Can't Stop Won't Stop (13 page)

Clive tuned into rock and soul disc jockeys like Cousin Brucie and Wolfman Jack as if he had caught religion, listening to these smooth men rap their silver-tongued rap. He began going to “First Fridays” youth dances at a local Catholic school and at Murphy Projects. His mother took him to house parties, where he heard music he had never heard on WBLS or WWRL. The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and, most important, James Brown became his tutors; they were teaching Clive how to lose his accent.

“I was more around Americans. And I was tired of hearing them say ‘What did you say?' My accent really started to change,” he recalls. By the time Clive began attending Alfred E. Smith High School, some of his Jamaican friends didn't even know he was Jamaican. He was in the process of reinventing himself, creating a new identity.

He wasn't alone. All across the city youths were customizing their names or giving themselves new ones and scrawling them across the naked city surfaces. The young graffiti writers were the advance guard of a new culture; they literally blazed trails out of the gang generation. Crossing demarcated turfs to leave their aliases in marker and spraypaint, they said “I'm here” and “Fuck all y'all” at the same time. Gang members, who had trapped themselves in their own neighborhoods, had to give them respect. Clive and the post-gang youths were a different breed, more interested in projecting individual flash than collective brawn, and they would soon render the gangs obsolete.

Graffiti expert Jack Stewart traces the emergence of the modern-day movement to Philadelphia's neighborhoods of color as early as 1965.
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Aerosolist and activist Steve “Espo” Powers says that the Black teenager, CORNBREAD, who is credited with popularizing the tagging of the Philly subways, was only trying to attract the attention of a beauty named Cynthia. By 1968, the movement had spread to New York City. CORNBREAD's protégé, TOP CAT, moved to Harlem and brought with him the “gangster” style of lettering. A Puerto Rican youth calling himself JULIO 204—the number was the street he hailed from—began at about the same time. When a Greek American named TAKI 183 told the
New York Times
in the summer of 1971 why he tagged his name on ice cream trucks and subway cars—”I don't feel like a celebrity normally, but the guys make me feel like one when they introduce me to someone”—thousands of New York youngsters picked up fat markers and spray paint to make their own name.
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Writers like LEE 163d!, EVIL ED, CLIFF 159, JUNIOR 161, CAY 161, CHE 159 and BARBARA and EVA 62 were saying their names loud all across buildings, bus stops, and subway station walls uptown.

Roaming through gang turfs, slipping through the long arms and high fences of authority, violating notions of property and propriety, graffiti writers found their own kind of freedom. Writing your name was like locating the edge of civil society and planting a flag there. In Greg Tate's words, it was “reverse colonization.”
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The 1960s, as the hip-hop generation would so often be reminded, were a great time to be young. The world seemed to shake under young feet so easily back then. The revolutionaries expected the whole world to be watching and when they were given the spotlight, they cast a long shadow. But these writers weren't like the revolutionaries, or even the philosopher-activist wall-writers in Lima, Mexico City, Paris, and Algiers. Theirs were not political statements. They were just what they were, a strike against their generation's invisibility and preparation for the coming darkness.

They held no illusions about power. No graffiti writer ever hoped to run for mayor. And unlike the gang bangers, none would submerge his or her name to the collective. They were doing it to be known amongst their peers, to be recognized for their originality, bravado, daring, and style. Norman Mailer, one of the first to write seriously about graffiti, got it instantly: the writers were composing advertisements for themselves.

In the summer of 1970, TAKI 183's tags seemed to explode across the city. Like thousands of other kids, Clive, Jerome and their friend Richard picked up markers and spraycans. Rich became UNCLE RICH, Jerome became YOGI and Clive became CLYDE AS KOOL.
⁴

“They couldn't recall my name Clive,” he says. “So the closest you could come was Clyde, from the Knicks basketball player. They'd be like, ‘You mean like ‘Clyde' Frazier?' ‘Yeah. Clyde. Let's leave it like that.' So I started to write that. And where I picked ‘Kool' from was this TV cigarette commercial. A guy was driving one of them Aston-Martins, like this James Bond car, and his cigarette was right there by the gear shift, white gloves, dark glasses and just driving through the countryside—whoooooo! The girl with him, she reached over to touch his cigarette; and he goes—rrrrrrrrnt! Stops the car, leans over, opens the door, points his finger, tells her, ‘Get out!' And she got out. And the commercial said, ‘Nobody touches my silver-thin.' I was like, wow, that's ‘Kool'! So I picked KOOL.

“Wherever you see UNCLE RICH, you see CLYDE AS KOOL,” he says. “I put a little smiling face in it, the eyes, the nose, and mouth and a little cigarette hanging out, and a little tam on it, like a little Apple Jack's hat.”

Writing brought him into contact with the premier stylists, and he began hanging out with the EX-VANDALS, the legendary supercrew that had begun in Brooklyn and now included SUPER KOOL 223, EL MARKO, STAY HIGH 149 and PHASE 2. As graffiti moved off the walls and onto the subway steel, EL MARKO and SUPER KOOL revolutionized the name game by painting top-to-bottom masterpieces on the train-cars in late 1971 and early 1972. Just as city officials enacted the first in what would become decades of increasingly severe anti-graffiti laws, the great Bronx writer PHASE 2 launched a series of next evolutionary steps, introducing ever more imaginative refinements on the rolling steel canvases.

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

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

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

After the family moved into a brand new apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick, Kool Herc would return to the hotel to frequent the disco downstairs, the Plaza Tunnel. A friend of his from high school named Shaft spun records there, as well as a DJ named John Brown. In gay and Black clubs at the time, DJs were pushing the emerging four-on-the-floor disco beat. But the Plaza Tunnel DJs had a rawer sound. John Brown “was the first to play records like ‘Give it Up or Turn it Loose' by James Brown and ‘Get Ready' by Rare Earth,” pioneering hip-hop journalist Steven Hager wrote. “[‘Get Ready'] was a favorite in the Bronx because it lasted over twenty-one minutes, which was long enough for the serious dancers to get into the beat. They loved to wait for the song's two-minute drum solo to show their most spectacular moves.”
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The dance styles began as elaborations of moves people had seen James Brown doing on TV. Zulu Nation DJ Jazzy Jay, who began as a b-boy says, “You could be dancing with your girl and spin away from her, hit the ground, come back up. It was all about ‘smooth.' Like how James used to slide across the
floor and the fancy footwork and all of that.” They even called it—a hard-won irony—”burning.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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