When MTV launched in 1981 with the Buggles’ deliciously ironic “Video Killed the Radio Star,” its stable of videos was exclusively by white artists. Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, the Who, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Iron Maiden, and Phil Collins were among the first rotation of musicians featured on the network, and MTV continued to look like this despite the movement happening a few boroughs away from the network’s New York City headquarters. Rolling Stone observed that during MTV’s first eighteen months on the air, of the 750 videos played fewer than two dozen featured black artists.
MTV argued that music from black artists didn’t suit the desired format—in other words, the network’s mostly young, white audience wouldn’t like the music. Rick James was turned down “because the consumer didn’t define him as rock,” its founder, Bob Pittman, said, while another MTV executive shrugged off the criticism with this curt argument: “You cannot be all things to all people.”
“Rock and roll is not a guitar, it’s not long hair—that’s not rock and roll. It ain’t about an instrument, or this or that. The blues is the start of it all,” Ice Cube said. “You add some rhythm to that blues and you have all kind of people that’s doing rock and roll. And that develops into hip-hop. All of it is a spirit—the spirit of coming outside of the box. If you don’t see how N.W.A is rock and roll, then you really don’t get what it’s all about.”
In 1983, while he was promoting his Let’s Dance album, David Bowie—himself one of the first artists featured on the network—famously took the network to task for its lack of diversity during an interview with original VJ Mark Goodman. “Having watched MTV over the past few months, it’s a solid enterprise with a lot going for it. I’m just floored by the fact that there’s so few black artists featured on it. Why is that?” Bowie inquired. Goodman nervously explained to an incredulous Bowie how the network was thinking in terms of narrow-casting and were playing what they believed the entire country would like, suggesting Prince “or a string of other black faces” might scare viewers in the Midwest.
MTV was forced to loosen the reins with the arrival of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It was an impossible album to ignore as much of the country flocked to record stores to purchase copies. As a visual artist, Jackson was transforming the music-video medium with his innovative work, but by no means did the network view him as a rock artist, much to the chagrin of Walter Yetnikoff, the president of Jackson’s record label CBS. Enraged when MTV refused to play Jackson’s video for “Billie Jean,” Yetnikoff threatened to go public with the network’s position on black artists and to pull all videos of CBS acts from rotation. With extra pressure from Quincy Jones, MTV relented and added “Billie Jean” to its playlist. Thriller went on to sell an additional ten million copies, and the network’s viewership surged.
Michael Jackson’s prominence opened MTV up to more R & B, and soon Lionel Richie, Billy Ocean, and Prince became a presence in the network’s programming. Rap, however, was a tougher sell. The first time much of MTV’s audience got exposed to hip-hop came courtesy of Blondie’s shimmering disco jam “Rapture.” On the record Debbie Harry raps and name-checks Fab Five Freddy, who appeared in the music video alongside landmark graffiti artists Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat. “Rapture” set the precedent for rock artists to embrace hip-hop and vice-versa, but until more rock-rap hybrids surfaced, MTV was reluctant to showcase the genre. The same went for BET—which launched a year before MTV and catered exclusively to black audiences—until it slowly introduced rap videos in a segment during Video Vibrations. Rap videos did have a home on local, syndicated New York shows like Video Music Box and New York Hot Tracks, as well as on TBS’s Night Tracks, but were typically rejected by MTV for looking cheaply made—ironic considering labels didn’t want to invest more into rap videos because MTV refused to play them.
The same year Run-D.M.C. released “Walk this Way,” Beastie Boys crossed into rock-rap stardom. Previously a hard-core punk band, the Beastie Boys released their debut Licensed to Ill, which became the first rap album to reach number one on the Billboard chart. Its breakout single, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!),” broke them to MTV. “Walk this Way,” “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!),” and “Wipeout”—Brooklyn rap troupe the Fat Boys’ remake of the surf rock classic featuring the Beach Boys—got frequent airplay during MTV’s early days. It’s hard to believe those videos would have gotten the same airtime had there not been a white artist prominently featured on the record that appealed to MTV’s core audience. Roxanne Shanté, Kool Moe Dee, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five weren’t any more or less relevant to the genre at the time than Run-D.M.C. or the Beastie Boys, but where were they when it came to MTV spins?
As New York rappers began getting wider exposure, the LA hip-hop scene was flourishing with homegrown acts. What helped the West Coast rap scene explode in the mideighties? Much of the credit goes to KDAY, an underground record scene powered by a laid-back vinyl presser and a pair of roller rinks.
KDAY operated out of a windowless redbrick bunker on a grassy hill between Echo Park and Silver Lake. Its six antennas shot a fifty-thousand watt AM signal focused on a narrow path toward downtown and South Central, which gave the station an awfully spotty signal as most of its power was being sent out over the Pacific. KDAY hardly reached many parts of the city during the day, but at night it could be picked up in Hawaii and as far as Japan and Russia. During its prime, personalities like Wolfman Jack, Art Laboe, and Alan Freed called KDAY home, but the station turned its focus on black music since its signal was crystal clear across South LA. KDAY was far past its heyday when an ambitious, enterprising music director arrived to take over. He didn’t care that he was headed to a station in the midst of a slump. Twenty-eight and “barely scraping by” in Houston as a radio personality at KMJQ, Greg Mack (a shortened take of Macmillan) saw the KDAY gig as his entry into a massive market—the second biggest in fact. When Greg arrived in LA in 1983, out of the five black stations in the city KDAY was right near the bottom. His first objective was to top another low-rated black AM station, KGFJ.
Living in South Central, it wasn’t long before Greg realized the slow R & B jams the station had in rotation weren’t exactly what the kids thought was cool, as the old saying goes. What Greg heard blasting from car stereos and boom boxes, selling in shops and swap meets, were the sounds of East Coast rap. When Greg got hip to LA’s party scene, he witnessed Egyptian Lover, Bobcat, and Roger Clayton of Uncle Jamm’s Army lure ten thousand kids to the Sports Arena. Scores of Latinos packed Casa Camino Real to get down to freestyle music, a fusion of the syncopated percussion of electro music with synthetic instrumentation. “I had never heard the kind of music they were playing,” he recalled of the genre that seeped out of Latin neighborhoods in New York City and Miami in the early 1980s. “I started looking for stuff that sounded like that. That’s when I discovered Trinere, Debbie Deb, Lisa Lisa.” Greg started adding electro to his playlist and reintroduced rap back into programming whenever he was permitted. Initially he got pushback against adding rap, as it was removed from the station’s circulation at the behest of a conservative program director a few years before. But Greg was given the okay to bring it back, with a condition. Rap could only be played during late-night hours. KDAY saw an immediate surge in ratings and by 1986 at least 60 percent of the songs heard on the station were rap.
Records from East Coast rappers like Run-D.M.C., Whodini, and LL Cool J dominated KDAY’s programming, but Greg was clamoring to showcase local DJs like the ones he saw in clubs. He figured he could partner with Uncle Jamm’s Army with an idea that appeased both parties—the station got the most popular DJs in the collective on its airwaves while Uncle Jamm’s got free promotion for its events. During an Uncle Jamm’s party, Greg made his way to the stage and introduced himself to the crew’s leader Rodger Clayton.
“Does it look like I need fucking radio? We don’t need y’all,” Clayton barked. He had a point. Uncle Jamm’s wa
s packing kids in strictly through word of mouth.
Getting dissed by Rodger Clayton pissed off Greg. “I’ll just start my own thing,” he thought. Greg named his rival collective the Mack Attack Marines. He then tried to poach Clayton’s DJs. Bobcat passed at the idea when Greg tried to lure him over. The DJ had zero interest in working for free. Bobcat did have some advice for Greg, though, telling him not to bite Clayton’s military theme, suggesting instead he call his unit the Mack Attack Mixmasters. Bobcat connected Greg to a young, New York–born Cuban-American DJ that went by Tony G, whom he hired along with DJ personalities Julio G and M. Walk. Greg then made a visit to Dooto’s, a new club being promoted by World Class Wreckin’ Cru leader Lonzo Williams. Lonzo regularly advertised on KDAY and, unlike Clayton, didn’t tell Greg to fuck off. Lonzo suggested he use his DJs Dr. Dre and DJ Yella in exchange for on-air promotion.
“Man, he’s damn good,” Lonzo promised of Dre.
Greg loved the mixes by Dre and Yella. “They weren’t normal mixes, they were actually productions. It was eight-track mixes. You had eight songs playing. I’d never heard anything like it,” he recalled.
Dre and Yella were added to his Mixmasters crew and recorded daily blends of R & B and rap for a show Greg dubbed the Traffic Jam, a format pretty much every city has now. Because there was no budget to pay them, Lonzo got ten- to fifteen-second commercial spots before and after the show: “This Traffic Jam is brought to you by the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. They are live every Friday at Dooto Music Center, located at 135th and Central.” Greg took tapes of old mixes the station put together and gave them to Dre and Yella to record new ones over. The duo did their mixing in the dinky, four-track studio Lonzo had built in the club. He also had the Traffic Jam mixes pressed on twelve-inch vinyl to sell. Greg broadcasted live from high schools, clubs, and popular roller rinks. The Mack Attack Mixmasters also performed at events around the city and Greg, who strongly believed in fostering community, sent his DJs around town to community centers, schools, and shopping centers, “in the places people told us not to go.”
Greg’s instincts paid off: KDAY beat KGFJ on his first book as music director. He brought the hottest acts to Dooto’s, including LL Cool J, Soulsonic Force, Klymaxx, New Edition, Run-D.M.C., and Big Daddy Kane, and broke a ton of rap records—angering label bosses who wanted the single chosen for its artists played. “Back then record companies didn’t want to put out the best song. They wanted that song to stay on the album to sell the album,” he said. “I’d always get every album and listen to it and go, ‘Oh, there’s that song.’ That was the key to us being different.”
KDAY also played a crucial role in gang relations. Greg built a rapport with the bangers who ruled the streets. He often found himself in gang territory while working clubs and roller rinks and being aware of the different, sometimes volatile crowds was crucial. Dooto’s and Skateland were Blood areas. World on Wheels, a popular skating haunt in Mid-City, was Crip territory. Casa Camino Real was neutral. Sherman Square mostly attracted Hispanics while 321 Club in Santa Monica was the spot for the white folks who didn’t want to go to any of the other clubs. An admittedly corny, country boy who wore cowboy boots, Greg had the trust of gang members because of his kind disposition and neutrality. “Anytime somebody got smoked I usually got a phone call. I would always tell them, there’s a better way to handle it. But these are the streets. The streets have a court system all their own,” he said. In the aftermath of the 1986 gang riot that shuttered a Run-D.M.C. concert in Long Beach, KDAY held a Day of Peace where regular programming was suspended and Greg had Run-D.M.C. and soul-funk crooner Barry White, who was a former member of sixties LA gang the Businessmen, on air to promote nonviolence. A cease-fire was called and observed on the Day of Peace and a few weeks later a dozen members from the warring Bloods and the Crips signed a treaty—however, the peace was short-lived.
Despite KDAY’s success, complaints were rampant. People were furious over the music Greg was playing. Even though he turned the station around, record labels thought he was “fucking crazy” for playing rap. “They’d call my boss and go off,” he said. “Everybody thought it was a novelty.” And of course, there was the content of the records. Perhaps more comical, albeit achingly disruptive, was how KDAY’s wonky antennas beamed the twenty-four-hour broadcast into the telephones, televisions, stereo players, bedroom walls, and even toilets of residents near the station’s headquarters. “It’s awful. It’s unbelievable. At night it’s unbearable,” one resident was quoted in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s even worse in wet weather. You can walk in my yard when it rains and hear the ‘rap, rap, rap’ music on the chain-link fence.”
KDAY’s playlist quickly filled with homegrown acts who had discovered Macola Records.
A storefront on a shady strip of Santa Monica Boulevard housed Macola. It was run by a silver-haired Canadian named Don MacMillan. His father had been a “rack jobber”—a wholesaler who merchandises goods on racks in retail stores—for records. When MacMillan moved to Southern California in the 1960s, his dad got him a gig at Cadet, a vinyl manufacturing plant located in South Central. Cadet pressed vinyl for its parent company Kent Records, handling releases from Ike & Tina Turner, B. B. King, and Lowell Fulson. When Kent folded in 1983, MacMillan purchased the small Hollywood plant with twelve manual vinyl presses and shrink-wrapping machines in a bankruptcy sale for $10,000. He named it Macola, an amalgam of MacMillan and Olaug, his Norwegian-born wife.
His timing was impeccable, as the LA rap scene had started to pop. Uncle Jamm’s Army DJ Egyptian Lover with his single “Dial a Freak” was one of Macola’s first clients. A thousand dollars got five hundred records pressed, which the DJ did for his next single “Egypt, Egypt.” He sold the records out of the trunk of his car and peddled them on street corners and swap meets. MacMillan offered to help the Egyptian Lover sell records, pressing additional copies free of charge and shipping them to contacts he had with independent record-store distributors around the country, such as California Record Distributors, Select-O-Hits in Memphis, Schwartz Brothers in Baltimore, and Big State in Texas. MacMillan made a percentage of the profit, taking 15 percent of gross receipts as a distribution fee. If the records didn’t sell, though, he’d eat the costs and give artists a chance to come pick them up—lest they wanted them to be recycled and pressed as something else. MacMillan had the upper hand in this business agreement since he could press additional copies the artist might not know about in order to boost his profits. Another client was a trio of Riverside air force reserve men who called themselves 2 Live Crew. Their bouncy, bass-heavy electro rap single “Revelation” became especially popular in Miami as did Egyptian Lover’s “Egypt, Egypt,” and both acts headed to Florida for promotional appearances. 2 Live Crew ended up relocating there and aligned with a local promoter named Luther Campbell who performed under the moniker Luke Skyywalker. Campbell became their manager and added himself to the group, becoming its lead member. The group then took on a raunchy, sexually explicit aesthetic and became a national sensation—to the intense scorn of conservatives.
Macola continued to attract young, enterprising artists. World Class Wreckin’ Cru leader Lonzo Williams launched his Kru-Cut imprint under Macola, while Unknown DJ called his imprint Techno Hop Records. At one time or another MC Hammer, Digital Underground, Too $hort, and Timex Social Club released records through Macola. MacMillan essentially operated the plant like a record label, taking his clients to sales meetings and radio conventions. He called radio stations to work records for airplay and reached out to retailers to get them stocked.
Despite the arrival of compact discs, vinyl was still quite viable throughout the eighties, as were cassette tapes. Introduced to the United States in the spring of 1983 after first hitting Japan and Europe six months prior, the technology of compact discs allowed sound to be reproduced with remarkable clarity and a dynamic range. Discs lacked the distortion or the pop and hiss of vinyl and were a significant improvement o
n the sound quality of cassette tapes. Throughout 1983 and ’84, approximately four hundred thousand CD players were sold in the United States. But the players could cost up to $1,000, which, at the time, was far too steep a price for most Americans. Record players were cheaper, and far more dependable than a new technological advancement. Because vinyl and cassettes were more affordable than compact discs, aspiring musicians were able to record without assuming much financial risk. This all made for a robust scene where independent local acts and mom-and-pop record shops thrived.
An essential cog in the underground record scene was the Roadium, a swap meet on Redondo Beach Boulevard in Torrance, California.
Located on a sprawling patch of beaten asphalt once home to a drive-in movie theater, the dingy open-air flea market was lined with varying wares as far as the eye could see. The Roadium had it all, and for bargain prices. Irregular socks and underwear, secondhand clothes, canned goods and nonperishables that were dangerously close to expiring, toys, rugs, car batteries, radios, and tons of cheap products imported from China and shipped to the Los Angeles Harbor through San Pedro. Every weekend, people poured in from Redondo Beach, Lawndale, Hawthorne, Carson, Gardena, Inglewood, Compton, and as far as Anaheim to peruse the Roadium.
Steve Yano had one of the most popular booths there. Before he was a vendor at the Roadium, Steve worked as a gardener to help pay for classes at California State University, LA, where he was studying psychology. He found part-time work transporting and selling records and tapes at an Orange County swap meet. Within a year, Steve was part owner of a shop with the man who hired him to transport records. The store did okay, but “okay” wasn’t enough to pay them both. Steve sold his half of the business to his partner and took payment in merchandise. His plan was to start his own record-selling enterprise. He brought on his wife, Susan, to help sell records at a number of flea markets in Southern California before landing at the Roadium in the early 1980s.
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