Chapter 9

Even after the Psychos were accepted by New York punks, I still felt like a loner. I was living in New Jersey, so I’d do drugs by myself or with Elio. Whether it was because of the drugs or paranoia stemming from my childhood, I felt alienated from everyone around me. Even though I loved the music and wanted to hang out with people in the scene, I didn’t put myself out there.

On April 3, 1983, I decided to shave my head—not to be accepted but because I wanted to. That night I put on combat boots and went to see Angry Samoans play at Great Gildersleeves, which was one of the bigger venues that booked punk and hardcore shows. To my surprise, when I stepped down to the floor, people gave me space and treated me with respect. I felt safer in the pit than ever just because I was buzzed down. I looked the part. I went crazy stagediving. It was like a hardcore baptism. I had undertaken a rite of passage and suddenly was an active member of this wild community. The scene was all about individualism and self-expression, but it wasn’t until I did the “hardcore” thing that I was totally accepted—so much so that, after the show, I was invited to join Agnostic Front.

Their bass player at the time, Adam Mucci, and drummer, Raybeez, came up to me. Ray said, “Hey, we’re looking for a singer.” I was a little hesitant because I thought the Psychos were a better band. I was also reluctant to join because the Psychos were nuts but AF were fuckin’ crazy.

The first time I saw Agnostic Front them was at the Two Plus Two Annex on August 14, 1982. When they first advertised the show, they called themselves The Zoo Crew. It was a dumb name, but anyone who told them that would have gotten their teeth knocked out. Before the show happened, they changed their name to Agnostic Front.

The band were the original four members—John Watson on vocals, Diego on bass, Robbie CryptCrash on drums and Vinnie on guitar. They looked hard as fuck. They’d start a song and only make it halfway through, which isn’t saying much since the songs were 40 seconds long. At the 20-second mark, the mic went down and John Watson dove in the pit. Diego dropped his bass and jumped in there and started swinging. Only Vinnie and Robbie were left onstage. John and Diego were hard dancers. Everybody had to dodge or duck when these guys swarmed through. They were like wrecking balls smashing through walls of people. Then they’d get back up onstage and do the whole thing again. It kept going like that throughout the whole set.

“Are these guys ever going to finish a song?” I thought. “This is awful—but fucking insane to watch.”

The next time I saw AF was September 4 at a big, free show in Astoria, Queens. The show was at a center in the projects where Johnny Waste lived and it was at a party for his birthday. They were on a huge bill with Reagan Youth, Urban Waste, The Mob, Armed Citizens, Headlickers, Cavity Creeps and Shök. They did the same thing all over again and everyone loved it. Their M.O. was to be harder than anyone else and not worry about playing songs. As long as they looked fierce, played loud and left trails of destruction, everything was good.

When John Watson got arrested and went to Rikers Island, AF replaced him with Keith Burkhardt, later of Cause For Alarm, for a few shows. But Watson was back with them on November 2, 1982, when they played a legendary concert in a super-sketchy neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey, that became known as the Buff Hall show. It was Minor Threat, SS Decontrol, Agnostic Front, Flag of Democracy and Crib Death. Everyone came with their crews. There were people representing D.C., Boston, New York and New Jersey. I jumped in a car with the guys from the Psychos. Soon after we got there, someone in a car ran down Ian MacKaye and sped away. We all wondered if it was a hit or an accident, but Ian was okay and made it through the show. In addition to fans of the bands, members of Black Motorcycle Club and Ghetto Riders were there in big numbers and insisted on doing security. I wondered if it was going to turn into a situation like the show at the Altamont Speedway, where the Hell’s Angels did security for The Rolling Stones and four people got killed. But aside from Ian MacKaye getting hit by a car, nothing else major happened and Agnostic Front were the best I’d seen them. They were the band New York sent to represent us and they came away with their heads held high.

Soon after the show, Watson bailed again and they invited a guy named Jimmy the Russian to join. (Jimmy later formed the hardcore punk band Virus, which released an album on Rat Cage Records after we did.) I saw Jimmy the Russian play with Agnostic Front on a bill with Black Flag and Minutemen on March 13, 1983, at Great Gildersleeves. That was about a month before they asked me to join. Apparently, having a new vocalist didn’t calm their wild side. They sounded like an exploding airbase when they were onstage, trashed everything, stormed through the crowd and left the crowd shaking. It was intense, but I wanted to play in a band that finished songs and played a full set.

The night Raybeez asked me to join, I was torn. “I dunno, man,” I said to Adam, who had replaced Diego. “I’ve never just been a singer. I’ve always had a bass to stand behind. This might be weird.”

He was determined to get me in the band because he liked how crazed I looked onstage and dug my shaved head. Back then, AF chose new members by looking at the pit and seeing who looked the wildest. They didn’t care if you could play an instrument or sing. I asked Chessie what she thought.

“Just do it!” she said.

I figured I could play with both bands, but the Psychos were mad as hell that I joined Agnostic Front because of some imaginary rivalry Billy and Stu felt existed between the two bands. Billy didn’t care that they beat him up; he was mad because he felt I had crossed allegiances. AF were straight-up hardcore and the Psychos were hardcore punk. But I saw how insane they were onstage, and I thought that if they could generate that type of energy and finish their songs, they could be a really powerful band.

Vinnie also wanted guys who could play full shows, and he wanted some stability in the band. By the time I went to my first rehearsal, the original four were no more. But those guys’ importance in the history of the band can’t be overstated. One of the greatest characters of the original lineup was Robbie CryptCrash, who was a solid, charismatic drummer. He came from a band in Philadelphia called the CryptCrashers. There was a rumor that he’s a descendent of the Rockefellers, but he was disowned by the family because he devoted his life to punk rock and married his punk rock chick, Michelle CryptCrash, a Lower East Side girl that no one in the family liked. The family thought the two of them were like Sid and Nancy and were embarrassed by them, so he was excommunicated.

He left to play with vocalist Keith Burkhardt, bassist Rob Kabula and guitarist Alex Kinon in the newly formed Cause For Alarm. Interestingly, all four of the original Cause For Alarm guys were members of Agnostic Front at one point or another.

AF didn’t take Robbie’s departure personally and still hung out with him all the time. He remained part of the scene. The same went for John Watson, whom we raised hell with for years and who remains a good friend.

Things happened so fast that it was sometimes hard to keep track of who was coming and who was leaving. When I joined, Raymond “Raybeez” Barbieri was playing drums. He couldn’t keep a beat, but at least he stayed behind the kit. He was a total character. We were great friends up until the day he died. No one raged like that guy. Back then he had an X on his hand, as if he was straight edge, but at the same time he’d be high on angel dust. A lot of times when it was cold, and even when it wasn’t, he’d have gloves on and another pair of gloves with the fingers missing over the first pair. He’d wear three or four pairs of pants. Then he had a regular shirt on top of a t-shirt and a long-sleeve shirt over both. He used to walk around to the rehearsal studios with a bag of clothes.

Being in the band with Raybeez caused Chessie and I to break up. I liked her. It wasn’t my choice. There were three rules for being in Agnostic Front: 1) Shave your head. 2) No girlfriends. 3) Dance hard. Raybeez was especially strict about rule number two. He thought anyone who had a girl couldn’t possibly be devoted to the band, which was ridiculous. But that was the rule and I didn’t have any leverage to argue it. Chessie was so pissed when I told her we couldn’t stay together, especially since she had encouraged me to join. Raybeez was worried about girls trying to influence what we did with the band. He didn’t want a hardcore Yoko Ono trying to call the shots. It was a stupid rule, and Raybeez was only in the band for a short while after Chessie and I broke up. It didn’t matter. I was moving on.

My first show with Agnostic Front was April 16, 1983, at The Anthrax Gallery in Stanford, Connecticut. We played with CIA. I wasn’t seasoned yet, but I knew the punk rock ropes from the Psychos. I barked out the songs as best I could and no one complained. Then we prepared for the next show.

Two weeks later I was on television for the first time. On April 30, 1983, a TV program called Monitor filmed the concert for a segment they were doing on the New York hardcore scene. I had a good buzz, but I was still so nervous I was shaking. The fears I expressed to Adam were coming to light. I was used to standing behind a bass, and when you do that you automatically look like a musician. When you take the instrument away all you’ve got is the microphone. You have to be a front man.

Vinnie didn’t care what I did onstage as long as I went nuts, screamed at the top of my lungs and got in the pit and danced. At one point I ducked down and Jimmy Gestapo got onstage and jumped over my head and back into the crowd. It couldn’t have looked better if we had choreographed it. John Watson also took the mic and sang “It’s My Life,” which gave me a feeling of acceptance. He was doing his last bit and passing the torch to me.

The night the show aired we went to Vinnie’s place in Little Italy, where he grew up. He had a TV and chairs set up, and his mom made us pasta. We were so excited about our big television debut that it was all we could talk about between slurps of spaghetti. As soon as the show started, the announcer defined hardcore and how it differed from regular punk. Then the program switched to footage of our show. It was so cool to see ourselves on TV, but right away we noticed something was wrong. We were slamming, but the song we were playing wasn’t coming through the TV speaker. The producers of the show had dubbed the New York band Kraut over us. I was bummed out. It wasn’t until later that I figured out we were playing so loud that night that the audio of the show was distorted and unusable. Since we didn’t have any records out yet they went with another band’s music.

It was just as well. We weren’t at the top of our game back then. I was screaming away, sometimes not even forming real words. Vinnie was a little out of tune and sloppy, and Raybeez was struggling to keep up with Mucci’s tempos. But it was us and it was hardcore. Suddenly the media started catching onto hardcore, and it provided a lot of exposure for the scene, even though a lot of the coverage was negative. Truthfully, it hadn’t grown that big yet. Most of the concerts were still in small clubs, but it was controversial because it was explosive. Eventually all of the big talk show hosts, including Donohue, did segments on how hardcore turned healthy teenagers into raging psychopaths. At least when hardcore came to New York, it was the other way around.

I was still living in New Jersey with Elio for a while after I joined AF. We had an apartment right by the hardware store, where I was still working. But I became less reliable. I’d show up at work drunk or painfully hungover. Going back and forth between Jersey and New York became a drag. I decided to move to the Lower East Side since I spent so much time there anyway. I took over the lease on Apartment X at 188 Norfolk Street, which, at the time, was Keith Burkhardt from Cause For Alarm’s place. I had previously purchased Keith’s old Yamaha RD350 motorcycle to drive in and out of the City. Now I had his apartment. He was as happy about it as I was. He was tired of all the roaches and rats at Apartment X and decided to move to 6th Street between avenues B and C, so he signed over the place to me and I lived there for a totally event-packed year. The lease was symbolic since Apartment X was an illegal basement apartment that was falling apart. Unfinished drywall and hanging bed sheets divided the space. Shitty plumbing and lighting set the vibe for that muggy, moldy and dingy dungeon, yet everyone had their little compartment between the makeshift curtains. Every time it rained the place would flood and there’d’ be up to a foot of water. But we made the best of it.

All the bands came over to hang, drink, get high and crash on the floor. We found mattresses on the street and brought them into the place. Some of the people who crashed there never left, so there were a bunch of us living there, including the LES (Lower East Side) Girls.

They were our original girls and they were family; we were like a bunch of Mormons on acid. The LES girls were: Kym (who was my girlfriend at the time), Michelle CryptCrash, Nancy Mohawk, Lisa Bat, Leigh Marie, Dawn, Linda, Manon, Lazar, Shelly and Lucy. Five of the chicks—Michelle, Kym, Linda, Lucy and Dawn—got LES girls tattoos to show how devoted they were to our crew.

Everybody staying there got crabs. It’s impossible to tell if the crabs came from someone who was already infected or if they were living in the mattresses we dragged in from the street. All I know is these little buggers were resistant to any insecticide we used. They’d go away for a little while, but they kept coming back. They finally left for good after I visited my family in Florida and went swimming in the ocean. Maybe the salt water killed them. I used to joke that they swam away to hang out with real crabs underwater.

Lots of rats scurried inside the walls and ran through the apartment. Once, one came right out in the open while I was hanging out in my room. He didn’t seem especially dirty or scary. He wasn’t scared of me, and he seemed curious. I went towards him and he backed up a little, but he came right back. He seemed more like a dog you meet for the first time than a rat. I fed him some bread, and he stuck around and ate it. Then he looked up at me for more. I found a moldy hot dog, broke it up into pieces and fed it to him. He loved that. From that point on we were friends. I named him Simon and he became my pet. I could always tell him apart from the other rats that were uglier and nasty. Simon was gentle, almost friendly. While I was at Apartment X he’d scramble over to me and visit, and when I left the apartment I took him with me. I even took him on tour.

This is how I remember Apartment X from when I had the lease. We built our own spaces. I had a room in the back with Kym and I had two of the street mattresses on the floor. Raybeez had a front closet room that you saw when you first walked in, and he made himself a little loft. Poss had the other small room on the right, between the bathroom and the kitchen, and it was the room that always flooded. Kabula and Dawn had the other big room next to mine. Harley and Little Chris always crashed and slept in the living room on the beds we destroyed during the dust party, when we all smoked a half-ounce of dust, wrecked the place and chased Raybeez around because he had a gun.

We were castaways from mainstream society, and we formed our own demented commune. We all went to sleep at 6 or 7 a.m., so everyone woke up late. Depending on what night it was and who was playing, we’d go to one of a half-dozen or so clubs, sometimes hitting more than one. We didn’t need a concert to have a party. Some days we kicked it off by cranking killer hardcore seven-inches before going into Tompkins Square Park to listen to punk albums. Day turned into night, as we smoked angel dust, took mescaline or dropped acid and drank Ray’s Deli’s famous egg creams. Then we’d have breakfast at Odessa or Leshko’s. They were right across the street from the park, kitty-corner to the A7 club.

Since we spent our money on drugs, we’d sit outside in the afternoon and grub for change until we had enough to get breakfast. We’d usually send the girls and the younger punks like little Freddy (when he was visiting me) because they came back with the most cash. People had more sympathy for them than for degenerate punk rock teenagers whom they figured were just gonna use the money to drink and get high. They were right, but we had to eat, too.

My sister, Mayra, came to visit Apartment X once and had no idea what kind of squalor I was living in. She was only 14 and thought it would be a nice vacation. She was completely disgusted. My mom thought I was in a decent band making decent money. I never told her any different. Not long after we got to my room at Apartment X, Simon exited through a crack in the ceiling and came running down the wall. Mayra bugged out. I laughed.

“It’s just Simon,” I said. I tried to reassure her that it wasn’t some rabid animal that was going to attack her.

“You name the rats?” she snapped at me once she got over her revulsion that I was now holding a fat, furry animal with a long, bare tail.

“No, most of the rats suck. Simon’s my pet.”

“You have a pet rat? That’s just gross.”

Mayra didn’t enjoy her visit. I told her we were going to go out and eat. But first everyone had to go out in the street and grub for change, and she had to go with them to help make more money.

“What the fuck, Roger? I’m not going to beg for money,” she said.

“C’mon, just do it so we can go eat,” I laughed.

The restaurants we went to were Polish-owned and the people who ran them were polite to us. Maybe they couldn’t afford to lose our business. When you’re poor, any customer with money is a good customer. After we ate, we went back to Apartment X and did all the drugs we wanted—except Mayra. Then guys and girls hooked up for the night and everyone slept all day. We’d get up at 6 or 7 at night and start drinking to clear the cobwebs out of our heads. It wasn’t the healthiest lifestyle, but being a degenerate was part of the program and we were all having a blast. Also, we protected our own. Once in a while, guys in local gangs would see our girls and try to win them over. We weren’t having any of that. As soon as we saw them we pulled our chain belts off and started swinging.

“C’mon, motherfucker! Let’s see you hittin’ on our girls now!”

Most of these girls were close to us and we protected them like family, the way a big brother would stand watch over his little sister. A lot of the people in the hardcore scene in New York back then were runaways from abusive families or misfits that couldn’t get by in ordinary society. They all filtered down to the Lower East Side and a lot of them found the same kind of acceptance that I found. We were a community. We were there for one another.

One time, one of the punk chicks got raped. She came into the A7 club sobbing and told us how it happened and who did it. I saw red. We all did. One of our sisters had been violently sexually violated. A lot of girls in the scene had been molested or abused in their youth, and we were damned if we were going to let it happen here. We went outside with bats, found the guy and threw a little boot party. We were swinging for the bleachers, and he was cowering on the ground. Crack! We heard his ribs break. Crunch! A quick golf swing and his jaw was shattered! It was a flurry of mob violence because we were protecting our own and punishing a scumbag. We didn’t care if we wrecked him. He deserved a beating. I don’t know if the guy walked away. It was street justice, hardcore-style.

Back then, Avenue A was dangerous as fuck and the rest of Alphabet City was even worse. There would be a building that looked normal, and then there would be five more buildings that were destroyed and leveled. It was like someone’s mouth was open and there were teeth missing. Everything was burnt out—entire streets. If you went between avenues C and D, all of 7th, 8th and 9th Street looked like they had been bombed. There were complete blocks where there was maybe one building standing. Everything else had crumbled. Whatever was left was covered with graffiti.

We had nicknames for all the streets. Avenue A was adventurous, B was bold, C was crazy and, if you wanted to get really nuts, Avenue D was deadly. That’s where the heart of the projects were and where the serious gangbangers lived. People who weren’t from the hood got stabbed or beaten up badly if they trespassed. But if you stayed in your place and stuck with your own, you had a good chance of making it through the night.

The area was infested with packs of wild dogs, stray cats, even wild roosters. All the abandoned buildings—even the places we considered safe—were used for selling drugs. Everything was on the menu, from heroin down to marijuana, though a lot of the heavier stuff got dealt on the street. If you were buying weed, you left the store and smoked it wherever you wanted. The junkies scoring smack wandered over to the shooting galleries on Avenue C.

Almost the entire East Village was a thrilling mixture of grit, grime and great art. Since it was underdeveloped, the area was affordable. Every storefront was occupied by artists, musicians and weed dealers. There was an abundance of creativity, and the streets teemed with life. Between the elements of danger, the creativity of the art community and the intensity of the musicians, it was a wild, dangerous, wonderful scene.