Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  Now, I didn’t know John was doing that shit at the time. But still, I thought it was weird that he even cared or was even hangin’ around that shit, being that he was all Mr. Hare Krishna. Never mind that he was throwing other people’s names into the mix. As far as I was concerned, what the fuck was John even doing with Dave and blow, making it his business? It left a bad vibe with me. It just seemed shady. But looking back, it all makes sense, ’cause John then went on a crazy coke bender right afterwards. So I guess that was the very beginning of it.

  Anyway, the point is that it fueled the tension both within the Cro-Mags and with a lot of friends of ours on the scene. A lot of people started getting the idea that John was a rip-off after that shit and a few other things he did. I was disgusted with the whole thing. I didn’t like that John was involved with the coke situation; I didn’t dig that at all. Soon after that, Dave split to Florida and John went with him. I was living with my girlfriend at her father’s apartment in Chelsea.

  About two weeks later, they called me at my girlfriend’s house. They were like, “Dave’s brother has mad loot, but we can’t get no bud! Come down and stay with us at Dave’s brother’s house, just bring some weed. He wants you to bring some down.” They were hyping us on how nice it all was. So we took a bus, and I brought two ounces of weed.

  We got there, and the place was a dump—it was a fuckin’ coke den! It was trashed, and Dave’s brother was all fucked up on blow. He was dealing, and owed mad money to his connections. One night, people drove by and shot at the place. Crazy Dave’s brother was just as fuckin’ crazy as him! So we split, and wound up at a hotel. I mean, they were acting weird when I got there but I couldn’t tell what was up. As it turned out, they were getting seriously fucked up on blow. I never really fucked with that shit; that was never my thing. All I knew was I gave them their bag of weed and I had my bag of weed, and they burned through their ounce bag within two days. They were just high as fuck on coke, smokin’ through their weed, and not even feelin’ it. Then they started sweatin’ me for mine.

  Once we figured out what they were up to, me and her split and left those guys to their madness. We found other people to stay with: this black Hardcore chick, her mom and her brother. They had a lot of money and a nice house with a pool and shit. I stayed with them for a couple weeks, and then came back to New York.

  But yeah, that was the real start of the spiral down in John’s and my friendship. A few things went down around that time that were fucked up, before and after that fateful Florida trip. I can’t remember the exact order ’cause there was a lot of shit and it was a long time ago. But it’s not like I’m talking shit or making it up or trying to play “Mr. Innocent.” I’ve already said I was a fuck-up, and that I was just getting over having been a total Skinhead-street-thug-drug-casualty myself—none of which are admirable things—and it’s not like my days of fucking up had come to an end.

  I’m just giving you the other side of the picture ’cause I’m always being depicted as the bad guy or the fuck-up, and that’s a bunch of bullshit. We all had issues; no one was innocent. Every one of us had our moments. Preachy, self-righteous “Mr. Hare Krishna holy roller” with neck beads on, spliff in his hand, was a total hypocrite on the sneak tip.

  So we had our album out, The Age of Quarrel—the name itself came straight from Bhagavad Gita, and I was starting to get really on fire about the whole Krishna thing. I thought we were really on to something positive. I had been in Prabhupada’s presence as a baby, so it all made sense to me. I felt it was like a karmic thing, and truth is, it was a good influence in my life. Even though it did at first alienate me from people on the scene, even some close friends, I didn’t give a care. Fact is, I would’ve wound up dead or in jail if I hadn’t gotten into that shit.

  Around that time, the word was getting out on the scene that John had ripped off a few people and vandalized some people’s apartments. John had been staying with this chick rent-free, eatin’, and smokin’ up everyone’s weed. He said that ’cause he wasn’t giving her no dick she wanted him out. Eventually she threw him out, and then he went off and trashed the place. He also stayed with these two chicks on like 23rd Street for a while. When they threw him out, he emptied the cat box in their lingerie drawers, pissed in their closets, and all kinds of crazy shit.

  One time he was staying at some chick’s apartment on St. Marks, right there between 1st and A where we’d all hang out and blaze spliffs and shit. When he was eventually asked to leave, he invited all the homeless guys from the block to use her showers and towels and shit. What a creative genius! What a mind. Imagine a bunch of homeless, crusty-ass bums taking showers in your apartment when you’re not home! I mean, the filthiest ones on St. Marks, the ones that you’d see every day asking for change. It was funny, but it was completely fucked up.

  After all that shit went down, this one chick Alexa, who was friends with some of the chicks John fucked over, went after his ass, and I wound up knocking her out.

  It happened right after the “NYHC” episode of the Phil Donahue show. Alexa was friends with Agnostic Front, Warzone and all of them—a “Warzone Woman.” She was on the cover of a Warzone 45 crowd-surfing.

  This one chick Brooke, who me and John used to stay with, and I had always been friends with up until that point, started talking shit to John during the taping of the Donahue show. Of course me and him, being the juvenile motherfuckers that we were, started talking mad shit back to her and abusing the shit out of her like we were in fifth grade.

  I didn’t know at the time that John had ripped her off. We got outside the building and next thing I know Alexa comes running up on John and swings at him with a chain and a fuckin’ padlock. He snatched it from her and grabbed her by her neck. I thought he was gonna fuck her up, so I grabbed her and held her back. I was telling him to get the fuck outa there ’cause he still had warrants for his arrest and she was making a huge scene.

  He tried to walk away, but while I was still holding her back, she bit the shit outa me—sank her teeth right into my arm. I let go of her in disbelief and she punched me in the face. I was actually shocked! Then she went to hit me again, and on reflex I punched her in the face. And then I completely flipped out and went after her. I had to be pulled off by like four security guards from the building who came running out when they saw all the ruckus.

  All these little fuckin’ Hardcore kids were like, “Yo Harley, chill man, it’s a girl—that’s fucked up, she’s a girl.” I was like, “Yo, I don’t give a fuck—you wanna fucking hit me? I’ll fuck you up bitch, I don’t give a fuck what’s between your legs! I will fuck your shit UP! Who the fuck is next?”

  I went off! She had a black eye for months.

  I got a few dirty looks after that one, but no one said shit. I guess no one else wanted to get knocked the fuck out or fucked up. But for the record, she was a tough little Hardcore chick who was always getting into fights, starting shit, and always in the mosh pit—crowd-surfing, going off. It’s not like she was some little girly girl, she was a scrapper; not to justify it, but whatever—it was a reflex.

  Me and her are cool now, and we were cool before that shit happened. And to her credit she’s one of the only people that ever went after Bloodclot; I give her props for that. A lot of people talked a lot of shit about him, but no one ever did anything. It’s funny actually, ’cause a lot of the shit I got into was because of him. But that shit didn’t win us no friends. The general consensus on the scene was that I was crazy and John was a scumbag.

  We were pretty much friends with all the fuck-ups. Errol, our crazy black “rude boy” Skinhead friend, stayed there for a minute, too. His gig was he’d pick up chicks at bars and clubs, go back to their pad, fuck ’em, and then steal their money while they slept. He loved John and me ’cause we were such maniacs. He used to come to our gigs, hang out onstage, and pretend to do security. He’d pull people up onstage and they’d be thinking they were gonna stage dive. Then he’d punch them and
throw them back into the crowd. I’ve seen footage of us at the Ritz with him standing there with a big grin, doing that. Me and him would always dine-and-dash at the yuppie restaurants that were opening on the LES. We’d sit at the outside tables, order like 20 different things, eat, send them in for more stuff, and take off running into Tompkins Square Park, laughing our asses off.

  John and me were fuck-ups, as were most of our friends like Bleu, Squint, and Stig, who had been beating the shit out of some of the new-jack Skinheads on the scene. So yeah, some people didn’t like us, except for the old-school heads like the Bad Brains, so we didn’t really give too much of a fuck. Plus, people still hadn’t forgotten about the C-Squat Benefit. Some people were even trying to say me and John and me started the fire so we could keep the money! That shit was ridiculous, except for the fact that people actually died. I mean, after it burned down, we were out of place like everyone else. We didn’t burn that shit down, but we did spend the money. Or really I should say “he” did, ’cause he controlled it. But hey, we both spent it—smoked it, ate it, whatever. John had the money in his waist pouch and basically we just smoked a lotta weed, drank a lotta milkshakes from Ray’s on Avenue A, and stayed in hotels a few nights.

  We’d be standing there in the rain, high as a motherfucker, stinking of Hawaiian bud, with this money, but nowhere to stay. John was like, “What are we supposed to do, split it up and give like $20 to every junkie and Skinhead and runaway that’s crashing there? All those motherfuckers who are gonna just go spend it on drugs.” He laughed and was like “I don’t need that Karma,” as we were standing there high as hell, drinking milkshakes.

  We were like the bad guys on the scene even though we were trying to be religious. That’s what made it all more ridiculous. I mean it was really just John and me. But as far as people were concerned, me and John and represented the Cro-Mags, and we were—I hate to say it—two of the worst fuck-ups I ever knew. And the funny thing was, we weren’t nearly half as bad as we used to be before we got into Krishna!

  I didn’t intend to talk about half of this shit, but I feel like I have to, ’cause it’s a preface for all the shit that was yet to come. Trust me, there was a lot of other fucked-up crazy things that went down. Some of it I won’t get into ’cause it was too fucked-up. When John started doing blow on the sneak tip and I found out, I was really disillusioned with him. I felt like I was part of the fuckin’ hoax, the farce. I felt like everything the Cro-Mags was representing was a joke. He was our frontman, and it was just shtick. At that point, it’s not like it ended our friendship—he was still my boy—but I just couldn’t take his shit so seriously anymore.

  I don’t think John ever forgave the band or me after he quit after The Age of Quarrel tour because no one in the band wanted him back. The fucked-up thing was I did want him back. But he quit. And that was that. He completely flipped out after that wallet shit in Europe—he threatened Doug, and freaked out on Chris, Pete, and Parris. He used to quit all the time, and everybody was just done with it. When I came back from Europe and dealt with Chris and the wallet, that’s when I heard John quit. So, I went and found John, and talked him back into playing, like I always used to do. So I went to the next practice and told the guys, “John’s back in, he’s down to play again.” And they were like, “We don’t want to play with him anymore.” So I was like, “Now what? I just talked this motherfucker back into playing!”

  It was a fucked-up situation. We had all these songs that we were working on at the time. Parris and me had years of time and effort put in; I had been playing with Parris before I was playing with John. The whole shit was fucked up. We had bounced back from losing Mackie, and we were solid with Pete. Doug and Parris sounded great together. I mean, we sounded good. But they were done with John. It was just a bad situation. Ultimately, I think he resented the fact that I went with them instead of with him. He even said to me, “Dude, why don’t you stay with me? We’ll be the Cro-Mags, fuck those dudes!” I felt like, “Yo, this is a band, and you’re the person in the band making waves. You quit like every other week, and I’ve got the rest of the band looking at you like, ‘Dude, we’re done with you.’ What am I supposed to do? They don’t wanna play with you anymore.”

  I was being put in the position of dealing with it ’cause he was my friend. I was never happy with the shit. But it was either that or the band was gonna fall apart then and there. They were done with him. At the time, I felt it was the right thing to do. It was “majority rules” as far as the band went, and one guy was quitting all of the time. What were we supposed to do? I hated telling him. But it was like, “Bro, you keep quitting all the time. What am I supposed to do, form a band with you, so three-four weeks from now, you’ll say you wanna go back to the temple?” Which he’d do all the time. Whenever shit got tough, he’d be like, “Fuck this, I’m going back to the temple. I’m going back to Hawaii!” That’s where he was when he was with the devotees. It just became this thing where all that was more of a nuisance, and no one ever knew if he was gonna quit or not.

  He left the band Bloodclot; he didn’t stick it out when we tried to do M.O.I.; he didn’t stick it out in the Navy; he kept leaving the temple and going back. You just never knew what he was gonna do from one instant to the next. He was always saying he was gonna quit, but when he left, we had no plans for that happening. It was just some shit that happened, and it exploded. Soon after John left, he started buggin’ out on crack. He even started doing crazy shit like robbing people. I lived a few blocks away from him in Brooklyn, and I knew he was starting to bug out ’cause he sold everything in his house to a pawnshop down the street; he even ripped out the fridge that belonged to the landlord and sold that! We all came through a lot of struggles. It’s hard to not lose your mind and go through crazy shit, especially when that’s almost all you’ve ever been around. But fortunately, he pulled through that period of his life.

  Then there was this empty spot—and the band, as well as Chris Williamson, wanted me to fill it. I guess in Chris’ head, he wanted us to go more “crossover.” The “frontman with the instrument” was more metal like Metallica or whatever. All I know is, I didn’t want that position. I didn’t even know if I’d be able to play bass and sing at the same time; I’d never done it. When I recorded Best Wishes, I didn’t know what the fuck to do, but we were under the gun to do an album. In all honesty, I didn’t trust anybody to take over that position and express my feelings. I felt John and I were on the same page lyrically, and that someone else would just be faking it, or might take it somewhere I didn’t want it to go. It took John and me a while to find a lyrical direction, and I didn’t trust that to just anybody. I reluctantly took charge of what was a runaway train; there was nobody behind the wheel, and I had to grab the wheel. But I never wanted to be a frontman or a vocalist.

  We started writing a lot of the songs that wound up on Best Wishes when John was still in the band. In all honesty, no one was happy with John’s vocal direction. The songs were becoming a bit more metal and John didn’t have the ability to sing in any kind of key, not that I sang in any kind of key on that record. But some of the shit he was trying when we were writing those songs, everybody would just cringe. In his defense I’d always say, “We’re still working on it, we don’t have it down yet.” But everybody, especially Parris, was like, “Oh man, what are we going to do about John?” It was a fucked-up situation.

  Best Wishes was the end of an era and the beginning of something new. It was a metal-style album without the metal-style lyrics. Songs like “Death Camps” or “Age of Quarrel” were my straight-up versions of Judas Priest Screaming For Vengeance-type shit, but done by a Hardcore band. I was diggin’ on metal, as was Doug, and Pete had been a metalhead before he got into Hardcore. Around then, you also had metal bands going in a Hardcore direction, like Crumbsuckers or even Leeway. That kind of started that next generation of NYHC. I don’t know; I was doing my own thing.

  As I said, a lot of it is a blur. The
re were only a few bands that stuck out. I was getting a little bored with that era of Hardcore. The shit had been going since 1980 and I had been hanging since the ’70s. By now, it was nearing the end of the ’80s. I didn’t know most of the new kids; they all looked at my homies and me with awe, which to me was fucking ridiculous. Most of them only came in for the Sunday matinees or big shows. There were a lot of bands that were around then that people glorify now, and I couldn’t hum you one song or give you one song title if I had to.

  The Hardcore matinee new-school style was boring to me. It was no Bad Brains or Minor Threat, that’s for sure. There were a few bands that stuck it out and earned their stripes over time but they were few and far between. But you’re talking to someone who saw the birth of the shit, so I’m not easily impressed. I saw a book on New York straight edge, and I had to laugh. People seem to think straight edge had this huge impact on NYHC, when the fact is, most of the old-school people didn’t notice or care.

  To me, it was just a bunch of middle-class kids trooping into the city to play Hardcore on the weekends. And not to piss on anybody’s parade, but it didn’t change anything or contribute much. It just wasn’t a significant time in Hardcore. It was an imitation. It was more or less during that era where Agnostic Front was temporarily on hiatus and the Cro-Mags weren’t doing as many shows. John left the band and we were writing Best Wishes. Bad Brains were even kind of on hiatus.

  So you had your most influential and strongest NYHC bands—besides maybe Murphy’s Law, but they weren’t as serious as we were—out of the picture around the same time. So it left room for kids that had caught the end of an era, and wanted it to keep on going. Sure, some of the band members were nice when I’d meet ’em, but what was happening wasn’t too inspiring.