Hard-Core: Life of My Own Read online

  In New York, it had a lot to do with the Stimulators, who were by no means a Hardcore band, but who had a large young fan base. The Mad were another very influential New York punk band, as well as the Bad Brains, whose sound would forever change everything.

  A lot those kids who used to come to those shows started the first New York Hardcore bands: bands like th’ Influence, Reagan Youth, and the Mob. There were so many great bands in the early ’80s. We all kept it going when the old punk heroes were either dead or had sold out. The Pistols were done. The Damned broke up many times and had gotten weird. The Clash were getting “lost in supermarkets” and “rockin’ the Casbah,” and shit like that. Billy Idol was “Dancing with Himself” at a “White Wedding.” The original punk scene was just about gone.

  But we were still way into it, playing punk rock music and living that lifestyle. We were part of a new generation of punks. Pogo-ing turned into slamming, moshing, stage diving, and whatnot. It was a natural progression. The music got faster, the dancing got crazier and more violent. My friends and me, meaning the kids on the West Coast and in D.C., were all doing it at the same time. And I don’t think at first any of us were aware of it being what’d become known as “Hardcore,” ’cause the term hadn’t spread nationwide yet. But the first generation of Hardcore kids came out of that late ’70s punk scene.

  From the late ’70s to the mid-’80s in NYC, there were a lot of little places that booked these Hardcore shows, but most of the places didn’t last long. Of course, A7 was the real home of NYHC, ’cause it was “ours.” Jimmy Gestapo, Doug Holland, and Ray a.k.a. Raybeez worked there. But CBs was basically the only place that lasted from the original punk days through the entirety of Hardcore, ’til the end. That place was literally like my home; I practically grew up in there.

  One great show back in the day was UK Subs, a classic punk band from England. Their singer Charlie Harper is a punk legend. He’s been a good friend since I was a little kid. One of the best shows I ever saw at CBs was when their guitarist Nicky Garrett climbed up the light rigs, and was hanging upside down from his feet while he was playing leads! It was the illest shit I’d ever seen. They had this mesh army shit that they hung behind them when they played. Yeah, they used to come over almost every year to play, which was awesome.

  Another band that used to come down and put on some killer shows at CBs was Negative Approach from Detroit. I remember one show where you couldn’t even see the band, there were so many people dog-piled on the stage. The guitarists were pressed up against their amplifiers, and the singer was under this “mountain”—all you could see was his head and a hand holding a mic, and a pile of humans, just diving on each other, getting higher and higher, diving off the stage and back on the stage. Negative Approach was such a great band. There have been so many bands over the last 30 years that have gotten over on just the strength of being poor imitations of them.

  To me, CBGBs meant one thing: freedom. Hilly Kristal had one criterion when he opened that club: anybody could play there, as long as they played their own material. He didn’t even like most of the bands he had playing in there, but he let them play anyway. To me, that sums it all up. We owe Hilly a lot for that.

  CBs was the place that gave bands like the Ramones a place to play, which in turn sparked the punk rock explosion, which in turn sparked the Hardcore explosion, which in turn sparked the punk-revival/Green Day/whatever-the-fucks. CBGBs gave freaks and bands that were not mainstream a place to do their thing. It was the only place you could do that. So if it weren’t for CBGBs and Hilly, none of the things that people take for granted today would exist. Period. There have been a million shitty dives in every state and every country that contributed to their local scene and kept the underground going. But there is only one CBGBs, and that place will forever go down in history as not just the birthplace of punk rock, but the place that spawned all of the shit that followed.

  But yeah, prior to all that, back in the late ’70s through early ’80s, New York was a pretty fuckin’ tough city. The LES was not the weak-ass touristy bullshit you see now. Back then, anything east of First Avenue was “ABC Land,” and you didn’t fuckin’ go down there. To me, I thought anything above 14th Street was Uptown! Where my grandparents lived in Queens was like another state. But like I was saying, it was rough down there. The city was hard back then: the LES stood equal to Spanish Harlem, Brooklyn, or the Bronx. It was all ghetto—gangs, drugs, and crime. There were a lot of things that led to me becoming the violent teenager that I eventually became. And a lot of it was because of my neighborhood.

  Besides all that punk rock, regular life sucked. Going to school was a really bad experience for me in many ways. I would cut school a lot, and go up to Forty Deuce/42nd Street, and hit all the arcades—they were all over the place—and go to Kung Fu movies. They were like two or three bucks, and they showed them continuously back-to-back, and all kinds of ill horror films—all the crazy classic shit.

  Back then, Forty-Deuce was all live sex shows, pimps, hookers, peep shows, hustlers and drug dealers. It was a crazy place that if you hung out long enough, you were bound to see someone get pickpocketed. I used to hang out and just watch all the madness go down—it was fun.

  New York just had a different vibe all together—a certain street vibe and hustle. I also used to go down to Chinatown and go to all the Kung Fu movies there, too. Chinatown had all these movie theaters that were really cool, in these big-ass warehouses, and only Chinese people were there. They didn’t serve popcorn; they served noodles and other Chinese food. The subtitles were in different types of Chinese. Four or five different types of subtitles were underneath, and one of them would be in English. It was great. Sometimes, I’d take my lunch money, leave the house, buy a fifth of vodka, drink it, and go find a place to pass out for a few hours until people that I knew would wake up, and I would go hang out with them. On the Westside by NYU, there’s this one building with a circular wall, on the corner of Waverly Place and Mercer, where you can’t really see into the center. I used to crawl into it and go to sleep. A lot of times that was how I started off my day.

  I remember when I was really young, I would “explore” all the buildings around my neighborhood. There are always steps leading down into the buildings on the LES, leading into the cellars. Usually, if you go down those steps, you can go through the back of the building and out the back door, and there are all kinds of alleys that run through behind most of the buildings. I’m sure most of that shit is shut now, but back then all that shit was unlocked, and I would go explore. I knew how to enter one building through the basement, and come out a half a block away on the other side of the block—all kinds of escape routes. I would walk all the way to the river, and all the way to Chinatown.

  A lot of crazy shit happened during those childhood years of cutting school and exploring the city. I found two bodies: I found a dead chick who had O.D.’d in an abandoned building, and another time, I found a dead bum who had already started to bloat and decompose—all full of bugs and shit. One time I walked under one of the bridges downtown toward Chinatown. I got to one of the dumpsters, I remember I looked down and saw all these ripped-up porno magazines and shit with blood all over them, and all over the ground were drops of blood; I looked up, and there was this really freaky dude standing there behind the dumpster looking right at me. I’d have to describe the guy looking like something out of a Rob Zombie movie. I don’t know what the fuck was in his hand—he had ripped up pages from the magazine in his fingers and he was holding something bloody. I swear to Christ he looked like he had just killed someone or something. He had blood on his fingers, on his clothes, smeared on his face. He was seriously fucked-up and scary-looking. I just took off running as fast as I fucking could. I didn’t look back; I just kept running. I will never forget that fuckin’ weirdo. Yeah, I came across a lot of crazy shit roaming those streets back then.

  By that time, I’d been skipping school for months at a time, and my school w
as sending truant officers to my house. This eventually led to me living on my own, in the squats. I was 14 when I really left home for the last time. From that point on, I was more or less living in abandoned buildings with other “squatters.” I did that for years.

  When I was a kid and I started smoking weed, there was a spot on 14th Street that was down a little staircase, and it looked like a little candy store. It was called Paradise Plum. Except when you went in there, there was just a wall of fiberglass with a little bank teller window cut out of it. You’d stick your money in there, and they’d pop out your nickel bag or dime bag, or back then they had “trade bags,” which was a three-dollar bag of weed. They didn’t even come in plastic baggies back then—they came in little manila envelopes.

  Anyway, there were these spots all over the city, and there was the one that I used to go to when I was in fifth or sixth grade. A friend of mine used to work at one of these places, and he hooked me up with a gig for a minute. It was down on Avenue D. I’d basically sit back there behind the “tell window,” and serve people. I only worked there for a day though, before the cops came and busted it. I was there with this black kid they called “Stubby”—he had real short stubby arms and everyone used to fuck with him. I kinda felt bad for him—the dude’s hands were basically at his elbows. But as it turned out, he was a real dick, so I was like, “Man, fuck this dude. Fuck you, Stubby.”

  They handcuffed me to the doorknob and they fucked up Stubby. They were screaming at him, “We told you we’d be back, motherfucker, and we better not catch you here!” They uncuffed me and said, “If we catch you here again, you’re gonna get what he got.” Needless to say, I didn’t work there anymore. My friend who got me the gig did, though, and he had a shaved head too, so they thought he was me when they raided the place again, and beat his ass! The whole time they’re screaming, “We told you not to come back!” He’s like, “It wasn’t me!” They’re like, “Bullshit, motherfucker!”

  Meanwhile, right in the middle of LES was this punk and Hardcore scene spreading out into the neighborhood: all these crazy, freaky-looking white kids. We were in the gangs’ neighborhood, and they didn’t like it. They even thought we were some kind of gang. They didn’t know what the fuck we were. They didn’t understand that it was all about music, and that we just had nowhere else to be.

  But this was where I lived. At the end of the night I was still there, and the next day I was still there. I still had to deal with all these fuckers—unlike so many of the kids on the scene who hung out, but didn’t really live down there. Even most of my friends were “bridge and tunnel.” Then as time went on, the scene started moving down further into my neighborhood.

  Back in the old days, punks used to hang out by all the stores on St. Marks, but didn’t really go much further east. But as time went on, the cops kept chasing punk kids further and further east, ’cause all the store owners and tenants were complaining. So we all just started hanging further and further down in ABC Land and Tompkins Square Park. There, the cops really didn’t care what happened. It was “off limits.”

  We just had to deal with the locals. But it got a little crazier and harder for me, ’cause it wasn’t just me anymore. I couldn’t just come and go anymore; there were a bunch of us. It was the beginning of the Hardcore scene on the LES. To a lot of the young locals, it was kind of an invasion—and in a way it was, ’cause to those that came after, we had opened the doors to gentrification. But at the time, it was still rough. I mean, like I said, I couldn’t just come and go anymore by myself—there was a group of us. We stood out, so we became a bigger target. I was part of a group. I wasn’t just a lone freak anymore. And in a way, it kind of started opening the door to more problems.

  By then, around 1980, the Bad Brains stayed at 171A. Eventually, Doc and Earl moved into a squat on Avenue A and 10th Street the next year; a few other dreads lived there and in the neighborhood too. Nowadays, no one who lives down there is really “from down there.” They’re all rich kids and yuppies from somewhere else, fucking thousands of dollars to live in little bitty-ass apartments that went for just a couple hundred dollars back in the day when I grew up. The people who are from there are gone. Those days are over.

  The only things left are all the ghosts from the years of craziness down there. They still roam up and down those streets, but most people can’t see them—except me. Sometimes it’s weird to walk down there, now that it’s a high-dollar thriving neighborhood. No one today could ever imagine what the LES of NYC was like back then. You could really never explain it or describe it in a way that would do it justice. It just can’t be done. To me, it’s a cemetery of ghosts from the past—a time of so much danger and creativity that is now gone for good.

  Chapter Three

  PART 1: THE STIMULATORS — THE CLASH — THE BEASTIE BOYS

  HARLEY AND MICK JONES OF THE CLASH BACKSTAGE AT THE PALLADIUM, NEW YORK CITY, BY PENNIE SMITH

  “If I ever had a li’l brother in this ‘rock shit,’ it’s Harley Flanagan. From the very start we would fuck with each other all the time, wrestling at sound check, slappin’ each other in the head. Kid could destroy a drum set with the purest form of this ‘punk shit.’ After I witnessed the Stimulators wreck a stage with the real punk rock—watching Harley literally dancing on his drums—we knew we had to step up our Bad Brains game. Harley is a key component to the early years of my bass style and approach. I was so blown away by his drumming that I sometimes forget his bass playing, which reminded me of Lemmy. Kid is the real deal. As a rock ‘n’ roll youth he was iconic in my eyes.”

  —Darryl Jenifer, Bad Brains

  My Aunt Denise, founder of the Stimulators, had been in several rock bands in the early and mid-’70s.

  Denise did so much for the New York underground music scene. She could outplay most of the guys, and yet still never got the respect she deserved. Even though the Stimulators were a significant band in the evolution of the New York scene, and have made it into one or two history books, I don’t feel she or the band got the credit they warranted.

  As a kid, I would jam with her on my visits to the States. We did Ted Nugent covers and some originals. I remember Denise and Stimulators bassist Anne Gustavsson played briefly in a band with the noted British drummer Bryson Graham, who played with Spooky Tooth and Alvin Lee, among others. They had a power trio: Bryson sang and played drums. I saw them open for the Dictators at Gildersleeves in the ’70s; it was great!

  By the time I moved back to the States, Denise had gotten fully into the whole punk rock thing. She had been to London and played in a band called the White Cats with Rat Scabies from the Damned and this guy Kelvin Blacklock who sang with Mick Jones before the Clash in a band called London SS. She saw a lot of classic punk shows in both New York and London.

  Anyway, it was 1979, and I was almost 12 years old. My mom and me were living with Denise, and I was going to all the Stimulators gigs and practices. And before I knew it, I was in the band! I replaced Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys, who had replaced Bob Wire.

  What happened was, Blitz just bailed out the day of a show. I knew most of their material from having seen them play and having been at so many of their practices. So I jumped in. They had a gig that night at the Hott Club in Philly, and I learned all the material in the back of the van, listening to a cassette and drumming on a phone book. We played that night with the Autistics, and it was great. No one had ever seen a kid my age in a real band. It was hysterical, and people loved it. Plus, we had two girls in the band, and this crazy little bleach-blond dude on vocals, Patrick Mack, who was all over the stage.

  Patrick had never been in a band before. Denise and Anne met him at a club and asked him if he wanted to sing and he said “Yes!” He was a poet, openly gay, and lived down the block from CBs, which was a really bad neighborhood back then. The Bowery was no joke: bums, junkies and scumbags. There was like one or two little stores near St. Marks Place that sold punk rock stuff, records and clothes. There was C
Bs, there was a halfway house and a homeless shelter and like one bodega, and that was it. It was pretty desolate. One time, Patrick told me he got jumped three times in one day going and coming from his apartment: the first time he was mugged, the second time they tried to mug him but he had no money left from the first mugging, so they beat his ass anyway, and the third time he just got jumped, with no mugging attempt.

  Patrick was really into Iggy and Bowie, so he was a crazy frontman. He would dive across tables on his face, knocking people’s drinks all over the place, do flips onstage, spazz out, and go nuts. He was a really cool guy. Honestly, I was never a huge fan of his voice, but hey, at the time everybody was doing their own thing.

  At one point, we started blowing up a little bit on the club scene. Everybody knew about us. I even got mentioned by name on some stupid sitcom called Square Pegs. I made it into the September 1980 issue of Whole Earth Catalog—which was like the equivalent back then to Google but in paperback; it was the Who’s Who world book of information, so it was kind of crazy I made it in there.

  We were getting all these big write-ups. There was an article about me with interviews and full-page pictures in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine. It was funny; I was being hailed as some “wonder-kid drummer” although I was far from that. We weren’t a typical so-called “punk band.” We didn’t really fit into any of the categories, but we were good. Looking back, my drumming needed work, but hey, I was 12. But we were breaking ground, not just musically, but because there weren’t many females in heavy bands and there definitely weren’t any little kids in bands and hanging out at clubs! Jesse Malin of Heart Attack, and later D Generation, who was around my age, told me, “When I first saw you, that’s what inspired me to start a band. I was like, ‘If he can do it, so can I.’”