As it turned out, Patrick had quite a following, not just on the Lower East Side within the magic community, but also in his native France, and with that necromantic freakazoid metalhead world. Unfortunately, he also attracted other freaks that were dabbling in the so-called “black arts”—one of them was the “soup killer” dude, Daniel Rakowitz.
The Daniel Rakowitz incident thrust Patrick into the news. They even went as far as saying it was a Satanic ritual killing that Patrick was involved with. It was such media-driven scapegoating. Of course, there was no connection other than this loser freak was fascinated with the fact that Patrick really knew his shit. Everyone in that ’hood knew each other; hell, I knew Rakowitz, I smoked a joint with him in Tompkins Square Park once. I just thought he was some hippie fuckin’ loser. Anyway, Patrick freaked out John, and of course, I fed into it.
I felt like this was a guy who knew Prabhupada, but he also understood the world I came from. He wasn’t a fuckin’ sheep like those other motherfuckers. He was a Sanyasi and he wasn’t trying to make money and milk Prabhupada’s movement after his death. Patrick referred to them as “crime bosses.” He said, “They wanted Prabhupada to die.”
Patrick passed away after Alpha Omega—that was another thing that left me in a bad place. I miss him a lot.
He was a rebel, a rebel from the movement just like I was a rebel from the scene. Back in the day, people referred to me as a “Skinhead leader”; they used to write about me that way in fanzines like Maximum RockNRoll. People even spoke about me in that way, even though there was no such thing on the scene. But sheep always need a leader, and scenes always need people to mimic. I was no elected leader. I didn’t have a “gang.” I retaliated against all of that shit, I wasn’t with it—just like I retaliated against Hare Krishna. I never liked being surrounded by sheep, wannabes and ass-kissing fucks. That is not my scene, never was, never has been and sure as shit never will be.
PART 3: NYHC NEW SCHOOL: “A STORY OF CREWS AND SHEEP”
In the late ’80s, you had an influx of new kids on the scene, most of them bridge-and-tunnel; it seems like everyone started forming little crews or cliques. It was all teenage fantasy gang stuff, pretty tame. These were kids who hung out, went to shows, used to write their name on walls—whatever initials stood for their crew. They’d all troop into shows together, kind of in awe of the old-school dudes. This is back when bands like Sick of It All and all their friends used to wear necklaces with the little dragon thing on them. Before that, there had been the Agnostic Front “Skinhead Army” and the “Cro-Mag Skins” or “Krishna Skins” as people called us, who wore beads and shit—but it didn’t really turn into gang-mentality shit in New York until maybe the late ’80s or early ’90s.
Prior to that point, my friends and me were kind of the hard-asses on the scene, the ones who used to fuck shit up. We’d get in fights at shows with people who didn’t know what was up and would get outta line, or people from outta town who’d come to our shows and fuck around.
I don’t know about the mythology that people want to pretend is true now, but when all that gang and crew shit started, those kids were Cro-Mags and AF fans, mostly from Brooklyn, Astoria, Queens, Jersey, Long Island or wherever—Sunset Skins and so on. I was cool with most of them. I didn’t know all of them. Some of ’em saw Cro-Mags back when it was me, John, Parris and Doug, so I’d known most of them since they started coming around.
Sure, some of them were knuckleheads but most of them were good guys. They were no different than a lot of us had been when we were their age, and they all knew and respected me and knew my rep from the old days. It wasn’t ’til years later that more new kids got involved and shit started to change.
By the ’90s you had people that just discovered the Hardcore scene, people who had never seen the Cro-Mags and thought Madball and Sick of It All were “old school”—kids who didn’t know the history and hadn’t been part of a scene before. And it kept going that way ’til you had the “new” new jacks thinking Skarhead and 25 Ta Life were “old school” bands.
Ironically NYC, a city that had once been known for violence and crime started to change, to gentrify and get more tame and less violent. The Hardcore scene started to get more violent, almost as if the new kids were trying to live up to the reputation that NYC once had. Now that “Hardcore kids,” punks, and Skinheads weren’t getting jumped on the streets by other groups, they turned on themselves, and it’s kind of pathetic.
I think it’s funny how some people now glorify the same dumbasses who started bringing hammers and chains and shit like that out on the dance floor in the late ’80s and early ’90s at Hardcore shows. Those kids were new jacks then and are now considered “old school” by the new jacks of today.
Now they say things like “DMS” started as a “graffiti crew.” Maybe it did. Like I said, there were lots of little Hardcore crews writing their names on stuff around that time. To my knowledge, DMS originally stood for Doc Marten Skins. They were pretty much multi-ethnic Skinheads. Some of them had been late-’80s Hardcore/punks ’til they shaved their heads and became Skinheads; others were ex-metalheads who discovered NYHC. They were into Cro-Mags, AF, and Warzone. I guess Freddie from Madball was always in it. I don’t really know. Roger started bringing him around once in a while when he was a kid, that’s about it. I remember the first time he showed up with Roger but he didn’t come around much.
People in bands started joining crews, or people in crews starting joining bands, and singing songs about it and hyping it up like it was larger than life, like it was some real “hard” shit instead of just a bunch of knuckleheads and kids in Hardcore bands. Some of the new bands started making it over to Europe where people didn’t know what was what, and to them, New York still had this aura of toughness, and before you know it people started believing their own hype. And it started turning into some real soap-opera bullshit. The joke was that New York was no longer the hard city it had been. So now the imagery of NYHC “hardness” was now just that: image.
Hardcore started borrowing the worst aspects of hip-hop and metal and turning into some new mish-mosh crap and still calling itself NYHC; wannabe gangsta rap/speed metal bullshit. Hardcore became the antithesis of what it once was. And even in the guise of unity and New York Hardcore, everybody was talking shit behind each other’s backs—all the bands that everybody thought were friends were all talking shit about each other.
Eventually, people started turning on each other, kicking people out of their “crews.” When I heard that some of these motherfuckers started having meetings, like some kind of raccoon lodge or some shit and paying dues, etc., I thought it was fucking comical. What the fuck does this have to do with Hardcore or the Hardcore scene? When I heard SOB and others got kicked out of DMS, I was like “damn, he’s been representing that shit since it started.” I thought the whole thing was kind of ridiculous; I didn’t get any of it.
Back in the ’90s when John started talking shit about me, some of these dumbasses started siding with him. I didn’t give a fuck. These people meant nothing to me. I always figured my old friends knew what was up. But by this point the “scene” was made up of a new generation of kids with no memory, and as it grew, even a lot of the old heads started pandering to the new jacks. I guess everyone felt that to maintain their “cool” status, they had to be down with the new scene. It all looked like a popularity contest to me. Hardcore was just life for me coming up. It’s where I grew up; it wasn’t some scene I joined.
This new scene was a circle jerk of assholes trying to rise to the top of some shit pile. It wasn’t about the music; it was about the posturing. Where old-school NYHC had a direct connection to punk rock before it, now it was taking the worst elements of rap and metal and combining them with the worst elements of Hardcore.
Kids on the scene used to get jumped by the gangs in my neighborhood; sure, we started fighting back and we started getting harder, but we never tried to be them. We did not want to be lik
e them. These days all they do is glorify drug dealing, do gang shit, jump people, and do blow.
Sure, when I was a kid I did a lot of drugs and got in a lot of fights and people thought I was tough. Me and my friends unintentionally ushered in that era of New York Thugcore/Hardcore. But time goes by and you grow up, and you learn things. You see friends die and go to jail and you learn from your mistakes, and from others. Years later when I started training Jiu-Jitsu with people like Renzo Gracie, Ryan Gracie and all the old-school MMA guys, I realized that, yeah sure, I’m tough, I can fuck someone up in a street fight, but yo, these guys are really tough. And at this point in life, all that “hard rock” tough-guy shit means nothing to me. Real tough guys are fighting in cages for money or in wars; they’re not jumping people at Hardcore shows, ten against one.
A funny thing happened around the time of Alpha Omega. One night, I was hanging out with my friend Bags, who’d just gotten out of jail. He was the guy who bit off the dude’s thumb while I was recording The Age of Quarrel. This is when I had my hair long. And once again—just like at the Ritz during the Best Wishes era—I almost got jumped by a bunch of Hardcore dudes that didn’t recognize me and, ironically, grew up listening to my music. But as shit would have it, they fucked with the wrong people.
Me and Bags were both tripping on LSD; he had just got out of jail that week. These motherfuckers were following us, talkin’ shit. There was some chick with them, she was some pseudo-Skinhead-looking bitch. I remember she was walking ahead of them near us; she could hear us talking and started to look a bit nervous.
Bags was like, “Yo Harley, I just got out of jail, I ain’t takin’ no shit from motherfuckers.” I’m like, “Yo Bags, chill.” I had a .38 snubnose with hollow tips in my inside jacket pocket. Bags was like, “Yo, fuck that!”
One of them said, “Aww, look at the Skinhead,” talkin’ about Bags ’cause he had his boots and bomber jacket on (that he had been wearing when he got arrested for biting the guy’s thumb off—he just got out of jail like two days before). He looked at me and said under his breath, “Harley, I’ll kill these motherfuckers.”
Then someone said, “Fuckin’ punks!” So Bags said, “That’s it,” turned around, picked up a garbage can and threw it at them. He was screaming, “I’ll kill you motherfuckers!” They looked like they were gonna piss in their pants; that’s when I turned around and opened my jacket. I remember pulling out a knife and putting it to one of their eyeballs. I was later told I flashed the gun; I may have, I don’t remember. One dude said something like, “We didn’t know it was you, Harley.” I was like “Fuck you motherfuckers!”
Bags was going off, I was talkin’ mad shit, and by the end, me and him and were crying and hugging each other, screaming, “You motherfuckers don’t even know what a real friend is!” We were all like, “I’ll kill and die for you, bro, they don’t fuckin’ know, they don’t get it.” As I said, we were on acid; we were going totally fuckin’ nuts. Looking back, I’m surprised that we didn’t do something really crazy. They all backed down like big-time bitches, and me Bags and staggered off into the night. We were going to fuck them up, and they knew it. But these fools were gonna jump us ’cause they didn’t recognize us. That’s some pitiful shit.
In the old days we would never have jumped another punk rocker, Skinhead or Hardcore kid just ’cause we didn’t know them or recognize them. In New York, we were glad to meet people and bands from out of town. People didn’t get approached with this hard rock attitude; it was more unified. So that’s when shit really started to turn against itself. Even in the day when I was a hard-ass, I didn’t seek out people on the scene to beat down and prove myself. I had enough issues with outside people trying to fuck with us, and if I did have issues with someone on the scene, I didn’t need other people to handle it for me. I handled my own shit.
The fact is Cro-Mags was a big part of what changed the sound, style and image of Hardcore; bands like us and Suicidal Tendencies were bringing a harder, tougher edge to Hardcore. It was a little more intimidating. It had thug-ness to it, “street-edge.” My friend Steven Reddy who runs Equal Vision Records said, “There were some bands that were just scary to go see. You knew it was going to be crazy, and you knew shit was going to go down.”
After the European Alpha Omega tour, Cro-Mags attempted one last tour, which completely fell apart. In fact, we were all sitting in the van waiting for him, and John didn’t even show up! We wound up doing the shows as a three-piece with me, Gabby, and Amit. Bags came out on that trip with us a roadie. The shit was insane.
I knew people weren’t gonna be happy. The posters had a picture with me, John, Doug, Gabby, and Dave, and here I was with Gabby and Amit. At that point, I was like, “Fuck it, the show must go on.” And it did. But it wasn’t the show people wanted to see. I got fucked up: shitfaced and tripping. I was like, “These people ain’t gonna see what they came for—I might as well give ’em something altogether different that they’ll never forget!” Now, as it turned out, Bags played a really mean flute—and no, I don’t just mean skin flute, the motherfucker could play like some crazy Jethro Tull-type shit! So I brought a flute with us that was my grandfather’s from the military, and we did an insane fucking Jethro-Cro-Mags-Tull freak show!
It was around this time I met the future mother of my sons, Harley and Jonah. It was one of the gigs that John didn’t show up for, in Albany at the South Troy Community Center. I was losing my mind, tripping my ass off on LSD. I met her and her brother and their friends at the show. I wound up playing part of that show in nothing but Speedos and Saran Wrap from my ankles up to my neck!
I didn’t hook up with her ’til a few years later. I became friends with some of the kids up there, and started going upstate to visit them from time to time.
After touring as a three-piece, I was no longer interested in going out on tour with John. I was like, “Fuck that asshole.” He left us hanging. He was talking mad shit, so I was just like, “Fuck it.” I kept living off the monthly paychecks from Century Media; they were trying to get me to go back out on tour with John. But there was no way that was happening—John and me would’ve been at each other’s throats. But there was enough leftover material recorded from the Alpha Omega sessions to do a second album ’cause it was originally supposed to be an “epic”—like twice as long—but we ran over budget. So there were all these unfinished tracks that were ready to be finished and turned into an album. Either John approached Century Media or they approached him. I don’t know exactly what happened, and I don’t give a fuck anymore.
They took those leftover tracks from the Alpha Omega sessions, and turned them into an album. It was fuckin’ horrible. They called it Near Death Experience, from a song title I came up with.
It wasn’t “near death”—it was “death.” I mean, Alpha Omega was not the greatest Cro-Mags album by any stretch of the imagination, but Near Death Experience is just fuckin’ horrendous. It’s embarrassing that it had the Cro-Mags’ name on it.
Over the years, me and John had a few minor “incidents” that he blew way out of proportion. One time at CBGBs during the late ’90s, I was just hanging out. I had just smoked two fat blunts, and he snuck up from behind me, hit me and ran. What a bullshit/cowardly thing to do! If the motherfucker had any heart, he woulda stepped to me like a man.
John has talked a lot about how tough he is. I’ve known John since I was about 13, and I’ve only known him to get into maybe three fights ever.
Chapter Thirteen
AFTER THE OMEGA AND BEFORE THE REVENGE
PHOTO BY STEVE PASINELLA
Before I get into this next chapter, I’m telling you that I had to lose a lot of stuff from this era ’cause I have kids now, and I don’t want them to know exactly how insane things got or to think I’m a worse piece of shit than they already will or do. But again, this is proof that you can plummet to the bottom of the worst depths of hell and still come back and try to become a better person.
There was enough filth, drugs, orgies, violence and crime during this period to write a book about nothing else. As insane as it was, and as much fun as I thought I was having, deep down I was looking for a way out. I think that’s why I took everything to such extremes. I don’t think I cared if I lived. There were times I don’t think I wanted to. I’m not proud looking back on it now. If anything, I’m surprised I survived.
In the early ’90s, it became “fashionable” to be a heroin addict. People were glorifying Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and the rest of the celebrity drug culture. Calvin Klein built an entire ad campaign around the strung-out, skinny bleakness of “heroin chic,” but there was nothing chic about the real life of addicts. The MTV version of what was the Real World during those years was a distant stretch from anything resembling what the “real world” actually was.
That being said, after Alpha Omega, I started spiraling downward. I fell into some serious drinking and drug use. Every time I’ve fallen into drugs, it’s been because I didn’t have someplace constructive to put my energy and/or over chicks, or a combination of the two.
And it did get bad for a while. One night, actually one morning, I was fuckin’ destroyed, and on the subway. I’d been partying all night; I was probably high on dope, pills, and alcohol. I had been wearing the same clothes for a week, beat-up looking, unshaven—I’d been partying for days. It was so late that it was early: morning rush hour. For those who don’t know morning rush hour in Manhattan, it’s so jammed on the trains that there’s no room to do anything. You could be having the crack of your ass getting felt up or getting pickpocketed, and there’s not much you could do about it. It’s so crowded, people could have their hands in your pockets and you wouldn’t even know.
Hard-Core: Life of My Own Page 28
