Chapter 20

The first show we did for Cause For Alarm was with Lou at CBGB. Youth of Today opened for us. We took the stage and did a song from Victim In Pain before announcing that we were playing some of the new material. There was a mixed reaction. Fans were psyched to see us perform our new songs with Alex, but they didn’t know how to take the music, especially the hardcore kids. They were confused. They were used to United Blood and Victim In Pain, and suddenly we were playing these crazy metallic songs full of guitar solos. We only did two more shows with that lineup since Lou had commitments to Carnivore. It was time to find another drummer.

Alex still seemed troubled and unhappy, even after we named the album after his old band and even after he and Rob had free reign to add all this metal to our sound. We played a show in Montreal, which was cool, but Alex wasn’t feeling it. He was bummed that Louie was leaving. He wasn’t happy with the record. I felt like he wanted it to be more metal and wanted us to evolve into a straight-up metal band like Metallica. At least that’s what I thought until I found out 25 years later that he never felt like a full band member. We didn’t do anything to make him feel more comfortable when we did that show with him in Montreal. When we finished our set, people wanted to hear more, so we played songs from United Blood that Alex didn’t know. He just stood there on the side of the stage and felt awkward. He was pretty upset about that, but we had no idea since he never told us. After the show, Alex quit.

To this day, I feel badly about it, and looking back, I wish we could have felt more comfortable playing together. We wanted to please our fans, but we ended up distancing a good friend. That was never our intention. Alex is a good guy and a bro. He went through a lot with us and helped us make a legendary record.

Kabula was bummed because he lost his songwriting partner. It was time to rebuild. We auditioned drummers first, and that’s how Joe “Fish” Montanaro came into the picture. He had no idea how we rolled. He showed up for the audition and was really good. He nailed all the beats and tempo shifts and injected some stylistic fills into the songs. It was clear he could play, but he had no idea about how we toured or what our lifestyles were like.

Joe wasn’t hardcore. He was a big guido from Howard Beach. Long before he joined the band, his dad worked for the Mafia as a bookie and numbers guy. But he did something that upset his boss, who took him “for a ride.” Police found him cut up in pieces inside a metal drum. It was a typical Mafia hit. I don’t know how close Joe was to his father, but he was really shaken by that.

With Joe onboard we started looking for a new guitarist, and hooked up with Gordon Ancis, who had played with an early crossover band called NYC Mayhem. He didn’t quite fit with our image because he had wild hair that made him look like Howard Stern. But he knew our songs, and was young, hungry, super-excited and part of our scene. He had never been on tour, and we were psyched to show him the ropes. First we needed to help him straighten out an ugly situation at home.

Gordon’s mom was a sweet Jewish lady, but her boyfriend was abusive and knocked around Gordon, his sister and his mom. One day after rehearsal we went back to his house and found his mom crying. She had just been beaten up. It reminded me too much of my own upbringing, and I wanted Gordon to stand up for himself and protect the women in his family.

“Gordon, man. You can’t let this guy hit your mom,” I said in a calm, serious voice.

“You don’t know him. He’s got a bad temper.”

I knew all about bad tempers, and I decided that if Gordon wasn’t going to do something I would. Montanaro backed me up. We sat with Gordon and waited for his mom’s boyfriend to get home. We were in his high-rise apartment on York Avenue in a ritzy part of town. When we heard the knob on the front door turn, Joe and I got ready. I grabbed a chair and swung it down on the guy. I hit him in the back. He didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Joe hit him with a left-right combination and he went down. I kept hitting him with the chair, pounding and pounding him. He turned to look up at me and put a hand up—maybe to ask for mercy, maybe to block the chair. I swung down even harder and his nose exploded. Blood splashed over his collared shirt and tie. He rolled over and scrambled into the kitchen. I kept hitting him with the chair. Finally, he stopped moving, but he was still conscious. His face was swelling up like a water balloon. I kneeled down and put my mouth right up to his battered ear and told him if he ever beat Gordon’s mom or anyone else in the family, we would kill him.

That gave his mom some hope and courage. She kicked her boyfriend out and he never came back. Gordon’s mom was nice to us before, but she had a new respect for us and was astonished that we stepped into a situation that didn’t directly concern us. I didn’t think what we had done was heroic. It was simply the right thing to do.

Gordon’s birth parents were divorced, but Gordon stayed in contact with his dad, who was a professional joke writer. One of his main clients was his roommate, Rodney Dangerfield, a funny-looking dude whose comedy routine revolved about how he didn’t get any respect and was always treated like shit. When we opened for Slayer in New York at The Ritz on December 7, 1986, Rodney Dangerfield introduced us. It was great that Gordon’s dad made that happen, but I don’t think Rodney felt too comfortable in a rock club with skinheads and headbangers. He spoke so fast we couldn’t understand a thing he said. All I could make out was “I don’t get no respect” and then, “Ladies and gentlemen, Agnostic Front!”

Gordon had never been in such a reckless band and didn’t really party, but he handled himself by staying away from us when we were on a tear. I respected that, though I wished he had a bigger set of balls. I never got into a physical fight with him, but I messed with his head a lot. Gordon was a virgin when he joined the band. I told him that before he went on tour with us, he had to have an orgy. I said that I’d set it up and that he should take a shower and come to Dave Da Skin’s house at 3 p.m. He was really nervous, but I told him that if he was going on the road he had to be able to deal with weird situations. I told him we got drunk and had gangbangs all the time, which wasn’t true, but he believed me. He came over to Dave’s and took off all his clothes. I stripped naked, and so did our friend Alexa.

“C’mon, Gordon, dude. You gotta get into it,” I said. “Make a move!”

He just stood there with his shirt off for a minute. When he was about to drop his pants we all started laughing.

“Dude, we’re fucking with you,” I said “Put your shirt back on.”

He was totally embarrassed and turned red. He scrambled for his clothes and ran out as fast as he could. Eventually, Gordon did get laid on the tour.

Joe wasn’t a virgin, but he had never been in a band, so he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing and he bugged the shit out of us all the time. He went from practicing drums at home along with records to being on the road as a piece of this crazy hardcore machine. He was so not hardcore. He was corny and rude, and he used to embarrass us. He had a Mohawk, but it was a bullshit Mohawk because he kept his mullet. He just looked like an idiot with a confused hairstyle. Once, before a show, he was sitting in the club ripping his pants.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I said.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m tearing my jeans before I go onstage.”

“You dick. You’ve gotta earn those rips,” I said. “Go put on another pair of pants.”

The first tour with Joe was a nightmare. We came to blows because he didn’t understand that we had to live on $3 a day when we were on tour. When you got your $3, you would get two hot dogs and a drink at a Super-K. That was our life for months. On his first day, this idiot bought marinated olives. He blew his $3 in one fell swoop. Then he tried bumming off us. We wound up swinging at one another and then rolling around on the ground screaming. That was nothing unusual. The trailer behind the van that held our gear became like our steel cage for combat. When there was some sort of conflict, we went in there and duked it out, blow for blow. I threw down with everybody in my band except Vinnie.

There were several times when Joe and I would be locked in the trailer high as fuck, throwing coffee mugs and glasses and trying to kill each other. But I gotta give Joe credit. He hung in there. He’d scream like a combat soldier and whip glasses back at me, and they’d smash against the wall. Eventually we made peace, but he was never one of us.

Joe’s commitment to metal was emblematic of a growing schism in the scene. Some hardcore kids had a problem with bands tapping more into a metal sound, so there was a real division between the crossover metal kids who loved Cause For Alarm and the old-school hardcore fans that hated it.

We played a show at Rock Hotel with Murphy’s Law. They all wore wigs onstage to make fun of metal kids, because they hated that crossover was getting popular. We loved Murphy’s Law, but we didn’t think that was cool since I had grown my hair and Cause For Alarm appealed to thrash metal kids. A lot of them saw us as a gateway band and they came to our shows. Murphy’s Law were being elitist and territorial, trying to claim some sort of purity for the New York hardcore scene. A lot of the time it came down to how a band presented itself. If they looked hardcore but sounded metal, they were often given some slack. But when you had a guy like Joe Montanaro in the band trying to high-five guys in the front row, that was a serious blow to your hardcore cred.

Between tours I was living in a really nice warehouse apartment that I had fixed up to suit my taste. While life was improving for me on the Lower East Side, things were going to shit for my little brother Freddy back in Florida. Eventually the situation got so bad that my mom called and asked if my brother could stay with me for a while. I was happy to have him, and pretty soon it became clear that he was better off with us. We tried to be responsible. We enrolled him in school, which is crazy since we never had legal custody. Freddy never wanted to go to school, even as a little kid. He was impossible to wake up in the morning.

By the time we headed out on tour, Freddy was back in Florida, but he never stayed there for long.