Читать книгу Don't Rhyme For The Sake of Riddlin' - Russell Myrie - Страница 7

The mid to late seventies would see New York slowly but surely become hooked by the last great cultural movement of the twentieth century. While it was still very much a ghetto secret for much of the seventies, by the end of the decade hip-hop fever was spreading everywhere. Like rock’n’roll in the late forties or soul music in the early fifties, hip-hop was still very much in its infancy, but the vibe was unmistakeable. Hip-hop probably fascinated its first era of fans more than any subsequent generation. It would never be this fresh and new again. It was into this that the Spectrum City crew came to life.

The first incarnation of Spectrum City consisted of Hank and Keith Shocklee and Richard Griffin. But they took their original name from the childhood partnership Keith and Griff had formed. ‘We used to call ourselves the KGs, Keith and Griff.’ Keith recalls. ‘Eddie Murphy used to come DJ with me too. He used to come to my parties and get on the mic and say his thing in high school.’

The budding mobile DJ crew didn’t name themselves ‘Spectrum’ until 1976 when the trio were in their teens. The ‘City’ was added for marketing reasons on WBAU radio around 1984. Operations were based at their local youth centre. They managed to convince a lot of the local youths that a radio station was housed inside, although that wasn’t strictly accurate. But music was being played in the place, courtesy of some old turntables, a mixer and some speakers. It also meant that their mothers didn’t have to worry about them running the streets and falling prey to the many temptations therein.

When Griff left Long Island to join the services, the Shocklee brothers continued doing parties, and watched their local business grow as time progressed. ‘Around our way we was just picking up from what the guys were doing up in The Bronx and Brooklyn,’ says Keith. ‘Brooklyn had a lot of mobile DJs when we was growing up.’ Other popular DJs in Long Island included DJ Hig, whose little brother Brian Higgins would eventually become Leaders of the New School’s Charlie Brown.

Keith was also making mixtapes and earning a couple of dollars doing beats for local groups as early as 1976. ‘A lot of mobile DJs were making mixtapes but I had to make special ones.’ Cos I used to make them for different people, cats would come to me like, “I don’t want the same records that you put on his.” Or it would be, “I don’t want the same records played the same way. I want mine, my own unique mixtape.”’ Consequently, he would spend literally hours in his basement making sure his stuff was on point.

Mobile DJs became popular because in 1970s New York racism was still very prominent and certain things were understood if not spoken. ‘Most of the clubs was white clubs and, you know, they had the white DJs playing there,’ Keith says. After a while, a lot of ghetto celebs began to pass through their events. Everybody from Grandmaster Flash to Grandmaster Caz came by. Chuck first saw Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel aged eighteen at Roosevelt Roller Rink.

He was overwhelmed. ‘I had no words, believe me. They came out to Long Island and tore that shit down. I couldn’t even believe it, man. It was one of those things where I said, “Shit, I don’t know about rapping,’ cos nobody in the world could be better than this.” So that kept me away from rapping. Fo’ real, I’d just never heard a dude so good. And Flash was a DJ that was just never, never, ever off beat. And these two guys together? There was nothing like that DJ and that emcee, man. They were a million miles ahead of anyone else in my mind.’

Nearly ten years after the Ridenhours moved to Long Island, when he was eighteen, Chuck connected meaningfully with Hank Shocklee, and their friendship was born. This was the first crucial meeting that would eventually lead to the formation of Public Enemy. But before Chuck linked up with Hank’s Spectrum City DJ-for-hire collective as their emcee, he had to pay his dues and watch from afar. Like a large number of Long Island youths, Chuck was already a fan of Hank Shocklee and Spectrum.

Chuck first hooked up with Hank during the early months of 1979. At this time he had returned to Adelphi University, one of the spots that used to host Afro-American studies, to study graphic design. Besides sports, graphic design and the burgeoning hip-hop culture were his main obsessions. Strangely, Chuck has his mother to thank for creating the circumstances. ‘Really, my moms hired Spectrum,’ he admits with a laugh. Chuck’s mother was involved with the Roosevelt Community Theater, and they were looking for people to play music. Hank and Spectrum fitted the bill perfectly.

In late seventies Long Island, if you needed some DJs for a function of whatever kind, you could do a lot worse than the Spectrum crew. Keith emphatically insists, ‘From the beginning we were DJs and we knew how to rock a crowd.’ Although they wouldn’t start playing even a few rap records until the eighties began to loom on the horizon, they did have ‘tons of r’n’b records, that had a great vibe and a great funkiness to it’.

So while the likes of Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five were the first to blow Chuck’s mind, Hank and Spectrum were largely responsible for making Chuck decide to form a lasting relationship with this new music. Like many, Chuck was amazed at the way hip-hop DJs used their turntables to extend certain sections of records to make them last longer than their creators had intended. At the time, ‘Galaxy’ by the LA-based funk and Latin group War was one of his favourite records. One night, while in a basketball gym watching Hank DJ at a local night called Higher Ground, Chuck became more and more stupefied by how long his favourite song was lasting. Of course Hank was just back-to-backing, or mixing and blending the break section of the record, extending the appropriate section for as long as he saw fit. Not so much of a big deal today. But at the time, that was some shit. ‘It was the same record I liked but no words came in. I was bugging out like, “How big is this record?” Ain’t no words came in. It just played on and on till the break of dawn,’ Chuck says with a ‘those were the days’ look. ‘When I found out that two turntables, two records did this? And it was a mixer in between? That’s when I got bitten by the hip-hop bug.’

By this time emcees were just beginning to make their mark and the subsequent rise of their popularity would eventually see them become the main attraction at the DJs’ expense. Technology played a part in this too. The echo chambers used by Keith never failed to get the crowd hype. ‘That was like, “You’re listening to the sound, sound, sound, of the K, K, K, G, G, G”. That style was new to people. Words repeating on and on and on and music is changing in the background. That was sorta new.’

‘Watching Hank Shocklee and Spectrum was riveting, like seeing a band,’ Chuck says. ‘But they didn’t have an emcee.’ This is the gap Chuck would eventually fill. The heads in his neighbourhood were perhaps the first to notice that Chuck was blessed with a voice tailor-made for oratory and performance, and encouraged him to explore these talents further. But another skill would enable him to break the ice with Hank. Chuck was, after all, serious about graphic design. So after one of Spectrum’s parties, Chuck decided to approach the local hero he’d been watching from a distance. Even if the thought of becoming Spectrum’s emcee existed in the back of his mind, he kept it there, and approached Hank on a design tip. Chuck was specific about the kind of art he wanted to produce. He wasn’t about graffiti. Kids did that, and he was already in college. But a combination of graffiti and commercial art was cool.

‘I was also into flyers,’ he says, ‘so after one function, I used to go to all the functions, I approached Hank and also EJ the DJ.’ Everett James was Hank’s business partner. In years to come he would share PE’s headquarters on 510 South Franklin Avenue. But for now, Chuck’s main goal was to persuade Hank and EJ that the reason they were sitting outside of a failed gig was because they didn’t have a flyer that was good enough to advertise their talents. ‘I said, “You guys are too good to not have a flyer nor an artist represent what you guys are doing.”’ This first attempt didn’t really bear much fruit. Chuck recalls, ‘They were on some “yeah okay… go away” type shit.’ Keith concurs: ‘My brother Hank was handing out some flyers and Chuck saw one of the flyers and said, “Yo man, your flyers man, they’re sorta wack. I can do some better ones.” At the time Hank had just met Chuck and he was like, “Man, what are you talking about my flyers is wack? What you mean?”’

Despite this initial rejection, Chuck did do some Spectrum flyers. Meanwhile, his mic skills were developing at a prodigious rate. If only because he could not endure lesser-skilled emcees. He used to get on the microphone every once in a while just to shut other guys up. ‘Back then you had a lot of wack-ass cats getting on the mic, and everybody swore they had rhymes for the music.’ During the late seventies a song like MFSB’s ‘Love Is the Message’ would prompt a line of hopeful mic controllers to swarm the DJ box. This annoyed the young Chuck. ‘Sometimes you’d be trying to get your dance on with a chick and some cat would just get on the mic and disturb the groove, man. I would just joke with my fellas like, “Well I’m gonna get on the mic just to get these motherfuckers off!”’

They say necessity is the mother of all invention and, in order for Chuck to have a good night out, and, perhaps more importantly, some luck with the ladies, he had to invest a little time showcasing his skills. His natural ability would also lead Hank to change his mind about Chuck becoming Spectrum’s emcee.

These days any kid with even minimal equipment can knock out demo-quality songs in a bedroom studio. But nearly thirty years ago, sound equipment, particularly that used for hip-hop functions, just wasn’t up to scratch. Therefore, in order to be an effective rapper, for the crowd to actually be able to hear what you were saying, you had to have a voice that could cut through the distortion, feedback and whatever other sonic ailments were present. Carlton Ridenhour just happened to have one of those voices.

As 1979 progressed Chuck decided to sit out a couple of semesters from Adelphi, but he was still regularly attending Spectrum’s Thursday Night Throwdowns and getting on the mic. Luckily for many future generations of rap fans, Hank heard him spitting there one night, and was suitably impressed. ‘He was surprised to find out that I was the same dude who came to him with the flyers. He was like, “Yo man, I need an emcee. I want an emcee for my group but it’s gotta be a special kind of emcee.” I was flattered. I was honoured. I was just a fan.’ But the fan still managed to play it somewhat cool. ‘I said, “Give me the weekend, and I’ll think about it.”’

‘Hank came back screaming like, “Yo, I found this kid, he can do flyers, he can rap, I’m gonna check him out, get him to come to a party”,’ says Keith. Keith Shocklee was one of the first to benefit from Chuck D’s knack for coming up with rap monikers. ‘When Chuck came on to the scene I picked up the name KG, Chuck threw in the wizard and so it was like The Wizard K-Jee and from there it just took off. I was DJing at a party right around the corner from his house and not too far from where his friend passed away.’

Sadly, the house party took place on the same day as the funeral of one of Carlton’s friends. But he did his best to spit a couple of rhymes. Today’s hip-hop kids would struggle to recognise it as rapping. It was most definitely not the type of rhymes you would hear nowadays. What Chuck was doing at the time was more on the MC tip. Instead of spitting sixteen (or more) consecutive bars, he would come up with a series of two-and four-bar phrases. During the next week they hooked up and Chuck did his first gig way out in Riverhead, all the way at the end of Long Island, near the Hamptons. By all accounts it was a great experience, and the first seeds of PE were sown.

While all of this was going down hip-hop was still steadily developing and forging its identity. Chuck describes the summer of ’79 as ‘just a total hip-hop summer. I never ever recall anything being so hip-hop crazy like the summer of ’79.’ This was despite the lack of rap records in existence. Everyone just knew that there was something in the air. That something genuinely different was about to take place. Popular DJs at the time included Play Hard Crew, DJ Pleasure, Groovy Loo, Mechanic and Tommy T. Another important milestone occurred when famed DJ Eddie Cheeba premiered ‘Good Times’ by Chic. A few months later this song would form the bedrock of the first globally popular rap record, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by The Sugar Hill Gang. This introduced hip-hop to the world, while simultaneously making many of its originators in The Bronx sick to their stomachs.

‘Good Times’ broke new ground for the band that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards put together. They were mostly known for uptempo records like ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsa, Yowsa, Yowsa)’ and ‘Le Freak’, which at the time was their biggest hit to date. ‘Good Times’ would surpass both. Chic slowed down the tempo and made it funky. This helped it become an anthem with the emerging hip-hop community, and the hit of the summer. All the while, Spectrum City continued to do their thing, but with the added extra of Chuckie D (as he was originally known) on the mic to hype the crowd.

The lack of a large selection of rap records meant that they were still playing a healthy amount of funk and r’n’b, but hip-hop was changing the way a party got started. ‘Rap music was so new you couldn’t play it all night long. You know some of these girls like to hear the singing records. They want to hear Midnight Star. They want to hear, “I’m curious about your loving girl”,’ Keith explains. ‘But at the same time they also want to hear the DJ scratch.’ Spectrum City also made sure they never played a record twice in one night.

Their party-starting business continued in this vein until 1982 when Chuck met Bill Stephney. This was the other crucial meeting that led to the eventual formation of PE. Stephney was the programme director at Adelphi’s college radio station WBAU and he had seen Spectrum doing their thing around Long Island. ‘They DJed all the parties where hundreds if not thousands of kids would show up,’ he says. ‘And they gained a great reputation like, “This is the cool gig to go to”.’ Chuck D had not only been using his graphic design skills for Spectrum’s flyers. ‘We were one of the rare DJ groups that all had jackets with logos on them,’ he says. ‘Bill had seen us running around the neighbourhood as Spectrum. He had noticed this and was like, “Oh, Spectrum, wow”. This was marketing before there was such a term.’ Bill remembers it well. ‘At that point there were 11,000 students enrolled at Adelphi University, and of those 11,000, 10,000 of them were white. So you’re gonna notice anybody who’s African American anyway. But when I saw this guy walking around the campus with a Spectrum City jacket on. Woah! Yo, who is that? He’s down with that crew?’ One day Bill happened to go over to this guy and introduce himself. ‘It turned out to be this guy named Carlton Ridenhour who was down with Spectrum and was familiar with the radio station and the radio show that I was doing and wanted to bring his crew up there. I said, “That’s fantastic, I’m a huge fan of Spectrum.”’

The Spectrum parties were still doing very good business, probably better than ever. By this time the guests included nascent versions of now classic groups like the Fat Boys and Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three. ‘We’d put ’em on the radio, everybody would hear them on the radio and then we’d go right downstairs to the party and party,’ enthuses Keith. ‘It was crazy.’ Things were good, they were having fun, making a little bit of money and they weren’t, as Keith puts it, ‘in the streets going nuts like our friends that used to hang out with us used to do’. Significantly, while hip-hop had not yet become the big business it is today, they still had their eyes on the prize. Keith recalls how: ‘In the back of our minds we were hoping we could turn it into a big business.’

There were still a couple of legendary members who were yet to join the fold, but some of the key individuals who would eventually be known as PE were forging alliances.