“Struggling in the streets just trying to survive;
Searching for the truth is just keeping us alive;
Gotta break these shackles, gotta break these chains;
Said the only way we’ll do it is if we use our brains.”
— “We Gotta Know” from the album The Age of Quarrel
No one ever accused John Joseph of taking the easy road. In his book “Evolution of a Cro-Magnon,” Joseph describes how growing up in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s in New York City, he suffered years of abuse, neglect and homelessness and coped primarily with drugs, crime and violence. Yet rather than succumbing to the streets, he chose a new plan of attack. Not only did Joseph become lead singer of the Cro-Mags, whose innovative fusion of hardcore punk and thrash metal music continues to influence, he also became a triathlete who dedicates his life to a spirituality that includes meditation, a plant-based diet and helping others. And in doing so, he is showing everyone that healthy living can be as intense as any mosh pit.
Joseph was born of violence. He told me: “I came out of a very violent background as a child. My father was a well-known boxer and very violent towards my mom. I didn’t find out until I was 40 years old that she had already left him, and he broke in and raped her, and that’s how I was conceived. The last memory I have of him was that he broke down the door one night to my mom’s house and beat her all over the apartment, and she ended up in the hospital. Broke her jaw, everything. That’s when they took us away and put us in the orphanages, and then they put us in foster care.”
Unfortunately for Joseph, the cycle of violence only got worse; physical abuse, sexual abuse and neglect marked his foster care and orphanage experiences. Joseph describes it this way: “So we spent seven years in one of the worst foster homes you could imagine; Everything happening to us that you can imagine happening in that home. Starved, beaten and even worse. I have two brothers; I’m the middle brother. First, they separated us all. And then the foster home that my older brother was in, the guy was molesting the kids there, and they closed that down, and then they put him in with us. So similar things were happening to us in that home.”
School provided little safety. In “Evolution of a Cro-Magnon,” Joseph describes other children stealing his food and routinely being called a “freak” and an “orphan.” He says, “It was Deer Park, so all the other kids picked on you.” Joseph’s treatment was not only at the hands of the other students. In fact, Joseph describes telling the school principal about the abuse, only to have the principal become angry with him, assuming Joseph was lying.
Joseph recounts the multiple reasons why he and his brothers were reticent to tell his mother about the abuse and neglect. Joseph first describes how his foster family threatened him, and how this fear kept them silent. He says: “But we never said nothing, because when people threaten a young kid, 7, 8 years old, they told us they would put us in a mental institution if we ever said anything. Just crazy mind-fuckery that they did to us.”
But there was something else that kept him silent. Joseph and his brothers were afraid that their mother would not be able to handle the reality of their situation. He describes trying to tell her only to have her scream at him and his brothers. He says, “My mom was always having to take medication for depression and her nerves, and it was like you had to walk on egg shells around the house. I just couldn’t deal with it. We kept a diary, but we didn’t want to upset my mom because she tried to commit suicide on one of our visits when we went home. She had a nervous breakdown, so we didn’t want to upset her, so we never told her what was going on in the home.”
This left Joseph with few resources to cope; and as a result he turned to drugs and crime. He told me: “And that’s one of the ways I did it, just numbing myself by taking drugs. So it wasn’t like I was feeling bad or anything like that. I was just getting high, with whatever the fuck. Whether it was weed, dust, fucking acid, Tuinals, Placidils. I was just a garbage pail that took any drugs and drank.”
For Joseph, stealing began as a way of gaining control over an otherwise helpless situation. Joseph says, “Every day, we went to bed hungry. We were never allowed to go into their refrigerator for the seven years we were there. There was a lot of anger towards those people for what they did, but in that home we found out where they were stashing the money. So we started stealing from them; Anything that we could do to get a little power in that situation because you’re powerless. We were like ‘Yo, we’re going to flip the script on these people.’ So we would stay up ‘til 1:00, 2:00 in the morning and then do bread-drawer raids, and we would make sandwiches. And then when we’d start stealing the money, we would go to Friendly’s and pig the fuck out.”
Studies demonstrate that childhood abuse and bullying can predict increased negative emotion well into adulthood. And Joseph felt that he was suppressing, rather than confronting, his negative feelings. This type of suppression can often worsen negative emotional states. He describes it this way: “The problem is I suppressed a lot of shit that I had as a kid. I never told anybody about being molested in the home or any of that shit until I wrote my book. Even how bad the foster home was. Me and my brothers never talked about it like it didn’t happen.”
The most powerful emotions that Joseph avoided were his feelings towards his mother. He says: “She kept promising to take us back, but her boyfriend didn’t want us around. I think subconsciously I was numbing myself so I didn’t have to deal with what I was really feeling, which was my mother abandoned us. She chose her boyfriend over us. You know that’s a fucked up thing for a kid to keep getting promised we were going to come home at some point and then to just keep getting let down. I just never chose to deal with that.”
Ultimately, it was only when Joseph and his brothers realized that they were not able to return home that they decided to more fully share their experience. He says, “So, that’s when we finally handed in the diary to the social worker. They took all the kids out of the home, closed the home down. So when that got closed down, my brother went to another home, and me and my older brother went to another.”
After being placed in other foster homes and orphanages, Joseph ultimately ran away to begin a life on the streets of Lower East Side of Manhattan at age 14. And it was here that he unfortunately became acquainted with a new life of crime and violence in order to survive. He says, “In January of ’77, I just split and went to life on the streets. I split from the home, and I was living with junkies in abandoned bungalows in Rockaway Beach. It was crazy being on the streets. You had to do what you had to do to survive. I was a heroin mule and smoking angel dust and drug trafficking. I’m a 14-, 15-year-old kid, so I had to hurt some people. I got shot in Forest Park. I got beat down a bunch of times. I was robbed, whatever. So I just developed a violent streak.”
His attitude could be summarized succinctly with his statement: “I was like, you might be bigger than me, but I’m going to put something across your fucking head.”
Joseph’s criminal activity eventually caught up with him, and he was incarcerated for 21 months for drug trafficking and breaking and entering. Research suggests that emotional issues are not adequately treated in prison. Joseph similarly did not feel like the prison time did anything to improve his circumstances. He says, “I didn’t really get rehabilitated. They had me seeing a psychiatrist the whole time that I was there.”
Joseph was also put through the “Scared Straight” program, in which young offenders are subjected to interventions in which prisoners scream at and threaten them. This practice has been subsequently labeled as ineffective by the Department of Justice. Joseph describes it this way: “They put us through the ‘Scared Straight’ program. Didn’t work, because they didn’t give me any alternative to what I was doing before. I came out of jail more angry without any kind of solution. So I went right back to the drugs.”
But prison time did have one positive effect. Joseph discovered that exercise could be an escape, and he began what would become a lifelong commitment to exercise and physical fitness. Physical activity has long been shown to improve health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, depression and anxiety. He says, “I got very physically fit when I was locked up. I boxed; I worked out. As they say in jail, I ‘got my weight up.’ Cause when I was a kid on the street, maybe it was one meal a day. Now you’re getting three hots and a cot, working out every day I put on like 30 pounds of muscle.”
Joseph eventually went into the Navy, but unfortunately his behavior did not change. In fact, Joseph was intoxicated on angel dust during his first naval experience. Joseph describes it this way: “I continued with the street mentality in the Navy. I went to boot camp high on angel dust. Dust made you feel like you had superhuman strength. We shipped out of Fort Hamilton. As we were waiting to get on the military plane to the Great Lakes, my brother was like, ‘Yo, they sell dust right over here. I know a dust spot.’ So we went and smoked three bags of dust and went to boot camp high on angel dust. The next morning, when they would fucking throw fireworks down the aisle and bang garbage cans to wake you up, I was like, where the fuck am I coming off of angel dust. Dust is not something I’d recommend anybody to do, but it was just the time, you know.”
Everything changed for Joseph when, in 1980, he met the legendary hardcore punk band Bad Brains and H.R., their lead vocalist. In what became a signature feature of hardcore punk, Bad Brains set a more egalitarian tone and broke down the barriers between rock stars and the audience. Joseph says, “The singer (H.R.) was kind of like a big brother to me. He was so humble. At first I’d seen every damn band you could imagine in the ‘70s—Aerosmith, Yes, the Who, Led Zeppelin, [Black] Sabbath—and none of them could touch H.R. on the stage. And here’s this dude, a rock star beyond any of these dudes, and he was the fucking most humble and approachable person who had compassion.”
Joseph recalls how other punk rock icons such as Black Flag’s Henry Rollins had watched Bad Brains and decided to play hardcore music. Joseph says, “Henry Rollins was always this figure, I was always like, ‘Wow, this dude’s fucking cool.’ But he said something: ‘People ask why I got into this music, into punk music. Because in the ‘70s, it was always like the rock stars were like a football field away and being worshipped. And here it’s like you’re fucking right up front. And it’s like H.R. jumped right off the stage and knocked me on the floor and screamed in my face over me. And that’s the moment I realized that I wanted to do this the rest of my life. It was always a little more approachable.”
It was at this point that Joseph began a different journey that would help him change his life. He says, “I would say the trifecta was the music, the spirituality and the training.”
H.R. did more than just provide an example to Joseph. He literally put the microphone in his hand. Joseph says, “I wanted to be a drummer. Then H.R. said, ‘You have too much energy to be a fucking drummer. Get on the mic. And he basically put the mic in my hand, and was like, ‘Go do it.’ And then we formed a band for all of the roadies of Bad Brains. So when we went out on that tour, we opened up for them in ’81. August or July of ’81, we started with the Cro-Mags at 171A. Then I went on tour with the Brains. And that was the first time I went on stage.”
Research demonstrates that playing music can improve one’s health and well-being. For Joseph, this effect was immediate. He says, “I had no anxiety. I had no fear of the stage. It was like, naturally; I just grabbed the mic and did it. It was just a very natural thing to get into it.” Joseph eventually went on to be the lead singer for the Cro-Mags, whose 1986 album “The Age of Quarrel” is still considered to be one of the best albums to ever come out of the New York City hardcore and metal scenes.
This may have been in part because hardcore music provided a real outlet for Joseph’s experience. Sharing traumatic experience has been shown to be associated with positive emotional health. Joseph says, “It was just an outlet for a lot of shit that we were going through. I mean, when we sang about cops kicking down the doors and all of this shit, street justice, survival of the streets and hard times, and ‘We Gotta Know’ and all of this crazy shit, we were living it. So when we wrote those lyrics, we really was a channel to put emotion in, but in a positive way.”
More, it was here that Joseph also found a sense of community that he had not had previously. He says, “I think it was a place where a lot of people were going through some crazy shit, and then they all came to this music scene. I mean, I was going to the punk shows before hardcore. And then hardcore was more positive. And then Bad Brains is the ones that really started that whole shit; and Ian Mackaye and Fugazi, Minor Threat and shit. It was kind of like a positive outlet for their energy.”
But as influential as Bad Brains was on Joseph musically, it was perhaps their initial spiritual philosophy that was more critical to turning around his life. He says, “It wasn’t until I met the Bad Brains in 1980 that I started getting into yoga and meditation and stopped eating meat. I just had this conversation with the singer all about spirituality. And they gave me a job, and they were like, ‘You can’t do drugs, and you can’t eat meat.’”
It is now well-established that mindfulness training and spirituality can improve emotional well-being. Joseph told me: “It was at this point that And then their sound man was all into philosophy. He was giving me books by Gurdjieff and Ramdas and Krishna Morte and ‘Autobiography of a Yogi,’ so I started getting heavy into reading and meditating and studying and started training a lot. Started studying under Ron Van Clief, the Black Dragon dude. Always tried to learn from martial-arts teachers. But mainly stuff I could use on the streets ‘cause I was down in Alphabet City.”
Never prone to doing anything half-heartedly, Joseph described in “Evolution of a Cro-Magnon” how he was a “living, breathing, eating vacuum for anything related to spirituality,” eventually became a monk. He says, “I didn’t go to rehab. I just showed up at the Hare Krishna temple after all this crazy shit. I went to the temple and read Prabhupada books, and I was like, ‘I want to try to be a monk for a little while.’ So I did that. I was a monk for like two years. Shaved heads, the robes, everything. Up at 2-3 in the morning, training martial arts in Hawaii with this master that used to go to the temple. I still adhere to a lot of those principles even today 35 years later.”
Another part of his new spirituality was kindness to animals and not eating meat or animal products. As described in Evolution of a Cro-Magnon, his diet comes from live food juices, complex carbs like whole grains, green leafy vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and beans. He says: “I swear when I stopped eating meat, something just clicked, and then I started meditating and stuff like that. First, I got into it for spiritual reasons. Animals have a soul, dude. Look into a dog’s eye.”
Soon, Joseph was eating based on his understanding of the evidence of the health benefits of a plant-based diet. He says, “But then I started going to hear guys like Viktorus Kulvinskas, who wrote “Survival into the 21st Century,” [and] Ann Wigmore from Hippocrates Health Center. Like, all these raw-food people, like Gabriel Cousens. I’ve studied this shit, and met with some of the top people. Dr. Campbell, who wrote the China study, and the Forks Over Knives people and gained that knowledge over the years.”
Joseph has always found the stereotype that you can’t be tough unless you eat meat to be laughable. He says, “Nobody can tell me you need meat to be strong, ‘cause that’s a bunch of bullshit. You don’t. Now, if you’re looking at some of the top endurance athletes in the world and the top strength people, you see some of the most bad-ass motherfuckers in the world. You see some of the guys in the best shape in the world. Rich Roll, who wrote “Finding Ultra”; Read Brendan Brazier’s book “Thrive,” fucking changed his whole shit. Within two years of switching to a plant-based diet, he was doing ultra triathlon. So over the years, you’ve seen more bad-ass motherfuckers, even Aaron Pryor back in the day, the boxer, was vegetarian. Mike Tyson, George Laraque, who’s the baddest fighter. The guy who just broke the record for power lifting is a fucking vegan. I wrote a comedy book; I was always told vegans and vegetarians were pussies, so I wrote: “Meat is For Pussies,” like, fuck you.”
For Joseph, much of his eating has to do with being mindful. He says, “You need to be very diligent about what you’re eating and know what you’re eating. I never just blindly stuff some shit in my face without knowing what the fuck’s in it. If you care about your mental and physical state, you want to be eating foods that kind of help with your well-being. Healthy body, healthy mind.”
The kindness was not reserved for animals. Part of Joseph’s spirituality involved helping others. He says, “I kind of feel like any gifts you get, knowledge-wise, I try to pay it forward. I always felt to give back whenever I was able to. And being homeless on the streets, too, was like hunger nonstop. So when I got in the Hare Krishnas, I started the food program in Tompkins Square Park in 1982 to feed the homeless. And we did this big concert in Tompkins Square Park. Five-thousand people came, called ‘Rock Against Maya,’ which means illusion. It was 5,000 people, and we got all these bands from the neighborhood to play. And I just kept it going. I’ve done benefits, I opened up a soup kitchen down at 4th Street. We did a benefit. MTV covered it. It was called Hardcore against Hunger. I built the yoga center that gave free yoga to people. We’d go up to Times Square to sell hats and books to raise money because it’s a charity. Whatever it took to pay the rent. The place is gone now.”
Joseph described how his spirituality facilitated his exercise. He describes it this way: “Even when we went on the road, I was up running 10 miles a day, working out like a fucking beast. So it was never like sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll on the road. It wasn’t about that; Because the Cro-Mags’ lyrics were about a spiritual kind of awareness. I was into my training and into my chanting and doing what I had to do on the road.”
Most recently, Joseph has added Iron Man competitions to his regimen of physical training. “That’s why I compete in Iron Man, the mental challenge to stay focused and not give up. And that’s what life is about. You could be going through the craziest stuff, but you just to have to keep pushing through. I started in 2012. I’d run marathons, biked fucking 225 miles in a day, did fucking four-mile ocean swims, whatever; But then to put all of that together in one day. Never did a triathlon before. My first triathlon was an Iron Man. August 11, 2012. We played a show the night before in Philly. Now, I’m on my fifth Iron Man now.”
Joseph feels that all of these factors have contributed to his being better able to cope with difficult situations. In part, this is because of a proactive lifestyle plan that makes time for these various healthy behaviors. He says, “I try to keep very focused on all my time during the day. I get up, write, train, go back to writing, doing whatever. It’s a way to keep my stuff focused and challenge myself and keep fit.”
This includes avoiding previously difficult situations. Joseph describes it this way: “I don’t really put myself in situations where I would be subject to that. I don’t go to bars. The only time I’m ever in any kind of club is when I’m playing. I just try to avoid stress and beef, and I got positive things to do.”
But he’s also more able to cope in a healthier way when stress arises. He says, “And it wasn’t until I started writing the book and kind of getting my feelings out there. I have to say now, when the pressure is on, I take shelter of my meditation, and I have ways to work through it. I’ll go train. There’s different ways to deal with grief and struggle. I always stay calm in the situations because that’s what the training teaches you. I learn to control the anger and place it where it needs to be rather than that anger controlling me all the time. I’m not saying I don’t lose my cool still. Sometimes I do. But I learned to pull back a little bit and be like, ‘Yo, let my intelligence control the senses and this urge of anger. If I do this, this is what could possibly happen. Whereas before I didn’t have that thought process, I would just smash somebody because I could.”
Joseph is clear that this does not make him. He says, “It’s not like I’m walking around turning the other cheek. It’s never like I became a pacifist, fucking chump. It’s just I’m not walking around fucking grinding fire hydrants now. I know how to control it. Empty battles make the most noise.”
After writing his books, Joseph describes how many people have reached out to him for help. For Joseph, it is important that he leads by example, rather than tell others what to do. He describes it this way: “That’s what my spiritual teacher, Srila Prabhupada, said. He came from India at 70-something years old. Crossed two oceans to come to the West to help people because his guru told him to do it. And he slept on the floor. He led by example. The example that he set—you have compassion for people. I don’t preach to nobody. But if people are like, ‘Yo, I’m interested in your story,’ then I’ll send them a book. You can’t force knowledge on anybody. They have to be willing to grow. That’s how it was with me, too. We’ve seen so much hypocrisy, where people say one thing and do another. I think more and more people are looking to the example that you set. People see what you do and how you’re doing it. It’s more about what you do than what you say. There’s so many flappers and shit talkers. The real dudes I know, it’s like, KRS-One said, ‘Real bad boys move in silence.’ And I’m like, ‘Yo, when you’re ready.’”
For Joseph, leading by example included forgiving his mother. He says, “Compassion. That’s really what it’s about. I didn’t have an attachment. I never heard her side of the story. You have to forgive people and move on from holding anger. And that’s how I kind of ended the book. Talking about how I forgave her. The arc of the book is that people look at where I was and what I became as the inspiration for helping people in their own way. It’s never too late to change.”
These days, Joseph is enjoying doing what he loves and makes him feel healthy. He continues to train for triathlons, and substance abuse is a thing of the past. He says, “Think of the word intoxication. The main part of that word is ‘toxic.’ What do I want to be smoking weed or doing any of that shit anymore?” He is playing music with a new Cro-Mags lineup. He says, “You’re doing it for the love of the music. I started playing in ’81, so 34 years later I’m still playing and touring and whatever.” And he continues to write. “Everything I write, I’m trying to sell these TV shows and screenplays. It’s with the aim of buying a building for these people so we can have this yoga center ‘cause it helped so many people. That place for 10 years helped so many people who were suicidal or fucked up on drugs.”
To be sure, the story Joseph tells in “Evolution of a Cro-Magnon” is not a linear tale of success. Joseph describes many fits and starts as he slowly shaped towards his current behavior and emotional state. But he sees these ups and downs as part of his ongoing development. “Real true character is only revealed under pressure. The greater the pressure, the greater the revelation of true character.” Anybody can talk a good game. But it’s what happens when the pressure is on.”
“I’m not just surviving. I’m thriving.”
