Hard-Core: Life of My Own

by Harley Flanagan

  One night I was watching a gig at the Ritz from the balcony, and there was a group of Skinheads in the crowd slam dancing. But they were being really extra dicks, going after people and singling people out—back-fisting people not paying attention and throwing themselves backwards into people who were not looking, and being a bit too obnoxious. In my mind, I was thinking, “Who are these assholes?” I didn’t even recognize them.

  Anyway, I had recently gone to court for an assault charge—it was a justified assault, in my opinion—so I had grown out my hair for my court date. At the time, Skinheads were getting a bad rap in the media, so I felt it was a bad idea to show up for an assault case with my head shaved and tattoos on my head and shit. So my hair had grown in a bit, and I was sitting up in the balcony watching these guys be dicks.

  I took a glass ashtray off the table and winged it into the crowd at them. It just missed one of them, and they started looking around like, “Where did that come from?” I got another ashtray, and whipped it at them again. I don’t remember if I hit any of them or not, but one of them saw where it came from ’cause I was right near the spotlight in the balcony. So they all came running up the stairs. And those guys had jumped three people by that point if not more, and they’d been trying to intimidate people all night on the dance floor.

  Back then, I didn’t leave the house unarmed. You know the bar from a dumbbell that holds the weights in place? I had a short dumbbell bar with one of the bolts at the end up my sleeve. So these guys came up the stairs, and I jumped over the chain guarding the table, and punched the first one in the face that came rushing at me, and cracked another one over his collarbone with the piece of metal. I don’t know if I broke his collarbone, but by the look on his face, I think I did. There were Hell’s Angels at the table next to me and they all turned around. Everybody was taken back at the chaos that erupted. The bouncers came running up and were pulling everybody apart. As it was all going on, one of them had on a Cro-Mags shirt! They didn’t recognize me ’cause my hair had grown in. For me, that was it. I was like, “Fuck these assholes! I’m not gonna represent this anymore.”

  Like I said before, when we started writing the songs for Best Wishes, John was still in the band. Some people may think that he left the band and the sound changed. Songs like “Crush the Demoniac,” “Death Camps,” and “Fugitive” had music written for them while John was still in the band. So, the music was already starting to change a bit. We were one of the first Hardcore bands to start leaning toward a metal sound and direction. It’s funny ’cause at first, a lot of the bands and people were doggin’ us for doing it and then, a lot of them kind of went metal themselves—or at least touched on it for a minute. Agnostic Front even enlisted metalheads and the guys from Carnivore to help them write songs.

  But even though there were some metal influences going on, we didn’t set out to write a metal album or a crossover album; we just started writing a new batch of songs. A lot of the late ’80s and ’90s bands praised The Age of Quarrel like it was the fucking Dead Sea Scrolls of Hardcore or some shit. I think a lot of ’90s Hardcore was reminiscent of the riffs of Best Wishes but played with more of The Age of Quarrel attitude. Best Wishes wasn’t the landmark album The Age of Quarrel was to Hardcore. But I think Best Wishes was as significant in the way that it changed things. Best Wishes influenced a lot of people, even if on a subconscious level. And it caused more metalheads to turn on to Hardcore. At least that’s what people in bands that used to be metalheads who picked up on that record have told me many times over the years.

  Doug had some shining moments on that album. He was going through some hard times. At that point unbeknown to me, he had developed a bit of a drug problem on the down-low that then had to be dealt with during that session. It was bad—he would freak out and go nuts, then we’d get him back to a mental place where he could play again, and he’d just tear shit up. It was crazy. If you listen to the leads on “Death Camps,” they’re awesome; they’re like Tony Iommi on “Zero the Hero.” But Parris was the rhythm guitarist on that album. I mean, as far as I was concerned, the riffs were still hard, and the words were still real. It was like a metal album played by Hardcore kids.

  We were no longer a straight-up Hardcore band. So a lot of what they did with the sound mix was kind of experimental; a lot of it was Tom Soares’ and Chris Williamson’s ideas. We just wrote the songs and tracked the album; we were just psyched to be in a real studio. Normandy Sound had an upstairs apartment that we all stayed in while we were there. The place was kind of beat-up, but it was better than where I was used to staying.

  Pete Hines started buggin’ after a couple nights there, ’cause, well, Normandy Sound is haunted. Not everyone feels it, but some people do. He was freaking out, and of course, everyone started fucking with him worse, especially Chris Williamson. It was hysterical; motherfuckers were giving his ass a nervous breakdown. There was a living room in the upstairs apartment, and there was a door that was always closed. So they told Pete it’s a room where someone killed themself. Of course it wasn’t; it was actually a staircase that led out to the back entrance of the building, which they kept shut.

  So after telling Pete the story, Chris Williamson snuck out the front and up those back stairs, and while we are all sitting there hanging out and watching TV, he came bursting through the door with a sheet over himself, screaming like a ghost. Pete just about shit himself—jumped screaming up into the air. We were all dying laughing. Pete was on the floor, practically crying. Chris was pissing himself. I gotta tell you, as much of a dick as Chris was, he was a funny motherfucker. The whole shit, the set-up, it was priceless.

  In the studio, Chris would keep setting off the motion detector and moving shit to freak out Pete. He’d be down on his hands and knees in the live room, moving mics and shit, and Pete would be like “Yo, did you see that! You didn’t see that shit? That mic just moved by itself!” Then Chris would sneak out that room, run around to the front of the building, and come walking through from the other side, so Pete would think he’d been in the other side of the building. It was hysterical. So, Pete tracked and left pretty quickly.

  While recording, we did some crazy shit trying to get sounds, like surrounding the mics with guitar amps, literally boxing it in with Marshall stacks and JCM 800s. I played my Guild Pilot bass through like three heads. I used a vintage acoustic one on one track, and a nice vintage SVT on another. I had a direct one, the SansAmp—all that shit blending it all together—so I did get a really sick bass sound. Chris and Tom the engineer even did shit like slowly increasing the volume at the end of the song “Age of Quarrel” to build up dynamics at the end of the album. It just keeps getting louder and louder.

  I don’t know if they were buggin’ or what, but it had some horrible shit too, like some of the effects they did on the vocal tracks. My vocal performance itself wasn’t all that good, ’cause I was caught off guard by the whole situation. I had never thought about being the singer, and here I was, trying to figure out what the fuck to do. It was a lot of stress—I was having insane migraines and shit. I remember throwing up after doing some of those vocals from one of those fuckin’ headaches.

  While writing Best Wishes, I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The neighborhood was fuckin’ insane. I lived in this little apartment on a serious dope-dealin’ corner. I wasn’t involved in any of that shit at that time, but I used to watch the madness going down outside my window. I once saw a full-on gang fight, where people were pulling out baseball bats, getting stabbed, and shooting at each other. Another time, I saw someone get shot four times, dive into their car while they were getting shot, and come out with a baseball bat, screaming, “You wanna get ill, motherfuckers? Let’s get ill!” And the dude who shot at him turned and ran! It was a crazy fuckin’ neighborhood.

  There was a Good Humor truck on my corner that sold heroin, and there was a chick that used to sit with her baby in her stroller, and sell works—syringes—out of the stroller. I had
a badass pit bull named Reigner at the time, and motherfuckers were always offering me money to fight him. It was like one of those movies that you see about New York in the ’70s. And it was, except this was the late ’80s. The area was mostly Puerto Ricans from the LES that got gentrified out of the LES, and ended up migrating to Williamsburg, because many of them already had family there. So naturally, I moved out there ’cause it was more my style, my rent and price range. It was what I’d grown up in. It was ’hood.

  I was walkin’ down the street late one night out there. I hear these dudes across the street. Some young Puerto Rican dude says to me, “Yo!” I’m like, “I hope they’re not talkin’ to me.” “Yo! What’s up?” I’m like, “Oh shit.” They started to cross the street. Naturally, I had my knife in my hand. They come over and ask, “Are you in the Cro-Mags?”

  Even though the Lower East Side had already started to get gentrified by the late ’80s, a lot of people forget how crazy the neighborhood still was. I mean, we had Tent City in Tompkins Square Park. Bums and junkies everywhere, and scumbags living out of boxes, tents and makeshift shantytown shit. You could barely walk through the park, it got so bad. There were dope spots and coke spots every-fucking-where.

  We had the Tompkins Square Park Riot in ’88. I was walking down Avenue A with two pounds of weed in a K-Mart shopping bag, when all of a sudden, I see riot cops running straight at me! There were helicopters, the whole shit—a full-on riot on Avenue A! I walked into it, totally unaware that the shit was going on. The cops had been trying to get the squatters out of the park. They weren’t even really squatters; they were just fucking bums, junkies, and scumbags. But it was crazy.

  They were trying to enforce a new curfew on the park, and kick the homeless Tent City motherfuckers out. There were all kinds of protests going on, and all kinds of pseudo radicals jumped in. It turned into a big protest, and some asshole wound up throwing a bottle at the cops, who were already dying to fuck up some crusty punk rock squatters. And then the shit just erupted. The cops beat up a few friends of mine who happened to come around the corner at the wrong time. There were pictures of cops on the front pages of the papers with their nametags taped over with black tape, so you couldn’t get their names. It was a major scandal.

  It was totally planned; the cops wanted the riot more than the so-called anarchists. And the cops came prepared, with helicopters, riot cops, and mounted police on Avenue A! I was lucky I got the fuck away, especially with what I had in that K-Mart bag. But the city was still pretty grimy and crazy back then. There were still a few serial killer types like Joel Rifkin in the neighborhood. We also had that crazy motherfucker Daniel Rakowitz, who in ’89 killed that chick and fed her to the homeless people in Tompkins Square Park.

  Crazy Dave was the super in the building that Rakowitz did that shit in. That whole ’hood was insane. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t even really that long ago, and how fucking tame it is now. It’s crazy how much shit can change in such a short time, really. I mean, shit had sure changed since the ’60s, with Prabhupada feeding people in Tompkins Square Park, and chanting “Hare Krishna.” Now, you had people shooting smack in bushes, scumbags everywhere, and motherfuckers feeding the homeless human soup!

  BEST WISHES: THE MUSIC

  The music was different on Best Wishes. I was digging Judas Priest when we started on those songs. John was still in the band, but he couldn’t get past Rob Halford being gay. I was like, “Dude, listen to the fucking riffs!” Doug was into Mercyful Fate and shit. And we were both big Sabbath heads.

  I remember when I came up with the idea for the lyrics to “Death Camps.” Those were the first lyrics I wrote for that album. I was walking to a friend’s house, who lived on the West Side over in the Meatpacking District. It was a disgusting neighborhood back then with all the meat warehouses and the transsexual hookers walkin’ the streets.

  I was humming the riffs to the song when I looked up and saw all these meat hooks and the conveyor belts over my head. It disgusted me. I looked around and all of the buildings had them, and of course the stink was unbearable. The Meatpacking District inspired all of that. I wrote the rest of the lyrics with my boy Doug Crosby. It may have been one of the first pro-vegetarian Hardcore songs.

  “Days of Confusion”: The chord progression was my version of a Discharge-type riff. I mentally just kinda bit off of one of my favorite Discharge songs, “Protest and Survive”—like many others did, Yeah, I admit it, I love those guys, but I changed all the chords. I just tried to attack it with that kind of feel, and then I tacked that Parris guitar intro on to the beginning.

  “The Only One” was my first real Krishna consciousness song. I just tried to pour my heart into it from the feeling of someone in love with someone, or in this case, with “God” and the deities. It was very different from anything we’d done before. Glenn Danzig told me that was his favorite Cro-Mags song.

  “Down, But Not Out” was written in Brooklyn, inspired by the night I saw that guy get shot in the gang fight, and by reflecting on my life growing up on the LES. But I was trying to be hopeful and inspiring, like, we are down but we’re not out.

  “Crush the Demoniac” was the first riff Doug Holland contributed to the band, that one main riff. I didn’t know that it sounded like Iron Maiden’s “Aces High”—that makes me laugh so hard, to this day. But it is fun to play. That was a song we started playing when John was still in the band.

  “Fugitive” we did when John was still in the band. It was Parris’ parts and one of my riffs. It was my least favorite song on the record, and it was the one that sealed John’s doom with the other guys; Parris, Doug, and even Pete would be cringing. But really, Chris Williamson was always going off about John and his voice around that time. They hated the way he was trying to sing. In my opinion, I didn’t do a much better job than he would have. I sang one note on the word “real” that was so unbearably bad, it hurts every time I hear it. I never knew the words John was starting to sing. We only did it live a few times with him, and his words never stuck.

  The music to “Then and Now” is pretty funny. Listen to the first riff, the bass line; I was kind of doing my own version of the theme to The Exorcist. I switched some notes, and did it metal-style, then added those harmonic chords on the guitar.

  The song “Age of Quarrel” is about the age that we are living in. Again, as a Hardcore kid from the LES, I have no problem saying that it was very Priest-influenced.

  The name “Best Wishes” was kind of tongue-in-cheek. It was my way of saying “Fuck you” to some, but to others, it was really my way of saying “Goodbye to the past and best wishes to a whole era.” Anyway, I wrote most of the riffs on that album and the words I wrote with Doug Crosby. Doug was a UFC judge and stunt man, among many other things. He’s a great writer; those lyrics would not have come out that way if not for him and his help. He wasn’t credited on the album and I have always believed that Chris Williamson took his name off the credits ’cause he didn’t want it to look like there was anybody else behind or involved with the Cro-Mags besides him. Just like Eric didn’t get credit on The Age of Quarrel—which I didn’t even realize it until the record was out. I just want to make sure people get credit where it’s due, now that I have the chance.

  Chris was a bit nutty trying to “sculpt” us. When I started singing, I think he wanted to create a Metallica-type image, like the lead man on an instrument and vocals, with two guitarists on either side. Chris saw himself as the puppet master behind the band. He wanted to be like Malcolm McLaren. Chris would come to our practices and start trying to tell us what to play. He really saw himself as another member of the band, even to the point where we’d walk off the stage and Chris would be like, “We were great, guys!” He was completely nuts. I do think he believed in us, but he was a major part of all of the internal schism that began. Sure, he did help us get our first big gigs. But he also fucked us over. And really, people like him helped destroy the scene in many ways, and ultimate
ly caused the business end of it to take over things and turn it corporate.

  As usual, the artists—especially the original ones—get fucked over ’til the end. That is life. When I was in the studio doing Best Wishes, I used to draw this caricature of Chris’ face everywhere, especially if I was bored. It used to drive him crazy. I spray-painted it on the street in front of his building. One time, I unraveled a half a roll of toilet paper, and drew him on every sheet, and rolled it back up. I was obviously very bored, but it was funny watching him unroll it. It was all made out of triangles. He was “triangle man”—always looking for an angle to screw ya.

  The Age of Quarrel tour was still kind of during the early days of Hardcore. But by Best Wishes, the shows were a lot bigger.

  Two days before the tour started, our first gig was supposed to be at L’Amour. I was on St. Marks Place on the corner by 1st Avenue with my girlfriend and two other girls I knew, when these rednecks come walking down, and they’re shitfaced drunk. This was back in the day when the ’hood was still sometimes rowdy, especially on the weekends.

  One of the rednecks turned to us and said some smart-ass shit. As I’m trying to walk away, he stepped up and threw a swing at me. I saw it coming a mile away, ducked underneath it, and nailed him with a left hook. All his weight was on his left leg from throwing the punch, so when I caught him with that punch, he just dropped. I stepped back, and was like, “What’s up, motherfucker?”

  He got up, smiled, wiped the blood off his lip, and came at me again. He threw another wild, sloppy, looping punch at me, and again I ducked underneath it, and nailed him, and put him on the floor. The guy was sloppy and I was lighting him up, the whole time telling him “Chill, I don’t want to keep fucking you up, dude.”

  I put him to the ground twice, and as this is happening, his friend is circling behind me. He starts reaching behind him for a knife that he had on the back of his belt. One of the chicks tries to grab him by the wrist. He turned around and punched her dead in the face—her legs went up in the air and she dropped. At that point, I pretty much went ballistic.