Chaos equals opportunity

Harley Flanagan at age 11 on drums in The Stimulators with Anne Gustavsson, Patrick Mack and Denise Mercedes (May 17, 1978)

Rex Miller’s unrelenting Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos (a highlight of the 15th edition of DOC NYC) on The Stimulators drummer and Cro-Mags founder, features revealing on-camera interviews with his wife Laura Lee Flanagan, Denise Mercedes (his aunt and founder of The Stimulators), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Ian Mackaye (Minor Threat; Fugazi; founder of Dischord Records), Lucy Sante, Darryl Jenifer (Bad Brains), Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Keith Morris (Black Flag; Circle Jerks; OFF), Glenn Danzig (The Misfits; Danzig), Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos, White Lotus, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, co-host of the Jesse Malin benefit concerts), Brooke Smith (Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs; Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street; Alan Rudolph’s The Moderns), Anthony Bourdain, Sacha Jenkins, Marcia Resnick, Scott Ian (Anthrax), Kate Schellenbach (Beastie Boys; Luscious Jackson), and Ray Cappo (Youth of Today).

Rex Miller with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze on Harley Flanagan: “There's photographs in the film of him with Debbie Harry, and he interacted with The Clash, and he talks about the Sex Pistols … ”

When Rex (cinematographer of Nancy Buirski’s masterpiece Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy) mentions that he was at the Palladium concert by The Clash in 1979 (where Marcia Resnick took the incredible backstage photo of Andy Warhol, Joe Strummer, and Harley Flanagan), we are joined by music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, whose shop 99 with Gina Franklyn designed The Clash official Give ‘Em Enough Rope and Pearl Harbor ’79 Tour (East Coast leg) T-shirts.

Harley Flanagan takes us back to his childhood that never was as he continues with the ongoing struggle to find peace in himself in Rex Miller’s unwavering portrait of a man in constant battle with the past looking towards finding a glimpse of a less traumatic future.

A voice recording of Harley’s absent father reverberates, terrifying and sad, foreshadowing a tragic end. Former neighbour Lucy Sante likens him to Dickens character the Artful Dodger. We hear from his fifth grade teacher and Miller comments on the point that the mother pretty much left young Harley to his own devices with “it was a different time,” triggering an immediate, scolding response from Harley’s wife Laura to the voice off-camera.

From Durham, North Carolina, Rex Miller joined us on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos.

Rex Miller: Good morning! How are you doing?

Anne-Katrin Titze: Good morning! Hi! Very well. Where are you? On the West Coast?

RM: No, I'm East Coast in Durham, North Carolina. You're in California?

AKT: No, I'm in New York now.

Andy Warhol, Joe Strummer, and Harley Flanagan backstage of The Clash concert at the Palladium in 1979 Photo: Marcia Resnick

RM: Oh, cool. Yeah, I am an escaped New Yorker.

AKT: I think that's what you said when we spoke about Citizen Ashe, you called yourself the same thing.

RM: Yeah, that's me. Yeah.

AKT: Also, when we spoke about Citizen Ashe, you insisted that this is not a tennis movie. And I think similarly, here we could say, this is maybe not simply a music documentary?

RM: Yeah, I think it's not a music doc, but it's a punk rock film, for sure. Hopefully.

AKT: And it is very much about childhood. I thought about this quote that you have early on by Harley's wife [Laura Lee Flanagan]: “He's working out the absence of his own childhood.” This is a theme that's very, very prominent in the entire film, no?

RM: Yeah, absolutely. Harley had one hell of a childhood. So he's still dealing with that on multiple levels. But I think he's working through it pretty well. But yeah, he had quite a crazy childhood, I would say. That's one of the things that really drew me to his story. When he was a kid, and, for instance, when he's in that photo, that amazing photo by Marcia Resnick, of Harley, Andy Warhol and Joe Strummer. So that was backstage at The Clash concert at the Palladium the very first time The Clash played in the US. So I was 16 years old, and I was at that show. I was out in the tenth row with my buddies from high school, and we thought we were like, our lives changed.

Harley Flanagan on drums in The Stimulators at Max’s Kansas City Photo: Rex Miller

AKT: It's an incredible photo. His childhood made me think of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She ends the essay with a description of I think she calls it children in “high kindergarten.” How he survived a beginning like that!

RM: Yeah, I think him being a musical prodigy helped him survive because he had something to latch onto and give himself focus and discipline. You know, when he was playing in The Stimulators, when he was thrust into that role of being their full-time touring drummer that gave his life some discipline and schedule, and that balanced, I think, with the insanity of how he was actually living.

AKT: All the moves, too, to Denmark, and being with the stepfather, and then Morocco, and later the squats. It gave me an idea that I never had before. I could never really understand why people would get tattoos. There's no home, really, that he had. So his skin became his home and the permanent marking is furnishing the home on his skin.

RM: Yeah, I mean, one can make the case that his skin is his roadmap of his entire journey. And it was quite a journey. Yeah.

AKT: You got his 5th grade teacher for an interview. How did that come about?

The bass guitar of The Stimulators’ Anne Gustavsson Photo: Ed Bahlman

RM: Oh, I think that was through social media, and Miss Nina Drooker was his 5th grade teacher, and she's still going. She paints every day. She was his art teacher. Her son is on Instagram, and her son interacted with Harley during their teenage years, and her son [Eric Drooker] grew up to be this very, very successful cartoonist illustrator. He must have 30, 40 covers of The New Yorker.

So that was how we made the connection, and he actually did some artwork for us, and we spent a wonderful couple hours in Miss Drooker's apartment at Peter Cooper Village down on the East Side of Manhattan, around 23rd Street.

There was a lot of mingling and interaction with my history. My best friend lived in the adjacent building in Peter Cooper. So going there was like old home week. So yeah, there's a lot of New York history. There's quite a bit of my own personal history, so that all combined to make this by far my favourite film project ever.

AKT: What was your first encounter with Harley?

RM: Well, my first encounter with him was through meeting him through a friend of mine, my friends Karen and Bob. She's one of my best friends, her boyfriend, Bob, does jiu-jitsu with Harley, and I had mentioned to them, oh, I need a new project. This is right at the end of the Citizen Ashe project, and he just says, oh, you might want to meet Harley, and I'm like, who's Harley?

The Clash Pearl Harbor Tour '79 T-shirt, designed by Gina Franklyn and Ed Bahlman of 99 Photo: Ed Bahlman

So, even though our youthful years, Harley and mine. interacted somewhat, I didn't know him, and I didn't know his music. Looking back, I left the city in about 1980 to go off to college, and by the time I came back five years later I was into all kinds of music, and the Cro-Mags just passed me by. But I did mingle a lot with the same influences that he had and the people that he interacted with.

There's photographs in the film of him with Debbie Harry, and he interacted with The Clash, and he talks about the Sex Pistols when his mom got him that album, it was basically all over, you know, changed his life, and I had a similar reaction to the Sex Pistols. I didn't run away from home, but I was affected by the music.

AKT: And of course it's always wonderful to have Lucy Sante commenting in a film, and she was his neighbour!

RM: Yeah, I think right down the hallway. And before we filmed with Lucy, I had filmed with her about a year earlier on Nancy Buirski’s wonderful documentary about the film Midnight Cowboy [Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy]. So that was a connection already, and she's great, I mean so insightful, written famous books about the time and the place, and very much a literary voice.

AKT: It was actually through Nancy that I got in touch with Lucy. I also have someone else here who would like to say hello, Ed Bahlman, founder of 99 Records!

Ed Bahlman: Hi, Rex, nice to meet you! I loved Citizen Ashe.

RM: Oh, great! Thank you so much.

Harley Flanagan the leader of Cro-Mags Photo: Jonah Odin Flanagan/ Wired For Chaos

EB: I met Harley through his aunt.

RM: Oh, okay. Denise!

EB: TWA used to have really inexpensive round-trip tickets to London. So I went to London a lot. This is before the 99 days and she showed up at the airport at 5:00 in the morning, too, Denise, with Anne [Gustavsson], the bass player, also of The Stimulators.

RM: Yeah.

EB: And Anne lived with Allen Ginsberg for a time, and Peter Orlovsky in that same building.

RM: In the same apartment, they all lived.

EB: Same apartment. Exactly. She was being flown over by Rat Scabies when the drummer of The Damned, when they broke up she was going to audition. So we stayed in touch in London, and I went to Speakeasy to see her audition, which was a members-only club. But if you had a US passport they'd let you right in.

RM: There's a lot of musical history in this big story.

EB: And that's where I met Poly Styrene and Ari Up the year before, and Falcon Stuart, the manager of X-Ray Spex and Danielle Dax and all those people. Denise was a really important person, it was before The Stimulators. And then I met Harley, precocious Harley.

99 Records fan Anthony Bourdain with Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Ed Bahlman

RM: How old was Harley when you met him?

EB: He had to be 11.

RM: Wow. Okay.

EB [holds up his photograph]: 1978.

RM: Oh, I don't think we have that!

AKT: It's Ed's photo!

RM: I don't think we have that one. Please, maybe we can throw that in the film or on the website or something? And we'd be happy to license it! We don't have that one, I think. Do you have more?

EB [holds up a photograph of Anne Gustavsson’s bass guitar]: This is Anne’s bass guitar at the club that night, and I marked it. It was May 17th 1978.

RM: Wow!

EB: 99 started in June of ’78, the shop, not the label.

RM: Right, right.

EB: So Denise was a great person. I met Harley's mother [Rose] at that time, you know, struggling.

AKT: You also have Anthony Bourdain in the film.

EB: Now that triggered memories of seeing him in 99 in his twenties.

AKT: This is, of course, an older interview, because Bourdain is dead. What is that clip that you have in the film?

Tennis match at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train

RM: Well, I mean Anthony and Harley became friends, like real friends. I think it might have initially been, well, as you see, in the film. Anthony saw Harley play when he was a kid in The Stimulators at Max's and at various clubs, and, as he said, who's this kid walking through walls getting into clubs? Later they wound up at Renzo Gracie's Jiu Jitsu Academy, and Harley taught Anthony's kids and his wife at the time, and then, Anthony had Harley on his show. What's it called? Parts Unknown [CNN]. Yeah. I think it was the very last episode. He did a Lower East Side episode, and Harley was featured in it. So when Harley's autobiography [Hard-Core: Life of My Own] was published, Anthony said, what do you want me to do? I'll do anything you want. So they arranged to speak on camera. And Anthony just said, here, it's yours. Do what you want with it.

AKT: It adds another layer to it. “Wolf Boy” has “Pig Man” looking for him. There's an element of fable to this whole story. If it weren't real, you would hardly believe it as a fictionalised version.

RM: Yeah. Fable is one way of looking at it. I mean, primal. What's the other word? Feral? You know, Harley was definitely...

AKT: A Feral Fable.

RM: Yeah, that's pretty good. That's a good one. As Henry Rollins points out, the way Harley was living is the very definition of feral, as he says, you're going to eat that? Okay, I'll eat that, you know. That was kind of how Harley was living while he was in squats on the Lower East Side.

Forest Hills Tennis Stadium crowd in Strangers On A Train

AKT: And from there the journey leads him to the horse zipping up his zipper with its teeth! Probably, when that happened you couldn't believe what you got. Or is that a trick that the horse does all the time?

RM: Well, it's definitely the first time I saw it. I have a feeling they have a relationship all to their own. I didn't go too deep into it. But you know, Harley is quite a charismatic person. And I think the horse just kind of relates to him. That's his wife's horse, so I'm sure they're all friends.

AKT: Brooke Smith, you have an interesting exchange in there and I applaud you for keeping it in. I think it's very strong when she asks you, “how many people in your film have been sexually abused?” And then the next sentence: “Has anyone not been?” What did you think when she asked you that?

RM: Well that was her experience. I think it showed how all the kids that got together down there at those clubs were all damaged in their own way. They were all misfits in their own way. It makes me look at the name of that amazing band in a different way, because it really sums up the movement of New York City, hardcore and punk, and almost any youth movement is bringing kids together that might not fit into the mainstream.

And Ray Cappo [Youth of Today], who's also in the film, talks about, I’m a freak at my high school, and all these other kids are freaks, and we're all coming together for a freak parade and hear this freaky band play their freaky music. So he's shedding some humor on it. But I think what Brooke talks about is very real, damaged disaffected kids coming together through music, that's not new, really. But I like the way she puts it.

Richie with headband (Luke Wilson), the tennis player in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums

AKT: What is Harley’s tendency to run and play at the same time, which is your bookend of the film? You see him running through the woods somewhere.

RM: Yeah, I mean, that wasn't staged. That's what he does to prepare for going on tour, because when he performs, he not only plays guitar bass, he sings, and he runs all over the stage, and he's, carrying the whole show. So you know he goes, when I practice playing the bass sitting in a chair isn't going to do it. He has to practice the way he performs, which is like constant motion and crazy physicality. So when he had told me that that's actually how he trains for touring, by running in his local park and playing, I dreamed up this idea for this shot. So yeah, that wasn't really staged. That was like a real moment in Harley's life.

AKT: And also the balancing on the swimming pool diving board?

RM: You don't script things with Harley. You just have to be paying attention somewhat when you're hanging out with Harley.

EB: The way you edited also the Belfast Punk Festival by showing us what was going on. You got so much great footage. You really show how nobody could ignore how serious it was in Northern Ireland.

Harley Flanagan: Wired For Chaos poster

RM: Yeah. Big shout out to filmmaker John T. Davis from Belfast. That's from one of his early films. And he was kind enough to collaborate with us, and let us use his footage, which is incredible. And he actually met Harley and filmed Harley at the time in 1980 in Belfast, and then tragically, all that footage got destroyed in a house fire. But luckily not everything he did was destroyed. But yeah, he knows Harley from when he was 12,13 years old.

EB: The way also you show the interview with the four of them there, and how everybody defers to Harley. They just want to hear what he's going to say and I see Denise cringe a little bit when he says, everybody hates me in school because I'm white, the Puerto Ricans. She's cringing at that: Oh, my God! Don't say that, Harley!

RM: Yeah, Harley speaks what's on his mind, and he was 12 at the time, and that was his reality at the time, and that footage is from BBC. And of course it mirrors the Beatles’ famous on the rooftop BBC performance. So it was quite a moment.

EB: You really did a great job showing people who don't know that time what a rough life it was. You got a lot of how rough New York was at that time. It definitely made me think, why did I start 99 in ’78, when I see all this chaos going on in the city?

RM: Well, you know what they say: Chaos equals opportunity. So clearly, you jumped on it.

AKT: Any new projects that you can talk about?

RM: Yeah. I have a wonderful project that's also a little bit music related, but not about music. And it's on the 100 year history of Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, which I'm sure you're both familiar with.

AKT: I am not, really.

EB: I saw The Who there.

The Lower East Side in the early Eighties by Brooke Smith Photo: Brooke Smith

RM: It was built in 1923. It's still there. It looks like an old Roman Coliseum. It's in a neighbourhood in Queens, and it was built for tennis, and they had the US Open there through 1977, along with some music in the Sixties. It was a huge venue. The Beatles landed their helicopter on the grass tennis courts next to the stadium and played there. The Stones, Dylan, The Who, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Sinatra - they all played there in the Sixties, and then in the Seventies it sort of declined.

By the end of the Seventies it was dying and then a promoter, Mike Luba, who's featured in our film, brought it back with a couple of his buddies, and today, I think they had 38 concerts there this summer, sold out most of them. It holds 15,000. And so yeah, we've been working on this film for over a year, and it's got a little tennis, a little music.

AKT: It's all your topics, tennis and music!

RM: Also, famous movies were shot there. Hitchcock filmed Strangers On A Train, and [Wes Anderson’s] The Royal Tenenbaums was filmed there.

AKT: The tennis scene in Strangers On A Train!

DOC NYC poster Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

RM: Yeah, that's the big part of the movie. Yeah.

AKT: Oh! The lighter!

RM: The lighter, and the tennis. One of our experts calls it, perhaps Hitchcock's greatest scene ever, because of the cross-cutting between the tennis match and the time running out.

AKT: Yeah, it's incredible. You should have a lighter in your film too!

RM: Well, we use the real footage from Hitchcock.

AKT: Well, thank you for this.

RM: Thank you! Thank you guys for singling us out. Much appreciate it. Go tell the world about Harley!

AKT: We will, and have a very good Thanksgiving!

EB: Yeah, you can reach out to us, too. Okay, bye-bye.