The wild reason Bad Brains frontman HR performed while taped to a chair
To call a band ahead of their time implies that at some point, their brand of music will one day become mainstream. While Bad Brains were refreshingly progressive, we’re still waiting for the day where there livewire mix of reggae and hardcore punk takes over the world. Also, fundamentally, who’s going to do it better than Bad Brains?
The ultimate compliment you can give to the likes of Black Flag and Minor Threat is that many bands that have taken from them since then, including a few that have matched them for quality. Bad Brains, on the other hand, are still utterly singular. Their vision was just so unique that anyone trying to match them would end up being little more than copyists.
Moreover, as exhilarating as they were on record, they were even better live. Most hardcore bands of their ilk were impressive live because basically anything sounds good in that environment when you play it loud enough and have an energetic crowd swirling around them, hollering along to every word. But, in the case of Bad Brains, they thrived as a live band because they were consummate musicians.
They also had HR, a frontman who was just as eccentric, unique and unforgettable as any of their songs. Go back and look at any video of HR performing; he’s a genuine star. I mean, a hardcore frontman who can actually dance, say it ain’t so! Therefore, it makes it all the more confusing that a handful of the most legendary Bad Brains shows were performed with HR taped onto a chair by the road crew.
This is a man who was known to do standing backflips on stage, so having him forced into one place seemed to go against everything the band stood for. Not even his bandmates were initially let in on why HR had chosen to do this until it had happened numerous times. It’s also worth mentioning that just because he was taped to a chair, it didn’t mean that HR was still at all.
He remained as forceful and magnetic as he ever was, straining against the tape and falling over multiple times a show, yet still, the chair persisted.
Eventually, bassist Darryl Jennifer had to step in and ask HR why he’d been taped to a chair, and with a smile, HR said that it was to keep his movement to an absolute minimum – it turned out that HR had been performing with a hernia the whole time, and rather than cancel the shows, he’d decided to perform while taped to a chair instead.
One wonders how much this did to actually heal HR’s wound, especially when you remember that he fell over onstage multiple times, and all the while, he had a big hole in his stomach.
What can you say… punk frontmen really were built differently back in the day.