3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  As he honed his graffiti skills in the yards of the Bronx, using the tag “FRED FAB 5,” Fab spent more time downtown. There, at clubs like Danceteria and the Roxy, musicians from Talking Heads and Blondie listened to early hip-hop music alongside up-and-coming artists like Basquiat, whom Fab quickly befriended. As his involvement in pop art and street art grew, Fab yearned for a way to unite them, and then it dawned on him: what if he painted an entire train with Campbell’s soup cans as an homage to Warhol?

  “The purpose was to disrupt kind of the consciousness of people painting trains, to do something totally out of the box,” says Fab. “Also, if anybody [not] aware of our history sees it, to make them think, Wait: these guys are not just these crazy vandals that they’re depicted to be. Some of them—one of them; who knows how many of them?—are familiar with modern art!”

  On a frigid night in 1980, Fab and fellow graffiti artist Lee Quiñones made the trek to Baychester in the north Bronx, armed with spray paint and keys not only to the layup but to the actual subway cars. They targeted the 5 train, a heavily trafficked line that travels south through the heart of Manhattan before continuing on to Brooklyn. Fab and Quiñones slipped into the yard, unlocked a train car, and switched on the heat; it was so cold out that they had to keep their paint inside the car to prevent it from coagulating. Fab painted through the night, creating Campbell’s soup cans with his own twist: under the iconic red label, he called the flavors “Da-Da Soup,” “Pop Soup,” “Fabulous Soup,” and “Fred Soup.” He rushed off before he was completely finished. “The sun started coming up,” he recalls. “So it was time to go.”

  The reaction to Fab’s mobile installation came swiftly as passengers at crowded stops from Grand Central Terminal to Wall Street discovered his handiwork. The notoriety earned Fab an introduction to Warhol himself. “Oh my God, this is so incredible,” Fab remembers Warhol exclaiming upon seeing a Polaroid of the mural. “I have to sign this.” The two artists soon became friends; Fab had found his fifteen minutes of fame, and then some. (Warhol would often say, “Fred, you’re so famous!”) The subway in question didn’t get “buffed,” or cleaned, for several years thereafter—an unofficial arrangement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to preserve Fab’s art. Graffiti was becoming the visual representation of a rebellion against the dreary uniformity that Robert Moses stood for, carried out by the very people who’d been hemmed in by his midcentury machinations.

  Warhol wasn’t the only member of the downtown intelligentsia impressed by Fab’s work. His new friends in Blondie—especially lead singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein—decided to record a tribute to the movement to which he’d introduced them. “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly,” Harry rapped on “Rapture.” “DJ spinning, I said, ‘My, my.’ Flash is fast, Flash is cool…” The band flattered Fab by playing him the song one day. A month later, he was sitting in a cab in Paris with members of Talking Heads when the song came on the radio.

  “I never thought it was a real record that was supposed to come out,” says Fab. “I just thought they were showing me, ‘Look, we got everything you were telling us. We think it’s cool, too.’ I thought they were just fooling around in the studio.”

  The band was completely serious. Upon its release in 1980, the song rocketed to number one on the charts, the first track with a rap verse to accomplish that feat.4 Stein and Harry invited Fab to appear in the music video and asked him to bring along someone to play the role of DJ. Fab invited Flash, but when the scheduled date arrived, he was nowhere to be found. So Basquiat stepped in and pretended to be a DJ. Says Fab: “Jean was like, ‘Fuck, man, I’m just going to stand here and look cool. Whatever.’”5

  With the help of writer-director Charlie Ahearn, Fab parlayed the success of the video into Wild Style, a thinly veiled 1983 biopic of hip-hop’s origins. This time, Flash did show up, acting in the film alongside Grandmaster Caz, Grandwizzard Theodore, Quiñones, Fab, and others. Reviews of the movie provided some of the first printed references to hip-hop and rap as art forms. Even the New York Times weighed in, describing the film as “a partly improvised piece of fiction, about the cheeky, high-spirited art of the South Bronx, that is, subway graffiti, also known as ‘writing,’ and about rapping and breaking.”6

  Hip-hop had, within a span of less than five years, gone from being a nameless genre whose music had never been recorded to a “Rapper’s Delight” novelty to a new form of music cited in mainstream publications—and charts. In 1980, Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” reached number eighty-seven on Billboard’s Hot 100 and sold more than five hundred thousand units. The song broke big in the Netherlands, prompting a trip by Blow and Simmons to Amsterdam; they knew they’d officially made it when the head of PolyGram met them at the airport.7

  “What would you like, Mr. Simmons?” he asked.

  The young mogul didn’t hesitate: “Cocaine and pussy.”

  “Absolutely,” the executive replied.8

  Blow and Simmons had company. By 1981, Tom Silverman had turned his obsession with the nascent genre into the record label Tommy Boy; one of his first signees was Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force. Drawing on Bambaataa’s burgeoning brand of hip-hop-infused electrofunk, the group released “Planet Rock” in 1982, and the song made it all the way to number forty-eight on the charts while selling over half a million copies in the United States. Yet music industry bigwigs overseas didn’t always give hip-hop acts the same treatment Blow and Simmons received in Amsterdam. Silverman still remembers trying to sell British radio DJs on early rap songs. “They were like, ‘I love you, Tommy, I’d love to play this record, but they’re talking on the record,’” Silverman recalls. “I did the same thing when I took Bambaataa to England. They didn’t understand it. They said he was a disgrace to his race.”9

  But the hits kept coming. In 1982, Sylvia Robinson was still working her formula: hiring a house band to back rap tracks, which enabled her to produce songs at a cost of $3,000 to $4,000 apiece and entire albums for less than $50,000.10 (Today, big-budget videos alone often soar well into the six figures.) She graduated from scouting rappers in New Jersey pizza joints and started signing big-name acts like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Robinson overcame being a one-hit wonder as a hip-hop producer by releasing the act’s aforementioned smash “The Message,” despite a heavy dose of skepticism from the members of the group itself. When they first heard the track, one of them threw the cassette into the bushes.11

  “We hated the song. It was just so different from what we were used to doing… the natural party songs and dance songs,” recalls Eddie “Scorpio” Morris, another member of the group. But bandmate Melle Mel believed in Robinson. “Mel said, ‘Well, if you like it that much, Ms. Rob, then I’ll do it.’”12

  The song peaked at number sixty-two on the Hot 100, with Melle Mel doing most of the lyrical lifting. At around that time, Grandmaster Flash sued Sugar Hill for $5 million in unpaid royalties (he lost), and the group disbanded in 1983.13 They reunited intermittently—most notably for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, becoming the first hip-hop act to earn that honor. It was no doubt a matter of pride for the man who introduced them at the ceremony: Jay-Z.

  As far as Fab is concerned, the DJ and his group were sensible choices as the genre’s first representatives. “It was all good,” he says. “Flash’s position and legacy is solid.”14 Other hip-hop acts would go on to be inducted: Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, N.W.A., and Tupac Shakur, to name a few. But forefathers such as Starski, Caz, Bambaataa, and Herc remain excluded.

  Just as hip-hop made its move from the streets to the clubs to the mainstream charts, America’s social fabric was upended in a completely different and destructive way by another addictive phenomenon: crack cocaine. The high-grade powdered stuff had been around for ages, fueling the glitzy disco scene in New York and beyond. But the degraded, smokable form—which can be created from pure cocaine with little more than
baking soda and a hot plate—was far cheaper and faster-acting.

  Cocaine poured into the United States from Latin America in the 1980s, and the glut of supply sent its price tumbling from $50,000 per kilo in 1980 to $35,000 in 1984 to $12,000 in 1992; by the mid-1980s, single doses were available for as little as two dollars a pop. Within a few years, the number of people employed in the distribution of the drug had swelled to 150,000 in New York City alone.15 “No one hired a skywriter and announced crack’s arrival,” noted Jay-Z. “But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. Sudden and complete. Like losing your man to gunshots. Or your father walking out the front door for good.”16

  Jay-Z’s adolescence was marked by all of the above, but the advent of crack influenced his path perhaps most of all. According to his mentor, Jaz-O, Jay-Z’s brother struggled with drug addiction; when Jay-Z was seventeen, he even shot his brother in the shoulder for stealing his jewelry (he’d initially intended to startle him with a near-miss).17 Still, the young rapper himself entered the trade after childhood friend DeHaven Irby, who lived across the hall from Jay-Z in the Marcy Houses, showed him the ropes.

  “If you’re a person that’s studying and focused on what you do, and you become crafty at it, I begin to mimic what you do,” says Irby, explaining Jay-Z’s thought process. “Because it works for you. I’m going to put my own twist to it, my own originality.”18

  When Irby moved to Trenton, New Jersey, a teenage Jay-Z would go down on weekends to visit him—alternately impressing Irby’s friends with his spitfire flow and honing his hustling skills. He started out small, selling quantities of crack for as little as ten dollars. As Irby told me for my book Empire State of Mind, Jay-Z would never cut the price to nine dollars. Like an airline executive refusing to slash fares on unsold seats two hours before takeoff, Jay-Z didn’t want to condition his customers to expect discounts, a philosophy that would follow him into the music business. He was also unflappable: not even the gruesome murder of his trusted supplier—shot in the head, execution-style, with his own testicles stuffed in his mouth—could convince him (or Irby) to leave the drug trade.19

  The only thing that ever pulled Jay-Z off the streets was music. In 1988, Jaz-O became the first rapper to land a deal with UK-based label EMI, one of the major record companies at the time, and he invited his apprentice to come to London for two months. Shortly after turning nineteen, Jay-Z got his first taste of foreign travel, not to mention luxury: Jaz’s entourage motored to his New Year’s Eve release party in a Cadillac limo.20

  Jay-Z returned to the United States in 1989 and tried to break into the stateside hip-hop scene, landing a spot on a tour headlined by Antonio “Big Daddy Kane” Hardy, one of the most successful rappers of hip-hop’s late-1980s golden age. They were joined on the road by a host of burgeoning stars, including Tupac Shakur, Queen Latifah, and Michael “MC Serch” Berrin of seminal hip-hop group 3rd Bass. Jay-Z would go onstage and rap during Kane’s wardrobe changes, receiving only room and board for his troubles. Despite his subsequent lyrical claims that he was still spending money from 1988, his drug-dealing profits hadn’t lasted into the new year: Serch remembers Jay-Z having to beg Kane for cash just so that he could grab fast food for dinner.21 “He doesn’t exaggerate the amount of hustling,” adds Jaz. “He exaggerates the magnitude.”22

  Disillusioned with the lack of financial opportunity afforded by hip-hop, Jay-Z turned back to the drug trade in the early 1990s. With connections in New York—the main entry point for illegal drugs in the northeastern United States—and across the river in New Jersey, he reunited with Irby and started testing the laws of supply and demand. Though the per-kilo price of cocaine had plummeted, it was still harder to find, and therefore more expensive, beyond New York. So they expanded their enterprise into new markets like Virginia and Maryland. Jay-Z raked in more cash than he’d ever dreamed possible—and grew even richer in subject matter.

  “I stood on cold corners far from home in the middle of the night serving crack fiends and then balled ridiculously in Vegas; I went dead broke and got hood rich,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I hated it. I was addicted to it. It nearly killed me. But… I was part of a generation of kids who saw something special about what it means to be human—something bloody and dramatic and scandalous that happened right here in America—and hip-hop was our way of reporting that story.”23

  Charlie Stettler does not look like someone who played an instrumental role in laying the earliest foundation of the business of hip-hop. But that’s exactly what the ice-blue-eyed, bald-headed Swiss entrepreneur did after leaving his homeland in 1971, landing in New York with $300 in his pocket and no English in his vocabulary.

  Stettler slept in Central Park his first night in the city—after trying marijuana for the first time and blacking out—and woke up to find himself robbed of everything but his underwear. Instead of turning around and going home, he stayed. By 1978 he had learned English, worked a string of nightlife jobs, and gotten so accustomed to New York (and the noise from living next to a fire station) that when he went to Barbados for a vacation with his girlfriend, a coconut falling on the roof in the middle of the night startled him out of his wits.

  “I get up the next morning, I tell her I’m going to go back to New York,” recalls Stettler. “I’m going to record the sounds of New York City for people who can’t sleep in the country.”24

  Stettler started his own label, Tin Pan Apple, releasing the noise cassettes in 1982. He took to walking around New York in a gorilla costume to promote his product, which soon landed him a TV interview—and helped him sell over a quarter of a million copies of his tape. Flush with cash, he went out to the Roxy one Friday night. He was surprised to find the club full of black teenagers “spinning on their heads,” whipped into a frenzy by a sturdy turntablist dressed in African regalia. Imagine Stettler’s surprise when the jock walked up to him after the show.

  “I saw you, crazy motherfucker, on TV yesterday,” the DJ said, having immediately recognized Stettler and his marketing prowess. “You have what we need.”

  “What is this?” said Stettler, gesturing to the scene around him.

  “It’s called hip-hop.”

  “Who are you, man?”

  “My name is Afrika Bambaataa.”

  After Bambaataa educated Stettler about the movement, the Swiss entrepreneur hatched a plan: to host a massive hip-hop talent show at Radio City Music Hall, with the idea of further establishing the genre in the mainstream consciousness—and making some more cash for himself. Stettler went to the Fever and met Sal Abbatiello, who put him in touch with the general manager of R & B radio station WBLS. Many outlets had instituted “No rap” policies by this point, even urban stations. (“The African Americans who were working the record business didn’t like these voices,” says Simmons. “They’re very harsh voices. These guys had escaped that.”)25

  WBLS’s manager told Stettler he’d put the contest on the radio if it came with advertising; Stettler managed to convince Coca-Cola to pay $300,000 to be associated with the contest. On May 23, 1983, Stettler and Simmons joined the six thousand people who descended upon Radio City for the show. Judges included Abbatiello, Robinson, Silverman, and agent Cara Lewis, who would go on to represent Tupac Shakur, Kanye West, and others. Kurtis Blow and Whodini performed as guest artists, but a relatively unknown trio of beefy teenagers called the Disco 3 won the crowd—and the grand prize: a record deal with Stettler, who took them to Switzerland to celebrate. Shortly after their return, Simmons appeared at Stettler’s office.26

  “Look,” said Simmons. “We don’t know who the fuck you are, but we’re putting together something called Fresh Fest. Since you got money from Coca-Cola, can you help us get money again?”

  Stettler agreed, with two conditions: first, he’d get 10 percent of the proceeds of the proposed tour, and second, his new group would be the opening act. “I just came back from Switzerland and they ate so much food that I got a bill for three
hundred and fifty dollars, so I renamed them the Fat Boys,” he explained. Simmons laughed. The 10 percent was fine, but he didn’t want a bunch of no-names opening for the acts on the roster of his new company, Rush Management. In addition to Blow, he was managing Run-D.M.C., a trio featuring Simmons’s brother Joseph “Run” Simmons, alongside bandmates Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell and Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels. The group’s first single, “It’s Like That / Sucker MCs,” had peaked at number fifteen on Billboard’s R & B charts.

  After Simmons left, Stettler walked down to the Tower Records on Broadway, where he convinced the store’s brass to host a cringeworthy contest revolving around the Fat Boys. Stettler had the trio stand on a meat scale in the window; anyone who could guess the group’s combined weight (nearly half a ton) would receive a can of Diet Pepsi for every pound—donated, of course, by the cola company (remarkable, given Stettler’s recent tie-up with its top rival). Then Stettler had his girlfriend print up a fake press release saying that the Fat Boys had been selected to open for Michael Jackson and his brothers on their upcoming tour. The attention earned Stettler a spot on Good Morning America touting his group. Then he called Simmons.

  “Did you see that shit?” asked Stettler.

  “All right,” Simmons replied. “You’re the opening act.”

  Stettler’s next trick: leveraging his European connections to get a $360,000 deal for the Fat Boys with Swatch, the first of its kind for hip-hop, allowing the group to fund a spate of live shows and recording sessions. Their self-titled debut, which featured production from Blow, reached number six on the R & B charts and cracked the top 50 on Billboard’s broader album rankings. Their association with Simmons also earned them a spot in the film Krush Groove in 1985, which chronicles the rise of hip-hop—as well as Simmons’s latest venture, Def Jam Recordings.