After our conversation last month, Flanagan was off to Europe for some shows, then he returned to continue promoting the documentary on his life, Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos. Released in 2024 and directed and produced by acclaimed filmmaker Rex Miller, this is not your typical music documentary. It’s more than that, and not surprisingly, it hits harder, taking viewers into a life that often defies description. That’s not just a credit to Miller, but to Flanagan, who was as no holds barred in telling his story as he was living that life.
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“We didn’t go into this thing knowing what direction it was going to go in or what turns it was going to take,” he said. “I had a feeling it was going to go into some pretty dark places, but I really wasn’t certain. I knew they were going to be interviewing a lot of different people, and I knew a lot of crazy things were going to come up, some of them not so pleasant. Some of them were actually just quite terrible, and some of them I was responsible for, as well. So I was like, okay, this thing could play itself out in a lot of different ways. But I gave the director free reign based on a couple of things. One is that I saw the film that he had made, Citizen Ashe, and I remember one comment he made at the end of it was when he was editing and losing lots of parts of the film that meant a lot to him, he had to; that’s how it is when you do any kind of editing. You have to ‘kill your darlings’ as they say a lot of times, to tell the story. And I remember him saying, ‘At the end of the day, I had to think about what was best for Arthur Ashe, what would be best for him?’ And now this is a guy who isn’t even alive to speak for himself anymore, so I thought that that was very honorable, number one. Number two, the movie really pulled me in, and this is a movie about a tennis player and I have very little interest, actually, none really, in tennis, and I didn’t know a lot about Arthur Ashe. I remembered him a little bit from when I was young, but I didn’t really know the details of his life, and I found it a very fascinating story, and I found that the movie really sucked me in. And I was like, if this dude can do this, if this guy can pull me into a tennis movie about a guy that I really didn’t know or care much about, I got to have faith that he’ll be able to tell my story pretty well, because he’s definitely got some things to work with.”
