Two of the main guys in the group were Sam and his brother Ricky P. They were the ones who originally bought the speakers and started the group off. There was Dewayne Kemp, Jerry Parker. Jerry was the guy who fixed the speakers. Kemp was a good DJ. Sam was a good DJ. This kid named GI Joe, another guy named Bean. At some point we had close to twenty guys, which was way too many fucking guys. Only about five of us were actual DJs, but we wanted to have a crew behind us. You had to have the gift of gab to get on the mic, but if you didn’t, you would ride on the truck, help out with the speakers, get you a T-shirt, just to be a member of the group.
Everybody in the neighborhood had a group. It was like a club. We prided ourselves on not having “real” gangs, which was more about blocks. The Ghetto Style DJs, people might consider it a gang, though. We’d fight together if we had to because somebody messed with one of our guys. If we went to the club and somebody tried to beat down one of our friends, we’d all step up and fight with him. But it wasn’t a real gang. We just hung out with our crew. It wasn’t like the Crips and the Bloods, with initiations.
Most nights folks hung out on the corner, at the corner store. That’s life in the ghetto. Everybody hangs out. When we were little kids, we were on our block playing in the streets. Sun went down, streetlights came on, we went in the house. As we started getting older, sixteen, seventeen, we started hanging out on the corner, outside the store. There’d be a carton, a milk crate. We’d sit the milk crate down, have a seat, and talk shit all day. Every now and then a dice game would start up. Once in a while girls came by: “Hey baby!” Next night, same thing. All we did was hang out because that’s all there was to do. We could either go home or we could hang out on the corner. There’s no movie theaters to go to, no mall to go to. Liberty City didn’t have any of that. Wasn’t a whole lot of jobs to be had, so we hung out.
On the corner, I learned about the world. Everybody out there, talking about life, telling stories. We’d get these older guys sitting around talking shit, talking about, “I was the man. I was the baddest football player in the world. I was this. I had that. I was the shit.” And now he’s on the block, selling dope, because he’s confused and doesn’t know where he is going. These corner boys, that’s all we would hear about: what they did, when they did it, how they lost it, when they got on the drugs, how they got off the drugs. I’d listen to this stuff, and I’d get something out of it. I learned a lot about what to do, what not to do.
That’s what most rappers do. They learn about life by hanging out on the corner. Most rappers ain’t been in no gangsta shit. They ain’t been in no shootouts. They ain’t got a criminal record. Most of them dudes are squeaky fucking clean. What they do is hang on the block and hear these stories. “Jason, man. Jason used to sell this and sell that. Jason killed bout five motherfuckers.” And before you know it, we hear a rap song about it, about how this rapper used to slang kilos. He’s buying bricks. He’s flying them in to Miami from Colombia. We hear that and we’re like, Damn, this guy, he’s a tough guy. He’s trapping. He’s got a chopper in his car, and all that. These rappers, they get their stories from the guys who lived that life, who came off the block. It’s like folktales that get passed along, the folktales of urban life.
I had no intention of getting caught up in all that, but we needed equipment for our group. When you DJ, if you ain’t got speakers, then you ain’t shit. Being the best DJ, it’s about knowing the right music and having the best and biggest system. If you don’t have that, some other group will take you out. We used to battle for street cred, for the right to play the parks. You’d be out there spinning records and some other DJ group, they’d see you with nothing but two shitty little speakers. They’d set up on you and turn their shit on and blow you away. Nobody would be able to hear you. They’d shut your ass down, make you pack up and leave. Then they’d take away your gigs.
That’s how DJ groups would claim their turf, same way a gang would. It was a kind of fight. Sometimes it would turn into an actual fight, and we had to do that, too. We had to battle for our turf. There were times when we battled other groups and we beat them and took their T-shirts and burned them. We’d set the shit on fire and say, “This is what we think about these fucking pussies!” Some of the battles were honest. Some of them got real dirty. Our group was more hard. We’d fuck around and we’d beat your ass. A lot of other groups didn’t want to battle us because they thought we’d get mad and start fighting if we lost. If anybody in the audience voted against us, we might beat their ass, too. I’m one of the sorest losers you’ll ever meet.
To get a bigger audience and to win more battles, we had to build ourselves up by buying more speakers, and around here there wasn’t but one way to get enough money to get the equipment you needed: selling drugs.
At the time, most of us were selling marijuana to make some money to buy our gear. I was selling a little here and there. The other guys in the group, some of them were slinging, too. That’s what we did. But along with that comes the bullshit. In the back of my mind, I knew I didn’t want to be a dope dealer. I knew it would leave me on the corner like these other guys, talking all about what I had and how I lost it.
I was telling myself I could just sell a little here and there and use that money to do my music. But that ain’t how it works. You get in that life even a little bit and it starts sucking you in. You get stuck. I was getting sucked into playing the part of a goon. I was working for my friend’s brother. He was just out of prison, and he hired us to sell his shit. Somebody owes him money, now I got to go collect the money. When we go to collect, if the debt holder didn’t have all the money, we had to make sure we get the money. So now I’m a tough guy. I’m hanging out with tough guys, and I’m one of the toughest guys. Police are starting to know who I am. I’m not a gangster. I’m just another one of these kids on the edge of the life.
I was on a bad path. My mom knew I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, the wrong type of people. I wasn’t really working much, but I was bringing home money. I’d get chastised: “Where the fuck you getting this money from? You don’t need to be hanging on the corner with them motherfuckers ain’t doing nothing with their life!” She knew I needed to get out of Liberty City. She wanted me off the streets, so she sent me to DC to spend some time with my brother Stanley, who was working in the defense industry as a test pilot and an aerospace engineer. He got me a job working at his office.
I was only there for maybe six months, but it changed my whole outlook. It was a big eye-opener. I was sitting up there, seeing black people with suits on, being professionals, riding around in Mercedes. They were running shit, working with computers. It was completely foreign to me. All black people did in Miami was janitor, yard man, bus driver, jobs like that. I didn’t see black executives. I went to a black restaurant in DC, and black people owned the shit. I never saw that in Miami. Black people in Miami were in the back in the kitchen. We weren’t even the damn hostess at that time. Not even the waitress.
I was looking around DC, thinking, Ain’t this some shit? My whole life changed. It totally straightened me out. Out on the corner, the focus was always about kill or be killed, but now my eyes were open to the world beyond that. I got myself together, got my mind right. I said, “I can do better. I’m smarter than this. I don’t need to be out here selling no weed, doing all this wild shit. Let me put my mind toward something that can be beneficial in the long run.” After those few months up there, I told my mom and my brother, “Look, I’m straight. I get it. I see what you’re talking about.”
I’d always known I wanted to do my own thing, but in DC I saw how to do it, that I was capable of doing it. I also recognized that there was the potential to do it with what I already had going, in music, in DJing. Kids in our neighborhood didn’t have anything to do but hang out on the corner. There was a need for organized entertainment. We could be putting on dances, playing roller rinks and teen discos, selling tickets, selling drinks, selling food—making real mo
ney. I went back to Miami and I told my guys, “Shit’s changed. We’re gonna raise up our own money and do our own thing. We can make this a real business, booking real gigs. We can turn this into something. We could maybe even open our own club.”
All my guys were like, “The fuck you talking bout?”
And I’d say, “No, no. Listen. We can do this.”
After seeing all those black folks in DC going to work with briefcases, that just turned me on. In Miami, I went back to my job at Mount Sinai hospital, working as a busboy and later as a cook, and I built my own thing on the side. I wanted to learn more about how music worked as a business, so I got an internship at a radio station, 99 Jamz. I started taking the Ghetto Style DJs in the direction I wanted it to go. They’d originally brought me on because I was the guy with a van who could haul the speakers, but pretty soon I was the brains of the operation. When I came back home, I got myself a briefcase. I was a twenty-year-old DJ going around Liberty City with a briefcase, people looking at me like I’m crazy.
The DJ groups were playing in the park—for free, as it was about having fun and meeting girls. Parks in the ghetto, they didn’t have programming or events or anything. We never had permits, and a lot of the parks didn’t even have outdoor power outlets. We couldn’t power up because we weren’t really supposed to be there in the first place. What we’d do was go to the hardware store and purchase outlets that plugged into a lightbulb socket. We would get those and go to one of the apartment buildings next to the park, unscrew the lightbulb from one of the outdoor lights of the building, screw our outlet into there, and then we’d be able to run the juice out of there and plug in our amplifiers. Once we got the juice we could fire up. Fire up. Turn the shit on. Have a big event.
DJing in the park was mostly about building up our fan base. We were going out in the park on Sunday and jamming. People were liking us and became familiar with us. They liked our vibe, they liked our group. They liked the color of our speakers. They liked our swag and all that. It was pretty much the same as what was going on in New York, in the South Bronx with Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa and those guys. You’d do call-and-response, do little rhymes over the microphone. At the time, we had no idea that those guys were doing the same thing in New York. I later learned that the difference was in New York they were mixing, mining records for the breaks and scratching and all that. Down here we were just spinning records and talking on the microphone. What we’d nowadays consider a hype man at a concert, the guy who’s talking the good shit to get people revved up, pumped up. That’s how we DJed. We were creating our own sound.
The thing that really made a group stand out in Miami was how much bass it had. Other than being a person that had the gift of gab, you had to have a lot of bass. It was expected that each group would do a bass check in the middle of a set. It’s what people wanted to hear. People wanted the shzzz, shzzz, that hard bass, and that’s what made one DJ group more popular than another. We’d set up and start talking shit on the microphone, “Hey, we got more bass than all you motherfuckers!” We’d put a record on the turntable, hit the button, and that shit would drop. It’s what would really get the crowd moving. So when you were building out your gear, you’d do everything you could to enhance the bass: bass bins, bass cabinets, bass speakers, bass enhancers, bass equalizers. Anything that would get you more bass.
Miami’s a melting pot. It’s Cubans, Bahamians, Jamaicans, Haitians. It’s all island music, all Afro-Caribbean influenced. The Bahamians laid the foundation, bringing over the Junkanoo parade and traditional goombay music. Then we had calypso from Trinidad, méringue from Haiti, the mambo out of Cuba, reggae and rocksteady music from Jamaica. It was all these different musical styles coming together. They’re different but they’re all related, and they all share that rhythm, that bass-centered rhythm that gets the gyrations in the dancehall. There was the Latin influence coming in on top of that. The congas and the hi-hats and all the up-tempo stuff coming out of South America and Latin America and mixing with the Afro-Caribbean sound. Mix all that bass with the up-tempo percussion, and that’s booty-shakin’ music. It’s a very sexually oriented music.
There were all these musical influences around Miami coming from all these immigrant populations. My biggest influence was reggae. The Jamaican dudes across the street, the guys who had me putting all their reggae vinyl on tape in exchange for a little weed, I’d be listening to those albums while I was dubbing them and I’d be like, “Man, this is all right.” Reggae has that bass sound, that Jamaican bass line. When I started DJing, knowing DJing is all about who has the most bass, I went back to those records. I was like, “Oh, man, these fucking reggae records got more bass than anything.” I started going back to the songs I’d recorded for these guys. I would take those songs and put them in my mix when I would DJ. I’d play a mix of music. I’d play the hot popular American dance stuff, but then I’d sample a stupid amount of bass from these obscure reggae songs that nobody’d ever heard of. That gave the Ghetto Style DJs a unique sound.
We started getting groupies, which was why half the guys were in the group anyway. Women love DJs. The girls in the neighborhood, they thought DJing was glamorous. It isn’t. Like anything else it’s just a job, a lot of hard work. Me and my boy Kemp, we had a hookup at a hotel near the park. Back then, the going drug was quaaludes. The guy behind the desk at the hotel, we’d get him a bag of weed or some quaaludes and he’d give us a room; it was already late, after hours, and nobody else was going to be checking in that late. After we’d DJ in the park, we would take us a bunch of girls to the hotel to get with the guys. We’d stay in the room all night. Next day, get up and go home. As our popularity grew, all the girls wanted us. Our whole thing started to be about how fast we could talk the girl into taking her clothes off. It was wild.
I started to go talk to the people at the high schools, at the junior highs, about playing their dances. I was a great salesman, but these other DJ groups had the market all locked up. The student councils had to vote on who got those gigs, and the older DJ groups had relationships with all the student-activity directors; they were giving those kids kickbacks to lock up the gigs. I tried to beat them on price, but I was still locked out. I went over the kids’ heads. I went straight to the coaches in charge of the athletic events and pitched them and gave them the kickbacks. Pretty soon, the kids were being overruled by the faculty, and we were doing all the dances at the area schools. I knocked out all the other crews before they even knew what happened.
We’d do gigs anywhere, at a junior high cafeteria, the opening of a car wash, you name it. With my internship at the radio station, I was able to learn how all the other local bands and DJ groups were promoting themselves, and I copied what they were doing. I could even slip some promos for my own gigs on air for free during some of the station breaks. It took a couple years, working in the kitchen at Mount Sinai, hustling every possible gig on the side, but eventually I’d built us up into a solid little business. Along the way I picked up my DJ name. Star Wars had just come out, and since I had the touch that was making everything work, guys said it was like I had the Force. They started calling me Luke Skyywalker.
Negotiating every gig as a one-off thing was a hassle. It wasn’t terribly lucrative, and I couldn’t count on it as a regular thing. One day it came to me that we should be organizing and promoting our own gigs, rather than waiting around to take what we were offered. I started looking for other angles. There was a skating rink called the Sunshine Skating Center out on 199th and County Line in Homestead. It was a nice place in a nice neighborhood, and I knew the kids in Liberty City wanted places to go. They’d say, “We in the hood every day. Let’s go someplace nice.” They wanted something to do to make it feel like a real night out instead of just hanging out on the same old corners. Nobody was doing anything really fun and uplifting for those kids. I talked to the guys who owned this roller rink and there were a couple of nights a week that they didn’t h
ave anything going on. My plan was to rent the place out, promote it on the radio, put up fliers around the hood, and have a big party. The nights we rented it out we called it the Pac Jam Teen Disco. Wednesday night was Soul Night. Thursday was Reggae Night. We charged seven dollars to get in, and we were packed.
The cops hated that we were bringing so many blacks into the area, but we were making so much money for the owners, they couldn’t stop us. Cops were looking at all these black kids coming in, scared there was going to be some violence. We policed our own shit. We had a reputation for being tough. People knew the Ghetto Style DJs would beat your ass, but it was only because we were trying to keep the bad element out.
When you’re from the ghetto, even when you try and get out and go someplace nice, the bullshit follows you, that street attitude: “I ain’t no punk.” Guys always ready to fight over some kind of shit: you disrespected them, you’re on their turf, they’re jealous about some girl. One guy from our group, he would go to a party and somebody would jump him. Who jumped him? The 22nd Avenue Players. Okay, so we gotta go to where they hang out and we gotta jump them, beat their ass. We’d go to a dance over in Hollywood and all the Hollywood dudes, because we touching up their girls, they get mad, so they jump us and now we gotta fight over there. Macho bullshit. Dances would turn into all-out fucking brawls.
The Book of Luke Page 4