He looks like a human pit bull, says a friend. You don’t have to be a fan of early hardcore punk to enjoy this documentary about the incredible life of Harley Flanagan, founder, bassist and vocalist of the New York band Cro-Mags. By the age of 13, Flanagan was the drummer in the Stimulators, playing with Madness and the Cramps. He was punk’s Artful Dodger, with a bit of Animal from the Muppets thrown in; hammering away behind the drums, bare chested, with a mop of hair. As another talking head puts it: punk didn’t shape him, he shaped punk.
Flanagan was born in 1967 to a drug-addict mother (he was that baby on a dirty mattress on the floor, he says). The poet Allen Ginsberg rescued his mom from a hippy commune; they lived in New York on the pregentrified Lower East Side, which in archive footage from the late 1970s and early 80s looks like a war zone, with burnt-out buildings and rubble everywhere. On the punk scene, a kid behind the drums was a novelty; but Flanagan was exposed to drugs and sexually assaulted on numerous occasions.
