Allen: We were on tour with some Finnish punk bands and we had a gig in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. The Finns came up to us at the venue: "You're not going to believe this, there's this Nazi-bonehead band playing, and they had songs like 'N------ Get Back to the Jungle.'" And we were like, "What?"

Darryl Jenifer (bassist, Bad Brains): Out of my whole 40 years in Bad Brains, I probably faced racism or heard the word "n-----" maybe a handful of times. Back in the ’80s, we were playing a show in Oklahoma. The little punk-rock kid came up and said, “I love your band, but my boyfriend and his friends are Nazis, they’re going to come down and kick y’all’s ass.” But they never came. That seemed to happen with the Bad Brains. No one came up with us in that "n-----" shit. I’m thinking we’re unique in that. I’d be all around white culture, and it’s just something that didn’t ring to me. And I jumped off tour buses and ran into the Klan’s gas stations.

Allen: There have been gigs where Nazis have turned up and we've said, "We're not playing until these fuckers are out of here." In this instance, we said, "We're going to go and talk about this stuff." We went on, and the first songs we did were about fascism and racism. It wasn't going down very well.... They hit me and I hit them with a microphone stand, and it turned into a barroom brawl, like in a Western. Most of the locals sat there and watched as if it was entertainment. The only ones who lifted a finger to help were the Russian bar owners who came out from behind the bar with blocks of wood and laid into the boneheads.

David Lowery (singer, Camper Van Beethoven): What we would do was play these fast ska songs. They would kind of run around in circles and skank, and they were happy with us until we started playing something that offended them. I specifically remember playing a Veterans of Foreign Wars or Knights of Columbus hall. We probably had about 800 people in Chico, California, and the crowd kind of turned on us. We were hippies, we had long hair, we played "Wasted" and "White Riot" in this country style, and it just wasn't going well. We had to play a lot of these fast ska tunes to get them under control. I remember going, "I don't know if we're going to make it out of here. I don't know if we have enough of these fast ska tunes to last the 25 minutes."

Doug Kauffman (longtime Denver concert promoter): That whole movement was a frightening one to have at a show. The last [Denver punk band] Warlock Pinchers show at the Gothic Theatre, they all came and they were sieg-heiling, and the entire crowd on the main floor just suddenly turned on them. Everybody said, "We've had enough of this shit." All of a sudden, this phalanx of skinheads came running through the front doors and were never seen or heard from again. It was an amazing thing—the crowd just collectively decided, "There's 700 of us and there's 40 of you, and we've had it." They ran with their tied-up boots and their gray jackets and their shaved heads, and they ran out of that theater, and I swear to God, it ended the problem.

Rollins: When I had a bunch of overweight teenagers sieg-heiling me, I was unable to take it seriously. I told them that they wouldn't make it through a week of Army boot camp, much less the Third Reich. They got really mad.