Performers began to identify the ringleaders who caused most of the violence in each city. ![]() Groups of Nazi skinheads began to coalesce in cities around the world, using clubs such as City Gardens, in Trenton, New Jersey, as bases for their operations. We don't want them here anymore." Now I've got like six bouncers-we're the Avengers, the Hulk, and Thor and Iron Man. It's all the bouncers saying, "This thing's been going on for like six to eight months a year, we just let everybody do what they're going to do, and people get hurt and leave early and people go to their cars and drive away. I'm ready to just be a puddle, a broken and busted blob of humanity, lying in the middle of this dance floor.Īnd all of a sudden it's like the trumpeteers going, "Da da da da da!" Here comes the cavalry. I leapt off the stage and got in the face of the biggest guy-he probably would have hit me a couple of times, and I would have been in traction in the hospital. The skinheads would line up at the back bar and lock arms and run towards the front of the stage, and if you just happened to get in their way, you'd get knocked down, you'd get kicked, you'd get trampled. Keith Morris ( frontman, Black Flag and Circle Jerks): I witnessed this thing called the Wall of Death in Trenton, New Jersey, at the City Gardens. ![]() Everybody was kind of standing around, and that's when I gave a little rant on stage: "Why aren't you doing anything?" "You guys can leave, but we have to see them around, and they'll jump us later and scratch our cars." ): In Canberra, Australia, it was only a handful of them, but they were disrupting the show and standing in front of us. The skinheads were standing behind them, flipping us off. The cops came, shut the show down, and told us we were the problem and we had an hour to get over their county line. One night in 1986, they mugged our soundman, kicked his head in and cut the lines to our PA. Rollins: In the Black Flag days, we had skinhead problems in the lower half of America. To make things especially confusing, both groups shaved their heads, and it was only through a complicated code of color-coordinated shoelaces that anyone could tell them apart. Bob Chamberlin/Getty Imagesīy the mid-’80s, kids who wanted to play rock ‘n’ roll to their friends found themselves in the position of having to put up with crowd wars between Nazis and anti-fascists. Lead singer of Black Flag, Henry Rollins, on January 16, 1983. “Pogoing became slam-dancing, now known as moshing, and some of ’em didn’t seem like they were there to enjoy the music, as much as they were there to beat up on people-sometimes in a really chickenshit way,” says Jello Biafra, whose band, Dead Kennedys, put out a classic song about it in 1981: "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." ![]() Punk rockers had flirted with fascist imagery for shock value, with the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux wearing swastikas in public, but, as early San Francisco scenester Howie Klein, later president of Reprise Records, recalls: “Suddenly, you had people who were part of the scene who didn’t understand ‘fascist bad.’”īy 1980, a more violent strain of punk fans was infecting punk shows. ![]() Every hardcore band you loved in the '80s and beyond, from Black Flag to Minutemen to Fugazi, had one unfortunate thing in common: Nazi skinheads occasionally stormed their concerts, stomped their fans, gave Hitler salutes in lieu of applauding, and generally turned a communal experience into one full of hatred and conflict.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |