was time for them to go on we all hustled down the stairs and to the stage. I’ll tell you this: it was one of the greatest shows I ever saw. They opened with either “Safe European Home” or “I’m So Bored With the USA.” I’d listened to those songs so many times and to see them live rippin’ them up only a few feet away from me was incredible.
It was such high energy; it was amazing. I was standing there with all their friends and roadies. But as soon as they started playing—they barely got halfway through the first song—I ran out to the edge of the stage, and jumped right into the front row. I was just a little bit left of center stage, kind of between Joe and Paul.
I wanted to see it right from the front, not from the side of the stage. I wanted to be in front of the stage so I could see and hear the whole show. They were running all over the place. It was great. I remember Mick kept running over to where I was and I felt like he was making eye contact with me—yeah, me and everybody there felt that way I’m sure. But seriously, I really felt like he was looking at me, and I really do know what it’s like to be onstage and make eye contact with people you know in the crowd.
That photo for the London Calling album cover was shot when I was standing in that front row, like four feet away. I remember when the flashbulb went off. I know it was that flashbulb, because it was from that angle, and it was the only flashbulb that went “pow!”—right when the bass made the impact, the neck broke off, and the body split in half. Every time I see that picture, I remember it as if it were yesterday.
At the end of the first night, they were like, “Do you need a ride back to your house?” They were offering to drive me home in their tour bus. I’m sure most people would have jumped at the chance. But I was like, “It’s cool man, I live a couple blocks away. I’ll walk home.” You gotta remember this was on 13th Street and like 3rd Avenue and I lived on 12th and A, so I was always on these streets. I had friends who lived on 13th Street. I was on that block all the time. One day it’s all normal, the next day the Clash are just a few blocks from my little one-bedroom apartment where me, my mom and her boyfriend lived, and here is the fuckin’ Clash and I’m hanging with them.
They did two shows, back to back, two nights. Joe gave me the shirt he had worn the first night for my birthday. I still have it. Ian Dury was there and he gave me a silk scarf and a Blockheads watch.
At sound check on the second night, after I’d been running all over the place with my VIP pass during the day—upstairs, to the store, backstage, on the stage, running errands for the band—I wound up on the stage, standing by the drum riser looking out at the place. All those seats; it was empty except for the few people walking around who worked there and the band crew. It just seemed so huge, and I was like, “Wow, imagine playing a show on a stage this big in front of that many people…” It seemed unimaginable to me. Of course, years later I would play at lots of shows on even bigger stages. But who knew?
By the second time the Clash came to the States, Sandinista came out. I felt they had lost their edge, and that they were selling out. I felt they were catering to a broader American market, and that they were losing the rawness and edge they’d had. I was disappointed. I took it personal, not to me, but to punk rock.
By the time they started doing those huge shows with the Who, I had completely lost interest. I had no idea that Joe replaced Mick, and got new guitarists and a new drummer. I was busy living on Avenue A and dealing with the day-to-day craziness of my life and my ’hood. They no longer represented anything that had anything to do with me or my life or what I was going through. But I’ll never forget those few encounters with those guys.
By that point I was creating what would be known as New York Hardcore. The original punk rock, those days were gone, that era was done. It was dead and over.
PART 2: IRELAND ’80
The Stimulators recorded a 45, “Loud Fast Rules.” We recorded a few other tracks that didn’t wind up making it. We eventually wound up doing our last show, and recorded it in North Carolina. When we recorded the single, one of the problems I encountered was the drum set was huge, and it was really hard for me to reach the toms. So I wound up standing. Even live, I would stand up when I was playing a lot of the time. I’d be rockin’ out almost Keith Moon-ish, and most of my shows ended with me wrecking the drums. Keith Moon and Rat Scabies from the Damned were some of my early drum influences, just real destructive and chaotic.
Eventually, the Stimulators’ intention was to tour England. But they wouldn’t let us get working papers because I was a minor. Since we weren’t able to get into England, we said, “Fuck it. We’ll go to Ireland. That will be even more fun anyway.”
In 1980, the Stimulators went to Ireland, which is where I became a Skinhead. The New York scene would never be the same! We went over to do a small tour, and play the first-ever Irish punk festival in Belfast called “The International Festival of Punk and New Wave” at Ulster Hall. We stayed with film director John T. Davis and his family. John made a great movie about the Irish punk rock scene called Shellshock Rock.
We hung out with lots of bands: the Outcasts, Rudi, and many more. We also hung out with Terri Hooley, the owner of Good Vibrations Records, a record store in Belfast. He also produced some of the local punk bands. I think he might have put out the first single by the Undertones. He was hysterical. He would get drunk as shit, and then pull out his glass eye and shake it at everybody while he was talking to them!
There were a lot of good local bands—this was when the Oi! movement just started in England and Ireland. While I was there, I was in one full-on riot, two bar brawls, one fight in a chip shop, and a melee on the streets between two rival factions of kids, one Catholic and the other Protestant. Bottles crashing, bricks and whatnot, immediately after which we had a shotgun aimed at us from a second-floor window, and some guy screaming “orange bastards!” “Not me, I’m from the Shankill!” Fallsy from the Outcasts yelled back. They exchanged a few more words and we went on our way.
The first real riot I ever saw was at that festival at Ulster Hall, with Aussie punk legends the Saints, us, the Outcasts and a bunch of other Irish punk and Skinhead bands. It was huge. I remember meeting John Peel, the legendary UK radio DJ and record producer at the show. He introduced the event and some of the bands at this two-day event. It was the first time I had ever seen any punk event of its size and as extreme. I had never seen so many mohawks, spikes, and Skinheads in any one place in my life. When you went into the bathroom, you got a fuckin’ contact high from all the glue that was getting huffed! I was just walking around, meeting people, mingling, and soaking up the vibe.
The end of the second night is when I was in that first full-on riot. It was a big-ass hall, the capacity was around 1,000 and it was more than half full. It started with just a little fight, and then another one brok
e out, and then it just spread from little skirmishes here and there to all of a sudden, everybody. The bouncers got a huge metal ladder thrown at them from the balcony, and chairs started flying. All the while, we’re onstage playing! As we ended the set, our manager Donald was onstage, trying to make sure none of us got hit with the chairs that were flying at the bouncers—who were running past us and hiding off to the side of the stage, while getting pummeled by Skinheads! Then the Royal Ulster Constabulary came rollin’ in all the doors at once, shields up, and clubs comin’ down hard. They circled the kids, rounded them up and out, all the while getting pelted with shit. It was nuts. Then the kids ran amok in the streets as they dispersed into little groups.
The first Skinheads I met in Ireland were the Black Catholics, in Dublin. I almost got jumped. They were all kids just a little older than me. The rest of the Stimulators and the people we were with were in a pub, so I was hangin’ outside and walkin’ around, looking in store windows. And these Skins came walking by, a crew of five or six. They were like, “What are you? You’ve got punk hair, a mod jacket, a dog collar, and a Sham Army badge.” By now, they’d totally surrounded me, with my back against a wall.
HARLEY AND OUTCAST GREG COWAN IN BELFAST, IRELAND, PERSONAL COLLECTION
I started getting nervous. I was used to this type of shit from back home, but just from Spanish dudes, black dudes, and jocks. I didn’t know what the fuck a Skinhead was. I was sure I was about to get a beating, but I wouldn’t show them any fear. I said, “I ain’t no fuckin’ mod!” And they were like, “A fuckin’ Yank!” And they all started laughing, imitating me and my American accent. They kept saying, “I ain’t no fuckin’ mod!” And then just left me alone and kept walking. Boy, was I relieved. But that was my first encounter with the Skinheads in Ireland.
The first time I got my head shaved was in Belfast was by a Skinhead they called “Fallsy,” who roadied for the Outcasts, and eventually became their drummer when their original drummer Colin Cowan, rest in peace, died in a car accident. He gave me my first pair of braces, or suspenders as we call them, and a Ben Sherman shirt, which was the traditional Skinhead shirt. He also trimmed up my pants and rolled them up. He got me decked out properly like a “boots and braces” Skinhead. The punks and Skinheads all hung out at this place, the Harp Bar. They were all really nuts. That’s where I saw my first slamdancing, if you could call it that—it was more just drunken wrestling to music and people throwing and pushing each other around again. Colin Cowan comes to mind.
We got in fights in chip shops, on the streets, and at shows. When I say “we,” I mean my newfound friends that I was running with, not the other Stimulators members. One time, I went into a chip shop with this one punk, and these assholes started talking shit and fucking with him. He just laughed it off and they kept talkin’ shit. So we went around the corner, and next thing you know, the whole fucking Harp Bar full of Skinheads came running in the chip shop! You should have seen these dudes’ faces, they were shittin’ themselves. The Skinheads started kickin’ their asses, hittin’ them with chairs and whatnot. Then they all bailed out, door slammin’ behind.
One time, two or three mods accidentally walked into the Harp Bar, and they didn’t know it was a Skinhead pub. They walked in, and got their asses beat. It said “Skins Rule” in the corner—in their blood! And the Harp Bar had chicken wire up front by the door, so people couldn’t throw Molotov cocktails in the place. People think Ireland is all fuckin’ Lucky Charms now that everything is all chilled out, but back in the day, it was no bullshit. Anybody that grew up in Ireland in the ’70s and ’80s will tell you. That shit was a warzone. You used to have to go through checkpoints, get searched, guns in your fuckin’ face; riots could happen at any moment.
Ireland was also where I saw people fucking each other up with cue balls and cue sticks for the first time. And of course, years later, I would incorporate the cue ball into my arsenal. I introduced the New York scene to that weapon. I used to carry one in a sock. People started callin’ it a “madball,” and that became quite popular over the years.
That cue ball in the sock thing, the reason I put it in a sock was because I could use that motherfucker like nunchucks or a mace. The sock gives a little bit, it stretches, and I could do circle-eights with it. If somebody was trying to fight with me and they had their hands up in a boxing stance, I could whip that thing, and it would wrap around their wrists, and crack them in the head. There was an art to using this thing—I was bad with those motherfuckers. But you’d have to double-sock it, because a lot of times you’d whip it at somebody, and the ball would just rip through the sock. It was a great weapon; they are so hard, you can throw a cue ball at the cement as hard as you want, and it won’t scratch or crack. So imagine what it will do to a head, face, wrist, hand, or shoulder!
I remember in one Irish town we played in, for some reason there were tons of Skins in the streets. I don’t know if a football game had just been played or what, but there were tons of them: an army of bomber jackets and Doc Marten boots. They were terrorizing this little beach town and chanting “Skinhead! Skinhead! Skinhead!” They were picking me up and carrying me around on their shoulders. It was a rush—the feeling of taking over. That’s where I saw the Skinhead movement on a large scale. And I was so inspired by the fact that “Damn, these crazy white boys don’t take shit from nobody.” I thought that was awesome. It made me feel like us punk rockers don’t have to take anybody’s shit. I felt that in numbers, we could take care of our own. And that never entered my mind before. We had always been such a small scene that it felt like it was just “us against the world.” But when I was over there, I was like, “Damn, this shit is worldwide!”
They told me, “Teach America about Skinheads!” So I came back to New York with a goal: I was gonna teach everyone. I wanted my own crew within the scene, that didn’t have to take no shit from no one in our neighborhood.
After returning from Ireland, I had this whole new outlook on the possibilities of the movement, with these new sounds and new bands happening around me. And at the same time, this whole Hardcore thing started to happen. I wanted to split from the Stimulators—it was time. Music was getting faster and harder, and I was getting into all the D.C. and West Coast shit, and I was heavy into all the Skinhead/Oi! stuff, and the English punk shit like Discharge, GBH, and the Exploited, etc. I was up on everything that was coming out at the time, and the Stimulators were from a different time. They did their thing and they served their purpose well. But now, it was time for something new. It was time for me and my friends.
I started writing songs and learning bass while I was in the Stims. There was so much different stuff going on musically around me, I had started blending it into its own thing in my head. First, I learned how to play Sex Pistols, Dead Boys, and Black Flag songs. Later on, once I got good enough to learn most of the Bad Brains’ ROIR cassette, Motörhead’s Ace of Spades, and eventually Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, I knew I was ready to write my own shit, and that learning other people’s songs was no longer necessary. I started coming up with all my own riffs and ideas, some of which turned into Cro-Mags songs. The sound of the Cro-Mags was coming together. I was starting to develop my own songwriting style. I was musically on fire. But not just that—I was a little older, and I wasn’t taking shit no more.
Chapter Four
PART 1: THE LOWER EAST SIDE — A,B,C LAND
HARLEY, BY RANDALL UNDERWOOD
Life on the Lower East Side was not easy. Growing up there was rough for me; a lot of gangs, a lot of drugs and crime. I got no respect in school. I got jumped all the time and I had no friends. That’s just how it was day in, day out—until one day I finally snapped.
It was one of those days when you just had enough. There was this one big white kid, this bully that no one fucked with, this fuckin’ oaf. Not even the hard-rocks in school messed with him, ’cause he was just too big to fight. All he had to do was grab you, and you were fucked. He was
a dick, the one who’d smack people for no reason, take people’s shit, steal people’s homework and make people do his. He’d tell people to move and they would. He was the size of an adult and we were all kids. And like I said, it was just one of those days. I had had enough. And I was having a shitty day as always. I’d already been to the guidance counselor, the school shrink, and I was hating life as usual.
Anyway, the teacher stepped out of the room for a second, and I got nailed in the back of the neck with this big wet spitball. I stood up and spun around with rage in my eyes. He stood up, got right up in my face, and looked down at me. I could smell his fucking breath, and I was getting heated. He was smiling and said, “What are you gonna do?” Everyone was already laughing, and the teacher was still out of the room. Now they’re all going, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” I looked to my left, to my right, I looked down at the chair with the table attached to it in front of me. I picked it up and crashed him with it. He went down but I just kept hitting him in a frenzy. Then I threw it at him; then I started kicking him. I really fucked up this kid. I picked up a regular chair and started beating him with that while he was scrambling away. No one had ever seen that kid get fucked up! The whole fucking class was on their feet and on their chairs chanting “Harley! Harley! Harley!” I didn’t even know they knew my fucking name until that point.
Hard-Core: Life of My Own Page 8
