by Howie Abrams
H.R.
At the time I was one of those gullible youths who believed whatever people were telling me. Like one day, somebody said, “Did you hear the good news? DC Jail’s got a hotel and a club called DC Jail.” I said, “No way!” I said, “Hold on, let’s have a jam session at DC Jail.” I actually thought in my heart that there was a jam session at the DC Jail. Anyway, P.J., my son, he was about seven or eight years old, and I would bring him around here and we’d walk around, go to some of the Ethiopian clubs and restaurants or up to Madam’s Organ, where we did our first shows.
Al “Judah” Walker
He found a lot of time when he wasn’t on the road to spend with his son and to teach him things, and explain exactly who he was and what his goals were. He did all he could to stay connected with his son, Paul Jr.
Kenny Dread
I definitely remember this beautiful gig my band Outrage played at DC Space, where H.R. guested on a few songs. P.J. was up there, I believe he was about seven years old at the time, and he was up there playing the tambourine. He was a great kid.
Julie Bird
We saw P.J. on various occasions when they had a coming together. He lived with us for a while. It’s an unusual story: multiple women, multiple children. Remember Fela Kuti who had 278 wives in his independent nation, which was on the grounds of his property? He ran to be Nigerian president. He was H.R.’s peer.
Kenny Dread
The first H.R. solo band gigs in ’84 were supposed to be a national tour that was unfortunately cut short due to one of H.R.’s periods of incarceration. In 1988, we did a tour all over the States. ’89 was Europe. In the early days, the reputation that was already established by Bad Brains made the whole East Coast available to us immediately. Some of the earliest gigs were in Philly, New York, North Carolina, Atlanta, and, of course, DC.
David Jordan
We had a seventeen-song set list, but we’d never play more than seven to eight songs ’cause Joe had in his contract: “If you can’t control the crowd, the show is over.” So he would incite the crowd as much as he could, and then when the crowd goes nuts and jumps all up on the stage, we’d just go off the stage and the show’s over. I ain’t gonna let people stomp all over my cords and shit and pull the plugs out of my amp. We were contracted to play fifty to seventy minutes, but we never played more than twenty-five because the crowd went wild.
Chuck Treece
I was in McRad at the time, and H.R. called my house and asked if we’d come down to DC and play a show. It was cool because we all looked up to H, and he was doing the first H.R. record. He borrowed my guitar for the show, so I kinda tripped out at that. It was different than the Bad Brains because it was a bigger band, more like a Marley phase of what a punk rocker would do. It wasn’t the traditional Jamaican musicians, it was everybody, all these friends of his from DC Dave Byers was a great guitar player, a neo-classical shredder. Maybe Dave listened to more metal growing up, because most guitar players that shred listen to way more metal than R & B. Earl was playing drums. That was my favorite band of H.R.’s as far as when he stepped out to do his own thing. I still wanted him to be the H.R. from the Bad Brains, but he was so into this other thing.
David Jordan
After the first couple of tour legs we did together, I was like Man, I can’t be cooped up in a van with this guy. I’m gonna hurt him. I’m gonna hit him in the head with a hatchet or something, because he don’t know how to act. Like one time, he kept messing with the bass player’s mother, and I was, like, “This is one of your band members’ mother. Don’t try to fuck her! Leave her alone.” I was about to hit him in the head with a hatchet. This was the last straw.
William Banks
I experienced a lot of things with H.R., good times and bad. H.R. used to be a physical person. I don’t know why, but he used to get physical and stuff with the band members. Maybe too much talking. We were on the road. You know, talking so much stuff—gibberish. You get to a point where you’re just talking nonsense, and sometimes it might hurt somebody’s feelings and you get tired of it. The road . . . for some people might get you upset. Somebody’s feet might be stinking and smelling the whole time. You might not say something for a while, and the next thing you know, you blow up. I did some stuff where he blew up, but it’s all good. Calmed down and kept moving on. You’ve got to know how to deal with people when you’re around them. You’ve got to know what buttons to push and what buttons you don’t push.
Mark Andersen
He did create Zion Train and Human Rights, but you get a sense that something is not quite connecting. I mean, there’s a recording of Zion Train, and even though Joseph connected with other gifted musicians like Dave Byers to play guitar in Human Rights, it wasn’t Bad Brains. It was good, and it had an audience, but he needed Darryl and Gary. Earl, Darryl and Gary together—you know, you can’t touch them. That terrific focus that Joseph has is starting to waver. A lot of us didn’t understand what was happening, but as unfortunate and ugly things began to happen around Joseph personally, it started to become clear that there were perhaps other factors at play. Now it’s around 1985, basically a year and a half of being apart, Bad Brains reunite their original lineup and they’re just as great as they ever were. In fact, if you listen to I Against I, the album that comes out of that reunited Bad Brains, it’s arguably the most realized and influential work that they did because they started bringing stuff together, also adding a little more metal. They had something. It was like the magic was back.
8. Return To Heaven 1985-1987
I regretted not really being around the group as much because we were musically at a high point in our careers, and a lot of things were happening. While I was away, the band was getting offers from different record labels and I wasn’t around. I just didn’t want to be exploited.
-H.R.
Anthony Countey
Chris Williamson was a promoter in New York, and he was promoting shows at something called the Rock Hotel on Jane Street, a real hole in the wall. He was launching this venue and he asked, “Do you think you can give me the Bad Brains?” It was 1985, and at that point Doc and Darryl weren’t really involved. It wound up being just a matter of a couple phone calls. They got together, rehearsed, and basically, the rehearsal turned into writing the record I Against I. Most of that record was composed in preparation for those shows. So when they got onstage and played those Rock Hotel shows, it was like Bad Brains were back. It was all really amazing.
Ian MacKaye
I Against I was a real shift, a hugely influential record in terms of the music. Fugazi had started practicing around the time that record came out. Those songs were a little more rhythm-oriented and it felt like a liberating record. When they went to New York, they got super fast, and it was just crazy sounding, so it struck me as a significant departure when I Against I came out.
Nick Hexum
I was in my junior year of high school in Omaha in 1987, and my skinhead friend was like, “If you like punk and you like reggae, you’ve got to hear Bad Brains.” I had been really into The Clash and Bob Marley. This was well before the Internet, and it took a while to find out about different bands. Anyway, this guy was playing me the ROIR sessions, and I became obsessed with Bad Brains.
To hear the progression and change going into I Against I further blew my mind. I would get into these hypnotic bike rides with my Walkman where I would just listen to I Against I, really experiencing that music. It was life-changing for me to hear the jazz fusion sounds with metal. Looking at the liner notes and seeing Ron St. Germain was the producer, I said, “Wow, these drums sound so good and everything just sounds so crisp.” It was like an explosion in my frontal lobe. When I hooked up with the guys that eventually became 311, we were really into the production on Bad Brains, so it was one of our dreams to work with Ron St. Germain.
Anthony Countey
I went to Alan Douglas because I wanted an engineer who was capable of being a producer. I had to get somebody for a reasonable price who knew what the fuck they were doing. Alan turned me on to Ron St. Germain because Ron had been the engineer for some of Alan’s Hendrix work. SST was the only label that even wanted to put the record out because the band had gotten kind of a rough name.
Ron St. Germain
I was in the middle of mixing one of the Duran Duran offshoot records called Arcadia, which was one of the highest budget albums I had ever worked on. At the end of the day, it was probably $1.2 million, and it was during that project that I received a cassette. I listened to this cassette, and I was like, Are you kidding me? It was of a live performance of the Bad Brains. When I heard the music, I had to go see them. They were playing at the Ritz, so I squeezed out a night and ran down there and was completely flabbergasted. It was even better than the cassette. I thought, Man this is outrageous. Definitely, absolutely, I’m in. I definitely wanted to do it.
After I saw the band, I called up Greg Ginn at SST. I said, “I love the band, man. This is amazing. What have you got to make the record?” He said, “We will give you $5,000.” And I said, “Well, which song do you want to do?” He said, “No, no, no, no. That’s for the whole album.” I said, “Really?” He said, “That’s what we do, man.” It was SST. They have all these starving bands. It’s this indie, underground label. I said, “Okay, no problem. I’ll do it.”
I had been doing a lot of work up in Massachusetts at Longview Farm since the ’70s. It was a really impressive place, a 150-year-old farm on ninety acres or something like that. Just a great place to take a band where you got them out of their environment. You all lived there, they fed you, they washed your clothes and they adjusted their schedule to you. I said this is what we need ’cause this is gonna be really intense. I could get three days for 4,500 bucks, so I took them up there.
I remember when H.R. first walked into the house and the studio, he was kind of floating, and he says, “I have arrived. I have arrived.” My original thought going up there was to do this live to two-track, because these guys were so unbelievable live. I didn’t know any other band, particularly in the rock world or that hardcore world, that even had the balls to do that. I said, “This band has what it takes to do that,” and since we didn’t have any budget, we kind of had to.
So that first day, everyone was set up, and the drums were not sounding good. We only had three days, so we sent somebody from the studio to Boston to rent a different set and bring it back. That was sixty miles there and back, so we rehearsed in the meantime, and I set the guitars up and the basses up and did all of that. In the barn they could stand on the stage and perform as a band, which was good and I kind of got levels for the two-track. The vocals were so demanding, unbelievably demanding. We were having to do five or six takes, which with a normal song, probably wouldn’t be that hard, but I could see H.R.’s voice going down really quick. I had to drop back and punt. I said, “Okay, we’re gonna have to go to tape, and I’ll have to mix this later.” So we put up that 24-track, and during the day, I was patching things around, getting all the individual sounds together. New drums came in the next day, so we went for it.
What we would do is get a track, get happy with it, and then H.R. would give a reference vocal. We went through it that way until we got all the songs, and then it was Sunday and we were still working. I think it was around noon or so, and we didn’t really have the vocals the way we should, so we put H.R. in the house studio with Phil Burnett, who was engineering with me back then. We set up the sounds there, and I said, “Just give me two full takes all the way down, all the way through of everything we’ve got.”
They finished up about the time we finished up, and H.R. tells me, “Man, we gotta get these vocals, ’cause I’ve got to go to jail tomorrow.” “What?! Now you’re telling me?!” He only had time to get a couple of takes ’cause he had somebody coming to get him to bring him to jail. Somehow he just nailed it down, and we got everything done except “Sacred Love.”
H.R.
Some dudes were telling me once that by smoking herb and selling herb, it would be a one-way ticket to the big time. Well, it was my ticket to one of the deadliest places you could think of and it was called DC Jail. I had been selling a few bags when I had gotten back, and I called my brother to come to pick me up. One night, they pulled us over, and there was a whole bunch of marijuana in teeny bags. It wasn’t a picnic in there, and there wasn’t much to do except sit there and wait until your time is up.
Earl Hudson
We was hustling, man. Trying to eat food, you know. You can’t play music and work at damn Walmart. You’ve got to do something, so yeah, you get caught up sometimes. We were getting ready to go on tour in Providence, Rhode Island, so I went to pick Joe up. He put the runnings under the seat. I think somebody busted on us ’cause we came to a red light, and all of a sudden, the lights of the police car came on and they went right under his seat. It was my car, so that’s why I had to go to jail, but he primarily caught the beef for that ’cause it was underneath the seat he was sitting on. We were in DC Jail together, and that’s when we were pretty much finishing up that album. They wanted him to finish up the vocals on “Sacred Love,” so somehow or another, it got hooked up and recorded. My dad was a correctional officer. He was a captain, and two of his sons are in jail. He never came to see us because my dad’s a former soldier and he don’t play that shit, but he’d have his friend in there bring me some cigarettes, and he must have had something or other to do with recording him in the jail.
Anthony Countey
H.R. was an orderly in there. He got to clean up after lunch or something like that. He told me that the mess hall was not connected to the rest of the place. There was a phone in there and based on the layout, no one would be able to hear him, and they wouldn’t be able to see what was going on, so he could sing this song in there over the phone.
Ron St. Germain
So he’s in DC lock-up, and it was kind of a communal effort between the guys in the band and Anthony. Calls were made to set this up where he could call me on a specific day and time, and he would be able to sing this song over the phone to New York. I booked a studio right below Studio 54 called Soundworks, which was kind of the Steely Dan haunt, and I knew the tech there. The guy in the jail, instead of having him call from a pay phone, actually let him call in from the guy’s office, ’cause the guy thought it was pretty cool that H.R. was going to sing over the phone and he left him alone in there.
H.R.
I picked up the phone and called the operator and asked if I could make a collect call. Thank goodness somebody was there on the other end to receive it. Ron was there, picked up the call and began to play the music back, and they asked me if I would, to the best of my ability, give them some vocals, and that’s what I did over the phone. They recorded it and put it down on that record.
Ron St. Germain
The real kicker is, H.R. always traveled with his Bible. They actually let him have it in jail. Those first couple of pages were real thin, kind of onion skin. He had always cleaned his herb on the first page on the Bible ’cause it wouldn’t mess up anything. Just before we recorded, I could hear he was smoking something. I said, “What are you doing, man?” He says, “I’m sparking one.” I said, “Huh?” He said, “Yeah, you remember the page in the Bible?” He actually ripped that page out the Bible, rolled it up and sparked it. There was so much resin on the page, he actually got a buzz. He’s in the slammer for pot, and he’s inside smoking his Bible.
He also finished the lyrics to the song in there. The experience of him being in there I think directly relates to it: “I’m in here, you’re out there, don’t take our business out on the street.” It made him actually complete the song. There is a tape of that whole thing somewhere because I had a room mic in the control room and there was one out in the studio. I
t’s there somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find it. It’s a shame because it’s a real piece of musical history. It’s a great story. At the time we talked to Letterman and a couple of other shows, and they didn’t even believe us. They didn’t even want to listen to the tape. I suppose if it was Bruce Springsteen, they would have listened.
In all my travels around the world, even though that record never even went gold, anywhere I go on the planet, people come up to me, “Oh, my God, I Against I changed my life.” There is no record that I have done in forty-plus years that gets that kind of reaction. Once in a while, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, whoever, but nothing that gets that kind of passion. You know, there’s one Mick Jagger, there’s one Bob Dylan, and there’s only one H.R. Why do some bands explode and become the Led Zeppelins of the world and others don’t? He had that potential, but it’s a lot of other things that need to happen besides just having the talent and ability.
Mark Andersen
At this point, things start spinning out of control. For anybody who’s followed Joseph’s career, you would see him play with Human Rights and you’d be impressed, and then you’d hear about crazy stuff that was going on. Human Rights wasn’t really going anywhere in particular. It was doing okay, but at a certain point, you gotta break through or you can’t make it. You’ve got to calibrate what your expenses are with what you’re bringing in, or your enterprise is failing. Human Rights was supposed to play in New York, and the folks at the club are waiting. It’s late. Joseph walks in, and they’re like, “Cool, you’re here.” They were scared he wasn’t going to show. “Where’s the rest of the band?” they ask. There is no band. He hands the guy a cassette and says, “Play this, and I’ll sing along with it.” “I’m sorry. That doesn’t cut it.” These kinds of stories start building up about Joseph. He’s essentially homeless and going from place to place. In one situation, he barricaded himself inside the apartment of one of his friends from the Madam’s Organ days and refused to leave. They let him be for several days because he needed a place to stay. But the time had come to move out, so that the other guy could move in—the guy who’s actually paying the rent. Joseph wouldn’t do it. He punched out one of the housemates. These kinds of incidents start piling up, and there is a cloud around him. He’s acting out in other ways, too, and it comes to a head with his one-time friend, Jimi Riley, who was part of the Olive Tree crew living at the 17th and U house. Jimmy was gay, and he was coming out. He decided to do an interview with H.R. for the WDC Period, giving him a chance to respond to the rumors that were swirling around him. In this interview, H.R. spouts more antigay rhetoric and also says, “If a woman is inconsistent in her obedience, it is the responsibility of her man to set her right.” It’s just terribly disheartening.
