After “Rapper’s Delight” came out of nowhere and made all that money, lots of people were out there looking for the next hit. Afrika Bambaataa got a deal, put out a few singles. Kurtis Blow signed with Mercury, had the next big mainstream hits with “The Breaks” and “Christmas Rappin’.” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five signed with Enjoy, a small black-owned label out of Harlem, and put out “Superappin’.” Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three signed with Enjoy, too.
Then you had Fab Five Freddy. He came along and he started taking hip-hop downtown and introducing it to the white artists in SoHo and the punk-rock scene in the East Village. All these white folks downtown were just loving it. New York was still a very segregated place, and hip-hop started smashing through that. Everybody was embracing this music. Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” came out in ’82. It cost $800 to make, and it sold 650,000 copies. Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That”/“Sucker M.C.s” single came right after. That sold 250,000 copies. At the Pac Jam, we played those records right when they started coming out. People loved it.
Everybody played the big hits, but I was always looking for the newer shit, the more obscure shit. Part of being a DJ is you join a record pool. I was in the Jerry Jarvis record pool. I would pay a monthly fee, go to the record pool meetings every Saturday, and in my mailbox I’d have some thirty, fifty records. It was mostly dance albums, R&B, but every week I was seeing more and more rap singles when I made my pickup. They were mostly out of New York, but every now and then I had a couple from the West Coast. I would take all these songs and go home and listen to them. I didn’t pay much attention to the major labels, the shit from RCA, Atlantic, or Warner Bros. I’d play that stuff because it was popular, but I also knew the radio stations were already all over that. Everybody was playing “Rapper’s Delight.” Everybody was playing the Furious Five and the Treacherous Three. I was looking for records I could break. I would pay more attention to the singles from the independent labels. I’d sit there and listen to every one. I always found the different stuff. I was always looking for the next guy. If I heard something and thought it was hot, I would stand behind it and break it.
I remember one of the first records I picked out was Divine Sounds’ “What People Do for Money.” They were this obscure group out of Bed-Stuy. Nobody in Miami had ever heard of them. I took their album and I started playing it and I really hyped it. I was up there yelling, “This is the shit, people!” Friday nights I’d be DJing a dance at Allapattah Middle School, in the gymnasium or cafeteria, playing for about a thousand people. Saturdays I’d be at the high school doing it for two thousand people. Sundays I’d be at the Pac Jam II with another two thousand people. Collectively, I was DJing for five thousand people the whole weekend in different pockets all over the city. They were all going out, calling up the radio station to make requests, going into record stores asking for the single.
All of a sudden you had this indie label putting out this no-name group that nobody’s heard of, and the guys at the label were looking at their orders and scratching their heads because they were selling thousands of singles way the fuck down in Miami. They’d call up their local contacts, the music directors at the local radio stations, the regional distributors, and ask how this was happening. The word they got back was, “That’s Luther Campbell and the Ghetto Style DJs. They’re making your shit hot all over town.”
That’s how I became a real DJ. That’s how I separated myself from everybody else. People who came to my shows, they knew they were gonna hear new music. I became respected as the guy who’s gonna break the hot shit. Word started to get out: if you want to break a record in Miami, get it to Luther Campbell. Pretty soon I had record reps standing outside the fucking door of the Pac Jam before I even got there. They’d be hanging around outside with copies of their singles, like, “Yo, you need my song. Break my song, man. Break my song.”
I was breaking this shit and the club was doing great, but I was already thinking, How do I take this to the next level? Let me be smarter than this. I started calling these artists up, these guys in New York. I’d call them up and I’d say: “I like your shit. Your stuff is hot in Miami. Let me make you a deal. I’ll bring you down here, cover your expenses, but you’re going to do a free show for me, a promotional gig. You’ll do your thing in front of the people and then I’ll keep pushing your record and later on, four or five months down the line, I’ll bring you back and I’ll give you a paid gig. Or I’ll bring you down and you can book some other gigs in Florida while you’re here.” I started cutting deals like that. I’d get these guys just before they were about to blow up.
The first act I brought down was this duo, Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, Andre Harrell and Alonzo Brown. Harrell would go on to found Uptown Records and take over as CEO of Motown, but back then he and Alonzo were just a couple of kids from Harlem who’d won a few rapping contests around the city. I called up their managers, brought them down. They had a great time, sold a lot of records.
Pretty soon I was getting everybody. Mantronix, T La Rock and Jazzy Jay, Divine Sounds, Schoolly D, Run-D.M.C., EPMD, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Biz Markie. They all came down. MC Hammer slept on my couch.
Back then, nobody was booking hip-hop acts outside of New York. I know I was one of the first because a lot of those guys, before they got down here, they’d never left the city before. Shit, some of these guys had never been outside Harlem or the South Bronx before. When I flew them down here, they’d all tell me the exact same story: One, they’d never been on a plane in their life. Two, their record company was fucking them. “All these records I’m selling, and I ain’t seen no money from my deal.” That was the same for every single one. And three—and this happened all the fucking time—they knew nothing about cars. Cars were completely foreign to them. One day I was out with Jazzy Jay and somebody needed a jump. I said, “Jazzy Jay, we gotta fucking jump this car. You put the cables on and I’m gonna get in the car and jump it.”
He was like, “Huh? Cables? Batteries? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. We don’t drive cars in New York. We ride the train.”
I said, “Oh my God, y’all fucked up in New York.”
Just getting those guys down here was a crazy story sometimes. There was this one group, Ultimate 3 MC’s. They had one song, “What Are We Gonna Do,” and never really did anything else. I brought them down on People Express Airlines. The thing with that airline back then was there were no tickets. You’d get on the plane and you’d pay on the plane. You’d take your seat, and the lady would come down the aisle with the cart and you’d pay her cash money on the spot. It was like the Greyhound of the skies. I didn’t want to Western Union them the money because I was afraid they would end up spending it on something else and not get on the plane, that those motherfuckers would just take the money.
They got on the plane and the stewardess came down the aisle with her little cart and she said, “Where’s your money?”
“Oh, we don’t have no money,” they said. “Our man Luke’s gonna pay you when we land.”
Back when you could just walk up to the gate, I was at the airport waiting. Of course there was a swarm of cops there. The pilot had radioed ahead to say there’s these fucking black guys on the plane who ain’t got no money to pay for their ticket, and somebody was going to jail. Those guys walked off the plane and the cops were going to arrest them and I had to go running over yelling, “Hey! No, no, no! I got the money! They’re all right! Here’s the money! They good!”
That ended up working out. But it was a crazy time. Hip-hop was just taking off. There were no tours, no regular venues that booked these guys. We were just making the shit up as we went along. For these rappers, coming down to Miami was a big chance to party. I’d put them in a hotel by the beach or some shit and they loved it because they’d never been to the beach before. But I wasn’t partying. I was working. My days were busy, busy, busy. I’d have one group down and I’d be on the phone to New Yor
k working on the next group. I’d be out promoting the gig, putting out fliers, booking radio promotions. When Run-D.M.C. or whoever it was came in, they’d do the party that night and leave the next morning. I’d pick them up from the airport, bring them into the hotel, get them situated, get somebody to get them some food and all that. Then I’d be back to the venue making sure everything was in place there, doing sound checks and all that. Then right before the show I would give them their money, get their ass onstage, come backstage after the show, make sure they get back to the hotel, and then get them back to the airport the next day. Next week, different group, same thing.
The shows were great, but the crowds were tough. Crowds in Miami are like the legendary Apollo Theater crowds. These guys would come down and go back to New York with horror stories about it. It was funny, because in New York, fans might know their whole album, but down here we only promoted the single. Back then it was the single days anyway. Guys would come to the Pac Jam and get up there and start singing all this other shit nobody’d heard of. Those motherfuckers in the club would be sitting up there looking at the acts like, “Can you hurry the fuck up? Get to the shit we want to hear.” If you didn’t fucking perform, the people in the Pac Jam would look at you like you were fucking stupid. These guys would get off the stage, saying, “Man, that was the fucking toughest crowd I ever played. That bitch is hard. Them motherfuckers are crazy.”
These acts were selling gold and platinum singles, but almost all of those sales were made in the New York City area. Hip-hop hadn’t broken out nationwide yet. It was mostly still a local phenomenon in New York and a tiny scene in LA. I was really one of the first promoters calling and offering these guys gigs outside of New York. Even though it was a tough crowd, they kept coming because I treated them well. They were all used to getting ripped off; promoters would book them with some big promise and then not pay. I couldn’t pay much, but I always paid what I said I would. Wherever these guys got together back in New York, they’d tell the other groups, “Luke’s down, man. Go to Miami. He’ll take care of you.” That’s how I was able to get all these guys down in Miami practically for nothing.
I realized all that was about to change with Run-D.M.C. I booked them maybe three times. This was before they were on MTV with Aerosmith or any of that. The first time I paid them $700. The second time I paid them $1,500. The third time I paid them about $2,000. I remember very clearly one night we were sitting at the Howard Johnson hotel and they said to me, “Luke, you ain’t gonna be able to book us no more, man. We gonna be big-time.”
“The fuck you mean, ‘big-time’?”
“You gonna have to pay us a lot of money. We gonna be doing major concerts and all that. We gonna go out on big tours around the country. We gonna be blowed up.”
And they were right. After that night I never booked them again.
The East Coast hip-hop scene was on its way. Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, all those guys. Everybody was signing deals with these start-up labels like Def Jam and Profile Records. Meanwhile, the West Coast scene was just getting started. The groups out there weren’t coming out on a real label at all. There was this vinyl pressing plant out there called Macola, run by this Canadian guy Don MacMillan. Most pressing plants produced in bulk for the major labels. Macola was a small vanity-press type deal. You’d go to Macola, pay this guy a few hundred dollars, and he’d press you however many albums you paid for and then you could go and hustle your records on your own, at the clubs, flea markets, swap meets, wherever.
Macola had opened its doors just as hip-hop was coming up, and a lot of these aspiring rappers were going to him because the major labels in LA hadn’t taken any interest in hip-hop at all. Pretty soon this MacMillan guy, he was seeing the numbers that these rappers were selling, thousands of records, just out there hustling on their own. He saw the angle. He saw that he could make a lot more than just this little pressing fee he was charging, and he started acting more like a label. He was offering to print up extra inventory for free. He was offering to help with distribution. Of course, once he started doing this, he started taking a cut. The whole thing seemed a little shady, but this MacMillan guy was literally the only game in town. Ice-T, N.W.A, all those West Coast guys got their start through this one place.
The second act Macola ever signed was this group called 2 Live Crew. The thing about 2 Live Crew is that they weren’t really a part of the whole West Coast thing. They weren’t wannabe gangsters coming up on the streets of South Central. They were all in the air force. They were three guys stationed at the March air base in Riverside, California: David Hobbs, Chris Wong Won, and Yuri Vielot. Back in 1982, after “Planet Rock” was this big success, some promoter put together a deal for Afrika Bambaataa and a few of the other New York guys to go over and tour in Europe. Hobbs was stationed in England at that time and he was into music in a big way. “Planet Rock” blew his mind with the possibilities of where hip-hop could go. He got a chance to see and talk to Bambaataa on this European tour and he asked him what kind of equipment he used to make those kinds of sounds. Bambaataa told him about the TR-808 drum machine. Cut to a year later and Hobbs was stationed back in Riverside, DJing parties in the barracks at the air base with some turntables and this brand-new 808 drum machine he’s picked up for himself.
Hobbs started calling himself Mr. Mixx onstage, and some of the other soldiers started getting up and rapping and MCing at these parties. Yuri, who named himself the Amazing V, and Chris, who named himself Fresh Kid Ice, they got with Hobbs and started performing together as a group on the base. Mixx reached out to Macola, and they agreed to produce the group’s first single, “The Revelation.”
A lot of people don’t know this, but 2 Live Crew started out as conscious music. They were one of the first socially conscious groups. That was the direction Yuri Vielot wanted to take it. The lyrics to “The Revelation” were trying to be like “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash, rapping about life in the hood and brothers struggling against oppression: “You go down to the unemployment line, but the man throws you out on your behind.” Shit like that.
It didn’t work. It was flat. But the B-side to that single was this joint called “2 Live (Beat Box).” You could tell from that record that Mr. Mixx knew how to lay down a fucking track. I listened to it, and I was like, “Oh, shit. This is it right here.” “Beat Box” was a dance song. It was party music. You could speed it up and it would still hold its own. To hear the bass on this song, the way Mixx used the 808, you’d have thought that shit came out of Miami. It really fit the kind of music people were doing around here. It also had one line I really liked: “Like Luke Skywalker, I got the Force. Wherever I rhyme, I am the boss.” Since Luke Skyywalker was the name I’d started using as a DJ, that single was great for me to play at shows. I started spinning “Beat Box” at the Pac Jam, and people loved it. I decided to reach out and bring those guys down to do a gig. Same as everybody else, every time those guys came down, damn near the first thing out of their mouths was, “Our label is fucking us.”
In the recording industry, a deal with a major label is the closest thing to modern slavery there is. You sign on the line and they own your ass. But at least with a standard recording contract they spell out in black and white how they’re going to fuck you. The label owns all the masters and they’re going to hold all these marketing and promotion costs against your advance and you’re never going to see a dime on the back end. And you sign it anyway, knowing that they’re going to fuck you, because you want to make a record and be a big star.
This MacMillan guy out in California, he wasn’t running a real label, so these guys didn’t even know where their money was going. Since Macola ran its own production plant, they could be pressing extra inventory and selling it out the back and you’d never even know. It was small-time, off-the-books kind of shit. These guys in 2 Live Crew, if it’s true they were getting fucked, they didn’t even know how they were getting fucked. All they knew was they we
re selling records but they weren’t seeing any money. Since I’d been bringing all these acts through Miami, listening to all their problems with the business side of things, I’d learned more about the industry than these guys had. So they came to me and said, “Hey, look, can you find us a record label?”
The music industry has always had a strong presence in Miami. It’s a regional hub. All the music of the Caribbean gets produced and distributed here. A lot of the reggae and calypso labels from the islands, they produce their records in Miami because there’s better infrastructure here. All the major American labels that want to sell their music in the Caribbean and in South and Central America—since records retail for less in those countries, those records have to be pressed at a lower cost per unit. There are so many pressing and distribution companies here that produce records more cheaply than they do it in other regional hubs, like Philadelphia or Chicago.
I was confident I could get the 2 Live Crew guys a deal. I really liked them, especially Mr. Mixx. The two MCs, Fresh Kid Ice and the Amazing V, they were just okay, in my opinion. But Mixx, I knew he could crank out singles like “Beat Box” that would get people out on the dance floor. I told the guys straight up: I’ll help you get a record deal, but first thing you do, you’ve got to ditch this conscious stuff and focus on the dance music. I’m all about Black Power and building up the community and fighting the Man, but I just didn’t think the conscious thing would sell. Folks in the ghetto live that struggle every day. They come to the club to forget about that shit.
Bringing all these acts through Miami had educated me on what the people liked about the music. I learned how to spot a hit. I was a DJ, but I was also breaking records, so I was really working more like an A&R guy, a music director. These A&R guys from the major labels, when they’re picking songs, they’ll go through a thousand demos and find one and say, “This is the next guy. He’s hot.” I was always working with that mentality. I learned that the groups that took off in the South had a lot of bass and were real up-tempo. That’s what worked down here. Most of the New York stuff was about sixty beats per minute. A lot of the LA records were slow records: “Boyz-n-the-Hood” and all that. It’s a car culture out there, and that music was cruising-around-in-your car kind of music. We’d speed all that up down in Miami. We’d crank songs up to 120 beats per minute and the crowds would dance to it all night. Schoolly D, he was the first guy I knew who cussed on a record. I saw that the crowds loved that, too.
The Book of Luke Page 7