Chapter 19

Originally we had no intention of calling our second record Cause For Alarm. That was a move to placate Alex. The rest of us were bouncing all over the place, stoked by every new idea and song. Alex seemed less excited. He looked like he was going with the flow, as if he didn’t care much about what he was doing. Today, I realize that’s his personality and he probably was into the music we were making. It didn’t feel like it at the time, though, and that bummed me out. I did everything I could to make him feel welcome and happy to be in Agnostic Front. He perked up when I told him I wanted to call the album Cause For Alarm.

I always felt like he was resentful of something. It seemed like he was mad that we had stolen Cause For Alarm’s thunder. Cause For Alarm was the big NYHC band and they released a record and went on a national tour way before we did. They were always praised and admired, and we were the laughing stock of New York because we didn’t know how to play our instruments and were like a train wreck to watch. When Cause For Alarm were on the road, or weren’t performing because of their internal struggles, we became a stronger band. Still, I don’t know why Alex agreed to join AF, but he did. He and Kabula wrote all this crazy metal stuff that had a lot more riffs than anything off Victim In Pain and was influenced by Slayer, Exodus and Venom. Jimmy Colletti hated it and didn’t like the direction we were headed in, so he left. The way he quit was really strange.

He came to practice with us one day in 1985, and then disappeared. He didn’t come to our next practice. He never tried to contact me. I didn’t hear from him again until 1997. For a while I didn’t know if he was alive or dead. I found out later that for ten years after he quit, he was in and out of jail for various crimes. Whenever he got bored he’d call Vinnie, who was the only one that had an apartment with a phone. If we were on the road, Jimmy would leave a message for him with someone, and when we were at home Vinnie talked to him. For more than a decade Vinnie never told us that he was in somewhat regular contact with the guy. We weren’t always the most communicative people when it came to our personal lives.

I talked to Connie about our dilemma. She was older than us and more into old-school metal than hardcore, but she liked us. She was always good to talk to—friendly, efficient and never condescending. She suggested we recruit Louie Beateaux from Carnivore.

I wasn’t gung-ho about bringing more metal into the equation, but I liked the idea of going with someone we already knew. We went to Carnivore’s rehearsal space in Brooklyn and took turns rehearsing. Louie would play with them, drink a tall glass of water, wipe off his mouth and practice with us. I didn’t know how Pete Steele would feel about that, but he fuckin’ loved it. He watched us rehearse and went out of his mind, bouncing around the room as if he were at a show.

Louie was a different kind of drummer compared to Jimmy Colletti, Raybeez, Dave Jones or Petey Hines. He was precise and flashy, and he was inspired by a lot of metal, from Black Sabbath to Motörhead. Jimmy would have hated the way our music sounded, and I had mixed feelings about it. At that point, the metal dudes in the band outnumbered the hardcore guys three to two, so Alex and Rob went to town. While I had taken the lead for songwriting on Victim In Pain, I stepped into the background for Cause For Alarm. I brought in a few hardcore-based songs and that made me more comfortable. But between the drugs, relationship problems and the musical shift, there was a time when I wasn’t all there.

I was having trouble writing lyrics, and I needed help. I was so desperate I started the song “The Eliminator” with slogans from a bunch of T-shirts I saw at an Army/Navy store: “Killing’s my business and business is fine / Firing squad, electrocute, we’ll execute / More than one face of death / Kill ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out / A soldier of fortune, I’ll wipe ‘em all out.”  

It’s not like I didn’t have any ideas. I wanted to do a song about Bernard Goetz, the subway vigilante who shot four guys that tried to mug him in 1984. He fired five times and seriously injured all the dudes. Then he surrendered and was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and carrying a concealed handgun. A jury found him innocent of everything except one charge of carrying an unlicensed firearm. People freaked out. One of the people he shot suffered brain damage and lost the use of his limbs. He sued Goetz and won $43 million. It was a huge issue that sparked debate about race, crime and gun possession. I also wanted to have a song about all the waste in Staten Island, but I didn’t know what to say for either song.

To give credit where credit is due, I asked Pete Steele if he could help me out and he was happy to lend a hand. I told him about the ideas I was having trouble putting into words and Pete decided what to write. Honestly, I was looking for inspiration to stay in the band, and before I knew it we had “Bernie Gets His Man,” “Toxic Shock” and “Public Assistance,” which ultimately became the most controversial track that we’ve ever done.

Critics gave Pete, a Brooklyn white guy, a lot of grief for allegedly being racist because of the lyrics: “How come it’s minorities who cry things are too tough / On TV with their gold chains, claim they don’t have enough / I say make them clean the sewers, Don’t take no resistance / If they don’t like it go to hell and cut their public assistance.”

Those were actually my thoughts based on things I witnessed and experienced, and he expressed them perfectly. I was a minority kid whose mom was on welfare and I saw all the time how other people in our neighborhood abused the system. Public assistance was designed to help people better their lives and move on, not to enable the families that used it. Those are the people the song was aimed at.

That’s not how some people saw it, and the controversy quickly spread to the mainstream media. When Phil Donohue did a show about what he perceived to be the negative effects of hardcore on teenagers, he broadcast lyrics from the song on the screen.

“This has got a kind of reactionary look to it, doesn’t it? Have we got racism here?” Donohue asked the crowd. No. I called it as I saw it. What does Phil Donohue know about poverty?

Fortunately, Vinnie was in the crowd and he defended the song and the band: “We just speak of social unrest,” he told Donohue. “Conflict of interests and turmoil bring controversy and it speaks for itself.”

Even with all the negative press, I was glad Pete Steele worked on the lyrics and relieved I didn’t have to come up with vocal rhythms or be in the practice room with the guys. I didn’t have any idea how the songs for the album were going, and I didn’t care. When I realized I didn’t care I got worried. Then I quit.

“I can’t do this. It’s not me,” I told Kabula.

“What do you mean it’s not you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not hardcore. It’s something else and I don’t know how I feel about it. I need to step away for a minute.”

“Well, how long is a minute?”

“I can’t say. I need a break. Do what you gotta do.”

I left Agnostic Front for about four months. Vinnie was cool with whatever I wanted to do. I was a big mess, and he supported me during my existential crisis. It wasn’t just the music that was weighing heavily on my mind.

I was hanging with the NYHC crew one night outside A7, and some bad shit went down. I was flying high on mescaline and Quaaludes. I went to support some friends who were fighting with dudes who looked like they were from a Latin gang.

I squared off with one guy who was wielding a knife. He lunged towards me and I dodged the blade. He swung around with his free hand to punch me and got me in the chest, but it didn’t knock me back. Then he hit me again with the same hand. Just as he pulled back his knife and prepared to thrust, I jabbed him a couple times in the arm and shoulder with a sharpened, rusty, old screwdriver and he dropped the knife. I pushed him aside. He held his wounded arm and looked at me in disbelief. Then we heard police sirens and took off.

Witnesses at the scene told the cops I was the aggressor and gave them my description. A sketch artist drew a picture of me. Suddenly police were looking for a guy with a spider tattooed on his neck. I was a marked man.

It’s a good thing I had connections and was able to deal with the situation. During the day I had been doing construction for a plastic surgeon who lived on the Upper East Side. In exchange for some free work, he offered to do laser surgery on my neck to get rid of the spider. The first treatment was rushed, and each time he zapped away at the ink under my skin, it felt like I was being cut with a bent steak knife. It was a thousand times more painful than a tattoo gun. I was supposed to have two more treatments, but I blew them off and grew my hair to cover what was left of the spider on my neck. I faded into the background where policemen and gang members couldn’t find me. That meant staying off stage.

I wasn’t the only guy doing construction for the good doctor. I don’t know if the other dudes got paid in surgical procedures as well. While Dr. Facelift was striking deals with these guys who did manual labor, they were making their own deals right under the doctor’s nose. During the day, there was a little school bus that stopped in front of the site. Inside the bus was a guy selling coke. In the morning one of the workers would go in and buy a bag, then we would split it up, get coked out and work like crazy. It kept our energy levels up and allowed us to work much faster and longer than usual.

I felt like I was in the right place. I had always been a hard worker, and maybe what I needed to do to get my shit together was adopt a more normal lifestyle. I thought about giving up music and working in a club or going back to the hardware store. I needed to get a place of my own to think about these things, so Paul Bearer from Sheer Terror and I moved into my close friend Paula Reinhardt’s barn in Staten Island with about eight pit bulls. We called it The Pit Farm. It was in Stapleton near the projects, and the place was bare-bones—just a roof and four walls. There was no hot water and no shower. Some people get grossed out by conditions like that. It wasn’t a big deal for me. I had been living in vans and abandoned buildings. I liked being away from the City, and I loved the dogs.

There’s a cultural bias against pit bulls. It’s a stigma that has turned into a mass hysteria. The media run stories about how pits have turned on their owners or attacked children. That only happens when the dogs aren’t taken care of or if they come from abusive upbringings. They’re like people in that way. They get scared and paranoid, and they need to be in a loving environment to be reprogrammed. If they’re around kids who pull their ears or tails or poke them, of course they’ll lash out because they have a history of being abused. Any abused or cornered animal will strike out in defense. That goes for humans, too.

One day I got bit by one of the dogs, Oscar. It was an accident. He was blind and he didn’t even know he bit me. As soon as he heard my voice, he let go, but he chewed me up pretty good. The doctor couldn’t do anything about it. I probably could have used stitches, but I just let it heal.

During the time I was out of Agnostic Front they had a temporary singer named Carl “The Mosher” Demola, who had been in the Psychos and The Icemen. Carl was a good friend and was infamous for going crazy at shows. When he went into the pit, he had his own style and everyone gave him his space when he danced. He never played a show with Agnostic Front. He rehearsed with them a bunch, but right after my dog bit me, Vinnie stopped by the Pit Farm before a CBGB show that Agnostic Front were booked to play.

“We’ve got a show coming up at CBGB. Can you play it? We really miss you.”

“What about Carl?” I asked.

“He’s cool, but it’s not the same without you up there.”

Vinnie was really persuasive. He could talk bears out of the caves they were hibernating in. I did the CBGB gig with my arm in a sling (because of the dog bite) and a bandage over the third degree burn on my neck (where the tattoo was removed). The crowd went crazy, like normal. Nobody in the public knew I had left the band. They just wondered what the fuck happened to my arm and neck.

“All right, I guess I’m back in,” I said after the gig.

We started recording Cause For Alarm a week after the CBGB show. We tracked the record at Systems II in Brooklyn, which was basically a warehouse, and Norman Dunn produced it. I was sick with the flu and didn’t feel well enough to enter the studio, but we were on a deadline.

“I don’t feel good. I don’t want to do this now,” I said.

“Dude, you can do it! We gotta get this thing done and release it!” Kabula said.

It’s one of those records I wish I could have redone because I was sick. I didn’t have a lot of time to learn the songs and rehearse them with the band, so I wasn’t vocally or mentally prepared. The other guys have said in interviews that I was missing from the sessions and didn’t work that much with the songs. That’s true, but honestly, I didn’t want to be on Cause For Alarm. Vinnie dragged me back into the band. Even though I was working with them again, it wasn’t like everything had suddenly changed. I still wasn’t comfortable with the metal material.

Everything about Cause For Alarm was a challenge—even the artwork. We hired Sean Taggart, an amazing cartoon artist, to make the cover. He used to sing in the early hardcore band Shök, but he was best known for the flyers he did for hardcore shows. Mostly, he did work for Cro-Mags and was their in-house flyer guy. After we decided to work with him for Cause For Alarm art, Sean wanted me to check in with the Cro-Mags. That was a fair request, and they were cool with it.

The images he came up with for that album were classic, and lots of our fans have gotten them tattooed on their bodies. The background featured an American flag, but you could hardly see it because there were demented figures in front of it. On the top left was a winged demon with a nose ring. There was a bald guy in a suit eating from a spoon that was full of screaming people. On the bottom were three punks. The one on the left had green hair and his mouth was wide open, exposing rows of crooked teeth. Next to him was a skinhead holding a gun to the head of dude with a Mohawk.

At first, Steve Sinclair, who ran Combat Records, rejected the artwork because he thought it was too cartoony and didn’t think it was shocking enough. Sean was pissed as hell, so he drafted up a second cover, the “Eliminator,” that was more controversial than the first. A military leader was holding a chain attached to a growling pit bull. Behind him were five fully exposed nude bodies hanging on meat hooks and a wall splattered with blood. On the bottom left, one naked guy was curled up in a ball and covering his head with his hands. The guy from the military was looking right at him, like he was going to be the next victim. When Sinclair saw the new art, he freaked out and said it was too shocking! How crazy is that? Here’s a label that eventually put out records by Carcass, Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower and all these extreme metal bands with graphically violent or Satanic covers. Steve agreed to use Sean’s original image. We loved both images, so we decided to use the more grisly “Eliminator” drawing on our tour shirts and merchandise mail order. He also designed the promo poster art for the label, which was killer, and we used it for T-shirts, too. Sean Taggart later drew the amazing cover art for the Crumbsuckers’ Life of Dreams and got a job as an illustrator for DC Comics.

With Cause For Alarm, from the music to the artwork, we came to the table and smashed it to pieces. Over time it became one of our best-received records, and it’s widely regarded as the ultimate crossover record for its time. Some people didn’t get it right away. Other fans never got it. I’m still not sure which of those two categories I fit into.