MO' META Blues Part 5

The majority of this was stuff I had to listen to in the bas.e.m.e.nt, while I practiced drums. I couldn't play it outright. The Prince performance was on TV and I snuck down and recorded it off the set onto a ca.s.sette.

... Deniece Williams, "Black b.u.t.terfly"; Sheila E., "Shortberry Strawcake"; UTFO, "Roxanne Roxanne"; Prince, "I Would Die 4 U/Baby I'm a Star (Video Version/Live in DC)"; Diana Ross, "Telephone"; Jermaine Jackson, "Come to Me (One Way or Another)"; Glamour Girls feat. M.C. Craig G, "Oh! Veronica"; The Beastie Boys, "Party's Getting Rough/Beastie Groove"...

1985: Jesse Johnson, Jesse Johnson's Revue

Prince's development during the mid-eighties was interesting, and not always satisfying to his hardcore fans. He wanted to be a star, but when he had his big breakthrough with 1999, it turned out that wasn't enough. He wanted to be a movie star, but when he conquered the film world with Purple Rain, it turned out that wasn't enough. He wanted to be a celebrated, universally loved singer-songwriter. He wanted to beat the Beatles at their own game. Around the World in a Day was his bid. I dug it. I loved it. I actually loved the B sides and twelve-inch singles more. But I also missed the straight, stripped-down Minneapolis funk, and that's why I gravitated toward Jesse Johnson's first record.

Extended Playlist

I went to California to visit relatives, and that is where I heard "Batterram" by Toddy Tec. It was West Coast hip-hop, a regional hit, and when I got home no one had heard it and no one cared.

... Schooly D, "P.S.K."; Toddy Tee, "Batterram"; Doug E. Fresh, "The Show"; Stevie Wonder and the Huxtables, "Jammin' on the One"; Sting, "We Work the Black Seam"; The Family, "Susannah's Pajamas"; Jesse Johnson's Revue, "Can You Help Me (Extended Version)"; Fishbone, "Modern Industry"; Sheila E., "Yellow"...

1986: Janet Jackson, Control

At some point, my mom let me join Columbia House Record and Tape Club, which meant that I could get a dozen records for a penny, which meant that lots of questionable pop and adult contemporary started to enter the picture, from Anita Baker's Rapture to Debbie Gibson's Out of the Blue. Some of it was okay: I was actually not mad at the first record by the Jets-to this day, I will say that "Curiosity" was one of the best Prince-cut songs that he never got to write for any of his female foils. And then there's Control. From a creative standpoint, I preferred Prince and the Revolution's Parade, but I will admit that Control was the standard-bearer of mid-eighties funk. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were fired from The Time and had gotten their revenge. And I was a Janet fan. I had her self-t.i.tled first record, which is a boogie cla.s.sic, and Dream Street. I DJed for her three times, and she just s.h.i.+t when I put on "He Doesn't Know I'm Alive," which is one of the few songs from that record that didn't become a hit. I wasn't doing it to shock her or anything-I wanted to show her that she was important to me, that I remember when she sang "The Magic Is Working" on Diff'rent Strokes. In a way, that's the best thing about having achieved a measure of fame: I can be near the people whose work I love. I can be a superfan with the best seat in the house.

Extended Playlist

I bought songs after this and taped them off the radio. I loved songs. But it was a little different after this-high school, peer pressure, hip-hop radio. After this it was more of an apprentices.h.i.+p, less innocent. So I'm going to end the extended playlists here.

... Prince and the Revolution, "Alexa De Paris"; The Beastie Boys, "Paul Revere"; Sade, "War of the Hearts"; The Jets, "Curiosity"; Oran "Juice" Jones, "The Rain"; Run-DMC, "Peter Piper"; Peter Gabriel, "This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds)"; Luther Vandross, "So Amazing"...

CHAPTER SIX

What's the single most influential moment in the history of hip-hop?

It's not an alb.u.m release. It's not a video. It's not a concert tour. To my mind, hip-hop was changed forever by the episode of The Cosby Show in which Stevie Wonder's driver crashes into Denise and Theo. Why do I say that this episode changed hip-hop forever? Simple: it was the first time that 99 percent of us who went on to be hip-hop producers saw what a sampler was. Go look at the episode, you can find it on YouTube or Netflix. At one point Theo says "jammin' on the one," and before you knew it, Stevie Wonder had sampled it and inserted it into a song. It's not an exaggeration to say that this episode was the incident that truly sucked me into hip-hop production. It was the first time I saw anything like that, and I've surveyed the rest. It was the first time J Dilla saw a sampler. It was the first time Just Blaze saw a sampler. There wasn't a sense yet that it was truly revolutionary, in the critical sense, that it would explode old ideas of structure, sign, and play. At that point, it was just something cool on a sitcom, and in response to it, in awe of it, an entire generation of talented, ambitious black kids leaned forward in their chairs to the point of falling out.

And then, on the heels of that, fantasy became reality. The Casio equivalent of that keyboard, the SK-1, came out right around that time. There was a TV commercial with a clean-cut suburban kid in his bedroom, playing some kind of New Orleans jazz on his little keyboard. Suddenly, he has a brainstorm: he'll include his dog Rufus in his music. The dog barks while he presses the record b.u.t.ton on the keyboard and then, just like that, as if by magic, the keyboard barks back. The dog is shocked and possibly impressed. "You know, Rufus," the kid says. "This could be a single." It couldn't, but still, by mid-1987 that keyboard was what every music kid wanted for Christmas. I was one of the lucky few who got what he wanted. You know that feeling when you're young, the moment when you realize what present is inside the box, and you have to make a choice between covering up your mild disappointment and covering up your insane enthusiasm? I had to cover up my insane enthusiasm. I am not sure I succeeded. If it happened now, I might be one of those kids on YouTube shrieking and running in circles around the room until exhaustion got the better of me.

I was still drumming, mostly, but when I got that keyboard, it changed my life. In retrospect, it was mainly a conversation piece. You could record yourself saying "s.h.i.+t" and then play it back in every key. But that exercise was more than trivial. Much later in life, I had a friend who tried to explain Roland Barthes to me; not all of it, of course, but that one little principle about how a text is not a unified thing, but a fragmentary or divisible thing, and that the reader is the one who divides it up, arbitrarily. Reading is the act that creates the pieces. I wasn't totally sure I understood it-I'm still not sure-but it sounded like what was happening with the SK-1. You, as the listener, pick a piece of sound, a snippet of speech, or a drumbeat, and you separate that from everything around it. That's now a brick that you have in your hand, and you use it to build a new wall. It also lets you take things that were transparent, that were previously thought of as words and sounds that you look through to see other words, and make them opaque. You can take the invisible and make them visible. This was especially useful to me, because I wasn't the kind of kid who listened to the obvious parts of songs. Take Prince's 1999 (again). When I first listened to it as a kid, I fixated on songs like "Something in the Water Does Not Compute," with its crazy drum programming and dissonant chords, or "Lady Cab Driver," where the snare drum is played live but the rest is programmed. I played the record constantly, but more often than not I found myself drawn into the more experimental material over on side 2, all the while ignoring the fact that what made 1999 a cultural phenomenon was the trip of huge hits that kicked off side 1: the t.i.tle track, "Little Red Corvette," "Delirious."

And I was like that long before 1999. As a child, my parents noticed that when I listened to songs, I never focused on the obvious melody or the lead singer. I almost seemed deaf to what was out in the front of the mix. I was searching for a part of the song that was buried, a rare treasure that no one else knew about. The SK-1 was just a toy, but it was perfect for bringing with me on those kinds of expeditions.

When I figured out the SK-1, I became the man to Tariq. He had started down his path as a lyricist, though maybe that's overstating the case a bit. He wasn't exactly writing, but he had developed his reputation at the cool-kids table as a dozens player without compare. He would sit back and coolly dissect everyone else with a quick wit and deadly aim. Somehow, from talking trash with the guys and messing around with the girls, he evolved into a kind of verbal athlete. I remember one kid whose sneaker sole flapped around loosely. Tariq told the kid that his shoes were talking, and then, before you knew it, the talking-shoes insult became a rhyme. There's a clip of the Roots online where we're in an alleyway. I point at random objects and Tariq invents a rhyme on the spot. Sink, fish, bolt-whatever I give him becomes a brilliant freestyle verse. It's gotten some currency online as proof of his talent, and it was certainly a moment where he was in the zone. But for me, I don't need that as proof: I go right back to CAPA in 1988, watching Tariq dismantle kids at the lunch table, to the point where other guys wanted to fight him. I saw the power of words wielded in that way. He was amazing.

And as amazed as I was by his verbal dexterity, that's how amazed he was by my prowess with the SK-1. Before me, they would back him by tapping out a lunch-table rhythm. Then suddenly there I was with a James Brown sample, and what was a casual game a moment before became a kind of performance. So I started to pa.s.sive-aggressively inch my way into the cool-kids circle. Soon, they were asking me for backing tracks. Tariq might ask me if I could do "Top Billin' " by Audio Two, and I'd run from the eighth-floor cafeteria all the way down to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where the studio was, where I could drum out the beat. They wouldn't let you use the elevator, so I went down the stairs, out of breath, played the break beat from "Top Billin'," put it in the SK-1, and ran back upstairs, only to find out that Tariq had changed his mind and that now he wanted Busy Bee's "Suicide." The next day, maybe, he'd want Big Daddy Kane's "Wrath of Kane," and I'd have to run down to the studio room and get it ready. Soon enough, that was my job-and I was working in a growth industry, because Tariq was battling everyone. People started coming by with prepared rhymes and he'd take them on one by one. He mowed them down over my beats.

At the time, I didn't think we were starting anything. I thought we were just local dozens specialists. Part of the reason for that was my father already had a plan worked out for me. He wanted me to focus in orchestra cla.s.s so that I could go to the Curtis Inst.i.tute of Music in Philly, or even Julliard, in New York. His dream was that I'd call him from the road and tell him I was playing session drums for Luther Vandross or Anita Baker. He knew Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, the legendary session drummer who played with James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Steely Dan and hundreds of other artists, and whenever we ran into him on the road, my dad called Bernard over to tell me "how he keeps food on the table." Bernard simply said, "The two and the four."

Once again, things ascended to the next level because of a girl. Her name was Amel Larrieux, and she ended up having a Top Ten hit, "Tell Me," a bit later with her group Groove Theory. But at the time, she was just a beautiful, kind girl in high school. She was like an unattainable golden girl. One day, we were waiting in lines for tokens-much of my life seems to have happened on or near the token line-and she was talking about Prince's Parade. I got in on that conversation, because I was a card-carrying Prince expert, and the conversation evolved into a discussion of student groups. Suddenly I heard words coming out of my own mouth. "I got a group," I said. "Yeah. With Tariq."

"Oh?" she said. Her posture changed in a way I liked. "Are you going to do the talent show?"

I looked around and took a quick breath. "We're going to do it. Sure."

And so I was trapped.

Later that day, I ran into Tariq. Remember that at this point we had no real relations.h.i.+p. We knew each other well, but I was just the kid who got him samples. My mind was running full-speed, trying to figure out how I could break the news that I had lied to Amel about this group he and I supposedly had together, and I wasn't really listening. When I brought him into focus, though, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. His playful arch-nemesis at the time was a guy named Wanya Morris, and he had a singing group that was always practicing in the bathroom. Tariq was fuming. "Wanya ain't going to take [enter Jawn's name here] away from me," he said. "Let's start a group." Wanya's singing group, by the way, enjoyed some success a few years later. You may have heard of them: Boyz II Men.

So we had the beginnings of the beginnings of the idea, and then I had to flesh it out. My first trip was to the jazz kids. Other high schools are dominated by jocks, or by student government, or by cheerleaders. CAPA was dominated by jazz kids. But even within that group, there were two distinct camps. On the one hand, we had kids like Christian McBride, who played ba.s.s, and Joey DeFrancesco, who played organ and trumpet. They were traditionalists who believed that jazz had entered a fallow phase thanks to fusion and that it needed to be rescued by purer figures like Wynton Marsalis. On the other side, there were kids like Kurt Rosenwinkel, self-styled outsiders who argued that Wynton's music was retrograde, the kind of "Salt Peanuts" bebop that had no place in the world anymore, and that the future belonged to iconoclastic rock experimentalists like Frank Zappa. The two groups were Bloods and Crips, in a way, but they were united by a common hatred for hip-hop. So here I came, wading into the middle of that divide, to ask them if they would be a backing band for me and Tariq at the talent show. It wasn't an easy sell, though I could con McBride into playing a loop from "Get on the Good Foot" by James Brown without telling him that it would be a sample from a hip-hop song.

And so that was our live band for the talent show. Tariq and I played our first pre-Roots gig, as Radio Activity, on Valentine's Day of 1989. I'm not sure I saw a future in it, but I saw a present in it. And the jury's still out on whether or not it impressed my future prom date, Amel.

When I graduated high school in 1989, my plan for myself was essentially my father's: to go on to Julliard or to the New School for Music, to continue to learn theory and arranging, to make my way as a professional musician. But I couldn't afford it, and I settled into a kind of limbo in Philly. I was taking courses with Joe Nero, who was the head of percussion at the University of the Arts. He was keeping my chops sharp. I enrolled in a program called the Philadelphia Settlement Music School, which was one of the largest community-based continuing-education programs in the country. Other alumni of the Settlement Music School included Chubby Checker and, if you can believe it, Albert Einstein-he played the violin in chamber groups-though I obviously didn't take cla.s.ses with either of those guys. (Too bad, really: I could have learned how to dance from Chubby and copied off Einstein's tests.) I was living at home and when I worked, it was for my father, who paid me about $200 per gig. I had a normal job, briefly, selling death and dismemberment insurance. It was not very much fun. But in my mind, whatever I was doing was still pointing me toward the ultimate goal of Julliard.

At the same time, I sensed there was a new culture coming together and going strong. On a family trip to California in the summer of 1990 I stood in line for what must have been six hours just to get into The a.r.s.enio Hall Show. All of the celebrities I saw going in and out of the studio got my attention-I saw Sheryl Lee Ralph drive by the corner, and I saw Warren Beatty, who was a guest that night-not to mention the fact that the music they were playing, Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted and A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, was confirmation that a new generation of hip-hop had truly been set in motion. There was a Warner Brothers representative giving out prizes to the people who were waiting in line. I got the Time's "Jerk Out" single, which was a huge surprise to me. I didn't even know that they had reunited. To this day, whenever I drive down Sunset toward Gower, I make a right turn and then two lefts rather than simply turning left into Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles heaven. My reason for taking the scenic route never makes sense to anyone I'm with, but it does to me: I'm paying tribute to a.r.s.enio and to the show and to everything that it represented about pop culture, and black culture, and hip-hop culture, and my memories. And to "Jerk Out."

But that California trip was just a flash in the eye of that year. The rest of the time, I hung in purgatory, playing talent shows and showcases here and there, living like a normal teenager in Philadelphia. Or maybe I should say living like a normal black teenager, which meant that aimlessness was accompanied by a certain unique set of risks. One night, I was out driving with a few friends of mine when the police pulled us over. We were told we fit the description of someone who had committed a robbery or stolen a car, though I don't really know what kind of description that could have been: three black kids in a Hyundai blasting U2's Joshua Tree on their way back from Bible study? The officer actually drew a gun. I was terrified. The worst part of all was that when I saw the police in the rearview mirror, I started thinking that maybe I had stolen the car. I don't know what the psychological phenomenon is called, exactly, but when you encircle someone with suspicion, the idea of guilt just starts to appear within them. It was a terrible feeling and it's a terrible process, and it was another reminder that the life I was leading, while superficially uneventful, had the potential to turn against me at any moment.

All the while I was hoping that something was going to happen with Tariq, with the music career we so desperately wanted. During those years, Tariq's afterschool job was was.h.i.+ng dishes at Pizzeria Uno. He would work until closing, from ten until three in the morning, and then he'd go home, grab a few hours of sleep, and try to make it back for the opening bell of school. At some point, like many young black men of his generation, he decided to explore various aspects of recreational drug culture. One day he was out on the corner with the wrong kind of guy, and one of his uncles drove by and saw him standing there. That uncle went instantly to his grandmother, who called another uncle to drive down to the corner and grab Tariq. An hour later he was packing a bag, and the next day he was on a plane to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to live with some rich relative. He got Fresh Princed. I didn't know that he had gone to Michigan. I was minding my own business, literally, working in insurance. But I found out soon enough.

These days, I'm one of the go-to guys when someone wants something done musically in Philly, when they want a band for a big public event or a youth music program. At the time, the guy was Bill Jolly, who had a trademark piano-patterned scarf. He had a studio in his bas.e.m.e.nt and he charged about seventy-five dollars an hour, and Tariq and I would go down there and loop beats or put down vocals. The money, for the most part, came from my insurance career-whatever I made went directly to paying for sessions. The day after Tariq's misadventure, we had a session booked, and I went over to Tariq's house and waited for him. He didn't show. Eventually his grandma looked up at me and said "Tariq's gone."

"What?" I said. "What do you mean? He went on ahead to the recording session?"

"No," she said. "Gone. He's in Detroit."

I went directly home and collapsed. I was devastated. I had been counting on my life with Tariq, even in this germinal form, to deliver me from a life of being a session musician or an insurance salesman. My father wasn't entirely sympathetic. "Serves you right," he said. "I never liked that rap stuff, anyway."

And just like that, a year went by. I continued working in insurance. I went to jazz and composition cla.s.ses at Settlement. Other than that, there was nothing. Tariq and I talked every once in a while, but he wasn't exactly forthcoming about what was happening in his life, and neither was I. It might be strange for other people to hear that, but it's the way things have always been between us, and especially for him. It took our first Rolling Stone feature for me to really find out how his father died. He had been part of the Black Mafia, a crime organization that grew out of the Nation of Islam that was responsible for lots of the South Philly and Germantown drug trade. He was murdered when Tariq was just a baby-the same thing that would happen to Tariq's mother when we were in high school. His life, which was surrounded by crime and violence, was so fundamentally different from mine that it created a kind of attraction. We were like negative images, each of us seeing something in the other they had never seen before. I saw this kid living on the edge, dabbling in all the dangerous areas of urban life. He saw an awkward black kid with an optimistic outlook, a sheltered Christian devoted to clean living, naive about girls, not really able to partic.i.p.ate in thug life at any level. At the same time, I saw his sensitive side and he saw that I had a hidden self-confidence and self-possession. In that sense, it was a perfect kind of sibling relations.h.i.+p. To my parents, though, he was a liability. Tariq loved them. He enjoyed my mom's cooking and the affection he got from them; when my mom would hug him, he would light up. But he was the first person I ever brought home who had anything remotely "street" about him. Most of my other friends were white dudes or, if they were black, other musicians. When he was gone, I missed him, but I also felt like a part of me was missing.

And then the wheel turned again. Someone in the neighborhood where he was living went after him. She was a troubled teenager, apparently, and the pressure of having extra people around was too much for her. She attacked Tariq with some kind of weapon and he came right back to Philly, where he enrolled at Germantown High School. I was two years older and well out of school by this point, but we were back in the same city again, back in the same band again, and that was enough for me.

In 1992, I heard about a scholars.h.i.+p program at the New School for Music. I went to New York to apply and audition, and Tariq came with me. On the way back on the train, we started talking to a girl. "Hey," she said. "You look like that kid from the commercial." I knew what she meant immediately; there was a Spike Lee commercial that featured a street musician named Chocolate who played buckets as percussion instruments.

The next day, Tariq and I were watching Soul Train and that commercial came on. We sat there, staring at the guy that the girl thought I was. And then, all of a sudden, Tariq had a moment of irrational bravery. "Hey," he said. "Why don't we just do it?" The second he spoke, the whole idea came spilling out of him. Meet me on South Street at five, he said. You bring the pots and pans, he said, and I'll bring my grandmother's chitlin' bucket, and we'll play. It was Greek Week in 1992, and we set up on Pa.s.syunk Square, and he was freestyling, and I was playing. We had a crowd right away. It was a busking trick, but a great one: we were recycling great break beats and giving the people top-notch spontaneous lyrics. You could see it in their faces-they were getting something they weren't expecting and it had value to them. That's the seed of any entertainment, and their energy energized us.

The cops eventually stopped us, but in the nicest way possible. "You can't make noise here," one of them said. "But-word to the wise-if you come back at a different time, like noon, we let street musicians play."

We thanked them, but when we counted our take for the day, we had eighty bucks, or forty each. Our goals at that time were pretty modest: we wanted to have enough cash to go down to Wawa and get a quarter pound of honey-roasted turkey, a quarter pound of pepper-jack cheese, iced tea or lemonade, and a roll. If you got that for yourself and for a girl, that was date money. Forty dollars of cash in your pocket was more than enough. You could really take a girl out.

I went back to Settlement Music School, flush with cash, thrilled with my good fortune, and ended up telling the story of our South Street score to a ba.s.s player named Josh Abrams. "That sounds dope," he said. "Are you going to try again next week? Can I join up?"

The next week, Josh came to pick me up in his station wagon and I walked out the front door with my buckets. "Hey," he said. He was looking at me funny. "What's up with that bucket? Why don't you bring your real drums?"

"My dad would kill me," I said.

"Is your dad home?" he asked. I shook my head. "When is he coming back?"

"Around midnight," I said.

"Well," he said. "We have to stop playing at six, right? We'll have everything back in order by the time he's back. He'll never know a thing. Get your drums."

I was a sucker for logic. We snuck out of the house and loaded my drums into Josh's station wagon. My father wouldn't have understood. He thought hip-hop was one big nothing, a bunch of nonmusical nut-grabbing. And he sure didn't think much of Tariq at the time. In a way, it was understandable. My dad was old-school to the extreme. He had undergone this extended education in the business, learning to clean his suede and to cut light gels and to adjust monitors and to count his cash before the show. As far as he was concerned, he had spent years busting his a.s.s so that I could go to a private music school and then a private Christian academy. He was getting me the best education that he could so that I could go on to become Bernard Purdie, not so that I could stand on stage while my punk friend said, "b.i.t.c.h, suck my d.i.c.k."