Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  But Clive would finally make his name elsewhere. He was running track, pushing weights, playing rough schoolyard basketball. His classmates kidded him, dubbing him “Hercules” for his bullish power drives to the hoop. “I went back to the block and I said, ‘Yo fellas, this guy at school, man, he’s calling me Hercules. I know he means well, but I don’t like it.’ So I said, ‘What’s the shortening for Hercules?’ They said ‘Herc.’ Aaaaaah—sounds unique! So I said, ‘Yo man, just call me Herc, leave off the ‘lees’, just call me Herc.’ Between high school and the block, I put the two names together and I dropped the CLYDE. I started calling myself Kool Herc, and that was it.”

  New Fires

  A fire sent the Campbells out of their Tremont apartment. Their baby brother was striking matches, lighting pieces of paper and tossing them out the window. A breeze caught a burning paper and blew it back in, setting the window curtains aflame. Although the firemen were able to put it out without anyone getting hurt, Cindy remains angry at what happened afterward. “When the fire department came in there, they were looking for money. The fire was really in one room, but in the bedroom the drawers were pulled out. My father had a tin-pan of quarters that he was saving, and that tin-pan had at least three- or four-hundred dollars in quarters at the time. That was just missing,” she says.

  Populations were in flux. Whites were leaving for Co-op City and the suburbs. With government vouchers and assistance money, the Campbells joined the Black and brown exodus into the West Bronx. They moved into the Concourse Plaza Hotel on the Grand Concourse at 161st Street, where many burned-out families had been temporarily relocated.

  After the family moved into a brand new apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick, Kool Herc would return to the hotel to frequent the disco downstairs, the Plaza Tunnel. A friend of his from high school named Shaft spun records there, as well as a DJ named John Brown. In gay and Black clubs at the time, DJs were pushing the emerging four-on-the-floor disco beat. But the Plaza Tunnel DJs had a rawer sound. John Brown “was the first to play records like ‘Give it Up or Turn it Loose’ by James Brown and ‘Get Ready’ by Rare Earth,” pioneering hip-hop journalist Steven Hager wrote. “[‘Get Ready’] was a favorite in the Bronx because it lasted over twenty-one minutes, which was long enough for the serious dancers to get into the beat. They loved to wait for the song’s two-minute drum solo to show their most spectacular moves.”5

  The dance styles began as elaborations of moves people had seen James Brown doing on TV. Zulu Nation DJ Jazzy Jay, who began as a b-boy says, “You could be dancing with your girl and spin away from her, hit the ground, come back up. It was all about ‘smooth.’ Like how James used to slide across the floor and the fancy footwork and all of that.” They even called it—a hard-won irony—”burning.”

  James Brown’s career had peaked in the late 1960s with the Black Power Movement. He performed “Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” without apology on national television, and his mere presence in town, it was said, prevented riots in racially tense Boston in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.

  But during the early 1970s, attitudes changed. Across the country, Black mayors took over in cities that had once burned, class gaps widened and Black radio shifted to the tastes of upwardly mobile listeners. Coleman Young became mayor of Motown, while Berry Gordy departed for Hollywood. James Brown’s career went into steep decline.

  Bronx-born hip-hop historian Davey D recalls, “If you listened to the Black radio station at the time, WBLS—Black-owned, Black-run, the station that everyone listened to—you did not hear James Brown. Not even at nighttime. So while James Brown was being tossed out, we were embracing him.”6 His music, dance and style now possessed outlaw appeal. At the climax of a Plaza Tunnel night, when DJ John Brown put on “Soul Power,” Hager says Black Spades would overrun the floor, hollering “Spade Power!” The firecracker energy being generated at the Plaza Tunnel gave Herc the standard to aim for with his own parties.

  The Man with the Master Plan

  At the same time, discos were shutting down and house parties were declining, partly because gangs like the Spades were making them unsafe. But the West Bronx had not suffered the same kind of devastation as the South Bronx. And all these youths needed somewhere to party. These reasons may explain why Sedgwick Avenue was ripe for a fresh new party scene.

  The crowds at the Campbells’ early Sedgwick parties were mainly high school students who were too young or too clean or living too far west to fall under the waning influence of the gangs. In those days, Herc would tell the weed-smokers to head around the block, and he’d even play slow jams. “Now and then a mom or pop might come in to see what’s going on,” says Herc.

  Cindy adds, “My father was always there. People knew him in the neighborhood and they respected him so we never had violence or anything like that. We didn’t have to hire security guards. We never searched people. When people came, they came out of respect. It was a recreation thing for them to meet people. A lot of people met their boyfriends or girlfriends there.”

  Buzz spread about the back-to-school party, and they found themselves throwing parties almost on a monthly basis at the rec room. “Herc actually took away a lot of house parties and basement parties,” says Cindy. “At those house parties, after a while, the parents would come in, flick on the lights and tell you, ‘You kids got to get out’ or ‘Too many people in here’ or ‘I don’t know who this one is’ and ‘Who’s this burning up my floor with the cigarettes?’ People didn’t want to go back to that anymore.”

  Herc’s reputation spread along the Bronx high-school circuit as well, after Cindy, through her role in student body government at Dodge High School, secured a successful boat cruise dance. By the summer of 1974, when Herc was playing regular parties to a loyal following, he decided to play a free party on the block. “And after the block party,” he says, “we couldn’t come back to the rec room.”

  Outdoors, he knew he was putting the sound system at risk, and that fights could potentially break out. “So when I come out there, I said, ‘Listen. The first discrepancy, I’m pulling the plug. Let’s get that straight right now. There’s kids out here, there’s grown folks out here and we’re gonna have a good time. So anybody start anything any disturbance or any discrepancy, any beef, I’m pulling the plug because I’m not gonna be here for the repercussions. All right?’ So they said, ‘All right, Herc, no problem.’ And I start playing for the older heads, and then I go on for the younger heads and I’ll go back and forth like that,” he says. “We broke daylight. I played to the next morning.”

  Herc wanted to summon the same kind of excitement he felt as a pickney down yard. Along with his immigrant friend Coke La Rock, he distinguished their crew from the disco DJs by translating the Kingstonian vibe of sound system DJs like Count Machuki, King Stitt, U-Roy and Big Youth for the Bronxites. Herc hooked up his mics to a Space Echo box, yard dance style. They set off their dances by giving shout-outs and dropping little rhymes. They developed their own slang. At an after-hours spot Herc spun at, a drunken regular greeted his friends with the call: “To my mellow! My mellow is in the house!” With lines like these, the two created larger-than-life personas.

  Herc carefully studied the dancers. “I was smoking cigarettes and I was waiting for the records to finish. And I noticed people was waiting for certain parts of the record,” he says. It was an insight as profound as Ruddy Redwood’s dub discovery. The moment when the dancers really got wild was in a song’s short instrumental break, when the band would drop out and the rhythm section would get elemental. Forget melody, chorus, songs—it was all about the groove, building it, keeping it going. Like a string theorist, Herc zeroed in on the fundamental vibrating loop at the heart of the record, the break.

  He started searching for songs by the sound of their break, songs that he would make into his signature tunes: the nonstop conga epics from The Incredible Bongo Band called “Apache” and “Bongo
Rock,” James Brown’s “live” version of “Give It Up Turn It Loose” from the Sex Machine album, Johnny Pate’s theme to Shaft in Africa, Dennis Coffey’s “Scorpio”—Black soul and white rock records with an uptempo, often Afro-Latinized backbeat.7 Then he soaked off the labels, Jamaican style. “My father said, ‘Hide the name of your records because that’s how you get your rep. That’s how you get your clientele.’ You don’t want the same people to have your same record down the block,” Herc says. Here was one source of hip-hop’s competitive ethic and beat-this aesthetic.

  In a technique he called “the Merry-Go-Round,” Herc began to work two copies of the same record, back-cueing a record to the beginning of the break as the other reached the end, extending a five-second breakdown into a five-minute loop of fury, a makeshift version excursion. Before long he had tossed most of the songs, focusing on the breaks alone. His sets drove the dancers from climax to climax on waves of churning drums. “And once they heard that, that was it, wasn’t no turning back,” Herc says. “They always wanted to hear breaks after breaks after breaks after breaks.”

  To accommodate larger crowds, Herc moved his parties further up Sedgwick Avenue into Cedar Park. He had seen construction workers hooking up power by tapping the lightposts, and so he started doing the same. “I had a big Mackintosh amp. That thing cost a lot of money and it pumped a lot of juice. It was 300 watts per channel. As the juice start coming, man, the lights start dimming. And the turntables, I had the Technics 1100A, the big ones, so it wouldn’t turn.” Finally they found a tool shed in the park. They would send a young boy through the stone-broken window to plug into enough juice for the sound system.

  The results shocked the borough, and brought in new audiences. Aaron O’Bryant, who would later become DJ AJ, was a marijuana dealer living near St. Mary’s Park. “Everyone was talking about this guy DJ Kool Herc. And I was really excited. I knew all the women was gonna be there. I was excited by Herc but I really wanted to see could I bag something!” he laughs. “I became a Kool Herc freak. Everywhere he played I was there.”

  A teen from Fox Street in the South Bronx named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Flash, also heard about Herc’s exploits and went up to Cedar Park to see it for himself. “I seen this big six-foot-plus guy with this incredible sound system, heavily guarded. People just enjoying themselves from like four years to forty. I’m like, wow! He looked sort of like this superhero on this podium playing this music that wasn’t being played on the radio. I liked what he was doing and what he was playing, and I wanted to do that, too.”

  The gangs were dissolving and Herc was popularizing a new hierarchy of cool. Turfs were still important but in a different way. Jazzy Jay says, “Instead of gangs, they started turning into little area crews where they would do a little bit of dirt. In every area, there would be a DJ crew or a breakdance crew. They would be like, ‘Okay, we all about our music and we love our music but you come in this area wrong and we all about kicking your ass.’ Competition fueled the whole thing.”

  Herc’s parties drew in the crews, gave them a chance to strut their stuff and make their names. He kept the peace by taking a live-and-let-live policy and skillfully working the mic. “Everybody had to make money, even the stick-up kids. The guy selling weed would come to me, ‘A-yo Herc, man, say I got weed.’ I’d say, ‘You know I can’t say you got weed!’ So I’d say it indirectly, ‘Yo, Johnny, you know I can’t say you got weed, right?’ He’d take the heat.”

  “Or if I know there’s a certain party up in there starting trouble, I never would say their name, I just say, ‘Yo kill it, cut the bullshit out. You’re my man, cut the dumb shit. You know and they know who I’m talking about. Okay? Alright.’ They’d be like ‘Oh shit, Herc gave me a little warning.’ I might be playing music but I’m no sucker.”

  The real action was in the dance ciphers, with the kids who had come for Herc’s “Merry-Go-Round,” and were becoming personalities in their own right. They were too excitable and had too much flavor to conform to the precision group steps of dances like The Hustle. They would simply jump in one after another to go off, take each other out, just “break” wild on each other. Herc called them break boys, b-boys for short.8

  There was Tricksy, Wallace Dee, the Amazing Bobo, Sau Sau, Charlie Rock, Norm Rockwell, Eldorado Mike, and Keith and Kevin, the Nigger Twins. They did dances like The Boyoing, where a b-boy sported a Turbans-like pom-pom topped hat, and stretched, wiggled, and shook back and forth to make the ball go “boyoing.” “It was called that because that’s basically what they see,” says Jazzy Jay, “just bounce all over the place, hit the ground, go down. It wasn’t like a lot of the acrobatics. It was more from style and finesse. You could do a whole routine standing up before you even hit the ground.”

  “Another kid uptown called it the cork-and-screw,” says Jeffrey “DOZE” Green, a Rock Steady Crew member and second-generation b-boy who first saw The Boyoing in the North Bronx in 1975. “It’s ‘cause they used to spin down, pop up, do a split and then go whoop! Come up, and then go down again into a split into a few baby-rocks into a little baby freeze. People were spinning on their butts then, too.”

  “Tricksy had a huge afro,” says Cindy. “And he had that soft hair because his hair grew. And he did a move where he would jump up and his afro would start to bounce also. There was also a move called the Frankenstein move, where he’d start moving like Frankenstein and his afro would start bouncing. It was like a show, you know?”

  Herc assembled his own clique of DJs, dancers and rappers, and dubbed them the Herculords: Coke La Rock, DJ Timmy Tim with Little Tiny Feet, DJ Clark Kent the Rock Machine, the Imperial JC, Blackjack, LeBrew, Pebblee Poo, Sweet and Sour, Prince, and Whiz Kid. He refused to call them a crew. “That name ‘crew’ took the place of gang. When they said, ‘crew’, we knew it was a gang. So it was never the Herculord crew. That’s what people start calling us. But we never had on our flier saying ‘The Herculord crew.’ It was billed with the sound system we called the Herculoids.”

  After reinvesting his money in a few different sound system sets, Herc was ready to take it to the next level. By 1975, he was doing all-ages dances at the Webster Avenue P.A.L. But he was turning twenty, and didn’t only want the kiddie crowd anymore. He found a club called the Twilight Zone on Jerome Avenue near Tremont, and started hosting parties there with his clique and his sound system. He says he screened Muhammad Ali videos until they said, “Yo Herc, stop showing them Ali fights, you souping them motherfuckers up!”

  At a hot spot called the Hevalo, he passed out flyers for his Twilight Zone shows until he was chased out. One day, he vowed, I’ll play this spot. On a stormy night, Herc emptied the Hevalo by playing a party at the Zone. “Rain,” he says, “was a good sign for me.” The Hevalo owner quickly called him up to make a deal. Soon, Herc was playing there and at another club called the Executive Playhouse for a full-fledged adult crowd.

  They came to hear Herc rap: “You never heard it like this before, and you’re back for more and more and more of this here rock-ness. ‘Cause you see, we rock with the rockers, we jam with the jammers, we party with the partyers. Young lady don’t hurt nobody. It ain’t no fun till we all get some. Don’t hurt nobody, young lady!”

  Coke and another crew member named Dickey let the crowds know: “There’s no story can’t be told, there’s no horse can’t be rode, a no bull can’t be stopped and ain’t a disco we can’t rock. Herc! Herc! Who’s the man with a master plan from the land of Gracie Grace? Herc Herc!”

  By 1976, he was the number-one draw in the Bronx. No more roach killers. DJ Kool Herc dressed the role, sporting fabulous Lee or AJ Lester suits. All the high rollers, bank robbers, and hustlers from Harlem were coming up to see him. He says, “The reputation was, ‘Who is making money up in the Bronx? Kool Herc and the guy Coke La Rock with the music.’ ”

  Two Sevens Redub

  1977 started off very well for Herc. But as it would be everywhere, trouble was ahead.<
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  It was not, as many well-meaning journalists and academics would later erroneously write, that the block party or sound system showdown had replaced the rumble or the riot. That notion was as misguided as Robert Moses’s contention that nothing good could ever again come from the Bronx. The truth was, in fact, much less dramatic and much more profound. In the Bronx’s new hierarchy of cool, the man with the records had replaced the man with the colors. Violence did not suddenly end; how could it? But an enormous amount of creative energy was now ready to be released from the bottom of American society, and the staggering implications of this moment eventually would echo around the world.

  By 1977, Herc and his competitors had divided the Bronx into a new kind of grid. In the South Bronx from 138th to 163rd streets, where the Bachelors, the Savage Nomads, the Savage Skulls and the Ghetto Brothers had once run, Grandmaster Flash, backed by the local Casanova Crew, was emerging as the area celebrity. In the Southeast, formerly the territory of the Black Spades, P.O.W.E.R. and the Javelins, Afrika Bambaataa held sway with his Zulu Nation. In the north, there was DJ Breakout and DJ Baron. And the West Bronx neighborhood and the East Bronx nightclubs were still Herc’s. Herc remained the undisputed king of the borough by virtue of his records, his loyal crowd, and his sound system.

  “It was ridiculous. He was god,” says Zulu Nation DJ Jazzy Jay. At a legendary Webster P.A.L. contest, Herc drowned out Bambaataa’s system with little effort. “Whenever Kool Herc played outside, shit was loud and crystal clean. When we’d play outside, we’d be hooking up a whole bunch of little wires, a bunch of four or five amps and—errnt! Zzzzt! Shit would be blowing up.” And every time Grandmaster Flash came to a Herc party, Flash chuckles, “Herc always used to embarrass me.”