During a recent appearance on Lipps Service With Scott Lipps, Cro-Mags frontman Harley Flanagan was asked about the possibility of a classic lineup reunion. He responded by saying he has “always been open to any kind of communication.”
Flanagan said the following:
“For whatever it’s worth, man, I’ve always been open to any kind of communication with any of those guys about whatever, and always have been. But sometimes people just get so dug in on shit that they lose sight… Honestly, I can’t say that fans really would give a fuck about me playing with any of those guys again at this point, because we’re doing well, we’re touring a lot, life is great, but if the fans really wanted it, and more so if those guys ever wanted to give those fans what they wanted, I’m always open for the conversation. Because at the end of the day, as a musician, you’re an entertainer, right? I mean, that’s what you’re getting paid to do, is to make people feel good or get some steam off or whatever that emotion is — that’s your job. So if that means that you gotta get on stage and do that, and you know you can do it with these guys and people are gonna be super pumped, then what the fuck, man? I mean, I just don’t see the big fucking deal [of] just playing with people that you may not necessarily love just for the sake of, you wanna make fans happy, you wanna make people happy. But fortunately for me, I feel like I’m doing that right now any goddamn way.”
He also reflected on a 2012 incident in which he was arrested and charged with attacking members of the Cro-Mags during the CBGB Festival in New York:
“I talk about it in the film [the recently released ‘Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos’ documentary, which charts his tumultuous life and survival] pretty extensively. I don’t think I can ever say I’m good with it now, ’cause how do you get good with getting set up by people that you know and assaulted.
We don’t gotta get into the entire thing. I went to go see my old singer [John Joseph] who at the time was playing under the name CRO-MAGS. It was illegal; they weren’t supposed to be using the name. Whatever. Longer story, irrelevant. I went to go see the show. Some part of my brain thought that I would see these guys and there would be some rekindling of the bromance. They’d be, like, ‘Oh, really? You fucking asshole. Ah, fuck you too. Ah, come on. You wanna come up and play a couple [of songs]?’ Some fucking dumb part of me was, like, ‘Come on, man.’ We used to fucking live in squats together, man. We used to have to fucking shoplift food together. We were fucking homeless kids… Anyway, so I was, like, ‘All right.’ I went. And ironically, I was texting the woman who’s now my wife on my way there, like, ‘Do you think I should go? I’m thinking about going. There was this whole series of texts, and I was, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fuck it. I’ll go.’ And I actually got put on the guest list… So, anyway, I go. I have tickets. And everybody knew I was coming. And I got invited backstage, and the fucking door got pulled shut, and I got jumped by a room full of people. And I heard a lot of different things that were happening inside that room before I went in from different people, but it’s all hearsay. I’m not witness to it, so I’m not gonna repeat what other people told me. It doesn’t matter anymore. What the end outcome was, I wound up getting like 40-something stitches. I got stuck with something. I put three guys in the hospital. And then it just turned into this whole thing where they all started accusing me of going in there and attacking everybody, which was complete and total fucking nonsense.
“[Eventually the case] got thrown out, [but] I did go to Rikers Island [New York City’s notorious jail complex], and that’s where things got kind of weird because that’s where my old singer was going in the New York Post and all these different newspapers and saying a lot of, basically… I get really uncomfortable even talking about this shit. Like, [he was] basically putting a fucking target on my ass, calling me a snitch, saying I’m a skinhead, I’m a racist, I’m this, I’m that, all kinds of shit that in any kind of a lockup situation would possibly get you fucked up by someone who totally just wants to get some credibility. And it was not cool, man… This big black dude comes in my cell and throws the paper on my bed and says, ‘[Is] that you?’ And I’m reading all this shit and I’m, like, ‘Wow.’ And I’m just shaking my head, like smirking to myself, just like, ‘This motherfucker. Unbelievable.’ So I can’t say I’ll ever be good with it.”
He also added that he ended up spending about “10 days” at Rikers Island:
“It wasn’t shit,” he explained. “But I was having a hard time raising bail, and I was looking at up to three years for nothing. So it was a very unnerving minute, especially with all that shit in the papers, because I was, like, ‘Somebody’s gonna try to do some shit,’ whatever, whatever. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. This shit’s old news. I’m kind of past all that, the experience, but that shit bothers me. It does. It does bother me that things had to come to that, that somebody would pull some shit like that.”
[via Blabbermouth]
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