Denise attended the gig with a friend who worked for Stiff Records and has recalled of the event "literally the second they started to play, my life changed."
She resolved this discrepancy by visiting Max's Kansas City and asking an attractive patron at the bar, Patrick Mack, whether he had experience singing, and whether he would like to be in a band, to which his answers were "no" and "yes" respectively.
[3][4] Drum tryouts with 1970s punk notables Johnny Blitz and Jerry Nolan failed to fill the vacant position,[6] so Denise turned to her 11 year old nephew.
He had a book of poetry entitled Stories & Illustrations by Harley (Charlatan Press), with a foreword written by family friend Allen Ginsberg, published when he was nine.
Fanzine editor Jack Rabid, who was a regular at punk shows at Max's Kansas City, noticed for the first time many young overtly punk-looking and behaving attendees at the establishment, at Stimulators gigs.
came from bassist Nick Marden (who like Flannagan, had been around rock music from early childhood, his aunt Joan Baez having taken him to Monterey Pop when he was 8).
Marden wrote the phrase on the back of his punk leather jacket, surrounded by band names, and when noticed by his bandmates, was used as a title for a song Mercedes and Mack had already written.
"[5] In 2018, Mercedes teamed up with Marden and former singer of the iconic 1960s girl group The Crystals, LaLa Brooks to work on a new project called Dae Lilies.
Blush also noted that the Stimulators befriended Washington D.C.'s Bad Brains, who proceeded to make NYC their second home, another hugely influential development in the history of NYHC.
Jesse Malin of Heart Attack and D Generation noted that the presence of the adolescent Harley Flannagan in the band was a seminal influence on the underaged future hardcore set.
[3] Harley Flanagan returned from the Stimulators' 1980 Ireland tour with a shaved head and a skinhead identity, which proved influential to what became the New York Hardcore scene of the 1980s.
The first live performance for an embryonic form of Cro-Mags, with a lineup featuring Harley (under the name "Disco Smoothie") on bass, and members of Even Worse and Crucial Truth, took place at the Peppermint Lounge in 1980, opening for the Stimulators.