Who remembers in the 1990’s photos of Harley Flanagan, bassist of the Americain hardcore band Cro-Mags, showing on his naked chest a spectacular tattoo of a demon ? After an incredible live streamed live during the Covid-19 lockdown and titled The Quarantine Show, Harley tells us more about this tattoo, now a classic.
Controversial legend of the New-York hardcore scene, Harley Flanagan is a man of multiple talents. Not only to write a raw, brutal music and survive in hostile urban landscapes, but also to put down his own story, as you can read in his autobiography Life of my own published in 2016. In this massive brick of 444 pages, he tells all about his incredible and unexpected destiny: from being born as a child of the flower power he became one of the founders of the New York hardcore in the 80’s. A movement born on the ashes of punk who rose thanks to bands like the Cro-Mags he created. At that time, all the music fans remembers his chest tattoo. The large demon with wings all spread out was truly spectacular and an unforgettable thing that might have been a highly flammable material for some receptive minds. Now working as a jiu-jitsu instructor in one of the most prestigious Gracie academy in New York, where he still lives, Harley keeps up making music and a new Cor-Mags album is expected in June.
How do you explain you survived the life that you lived ?
I’ve been very lucky, I’m very blessed. But, I’ don’t give up. There are many times when I should have just crawled up in a bar and just gave up, but that’s not my nature. I never had an easy life. I’m not one of these people who ever had it easy so, when things get tough, that’s nothing out of the normal for me ; it just means that you have to suck it up. And that’s when you see what you’re made of. Once you give up you’re done and at the end of the day the fact is you’re still gonna exist, breathe, you have no choice but to put food in your stomach. Otherwise, what are you gonna do ? A homeless person ? Surrender to drugs until they kill you ? I’ve suvived and I’ve tried not to fuck other people over in the process, I’ve tried not to live off of other people and take advantage of them.
The tattoo you have on your chest is a classic, what’s the story about it?
I was 15 when I got that. I did it in Canada. I hitchhiked there, I was gonna go and get a devil tattoo. Normand Demers who worked at ‘Tatouage de Quebec’ in Montreal, said : « If you like that one, check this out, I’ll do this one on you » and he came out with this drawing and I said : « Fuck yeah ! » (laughing). I didn’t design it. I think it was a drawing done by this American tattoo artist named Kari Barba but he modified it, he changed a little bit to make it so that it would be unique for me. It’s the devil grabbing the world, which is basically the same theme as the album The age of quarrell : the world is going to shit. I had to suffer a little bit for that because I did it in four days in a row. He said it would be good if we had time for each session to heal before we do the next but I didn’t have time. I had like 16 hours worth of tattooing done, over a period of four days ; but at 15 years old you can take just about anything. When she saw it, my mom was pissed.
He didn’t have any problem to tattoo you at 15 ?
I think he didn’t realised I was so young and I already had some tattoos –but that was the first big one. I had that one from Bob Roberts (a skull and a hat on the upper right arm) already, which was from Bob Roberts who was very famous tattoo artist. We did it in New York when he was on 23rd street on 3rd avenue when tattooing was completely illegal. So when you’d walk in and say he did it, guys went like : « Oh yeah ok ». They just figured you already went through the screening process, you’re cool. « If Bob tattooed you, I can tattoo you ».
What about the other ones that you have, like your backpiece ?
It is an illustration of me giving the finger to the grim reaper in front of a nuclear explosion, New York city getting destroyed, around 2000. I had it done in this guy’s house. One guy started it and an other one finished it, it’s a fucking mess. Here, it’s a mantra, a little reminder, that there’s more going on than this world and the physical body. The portrait of the zombie girl I have inside the arm is a reminder that the outside is just a covering, it’s temporary. You could have a beautiful face and still be a rotting body.
What about the stars on your right-hand fist ?
They were the last thing you saw when I hit you. The last one I got was these portraits of my kids wearing kimonos. Now, fucking everybody has, school-teachers have fucking tattoos, when you go to the restaurant the waiter comes out and he has one on the neck. When I was a kid you’d be lucky if you get a fucking job if you had tattoos. Nevermind working with children, and working in public, tattoos were for criminal and bikers, yakuza…
Would hardcore kids get tattooed ?
Fuck no, I was one of the first kids on the scene in New-York to get covered with tattoos. I always liked tattoos, when I was a little kid I always used to fucking draw on myself. I come from the bottom, tattoos have always represented the underworld, not just the criminal element but the underbelly of society. When I was a kid you couldn’t get tattoo in New York. There weren’t any tattoo parlours, you had to be involved with the underworld just to know where to get one. I don’t mean crime underworld, you had to be part of underbelly of society, you had to be in. The hardcore kids were living in their family in like Queens, in Brooklyn… I was living a much harder life like any of those kids. Vinnie Stigma (from Agnostic Front) lived in his mother’s building in Little Italy. None of those kids had the type of experience I did growing up. That’s part of the reason why everybody looked up to me and respected me, because I was real and most of them were kind of faking it.
Roger Miret and Vinnie Stigma from Agnostic were also one of the first hardcore kids to get tattooed at that time ?
Yeah, after they got crazy I came back from Canada with my chest covered in tattoos. Roger had one little tattoo on his wrist. I remember the first thing he said when he saw my chest, he went like : « WAOW ! » By next summer, everybody was covered with tattoos. Henry Rollins didn’t have all those tattoos either when I started to get mine. I mean I can show you pictures when none of those guys had already tattoos and I was already covered. But whatever, it’s not a pissing contest, it just happened like it. I got the one on the back of my head when I was 15 too. Actually it was done by the same guy. My mom was pissed when she first saw the chest tattoo.
What did you expect from the biography you published in 2016?
I expected actually to get a lot more negative feedback than I have. Because I pull the fucking the rogue out of the myth, I expose a lot of people for being full of shit. And I thought a lot of people were gonna be : « Yo man, fuck that shit… » but I guess at the end of the day, you can’t hide from the truth. When I had my first signing, I had a lot of people who came to it, people I went to school with, when I went like 6th grade. They said : « Dude, you describe this neihborhood so fucking perfectly, you did like you brought me right back to that time, no one could have described it better… » That was huge for me. I wanted to give people a feeling of what the experience was. Links : http://www.harleyflanagan.com http://feralhouse.com/hard-core/
