The following is a piece entitled The Ballad of “An Ode To Ken Death” which was graciously written for us by PFN, a founding member of Portland Anti Racist Action and former Corvallis punk. This true story was originally told during the It Did Happen Here panel at the 2024 HotV AntiCapitalist BookFair. A zine version of this piece can be found on our website at cvantifa.noblogs.org/PeacockStabbing. -CVAntifa
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I don’t know if I was consciously entering the fight against White supremacy when I did. I was 14 years old, and my band, Ehgas (it came from a dream the guitar player had), were playing our first ever show 8 months after Ethiopian college student Mulugeta Seraw was murdered in southeast Portland by members of the racist skinhead gang East Side White Pride. One of the three murderers was known by the name Ken Death, and from reports on the murder, it was Ken who struck the final blow that ended Seraw’s life. Ken was a known entity in Portland’s hardcore punk scene prior to becoming a murderer, having been a bouncer at Portland’s largest all-ages club, The Pine Street Theater, and having been the lead singer in a metalcore band that had opened for The Accused and Poison Idea (the biggest hardcore bands in the Northwest at the time) at a packed show at Pine Street only 8 days before killing Seraw on November 13th, 1988. Seraws’s murder brought home the reality that the Nazi skinheads who had been increasing terrorizing the Portland punk scene with unbridled violence knew no limit. The swastikas and sieg heils were not cosplay, the unprovoked punches were not just roughhousing. My friends and I were stunned and outraged, and it led our guitar player, Spot, to write song about how we were feeling called Ode to Ken Death. I knew the moment I heard it that it was going to be our best song, and fully supported the sentiment behind it, despite the passing thought that it might REALLY piss off some very dangerous people.
As was common among political hardcore bands of the time, we created a photocopied lyric sheet to hand out at the show, and Spot added his address and phone number to it in hopes that people would contact us and ask us to play more shows (This was ultimately short-sighted on his part). We played our set as the openers of an all-day, 8 band benefit show, and were received well, if for no other reason than who doesn’t like seeing 14 and 15 year-olds playing their first show? I noticed a small group of skinheads there, but their vibe was observational more than aggressive, which was unusual for the skins I had previously encountered at shows, so I and presumably everyone else assumed that they were not Nazis, and not there to cause trouble. Notably their matching dark blue flight jackets and overall clean and composed appearance presented a stark contrast to that of the Nazi skinheads who marauded around Portland punk shows. Guys in East Side White Pride often looked like they had woken up in their own vomit.
About a week after the show, my teenage band mates and I were hanging out in Spot’s bedroom where we practiced when he got a call that sounded like a prank. A young woman was on the other end saying she was a part of anti-racist group in Texas that monitors the activity of racist groups such as former KKK grand dragon Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R.), and did we know that on his weekly address to his followers on the W.A.R. hotline that he had implored them to let us know what they thought of our characterization of Ken Death and theviolent acts that he committed. This had to be a joke, right? The most powerful and dangerous bigot in America had just sicced his legions of militant White supremacists on us, three teenagers in a little town outside of Portland? It was not, in fact, a joke. Within days the letters started pouring in, mostly with U.S. postmarks, but some coming from as far as Europe. The tone of these letters ranged from your standard “Fuck you go die race traitors” to carefully crafted appeals to our intellect and anti-authoritarian sensibilities, expressing concern that we had been misled by mainstream media reports on the Seraw murder. Wisely, none of the mail we received (roughly 20 letters, from my recollection) threatened us with actual harm, as this would have been a legal offense. We responded to this situation with the kind of exhilaration a person whose life is very boring experiences when something interesting finally happens, while at the same time carrying a collective pit in our stomachs. Our next show was about a week later in Corvallis at The Peacock Ballroom (AKA The Top of The Cock), opening for Rhode Island’s Verbal Assault, among others. As happens in college towns sometimes, the punk scene in Corvallis was exploding at that moment, and nearly all the shows were happening up that long flight of stairs. Getting to play a proper punk show opening for a bunch of touring bands was incredibly fun and exciting, but the traumatized child part of me was always hypervigilant when the threat of danger existed, even in moments where I was having a good time. So yes, I was watching the door all night, and yes I was the one to notice a couple of skinheads in dark blue flight jackets entering the club minutes after we played. I watched as they spoke to the person at the door, and after a moment saw them turn around and leave. Deductive reasoning told me those were the skins from our last show, who had very likely provided W.A.R. with our lyric sheet, and they were there to find us. The threat we experienced felt serious, and as teenagers without any real community or connections, it seemed to us that we had entered that fight alone. Having been ready for a name change as it was, we chose self-preservation and updated our name to Malcontent.
Part of why the punk scene in Corvallis was thriving at this time in 1989 was because very few venues were hosting all-ages shows in Portland. The violence brought by Nazi skinheads to nearly every show was a likely reason for this, along with the restrictions imposed by Oregon Liquor Control Commission on clubs who dared selling alcohol to the 21+ crowd while minors were present in the same room. Meanwhile some folks in Corvallis found a good, cheap, mid-sized ballroom to rent out for shows, and soon bands from all over were stopping there to play in lieu of Portland. In December of that year, one of my favorite bands at the time, Neurosis, came up from the East Bay to headline at The Peacock. I’d love to tell you how thrilling it was to see a band that I had been obsessed with for more than a year prior, but I can’t. They made it to The Top of The Cock, but they didn’t perform.
Like several towns in Oregon at the time, Corvallis too had a Nazi skinhead problem, and the biggest problem of them all was named Shanley. He was an oaf with a big mouth, and was always looking for trouble. Mike Arrogant, the guitar player for Portland’s Deprived ( later of Defiance), who were also on the bill that night, had a mouth of his own, and embodied some oaf-like tendencies when supplied with enough alcohol. But he was our oaf. Reports vary from about what happened when Mike and Shanley crossed paths outside of the club, but the end result was multiple stab wounds in Mike’s abdomen from Shanley’s knife. The stabbing occurred while punk legends The Detonators were warming up the stage for Neurosis. The kids were wild with anticipation when Mike emerged onto the stage, propped up by his girlfriend Pilar. He grabbed the mic from Bruce from The Detonators while lifting his shirt to show his grotesque stab wounds to the 350 or so kids in attendance, yelling “Shanley just fucking stabbed me!” We gawked at the disfigured flesh while trying to process his words. Once the message hit, it was as if someone had kicked an ant hill, and we were the inhabitants, out to seek revenge. The entire venue emptied in the span of 45 seconds, and kids flooded the streets of downtown Corvallis, screaming for vengeance and running in all directions, searching for the guy who harmed one of our own.
It’s easy to dismiss teenagers, and boy oh boy, they can be very silly without even trying, but what I experienced that night was my first real moment of solidarity in action. And it was powerful. Nearly every kid in that room had felt terrorized by a Nazi skinhead at some point in their short life, whether it had been in the pit at a hardcore show, in the halls of their high school, or walking down the street minding their own business. The rage expressed by every one of us was not just about seeing a guy from a band we liked with his guts poking out. It was a rage that had been simmering and finally came to a boil. I don’t want to speak for everyone, but in that moment I did not only want justice for a member of my punk rock community. I wanted justice for every punk kid that had been fucked with or beaten by a skinhead. I wanted justice for Mulugeta Seraw, and I wanted justice for every person who had been harmed in any way in the name of White supremacy.
The Nazi got away that night, but ultimately wound up in prison for the stabbing. One Nazi behind bars, however, was not going to solve the problem we were facing. First they came for Mulugeta Seraw, and we marched and wrote songs about it. Then they came for us, and we had not choice but to fight back.
In November of 89, a month prior to the stabbing, Maximum Rock and Roll published an interview with a Minneapolis anti-racist skinhead named Kieran, who was one of the founders of an organization called Anti-Racist Action (ARA). In the article, he described the tactics of the group, their values, and the ways in which they were finding success in taking back their community and driving the Nazis underground. I can only image how many people reading that interview felt a sense of hope that something like that could happen in their town, and in their scene, and it most certainly played a part in my friends and I forming our own chapter in the months that followed.
Nobody seems to recall the exact date or even month that the first meeting of Portland ARA took place, but based on the clothing we wore in the group photo taken that day, it must have been early spring, 1990. We met at the home of our friend, Karen, on Southeast Belmont Street. Karen seemed almost too old and mature for the 30 or so punks and skinheads who comprised that initial core of the ARA chapter, while perhaps too young and punk for the professional activists who made up Portland’s most visible anti-fascist organization at the time, the Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD). If I don’t mention a single word here about Karen again, I want to be clear that without her, Portland ARA would have been far less functional, and might never have happened at all.
I would love to say I had some important role in the inner-workings of our ARA chapter, but that just wasn’t the case. At 15 I was the second-youngest member of our chapter, and much like now, a better listener than a talker. Regardless of how much I spoke up in those meetings, I deeply believed in the cause, and felt an adrenaline rush every time I sat with my friends and comrades scheming up ways in which we could take back our scene and drive the Nazis out of our community. When we put those plans into action, it was a strange euphoria where fear and joy become jumbled up together.
The actions taken by ARA, in conjunction with SHARP, CHD and other community organizations, have thankfully been well-documented in the podcast and book, It Did Happen Here, so by all means go find those resources if you want an in-depth look at what we accomplished and how we accomplished it. For now, though, it’s important to know that through coming together and utilizing ourstrengths as individuals and as organizations, the positive impact was undeniable and massive. By 1992, less than two years after the formation of Portland ARA, Nazis at punk shows in Portland or anywhere else in Oregon were an exceedingly-rare sight. Not to say that they disappeared, but they became ashamed and afraid to make themselves known. Pompadours and rocker dos became the new style for these fascists in hiding, who found new homes in the more conservative rockabilly and metal scenes. Most moved to the outer edges of town, or left the area completely. An incredible win for our community, though like all things, impermanent, and emblematic of what John Steinbeck once wrote in a letter to a friend:
“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die”. -PFN
