Raising Hell Read online

  Darryl didn’t really like anyone coming into his house, but months after they met, he invited Joe in and led him to his set of equipment in the basement.

  “Oh, shit!” Joe said. “You got turntables and records?”

  “Yeah, I’m Grandmaster Get High.”

  “That’s cool. I got turntables too. I perform as ‘the son of Kurtis Blow,’ DJ Run.”

  DJ Run was a little-known performer—not in the big leagues at all—but D remembered seeing Run’s name on one or two flyers. “Really?”

  “Yeah, I get onstage with Kurtis and play the record while he raps. And I call him out. I’ll bring a tape for you.”

  “That’s cool.”

  Darryl turned his equipment on and started mixing two copies of Captain Sky’s “Super Sperm.” As Joe watched with amazement, Darryl made the Sky record go from singing “soup-a-sperm” to chanting “soup-soup-soup-soup.” Between sips on his quart of beer, D pulled out other break-beat albums: the opening beat on the Monkees’ eleven-year-old “Mary Mary,” the fiery horn blast on John Davis and the Monster Orchestra’s disco song “I Can’t Stop,” the Incredible Bongo Band’s salsa-styled “Apache,” and Bob James’s jazzy, dreamlike remake of a Paul Simon song, “Take Me to the Mardi Gras.” Soon Joe started asking questions, so Darryl taught him how to quick-mix, backspin, and cue the record up.

  Chapter 2

  Son of Kurt

  Joe went home excited about what D had taught him. He could apply these lessons to his own career with his older brother Russell’s friend Kurtis Blow. Until now, his home life had been wonderful, filled with love, gifts, and middle-class comfort. If he wanted something, he had only to ask his parents. He never went without, and never had money problems.

  Born in November 1964, Joe first got into music at around the age of ten after hearing WBLS on the radio. “I got interested in where is the best radio station.” said Joe. “How do I do it? Give me a radio.” At home, an adult taught him to turn the radio on, “put it on FM, and turn the dial a little bit and get to BLS. There it was. It was extremely easy.” Since then, he’d tried to express himself through music, dubbing himself “DJ Joe,” taping songs from the radio, attending block parties where residents played guitars and drums, and banging away on a drum set his father bought and installed in the attic (with an older next-door neighbor named Spuddy giving him lessons).

  His father, Daniel, supported Joe’s dream. An attendance supervisor for New York City’s Public School District 29, and professor of black history at Pace University by night, his father had spent the second half of the 1960s as part of the civil rights movement. Now in the late 1970s Joe saw his father reading aloud from Hamlet, espousing the value of a college degree and traditional nine-to-five establishment jobs, and reciting his own politically charged poetry. Joe’s mother, Evelyn, also supported Joe’s new hobby of playing drums and writing song lyrics. A slim, light-skinned artist with degrees in sociology and psychology from Howard University (where she had met Joe’s father), Evelyn worked as a recreation director for the city’s Parks Department. She was easygoing and sophisticated, and had always been willing to listen to Joe’s nonstop chatter. But in 1978, her marriage to Daniel was disintegrating. “That messed little Joey up ’cause he was close to his mother,” said one of Joe’s close friends, who spoke on condition of anonymity (since this matter has never really been discussed in the media). So Joe retreated to his room at night to cradle his radio in the dark, and to tell himself, “I’m in control.”

  Once he heard this new park jam music at a block party, and saw Russell immerse himself in this exciting new scene, Joe wanted to be part of it too.

  Russell (born 1957) shared Joe’s bedroom on the second floor of their Queens home. Russell had attended an integrated elementary school instead of the all-black one and a mostly white junior high, and had played baseball at August Martin High. But he surprised everyone by joining the fearsome Seven Immortals street gang, partly so he could earn money to buy flashy clothes by selling marijuana. And though he left the gang at age sixteen, after their nemeses, the Seven Crowns, killed one member and left his colors on a lamppost in the park, Russell kept selling weed on the corner of 205th and Hollis Avenue, near a park where children played basketball.

  Their father tried to get Russell a job at a hot dog store in Manhattan’s West Village, but Russell quit this job and instead chopped up coca-leaf incense, claiming it was foil-wrapped blow. Russell was not above lying to make some money. In his lizard-skin shoes, sharkskin pants, and Stetson hats, Russell both sold and used drugs. He kept twenty nickel bags in bushes in front of the house, spent nights in fancy nightclubs, ignored his parents’ rules, and didn’t seem to care about anyone’s feelings but his own.

  By his senior year in high school, spring of 1975, Russell was taking LSD every Friday, running down Jamaica Avenue, and on one occasion had shoved into people and said Mickey Mouse was after him. He started attending City College of New York in Harlem in the fall of 1975. He was supposed to be studying to become a sociology teacher, but was more interested in smoking angel dust, wasting days in the student lounge and going to Harlem’s hottest clubs each night.

  Then during the autumn of 1977, everything changed. Russell came home excited about a party he had attended in the Harlem nightclub Charles’ Gallery. He’d seen a DJ mix two copies of P-Funk’s single “Flashlight,” and a young guy named Eddie Cheeba, holding a microphone, tell a crowd of blacks and Puerto Ricans, “Somebody, anybody, everybody scream!” He smelled money in this new music. He stopped selling weed, and enlisted schoolmates Rudy Toppin and Curtis Walker (already rapping as Kool DJ Kurt Walker) to help him throw parties. He barked orders, printed thousands of flyers and stickers, rented halls and charged admission, and changed Curt’s stage name to the Eddie Cheeba– like Kurtis Blow (which Walker, an affable communications major, didn’t initially like). Soon Russell’s flyers claimed the Harlem-bred Walker was really “Queens’ #1 rapper.”

  Russell came home one night to complain that no one had come to one of his events and he had lost all his money. Their dad urged him to treat this as a lesson and return his focus to school, but their mom handed Russell $2,000 in $100 bills she kept in her “personal savings” and encouraged Russell to continue. Russell kept throwing parties and littering the city with thousands of flyers headlined “Rush Productions in Association with Rudy Toppin and Kurtis Blow.” Once his minor success in Manhattan threatened to eat into other promoters’ profits, however, his competitors started telling people, “Hey, Russell’s gay!” Said Russell’s friend Dave Sims: “The partying community was very tight and a rumor like that could hurt a person.” Sims added: “Suddenly it was, ‘Is there something else about this guy?’ But no matter how hard they tried, Russell shot past them. Russell had that drive.”

  In late 1977, only two or three months into his new career as a party promoter, Russell started concentrating on Queens. The uncorroborated rumor had made its way to Hollis, but he stood in front of crowds at a block party, holding a microphone, welcoming his guests, and inspiring Joe to want to become part of Russell’s events. Joe was also able to see more of Russell’s main draw, Kurtis Blow, who had done a few things in the street but also encouraged Joe to stay in school. Other rappers who performed with Kurtis said Kurtis mimicked rappers from the Bronx (even if they were right onstage with him), but Joe didn’t care. At local parties, Joe watched Kurt come onstage with his neat Afro, fly clothes, and jewelry. Kurt played MFSB’s string-heavy Love Is the Message on his turntables, and rapped into a microphone: “When Kurtis Blow is on the go, he’s gonna make you hate your radio,” he’d say. “When Kurtis Blow is ready to rock, he’s gonna make you tick just like a clock.” He’d rhyme until the MFSB record was ending, then play it from the beginning on a second turntable, and speak some more. In Kurtis, Joe saw a mentor, and a gateway into this new music and Russell’s circle of performers.

  Joe had decided to pattern his own embryonic lyric
s after Kurt’s. And when Kurt slept over in their second-floor bedroom after a show, Joe would let Kurt hear his newest rhymes. Kurt listened, and offered tips and suggestions, but couldn’t induct him into the act. Only Russell could do that.

  And Russell was busy trying to get audiences to view Kurtis with the same respect they accorded groups from the Bronx. Russell tried to pair Kurt with Grandmaster Flash, approaching the Bronx-based DJ (born Joseph Saddler) after a show to ask if he’d play Queens.

  Flash had asked, “Queens? Who’d want to hear me in Queens?”

  Russell said he had a club out there. “I want you to play with my boy.”

  For this party, which Russell hired Flash to perform at, Flash arrived at the nearby club Fantasia one evening in a flashy Lincoln Continental (really, a cab).

  Inside, the rail-thin DJ stood near the turntables he’d be using to play for Russell’s audience, and watched a Queens-based disc jockey—the opening act that night—perform a few Flash-like turntable maneuvers. After the show, Flash became a fixture at Russell’s events and let Kurt join some of his famed Furious Five MCs onstage. Joe wanted to be part of the act but couldn’t persuade Russell to let him perform. He kept auditioning new rhymes for Kurt and volunteering to spend weekends putting stickers and flyers on walls, but Russell wouldn’t give him a chance.

  But then Russell changed his mind. Kurt was doing two shows a night, and Russell wanted to change his image, make him more like popular DJ Hollywood. Kurt approached Joe one day and asked, “Joey, do you want to come spin?” Joe knew he would be a novelty act, but didn’t care. “ ’Cause there was a son of Hollywood, DJ Smalls. I’m young, I’m thinking, ‘This is the coolest thing ever.’”

  Before his first show in early 1978, Joe was in his backyard with his dad. Joe heard Russell and his promoting partner, Rudy, in the kitchen in his home, discussing how to bill Joe on the flyer. Joe heard Rudy say, “DJ Run.”

  Joe ran to the kitchen. “Where’d you get that from? That name! Where that come from?” For Joe, it was as dramatic as Flash.

  Rudy said someone already had the name.

  “That’s got to be a lie, that can’t be true, anyway it doesn’t matter, I got more juice, I’m with Kurtis…. I got it, that’s my name.”

  Alone in his room that night, Joe sat in bed with his radio playing and thought, “DJ Run. I get to have that?” He thought people would bug when they heard it. They’d say, “From this DJ Run it sounds like you’re very fast on the turntables or something.”

  In early 1978, Joe accompanied Russell and Kurt to a rented hall in the Hotel Diplomat in Times Square. He saw crowds waiting to see Kurt, Flash, and “Kurtis Blow’s Disco Son—DJ Run.” Inside, Flash said he would handle the mixing. Kurt performed a few rhymes, then passed Joe the mike. With Russell watching, Joe yelled, “I’m DJ Run, son of a gun, always play music and has big fun. Not that old but that’s all right. Make other emcees bite all night.”

  As winter turned to spring in 1978, Russell kept including Joe’s stage name, “DJ Run, Son of Kurtis Blow,” on flyers. And Joe felt he’d arrived. He was only in eighth grade but had people from every borough coming to see him perform. And he was making money, $35 a show. “So I was big-time as a kid. I was a huge star in my mind.” In Hollis, before he meet Darryl, Joe felt other kids were acting jealous. They hurled insults when they saw Joe on Hollis Avenue. When Joe dribbled his basketball in 205th Street Park—the center of social life in the neighborhood—kids ran up and kicked his ball down the street. He couldn’t even walk the eight blocks to Darryl’s yard, friends recalled, without people taunting him. “He was a thin little kid with long hair looking like a girl,” one witness felt. “They used to say, ‘Yo, your brother’s a homo.’” But Joe ignored them. He took the side streets to reach Darryl’s section of Hollis, and told himself that one day he’d show them all.

  Chapter 3

  Disco Sucks

  During the summer of 1978, D (still calling himself Grandmaster Get High) would leave his home at about 10:30 every morning to join basketball games in Jamaica Park, in the concrete courtyard behind Junior High School 192, or in the park on 205th. Run usually joined him out there for games until 8:00 p.m. At that point, Darryl would head home for a shower and change of clothes, then quickly return to the park because people usually brought their turntables and records outside to throw a jam.

  Usually Darryl watched Solo Sounds, a Hollis crew led by young, light-skinned DJ and guitarist Davy DMX (David Reeves). “He had just as many records as Bambaataa did,” said Darryl. “ ’Cause he was rolling with the Bronx and Manhattan. He was current. He was up to date.” But Davy couldn’t cut loose and play the break beats he loved. “Queens wasn’t really into hard-core hip-hop like up in the Bronx,” said DJ Finesse, an associate of the Hollis Crew who attended Davy DMX’s parties in the park. “Queens was bourgeois, on that R&B tip.” Hollis residents wanted to hear the songs popular radio DJ Frankie Crocker played on WBLS, but Davy and his friends eventually reached for break-beat albums and handed microphones to aspiring neighborhood MCs. Some nights Darryl would see his friend Butter up near the turntables, saying a few rhymes.

  September 1978 arrived, and with it, cooler temperatures, brown leaves on trees, and a new schedule. Darryl had to take two buses and three trains to reach Brother Rice, the only Catholic high school in Harlem. His parents thought it was a haven from a violent public school system, but Darryl arrived with a fresh shave, shined shoes, and formal attire to see older Harlem kids bringing guns to school, discussing drug deals, and griping about the cost of repairs to their BMWs. No one sold drugs in the school, but many students that year used them. Darryl fell in with a group that drank malt liquor and played all the latest jam tapes by Grand Wizard Theodore, Luv Bug Starski, and Afrika Bambaataa. And his exposure to this raw form of park music changed his opinion of the tapes Run brought to his house every Sunday afternoon. Run’s tapes (Run and Kurtis Blow in concert) were enjoyable, but struck Darryl as softer than the ones he heard at Rice.

  Once Run’s latest tape ended, Darryl would turn his equipment on and start mixing break beats that reflected what he felt this music was really about. Not the soft disco sound of Kurt, Russell, and Run.

  Run kept sharing stages with Kurtis Blow and playing the nearby nightclub Fantasia. Run—still a little kid—stood by Kurt’s turntables onstage, facing two hundred or so people and playing Kurt’s beloved disco breaks. He’d hear a gunshot, see the audience scatter, and calmly step to the side of the stage to avoid being shot. But after a show one night, he, Russell, and Kurt left the club and encountered armed robbers. One fired a gun and they ran. Russell slid under one car with the night’s receipts while Kurt and Run hid under another. For a few tense moments they held their breath and watched gunmen’s sneakers run past. Later that night, Russell said no more shows at Fantasia.

  For his fourteenth birthday in November 1978, Run installed his own set of turntables in his attic. He told people he had saved money to buy them, but most people felt they were another gift from his educated, middle-class parents. Whatever the case, “They were called Quantas,” said Run. “I picked them out myself.” They weren’t name brand like Technics or Pioneer, but “they were good,” he added.

  Darryl agreed, so he carried one of his turntables and his mixer to the pawnshop. He received $15, spent it on weed, and looked forward to practicing in Run’s attic. But Run didn’t let him get on the turntables. Instead, he’d pass D a microphone and say, “Start rapping. Say a rhyme.”

  With a heavy sigh, D performed lighthearted raps and listened to Run tell their friends, “Yo, get D a beer. Keep going, keep going.”

  As time passed, D came to enjoy rapping more than spinning records. As a rapper, he could tell people—not show them—how great he was. He changed his nickname to “Easy D” and started writing rhymes. And in the spring of 1979, after hearing a jam tape by the Funky Four Plus One More—a female member named Sha Rock saying rhymes with an echo cha
mber—D told himself, “This is what I want to be.”

  That thunderous echo was on his mind in English class, when the teacher let students spend the last five minutes of each period on creative writing. D started filling his black-and-white composition notebook with lyrics about fistfights, Puma sneakers, British Walker brand shoes, angel dust (something he smoked for three weeks, then gave up), Olde English, Hollis, and rocking the mike.

  He wrote an entire song in one sitting, and stopped whatever he was doing to write another if inspiration struck. Soon he had filled seven notebooks. “In school, on the train, on the bus; I was always writing rhymes,” he remembered. One day his English teacher read a few and asked, “What is this? Where’s this stuff coming from?”

  With a shrug, the laid-back student said, “I’m an MC.”

  Chapter 4

  Party Time

  One afternoon in the summer of 1979, Run was out in Hollis hanging posters for a Rush party. A bespectacled thirtyish black man with an Afro came over to ask about Rush Productions. His name was Robert “Rocky” Ford, and he worked for Billboard. He was also writing a story about break beats. Run accepted his business card, handed it to Russell at home, and within days saw Russell hanging with Ford, who lived in nearby St. Albans, Queens.

  Russell and Ford were looking to create a rap record, and Ford wanted to record DJ Hollywood, a jolly disco-style DJ who stole the show during intermissions at concerts by major black music acts like the Ohio Players and Kool and the Gang. Since he couldn’t get Hollywood, Ford then wanted to record the Hollywood-like Eddie Cheeba. As Russell and Ford went back and forth about whom to record— Russell pushing for Kurtis Blow—Run kept joining Kurt onstage in local nightclubs. One night D came by his house to hang. Run had no time to stop and talk, since a long limousine was waiting out front. He and Kurt ran past D, leaped into the car, and took off.