3 Kings
Page 4
“Fifty dollars!” replied Flash, outraged.
“What do you want?” said Abbatiello. “We are going to charge a dollar to get in, a dollar to drink.”
Flash eventually agreed to the fee after Abbatiello agreed to include an additional sum for the Furious Five. But Abbatiello’s father’s friends—the older black clientele that filled the family’s other clubs—thought the idea was terrible. A common refrain, according to the younger Abbatiello: “They talk in the microphone and they talk over other people’s music? What kind of shit is that?”
Abbatiello prevailed upon his father to offer up a weeknight for the show, and soon he was running around the Bronx handing out flyers promoting the first performance of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. When the big day finally rolled around, the result was astonishing. “I had about seven hundred people show up the first night,” Abbatiello says. “On a Tuesday.”
Hip-hop’s earliest practitioners caught wind of the parties and found their way to the Disco Fever stage, from Flash to Herc to Starski to Hollywood to Cheeba; young crowds flocked to see them. At the time, the drinking age was eighteen, but plenty of underage patrons were able to get into what became known simply as the Fever. Abbatiello launched promotions geared to his clientele, offering free admission to students who showed straight A report cards at the door. Sometimes he’d let homeless teenagers sleep in the club overnight or give them money to buy food.
The Fever was far from squeaky-clean, though. Abbatiello recognized that some of his patrons were there for drugs, and instead of trying to root out the practice, he created “get high” rooms in the back. He even built an elaborate system of blinking lights to alert patrons that police were on the way. These sympathetic policies generated a level of loyalty among the revelers, some of whom became stars in their own right. One of them: Harlem emcee Kurt Walker.
“We called him Kurtis Blow for two reasons,” says Russell Simmons, the bold, bald Def Jam cofounder who got his start managing the aforementioned rapper. “He kept selling fake cocaine… and blow was better than cheeba.”56
Seemingly overnight, Blow and Simmons went from waiting in line at the Fever to being VIPs after Blow’s holiday hit, “Christmas Rappin’,” debuted, just weeks after the Sugarhill Gang first put hip-hop on the map. (“When ‘Rapper’s Delight’ came out, we had ‘Christmas Rappin’ ’ [ready to go],” explains Simmons. “We felt a little bit as if they had stolen something.”) When Blow’s song started to explode in clubs, a British executive at PolyGram’s Mercury Records tracked him down and inked him to a $10,000 deal, making him the first rapper to sign with a major label.
By the dawn of the 1980s, hip-hop had established a secure foothold on the East Coast. Out west, things were just getting started.
Andre Romell Young was born on February 18, 1965, making him the oldest of the three kings. The boy who would become Dr. Dre got his middle name as a tribute to the singing group of his seventeen-year-old father, Theodore. Dre’s mother, Verna, was just fifteen when her first son arrived; she married Theodore while they were still in high school, but their turbulent union dissolved when Dre was a toddler, as she explained in her memoir, Long Road Outta Compton. Verna raised Dre mostly by herself in the Compton section of Los Angeles.
“Andre loved hearing music, even as an infant,” she wrote. “When music was playing, he would lie content and look around as if he were searching for the direction from which the sound was coming.”57
As was the case for Jay-Z, Diddy, and their forerunners, Dre’s childhood reverberated with the realities of America’s midcentury metropolitan decline. Robert Moses didn’t have to unravel the urban fabric of Los Angeles; it was, as novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote, “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”58
Despite the sprawling randomness of its road map, Los Angeles shared a crucial organizing principle with cities around the country: an insidious, institutionalized brand of racism led by the Federal Housing Administration, which actively recommended that homeowners avoid selling property to unwanted ethnic groups. “If a neighborhood is to retain stability,” a 1938 FHA manual explained, “it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.”59 In Los Angeles, civic groups (including one that unabashedly dubbed itself the Anti-African Housing Association) used what were known as restrictive covenants to wall off as much as 95 percent of the city from black and Asian families in the 1920s. The Supreme Court finally ruled against such practices in 1948, but by then, much of the city had been settled along racial lines.60
Sandwiched between downtown Los Angeles and the working-class port of Long Beach, Compton emerged as a residential neighborhood less plagued by restrictive covenants than others, drawing midcentury minority middle-class families to California with the promise of a palm tree in every yard—the “black American dream,” as a voice-over on Dr. Dre’s 2015 album, Compton, noted. But the influx caused many prejudiced white families to decamp for new, informally segregated suburban subdivisions.
Capital fled, too. The common midcentury practice known as redlining, wherein banks and other organizations refused to invest in minority-dominated neighborhoods, left Compton’s finances in disarray and its infrastructure crumbling. By the 1980s, the number of Los Angeles residents with annual incomes below $15,000 jumped by a third, while individual incomes in excess of $50,000 nearly tripled; the size of the middle-class population in between fell by half.61 As the crack epidemic took hold (more on this later), Compton became a gang-infested drug center with one of the highest per capita murder rates in the United States.62
Dre’s personal life also had its share of strife. He had little contact with his father after his parents split up,63 and his mother remarried, and then divorced again. Dre also lost a baby brother to pneumonia and a half brother to gang violence. He gained a new stepbrother when his mother married William Griffin, the father of Warren “Warren G” Griffin, who would go on to become a successful hip-hop act himself. Dre’s mother provided the family with some stability, working a series of clerking jobs—including one at the Compton Police Department’s traffic division—before settling in as an operations control analyst at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company for thirteen years. That allowed her enough disposable income to accumulate a sizable vinyl collection, much to the delight of little Dre, who would spin records at his mother’s social gatherings, often earning a few dollars in tips from her friends.64
“Parliament-Funkadelic and James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye—this is the music I grew up on,” Dre told VH1’s Behind the Music in 1991. “And I love her for that.”
Though Dre was a model student in middle school, things changed once he entered high school. He didn’t seem to care about doing well in subjects he didn’t like, but the faculty still saw signs of brilliance. “I watch him play chess at lunchtime, and he beats everybody,” his English instructor said. “Students line up to challenge him, yet he remains undefeated.” He excelled in classes that allowed him to flex his creative muscles, such as drafting. One teacher encouraged Dre to apply for an apprenticeship at defense contractor Northrop Aviation, but his grades weren’t good enough. The cash would’ve come in handy, as he fathered the first of his six children at age seventeen (some sources suggest that Dre has closer to a dozen). Schoolwork couldn’t compete with Dre’s two main interests: music and women.65
“Dre would sit in a room sometimes, and you never knew he was there until a woman walked in,” says Alonzo Williams, who owned a local nightspot called Eve After Dark. “He was very introverted as a kid. When he got onstage, he would perk up.”66
Williams learned that firsthand. One night in 1982, after watching Kurtis Blow perform, Dre gathered the courage to get up on the turntables at Williams’s club. The audience saw a teenager who had mastered the scratch technique that Blow’s DJ had brought
from New York; beyond that, he had also figured out how to seamlessly blend two records with different beat-per-minute (BPM) rates. Williams had never seen anything like it and soon invited Dre to be part of his group, a sequin-jumpsuit-wearing disco-soul collective called the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. Often anxious beneath his confident exterior, Dre didn’t mind taking a back seat to Williams. (“I don’t like being in the spotlight,” Dre told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I made a fucking weird career choice.”)67
For Christmas in 1984, Dre’s mother and her husband bought him a mixer; he attached it to his sound system and two turntables and stayed in his room all day, practicing. After Verna’s holiday guests had left the house, she opened Dre’s door to say good night. “He was lying on his bed fast asleep, with his headset still on his head and the music blasting,” she wrote. “From that day forward, Andre took his place as the music person of our household.”68
“I always get emotional when I talk about them days,” says Starski. “Because those were the happiest days of my career.”
We’ve been talking for over an hour now, and his eyes are getting misty again.
“To this day, I can call Herc, and he’ll pick up.”69
As if to prove a point, he whips out his cell, finds “DJ Kool Herc” in his address book, hits dial, and puts the phone on speaker mode. Sure enough, Herc answers almost immediately.
“Hello?”
“Hey Herc, what’s happening, brother?”
“Who’s this?”
“Lovebug.”
“Who?”
“Lovebug.”
“Oh, what up, Lovebug? How you been?”70
“The question always comes up about me, you, and Bambaataa,” Starski continues. “And I always tell the story of how I met you through Pete DJ Jones when you and Pete used to battle. Do you remember those days, Herc?”
“Of course, son!”
“Pete and Herc used to battle, Pete used to get drunk and have me DJ against Herc,” he says to me, as though suddenly forgetting that the DJ is on the phone. “I would hold my own, but I would get my ass kicked every now and then. It was really good times, them days, with me, Herc, Bam, Flash…”
Then Starski stops himself.
“I was just calling you up because I was catching a moment, Herc.”
“Yeah.”
“You understand.”
Starski proceeds to say he’s glad Herc got some money for his participation in an upcoming documentary involving Grandmaster Flash; Herc seems less than thrilled, and Starski tries to soothe him.
“Our time is coming, Herc.”
But the DJ on the other end of the phone isn’t having it, and starts to rattle off a long list of his grievances with other musicians and journalists, his Jamaican accent getting thicker and faster with each passing moment.
“He didn’t do shit,” Herc says of one figure. “He never mentioned my fucking name once… I got the article, our first fucking write-up, got it in 1976. When he see me, he run.”
It’s not entirely clear who he’s talking about; it’s just another name on Herc’s decades-old shit list. And just as suddenly as he heated up, the DJ has cooled down.
“Yo, Lovebug, I gotta go.”
“Okay, baby. I’ll talk to you in a minute.”
The line goes dead.
“He’s bitter,” says Starski, exhaling. “Herc has good days, he’ll call me up. Today, evidently, is a bad day.”71
It’s not entirely clear if it’s a good day or a bad day for Starski himself. Since the late 1970s, there have been plenty of both. Starski signed with Epic Records in 1986—brought on by the same executive who signed the Jacksons, he says—and received a $100,000 deal. He filled up his passport playing shows overseas and lived in London for a spell; his spooky “Thriller”-esque single, “Amityville (the House on the Hill),” reached number twelve on the UK charts. But the lighthearted brand of rap practiced by Starski and his peers was fading stateside, where, by the late 1980s, a more aggressive sound was starting to emanate from southern California. Over the years, Starski struggled with substance abuse and at one point landed in jail.
“I feel bad for Herc. I feel bad for me and Hollywood,” he says, looking at a copy of my Jay-Z biography, Empire State of Mind, which I’ve just given him. “I don’t fault anyone for being a businessman. If I was more business oriented and had the right people around me at the time that I needed them, instead of motherfuckers that was trying to shove coke up my nose…”
Starski sighs.
“Sometimes your luck can be so good,” he says. “And sometimes it can be like, if it’s raining pussy, you get hit with a dick all the time.”
For many of Starski’s peers, though, the forecast appeared much brighter.
CHAPTER 2
Writing on the Wall
When Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite strolls up to meet me on a bright January afternoon in front of his Harlem studio, he’s already embroiled in a cell phone conversation with Tony Shafrazi, a septuagenarian art dealer best known for spray-painting the words “KILL LIES ALL” onto Picasso’s Guernica at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974.
Fab also made his name by spray-painting, often turning the New York subway’s 5 line into his own fabulous canvas in the 1970s. He went on to direct the groundbreaking hip-hop film Wild Style and host the hit TV show Yo! MTV Raps. Perhaps most importantly, the Brooklyn native served as the connective tissue between Bronx graffiti artists and downtown creatives like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The latter embodied the essence of hip-hop perhaps better than anyone in the art world, getting his start as the graffiti artist SAMO and evolving into a neo-Expressionist painter whose work now sells for prices on par with Picasso’s. (Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988, at age twenty-seven.)
Still on the phone with Shafrazi, Fab leads me into a gated alleyway, empty except for a discarded church pew and a pair of lonely bathtubs. As we walk through a door and down some steps, Fab spots a circular mirror and, for some reason, hands it to me before opening yet another door. Behind it is a large room filled with fluorescent light—and dozens of Fab’s latest works, most exhibiting colorful shapes painted over images of stacked subway cars. He directs me to place the mirror next to a red-and-black poster featuring the silhouettes of a woman and a beaver (the heading: “ZOMBEAVERS”). Then he puts Shafrazi, now talking about Basquiat’s work, on speakerphone.
“It was so raw… so original,” the art dealer says. “That’s why I miss the motherfucker.”
“He’s still with us,” says Fab, adding a Swarovski crystal to the forehead of a life-size portrait of boxer Jack Johnson on an easel in the middle of the room.
Eventually he bids Shafrazi adieu, and we start talking about Fab’s first experiences with hip-hop. When he joined the budding scene during the 1970s, he saw something with the makings of a full-fledged cultural movement, complete with its own music, dance, and visual art. Its name took longer to catch.
“You would be like, ‘Well, it was one of them parties where they say that hippety hop thing,’” he says. “It was Lovebug who popularized that word, between him and Hollywood.”1
Fab goes on to credit Herc, Bambaataa, and Flash with helping to form the movement; his sentences are occasionally punctuated by the loud clang of pedestrians stepping on the part of his basement studio’s ceiling that’s a metal trapdoor to the sidewalk above. He’s careful to point to the earliest of hip-hop’s forebears as well, calling out Lightnin’ Rod and Grandmaster Flowers, before acknowledging his own contribution.
“I think Herc did important stuff, playing the breakbeats, and setting up a structure and a format that then rapping would become a part of,” he says. “But none of this… was [widely] called hip-hop at the time. I get a little bit of credit for helping brand it as such.”
Fab discovered hip-hop before the genre’s first song was recorded—legally, at least. He and his cohort started to hear rap music at parties hosted by m
obile DJs in Brooklyn during the mid-1970s, and through bootleg recordings distributed through a booming black market.
“There was a kid named Tapemaster,” says Bronx-born photographer Joe Conzo, dubbed “the man who took hip-hop’s baby pictures” by the New York Times. “He used to record all the shows on cassettes and sell them the next week.”2
One day, Fab heard a recording of a set performed in the Bronx by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I’ve got to hear these guys with this amazing rhyming, Fab thought to himself. “The tape, it must have been sixth generation,” he recalls. “It was pretty much static and distortion, but I could hear enough to go, ‘What the fuck is this? This is a whole other thing.’”3
As he roamed farther from his native borough, the din of a new movement grew louder. He went to a party in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and found some six hundred young revelers gyrating to hip-hop beats. At each gathering he attended, he’d learn the location of the next one; there were no cell phones, no social media—only paper flyers advertising exotic names like the Cold Crush Brothers (Grandmaster Caz’s group) and the Funky Four Plus One More (the latter featured Sha Rock, considered by many to be the first female rapper).
Fab also began to notice a change in the style of graffiti sprouting across the city’s public spaces. The monochromatic tagging that dates back at least to the “Kilroy was here” drawings by U.S. servicemen during the first half of the twentieth century was exploding into a riot of bright colors, bubbly fonts, and bold expressions of urban life, signed by mysterious artists who went by names like “Taki 183” and “Futura 2000.”
“Something clicked in my head from cutting school and going to museums and browsing through art books,” says Fab. “This stuff, to me, was very similar to what was going on with pop art.”
Inspired by Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg, Fab started to experiment with his own graffiti in New York’s subway system. In those days, as he recalls, a single master key unlocked doors to all the city’s stations, tunnels, yards, and layups, where trains are parked at night. A plucky graffiti artist had somehow procured a copy of the key and allowed it to be duplicated by other members of the community; Fab managed to get his hands on one.