Harley Flanagan

Since so many people always ask about all that old NYHC L.E.S shit
Heres some shit about some old school LES NYHC shit
it will be out on 4 CD's SOON!!! Hahahahah just kidding...


just for the sake of it ill start with The Park Inn.

The Park Inn was originally across the street from Tompkins Square Park, right there on Avenue A. It was the spot where we would all hang out and drink. Its funny; me and my friends were fourteen, fifteen and sixteen,in a bar drinking pitchers, no questions asked! [laughs] When you think about
it, its like, "What the fuck is wrong with this picture?" Theres a bunch of fourteen and fifteen year olds with tattoos, drinking pitchers in a bar full of adults. And then all of a sudden a fight breaks out, and theyre on somebody like a bunch of fuckin little freaks. It was nuts. But we were friends
with the bartenders; the guy who worked the door was this crazy old black dude Ike the Dike, who used to be a pimp and a gang-banger back in the old days, and now hes just a crazy old drunk motherfucker. It was our bar, you know. The whole neighborhood was full of little spots like this. Avenue A,
that strip from 7th to 12th, from A to C, we had all our little spots.

[Im guessing there wasnt much in the way of police presence

There was none, dude! None, none! I remember brawls that would literally go on for twenty minutes, running up and down Avenue A with like groups of people fighting. I remember one time getting in a fight with a bunch of Puerto Ricans, chasing them from Avenue A all the way to the projects down near
2nd Street, then realizing that everyone else that was running with me had stopped running a few blocks back. Im in the projects, throwing bottles and going, "Come on, lets go, motherfuckers!" And all of a sudden I see all these Puerto Ricans coming out of different doorways, and I look back and realize that its just me and my friend. [laughs] Were running back, like, "Aw, fuck!" Bottles crashing, bricks are landing fuckin next to you
But that;s what Im saying: People have no fucking clue, none whatsoever.

And if you go down to the Lower East Side now

Its fuckin; yuppie central, man! It makes me sick! Back then, I was one of the first people who, yeah, I used to beat up all the artsy-fartsy faggots and this and that, but it wasnt because they were gay, it wasnt because they were arty. It was because I felt that Id earned my way into that fuckin neighborhood, and I wasnt just gonna fuckin roll over and just let this neighborhood disappear without holding onto it. Because I was watching it
happen slowly but surely, the neighborhood was gentrifying. We hardcore kids, we made that neighborhood safe for white people! by standing our ground And then the fucking floodgates opened, and all these fuckin weird motherfuckers started coming down. I definitely did a lot of that shit that was uncool; I cant pretend otherwise. But once again, we were young, we were on a lot lot of drugs; we used to huff glue; you do stupid shit. And In my own child-like way, I felt like I was trying to
save the neighborhood from turning into what it finally turned into. It was wrong, but goddamn if my intentions werent good. I was trying to keep that neighborhood pure, and now its just full of yuppies, and aint nobody down there whos actually from there. Its lost everything that made it cool

Tell me about A7

A7, the stage was less than a foot tall. From the outside, it was just a door with a couple of steps up; you wouldnt know that there as a club in there unless you heard music coming out of there. The actual room where the concerts were in was smaller than most peoples living rooms; and then there was a bar, and in the back of the place there was a little lounge area. They
would cram a lotta fuckin people in there. A lot of crazy things happened in there, like Mike Ness getting his ass kicked. That was pretty funny! One thing people dont seem to realize is that the New York scene, up until was very open to outside bands and outside people. We were very welcoming; there wasnt that many hardcore bands in New York yet, so we were always thrilled when bands would come from out of town. DC, LA, Canada, anywhere we were always very psyched. I had played in DC a bunch of times with the Stimulators, and I was friends with all those DC guys. But when they came up to New York with that "Fuck New York" attitude which I still to this day dont know where they pulled that out of their ass it really took the
New York kids by surprise. Because back then, the scene was still very innocent. We werent trying to be tough; we were just trying to have fun. We werent trying to say that our city was harder than anywhere else; we were just glad to hang out and have a good time. All of a sudden, you have a group of guys comin in together, trying to strut like they were hard, and it kind of confused us, because up til that point, it was like, "Hardcore kids, punk kids we figured you know we where all in this together ya know, but they felt they had to prove something i guess or make some kind of a statement i didn't understand it, but boy did that start something hahahah they kinda came down hardrocked a little and in a way made a impression on me and my friends,
We loved all the slamdancing and shit but a lotta people where scarred by it i guess. So that happened once or twice i guess where they came down and tried to hard rock a little; I didnt
get it, but I was still friends with those DC guys. I just figured, "Yeah, theres a lot of assholes in New York, whatever." so their just trying to fuck with all the old school old head punks and throw backs, But then the Boston guys came down and tried to hard-rock that shit, too!

Are you talkin about SSD?

I;m exactly talkin SSD. but by now, me and my friends were a year or two older, and had started having our own street fights in our neighborhood with all these crazy fuckin dusted Puerto Ricans who really wanted to fuck shit up. And all of a sudden, these suburban fuckin jocks coming to our neighborhood was just not fucking cutting it. I dont think I need to explain that they got served. I remember Al, the guitarist from SSD that big nosed motherucker walking into A7 with a "Kill New York" t-shirt on,
and my boy Paul walked up to him and said, "Yeah, you wanna kill New York, motherfucker? Why dont you start with me?" The New York guys spent the rest of that night giving the Boston guys an ass-beating on the dancefloor. But Im saying this just to show how stupid it was. Yeah, New York had the reputation
of being the hardest city for hardcore, but that was because New York was a hard city; we had to be tough. We did not start this war between scenes; this whole gang war vibe between scenes, it never existed back then. I think
over the last twenty years, people have gotten confused about what it was really like back then. So yeah, A7, that was the battleground where we first started disciplining out-of-towners. Me and my friends, we pretty much became the regulators; when bands came in from out of town and got out of line, they would get their ass kicked, even if it was onstage. That happened quite
a few times, even bands from New Jersey. I remember U.S. Chaos got beat real bad onstage; the bouncers had to drag them out through the back door while
they were getting beat.

[What did they do to deserve that?

They hit one of my friends, or something. The scene was like that if you hit the wrong person, or you started a fight with the wrong person, you got jumped. But thats the way it;s always been.

The Cro-Mags definitely had one of the most contradictory images of any band on the scene.


Oh, yeah. Absolutely. We were a living contradiction, in every way and shape.
The idea of a Hare Krishna skinhead is absurd; theres no other way to describe it.

[Did it seem bizarre to you at the time?

It made total sense at the time! [laughs] The funny thing is, by the time I quote-unquote got into the Hare Krishna thing, like really started to speak publicly and preach about the philosophy, I had pretty much already walked away from the quote-unquote skinhead thing. I still had a shaved head, and I was still getting in fights a lot I was trying to be more peaceful, I had stopped eating meat and was trying to change my ways, but a lot of the
new-jack skinheads on the scene who were trying to be all boots and braces and real serious skinheads, started trying to dog me. "Oh Harleys a vegetarian, he got soft, blah blah blah." A lot of people used to try and pick fights with our friends; a lot of people tried to fuck with John. But it would always end up the same way; we would always wind up beatin their ass. There
was never any other result.

[But because you were still fighting, you couldnt shake the skinhead reputation.]

Yeah, thats why we were called Hare Krishna Skinheads. I always thought it was funny.

did you guys set out to take hardcore music to another level?


No, I just had been playing music a lot longer than most of the kids on the scene. I had been playing in bands since the 70s, so I was a little bit better at what I did. Our influences, Bad Brains is what I grew up on; to me, they were the end-all-say-all. Having grown up on bands like Minor Threat, and all that classic stuff. And then Motorhead, I got influenced by them, and my friend turned me on to Venoms first single. A little bit of metal started
slowly creeping in to what I was listening to. In 1980, I got turned onto Black Sabbaths Master of Reality; up ;til then, I had never really given any metal a chance at all. Black Sabbath changed every fucking thing for me. They changed the way I wrote my lyrics; the lyrics of Master of Reality made me think that music without a message is just noise. "Have you ever thought about your soul/Can it be saved?" I was like, Holy shit, these guys
are seriously talking some serious shit, here! [laughs] SO thats why I felt that the Cro-Mags had to have more to them than, "Skinhead! Avenue A!" I felt like theres more to life than trying to have the biggest boots and the most skinned head, you know? [laughs] So our music was destined to be a little bit better, because we grew up on all the real stuff, back in the
day. Like, I always look at the Cro-Mags as one of the last hardcore bands from that first generation. I had started working on the band when I left the Stimulators in 1980; I went through a lot of different lineups of the band. The band didnt really start dominating on the scene until;85 or 86.To me, that was already after the original era had started to fade. We were fortunate to have grown up on all the real stuff, and that was our foundation.
Up until that point, a lot of New York bands were really in their fledgling stages. I mean, Agnostic Front had Raybeez on drums back then, so they could never have really gotten too good because he wasnt a great drummer. They were a great band live, they were a lot of fun now theyre a really good band. But in the beginning, most of the New York bands were not really that
good. The better bands were from DC and the West Coast. Thats just the facts.
But New York took all the best elements of all those different scenes and turn it into our sound. And thats what became New York hardcore.

[When Age of Quarrel came out, metal had sort of already started to creep into the
NYHC sound.]


Yeah, because that;s when metalheads started to understand what we were doin I guess. We were definitely one of the first bands to bring a lot of metal heads to our shows. The Carnivore guys would come see us; the Crumbsuckers were big fans of ours. In the beginning, the metal guys used to get picked on a lot, but they were persistent.

When the straight edge thing came in, is that when the scene started to
get really fractured?

I think it was more Maximum Rock and Rolls fault, and I think it started before that.

[Im talking about Youth of Today, stuff like that.]

Oh, yeah, I never took any of those kids seriously. Really, that whole generation of upstate New York hardcore kids that pretended to be from New York, I never paid em any mind. If I said boo, theyd jump ten feet in the air. All those kids were so scared of the old-school hardcore kids, we never paid em any
attention. The only people who paid attention to them were the kids who were younger than them. I couldnt tell you one fuckin Youth of Today song, even if I had to. I couldnt tell you one Gorilla Biscuits song, or CIV, or whoever.
Me and my friends were the ones that mattered to me on the scene back then; I really didnt give a fuck. I thought it was cheesy that straight edge kids were telling everyone else how to think. Thats why me and my friends kind of protested by getting twice as fucked up. I never had anything against the idea; I thought it was a very positive concept, and I have a lot of friends
that dont do drugs who I respect a lot. But I just find people like that annoying.


Did drugs contribute to the Cro-Mags rough spots?

I would say individually, yeah. But not as a band. The rough spots the band hit were just destined to be. You had four very conflicting energies as people. Although we all had some things in common, Id say we all had a lot more things not in common. But yeah, everybodys gone through their rough spots,
even the people that claim not to have.

The straight edge kids, were they even from New York? As far as I knew, New York was all about getting fucked
up!

[laughs] I think that elitist straight edge thing is something that comes from being rich were better than everybody, even though were just a bunch of fuckin nerds. I think that just comes from being raised in the suburbs. "My daddys got a bigger fucking car than yours!"

[At what point did the NYHC scene begin to decline?

Id say that the hardcore scene pretty much came to a halt at the end of the decade. It started in 80, and ended in 89. Everything in its beginning stages is great, because theres no rules to it. But down the line, it starts to lose touch with itself. Hard music is now mainstream bands, all these tuned-down, fake tough-sounding bands that are on MTV and have shaved heads and tattoos, but are really just metal bands. Hardcore used to be hardcore punk we took punk rock and turned it up a notch. Now, I think hardcore
is more like hardcore metal. The difference is that punk was a street thing, whereas metal, even in its early stages, was always about trying to be decadant. The goal was decadence; the goal was to have the big hair and spandex and
all the fucking groupies. Hardcore, the goal was to bond. We didnt have any clue what getting signed was, you know? I think that, when the wall went down between hardcore and metal, hardcore started to die. And Im partially to blame for that. I brought the violence in, I brought the metal in, I brought
the fuckin Hari Karishnas in with help from JB hahahah; Jesus, I just wrecked everything! [laughs]


[What was the scene like by 89?

You know, I really dont remember so much, because youre talkin like, tenth generation hardcore at that point. Another club comes and goes, another band comes and goes; its like, who gives a fuck? Theres only a few bands that actually came out in the late 80s, early 90s that kept it real on any level. Theyre keeping it real in their own way, now, and thats cool. I respect that.


[What motivated you to start the Hardcore Hall of Fame website?


What motivated me to do that is, when I read Steven Blushs book, I couldntbelieve how many ridiculous statements he made. I thought most of the quotes
that people gave could have given a pretty good and accurate story of hardcore. but whenever you take somebody whos like a journalist or a writer who wasnt really part of what was happening, and they start putting their own spin
on it, I think that it starts becoming his story. He has no place to interpret
these things, not having been an actual participant I mean he was around but theres a difference btw being around and being actively a part of something from its begginin. It takes more than having been a third, fourth or fifth generation hardcore kid who was in the audience to be able to pass judgement on all these people who actually did something.
So I said, Im going to give all these people a place where they can actually speak for themselves, create a forum for the people who actually were part of the scene to give props to the people that they like, instead of someone
like Blush ( who I do like) or anybody saying who were the important bands. Who gives a fuck what he or anyone else
thinks who wasnt in one of those bands? Im more interested in who Daryl thought were the important bands,
who Henry Rollins thought were the important bands. Im more interested in who influenced Jimmy. What was Roger listening to before he discovered punk rock? What made these people the people they were? What caused hardcore to happen? Its just a way for everybody to tell their story without an editor.
Its a place for everybody who was around back then to have a forum. I went online a few times, and I saw all these idiots talking shit about people that they never met; people talking shit about me, people talking shit about Raybeez, people talking shit about this person and that person. Im like,
"Who are all these asshole?" So I decided to create a place for the people who were a part of it to actually tell what it was, and put up their collections of flyers, their collections of photos, and tell their stories. The criteria
is that you have to have been documented on the scene for at least fifteen years, just to be asked anything. You have to have made a significant contribution to the world of hardcore that has to have lasted for your opinion to matter, as far as Im concerned. Everybody has a question on their page "Who are
your favorite hardcore bands? Who do you think should be inducted into the
Hardcore Hall of Fame?" And thats how we actually induct people. The people
get inducted by their peers. It;s basically just a way to give props, you
know?
Anyway...

Nobodys talked about the Park Inn?

Nobodys talked about the Park Inn? Wow. Has anybody talked about C Squat?
[Nope.]
See, thats the problem; the majority of the people that were a part of the scene back then werent actually from my neighborhood, the Lower East Side. Most of them were from Queens and Brooklyn, and eventually from Jersey and upstate New York, and so on.

Tell me about C Squat.

C Squat was one of the many squats in the early 80s on the Lower East Side,but this one was predominantly taken over by mostly skinheads and hardcore kids. Like, Chaos punks, not really peace punks. Back then, there was a pretty big distinction in New York, at any rate between the two. The Chaos punks used to hang out more with the skinheads; the peace punks were more into Crass, and getting together and being hippies with mohawks. The other guys were more into slam-dancing and getting fucked up and getting into fights. More like the Exploited, you know? So C Squat was great; I actually wrote
a song about it on my last record; its called "Urban Screams". Me and John, we lived in one apartment. Basically it was an burned-out building. There was one old Puerto Rican dope dealer on one floor, who had been there from the start; we were never really able to get rid of him, because he had alot of pull in the neighborhood. The building was really gutted; you basically
find a door and attach it to the door frame, and hold it up with a frame to keep people outta there when you weren;t around. It was basically a destroyed, demolished building; but somehow, in everybodys minds, we were gonna live there and fix the place up, and eventually get control of it. That was the mentality back then, you know? The Lower East Side was a very different place.
So yeah, skinheads were living in that building; Raybeez lived there for a long time. For the most part, it was party central. Eventually, we got burned out by slum lords that were trying to get the property, and three people died in the fire. They were always trying to get the neighborhood gangs to get us out; they would hire cops to come and harass us. A lot of heavy shit went down there.

Where was it?

It was located at Avenue C and 9th Street. People dont realize how hectic that neighborhood used to be. There was always friction and tension between the punks and skinheads and the local Puerto Rican gangs; they never liked us being around there. It was really like the wild west back then. It was not a big thing to have gunshots in Tompkins Square Park, or people getting
jumped with hockey sticks and golf clubs and bats and shit like that; it was pretty frequent. People take for granted that they can walk around that neighborhood with their tattoos and stretched-out earlobes lookin all freaky and shit; but back in the day, you would seriously be flaunting your shit and asking for some problems. [laughs] And unlike most of the hardcore kids,
I lived down in the middle of it. The main neighborhood gang, The Hitmen, were on my block. So at night wed all be having fights on Avenue A, getting jumped by neighborhood guys; and then the next day, I would have to go to school with their younger brothers and shit like that. Thats part of the reason why I wound up getting as tough as I did, and why I wound up doing a lot of the fucked-up shit I did. If you werent a fucking maniac, you really
didnt stand much of a chance for survival. Even Jimmy, at the end of the night, had the safety zone of going back to Astoria, and most of the kids back then did of course as apunk though you really stood a chance of getting fucked with everywhere back then hahaha. But eventually, C Squat began to change that. And then Rob from Cause for Alarm, he had an apartment down on 2nd Street. There were always a few apartments that were like hardcore central; one person would have their shit together enough to have an apartment, and everybody would
stay there. There would be like twenty people in there, with curtains up as dividing walls. [laughs] There was Apartment X, where we all lived for a long time, Rob from Agnostic Front, me, John, Tony from Ultraviolence, guys from the Psychos there was always groups of us. It was like a little community.

The hardcore scene back then was really a community. Before things got all segregated, before Maximum Rock and Roll started dividing everybody up into categories and groups, there really was a lot of unity on the scene. You could go to another city or another state and see hardcore kids, and know that you had a support group; you knew youd find places to crash, people
to hang out with, shows to go to. Back then, the hardcore kids, it was really a subculture. It was before the internet and all this shit; you had to seek it out to be a part of it. See, I come from an even earlier generation; I was a punk rocker when I was ten, in 1977. I got the Sex Pistols album, and I;ve been a punk rocker since then. I saw the emergence of the hardcore scene;
Ive seen John and Jimmy and all those people make their debuts. on the scene I go pretty far back and Im still in my 30's [laughs]


[So you saw the New York scene make that transition from punk to hardcore.

Absolutely! When I was in the Stimulators, the whole first New York punk rock era was still going on. Unfortunately, when the Sex Pistols were in America, I was in London, hanging out with the Damned and shit like that. So I missed their limited tour of America, but I was hanging out with Rat Scabies backstage at the 100 Club and shit like that. My mother, basically, its her fault! [laughs] She went into some record store in London, and she
asked the guy behind the counter, "Whats new? What are the kids buying these days?" Because she was always very into music. And the record that had just come out that month was Never Mind the Bollocks.

Before hardcore came in, was there a lull between the CBs punk scene and
the hardcore scene?


It wasnt really a lull; it just wasnt documented so much by the media. The media had already declared punk rock dead; as far as they were concerned, punk rock no longer existed. But there were still a lot of kids who were not done being punk rock, just because Sid was dead. There was young kids who were just coming up, kids my age who, unlike me, were just discovering
it. Thats when people like Jimmy Gestapo and all those cats would start coming out. When Sid died, that kind of signified the end of that first period. And then, in between that and the hardcore thing, there was bands that werent hardcore, but they werent traditional punk. Thats when bands like the Bad Brains and the Stimulators and The Mad, they were three bands that kind of kept that scene going in that interim. There was other bands too, like Pure Hell they were a black punk rock band from New York. There was a lot of bands that were still trying to do that whole Sid Vicious junkie era punk rock, but that was all dying out. And then there was our scene, which was like younger kids who were full of life, full of positive energy. Those were the kids who would eventually be dubbed hardcore kids. The media didnt start to catch up with it again til a little later, but it never really died. There was always a group of us. I was always in the center of something.

[Were the Bad Brains that got everyone playing faster?]



to me They definitely were the band that changed the sound of punk rock. I will say that without a question. Bands like the Dead Kennedys were playing faster, but the Bad Brains took what was punk and changed it; they made it street again. To me, there was a very distinct period where the Pistols were done, the Clash were lost in the fucking supermarket somewhere, and Billy Idol
was being a fag dancin with himself at a fuckin white wedding. All the old punk rockers were selling out. Im an old friend of the Clash, but Ill be the first person to say that I couldnt give a fuck after Give Em Enough Rope. There was a couple songs on London Calling for me, but it was them trying to be pop, trying to cash in on what America wanted. But we still had our diehard scene going, and then the Bad Brains came to town and the Stimulators became good friends with them. And Ill tell you, the first time
that I saw those guys, it was confusing I didnt know what the fuck was going on! It was completely from another fucking planet! It was fast, it was noisy, it was explosive; my body didnt know how to react to it. Me and my friends, our energy level was so up afterwards, we stormed over to the Mudd Club where all the poser punks hung out and threw garbage at them, because
we were just so on fire. We were all just a bunch of little kids, and we didnt know what the fuck to do; we were jumping on the hoods of cabs, throwing garbage cans in the streets. It brought out this energy in you, you didnt know how to react. They definitely changed things; they turned it up a notch, and they kicked all the DC boys in the ass, too. They turned all those little
suburban fuckin rich kids onto the real stuff. We already had a scene going; there was already what you could call the roots of the hardcore scene. Kids like Jimmy had started hanging out, kids like Doug Holland; these were kids whod been coming to Stimulators shows, and they were like, "If that kid can do it, and hes only fuckin twelve, I can do it!" That was a big part of the reason why the Stimulators had such a young following. I was like
a legend, kinda; people heard about me, like, "Wow, theres this twelve-year-old kid in a band!" They even mentioned me on that show Square Pegs they were like, "This kid named Harley plays in a band" There was a while there where people knew of me; looking back on it, its really funny. So we had this really young following, and a lot of girls in our following, because there were two chicks in the band. Our scene was great a lot of girls, everybody was young, it was fun. Jimmy and all these guys, they were a little bit older than me, they started coming and hanging out, and it just started growing. And then the Bad Brains came to town and fucked everybody up.

Tell me about 171A

171A was a block away from where I lived with my mother, so I saw everything that happened there. I used to hang out there every day. The Bad Brains lived there for a long time; Black Flag auditioned Henry over there. There was also a record store, the Ratcage, where we all used to hang out. Dave used to sell acid, and we all used to fuckin dose we were twelve, thirteen,
fourteen years old and trippin our fuckin balls off! It was ridiculous. When I look back, me and my friends really were fuckin maniacs. It was like the Little Rascals gone fuckin berserk. Youre talkin about twelve, thirteen year old kids runnign around on the street, pickin fights with adults and shit. It really was kind of nuts.


Jimmy told me about the cueball

Yeah, that was actually something I started. I learned that when I was in Northern Ireland with the Stimulators; there was a bar fight in a club we played one night, and people started picking up cue balls and throwing them at each other and hitting each other with them. Just grabbing balls off the table and winging em. And it dawned on me that, man, you could hit someone really hard with a cue ball and not break it. [laughs] So I put one in a
sock and started carryin it around. It really was a good weapon, because the sock would give a little, so it had that stretching thing; you could use it kinda like nunchuks. I definitely perfected the cueball-in-a-sock; that was my weapon of choice as a youth. If theres such a thing as innocent destruction, or innocent chaos You gotta understand people hear about how quote-unquote violent I was, but really it was just a symptom of the neighborhood that I lived in back then. Im almost embarrassed about it now, that Ive generated this mystique that so many generations of hardcore kids have tried to emulate this tough guy bullshit, where they feel obligated to beat each other up at shows to prove whoever has got the fuckin biggest
balls. And I really think theyre a bunch of faggots, for the most part. Because back then, you had to be tough to be on the scene, just because the scene was always in a bad area. We were refugees from the world, in a way. Hardcore kids, punks back then, we were outcasts from everywhere; thats
kinda how we got together as a group. We were constantly being victimized by the surroundings, whether it was cops Puerto Rican gangs or Black gangs whatever. Not
to sound like the white boys always got picked on, but thats what it was like in the fuckin ghetto hahaha, period. And one of the ways I learned how to deal with it was you had to be as hard, as crazy as the next motherfucker; and the next motherfuckers on my block were a bunch of dust-smokin, golf club-wieldin, gun-totin Puerto Ricans. I really had some hard-ass motherfuckers to compete with.

The bar was raised

Yeah, the bar was definitely raised. And for a lot of the kids on the hardcore scene, who were a lot of middle-class fuckin pussies,And to some of them I was this real terrifying character. And I guess that they were just out of their element, because
I was in mine. And then Maximum Rock and Roll wrote a lot of negative shit about me and my friends, when they really didnt know anything, and were getting a lot of their information from people who really werent a part of what was happening.

It seemed like Maximum Rock And Roll was pretty anti- the whole New Yorkscene in general.

They were anti-New York. I think they, just like everybody else, needed an enemy to unite their forces. And we became that, because basically we really didnt give a fuck about what anybody said. Let me just say, once and for all: I was never a Nazi. Im a quarter American Indian, Ive got Dominican blood in me; Im of mixed blood, and thats just American. But when I was fifteen years old, if somebody called me a Nazi, Id be the kid that would
throw up my hand and go, "Seig Heil! Fuck You!" Just to be an antagonistic individual. But I grew up in the generation where Punk rockers like Sid Vicious was running around with a swastika on his shirt; the Sex Pistols had shirts with an upside-down
Jesus, and the Queen with her head cut off! Thats the generation I grew up from. We were all about, "Fuck you! Yeah, you dont like it? Fuck you twice!" So I had all these politically correct, pseudo-hippie punks pointing the finger and throwing stones. For the longest time, I laughed at it; but then, you get outside of your city and state, and you find that people actually
believe that shit.

[Roger Miret said the same thing happened with Agnostic Front people outside
of New York thought they were actually promoting white power.

Well, there was some of that shit in New York Im not gonna say there wasnt but it was mostly bridge and tunnel motherfuckers who would come down, strut their bullshit, get their little fuckin skinhead nut off and go back to the suburbs. Then theyd leave me and whoever else was a regular to fuckin deal with it. Id be the first to say that, back then, I definitely was all about white pride But that was it PRIDE, even though by no means am I any kind of blonde haired blue eyed motherfucker. [laughs] But I was all about white pride, because I grew up in a neighborhood where Puerto Ricans were all about being Proud of bieng
Puerto Rican; all you ever heard was salsa music, all the signs were in Spanish All the blacks in my school were all about bein; black; And they always used to fuckin pick on the white boys, and I just got sick of white people bein fuckin cowards. I decided to take the other route, especially when I went to Ireland and it was like, "Damn, there are some hard-ass motherfuckers!
White boys dont all have to be fuckin pussies, you know?" And it was funny, because when I took that stance, I actually got respect from all the black kids in my school. They actually defended me and made me part of their circle. And finally, after years of being fucked with in my neighborhood, I finally
got respect in my neighborhood. In my world, I got respect for bein a hard-ass but on the hardcore scene, I was a bad guy. Which was ironic.
but hey Life is ironic...

To be continued IN MY BOOK!!! hahahah This is only a very small part of it..wait till u see all the Old pictures photos etc etc...
All the best
Peace
NYHCOG
HF