If you managed to get in the club with Russell, and also managed to stay close to him, you gained entry, not simply to a disco but to a network of strange relationships. At that time there was a lot of racial/cultural segregation in New York music circles, where Euro disco, funk, punk, and glitzy R&B all existed in separate worlds. Through his record promotion gig, and his own careerism and curiosity, Russell sampled them all. Sure, he hit the hip-hop spots in the South Bronx, Harlem, and Queens, but he also cultivated relationships at punk rock and new wave clubs like Hurrah’s and the Peppermint Lounge, as well as black upscale Midtown hangouts like Leviticus and Othello’s.
While Russell and I were close, the budding mogul wasn’t my only entry to the world of hip-hop. There were players on the scene then, mostly people who either couldn’t make the leap as hip-hop reached the next level, or dropped out too soon. I went to clubs and concerts in Queens, the Bronx, and Harlem that were still called “discos,” but which we’d now identify as “hip-hop.”
Wherever I ventured in those pioneering days, I had the same feeling over and over. There was a mix of fear and freedom at the early rap shows that made me feel totally alive, as if I could die at any moment or experience a rush of joyous adrenaline. And since I’m still alive, despite being present at several shootings and more fistfights than I could count, it worked out for me. That heady mix of violence and exhilaration followed me from parties at Harlem nightclubs to arena shows at Madison Square Garden. For me rap shows walked on the edge of chaos, and could be tipped over and back several times a night.
The first time I saw hip-hop music performed before thousands of people was at the City College of New York gym in 1978. (About ten years later it was the site of a fatal stampede at a Puff Daddy- promoted event.) The show was billed as an R&B concert with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes (minus Teddy Pendergrass), an unheralded funk band named Brainstorm, and Philly’s teenaged disco-soul singer Evelyn “Champagne” King. But set up on the far right side of the stage were two turntables where D. J. Hollywood and Lovebug Starski held forth between sets.
With Starski cutting on the ones and twos, Hollywood, a heavy-set young man with oodles of charisma and a booming low tenor voice, rhymed over beats like Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Brazilian Rhyme.” It was my first time hearing “throw your hands in the air and wave ’em like you just don’t care,” and other, then fresh, now cliché party phrases. The young uptown crowd knew every bit of Hollywood’s show, chanting along and responding to him as if he was yanking them by their gold chains. Must have been two thousand young people enthralled with these beats and his rhymes in a way none of the R&B stars could match.
If that was the only revelation of my first R&B versus rap moment, it would have been memorable. But something else was going on. Three times during that evening, fights broke out. I was sitting in the bleachers stage left. Below me on the gym floor were hundreds of metal chairs. Several times people down on the gym floor would shout, blows would be hurled, and chairs would go flying. In a prescient echo of the later CCNY tragedy, pandemonium would reign. Then the violence would subside, and the fight/robbery would end (for the moment), and everyone would return to their seats, and Hollywood, undaunted and surely used to such drama, would rock the mike again.
This will to party, even in the face of obvious danger, was something I’d witness over and over in those early shows. The next big hip-hop event I attended was the Sugarhill Convention held at the Harlem Armory. It was 1981, and rap records were becoming the hottest items uptown. On the bill were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Treacherous Three, and several other uptown icons. I was there with two hip-hop tourists—Guy Trebay, a columnist for the Village Voice (where I was finally freelancing), and a very comely, light-skinned single lady I’ll call Alma, who worked in the Voice’s art department.
The stage was on the floor of the cavernous armory, with most attendees standing on the floor in front of the stage. After my CCNY experience there was no way I was gonna be on that floor. So I guided Guy and Alma up to a balcony that overlooked the floor. From there we could see hundreds of young people milling about, flirting and dancing the Patty Duke along with several other then popular dances. As the music flowed, we could look down and see little clumps of people, mostly boys, move through the crowd, bumping into people and causing little testosterone-fueled dustups. Then, like a tossed rock rippling through a pond, the crowd would part, as weapons were drawn. Two or three people would scrap. The battle would subside. The music played. After this happened two or three times, Alma praised my good judgment for sitting us upstairs.
Down below, the scrapping escalated. A gun was pulled. A shot was fired. The crowd scattered, and fear infected everyone like a dope beat. This was a time before crack, so gunplay like this still wasn’t commonplace. I grabbed Alma’s hand and Alma grabbed Guy’s. Somehow we moved through the crowd, down a long staircase, and out into the street without stumbling, or being stomped or robbed. I was really worried about Guy, a tall, whiter-than-white man in glasses. He would be an easy target in the chaos, but he was cool and collected, and we made it out of there safely. The theme remained the same throughout the eighties: energetic crowd, cutting-edge music, random violence.
I remember feeling the same restlessness, palpable anger, and intense enthusiasm at every show I attended during the eighties. But I must admit that feeling that something could jump off at any moment was actually part of the attraction. This wasn’t “rap violence,” as the tabloids labeled it. Just because something happened in a club or concert hall didn’t make it any different from the violence that was escalating in the streets.
The same stick-up kids and gangsta wannabes who were squeezing off in the streets outside the concert halls brought that attitude inside. These hip-hop gigs were the perfect cover. In the darkness of a club or arena, with innocent eyes peering toward the stage, the criminal-minded could run up on a victim unseen and, because of the music, unheard. This was especially true if the venue had a standing-room-only section or wide aisles between the chairs on the arena floor.
As a rule I never took floor seats at rap shows. I’d sit on the sides or in the mezzanine, so I could see the stage better. If forced to be in the standing sections, I’d spend a lot of the show watching my back, just in case a bum’s rush was imminent. By the time hip-hop was playing arenas, Russell’s Rush Management was booking most of the shows, so I went to a great many of them, feeling that same sense of exhilaration and dread on many nights.
Truth be told, I actually miss that feeling. So many of the major rap shows I’ve been to in the twenty-first century feel like boxing exhibitions, not real fights. You never feel like you’re gonna see anything new, or that anyone in the crowd is risking anything, and I’m including the fans. The crowds can be as complacent as the music, meaning that if they receive a crappy show (and they often do), they take it passively, and then head home quietly.
At the end of 1980 I was called in by Record World magazine, then Billboard’s chief competition, for a job interview. The work I’d done in college at Billboard had not gone unnoticed. They were looking to hire a new black music editor, and my experience in trade reporting made me the prime candidate. In January 1981, I started the first and, subsequently, only nine-to-five job of my life. Celebrating his friend’s ascendance, Russell threw me a congratulatory party at, of all places, the buppie disco Leviticus. The black-owned disco that had dissed (and would continue to dis) younger people throughout the eighties was where Russell introduced me to the record business establishment. I remember my mother sipping a piña colada that night, proud to see her “shining black prince” making the name Nelson George mean something in the world.
At Record World I began integrating coverage of hip-hop culture into stories on the Gap Band, Shalamar, etc. From that platform I began writing better paying freelance pieces, including my first for the Village Voice—two short reviews of rap 12-inch singles, one by Lovebug Starski on Harlem World Recor
ds, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Great Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” For Record World I worked on a very comprehensive Sugar Hill Records advertorial that in its gate-fold section printed every word of the Sugarhill Gang’s thirteen-minute “Rapper’s Delight.”
I’ve been credited a few places for helping to invent hip-hop journalism. My only goal back then was, in fact, the opposite—to weave hip-hop in with the other, more established black music styles I was covering. At that time this struck quite a few people as radical. Many saw hip-hop as a disreputable break from the traditions of the past, when it was really just an evolution that was more connected to black music’s traditions than they could see. The dress and language of the day scared folks off. So did the fact that most MCs, and even many of their early producers, couldn’t play any traditional instruments. Yet the young people who created hip-hop actually loved the traditions. They just found their own way of honoring them.
One of my most vivid memories of that period, one that illustrates my point perfectly, comes from Madison Square Garden in ’82. In one of the oddest concert lineups in history, Kurtis Blow opened for the Commodores and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Marley, though already a headline act in the United States, took the gig in an attempt to reach out to African Americans who hadn’t been as into reggae as whites.
I helped Davey D carry some of his equipment onstage, and then looked out at the weird mix of Rastafarians, buppies, and pop music fans who filled the Garden. This was as culturally diverse a crowd as you could imagine, and Blow rocked them. The Rastas responded to Blow like he was U-Roy or another reggae “toasting” DJ. The Commodores’ crowd dug the R&B beats and enjoyed “throwing their hands in the air and waving” like they just didn’t care.
While both the Rastas and the R&B folk accepted Kurtis Blow, this kind of musical fellowship didn’t extend at all to the headliners. After a typically soulful Marley set (I was honored to have seen the Wailers three times before this), most of Bob’s crowd got up and left when Lionel Richie began tinkling on the ivories to play “Still” and “Three Times a Lady.” The gap between crossover black pop and reggae back then was an ocean, but a hip-hop DJ and MC easily crossed that water.
The success of Blow, Run-D.M.C., and the growing visibility of hip-hop would alter the direction of everyone in our circle of friends. It put Russell on a hedonistic path he’d stay on, nonstop, for another decade. Our good buddy and former Def Jam executive Bill Stephney used to call him “Spuds MacKenzie,” after the bull terrier who became the party animal symbol of Bud Lite. Already a creature of the night from his life as a record promoter, Russell became the man who either produced or released the records played by the club jocks, emerging as a significant figure in New York nightlife, a role he fulfilled with gusto.
Hip-hop’s emergence changed my career direction as well. First at Record World, and then at Billboard magazine, I became a middle-man between the established world of rhythm and blues and the still relatively underground world of rap music. I was writing about the Fat Boys and Tommy Boy Records alongside major label releases and records by the likes of Jermaine Jackson and Patti La-Belle. There wasn’t yet a media infrastructure to support this culture. So it was me and a few other young journalists who, while not necessarily crusading for hip-hop, worked to normalize it for the reluctant old heads in the record industry and the media. Young record buyers didn’t need us necessarily, since they were finding (and defining) what a hot rap record was quite nicely on their own.
In 1985, I wrote a long profile of Russell for the Village Voice. Rush Management, at that moment, represented most of the biggest names in rap, and promoted tours with the rest of them. In a little two-room office on Broadway in the Twenties, Russell and his small staff had business relationships with everyone who mattered in the rap game at that time. The piece, which closely followed a Wall Street Journal article that labeled him “the mogul of rap,” helped project Russell as a personality to the Voice’s multiracial, music-savvy readership. It was another red flag for mainstream media that rap in general, and Russell in particular, was a story worth covering.
It was the first of many large pieces I’d write for the Voice, which became my literary home during the amazing eighties. The Russell profile, in my mind, was the beginning of a new era for both of us. We were no longer young guys desperately trying to get into the mix. We had kinda arrived. People knew we had something to offer. We weren’t proven yet, but we were on people’s radar screen. Which meant, to me, that it was time to get the hell out of Queens.
BLACK HOLLYWOOD
Although I am a Brooklyn boy through and through, many of my most important personal relationships and lucrative professional achievements occurred in Los Angeles, California. I’ve spent more time in the city of lost angels than in any place other than New York. It’s where I learned the joys of nasty hotel sex. It’s where I’ve made the largest sums of money. Even my most commercially successful novel, One Woman Short, was set out there. I know parts of LA better than I do areas in Brooklyn, which is strange, since I never learned to drive, but if driven somewhere, I rarely forget how I got there.
My first trip west was in 1981 to attend the Black Music Association conference at the Century City Hotel. On the way in from LAX, I got sick in the taxi, which happened on my first five trips to California (including on a journey to San Francisco to interview Marvin Gaye). My sinuses had been finicky since I was seven. I’d regularly weathered migraine headaches when there were radical temperature changes or on days of high pollen.
But I’d never felt worse than in the taxi that day. My head hurt. I felt nauseous. Between my first transcontinental plane trip and LA’s smoggy air, I was wasted. After checking in I had to lie down with a wet cloth on my forehead. Not a great intro to Cali.
When I finally got myself together, I ventured down to the lobby, and couldn’t help but marvel at the number of scantily clad women lounging around, sometimes alone, but usually in groups of twos and threes. In teased hair, pumps, and extreme eighties makeup, they watched me as intently as I eyed them. Some were hookers. A bunch were groupies, hoping to hook up with an R&B star. A few were actually well-trained singers trying to attract the attention of a producer or record exec. These distinctions were lost on me at first. It just looked like the sexy California dream to me.
Pumped up on antihistamines and determined to overcome jet lag, I shared a taxi to Hollywood with my Queens roommate Rocky Ford, and went to a press party at Yamashiro’s, a Japanese restaurant with a commanding view of LA. It was my first vision of the city at night, with its thousands of twinkling stars spread out as far as the eye could see. I downed free sushi and chatted with radio DJs, record executives, and wannabe stars. I ran into a friend from New York, Randy Muller, who produced hits for Brass Construction and Skky. Along with Rocky and Randy, I walked down the hill from Yamashiro’s to Hollywood Boulevard. It was my first time on this legendary street, and it didn’t disappoint.
Cars jammed the street, cruising slowly in a California ritual, many with their tops down. And car after passing car was blasting Rick James’s “Give It to Me Baby.” Where in New York disco and hip-hop flowed from ghetto blasters, in Cali souped-up sound systems filled the night air with punk funk. Girls in halter tops tossed their phone numbers to guys in passing sports cars. It felt like a scene from an urban version of American Graffiti, where black and Chicano kids had replaced their white counterparts, and lowriders were the car to have.
It felt right that my first taste of LA nightlife had a Motown soundtrack. Ten years after its move from Detroit to the West Coast, the black pop culture of Tinseltown was still very defined by its presence. The Jacksons, the Gordys, other offspring of the Motown universe, and their friends constituted a kind of black showbiz royalty. If you went to a club or a concert out there, it was the Motowners who got the best seats and had the most juice.
By moving to LA, Motown had shifted the nexus of mai
nstream black entertainment out there, and inspired many local initiators (Dick Griffey’s SOLAR Records, Lonnie Simmons’s Total Experience). The Motown model of success was the template. At Sunset off Vine was the Motown Building, perhaps the only large structure in the city that carried the name of a black-owned business. One long block away on Gower was Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’n Waffles, a black institution, where anybody and everybody in black pop culture came through for the house specialty of four chicken wings and two waffles.
Though I couldn’t drive, and hated paying LA’s inflated taxi fees, I’d drag my ass over to Roscoe’s on every trip I made to Cali during my days as a music journalist. I’d set up back-to-back meetings there, interview folks, and then linger around to see who’d run through. A long afternoon at Roscoe’s would fill up my Billboard column for at least two weeks.
While the cream of the city’s black middle class lived in Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Ladera Heights, the growing black Hollywood community favored predictable white enclaves like Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Brentwood, and San Fernando Valley towns like Encino, where the Jackson clan was based.
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