Can't Stop Won't Stop (28 page)

Bambaataa had hooked up with gearhead and keyboardist virtuoso John Robie, who had a dance single that Bam was playing. Silverman, seeing the obvious, blessed the project and sent the Bam, Baker and Robie to Vanguard Studios in the Village to assemble the record. The final version included only Kraftwerk and Babe Ruth.

This stripped-down result somehow perfectly captured Bambaataa's mystery. “Planet Rock” ‘s polycultural pastiche, framed by swooping, synthesized orchestral stabs, sucked the listener into another world—where dramatic melodies drifted across a barren landscape, “where the nights are hot, where nature's children dance inside a trance,” where everyone could rock it, don't stop it. Not only did it sound unlike anything that had ever come out of the Bronx, it sounded unlike anything else anywhere. “Planet Rock” was hip-hop's universal invitation, a hypnotic vision of one world under a groove, beyond race, poverty, sociology and geography. The Soulsonic Force shouted, “No work or play, our world is free. Be what you be, just be!”

Bambaataa says, “I really made it for the Blacks, Latinos and the punk rockers, but I didn't know the next day that everybody was all into it and dancing. I said, ‘Whoa! This is interesting.' ” Silverman says that the record cost eight hundred dollars to make. It went on to sell 650,000 copies. But its importance would be felt far beyond the number of copies it sold.

“ ‘Planet Rock' had more impact than any record I've ever been involved in,” Silverman says. “The only record I can think of in the hip-hop movement that maybe had more of an impact was ‘Rapper's Delight' because that's the first one that opened the door.
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But ‘Planet Rock' took it in a whole ‘nother way. That was the record that initiated that it wasn't just an urban thing, it was inclusive. It was okay for rockers, new wavers, uptown coming downtown. That's when they started pouring in from France and England to cover hip-hop. That's when hiphop became global.”

When Kool Lady Blue finally found a new home for her “Wheels of Steel” night, her club became the steamy embodiment of the Planet Rock ethos. In Negril, Blue had seen the potential of a model that countered the elitism of the Blitz. To its ecstatic followers, the Roxy would become “a club that changed the world.”
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After getting kicked out of Negril, Blue had done a couple of “Wheels of Steel” nights at Danceteria, another downtown new wave club. But convinced that she was on to something big and magnificent, she fell in love with a huge, nearly block-long roller rink in Chelsea on West 18th Street and Tenth Avenue. The Roxy's capacity was twenty times that of Negril. “I said the Roxy is megabig, I can't see you packing that joint,” says FAB 5 FREDDY. “She said, ‘Well I think we have an idea, we can bring this curtain and cut off more than half of the club.' So she took me to show it to me and I gave her my thumbs up on some shit like that. Then from there it was like, boom!”

In June, Blue hung out a sign at the rink:
COME IN PEACE THROUGH MUSIC
. Her gamble was immaculately timed. She opened the club with all of the scene's leading lights at the beginning of a hot summer when graffiti and b-boying and hip-hop music was on everyone's minds.

For the first few nights, a curtain painted by FUTURA was set in the middle of the floor. Each week, the crowd grew and the curtain moved back toward the wall, until it was literally against the wall. Long lines snaked down West 18th toward
the Hudson. After clearing the bouncers, clubbers stepped up into a long hallway that featured neon-colored graf murals and felt the tricky beats set their hearts to racing. They were stepping into another world.

“The regulars were Bam and Afrika Islam, and then Grandmixer DST, Jazzy Jay, Grand Wizard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and I'd rotate them,” she says. “We had no booth. The DJ would be in the center of the floor on a podium. Everyone could see what he was doing, and he was kind of elevated to rock star status.” On both sides of the DJ, large projection screens displayed Charlie Ahearn's slides of Bronx b-boys, rappers, and scenemakers. Nearby, the Rock Steady Crew convened all-night ciphers on the beautiful blonde wood floors. PHASE 2 designed the club's flyers and he, FUTURA, DOZE and others often did graf pieces live onstage. Here were the four elements, re-presented downtown as performance art on an epic and mythic scale.

FAB 5 FREDDY recalls the turning point as the July night Blue decided to book a screening of McLaren's Sex Pistols movie,
The Great Rock ‘N' Roll Swindle
before the regular opening of the club. “The crowd initially was mostly heads from the scene. The night when it all really mixed I remember vividly,” he says. “[The film] attracted all of these cool punks, white new wave heads, whatever. The film was shown kinda early like around nine. When it was over, a lot of that crowd stayed. And then the crowd for the hip-hop night started to come and I was wondering like, ‘Yo what's gonna happen?' And everybody kinda bugged out looking at each other. You had these ill b-boys with the poses and shit, checking out these kids with the crazy haircuts and that whole vibe. And everybody kinda got into each other, so to speak. That's when it really kinda took off as the first really major downtown club that had like a legitimately mixed scene.”

The East Village elite came west—all the Mudd Club regulars, the Co-Lab activists, bands like the Talking Heads and the B-52s, the come-ups known by a singular name: Basquiat, Haring, Madonna. Blue billed it as the anti–Studio 54. But the stars came anyway, blown in by the winds of change, the promise of something ineffably new and vibrant. David Bowie and Andy Warhol descended from the VIP booth to the join the masses on the dancefloor.

The scene also felt inviting for mainstream whites, like David Hershkovits, a music journalist who would go on to publish
PAPER
magazine. “It was cool, it
wasn't rowdy. And I don't remember it smelling dangerous or anything like that, the way those things eventually turned into,” he says. “What attracted me to it at first was it was a hip-hop thing coming downtown from the Bronx into my neighborhood and mingling with the artists and the writers and the people who were in Manhattan who didn't have any direct contact with hip-hop at the time. The doors were open.

“The crowds were very diverse. That was why I was so excited to be there. Suddenly this racially mixed group was having a good time partying in a room together, which was a very rare thing. On the level of music and art, people were able to bridge all these boundaries.”

He adds, “The other thing that reminds me of those days is the style, because we were coming out of a sloppy era. Punk rock was about wearing torn clothes, T-shirts and just messy. Here you got these guys who would wear their jeans, but they'd be creased and they'd be perfect. And they'd have their sneakers but they'd be completely white. I remember one time I went into the bathroom and I said, ‘What are you doing?' And it was FAB 5 FREDDY and another guy with toothbrushes cleaning their shoes. Here were these guys from the ghettos coming out and showing everyone how to dress, how to be fresh, how to be clean, how to have it together—whether it was the way you did your dance or your graffiti or your rapping or your DJing, it was all style.”

Among the masses on the floor were a new generation of white kids, watching the future rush right up to their shelltoes. Dante Ross, who would become a key hip-hop A & R exec during the late ‘80s, remembers, “I used to go to the Roxy, me and my neighbor Adrock. Me and the Beastie Boys and the girls from Luscious Jackson, we were like the handful of people who got to experience shit while it was still open and ill, before New York was corny and everything was kind of co-opted. The word ‘alternative' didn't exist. It was this great moment, man, the ‘Graffiti Rock' moment. Everything was all mixed up, it was cool to be eclectic.” The music was uptempo, bright—Malcolm McLaren's “Buffalo Gals,” Chuck Brown's “Bustin' Loose,” Manu Dibango's “Soul Makossa,” the Rolling Stones' “Start Me Up,” Aleem's “Release Yourself,” new rap records by FAB 5 FREDDY and PHASE 2—a perfect showcase for the Rock Steady.

Crazy Legs, all of sixteen, was amazed at how far he and his crew had come in three short years. “We were the stars,” he says. “When we had started performing,
we were the people that were at the jams in the Bronx outside the ropes. Now we had become the people that were inside the ropes. Now we had the opportunity to perform with Cold Crush Brothers, Fantastic Five, Grandmaster Flash, Grandmixer D.ST., Funky Four + One, we became part of that elite clique in hip-hop. We thought about that a lot. We were just appreciating the fact that we were at a place where we could be recognized for our skills by all these people we wanted to be.”

“We were just innocently having fun,” he says, “not realizing that we were setting a foundation for what is a multibillion dollar a year industry.”

Charlie Ahearn recalls, “You would go to a night at the Roxy and there would be eight b-boying circles. Girls would be getting laid in the back room by fourteen-year old graffiti artists that couldn't wait to do some blonde. It was all good. A lot of excitement, a lot of energy.”

“Ah man, the Roxy,” sighs DOZE. “Home! That's when the money was rolling and cocaine was flowing!

“I call them Dustland Memories. Fuck Stardust memories, it's Dustland memories!” he laughs. “Just everyone being on zoo-bang, walking around with cocaine wrapped up in newspaper, and just being in the VIP room with Madonna, and Shannon and fucking Jody Watley and fucking Shalamar and all them heads. It was just funny.” He shakes his head at his teen mischief, halfway between pride and sadness.

“You go from the real new waver to the hardcore punk to the b-boy to the stick-up kid b-boy to the Dale Webo fashion boy to the Funhouse Jellybean Benitez look to the Madonna lace-fiend to the wannabe artist
nouveau
bohemian. It was just an eclectic bunch. But it was cool ‘cause everybody got along and you got to meet some real cool chicks. Kinda weird chicks, too. Weird weird weird weird!”

Then he becomes animated. “Crazy shit went on in that place. My mom even went! Ken Swift's mom used to go. Crazy Legs's mom used to go. Yeah! We'd be embarrassed. Like—'Ah Ma! Get outta here, come on!' ‘I'm so proud of you, come here!' We'd be like, ‘Fuuuuck, get outta here!' So we'd hide ‘til they leave, ‘cause parents have to go home early.” He's laughing hard now. “They'd leave, then we'd be like, ‘Yeah! Aiiight! Wassup baby!' ” he laughs, making a high-five, then bending his head as if over a mirror laced with white lines. “Snnnnnooooort! Ahhh. Aiiight!”

Chi Chi Valenti, a downtown personality and sometime host at the Roxy, wrote, “By late 1982, Fridays had become a required stop for visiting journalists and Eurotrash—to be in New York and miss the Roxy was unthinkable. More than anything the Roxy embodied a certain vision of what New York could be—a multiracial center of a world culture, running on a current of flaming, uncompromised youth.”
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Blue tried to match all the artistic ambition with a booking policy that was just as eclectic and innovative. She brought an uptown who's-who to the downtown stage: Double Trouble, the Treacherous Three, the Fearless Four, the Disco Four, The Crash Crew, The Sequence, Masterdon and the Def Committee DJs. In the earliest stages of their careers, New Edition, Madonna and Run DMC stepped onto the Roxy stage. She brought in the Double Dutch girls, and featured a Harlem youth dance troupe and a Brazilian capoeira crew. She even hired Native Americans to perform a sundance.

But as high as the highs were, some of the hip-hop heads were beginning to wonder about what was really going on. Were they being paid fairly? Were they being exploited? Just how did this white downtown crowd really see them? Did being a part of the anti–Studio 54 only mean that the street kids got a chance to sniff coke, too?

Crazy Legs says, “The Roxy could have also been a zoo. People were able to hang out in the cage with us and feel safe from getting beat up or stuck up, as opposed to coming to the Bronx, coming to a jam. It's like they were allowed to hang out in the cage and party with the animals, you know? It was a safe haven for a lot of people. But on the flip side, it was also us getting into places that we never thought we could get into. So there was an exchange there.”

He concludes, “I'm not gonna sit here and act like, ‘Oh wow, it was so great back then!' There were things—that was also the beginning of us getting jerked. I'm not bitter about it. I'm over that. But that's a reality.”

Outside the floating world of the Roxy, Reagan's recession had bloated unemployment levels to the highest levels since the Great Depression—30 million searching for work.
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The official Black unemployment rate hit 22 percent.
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Poverty rates were soaring too. Black poverty hit a twenty-five-year peak in 1983, with 36 percent of the population counted as living below the poverty
level. It was much worse for young people. One estimate was that only one in five New York City teens had a job, only one in ten African Americans, the lowest ratios of youth employment in the country.
⁸

After dark, DJs cut up Trouble Funk's “Pump Me Up,” with its ironic command for people to dance their troubles away: “All we want to see is your body work!” But the Roxy night always opened into a Reagan morning that was much more than a comedown. “The Message,” released just weeks after the Roxy opened, was a downtempo track that perfectly captured that after-dawn crash when the buzz wore off.

It was credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but the story behind that naming revealed other tensions as well. The song was a home-studio concoction of Sugar Hill songwriter and house band percussionist Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher, featuring a memorable synthesizer hook from Jiggs Chase, that seemed to bear the influence of Peter Tosh's “Stepping Razor” and Black Uhuru's
Red
. Bootee and Sugar Hill mogul Sylvia Robinson could not interest Flash in recording it. He and the rappers felt the song had no energy, that the lyrics would get them booed offstage by their hardcore fans. You went to a party to forget about shit like this.