Parental Discretion Is Advised

by Gerrick D. Kennedy

  SOMETHING 2 DANCE 2

  The dawn of the 1980s brought with it the explosion a new music genre that would become far more influential than the 1960s British Invasion, or the surge of synth-pop two decades later, and dictate the next half century of popular music as its artists continue to set trends and dominate radio airplay and record sales. Within the first five years of the decade, Madonna emerged and propelled bright dance-pop to the masses, Diana Ross reinvented herself, Whitney Houston took her place as America’s sweetheart, Prince found superstardom with his magnum opus Purple Rain, and Michael Jackson—having ushered out disco with his brilliant Off the Wall album at the tail end of the seventies—released his behemoth Thriller, which became the best-selling album of all time. MTV crash-landed on televisions across America to serve as the official documentarians of the counterculture percolating among the youth. And on the East Coast, hip-hop took its first steps.

  New York City was hip-hop’s nucleus. DJs rocked block parties using turntables to chop and manipulate popular records for pop-lockers to bend and snap their bodies to, and rappers joined in to spit rhymes over instrumentals of groove-heavy beats and popping basslines to hype the party. DJs became the pulse of the party. House bands felt stale and irrelevant when compared to the excitement and originality of DJs. The popularity of DJs at clubs inspired emcees who would rap over beats. The verbal art form would soon transition from parties to recording studios. Early songs like 1979’s “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” from the Fatback Band, the Sugarhill Gang’s earth-shattering “Rapper’s Delight” and Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” were deeply funky joints that lit up dance floors. The music was free-spirited and perfect for dancing to, but it could also pack a punch that lasted far after the party ended. Inspired by funk innovator George Clinton and electropop pioneers Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra, Afrika Bambaataa crafted the dazzling “Planet Rock,” a sweaty dance-floor anthem blending synthesizer and vocoder sounds with breakbeats that served as a precursor to techno, house, and trance. Along with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 hit “The Message”—a record that introduced sociopolitical commentary to hip-hop—“Planet Rock” laid the blueprint for hip-hop. DJ Kool Herc, Fab Five Freddy, Spoonie Gee, Marley Marl, Kool Moe Dee, the Fat Boys, Whodini, Doug E. Fresh, and Warp 9 were some of the genre’s earliest architects and emcees like Run-D.M.C., LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, KRS-One, Slick Rick, Beastie Boys, EPMD, the Juice Crew, and Boogie Down Productions carried the second wave of the genre through the rest of the decade.

  Nearly three thousand miles away from hip-hop’s nexus, LA was in the midst of disco fever. Mobile DJ crews armed with crates of fast-paced dance and silky R & B grooves commanded the party scene, with varying crews dominating their own turf across the city—the Dream Team working South Central, Uncle Jamm’s Army playing Culver City and eastward with an ambitious and enterprising kid named Alonzo Williams anchoring clubs and parties from Gardena to Long Beach. Although dance and R & B was the official soundtrack at parties, the streets told a different story, as East Coast hip-hop was blasting all over the West. “In South Central, all you had to do was open your window. You heard Run-D.M.C. or Sugarhill Gang or the Sequence or Kurtis Blow. Everybody was bumping it,” said KDAY programmer Greg Mack. But despite its bicoastal prevalence, major labels still weren’t checking for hip-hop.

  Alonzo didn’t plan to DJ for a living. Raised in Compton, the Gardena High School graduate had dreams of becoming a broadcaster. He enrolled at the Los Angeles School of Broadcasting through LA’s Regional Occupational Program to study the craft, but a lisp that had long ago earned him the moniker of “Daffy Duck” made that dream seem out of reach. While DJing might not have been his plan A, it was a fallback that took him further than he could imagine—and set the scene for the birth of an era of hip-hop that disrupted the zeitgeist.

  Alonzo purchased two turntables and set up an account to rent equipment from Hogan’s House of Music in Lawndale. He built his own turntable stand that converted into a rolling dolly, gluing wisps of fluffy pink material to make it look like he was DJing on a bright cloud. A friend at a Plexiglas shop made him a sign that read, “Disco Lonzo, Superstar DJ.” At gigs, he’d don a gold chain etched with his name, a whistle, and a construction hat with a rotating siren light.

  Lonzo made $150 a week performing at schools, house parties, nightclubs, and big dances. During a gig at the Long Beach Convention Center one night, Lonzo was approached by Roger Clayton and Andre Manuel, who both extended offers to help him out. Lonzo made Manuel part of his Disco Construction and Wrecking Crew, and taught him how to DJ. Clayton, who DJed under the name the Ace of Dreams, was cofounder of DJ group Uncle Jamm’s Army and he got Lonzo a part-time gig in the warehouse of a record distributor. Clayton also hired Lonzo to DJ parties he threw under his Unique Dreams production company. Lonzo’s father, after seeing his son perform to a packed crowd at a dance hall in Torrance called Alpine Village, asked what it cost to rent the place and was furious to learn it cost $1,000. “Too high,” he told his son. Lonzo’s dad hooked him up with a friend back in Compton who owned Eve’s After Dark, a small social club in nearby Willowbrook. Though smaller, Eve’s only cost half the fee Alpine charged. Lonzo now had a home base to launch his own DJ troupe.

  Eve’s After Dark was the only teen club in the city, with the exception of the Workshop on Ninety-First and Western. It was located near Compton—about a quarter mile away. Because it was located in the county of Los Angeles, it didn’t fall under the purview of Compton or LA city proper, which meant the club could stay open until 6:00 a.m. Kids as young as sixteen—the place was alcohol-free—flocked to Eve’s, although the club advertised its parties for an eighteen-and-over crowd (after midnight Eve’s turned into an after-hours joint for attendees twenty and up). Eve’s became so popular that Lonzo began hosting as many as four parties a night. The club was collecting nearly $10,000 a month. Although city law banished jukeboxes, singing, and live entertainment past a certain hour, Eve’s kept the party going until morning, since the law didn’t state anything about DJs. The crew expanded beyond Manuel, who had dubbed himself the Unknown DJ, to include Dr. Rock, a friend of Alonzo’s, Billy T from Sacramento, Sweet Ron Ron from New York, and later West Compton native Antoine Carraby. Lonzo dropped the words “Disco Construction” from the group name and soon the Wrecking Crew became the Wreckin’ Cru after an attorney for some group in the Midwest sent them a cease-and-desist letter because it had the same name. Inspired by athletes being described as “world class” while he watched the 1984 Olympics, Lonzo thought to flip the name a bit and add World Class to circumvent possible infringement.

  While Lonzo’s Wreckin’ Cru built a loyal following at Eve’s, Clayton moved around from one end of the Los Angeles basin to the other. Clayton’s Uncle Jamm’s Army was packing spots like the Veteran’s Auditorium and the Sports Arena. Thousands of people flocked to see its stable of popular DJs, including Mr. Prince, Egyptian Lover, DJ Pooh, and Bobcat. The DJs based their personas on characters they created, such as an Egyptian snake charmer, and dressed in costumes of military fatigues, leather, or spikes. When Uncle Jamm gigs ended, those unafraid to commingle with Compton’s gangs would continue the party at Eve’s. “We walked in and my eyes just lit up. Ten thousand kids, and nothing but DJs,” Greg Mack said of those Uncle Jamm parties at the Sports Arena. “I’d never seen that in my life. The place was just off the chain.” At Eve’s, the vibe was sophisticated. If you weren’t clean-dressed, you weren’t allowed in. Period. Ladies donned dresses, fellas were fitted in silk shirts with skinny ties and slacks. Colored handkerchiefs repping gang affiliations were strictly forbidden. The Unknown DJ served as the musical director for the club. Lonzo dressed the DJs in satin jackets and put together routines filled with Temptations-style choreography for the Cru to do during sets that were heavy on sweaty R & B, funk, and electro joints from Parliament, Donna Summer, Prince, and George Clinton’s solo work. “P
eople came out in droves,” Lonzo recalled. “It was a constant party.”

  In 1981, Andre Romelle Young was sixteen and barely focused on his studies at Compton’s Centennial High School. Tall, broad-shouldered, and skinny with an afro, Andre was mostly interested in chasing girls, ditching classes, and kicking it with his homies. His peers were being lured into the fast cash of dealing and the camaraderie of gang affiliations, even if both most often ensured a life of constant peril.

  Andre’s mother, Verna, was committed to keeping her son off the streets. Though he was deep within the confines of Crip and Blood territory, Andre never joined because “there wasn’t no money in it.” Verna worked full-time, which meant he was often shuttled between home and his grandmother’s place in New Wilmington Arms, a housing project in Compton that was a notorious drug bazaar. Verna moved the kids more than a dozen times across South LA, and at one time or another lived in places like Watts, Carson, and Long Beach. Eventually the family settled in Compton, in a home that was just two streets over from Eric’s family on South Muriel. Verna pushed strong values on Andre, and no matter where they lived, he was mostly able to keep his nose clean. She allowed Andre to transfer from Centennial to Fremont High School in South Central, where he excelled at swimming and diving. He loved drafting, and a teacher wanted him to enroll in an aircraft drafting apprenticeship program at Northrop Grumman, an aviation company. It was a prospect that excited him—especially considering the lucrative career it could lead to—but his grades made him ineligible and he dropped out of Freemont, enrolling in an adult school in Compton and later radio-broadcasting school.

  Handsome, with a voracious appetite for women, Andre met a young lady named Lisa Johnson, whom he got pregnant. It was a secret relationship, out of respect for Lisa’s mother, who thought her daughter was too young to be dating. She was livid to learn her daughter was expecting a child and threatened Andre during a call with Verna that ended with the women spewing venom toward each other. Lisa’s mother was so upset she refused to inform Andre the baby had arrived. His daughter La Tanya Danielle Young was born on January 19, 1983, when he was seventeen, and Lisa fifteen. But La Tanya wasn’t actually Andre’s firstborn, that would be Curtis Young, born just over a year earlier in nearby Paramount to a woman named Cassandra Joy Greene. It would be two decades later when Curtis was a twenty-one-year-old rapper named Hood Surgeon before father and son actually met.

  What Andre did have was a passion for music, something he shared with his mother. He would buy singles and listen to them as much as he could in his bedroom, spending hours analyzing the music. He loved the rap records coming out of the East Coast. But he’s also a true soul and funk savant, raised on the records his mother kept in her prized collection. Music was so omnipresent in their house, Verna would often toss on a record before she turned on the lights when she came home from work at night. Marvin Gaye; Earth, Wind & Fire, Sly Stone; Parliament-Funkadelic; Isaac Hayes; and James Brown were in constant rotation. When he was fourteen Andre saw Parliament-Funkadelic perform at the LA Coliseum and was awestruck by George Clinton’s euphoric showmanship. The show changed Andre, and funk would forever shape his musical viewpoint.

  Inspired by Grandmaster Flash’s seven-minute opus “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel”—where Flash scratched and mixed pieces of Michael Viner’s Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache,” Chic’s “Good Times,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” and Blondie’s “Rapture” with dialogue from Flash Gordon—Dre decided he wanted to become a dancer. He shared his dream with his brother Tyree, who is three years younger, and is Verna’s son from her second marriage after a tumultuous union with Andre’s father, Theodore. Tyree excelled at football, basketball, and track, and was the first in the family to graduate from high school. While Tyree appeared to be on the track to future success, there was increased concern by friends and family over his frequent run-ins with local gang members.

  Andre encouraged friends and fellow rap fans Darrin and June Bug to join him in forming a new dance crew. He was athletic when he felt like it, and he picked up pop-lock moves he’d seen on Soul Train for years. Verna, a part-time seamstress who had made a name for herself in the community for her elegant costumes, invested in her son’s newfound hobby. She designed outfits for the crew and drove them to dance competitions. Verna was incredibly supportive; she had her own dreams of being an entertainer, and perfomed in an act called the Four Aces. Verna gave up the passion when she got pregnant by her boyfriend, Theodore. Two weeks after her sixteenth birthday, Verna gave birth to Andre. Musical ambitions extended to Theodore as well, and his son’s middle name, Romelle, was chosen in honor of the group he sang with, the Romells, who never made it farther than their neighborhood.

  Andre would get in front of the crowd and wave his arms, bend his knees and lunge himself to the ground as if he’d fallen before jerking himself back up and moving in robotic poses. His crew competed in a number of contests but never finished higher than second place. He then decided to try his hand at DJing, in the vein of Grandmaster Flash. He’d sit with old stereo components, tearing them apart and reshaping them into homemade mixers. Andre took his crudely made turntables and speakers out to a park around the corner from his house and spun records for the neighbors. For Christmas, he asked his mother for a music mixer, which he planned to attach to the music system and two turntables he had cobbled together. Verna and her then-husband Warren, whose son became rapper Warren G, scraped together the money to buy it.

  “Andre was so excited when he unwrapped his mixer. He immediately got dressed and went out to show some of his friends before setting it up,” Verna recalled. “He remained in his room all day, practicing with his mixer. I had to beg him to take a break just to eat.” For Verna, it wasn’t uncommon to find Andre asleep with music blasting into his headset.

  At times neighbors complained about the loudness, but Verna didn’t mind. It meant her child wasn’t running the street or finding trouble. Her house became the party spot. Just about every kid on the block would come by. Verna didn’t care so long as it kept the kids safe and out of foolishness. It was a fair trade, she thought. Andre launched a new music crew—a DJ group—called the Freak Patrol. They DJed at dances in the park near the house, and even booked club dances and house parties. Verna would pile Andre, Tyree, and as many of their friends as fit in her car and drive to Eve’s After Dark, dropping them off at nine o’clock and setting an alarm for one in the morning, when she’d return to get them.

  Andre began frequenting Eve’s on the weekends. One night, a seventeen-year-old Andre caught a break when one of Lonzo’s DJ’s didn’t show up, and his godmother’s brother, Tim, persuaded Lonzo to let him show his skills. Andre pushed his way up to the turntables and, in a ballsy move, challenged Yella to a DJ battle.

  Antoine “Yella” Carraby, born and raised in West Compton, was a standout DJ in the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. Antoine joined under the name Bric Hard and earned his stage name from the Unknown DJ, who heard the Tom Tom Club’s “Mr. Yellow” and told him, “That’s what your name should be.” Yella had mad skills. He helped bring full-scale scratching to the area after New York’s Davy DMX, Kurtis Blow’s DJ, spent two days teaching him how to spin—showing him how to hold the record, do the mixing, everything. It was the first time the West Coast had been exposed to the act of scratching.

  Yella accepted the challenge from the young Andre. After Yella did his thing behind the ones-and-twos like usual, Andre mounted the stage like he had always dreamed. He reached for a headset and put them on. On one turntable he laid down Afrika Bambaataa’s sizzling, futuristic dance-floor banger “Planet Rock” and placed the Marvelettes’ Motown doo-wop classic “Please Mr. Postman” on the second turntable. The two records couldn’t be more distant sonically, with widely differing tempos and moods. He tinkered with the tempos, adjusting them to meet in the middle. The crowd went wild.

  Lonzo was taken aback. “Please Mr. Postman
” mixed in perfect time with “Planet Rock,” a record that ran twice as fast—it’s a trick that’s a cinch to pull off for today’s DJs, with the advent of computer software, but back then was virtually unheard of. “He would lay a beat down, go over it with the a capella from another beat, and then he might take another beat from another record. It was just layers of different songs,” remembered Greg Mack. “It wasn’t just mixing, it was a production. As a matter of fact, he got criticized for it by some of the other regular DJs because they thought it wasn’t mixing.”

  Andre began calling himself “Dr. Dre, the Master of Mixology,” the “Dr.” part lifted from his basketball idol, Julius “Dr. J” Erving. Lonzo knew ladies would go wild over the tall, handsome, and talented teenager and thought bringing Dre into the fold would help him compete with Uncle Jamm’s Army, whose flashy ensembles made them electric draws. Dre was offered a spot in the Wreckin’ Cru with Lonzo paying him $50 a night.

  WORLD CLASS

  Competition among DJ crews was fierce. Just like gang beef, rival crews were sensitive about their turf. When crews came across one another at the same venue, things often got heated and at times turned violent. But it was the fury that filtered in from the warfare between the Crips and Bloods that started to impede attendance at local dances, and eventually decimated the entire scene.

  One of the worst incidents came during an August 17, 1986, stop on Run-D.M.C.’s Raising Hell Tour at the Long Beach Arena. As Brooklyn trio Whodini opened, a melee erupted between 300 to 500 black and Latino gang members. Fists, knives, and snapped-off chair legs ripped through the crowd. One fan was tossed over the balcony and onto the stage by a gang member. Assailants snatched gold chains and pummeled anyone in their path. “Please,” one Whodini member said into the mic, “this is a place to party.  This is a place to hear music.” His plea was ignored and more than forty people were injured. Run-D.M.C. never made it to the stage.