by Jeff Chang
Cindy calculated it would cost a little more than half her paycheck to rent the rec room in their apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, whom she knew as Clive but everyone else knew as Kool Herc, was an aspiring DJ with access to a powerful sound system. All she had to do was bulk-buy some Olde English 800 malt liquor, Colt 45 beer, and soda, and advertise the party.
She, Clive and her friends hand-wrote the announcements on index cards, scribbling the info below a song title like “Get on the Good Foot” or “Fence-walk.” If she filled the room, she could charge a quarter for the girls, two for the guys, and make back the overhead on the room. And with the profit—presto, instant wardrobe.
Clive had been DJing house parties for three years. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, he had seen the sound systems firsthand. The local sound was called Somerset Lane, and the selector’s name was King George. Clive says, “I was too young to go in. All we could do is sneak out and see the preparation of the dance throughout the day. The guys would come with a big old handcart with the boxes in it. And then in the night time, I’m a little itchy headed, loving the vibrations on the zinc top ‘cause them sound systems are powerful.
“We just stay outside like everybody else, you know, pointing at the gangsters as they come up, all the famous people. And at the time they had the little motorcycles, Triumphs and Hondas. Rudeboys used to have those souped up. They used to come up four and five six deep, with them likkle ratchet knife,” Clive says. He still remembers the crowd’s buzz when Claudie Massop arrived at a local dance one night. He wanted to be at the center of that kind of excitement, to be a King George.
Cindy and Clive’s father, Keith Campbell, was a devoted record collector, buying not only reggae, but American jazz, gospel, and country. They heard Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, even Nashville country crooner Jim Reeves. “I remember listening to Jim Reeves all the time,” Clive says. “I was singing these songs and emulating them to the fullest. That really helped me out, changing my accent, is singing to the records.”
In the Bronx, his mother, Nettie, would take him to house parties, which had the same ambrosial effect on him that the sound systems had. “I see the different guys dancing, guys rapping to girls, I’m wondering what the guy is whisperin’ in the girl’s ears about. I’m green, but I’m checking out the scene,” he recalls. “And I noticed a lot of the girls was complaining, ‘Why they not playing that record?’ ‘How come they don’t have that record?’ ‘Why did they take it off right there?’ ” He began buying his own 45s, waiting for the day he could have his own sound system.
As luck would have it, Keith Campbell became a sponsor for a local rhythm and blues band, investing in a brand new Shure P.A. system for the group. Clive’s father was now their soundman, and the band wanted somebody to play records during intermission. Keith told them he could get his son. But Clive had started up his own house party business, and somehow his gigs always happened to fall at the same times as the band’s, leaving Keith so angry he refused to let Clive touch the system. “So here go these big columns in my room, and my father says, ‘Don’t touch it. Go and borrow Mr. Dolphy’s stuff,’ ” he says. “Mr. Dolphy said, ‘Don’t worry Clive, I’ll let you borrow some of these.’ In the back of my mind, Jesus Christ, I got these big Shure columns up in the room!”
At the same time, his father was no technician. They all knew the system was powerful, but no one could seem to make it peak. Another family in the same building had the same system and seemed to be getting more juice out of it, but they wouldn’t let Keith or Clive see how they did it. “They used to put a lot of wires to distract me from chasing the wires,” he says.
One afternoon, fiddling around on the system behind his father’s back, Clive figured it out. “What I did was I took the speaker wire, put a jack onto it and jacked it into one of the channels, and I had extra power and reserve power. Now I could control it from the preamp. I got two Bogart amps, two Girard turntables, and then I just used the channel knobs as my mixer. No headphones. The system could take eight mics. I had an echo chamber in one, and a regular mic to another. So I could talk plain and, at the same time, I could wait halfway for the echo to come out.
“My father came home and it was so loud he snuck up behind me,” he remembers. Clive’s guilt was written all over his face. But his father couldn’t believe it.
Keith yelled, “Where the noise come from?”
“This is the system!”
Keith said, “What! Weh you did?”
“This is what I did,’ ” Clive recalls telling his father, revealing the hookup. “And he said, ‘Raas claat, man! We ‘ave sound!!!
“So now the tables turned. Now these other guys was trying to copy what I was doing, because our sound is coming out monster, monster!” Clive says. “Me and my father came to a mutual understanding that I would go with them and play between breaks and when I do my parties, I could use the set. I didn’t have to borrow his friend’s sound system anymore. I start making up business cards saying ‘Father and Son.’ And that’s how it started, man! That’s when Cindy asked me to do a back-to-school party. Now people would come to this party and see these big-ass boxes they never seen before.”
It was the last week in August of 1973. Clive and his friends brought the equipment down from their second floor apartment and set up in the room adjacent to the rec room. “My system was on the dance floor, and I was in a little room watching, peeking out the door seeing how the party was going,” he says.
It didn’t start so well. Clive played some dancehall tunes, ones guaranteed to rock any yard dance. Like any proud DJ, he wanted to stamp his personality onto his playlist. But this was the Bronx. They wanted the breaks. So, like any good DJ, he gave the people what they wanted, and dropped some soul and funk bombs. Now they were packing the room. There was a new energy. DJ Kool Herc took the mic and carried the crowd higher.
“All people would hear is his voice coming out from the speakers,” Cindy says. “And we didn’t have no money for a strobe light. So what we had was this guy named Mike. When Herc would say, ‘Okay, Mike! Mike with the lights!’, Mike flicked the light switch. He got paid for that.”
By this point in the night, they probably didn’t need the atmospherics. The party people were moving to the shouts of James Brown, turning the place into a sweatbox. They were busy shaking off history, having the best night of their generation’s lives.
Later, as Clive and Cindy counted their money, they were giddy. This party could be the start of something big, they surmised. They just couldn’t know how big.
Sacrifices
Clive Campbell was born the first of six children to Keith and Nettie Campbell. Nettie had moved to the city from Port Maria on the northern coast. Keith, a city native, worked as the head foreman at the Kingston Wharf garage, a working-class job with status.
Keith was something of a community leader, he held the kind of job title that drew the attention of politicians. But he chose not to take sides when the JLP and PNP began their violent jockeying for position. The year before Clive left for the United States, Edward Seaga had unleashed the West Kingston War in Back-O-Wall. Clive says, “I remember police riding around in big old trucks, tanks. And some people who were brothers or friends would turn on each other. It was like a civil war.”
By then, the Campbells no longer lived in Trenchtown near the frontlines. They had moved east across the city to a house in Franklyn Town, a quieter urban neighborhood of strivers below Warieka Hill and the upper-class neighborhood called Beverly Hills. It was a modest but lush property near the famous Alpha Boys School.
“We had like seven different fruits growing in our yard. We had different types of peppers, flowers, you know, it was tight!” Clive recalls. “We wasn’t too far away from the beach. So, as a matter of fact, it was a traditional thing with us for my father to take us to the beach on Sunday. Every Sunday we’d look forward to go out to the beach after church.”
Cindy says, “She saw the opportunities. The public schools were free, because in Jamaica we went to private schools. So she told my father that when she finished with school that what she wanted was for the family to live here. And he didn’t want to come.”
But Keith could see Nettie’s reasoning. Even his own friends and relatives were leaving the country. Before Nettie returned to New York City in 1966, they agreed to move to America. Clive would be the first to join her, then the rest of the family would follow. Cindy says, “A lot of immigrants have to do that. You have to make sacrifices. It breaks up the family for a small amount of time but eventually the family gets back together.”
Clive and Cindy agree that Keith remained a Jamaican at heart. “He just said, ‘America was a place for you to excel and do better for your kids.’ But after a while you go back home, you go back to your country. And he believed in that. He loved his country,” Cindy says. Years later, after raising his children with Nettie in New York City and becoming an American citizen, he returned to his beloved island for a visit. While swimming in strong currents off Bull Bay, he had a heart attack. The Campbells buried him in Jamaica.
Becoming American
From Kingston to the Bronx. Stones that the builders refused.
Clive Campbell came to New York City on a cold November night in 1967. A fresh snowfall lay on the ground, something the twelve-year-old had never seen before. He took a bus from Kennedy Airport into the gray, unwelcoming city. This wasn’t the America he had seen on his neighbor’s television, or imagined from his father’s records. He had no idea how to begin again, he says, “All I could do was just look out the window.”
His mother’s apartment was at 611 East 178th Avenue, between the Bronx’s Little Italy and Crotona Park, in what had been the Cross-Bronx Expressway’s most contested mile. “Now I’m living in a tenement building. There’s no yard. This is all boxed and closed in,” Clive recalls. His mother feared Clive would fall prey to the heroin plague. She told Clive, “Don’t let anybody tell you they’re gonna stick something in your arm. Don’t let them trick you by calling you chicken.”
Clive looked and spoke and felt like a country boy. “Here I am all hicked out, got a corduroy coat on, with the snow hat with the flip-up-and-come-over-your-ears. I had that on with these cowboy boots,” Herc recalls. “And this girl at school started teasing the hell out of me. She was calling my shoes ‘roach killers.’ She had the whole hall laughing, ‘Ah roach killers, roach killers!’
“At that time, being Jamaican wasn’t fashionable. Bob Marley didn’t come through yet to make it more fashionable, to even give a chance for people to listen to our music,” he says. “I remember one time a guy said, ‘Clive, man, don’t walk down that way cause they throwing Jamaicans in garbage cans.’ The gangs was throwing Jamaicans in garbage cans!”
Herc was learning the ways of the Bronx. He found himself hanging out with young Five Percenters, absorbing their slang and science. For a time, he even rolled with the Cofon Cats, the same Tremont gang that Benjy Melendez had joined when he first moved to the Bronx a few years before. It wasn’t much of an experience. The Cofon Cats spent one long afternoon getting chased out of Little Italy by the Golden Guineas.
At Junior High School 118, Clive began running cross-country and track and winning medals. His physicality won him American friends. After school, he began hanging out with a Jamaican American named Jerome Wallace, who was a unicyclist. Jerome had already been through the transition Clive was going through. He taught Clive how to ride on one wheel, and how to balance his Jamaican past and his Bronx present. Clive began to see the Cofon Cats as punks who were nothing without the security of the gang. “The gang members started asking us to be division leaders because they see we have respect. So we didn’t need that anymore,” Herc says. “And I had a few other things to worry about besides the gangs, like getting my ass whipped by my father.”
Clive tuned into rock and soul disc jockeys like Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack as if he had caught religion, listening to these smooth men rap their silver-tongued rap. He began going to “First Fridays” youth dances at a local Catholic school and at Murphy Projects. His mother took him to house parties, where he heard music he had never heard on WBLS or WWRL. The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and, most important, James Brown became his tutors; they were teaching Clive how to lose his accent.
“I was more around Americans. And I was tired of hearing them say ‘What did you say?’ My accent really started to change,” he recalls. By the time Clive began attending Alfred E. Smith High School, some of his Jamaican friends didn’t even know he was Jamaican. He was in the process of reinventing himself, creating a new identity.
He wasn’t alone. All across the city youths were customizing their names or giving themselves new ones and scrawling them across the naked city surfaces. The young graffiti writers were the advance guard of a new culture; they literally blazed trails out of the gang generation. Crossing demarcated turfs to leave their aliases in marker and spraypaint, they said “I’m here” and “Fuck all y’all” at the same time. Gang members, who had trapped themselves in their own neighborhoods, had to give them respect. Clive and the post-gang youths were a different breed, more interested in projecting individual flash than collective brawn, and they would soon render the gangs obsolete.
Graffiti expert Jack Stewart traces the emergence of the modern-day movement to Philadelphia’s neighborhoods of color as early as 1965.1 Aerosolist and activist Steve “Espo” Powers says that the Black teenager, CORNBREAD, who is credited with popularizing the tagging of the Philly subways, was only trying to attract the attention of a beauty named Cynthia. By 1968, the movement had spread to New York City. CORNBREAD’s protégé, TOP CAT, moved to Harlem and brought with him the “gangster” style of lettering. A Puerto Rican youth calling himself JULIO 204—the number was the street he hailed from—began at about the same time. When a Greek American named TAKI 183 told the New York Times in the summer of 1971 why he tagged his name on ice cream trucks and subway cars—”I don’t feel like a celebrity normally, but the guys make me feel like one when they introduce me to someone”—thousands of New York youngsters picked up fat markers and spray paint to make their own name.2 Writers like LEE 163d!, EVIL ED, CLIFF 159, JUNIOR 161, CAY 161, CHE 159 and BARBARA and EVA 62 were saying their names loud all across buildings, bus stops, and subway station walls uptown.
Roaming through gang turfs, slipping through the long arms and high fences of authority, violating notions of property and propriety, graffiti writers found their own kind of freedom. Writing your name was like locating the edge of civil society and planting a flag there. In Greg Tate’s words, it was “reverse colonization.”3 The 1960s, as the hip-hop generation would so often be reminded, were a great time to be young. The world seemed to shake under young feet so easily back then. The revolutionaries expected the whole world to be watching and when they were given the spotlight, they cast a long shadow. But these writers weren’t like the revolutionaries, or even the philosopher-activist wall-writers in Lima, Mexico City, Paris, and Algiers. Theirs were not political statements. They were just what they were, a strike against their generation’s invisibility and preparation for the coming darkness.
They held no illusions about power. No graffiti writer ever hoped to run for mayor. And unlike the gang bangers, none would su
bmerge his or her name to the collective. They were doing it to be known amongst their peers, to be recognized for their originality, bravado, daring, and style. Norman Mailer, one of the first to write seriously about graffiti, got it instantly: the writers were composing advertisements for themselves.
In the summer of 1970, TAKI 183’s tags seemed to explode across the city. Like thousands of other kids, Clive, Jerome and their friend Richard picked up markers and spraycans. Rich became UNCLE RICH, Jerome became YOGI and Clive became CLYDE AS KOOL.4
“They couldn’t recall my name Clive,” he says. “So the closest you could come was Clyde, from the Knicks basketball player. They’d be like, ‘You mean like ‘Clyde’ Frazier?’ ‘Yeah. Clyde. Let’s leave it like that.’ So I started to write that. And where I picked ‘Kool’ from was this TV cigarette commercial. A guy was driving one of them Aston-Martins, like this James Bond car, and his cigarette was right there by the gear shift, white gloves, dark glasses and just driving through the countryside—whoooooo! The girl with him, she reached over to touch his cigarette; and he goes—rrrrrrrrnt! Stops the car, leans over, opens the door, points his finger, tells her, ‘Get out!’ And she got out. And the commercial said, ‘Nobody touches my silver-thin.’ I was like, wow, that’s ‘Kool’! So I picked KOOL.
“Wherever you see UNCLE RICH, you see CLYDE AS KOOL,” he says. “I put a little smiling face in it, the eyes, the nose, and mouth and a little cigarette hanging out, and a little tam on it, like a little Apple Jack’s hat.”
Writing brought him into contact with the premier stylists, and he began hanging out with the EX-VANDALS, the legendary supercrew that had begun in Brooklyn and now included SUPER KOOL 223, EL MARKO, STAY HIGH 149 and PHASE 2. As graffiti moved off the walls and onto the subway steel, EL MARKO and SUPER KOOL revolutionized the name game by painting top-to-bottom masterpieces on the train-cars in late 1971 and early 1972. Just as city officials enacted the first in what would become decades of increasingly severe anti-graffiti laws, the great Bronx writer PHASE 2 launched a series of next evolutionary steps, introducing ever more imaginative refinements on the rolling steel canvases.