"Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad."- Euripides

"You don’t know just how fucked up I am, so don’t blame me when I fuck you up." - Nash Kato

"We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves." - Nick Zedd

"You know what my message is to the people? Some of you fuckers need a crack in the mouth. That’s the message, plain and simple."- Harlem Greenwood

Harlem Greenwood has been called a lot of things, almost none of them good. ‘The Devil’ is a favorite, though. He formed the assaultive noise collaborative Coke Dealer 13 years ago. To this day, he claims they are a lounge band, although there is nothing remotely reclining about them. Like some sort of death tripping performance art piece gone horribly wrong, a Coke Dealer show is a lesson in violence you won’t soon forget, with band members abandoning their instruments almost immediately to brawl with the audience until the police are called. Yet, inexplicably, people still show up like wayward pilgrims to a profane cathedral. The "Car Crash Syndrome", as it’s often called. Harlem knows what the audience expects of him, and he delivers without a trace of irony, regret, or concern for safety. Offstage, he’s generally sad, scary, and drunk, a liability to the people that actually know the weird fucker that’s walking around, knocking people’s drinks out of their hands. But there’s a certain unmistakable fatal charm to Harlem Greenwood and his misguided attempt to entertain through pain. No matter how fucked up you are, at least you’re not him.

6 months ago, I got a late night phone call from Harlem Greenwood. He was in Topeka, Kansas, on what he cryptically referred to as a "suicide mission’. He needed me to wire him thirty-five bucks right away so he could "straighten this cock sucker out". I hung up on him, hoping said cock sucker would just kill him and get it over with. And for awhile, it seemed like that might have happened. But eventually, Coke Dealer made it back to town. They booked a gig opening for resident power stoner kingpins Milligram, a band renowned as a group of guys that are not to be fucked with. Coke Dealer showed up an hour later, plugged in, and began droning out some industrial noise cover of a Mel Torme song, while Harlem belittled the audience. It lasted all of 5 minutes before Milligram’s frontman, Jonah Jenkins, began to physically dismantle Coke Dealer’s set. Thing’s ended badly. Harlem found himself in the alley behind the club with his mouth duct taped shut and his pockets emptied. I met up with him a few days later at the Irish Eyes, a pathetically low rent Karaoke bar. Apparently, it was " Urine Soaked Pants Night" at the Eye. An interview, of sorts, ensued…

It’s mostly for where I’m from. I don’t know, my parents are black, and they wanted to name me from the greatest neighborhood in America. And my cousins are Spanish,that’s where the Greenwood comes from, from Cuba. I’m pretty much adopted.

I had some problems, but most of them weren’t mine. I decided really early on that music was what I wanted to do with my life, that music was in my blood. Or that there would be the blood on me of musicians…The idea was that I’d seen the cabaret, and I’ve seen the lounge, and that’s where it’s it, that’s what the kids want to see these days. And I saw that at a very early age. I wanted to model myself after singers like Jackie Gleason and Benny Goodman. I saw that that was where it was going with powerful singers like Miles Davis, and I wanted to infuse that, that be-bop sound with a rock atmosphere, like Jerry Lee Lewis, only with a friendlier atmosphere.

The name comes from ‘Coke’, as in something to do, and ‘Dealer’, as in someone to bring it to you. That’s what I’m trying to do, bring the music to the people, so they know what’s going on.

I’m trying to set up something with an insurance company to provide insurance for the members of the band. We had an untimely death with our guitar player, Brad Milano, but we’ve got his cousin Larry filling in, but in such cases when Brad was murdered, we had to have a benefit show, because we did not have sufficient funds to bury the man. In the future, we will provide policies, because I do go through band members quite often. There’s been up to 37 members of Coke Dealer so far. I’ve had to fire a few because of their outrageous behavior, because this is my show, it’s not an individual thing. I’ve had to fire people because they’ve shown up with a mustache, or with long hair, and refused to cut it. That’s a problem. Because it’s an honor to be in this band, and to be part of what it is that I’m trying to do.

Yeh, that fella, Jj…Jenny….Jenkins…whoever he is. I find people like that are a problem in this community, because he hired us, and he paid us quite well, but he wanted to look like the good guy, he wanted to be the hip kid. And sure, we might have ruined his show for him, but he knows what we do, and he seems to have a problem with music that’s gonna upstage his music.

I find no rock community in this town. And the reason I moved here, is because I knew there wouldn’t be any competition. People leave after seeing us, we’ve played with many bands and blown them off the stage. And the community thing I might understand better, but I’m usually too high on uppers, or doing too many drugs to really understand, or care. And there’s too many people like this Jen Jens, who asks me to put on a show, and then he attacks me. Jealous.

I thought they were horrible.

It mostly came from ex-cons that I was in jail with, and with trying to have people understand what I’m doing with my music. And I find that people relate to industrial music. I’ve been to clubs that play both, and the people understood the music, and I’ve been to lounges where there was no music. And I knew what would happen if there was music there.

I think people in this town just don’t understand the musical vision that we try to portray. They come into the show expecting a show, but they get more of a vision of what can happen to them if they believe in the vision…and these people get upset, because they don’t even realize that they’re the ones with the problem. I mean, we know what we’re doing, and they’re afraid of that. So in a nutshell, they’re afraid of themselves. So they’re afraid of us.

People have got to understand that I’m there for them. I’m not hurting them so much as they’re allowing themselves to be hurt by me. When they’re in my area, which is the whole club, they’re in my space. The ultimate rock show would have one person there. Me.

I think the people that have the violence want it that way. I could go either way with it. I could have a guy on stage making sandwiches, giving away sandwiches, or I could have a guy flailing away relentlessly, trying to make something happen. To me it’s more of a ‘what’s happening right now?’ kind of vibe. I could have a guy making sundaes, or a guy punching people in the face, it all depends on what’s going on right now at the sundae factory.

Out of all the cities in this country, I think that Boston is the least likely to understand art.

Because they’re stupid. They’re very stupid people who think they understand art, but when they see it, it scares them. They don’t know what happens next. Art isn’t forced, art is enforced in this town, so they see what’s happening, what’s really happening, and they try to shut it down.

Well, that’s a problem that people have, but if I was dealing coke, I’d call the band "Flower Kids", or "Real Time Watches", something not related to drugs. But since I’m not dealing drugs, I’m dealing rock, I have no problems with calling my band Coke Dealer.

I think if you want to come to the show for free drugs, then don’t bother, because we don’t have free drugs anymore. If you want drugs, there’s a McDonald’s down at the Fenway, they sell cocaine in the back.

It was at this club called O’Brien’s in Austin, Texas. The gentlemen there were having a good time with us, but then they decided they didn’t want the show to go any further. We usually get a $1,500 guarantee, and they didn’t want to give us that, they wanted to pay us in Gennesee Cream Ale, which they had 9 cases of. I figured that out to be about 400 dollars worth of beer. It became a problem.

Next question.

Most of the clothes I wear I found on the street. For my style, I like to go with what’s hip and in. I go for polyester, I go for platform shoes, mostly of the white variety. I know what looks good, I read the magazines, I see these people. But the rest of the band are slobs. They look slovenly, and it’s only a matter of time before they’re out the door. The music’s second, the fashion comes first.

Yeh, they’re rentals.

No, I’ve found remorse through Coke Dealer.

For current music, I’d have to go with Cactus, and Bill Haley and the Comets.

These people call themselves lounge, they say they love Sinatra, Louis Prima, Neil Diamond, but they’re faking it, as if it was some kind of joke. I hold those people sacred, Sammy Davis I hold sacred, so when we played with this lounge act, and I won’t say who they are, but they’re quite well known, I mean you know who I’m talking about… We had a much more soulful approach to our music. I strangled their singer with my mic cable. And if they had been playing real lounge music, I don’t think I would have felt compelled to.

I write all the songs myself. I give the parts to the guys and if they don’t get it right, they’re gone. There’s a lot of practice involved, you gotta rehearse 7 days a week to get the musical ability to achieve the Coke Dealer vision.

Our worst show was when our trumpet player, Vinnie Valentine, was shot in the stomach, over some girlfriend episode. This chick, Julie something, I don’t remember, shot him while we were on stage. The only reason that it was bad was because we had to stop the show. There’s bands like the Beatles, let’s say, with their ‘Sgt.Pepper’, which was a monumental record for them, right? Well, that’s what I want to do on stage every night, the whole cream show. And with somebody getting shot on stage, I can’t achieve that. I had cd 1 done. Where’s cd 2? You open up the case and it’s missing. People are yelling at you, going, "Where’s the party, where’s the party?" and I’m giving them paramedics…

"Birthday at the Party" which I will never give to them live, because they want it. And you know what, I want them to buy the record. When they come to the show, that’s a different feel. There’s some kids in the front row that don’t like that, but I don’t care, I don’t need them, these two bit wannabe’s that want to make friends with the big rock star. They can buy the record, and sit there.

Has-beens. The best music I make is from watching people that had a moment in the spotlight, and watching the spotlight crash on their head and burn them to death. That’s my inspiration.

Never. I’m on top, and I don’t see anybody coming up the hill to push me over. There’s some bands in town that try, but they’ll never go where I’m going, because they’re afraid to walk the extra mile.

What about it?

Sheep fuckers.

People with baseball bats.
Detroit?

I set a car on fire onstage there, to teach those people what’s going on.

Fat People.

Ugly people.

Ugly people with problems.

They should appreciate their moment. There’s your 15 minutes, now go bask in it before you go back to your horrible day jobs.

I just feel sorry for them, because they’re never going to be on par with what I do. They get paid for throwing people out of a club. I get paid for showing up at one. You see what I mean? I just feel bad for them, because I know what the next day for them is going to be like.

Yes.

Not a physical one, no.

Newspaper delivery, grocer, skin lab technician, nicotine deficiency (?), and I worked in a cinema for a month. I mean, I’ve been around, I know what the story is. Most people don’t know what the story is, they don’t have the literature.

I was doing some beatnik poetry for awhile, but I realized that I was so much smarter than the people that try to do poetry readings, that I just couldn’t do them anymore. The people that come down to those readings are morons.

Exactly. I think that people that want to do poetry are afraid of their poetry. If you want to go out there with your poems, and try to say something, then people should attack you, why not? It’s like, ‘ok, I said something to you, now you say something back’. That’s what it’s really all about.

I’ve come close to dying a lot of times. I was shot once, I was stabbed twice, 8 times with the car hijinx, many, many times I drank the wrong drink, and once it actually killed me. It’s the music you hear when you’re dead. I was brought back with a shot to the heart, but while I was dead, I heard all these sounds and I brought them back with me. I give all these sounds to these jerks, and it’s tough because they don’t understand, they haven’t been where I have. That’s why I need so many people to play it. I sit there and write music that says, ‘this is what it sounds like when I’m dying.’

No, it’s not peaceful. It’s a fucking mess.

Then they’re pretty foolish, because they paid the 5 bucks to meet us anyway. Everybody wants to be the hip kid, the one that met the band right? Yeh, you paid the 5 bucks, but what about the next show? Then it’ll be 10, 15 bucks. You’re getting a fucking bargain meeting us.

I usually try to give them another black eye.

Yeh, it’s coming out this summer, it’s called ’16 Ways To Deal Coke’.

No, it’s got 4. I’m not really in to giving out the music like that, because then people come to the show, and that’s what they expect, to hear the songs they know. And I have no intention of giving it to them. They want the hits, they should just be lucky we’re playing live, because most of the time I don’t even want to do it. It’s ridiculous for me to be playing live. It’s all just blood and craziness now, no one seems to remember the musical vision.

"16 Ways To Deal Coke" is set to be released this summer on Polterchrist records, with another Coke Dealer tour to follow. I’d suggest that you just stay the fuck home, but that would only further encourage you.