But Miret stands firmly behind the sentiment. He outsourced the job to Peter Steele, the leader of the Brooklyn metal act Carnivore, who would later go on to fame as the frontman for goth-rockers Type O Negative. Sample lyric: "Uncle Sam takes half my pay so you can live for free." Their 1986 track "Public Assistance," for example, was a harsh attack on the welfare state. But the band did sometimes express right-of-center views in their songs and interviews. Unlike some punk acts, Agnostic Front never offered any sort of coherent political message. I was Cuban for Christ's sake-far from the image of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan Übermensch." Miret has nothing but contempt for those "privileged, politically correct" punks that slandered his name. "From the start we welcomed anyone who wanted to be a part of what we were doing. After hanging around the scene for a couple of years, Miret joined Agnostic Front in 1983.Īgnostic Front has "never put down any other races or ethnicities," Miret writes in his memoir. He grew up rough in "the slums of New Jersey towns like Passaic and Paterson." From there he found his way to Manhattan, where the loud, fast sounds of bands like the Stimulators, the Bad Brains, and Reagan Youth were blaring out of clubs like Max's Kansas City, A7, and CBGB. as a young child after his parents fled the Castro regime. "The crazy thing about Timmy calling me a fascist is that I was an immigrant Latino kid dating a Jewish girl, and she never accused me of being a Nazi sympathizer." Lesser Gods Booksīorn in Cuba in 1964, Miret came to the U.S. "A writer for this crappy but influential fanzine, Maximumrocknroll, started talking shit about us and calling us a bunch of fascist skinheads," Miret writes in My Riot: Agnostic Front, Grits, Guts & Glory (co-written with Jon Wiederhorn). Now one of those band members, Agnostic Front singer Roger Miret, is out with a gripping new memoir that tells his side of the story. Skins apparently have embraced the British National Front's racist and nationalist attitudes." Yohannan rarely missed the opportunity to depict the band's members as the equivalent of goose-stepping goons. As he asserted in one 1984 issue, "the N.Y. For me, what makes punk different is the intelligence and commitment behind it."Īgnostic Front quickly became one of Yohannan's primary targets. "If it's just 'good sounding' music you want," he admonished readers in the March 1985 issue, "then punk is no alternative at all. ![]() ![]() In effect, Yohannan appointed himself as the grand inquisitor of the punk rock thought police, scouring the scene for any signs of deviation from the left-wing script. As Ray Farrell, a punk veteran who worked at the independent record label SST (run by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn), told Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore: A Tribal History, "there was an ideological development at Maximum RockNRoll, making everything move towards a Socialist bent." ![]() The author of that review was Maximum Rocknroll founder and editor Tim Yohannan, a 40-something ex-Yippie who thought that punk music should march in lockstep with left-wing politics. "Unfortunately, much of the narrow-mindedness, fanatical nationalism, and violence that has destroyed the New York punk scene seems to have revolved around AGNOSTIC FRONT." "I'm approaching this band with caution," the reviewer warned. ![]() In September 1984, the widely read punk zine Maximum Rocknroll published its review of Victim in Pain, the debut album by the New York City band Agnostic Front.
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