Chapter 31

Even though the Ritz crowd had been huge and the offers to play other gigs were flattering, the hardcore scene was heading towards its lowest point since its inception. I couldn’t believe how much everything had changed in just 18 months. Part of the reason it became smaller was because it had gotten so dangerous. The mosh pits were violent and unpredictable free-for-alls. There was no structure whatsoever. The people were different and the music was different. It was a little unnerving. At least we knew that as soon as we took the stage the crowd was gonna blow up for us, regardless of what they were previously into. We always got a good reaction when we played live.

There had always been a risk of violence at New York hardcore shows, but usually not in the pit. Before, if anyone bullied someone who was dancing or moshing they had to deal with me, Jimmy G, Raybeez or one of the other guys who kept the pits moving. We made sure everyone was having fun and no one was there just to hurt other people. Suddenly, people in the pit were acting crazy and decking guys who were smaller than they were. Kids were getting beat up over stupid things. I didn’t like that and I knew it wasn’t a smart place for me to be in case the cops showed up.

I focused more on my family. Amy, Nadia and I were living in our house in Staten Island, but we couldn’t keep up the payments. The projects had expanded, so we couldn’t sell the house for what we paid. We ended up in foreclosure, and the bank took it away.

Amy found a squat on 11th Street between B and C, and we worked on it together full-force so that we could move our family in. Back then, it wasn’t hard to find a place; it was just difficult to keep it. A lot of the buildings on the Lower East Side were owned by landlords who had mortgages to pay. They couldn’t charge rent because the places were in such bad shape and they were losing money. A lot of them hired arsonists to set fire to their buildings so they could collect the insurance money. It wasn’t legal, but if they were careful they usually didn’t get caught. A lot of the buildings that weren’t torched remained empty for years as they fell apart.

A couple of the squats we moved into—besides the legendary Eastern Front—burned down. There’s no way to know whether it was faulty electrical or landlords looking for a return on their failed investment. All I know is the fires caused a lot of heartache and property damage, and one of them could have killed Freddy.

Back in 1991, when Freddy was 14, he was home alone with my dog Vern, who was in a cage. Vern was a Jack Russell terrier, and he could get out of any crate. We didn’t want him wandering around the house, eating whatever he could find and shitting on the floor, so we were crate-training him. He had a cone on his head from the vet. Amy, Nadia and I were out since AF were playing a show with The Bruisers in New Hampshire. While we were gone, the place went up in flames. Freddy was sleeping, but he woke up coughing from the smoke and managed to get out unharmed. Sadly, Vern was in his crate and died in the blaze. If he didn’t have that damned cone on his head he may have escaped. There was another casualty of that fire: my cherished record collection. I lost some amazing gems, like first pressings of records by Misfits, Necros, Fix, Pagans and many New York hardcore bands, as well as a wall of posters and memorabilia. Three of the squats Amy and I lived in caught fire. I wasn’t living there when the last one burnt down in 1995, but Nadia and Amy were there watching my two dogs while I was away. They started barking and woke up Nadia. They saved her life.

The place we picked out when we left our Staten Island house wasn’t even an apartment. Talk about an open concept. When we walked in there was no floor and no roof. We took over the whole building with 10 or 12 other working-class families—not punks. We wanted to live in a place that was more family-oriented. We all worked together to build a roof and floors, make stairs and repair the walls. Each floor had two doors and a living space.

One guy was really good at mudding, which you do after you lay down drywall. So I did the drywalling and he mudded up the walls in exchange for some electrical work. I wired our whole apartment for almost no money using leftover parts from my electrical jobs. I found a barn heater for the main room, put air conditioning in my daughter’s room and installed a shower. Some visitors said it was nicer than a lot of regular New York City apartments. In all honestly, it was!

When Amy and I worked together on the squat, we got along better than we had in a while. But we had been through a lot and there was too much baggage for the seams not to burst. We met when we were young and we probably would have split up way sooner, but we stayed together to try to do the right thing for our daughter. That’s what I had been doing since day one. I always had good intentions. It’s my actions that weren’t always legit.

I worked more electrical jobs and spent time with Nadia. I avoided a lot of riff-raff because I didn’t want anything else to happen, and everyone around me knew it. The episode at 99X wasn’t an isolated incident. Any time something was going to happen anywhere, someone would tell me to leave. If I was at a bar and two guys were about to go at it, I’d hear, “Roger, man. Get out of here,” before anyone threw a punch.

Even though I looked over my shoulder when I was at clubs and bars, I still loved being onstage. I’d been doing it since I was 16. When we played shows I felt like I was where I was supposed to be. It was good to be with the band again, and I loved seeing my hardcore family in the pit, even though that family had become a minority, I loved looking out at the people in the crowd who were psyched to see me performing again.

A lot of bands have great memories of going to England for the first time and spending a few weeks playing all the neighboring countries. Not me! The first Agnostic Front European tour was a complete disaster! We were booked by Syd and Loraligh, two pen-pal friends. Maybe we were doomed from the start, but that’s the way things worked. Syd was in a hardcore band called Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers (CCM), who were based in Pisa, Italy. I guess he didn’t know I was Cuban-born. We flew into Holland on October 16, 1990, they stamped my passport and let me in.

We drove to Germany with no hassle at the border and played in a big circus tent in Oberhausen, Germany, with a psychedelic alternative group called Space Monkeys. The members of the audience didn’t know whether to come closer to check us out or cover their heads and flee for the exit, so they stood at a distance from the stage looking uncomfortable. It was a strange way to start, and it was about to get weirder. We drove to Belgium to continue the tour, and when we got to the border we handed over our passports. I wasn’t an American citizen yet and still had my Cuban passport. No one told me I needed a visa to get into each country. The customs officers detained me, questioned me and deported me. I had to catch the next flight back to New York.

The rest of the guys continued with the tour and got our roadie, Mike Shost, to sing. Man, did he have a good time! And I’m not talking about the thrill you get from fronting a hardcore band. For years, Mike would go to local bars and tell girls that he was the singer of Agnostic Front to get them into bed. He had the pictures to prove it—he was onstage singing with our banner behind him and the guys playing next to him. I didn’t know he exploited his brief tenure in the band like that until many years later, when my then-wife, Denise, was bartending at Wetlands and told me this crazy story.

She was pouring drinks for customers when one of her best friends from high school, whom she had lost touch with, came up to her. They were happy to see one another and started talking. The girl said, “Oh, my God! You’ll never believe whom I married.”

“Who?” Denise asked.

“I married the singer from Agnostic Front!”

“You’re married to Roger?” said Denise. For a split-second she wondered if I was living a double life or if this girl was bat-shit crazy.

“Who’s Roger?” the girl answered.

She had married Mike Shost! I didn’t see him much after the European tour, but apparently a lot of Agnostic Front groupies did. And one of them ended up marrying him!

When we returned from our comeback tour, we went into recording mode. We locked ourselves up in a rehearsal space for a couple months and wrote songs. This time there was less fucking around. I wasn’t partying anymore and was focused on making a great album. When we weren’t writing, we’d sit at my kitchen table over homemade cockroach-spiked paella and go over lyrics with Craig and Matt line by line to make sure they had the right flow.

For the first time, I wanted to release a record that had a strong theme. It’s a full-blown concept album like The Wall or Tommy; I wanted to tell my story about going to prison. “New Jack” is about walking into prison and being approached by an old-timer there who explains what life behind bars is all about: “You thought in the streets that your life was so unfair and cruel, make one careless mistake here, boy, and you’ll drown in your own pool / So take this advice, stay alert and on cue / Keep only to yourself and your ears in sharp tune.”

“Over the Edge” is about being betrayed by the guys I had worked with: “I thought you were a friend I’d trust ’til end /These days you learn to trust no one, you must include those closest friends.”

At the last minute we needed one more song so I wrote “Bastard” about my stepfather. It only took a half-hour to complete, musically and lyrically. Although it didn’t quite fit in with the prison theme, my experiences with my stepdad are part of the story of how I landed behind bars. Plus, it was therapeutic to write exactly how I felt about that abusive coward: “When it came down for mental support, a blatant strike was how you would resort / Tell me what I have done wrong to deserve such pain so strong.”

I liked having a record that told my story. I didn’t want to glorify prison, so I told it like it was and explained how it strengthened me as a man. I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. There were a lot of nightmares that I’d rather forget. But it lets you know who you are. It grounds you. You learn exactly how to walk the line. If you don’t, you perish.

We planned to record One Voice at Normandy Sound in Rhode Island. Matt wanted to record it with Tom Soares, who had worked with Cro-Mags and Leeway. We booked the studio and Tom tracked with the band for two or three days. When I showed up with Don Fury, who was going to help engineer the album and work with me on my vocals, Tom took off. He appeared nervous and said he had to leave and do last-minute sound for the band Scatterbrain. Was seeing Don Fury in his studio intimidating, or did Tom’s by-the-book, radio-minded, technical approach clash with Don’s homegrown, hardcore way of doing things? Tom might have felt slighted, but thank God Don Fury was there.

Tom told us we’d be in good hands with his engineer, Jamie Locke, and he couldn’t wait to hear the record when it was done. Jamie seemed talented, but he didn’t know us and he didn’t know our scene. Don Fury was a friend and we wanted to get some of that old, classic New York hardcore sound out of him. One Voice came out in 1992, and it was one of those pace-setting records. It was different than anything that was coming out—a mixture of old-school grit and new-school groove—and it introduced a new sound to NYHC. Again, AF were on the forefront of something unprecedented.

Having a new record out felt like a real accomplishment. I already knew I could still perform onstage after I got out of prison. The album proved to me that I hadn’t lost my ability to express myself in the studio. In fact, my songwriting got better. But there was no question that the album was less popular than Liberty & Justice For… and Cause For Alarm. The scene had gotten smaller. A lot of punks, skins and hardcore kids from the ’80s had moved on.

We were biggest during our Cause For Alarm cycle, but we didn’t want to return to that sound. All our records sound different even though they’re recognizable as Agnostic Front. Our attitude has always been Let’s always be on the edge of the scene, not caught up in the wave we helped invent and that everyone else was playing. We don’t like to follow anything, even ourselves. And we’ve always played with different members in different studios, which has contributed to our shifting sound.

In addition to being a cohesive concept album, One Voice introduced what would be considered new-school hardcore. If you dropped my vocals off the record and put my brother Freddy on instead, it would sound like a Madball album, but with a bunch of killer leads. You can attribute most of that to Matt Henderson’s guitar style combined with the rhythm section of Will Shepler and Craig Setari. All those guys played a big role in One Voice. They’ll always be my brothers and they’ll always have my thanks.

Musically One Voice is a crazy train ride and a lot of people love it, but they started loving it a while after it came out. The hardcore scene didn’t take to the album right away. People hated it, which was a bummer because we worked so hard on it. We went from Liberty & Justice For…, which was chaotic and on the verge of speedcore, to One Voice, which was raw but fresher and had more groove to it. The people who liked Cause For Alarm and Liberty & Justice For… were, like, “What the fuck is this? We wanted something wild and crazier.”

Looking back, it was a transitional record for us, and it showed change and growth within the band. A lot of people who lived with it for a while say it’s one of their favorites. As American bands often say when something didn’t go exactly right, it did phenomenally well in Europe. And the shows there were huge.

But huge didn’t always mean great. Some people in the German hardcore community didn’t welcome us because we didn’t fit in anywhere between Fugazi and Bad Religion. They bought into the hateful shit in Maximumrocknroll. Some haters printed up a seven-inch bootleg that featured us on one side and a band called White Pride on the other. I guess it was their idea of a sick joke; I didn’t think it was funny and it caused us some grief. Some of our supporters hated that they were trying to align AF with White Pride. They were outraged and scratched up the A-side in the shape of the anarchy symbol. They put a sticker on the record depicting the German flag with a zipper on it, a swastika and the words “Bad News.”

We once played an anti-fascist show in Berlin at So36, which led to a deep friendship between the So36 community and us. It also caused a big misunderstanding. We performed in front of a big anti-Nazi banner—a swastika smashed by a fist. So36 was packed and stage-divers swarmed the front of the stage for the whole night. Later, a picture from that show was used to depict us as fascists!

The photo was shot from the left side of the stage and the person who took it was standing at a weird angle. The shot caught a stage-diver in front of me and a big swastika flag behind me. The fist smashing the swastika wasn’t visible. When you’re playing a benefit show to oppose fascism, you never think that people will misinterpret—or misrepresent—your motivation. Even something as innocent as lifting a hand to show unity can be viewed in a photo as something terribly wrong, like sieg heiling a crowd!

Aside from the bizarre and unexpected episodes in Germany (where we still make lots of new friends), the European tour was a lot of fun and we sold a bunch of records there—more than we did in America. There might have been a reason for that.

In Europe the record came out on Roadrunner Records. They put it out on vinyl, cassette and CD, just like all their big releases, and they gave it a lot of love. We did tons of press in every country and got great bookings for the entire tour.

I don’t know if Relativity still had some sour grapes over when we brought Murder Inc. to our meeting or if the label just didn’t understand the record, but they didn’t do anything to help us out. The marketing and promotions department seemingly didn’t even know the record was out and One Voice was Relativity’s first record that was only released on CD. Back then people listened to hardcore on vinyl. Maybe that’s why One Voice was not well received in the U.S. Our U.S. concerts were still strong—maybe because, unlike the vast majority of hardcore shows, Agnostic Front shows were still unpredictable. It wasn’t the ’80s anymore, but you still never knew what would happen and if something crazy might go down.

If a security guard got out of hand and manhandled the kids, I’d reach out and crack him in the head with the mic. They usually figured out I wouldn’t put up with their shit, so they stopped it. Sometimes they needed a little extra prodding. During a hometown One Voice record release show at the Palladium on June 17, 1992, the atmosphere was tense all night. The bouncers were being assholes, the crowd was getting agitated and it felt like a powder keg was ready to blow. During the show the bouncers fucked up kids who got too close to the stage. Vinnie was the first to react. He took his guitar off and started swinging it at the bouncers. Then EZEC, a singer in a bunch of NYHC bands, picked up a big stage monitor and brought it down on a security guard’s head. It was on. I smacked bouncers with my mic, and the crowd flooded the stage in solidarity. It was us, the crew and the fans facing off against the meathead security guys. Needless to say, the show abruptly ended. Ministry’s “Thieves” played over the PA and a full-on brawl ensued. The club called the cops, and we got the hell out of there so we wouldn’t get arrested. We still had our AF banner up, and regrettably we left it there. It was a major fuck-up. We had a rule never to leave our banner behind for someone else to steal. It’s like letting the enemy capture your flag. We never saw that banner again, and we didn’t get paid for the show. We heard later that the bouncers had a party and burned our banner. At least some of them went home with busted skulls, black eyes and fat lips. Motherfuckers!

Even though we were playing new music, doing some of the shows was like turning back the clock. The same old radical right-wingers we thought we’d left behind years earlier would storm in and cause shit. They could turn a great show upside-down in an instant. One time, we were booked at the Airport Music Hall in Allentown, Pennsylvania, along with Sheer Terror, Life of Agony, No One’s Hero, Vision and Wrecking Crew. The area had a strong white power movement. Hundreds of guys came to the concert with swastika flags.

I was on my way to the show, but Vinnie later told me that when Life of Agony were halfway through their set, one racist in the crowd started picking on a black guy. One of these fascists punched the poor kid in the back of the head and another kicked him in the face, knocking out one of his teeth.

Life of Agony stopped the show and said something about not tolerating racism, and the place blew up. The crowd broke all the windows. The fighting spilled onstage and backstage. Some big skinhead wanted to beat up Little Zan, who was the cousin of Life of Agony guitarist Joey Z. Vinnie broke apart the mic stands and handed out pieces of metal to everyone backstage to crack some heads. He was like a general sending his troops out to battle. All hell broke loose.

I showed up after the fact, just before we were scheduled to go onstage, and the place was completely wrecked.

“What the fuck happened?” I asked.

I got the story and went upstairs, stepping over broken tables and chairs and piles of glass. I collected our money and we left.

Shortly afterward, I suffered a hernia from jumping around so much. I wasn’t doing anything different, but one day I landed wrong and it felt like I had pulled something above my right thigh. Later I noticed that the flesh between my bladder and my groin was swollen on my right side. I didn’t think anything of it, but the pain got worse with every show. By the second week of July, I was in agony. Even though we weren’t doing a Madball set anymore, Freddy was on the road with us and performed “Over the Edge” and “One Voice” with us.

Agnostic Front was co-headlining the Complete Control Tour with Obituary, plus special guests Cannibal Corpse and Malevolent Creation, promoting One Voice. We were booked to play the Milwaukee Metal Fest on a hardcore/death metal day. Before the show started, my hernia was throbbing so bad I could barely walk. I got through the show on sheer adrenaline, but afterwards I was screaming in agony. I had to fly back home and get surgery for a right inguinal hernia, which required two weeks of recovery time.

I told Freddy that he would have to fill in for me. I thought he’d be honored, but he was pissed off! He loved AF, but he had never done a full AF set.

“Fuck! I’m not gonna do it. I fuckin’ can’t,” he said, fists in tight balls and nails cutting into his palms.

“Don’t be a fuckin’ prick!” I shouted, partially because of the pain I was in and partially because Freddy was being difficult. “You can do it. You have to do it and our fans love you.”

 “No, Roger. I’m gonna get laughed off the fucking stage!”

“You’re not. You know all the songs. You’re the only one who can do this.”  

Mind you, Freddy was only 15.

Not only did Freddy play the shows, he killed it and our fans instantly loved him. Freddy stayed on the road and filled in while I had the surgery.

I was supposed to spend three weeks recovering before I did anything physical. Two weeks after I had the procedure, I was going stir-crazy and dying to get back on the road. Agnostic Front were driving back down the East Coast so they planned to pick me up on their way to Washington. The incision from the surgery had healed and the spot below my groin didn’t hurt all the time, so I made my way to a truck stop in Jersey where they were gonna pick me up. But I could tell something was wrong. By the time I got there my head was spinning and the pain was so bad I threw up in a trashcan. I tried to get into the van, but it wasn’t happening. I thought Freddy was gonna be mad if I couldn’t go back on the road. But he was the first one to tell me I should go home and fully heal. He was having a great time. AF continued another two weeks with Freddy before he handed the mic back to me.

Playing those dates was important for Freddy. His insecurity about taking the stage for a full show disappeared. By the time he was done, he was itching to apply what he had learned to Madball, which had only played a handful of regional shows at that point. That was the moment when he went from my little brother who sometimes took the stage with me to the commanding leader of his own band. Those shows gave Freddy the confidence and fortitude to lead Madball into the future and allowed him to shine.