FROM THE NYHC BOOK ARCHIVES: Keith Burkhardt (Cause For Alarm)
This interview with Cause For Alarm vocalist Keith Burkhardt was conducted in the fall of 2012 for my second book, NYHC: New York Hardcore 1980 - 1990.
How did you get into punk?
There was this weekly music magazine in New Jersey called The Aquarian and I would open it up every week, look at the club listings and try to find bands that just sounded cool. I remember going to Peppermint Lounge to see Psychedelic Furs and Nash the Slash and this all-girl band called The Mo-Dettes. I saw a million bands that way. The thing that launched me to be fully committed to Punk was seeing the Dead Kennedys at Bonds. I have to say, there was no looking back after that show. It was this incredible eye-opener; my Punk ‘A-Ha!’ moment. From that point on, me and my good friends Jeff Randozo and Bill Kerns would get into the car after I was done delivering pizzas in Nutley and go to Hardcore shows at Irving Plaza. Max’s is where I first saw the Bad Brains, which was this total eye-opening, spiritual experience. I got really into it.
It was incredible. Here you are. You came from Nutley. You came into the city and go to Max’s Kansas City. Instead of being at the hole-in-the-wall pizzeria where I worked, now I was at Max’s where you could run into Mick Jagger or Andy Warhol. There were all these punks. It was a totally surreal scene and then you hear this incredible music coming out of the sound system that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before. You couldn’t help but bounce off the walls. It was just an amazing experience.
How did you get to know the kids who were already on the scene in the city?
I remember being at Irving Plaza with my crew from Nutley. Harley and his friends were there going after kids that looked like posers. Someone from his crew was eyeballing me and Harley came up and told them, ‘No no no’ because by that point I was going to every show that was happening. After the show was over, Jimmy Gestapo came up to me and my friends and said ‘You guys should come to A7. That’s where everybody hangs out after these shows’.
A couple of weeks later after work at the pizza place, my friend Jeff and I got into my car and drove down to Avenue A and 7th looking for the club. Basically, all you had out there was The Park Inn, Ray’s Pizza and a little red light on a door and that’s how we found the club. It took us hours to find it actually. A couple of months after that, I moved into the city and that was pretty cool. Just moving from Jersey and going to 7th Street and A, it was like being on another planet. It was scary, dark and it was the winter to add to it.
How would you describe A7?
I would say it was just a dump. And it might have been just a dump, but it was an amazing experience. You had a doorman who was a character, there was a little bar to the right and then there was a tiny little room to the left where the bands played. To me, it was a magical time. I threw away any intentions to go to school or to do anything traditional and immediately moved to the Lower East Side. Originally, I was going to move in with John Watson (Agnostic Front) on Norfolk Street, but it was tight quarters. So, I found my own place with Tony T-Shirt from Ultra-Violence. He drove into Nutley and picked me up. We picked up a copy of the Village Voice on Astor Place at three in the morning to look at apartments and we found what would become Apartment X. I think it was 186 or 188 Norfolk Street. It was a windowless basement apartment. This was probably in January of ’81 or ’82.
Who were some of the first NYHC bands you remember seeing live?
Beastie Boys, Undead, Kraut and Crucial Truth. Crucial Truth was pretty serious and had their shit together. The Headlickers were a band I really liked. I always had fun watching them. They would throw cherry cigars into the audience.
How did the band Hinkley’s Fan Club morph into Cause For Alarm?
Rob Kabula started Hinkley’s Fan Club and Billy Milano was the singer for Hinckley Fan Club. From what I remember, Rob thought the band name was kinda silly and they just wanted to do something different. Someone saw me fill in for John Watson at an Agnostic Front show and suggested me to Rob. Rob approached me and I was like ‘Sure’. Lisa James was the one who named the band. Early ‘83 was when CFA formed.
How many shows did you sing with Agnostic Front?
I think two or three at A7. Maybe one show at CB’s? Agnostic Front was a scene band. They’d play and we’d dance and sing along but it took years for them to get it together and now they’re the greatest Hardcore band in the world because of Roger and Vinnie’s dedication.
There’s legend out there that other early east coast Hardcore scenes had issues with the NYHC scene.
Honestly, at the time, I didn’t really care too much about that stuff. There were some shows where certain bands would play and we’d get a little crazier and screw around.q with them a little bit, but you’d end up hanging out with the band afterword. I remember when The Exploited came to New York, we got up on stage with our big chains on and were stomping around. Wattie was expecting trouble. But you know what? They started playing and we loved the music and everybody had a great time and went crazy.
A couple of other bands might have said things in fanzines that got back to New York and we might have given them some attitude or danced a little bit harder at their show but it might have been more myth than anything. Maybe some of it got carried away more in the mid-’80s. I was more concerned with the street gangs in the east village. At one point, the word was anyone who looked like a skinhead had a target on their backs. I was more bothered by that.
The other cities with Hardcore scenes were more organized. They didn’t have as much stuff to distract them. They put more energy into their bands and because of that, they had better bands. But in New York, we had egg creams, bagels, and good coffee. When I lived on Norfolk Street, I used to walk over to Little Italy and get homemade ravioli. New York could do good punk bands, but Hardcore took us a while.
I remember at one of the early Black Flag shows with Henry, I ended up in the Village Voice. I got up on stage and was just about to jump off when one of their bouncers clipped me from behind. I literally fell headfirst from the stage and passed out. Some dude picked me up and carried me to the stairs and wanted to give me a drink but I was like ‘No Thanks’ I was afraid to take anything from a stranger. He ended up being a writer from the Village Voice. I was still in high school at the time and I was in the cafeteria one day with my friends Frank, Walter Billy, and Randy. They were reading a review of the show and the writer was describing what happened and they were like ‘Oh my god, he’s writing about you!”
Was Kraut the first band from the scene to gain some attention?
Kraut was a great band to see. At the time, the most prolific band from New York. Doug was the bartender at A7. They had a little bit of an attitude because they were one of the few bands on the scene that could play really well. It seemed a little weird to me that a band on the punk scene had this rock attitude. I never saw any of them hanging out on the scene outside of Doug. Doug was around a lot but the rest of the guys just hung out with friends in Queens.
How important was the Noise The Show radio show?
I listened to Noise the Show religiously. That’s where you got to know what was going on and got to hear new music. We’d usually listen to it in the car driving in from Jersey. I definitely have memories of that.
What can you tell me about making the band’s seven-inch?
It was kind of a big deal to put out a seven-inch. We were pretty broke, so it wasn’t really easy to get the money together to put that out. At the time, I was a foot messenger and came from a pretty basic background. So when I decided to leave New Jersey and move to New York, I was on my own. It was tough just to pay rent. We started rehearsing and Alex had these songs he had written like ‘Time to Try’, but we wrote ‘United Races’ and ‘Parasite’ together. Rob Kabula had written ‘Stand as One’, that was an old Hinkley’s Fan Club song. So we decided ‘Yeah, let’s make the dream!’ You know? Let’s put out a seven-inch. We scraped up the money and Alex’s father helped a little bit I think. We got together with Jerry Williams and went to High Rise Studios. It was a big deal because that was a real studio. I was utterly clueless. I sang all those songs on that seven-inch with one take. I didn’t know I was allowed to try a couple of times! So I just nailed it every time. Now I go back and listen to that and I’m like ‘Damn, that sounds pretty controlled’ But I didn’t want to make a mistake! Those are all first takes. The funny thing is the recordings that we got from High Rise was so good, but it lost something when it got mastered.
My girlfriend Angelica drew up a cover for the record, but the rest of the guys didn’t like it. It was something with a skull and they were like ‘You know, this really isn’t our image’. I was in a gallery on 8th Street and Alex Morris from Murphy’s Law was doing an art show and he had this art that he’d drawn and I asked him right there ‘We need artwork in 2 days, can we use this?’ and he was like ‘Yeah, use it’. It was a photograph of 2 English police officers dragging a northern Irish protester. He drew it from an actual photograph. There wasn’t much thought around it. I knew Alex was displaying his stuff and popped in and that was that. My friend Billy Kind printed up the covers at this stationery store in Nutley called Peerless. We stuck all those pictures together, put together the dedication list and that was it. Pressed up 500 of them.
How did you become interested in the Hare Krishna religion?
It came in through John Joseph. I think everybody on the NYHC scene can trace it back to him. He was somebody I had heard about when I first moved to New York. I was always a spiritual person in the sense that I felt there has to be something bigger behind this whole creation. I wasn’t a religious person. I couldn’t connect to the bible or the typical religious experiences you have been raised in a catholic family in New Jersey. I was always asking John to come to see Cause for Alarm, but he was always in bed by 9 o’clock at night. But one night he came out to see us at A7. We got done playing. It was January or February; I remember it was pretty cold. We went outside, smoked a joint and we started talking about spiritual stuff. He started talking about Krishna Consciousness and I was all ears. I remember that night was the first night I heard the name, Krishna. He was very conscious of the fact that here we are in 1982, outside of A7 and talking about Hare Krishnas. Back then, it was seen as whacky and cultish. He was going about talking about it in a very roundabout way, but John was always very articulate and very intelligent. He was very knowledgeable about Krishna Consciousness, even back then. He summed it up by saying ‘There are gods behind all of this and the gods named is Krishna’ I wasn’t shocked at all and a couple of days later, I got a copy of the book The Science of Self-Realization. I read that book and it made a big impression on me. So, I started following John around with a lot of questions and then he invited me to go to the temple one night. So, I went to the Temple and that was wild. To me, that was as wild and awesome and liberating as going to A7 for the first time. Going to the Brooklyn Temple in 1982 and taking part in those big kirtans and eating the food and the chanting and listening to the spiritual masters, it blew my mind. You don’t have to be religious or believe that Krishna is God to really appreciate Krishna Consciousness. It resonated with me and that was the beginning of my spiritual life. We used to do a lot of programs at my house. In 1983, I was living on West 22nd Street with this girl Angelica that I had been dating and would eventually marry and have two kids with. She ended up going Krishna Conscious and then Harley ended up there and Rich Stig became a devotee and slowly we had this little group of devotees. We were still hanging out on the scene. I became a devotee before the seven-inch came out. Rob Kabula and to some extent Alex Kinon really didn’t care about me being interested in Krisha; they just wanted to play music. They just thought ‘He’s nuts. If he wants to talk that Krishna stuff, let him go ahead’. I remember our drummer Robby Krpytcrash and his wife at the time were not into this Krishna stuff at all and it caused a great deal of tension in the band. At that time, I might have been a bit fanatical about it and it caused problems with the band. I wanted to write lyrics that were more Krishna Conscious at the time but they weren’t allowing me to do that. The song ‘In Search Of’ was the first song I wrote thinking about Prabhupada and had a spiritual vibe. That was pretty much going against this punk rock movement’s bible. That song caused a lot of stress with the band as well as people associated with the band. Looking back, I would be on stage preaching about stuff that wasn’t right. It wasn’t my band; it wasn’t the Keith Burkhardt Experience but I would be up there talking about Krishna Consciousness. There would be people on the side of the stage screaming at the band members ‘Do you hear what he’s saying?’ It was silly, but it made things interesting at the time.
When I look back on it all now, I just think I was really nuts. I wrote a long letter to Maximum Rock ‘N’ Roll talking about Krishna Consciousness. I felt Tim Yohannan had twisted my words when they published it, so I wrote him back slamming him and he took time out of his day to write a postcard telling me that really wasn’t his intention. He was a well-read older socialist dude in San Francisco and I was just this eighteen-year-old surfer from New Jersey who became a Krishna devotee.
But those were very magical times with me and John and Harley and Rich and John Watson going to that temple. It’s ’82 in downtown Brooklyn on a rough stretch of street and you have this beautiful temple with this beautiful room. John and I had the same guru, this guy Ramashw. He was a really intelligent guy that would get your head spinning. What I was used to was Reverend O’Flaherty trying to scare you. It felt to me when I was in those little rooms doing kirashans and chanting that it was as special as when I stumbled into Max’s Kansas City and all of a sudden saw the Bad Brains.
Did you get kicked out of Cause For Alarm because of the Krishna thing?
I was on 22nd Street waiting with my bags packed sitting on the curb and they never showed up. There were no cell phones then, but somehow, Rob Kabula got in touch and told me they had all gone out the night before and decided they had to kick me out of the band because my views were slowing them down. It didn’t really break my heart, though. Things were good with me in New York, but about a month after that, I moved out to L.A. I was living on the beach in this little studio apartment Angelica’s dad kept for when he worked out there and we took a road trip up to San Francisco to visit her mom. I was in the park and saw posters for the Dead Kennedys playing in the park. So I went to the show and lo and behold, someone taps me on the shoulder and it was Rob Kabula! They had a singer for them in San Francisco and it didn’t really work out. He invited me to where they were practicing and I had no ill feelings towards them. I was happy being a devotee. Alex Kinon was always the driving force behind Cause for Alarm, anyway. Nobody was more dedicated to playing music than Alex. Alex knew that I was a little quirky and that’s the kind of guy you need singing. By that point, I had established myself as the singer of the band. he actually asked me ‘If you want to come back and sing, do it’ and I said ‘sure’. They got rid of the other singers and we did some shows in San Francisco and then they organized a show in L.A. Eventually, we wound up going back to New York, but I remember playing this show that Johnny Stiff put on at a club called Belfast. It was in a basement on Avenue A. That was the last show I played with the old CFA. The show was packed and I remember singing when everything went in slow motion and I thought ‘I’m not feeling this in my heart. This really isn’t my path anymore’. You can’t be in a punk rock band and pretend. After that, I quit.
What did you know about the singer that replaced you, Chris Charuki?
I didn’t know Chris that well, but he was funny. A real class clown type of guy. He went out to San Francisco and got very involved with MDC and into the hippie political thing. I remember seeing Chris after he came back to New York from San Francisco and I was like ‘Wow, what a transformation!’ This guy was all about politics. Before that, he was into partying. Robbie moved out there and all of a sudden it was all about MDC and left-wing politics and soup kitchens and all that.
There are rumors of racist elements in the early part of NYHC. Did you witness any of that?
When I was a punk in New York, the scene was really diverse. On the seven-inch came out, there was a song called ‘United Races’ and that was my response to what was coming up in our scene. I remember Harley reading the lyrics to the song and being confused by the lyrics I wrote: ‘I don’t want to be labeled punk or skin’ and he was just like, ‘I like being labeled skinhead! That’s what I am! I’m a skinhead!’ But there were Italians and Puerto Ricans and Blacks and Jews and Cubans. We were there for the punk rock and no one was concerned about anything else.
What was the motivation for Cause For Alarm to reform in the late ’80s?
After I joined the Krsna movement, I remember people approaching me in 1988 to get CFA back together and do shows. I was absolutely shocked that Hardcore was still happening. Tony Scaglione made fun of me saying I was like the boy in the bubble. I really had no idea. But Raybeez told me when I got back to New York ‘No, it’s really big! There are all these new bands!’ and I was like ‘You’re kidding me!’ In the beginning, it was just this little scene where we hung out at A7 or took road trips to Boston or Cleveland or DC. I was shocked that something like that was still going.
And what about the reformation in the mid-’90s?
In 1994 I had an early mid-life crisis and lost my way spiritually. I was living in Manhattan and one night came back from a club a little drunk and called Alex Kinon at three or four o’clock in the morning. I asked him what he thought of playing music again and he was like, ‘You caught me at a good time, I just broke up with my girlfriend and have nothing to do’. After that, Rob Kabula came in. I never considered it a reunion because I felt we never finished CFA.