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By Troy L. Smith Winter of 2005
Bedford Stuyvasent section of Brooklyn. I went to John Dewey H.S. I always like to point out early in my serious interviews that my dad was best friends with Max Roach who’s also my godfather. O.k. the jazz drummer! Right, he was one of the architects of Bee bop. So my dad was a big part of that scene coming up, and that had a big effect on me because it was played and discussed often as I grew up. What type of effect, did
you also think about playing an instrument? No, well maybe when I was really young I thought about playing drums for a short while, but I had extremely intelligent black men around me all the time. That would include my dad and his friends he grew up with, and that was right here in Brooklyn, right in the middle of the Bee Bop scene. They continuously discussed what was going on with black people and politics around the world. They were aware and attuned to everything happening with us as a people. Culturally they were sharpening the cutting edge in jazz like we were in hip hop but they didn’t have the ability to tell their story, nor make videos, movies or write those books to put the right faces in the right places. So did Miles Davies,
Coltrane, Bird or any of those guys also come around the house as well? Miles use to come around
before I was born. Thelonius Monk was a good friend of my dad as was
Randy Weston. Willie Jones, a My dad marched on Washington for Kings famous speech and he was at the Audubon when Malcolm X was shot and killed. My father is 83 now with various health issues, but thank God he is holding on strong. My father was not a musician, but an accountant, a business guy. But he grew up a part of that whole brain trust, sensibility, with lots of black awareness. They were young black men very attuned to their time. As a young kid that was my back drop that I grew up against. Let me cut in for a minute, how did you feel about Sonny Carson and the Tomahawks and all the gangs around there. Being as you were around all that positive influence in your house, how close was all that other stuff, which was the flip side of the coin? That’s what was going on then when I was a young teen and I was right in the middle of all that. The unique thing about the way I came up was I had really intellectually hip parents and surroundings. But my parents let me run with who ever I wanted to run with, they weren’t the corny type of middle class black family….. see we were home owners in Bed Stuy. Other home owners wouldn’t let their kids play with the ghetto kids I ran with. For sure, you right! But they let me run with everybody. But why, what was their
thought? Did they school you before you went outside the door? I would get schooled, but during those early days when other kids could stay out all night I had to be in by 1:00 am or something like that there. While I lived at home, there was always some type of rules. I just couldn’t do what ever I wanted to do. But I could do a lot more than the cats whose family’s owned homes and couldn’t leave the front of their house. During that time I ran with a click called the Hell Cat’s, and we ran Bed Stuy at the time. I became an active part of that. I can say I ran with the best of the worst in Bed Stuy at that time. Actually we were the 113 Hell Cats, the junior division. This was the early mid 70’s type thing. There were gangs in the Bronx and gangs in Brooklyn, the Tomahawks were the most ruthless. We were kind of like brother clubs with them. We could go to Brownsville and hang with them at spots they had, and it was peace. I met Kato back then and Akbar, you know what I am saying. He played himself in “The Education Of Sonny Carson” movie. We had a few run ins with some rivals, cats out of Fort Greene and what ever. But it never got the way it was in the Bronx. Like we would hear about those cats and see those images, the Spades, the Skulls all the ruthless gangs up there, we never got that ill in BK but we did have rumbles and things would get ugly. But the Tomahawks were
that ruthless? Ah man the Tomahawks were legendary, Brownsville still is like the roughest part of Brooklyn. A lot more of black Brooklyn used to be completely buck wild, Brownsville & East New York is probably the only area still holding it down like the old days because so much has changed every where else in BK. The group M.O.P. encapsulates that energy better then anybody in terms of articulating what that is, and was. But Bed Stuy always had a rough image. But for the most part it’s a community made up of brownstones with families that still live in them. We always pictured Harlem cats as the slicker, flyer cats, but Brooklyn was the home of the stick up kid back then. And we mastered the knuckle game, that 52 blocks hand-to-hand fighting style before the big guns hit the streets in the 80’s. So what made you slide
away from that and head uptown towards the museums? Well I had a head on my shoulders, and I was always thinking. So when I played hooky it wasn’t always at hooky parties with the girls, I went on adventures. I got the subway map and I would plan out trips to the museums around the city or ride to end of the A train line, or this, that and the third. During that period in the 70’s I noticed graffiti getting heavy on the trains. I saw names and numbers and I was getting curious. As I got further uptown I saw more tags on the walls of the train stations. After awhile I just wanted to know who these people were. Who started it, who was really doing it and who was the best at it, as well as what were they doing with it. Which lead me all the way uptown towards Washington heights and Dykman street. Names I noticed were, Frank 207, SJK 171, Turok 171, and numerous other cats. So as I figured out what it was, I bought that back to Bed Stuy, and started tagging up my name, and became the cat that was writing Bull 99. I was tight with a brother name Herb and he became 99 also. He ran with me and the Hell Cats. The high school John Dewey that I was going to was by Coney Island and the train yards… So you went bombing?
I would also see some of these cats names tagged up on walls. Like Flowers and his man Dice. I began to put two and two together that this graffiti thing is some real hot shit. Cats from Brooklyn had their names all over, like all the popular intersections and places where people were going, whether its downtown Brooklyn, Fulton street, Albee square Mall, Flatbush avenue, in all the popular train stations I would see these cats names. I said this is something I really wanted to be heavily involved with. But at the same time I was at these parties in the parks with these d.j.s and they would bring their equipment out in the summer time to places like Reese Beach in the 70’s, and then I got to see Pete d.j. Jones and the rest. They were like Gods in the community, Rock Stars. They inspired other guys to get DJ sets. Frankie D, Master D and other started to get popular in Bed-Stuy. These guys would do the Disco thing, but occasionally they began to try to scratch records a little bit, and play music that I never heard any where before. I got really curious about this music, break beats, and I would go up to the D.J. by navigating through the party people, hard rocks and killers in Bed Stuy and get behind the rope, and get in the d.j.s ear to ask questions. And they began to tell me that the new sound was coming from uptown, Harlem and the Bronx. They started to mention guys like Flash, Theodore, DJ Hollywood and Bambaataa. So I would once again get real curious and be like an explorer and get on the train and ride up to Harlem and places like that with my crew. We would walk around the streets and try and to find a jam in the parks, you know trying to hear sound systems, to see if anybody was out doing it. We found a couple that were alright but I eventually got some tapes from my man Lee, Lee Quiniones. Right. That’s when I linked up with him and became a member of the Fab 5. When I met up with him I also for the first time heard Grand Master Flash at the Smith projects downtown on the lower east side of Manhattan where Lee lived. This was when it was Four MC’s with him. Rahiem, the 5th member hadn’t joined yet. That was when I first got a taste, a taste of the bass. Right, right, exactly. Now
what about the Fab 5 how did you actually meet these guys? I met Lee, I seen his work and he was a master of the game. I was also starting to think about making moves to penetrate the art world. I had discovered pop art while going to museums. I got familiar with some of these artists and did some studying and realized that pop art and graffiti were coming from the same place. Pop art is? Pop art is popular culture. Pop art took a lot of their imagery from things in popular culture. Like Andy Warhol painted the Campbell soup cans. Roy Lichtenstein based his art on a certain comic book style. He would blow the little dots up bigger. They were called Ben Day dots. Others were basically taking common newspaper and magazine headlines and popular products, and famous faces and just making fine art out of that. Hence the term popular art or pop art. I saw graffiti being inspired by the same thing; you know comic books, advertising. You know what I am saying? I mean as it developed into a defined form of making art. I saw these same color combinations on the Flash comic book covers, or Superman comic books, you know what I am saying? I began to see like a connection also between the art, the graffiti, the energy, the spirit and where it was coming from, and what the d.j.s and rappers were doing. Like “let’s reinvent our selves in these fantasy’s super hero pop culture images. Let’s make our selves these characters we dream about. Like hey I’m Flash, I’m the fastest, you know? I’m Super so and so, I’m cool this; I’m hot that, you know what I mean?” (He starts laughing.) A lot of that all started to flow around in my head. I developed these theories that all these elements of our urban culture were beginning to seem like one big thing. This is in 1978. While I was thinking about all this, and studying art history and what art is “supposed to be”, I basically realized that the best ART is a reflection of the people in the times that they live in, and you could connect it to a broader situation in the popular culture. I thought graffiti was doing that, and then I saw the early hip hop music was doing that, so I had all these complex ghetto theoretical idea’s jumping around in my mind and I’m sure I’m right. (Fred starts laughing.) So I thought why not? The other ingredient that inspired me was this thing called punk rock, which was developing at the time. I started seeing the articles about people in England with mad safety pins in their ripped up pants and shirts. Some of the biggest bands were the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Blondie and the Ramon’s. Some of these guys were talking about they really didn’t know how to play their instruments, and they had just learned how to play or they really didn’t know how to play. They were being very rebellious and getting all this attention in the media, so I decided to go to this place called CBGB’s where punk rock was happening here in NYC and make some moves. This amazes me because at
that time of your life you were jumping from so many different extremes,
especially to land on this Punk Rock thing. And this is no knock just
very interesting. Well I was very curious and I am not trying to say I was a big rock and roll fan and s---….. …..No I hear you, but
just the idea of going from hard core hip hop to this type of music,
because that was the farthest thing from my mind, because we was like
that s--- was crazy. So what I am saying is that you were more open
minded, to that sound which is a good thing. I hear you but I have to say it is from me growing up as a child and being exposed to so many different combinations and from hearing about the influence jazz had on the culture. Then I am seeing this new revolutionary thing happen in music called punk rock, with these radical looking white boys with the chopped up spike hair… …right. Spitting at each other, s--- was crazy buck wild with them white punk rockers. So I started thinking is there some type of connection between that and this hip hop energy? On the surface it could be hard for some to see. But when I went to CBGB’s the first thing that hit me was there were graffiti tags everywhere in that club. CBGB’s was almost like being in an abandoned building that lots of writers had tagged up. I‘m seeing the names of bands written everywhere. It had a raw dingy vibe. I was seeing the connections. Not like beat for beat, but it was that rebel attitude thing. What year was that when
you walked in to CBGB’s and seen that on the walls? Like 1978 and I feel like a black secret agent on a mission.
I hadn’t been to the Fever at that time yet. This is in terms of the vibe and the attitude and them taking the music to the streets and it was still rough, rugged and raw at the time. You know what’s crazy
about that time, as violent as that was a person didn’t care he would
rather be there to experience that music, that hip hop and all that
sound, but knowing that at any minute a mother f------ will bust off or
something like that.. …exactly… …or get robbed.. (Fred starts laughing.) But that was the farthest
thing from my mind. I’d
be like “yo, I just want to hear this sound”, “I want to see how
they perform because I keep hearing them on the tapes and now I want to
see how they do it.” Exactly, I hadn’t heard too many uptown tapes, I didn’t know, but I had a sense that there was something similar in the foundation in where these things were coming from. I hadn’t really connected with any real players from the scene at that time but I felt like I was on the right track in terms of a synergy culturally, if you will. Like a rebelliousness at the core. I feel what you’re saying. I saw a big underlying connection. With the graffiti it was like, “I don’t give a f--- I am writing my name wherever I think I should write it, and I don’t give a f--- what any body thinks.” That was underneath it all, you know what I mean? Cats coming out with their sound systems, and jigga, jigga, jigga, (making the sound of scratching.) on the record. Breaking into the street light to plug in and just give these outlaw parties. It just seemed like there was something very similar in these initial energies of where this s--- was coming from, punk rock & hip hop. Now bust this, what made
you go to the next level and start going to The Garage to see Larry
Levan and these guys?
He only wrote about what he liked and wrote about it in such descriptive terms, it made me go “damn he put it down in a way that made me want to hear all this music as opposed to a critic that is criticizing”. He would basically big up what he liked and put it in a way that you can understand it. So I met this cat and he became like a mentor to me. I told him what I was thinking and feeling about punk and hip hop at the time and the moves I was trying to make and he was with the program! He later became key because he had a TV show called TV party which was a public access cable show, which you can now buy on DVD. It was real arty and crazy. So when I got cool with Glenn I kicked my ideas and about graffiti, rapping and scratching and this breaking and how I saw it kind of connecting to this punk rock energy. He completely got it. He said “you are absolutely right.” At the same time you have to remember every single train, subway station and bus was soaked with graffiti. The city was spending 10 million dollars a year going to war against graffiti. Back then it was the scourge of the city, and nobody at that time was seeing it as this beautifully developed art form that it now is. But with my new downtown friends embracing me and my message and ideas, I became that link and they opened their eyes and arms. Glenn told me he was about to start a public access cable show, and I am like 18, 19 yrs at the time and I’m like “hey I want to get down.” He said “what do you want to do?” “I said I want to work the cameras.” He said I didn’t have any experience, but he still wanted me to hang out and be down. I said o.k. So at the first show one of the guys who was supposed to work the camera got high and never showed up, so he looked at me and said “hey Fred get on the camera.” So I became the camera man on the show and a regular guest. Also, this is when I became tight with Jean Michelle Basquiat, who was doing “Samo” tags in the village and Soho at the time. Like me, he was from Brooklyn and my age. When I met him he had a blond Mohawk with about seven six inch dreads, which freaked out a lot of people at the time. Was he already established
as an artist when you met him? Nah he was the come up like me. Like I said he was tagging Samo on the streets and theses short like poems when I met him. He was a starving artist, crashing on friends’ couches in the East Village trying to figure it out, just like I was. We came together and started to vibe. He heard about me and I heard about him, and we just started building on stuff. We became kindred spirits, generals in the game. We had similar ideas, and he like me had spent time in museums as a growing kid and got hip to art history and also liked Warhol, Jasper Johns and other pop and abstract expressionist artists. But he didn’t know anything about this rap thing. I played my old school party tapes and let him listen to “Super Sperm, Apache and other songs, schooling him and he was feeling it all. Let me ask you, do you
think that movie they did about him was very accurate? The cat Glenn O’Brien was the one that put the movie together, and came up with the concept and wrote the script. I was now moving in the same circles. Glenn was the leader, well not the leader but one of the main cultural cats on the downtown scene. He was part of what some would call the downtown Literati. That’s also how I met Blondie and the rest of the punk new wave people. I got to meet and kick it with all these people coming to his TV show. After taping the show we would all go and hang out at the Mudd Club and other hot downtown clubs at the time like Danceteria and the Peppermint Lounge. Amongst all these radical musicians’ artist and film makers, I was that graffiti dude who knew about this new rap thing going on in the Bronx, which at the time of course was a mystery to them. I would be explaining what was jumping off uptown with Flash, Cold Crush, Fantastic and all that. So you started getting up
town by this time? I had been going a little more, I got a little more knowledgeable. I got some uptown party tapes. Lee had cats in the L.E.S. with some hip hop party tapes also. I remember one hot Funky 4 tape with them on the echo and all that. While all that was going on I’m making my moves on the art world. You’re not even going home any more, are you? Did you start living in Manhattan by that time? (Troy starts laughing.) Naw, I’m still going home to Bed Stuy. I’m still getting on that A train to Utica or Kingston & Troop. I wanted to have my own crib but my paper wasn’t right. How did you hook up with
Charlie Ahearn?
That’s right. (We both start laughing.) They turned it into a free for all art show where you literally could have walked in off the street and just put your art work right on the wall, or ceiling! What street was this? … I think it was 40th street and 6th avenue. That’s over by Bryant
Park and the library. Not far from the library, exactly. Like about 70 artists are in this group show with all kinds of cool and wild art. Is that spot still there today? No, it’s long gone, but it’s well documented in mad books and all about the art scene in the 80’s. I mean, that show was the jump off. How long did it last? The show was up for a couple of months and was on the cover of the Village Voice as the first radical art show of the 80’s. We painted a Fab 5 piece on the outside of the building. Me and Lee Quinones did this together and had two of my paintings hanging in the show. Long after it was over, that piece outside stayed. This show is where I met Charlie Ahearn and I told him I wanted to make a movie about this new thing bubbling in the black and latin NYC ghettos uptown. Basically I was telling him about rap music, DJ’s, graffiti, and break dancing. That they were like all one thing in a way coming from the same place, the same vibe but nobody then was seeing it as all being connected. Charlie was feeling my ideas and we got serious, and began to plan the film that would become the earliest look at all of this, WILD STYLE! …right…
How long did it take to
put the film together?
Right. But the poster for the movie caught my eye, and it made me feel like that’s that real underground independent movie vibe I felt we needed. So once again, when I meet Charlie he is feeling my ideas. So we start to go to these parties uptown. That’s when I start to go to the T- Connection, Celebrity Club, Ecstasy Garage, Disco Fever, the whole 9. The first party we went to together was at a park called the Valley. O.k., up there in Co-op
city the Bronx! Right, Busy Bee, Funky 4 + one more, and the rest are doing their thing thing to a big crowd. So we meet them, and Charlie is like your all American very nice white guy. He was such a stick out sore thumb in the crowd. (Fred is laughing in kindness.) And you know, the game was real grimy back then with stick up kids and dust heads and just plain ill violent heads in the mix. I used to always think to myself, “I just hope nothing goes down”. But I guess bottom line, because Charlie’s got such a good heart, and he is such a good dude, everybody we would meet would end up really liking him. And of course many would think, “who in the world is this white dude coming up to these ghetto hood parties and taking this so serious?” And who is this black dude with him? This is the beginning of the research that leads to the screenplay for Wild Style. So we are meeting the key players. And I’m feeling it, meeting these cats. I’m talking about, Flash and the Furious, Busy, DJ A.J., Love Bug Star Ski, Lil Rodney C and the Funky 4, Bambattaa. We going to this party, that party, it was a beautiful thing. Charlie and I would take slides of everything we were doing. He made hundreds of slides and everyone, wanted to have their picture taken. People we got tight with like AJ and the Cold Crush, asked Charlie to show the slides at their show. It got so ghetto that cats was putting his name on the flyer. They started calling him Charlie video.Camcorders hadn’t really become popular but they put it on the flyer like he was shooting a video, but they were slides and people loved it. (Troy starts laughing.) They would see their face and say, “N----- I’m in a video!” So they started putting “Charlie Video” on the flyers and we would set up these little slide shows at the Ecstasy Garage and other spots. Right, when the music was being played. Yeah, and MC’s like Busy B would be shouting out the people in the photos like they shout out people at a party. So now were you originally supposed to make the movie about the Funky 4?
I got that video…. Huh? I have an 18 minute video
of j.d.l., K.G., Caz and they all solo. The Love Bug, Star Ski? Yeah Star Ski is d.j.ing and some other no name cats. Where did you get that? It’s out there, but very few people have it, but I have it. Good, good I am glad. That’s some s--- Charlie and me did.
Right, a burgundy mock neck shirt, and burgundy hat. You are right, a fight did break out, and Casanova’s went off. A stampede occurred.
Moe D said that was the
day he was going to take out Busy Bee.
See Caz was hot at the time but he wasn’t as hot as Busy that
night. Although Caz killed it doing that singing type routine to
“Ain’t no stopping us now.” But Moe was plo That is incredible that you said that, damn, I got a chill up my spine. You’re lucky to have that because we were going to release that with the re-issue of the Wild Style DVD. So what happened? We had to get clearances. One thing about Charlie is he’s been straight up and as 100 percent as you can be. He still has great relationships with most of the cats we dealt with back then. A lot of these cats still reach out calling him. He is just a stand up guy that did the right thing. But like I said, the complications of clearing it and what have you are crazy and expensive. It’s a crazy game right now, in terms of stuff like that. It just wasn’t cost effective to make it happen. So does he still think
about doing it in time? Many people have to be taken care of and music has to be cleared. I hear you, you right
because Caz was singing off of Mc Fadden and White Heads “Ain’t no
stopping us now.” See, we shot on 3/4 videotape. But a little bit earlier in the same year we shot a Fantastic 5 party at the Ecstasy Garage. It was like a little test that we filmed in 16mm film to check the lighting and sound before we made the actual movie. But sorry to say, that footage is lost. Charlie pulls his hair out to this day about that. It’s about a twenty-minute performance that was so hot but Charlie ended up losing it. It was AMAZING and an example of the Fantastic at their peak. But , their peak is on film in WILD STYLE! As we went through that whole process of going to these parties, filming and meeting cats etc, we were deciding who we were going to feature and focus on and put in our movie. We loved almost all the groups getting down back then but Funky 4 + 1 was the only major rap group that had a girl. Sha- Rock, give me a break, just an incredible MC with the dopiest voice and flow plus she was THE flyest girl. I really wanted to step to her back then but I was so caught up in the movie and making art and all that. You’re right she is legendary…. Unique, Attractive…. The vocals she had, the flow. Rodney and how he and the rest of the crew rocked the echo. The whole s--- was just unbelievable. But in the mist of what me and Charlie were trying to do, the break up was happening with the Funky 4 and this was literally while we were in the middle of the film. See we shot a lot of the party scenes at a club called the Dixie, which was banging back in the early days, and was right up the street from another banging old school rap club called the Black Door club. Rodney C lived on that block. He was dating Angie Stone, now the well-known soul diva but at the time she was Angie B from the Sequence girl rap group on Sugar hill records. We would literally be hanging out at Rodney’s house in between scenes, with his mom and his brothers. We were like a part of his family back then. Rodney C is a real cool cat. His story is really amazing with the way he flipped it and lived in London for several years after the movie came out and had a regular show on a major radio station there. Man, that’s an interview you need to do! For sure. But the Funky 4 was going to be in the movie. And this is another little historic fact. The first hip hop group to have national exposure on TV was the Funky 4 plus one more. Right.
So as Blondie’s group is explaining what they can do for the Funky, right before your eyes you could see the separation that Sylvia created amongst the Funky! But Debbie and Chris told the whole group right there that the most important thing was that “you must stay together as a group and not to let them divide and conquer.
I know what you talking about, the Double Trouble rhyme (Stoop Rap). Hello. That was the original reason why the rhyme was written. So you listen to that rhyme again and put it into context of what I just explained about the group being split up. “They tried to hold us back, from fortune and fame, they destroyed the crew and they killed the name…” When it first came out we didn’t know what the hell was going on, but later on I started to understand. They said, “They tried to walk on our ego and try to step on our pride, but true blue brothers stood side by side through thick and thin from beginning to end, this battle we lost but the war we’ll win….” Man let me tell you I could have cried when Rodney said that rhyme to me. I will never forget, the way he ran the rhyme down that first time I heard it. I said don’t worry about it Rodney, Double Trouble, is in this movie.
Right, right, right. So we weren’t making things up. It’s all based on what was really going on. At that moment! At that moment, right! That was one of the beautifulest’ things about that process of making the movie, because literally we would be stuck saying how are we going to figure this out. And to answer your question earlier, it really wasn’t like we followed the script word for word, scene for scene. We had an outline but the s--- was changing so much, so we are like the Funky 4 is breaking up, what are we going to do. Lee and Pink were literally having beef with each other, so we wove their lover’s quarrels into the concept of the movie. (Troy starts laughing.) I
hear you kid. She would be having beef…… I was just thinking that kid….how did their part start. Yo, a lot of that was really, really based on real s---. Now bust this did ya’ll
film any footage of the Funky 4 before they broke up. So ya’ll could
have incorporated it into the movie? (A short pause.) Yes, at a party, but it wasn’t for the movie. It was at a Roller rink and it was beautiful. Contractually ya’ll
wasn’t able to put that in the movie because of Sugar Hill records? It wasn’t for the movie it was mostly for our research before the movie. It was just like the video we did with Moe D, Caz and the rest of them guys at the Celebrity club. Yo cats are amazed that I
have something like that from 1980, they be wondering what you guys were
using to film. Well you know the cameras were real big and clunky, but it was ¾ video in that early 1980s format. But Charlie was connected to all these art and video/film cats downtown that had access to the equipment, and things of that nature. So we were able to go in there and do our thing. So was he thinking about
also adding that Funky 4 thing to his re-release?
So now how was the Furious
5 first in it and then they weren’t? Well that was an interesting story; we had a major technical problem with the sound, meaning we didn’t record the sound correctly. We were kind of learning while doing, so we had bad audio from all these parties we filmed. Originally, we had Flash and the Furious Five as well as others at the big Amphitheater finale scene. I don’t remember the whole line up. But all the audio was bad; it would not have made sense to release it. So we then had to re-shoot all the parties in the movie. So that was the only
footage lost was the amphitheater scenes? Well the first versions of it. The best case scenario, if somebody came up with a fortune’ we probably would be able to fix that audio. With the technology available now, almost anything is possible. We maybe would be able to salvage that audio, eq it back to life. But listen to this Fred, that piece right there with out the sound is legendary. People just looking at it and you put another sound on it; the viewer would still be impressed. Well you know working on Vh1 Hip Hop Honors, and this is before we got into the second version of it. I talked to Charlie about this, when I knew we were going to honor Flash and them. I said look Charlie, “I’d like to look into pulling some of that footage and using it for a few seconds, when we do the whole look at who they were back in the days. Charlie thought he had a piece of it. But once again that process is so expensive to go in and pull the negatives and the rest. But when we re-released Wild Style several years ago we went back in and did a whole new audio remix. Yeah I heard about Mardi Gras. Yeah we had to redo that song Flash was cutting because we couldn’t get the rights. So I found these cats that could create something very close to Bob James’s Mardi Gras in essence, but a completely different song. That was the only thing in terms of clearance regarding the reissue in the film; we use very little music that wasn’t ours. So what’s up with Bob
James? That’s a legendary movie for him, itself. It’s not so much Bob James, but who owns and controls the publishing. A lot of times people have sold all or part their publishing. So these publishing companies control the rights and what it costs to use a lil bit of their song. And they sometimes can ask for crazy amounts, and its different rates for movies as opposed to you wanting to sample it for a record, and these guys can be difficult at times. Also these companies have hundreds of songs and they are not clued in like we are to what’s really going on, they’re just looking at getting paid, a whole lot. How was it for you working with the Furious Five, were they completely business minded, and how did they feel that their part was excluded at the end of the movie. They were really big at that time. I don’t think they felt that bad about it, because they were the biggest rap group at the time. Also they were at the peak of what they were doing. They were touring the world and making records, living like ghetto rock stars, and dressing like it. Sex, drugs and rappin on a mic! We wanted them because we wanted the best of what was out there. Once again the foundation idea for Wild Style was to have almost every body in the film be who they were for REAL and doing what they do. Exactly. With very few exceptions. We knew by doing that we were going to be doing something that was right, but our original aspirations were nowhere near as big as what this culture has become. We just wanted a movie that we felt was going to be able to play on forty deuce for a year (In Times Square) and that was one of our dreams. And I wanted to big up and show that the young people of color in this city were doing something very important and powerful. We knew 42nd street was where our target audience is going to come and this is where they hang out. We wanted to be up there among the Kung Fu movies and the horror flicks and the remaining black exploitation movies. (Fred is laughing.) We wanted to be right there, up in LIGHTS! So bust this if you were
able to get Furious 5 back on the film at that time, would that have
excluded Cold Crush and Fantastic at the end?
Right They didn’t really do records, or I should say a group’s show wasn’t based on covering a bunch of hot 4-minute singles because only a few cats had made a few singles. Cats would just come on and do like 20-30 minute sets then the DJs would get busy. We weren’t into the full time hip hop record-making era yet. So basically we had much longer pieces of performances and music. And I used to say, wouldn’t this be great if we could use this, but it would require a great deal of money to use it as additional material on the DVD. What part did you play in
the sound track? I was in charge of it all. I made all those original break beats that everyone rhymes to in the movie Now what did you mean when you said you put that sound track together? Charlie and I felt that we might have problems later and sampling wasn’t even a part of the game yet. There used to be this industry myth that you could use 10 or 12 seconds of a song before you had to pay the piper. (We both start laughing.) I forgot all about that until you mentioned that. So that is one of the things you would hear about in terms of what you can use, etc., etc. but we were cautious. At first my vibe was like, f--- it, this is an underground independent movie that’s just going to play underground and on 42nd Street…. lets just do it. ….lets take a hit and see what happens, right? I mean there wasn’t a precedent. Rap music then was like, nobody had figured how to sample yet anyway to capture the essence of what the DJ’s were cutting and scratching. The biggest rap records were on Sugar Hill and Enjoy and they had bands replaying the s--- that was hot in the streets. Songs like “Freedom”, “Good Times”, “7 Minutes of Funk”. Freedom never really hit
crash Crew for their record High Power Rap.
Disco Dave and his brother Mix Master Mike went into the lab and
mix it down 1000 times. I am exaggerating of course, but they actually
cut the Freedom cut over and over, spliced it to death. As far as I know
they never got hit for that. Well…hum…some deal might have been made, who knows. But… Well Dave and Mike won’t give me their story yet, so I can’t find out about that part. Well the reality of cats getting hit were the ones with big records a little later on like in the late 80’s and early 90’s. When rap records started to get really, really big. See those records might have sold decent numbers but I don’t think they hit Gold or multi Platinum status. Well what it was, was she never let them know…rather ah… they pressed that their selves! Then they found out somebody in the crew was stealing. So they never knew the exact amount of records sold. I see. But even to this day that record sells. There are probably other songs that have come out as hip hop got really big but basically, it didn’t get really serious until Biz Markie got sued and lost. There would be situations were cats were threatened and your lawyer would tell you to settle, but not until Biz caught that bad break with that Gilbert O’ Sullivan record, and they found him guilty. Then that made it like a law. It created the whole idea of the sample clearance business. But how did you put this together? I mean you started the band, you said this is what I want? Did you play any instrument? When we agreed it wasn’t a good idea to use other peoples music like DJ’s did, I said I will do it. But I am thinking, “How am I going to do this?” So I came up with this process. Their was this white dude name Lenny Ferrari (Fred starts laughing.) who was one of the people that I met on that Down Town scene at TV Party. He was a white guy that played with a lot of Punk groups, but he loved black music, James Brown etc. He worshiped that original Soul sound. So he listened to those records and knew what those drum patterns were. The ones Flash and Theodore and them played. He studied all the classic black groups and drummers and said man I know how to do this. So my whole process was I started with him and I would hum out these beats with my mouth, kind of like beat box style. Right. I would hum a drum pattern. You didn’t take from the other known break beats? No, no, I didn’t take from break beats. But I did have them in my head, so I was like, I know the tempo, then I would hum it to him and he would play it and he would play something that sounded like what I was doing. Sometimes I would say do this and do that. Then he would lay these drum tracks down and we recorded it at this extra cheap super old school recording studio next to the Beacon Theatre on Broadway. The board was so old it still used the glass tubes instead of transistors! I first recorded all the drumbeats. Then I got this dude that I knew at the time who use to play with a lot of Philly groups named David Parker. He played with groups like First Choice… I remember them. I had him lay the bass lines down that I also hummed off the top. Then I went to Chris Stein from Blondie, and told him what I was trying to do, and he had heard some of the hip hop tapes I turned him on to and felt the vibe. See I didn’t have break beat records, I had the tapes of parties to use as examples. So I would let them get the feel and the attitude of certain records. You know those weird, obscure break beat classics like, Apache. There was probably only one store if you remember at the time selling what we now know as break beats records. The record shop called Downstairs Records, which was in the 34th street train station. Right on 34th
street before it went to 43rd street and avenue of the
Americas. Exactly, first in the
train station of 34th and then moved to 43rd
street. (Later on 40th street and 6th avenue). Well I played these beats and my man Chris from Blondie, he had all these new guitars with these sound effects, so he added a few effects here and there on to the records, you know what I mean? He played some guitar and changed up the sound on each one. Then he added some more sound effects. So how many cuts did you have? There are about 12 cuts to that record. I made them all be about 2 minutes long, because this would only be something a d.j. Would play, mix, scratch and extend. Right, right. And recreate and replay based on their needs. That was what the sound track for the movie is based on. I remember being in the studio with Chris and some one said always records the bass and the drums at the same time. I was like you know, I never knew that! There were a couple of points when they were out of phase. Right. Some times a drummer will go a little a head of the beat. But that’s how we basically got through all that. So now you had to explain your thought to Theodore how you wanted to put the sound to all the groups? Well, I remember the first mishap was, we thought we weren’t going to have to press up vinyl. We thought we were just going to be able to make acetates. But the acetates were something you would get before you cut the plate to make the vinyl ….. I am trying to remember the whole process because it is so old school when I think about it. You made your master, you know they were `¼ inch mix down from the 2 inch tape, and from the mix down an acetate is made. If you approve the acetate, then I think a metal plate is cut and then from that the records are stamped and pressed into vinyl. But I thought the acetates would work for the DJs to cut a scratch. But these kinds of records are much heavier then the actual vinyl. It’s a thicker, heavier thing. Basically when we came to the d.j.s with these acetates they were not able to manipulate them like they do vinyl. Too damn heavy. Right. So I had to go back and order up the minimum, I think you had to get 50 to maybe 100 pieces of vinyl. I actually wrote all the info for the records by hand, graffiti style on a white label. What, you had to order up all that just to get a cut? Yeah because that was the minimum, when you went to the pressing plant there was a minimum. This was a crazy low budget production you must remember. They felt why should they go through all this process, just to make you a few pieces of vinyl. It turned out to be good because a few more cats got their hands on the records. What made me feel so good; not knowing that the movie would become a cult classic like it did, but cats that later became record fanatics could never figure out what were those records used in Wild Style making it among the rarest music in hip hop and the first break beats made just for DJ’s and MC’s. Right, because I never heard them at the paries. And that was great. I never realized that it would have that kind of effect. And that’s all yours? Every one of those beats was completely original created by me. That’s your entire work, all your money on that? That’s right! I hear that. I mean it’s owned by me and Charlie and the others on the sound track. But I wrote the music. So did it become so
popular that you had to press it and put it out? No, well a couple things happened. Of course I remember going into the late 80’s it became an obsessive thing for cats to figure out how they can get this record. I remember meeting Jazzy-B from Soul to Soul, when they were the hottest group in the world at that time and Jazzy was telling me how he had found a space on the sound track album and he looped a chunk of “Down By Law” extending it and then pressed up a few copies Jamaican Dub plate style to spin on his sound system in London. He didn’t need to ask
you for permission to do this? No, he wasn’t like selling or bootlegging. I didn’t come at Jazzy like that because we were tight and I was feeling his energy. But after awhile we did have to go after mad cats for taking our s--- and make they labels pay up. So in the end you did track cats for yours? Oh no question, Nas used it on his record, the Beastie Boys. Many cats did. Nas first album, the classic, “Illmatic” opens up with the scene from Wild Style where Zoro’s brother home from the army disses his art. Nas freaks it like he’s the kid his brother is dissin. So now you take the record to Theodore and the other D.J.s… I took the record to all of them, Tony Tone, Charlie Chase, GM Flash, GW Theodore, DJ AJ, and I sat down with each and I play them all the songs. I let them know they all were going to be in the movie and told them they had to pick different songs for their MC’s to perform to in the film. I told them to work their routines out, based on the songs they picked thinking they would pick a few different ones. The whole idea was to recreate what hip hop d.j.s did, which was to cut and mix different records and create the routines that they did at that time. But what happened was as I gave it to Flash and Charlie Chase and them, they started to work on it. These DJ’s were all friends and cool with each other so they would know what each other was doing and playing so each could stay up on the others. After awhile all off them wanted to do their routine off of one song. “Down by law.” Yeah the same record,
that’s what I was just thinking. I remember I used to say what the
hell is this, why do I keep hearing the same record, where is everything
else at? But I understand now. Then we had Caz come in on the…… The eerie joint he did
when Lee is riding on the train trying to figure it all out. We came up with the idea of the Caz song in that scene over another one of those beats to help you understand exactly what Zoro’s character was all about at that moment like his conscience is speaking to him. Right, instead of the same one over and over. Right that was the purpose of creating original music. (Fred starts humming the sound.) So where did you get that sound from, what was your thought pattern for that one? Well to be honest it was just a combination of all these different beats I heard at parties. I didn’t have specific songs for inspiration, but something I thought DJ’s would love and a sound that was different and if you will, a little strange and gutter. Those were the records
that would draw you to the park and street jams as you were walking
through the hood and you hear that beat. You’d be like what the hell
is going on? Come on! The most amazing thing is you couldn’t hear these records any where else. Tony Tone (aka Tony Crush of the Cold Crush Brothers.) told me that one day. He said he went to a Kool Herc Jam and he heard these beats and it was unbelievable. I asked him what was the issue did he feel these beats were dated? He said No the s--- was the Bomb, He had never heard it before, except at a Kool Herc party. It’s funny because it’s just a thing that music does to us. It speaks to us in a way that’s sometimes really hard to articulate. It’s just a feeling that you get, and the feelings from those records were the perfect sound track to what was going down at that time in hip hop music. The attitude and vibe at a lot of those early parties was a sort of tribal hood celebration meets war party because the young soldiers would be ready to dance and got to war all in one swoop. The edge was like a jagged razor blade. Sharp and deadly. Remember, “A to the mother fuckin Z” I hear what you’re saying. The cats that ran the parties, I’m talking about the d.j.s and emcee’s, they were by comparison the nice guys. But some of the roughest elements in the illest ghettoes of the city were the other people at these parties. Murderer’s, hustlers and stick-up kids want to have fun too you know. Right the ones that were
lurking in the back ground, plotting to jump on its prey. Nucckas was ready to just bring it at a drop of a dime, 52-block style. I mean you could just feel that energy, fun mixed with a little danger. It’s hard to describe. And it really doesn’t exist any more in the same way. Young kids talk that talk but couldn’t take the first step of that walk. They want to run home for they mans toll as soon as someone smack a little fire out they ass. I mean when was the last time you heard about someone getting stuck up for his or her coat, sneakers or Cazal glasses? Aiight, cats get got for they jewels here and there but over all it’s different game today. I call’em, playstations cause they just playing games. Good guys vs. bad guys and they all want to be sooo bad. There’s more shootin and killing in some of these cats lyrics then what’s happening in Iraq. Right, so many have changed for the better, or just trying to be more sociable. Right, they changed for the fact that change is inevitable. You can see through a cats
eye that “that n----- there ain’t s---, let me stay totally away
from him, but watch him closely.” Which was the reason cats had that B- Boy stance back then Run DMC rapped about. That’s right, step back… And that hard rock ice grill expression, standing with your arms folded, feet in a V position. (Troy is laughing.) You hitting it right on the head kid. Because that look right there was…… “Don’t f--- with me money.” Yeah, so you needed to be in that same position because it looked cool as hell and you didn’t want to get stepped to, just chill and enjoy the party, not get stuck up for your sheep skin coat or your British Walkers. So slow down for a minute
since we talking about this, what made you put those two guys in, A to
the K? What was their story?
Right, right. They were like o.k. This is how we do this s--- for real, and his man said, “A to the K, A to the K, A to the mother f----- Z.” And I don’t know what that line means and trust me, hundreds have asked. What the hell did that mean, everybody said the same thing. That must have meant something to them. (Troy and Fred is laughing.) When they said the s---, we were like “yo that’s it!” So what became of them? From what I understand they’re both dead. You can get a lot of good little info about behind the scenes tales from the new DVD. Play the bonus audio track, and hear me and Charlie break it down and do a lot of reminiscing about how we made Wild Style like I am doing now. Those A to the K brothers, were they being a problem while they were there on the set, also were they there all the time or just that night? No problem, they were just hanging around. Like I said, we were shooting there a lot, we had a bunch of scenes that we shot in that area. And a movie is not shot in sequence. But they were there basically every day because they lived in the hood. The way we did Wild Style, knowing that we were working with none actors, me included, we would just give cats the idea. Instead of saying read this and memorize the lines. We were like here’s the idea. “Your about to stick these people up, what would you say? “O.K. I would say it like this.” (Fred mimics a gravely voiced thug.) O.K. boom, that’s what you say. O.k. you ready? Action! Let a dude be comfortable and just go on automatic. So now you said you took
the top groups at that time, why did you not include say Bam and the
Soul Sonic Force, or the Crash Crew or even the Treacherous Three
included in the story line or just in the movie? That’s a good question. Especially Bam, or Herc? Well Herc we didn’t have contact with at that time. At all the places we went we definitely heard his name, and knew who he was. Bam I had met at the T Connection…and as I get on this roll talking about this, this might have to be a 2-part interview. No problem. I brought Bam down town to that East village scene. One of these art shows in the east village was about to happen, and I met Bam earlier at a Bronx River jam, so this night I reached out to him and invited him. Also there is another thing I want to point out in my whole involvement and development with this culture was, whenever I would get to the d.j. no matter if it was the illest park jam at or a party, whether uptown, downtown, Brooklyn, Queens, whatever. When ever I got to the d.j. and engaged him in a conversation, they would always make me feel like I had a lot in common with them, because I could immediately see that these were smart thinking cats. It made me feel so good that I took the time and effort to do that, because there was some intimidating s--- going on at these parties. You know you had to be in your b- boy stance and n------- be ice grilling hard. You was either trying to catch a freak, or trying to figure out what the d.j. was doing. So when I got up to the d.j. I used to say to my self, “these guys seem smart and intelligent.” It gave me a lot of encouragement. Because I’d be wondering who started this. When I was in Brooklyn I would see cats scratching a lil bit and even though they didn’t have it down pat, I was asking, “yo, what’s that all about, and where is it coming from?” BK DJ’s called it that uptown sound. When cats in Brooklyn said uptown, we meant meant Harlem and the Bronx. Exactly. So that’s what us Brooklyn cats called it because it was different. And like I told you, I was that exploratory cat that said yo, I want to meet these dudes who started this and give them props for being geniuses. So did you and Bam become real close once you brought him downtown? We got cool, but at that time the city was more polarized back then around race. It was a lot iller, it wasn’t a great deal of people of color mixing it up downtown. Like I would be one of the few black dudes in the crowd. Me, Jean Michelle Basquiat, and a hand full of other’s were the only blacks almost everywhere I went on that down town scene. I wasn’t tr |
Fab
5 Freddy
bebop drummer and local activist was at my
house often when I was a kid.
Yes!
O.K.,
so that is some what similar to the Disco Fever with the crews up on the
walls also.
Well
that was again something else that was going on. Believe it or not I had
already made my connections now with key players on the down town punk
rock new wave scene. I connected with this guy named Glenn O’Brien,
who had been down with Andy Warhol, and was writing for and had been the
original editor for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine.
Well
as I became a fixture in this downtown underground New York scene I met
Charlie Ahearn. I met him at an art show in 1980 in Times Square called
the “Times Square Show”.
Graffiti
was a multi borough, city wide multi ethnic thing. Hip hop as music, the
rapping, and scratching, was pretty much a Harlem and Bronx thing. There
were some cats in Brooklyn f------ with it. There were some cats in
Queens. But in terms of the n------ that really wrote the rules, it was
up in Harlem and the Bronx. Mainly the BX you know what I am saying?
Well
I used to see the poster for this movie up in the lower east side when I
would be chillin with Lee mapping out these moves I thought we should
make. Lee said he knew about this dude, he said the guy with the blood
on his face was a local kung fu teacher; named Nathan Ingram who was
like a 10th degree black belt.
I
am going to get into all that. You know how Busy-B’s personality is so
happy go lucky and fun?
But
let me tell you this, I told Moe I had it, and Kool Moe Dee lost his
mind because he was supposed to go last, I think. You see Moe walking by
in his shades, but he never gets on, he said a fight broke out. In fact
Caz is on there with a burgundy old style Pittsburgh Pirate hat, and a
burgundy mock neck shirt. 
tting
to get Busy that night.
Because
when Blondie was hosting Saturday Night Live for the first time, I had
got them so up on what was going on with this hip hop thing that Debbie
Harry said to me, “Freddy, we can pick any group we want to come on
the show with us and we want you to help us figure this out”. I said
you know Flash and them are definitely incredible etc, etc, etc, but I
think it should be the Funky 4 plus one more, because they have a girl
in a group of guys, just like Blondie.
I’ll
never forget the day Rodney came up the block to the Dixie where we were
filmed all the club scenes for Wild Style and we were preparing to shoot
the “A to the K” stick up scene. Rodney pulled me to the side and
said yo Fab, they decided to stay with Sugar hill and me and K.K. are
stepping.
So
let me wrap this part up, the creative process of making this movie Wild
Style, was in many ways reflective of what was really going down on the
scene at that time. We were bending molding and shaping what was going
on to fit our bending, and flowing story. Also you see Rodney in that
battle against Busy, because of that thing about Busy Bee and A.J. being
down and how Busy B would always win the emcee battles AJ would promote.
That was why Moe Dee went after Busy Bee like that at the Harlem World
club. You remember what Moe said, at all these battles, the Celebrity
Club, it is all set up before we come in. (Fred is laughing.) So we
played that scene, and had Rodney like “wait a minute man, what’s up
with that, how did that dude win?” My character is based on A.J. in
that scene. Then, we go off to the Alps short stay Hotel with the
champagne and the girls to get BUSY. (Busy Bee’s favorite hotel in his
rhymes.)
There
might have been issues with that footage as well.
No
because we had them perform at the end also, at the amphitheater. That
big jam was to feature the best of the best. We were going to shoot them
all and chop it down. Because you know that’s another interesting
thing, which I talked to Charlie about, but once again it would be
extremely expensive. To re-cut the negative is very expensive. I wanted
to extend those performances, because we have a lot more footage. Those
rhymes and lyrics and things that you saw in the movie were cut down. We
had, 15 and 20-minute performances by everybody, easily. Because you
know how cats did their performances back in the days, they did their
routines and lots of rhymes.
Those
two guys lived in the area, local cats. We were up at the Dixie Club up
by Boston Road. They were just like most cats hanging out trying to get
some light and some love. “Yo, y’all should throw me up in the
movie.” Just like anybody else in the hood would say. So when we were
out their filming, this is another example of how improvisational the
movie was.