MO' META Blues Part 6

With the drums loaded in Josh's station wagon, off we went to South Street. We were beginning to be something. Over the next few months, a group coalesced around us, people who would come and watch us all the time and sometimes even partic.i.p.ate. For example, there was a kid named Kenyatta, a cla.s.smate of Tariq's from Germantown High we called Crumbs. He wasn't a great MC, but he had youthful energy, and he was a regular, and we took him on. We were inspired by the Native Tongues collective and their idea of a broader ident.i.ty that hangs over all the individual acts and unites them. By the fifth week out there, we even had a name for that overarching umbrella, too: the Foreign Objects. It was mostly playacting, I guess, the idea of thinking of a band name and a name for the group that united all the acts in your orbit, but it also kept the idea real, and that's what we needed more than anything. If the idea was real, then there was the chance that the thing inside the idea would one day become real.

Around that time, we met Joe Simmons, who went by the name AJ s.h.i.+ne. Joe was our hero, Philadelphia's Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia all rolled into one. He had a local college radio show called "The Avenue" on WKDU that we listened to religiously, because it was one of the only places in Philly that you could hear rap music.

Joe came to one of our shows, and then a few weeks later he came back and brought his partner, a guy named Richard Nichols. I already knew Rich, although I didn't know that I knew him. When we would finish our South Street sets, which went from noon to five, we sort through our money and find that we had acquired a half-dozen business cards offering us more gigs. Sometimes it was a young woman wanting us to play her poetry slam; sometimes it was an African-American group wanting us to come over to UPenn. Sometimes it was a big kegger at Drexel. So we spun our afternoon South Street sets into nighttime shows, and when those shows ended-or, in the case of the Drexel keggers, when the cops busted them up-we would drive over to Wawa for turkey and pepper-jack cheese, and then drive around at night listening to the radio. What was on then was a super-experimental, super outre jazz show called "Jazz 90." The DJ was this guy who would play the craziest s.h.i.+t imaginable-a half-hour improvisation by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the most outlandish Sun Ra s.p.a.ce jazz, violent spurts of saxophone. But I didn't know the DJ in person at all, so when Joe Simmons came to our show with his partner, Rich, I had no idea that I was meeting the guy from "Jazz 90." I had even less idea that I was meeting the guy from my future.

CHAPTER SEVEN

From: Ben Greenman [cowriter]

To: Ben Greenberg [editor]

Re: Refining the approach

No. I wouldn't necessarily say that the book is coming into better focus, though I would say that my excitement over the nature of the blurriness is increasing.

But yeah, to answer your question, Rich and Ahmir do play off each other well, but they also play on each other. Sometimes it seems like Rich is a voice in Ahmir's head, a correction or an echo, and sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes they remember the same event in exactly the same way, and sometimes their accounts are pretty divergent. It's intellectual and cultural isometrics, creating strength by pitting one set of muscles against another. At one point the other day, Rich mentioned something about how he used to go into his older brother's room and listen to Stevie Wonder records on his brother's stereo. But with Rich, because of the way he's wired, the conversation immediately took a turn into the nature of art in memory and memory in art. He went on to say that he listened to those same records in different circ.u.mstances over the years-maybe in the car driving, or on the tour bus with the Roots-and that the second and third and fourth occurrences didn't reinforce those original feelings and emotions so much as they eroded them. He was going a mile a minute, like he does, but at one point a silence swelled the line and Rich said, "As you get older, feelings are harder to come by." It was so simple and poignant.

That stark reflection on memory, by the way, came in the middle of one of those triathlete-level phone calls that always surprise me because they start the way that any other phone call starts. I dial the previously agreed upon number at the previously agreed upon time. He answers. I say hi. He says hi. But then, before you know it, there's an epic disquisition that winds through hip-hop, unemployment, unskilled labor, youth culture, regional ident.i.ty, market research, post-structuralist theory, doc.u.mentaries on industry, and the history of political subversion in Russia in the late nineteenth century. I was scared to look at the clock because I was sure that the hands had fallen off. Then, the very next day, with that conversation still ringing in my ears, Rich sent a quick, compact email in which he let me know that Ahmir was skeptical of the book becoming too straightforward a memoir, but that he (Rich) also thought he (Ahmir) would come to terms with it eventually because "I" (Rich) told him that "you" (me) were building in dialogues that would situate the more memoiristic material in a broader context. The day after that he (Rich) wrote to say that he (Rich) wondered if his dialogues with him (Ahmir) were yielding diminis.h.i.+ng returns, and that he (Rich) had another idea for how to enter his (Ahmir's) line of vision. Not for nothing, that email also contained jokes about and/or allusions to Quentin Tarantino, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ishmael Reed, Henry Ford, and the Petrashevsky Circle.

CHAPTER EIGHT

So what happened with "Jazz 90"?

Well the station was WRTI. It was Temple University's public Radio Station, which had an all-jazz format. Its location on the dial was 90.1 so sometimes peeps called it The Point (deep huh?) or simply Jazz 90. My show didn't have a handle. It just sort of was: it was an avant-leaning, stream-of-consciousness, Jazz tradition-ing, sleight-of-hand thing. The music director at that time was Steve Rowland, a tall, affable, intellectual Jewish guy who people would consistently mistake as a light-skinned black dude. Three slots had just opened and he recruited me, the visual artist Homer Jackson, and Ludwig Van Tricht. (Believe it or not, Ludwig was a n.i.g.g.a. His pop was from Suriname and Ludwig looked like Alexandre Dumas or maybe like a black Count of Monte Cristo or some s.h.i.+t, but he was a real dude and fellow admirer of the jazz avant-garde). Homer was still in art school, sported a ragged, deconstructed afro, and could often be found going off the top about Gabby Marquez or the Marquis de Sade or Foucault or Fanon or the like. There was also Miyos.h.i.+ Smith, who, while not an on-the-air person, was every bit a member of our collective (maybe more so than us even). So that was my inside-outside crew. Our mission: to rage against the machinations of conventional wisdom and culture. Ironically, conventional wisdom/culture raged against us. I quit the station in 1990 (the crew's last man out/dead man walking). This dude from the Midwest took over and showed us how they got down in Missouri. He had everything programmed by computer and he told me that I had to follow the computer. "I'm not gonna do that," I said, which he seemed to take well for a little while, but then he started telling me that I had to vary my show. Mine was a real DJ-driven show. If I wanted to play only Cecil Taylor from 12:00 to 12:28 on a Sunday, I would. He wanted me to do more programming, and I remember he had one question for me, which was, "If you have to play Mel Torme in some specific time slot, would you play it?" My answer was no. I'm not going to f.u.c.king play it ever. I'll play Lambert, Hendricks and Ross as a one-off, but that's about as far as I'm going to f.u.c.king go. What's the point in being here if you have to follow a computer? What is this, a f.u.c.king Turing test in reverse?

So you left.

I left. And pretty soon I started hanging out with Joe Simmons, who was over at WKDU. (Jazz had seen its better days and now hip-hop was all grown up and s.h.i.+t.) One night, Joe went to a talent show at Prince's Lounge. He came back and told me that there was something interesting there: a drummer, an upright ba.s.s player, and a guy rapping. The guy on the ba.s.s played the Inspector Gadget theme. He was excited by them, and the way he talked about them piqued my interest. A month later he invited me to come along with him to a local spot called The Chestnut Cabaret to see these "wunderkinds." So we went, but the affectless black "electric" ba.s.sist who was there was clearly not the inspired white "acoustic" guy Joe had described. The vocalist was spitting some rappering s.h.i.+t, railing against Kriss Kross of all f.u.c.king groups. I remember the chorus was "don't jump, don't jump, don't jump" (geez). If the s.h.i.+t wasn't so absurd I would have simply been disappointed. As it stood... I was mildly amused.

We came backstage, I remember.

To explain to me and to Joe that the ba.s.sist wasn't your regular guy, that he was off at college and would be back on break in October. On the way home, I asked Joe, "Uh, are you sure these guys are cool?" He was sure, and I decided that we might as well record a song. I had a relations.h.i.+p with the studio. If the Squares sucked I would have simply wasted a hundred and fifty bucks. So then the three of you came to the studio in the suburbs in Bensalem. There were two songs, "Anti-Circle" and "Pa.s.s the Popcorn," along with a "Pa.s.s the Popcorn" remix. It wasn't rocket science. We recorded it and added a keyboard overdub. And I remember thinking to myself, "These motherf.u.c.kers are all right." It was different, not quite there but nonetheless approaching inspired. And we went the next day and mixed it.

And then Tariq asked you to manage us?

Nah, that was months and months later, but I do remember him asking me some point-blank s.h.i.+t. I was driving him home after the mix and, like it was directed to no one in particular, he said, "I heard about you. You've worked with a bunch of rappers." I didn't bother to respond, it felt like a setup. Then he blurted out, "We're the best d.a.m.n group you ever worked with, aren't we?" At first, I was a little thrown off by his blatant hubris, but after I thought about it for a couple of seconds, I said yeah. "You guys are the best, but at best that's a dubious distinction." Things evolved from there, and there were shows and shows that begot other shows that begot other shows. I liked the early recordings a lot but the peeps that I let hear the s.h.i.+t were fairly dismissive and the whole "dubious distinction" thing seemed firmly in effect. The show, on other hand, was frenetic, a revisionist yet progressive affair. At once homage and karaoke, it had this proto-hip-hop-revue thing that was consistently working. Even the patrons who initially looked askance at the band ended the set as part of the nod factor. And what was success, anyway? In many ways, I was still using the jazz avant-garde model as an approach to financial success on the fringe. As a younger man I used to help out with concerts in the Philly area. My job, among other things, was to drive to New York and pick up the artists. I remember going to get Lester Bowie. He lived in a nice place. His floors were sh.e.l.lacked. They had African sculpture. His wife had a minivan. I would see Lester playing at the Empty Foxhole and there would be maybe thirty people in there smoking reefer, and somehow he managed to get enough money to keep a wife and a minivan. That was my entire sense of things at that point. I never thought the Roots would really get on the radio, at least not then (and now not ever). Industry types thought the Roots brand to be some unstructured freestyle-based s.h.i.+t. All heart on empty sleeves. It didn't matter to me, really (well, maybe it really did). I still dug it because I knew there was something there (even if that something was an afterthought).

So you knew that we were-

You know what? I've said too much.

About what?

About my own life. If you don't want this to be a straightforward account of your life, I'm sure as f.u.c.k that no one wants it to be any kind of account of mine.

So you're just going to leave the book?

No. I'll keep going, but I'm tired of being here, in bold type, like this. It's too straightforward when I want to be coming from the blind spot. It's too flat-footed when I want to be arch.

CHAPTER NINE

What were we before we were the Roots?

Lots of things. For our very first gig, at the high-school talent show, we were Radio Activity, but that name had a short life-or a short half-life, as the case may be. (That will be the first and last radioactivity joke in this book.) After that, we went into seclusion briefly and reemerged as Black to the Future. Then directly back into seclusion, and then back into the light as Square Roots. Each of the names came from Tariq. He would just show up to practice or to South Street and announce that we weren't who we were anymore. Each of the names had something to do with the hip-hop that was dominant at the time. Radio Activity reflected his two Queensbridge idols, Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap, because G Rap had said were "radio-activated" once. Black to the Future came around in 1989, at the height of Do the Right Thinginfluenced Afrocentricity. And then we settled into the Native Tongues groove, which is where we probably most belonged from the start, with Square Roots. It sounded nerdy, which (let's be honest) was clearly what we were at the time. I felt that was an accurate portrait of us. It fit.

The way we arrived at our name was representative of how we operated generally at that time, from the outside in, trying to find a package that made sense. Much of our time and trouble was spent figuring out what kind of act we were. I knew I wanted a record deal, but I wasn't sure that I wanted that record deal to center on our live act. I knew that we'd almost immediately be compared to A Tribe Called Quest, because we had the same sensibility, give or take, and I wanted to make sure that we distinguished ourselves.

To get a clear sense of who we were at that time, it's important to look at who we weren't: in other words, to s.h.i.+ne a light on the Philly music scene of the early nineties. It was more than a little strange, a bit of a crazy quilt. The biggest phenomenon at that time-and they had such popularity in Philadelphia that it's not inaccurate to say that they rose to local Beatles status-was Boyz II Men. Tariq and I knew the guys from the group, Wanya and Nathan Morris, Shawn Stockman, and Michael McCary. They had been our cla.s.smates at CAPA, and in fact I'm in their very first video, for "Motown Philly," which was a Top Five hit in January of 1991. I have a prominent solo shot wearing a T-s.h.i.+rt so distinctive that Tariq liked to insist that I wore it just so people would notice. It worked, and then some. People would say, "I know that s.h.i.+rt from somewhere... Oh, my G.o.d. It's you." Boyz II Men went so big so fast that even being a minor figure in that video made me recognizable.1

Beyond them, the Philly scene was eclectic, to say the least. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince had released "Parents Just Don't Understand" back in 1988, and then Will Smith went off to television to do The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in the fall of 1990. By the time they had their biggest hit, "Summertime," in 1991, it didn't even seem like Philadelphia music any more, not really. It was Hollywood music born of Philadelphia. Then there was Schoolly D, who many people believe to be the first gangster rapper; he had released some cla.s.sic music, like Sat.u.r.day Night! The Alb.u.m in 1987, that had the spa.r.s.e beats, the obnoxious comedy. The Beastie Boys owe their first three years to him. There was Three Times Dope, a great early hip-hop group led by EST, whose real name was Rob Walker. He had the best rap voice and was the standard of straight hip-hop in the city. Then there were MCs like Steady B and Cool C. They imitated Philadelphia drug dealers and they did it very convincingly-the two of them tried to rob a bank in 1996, and Cool C shot and killed a police officer. He's on death row, and Steady B is serving a life sentence.

So that was the world we were trying to break into, and to our eyes it all seemed kind of provincial. We were looking outward, to De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, who were New York bands but, more importantly, Native Tongues bands. We brought that into Philadelphia, which meant that we dressed up in khakis from Banana Republic and presented a certain style. People looked at us like we were from another planet. And it wasn't just the pants. When I braided my hair in the summer of 1990, it was more radical than anything you could have imagined, even more so than a giant Afro. It was out of step with the times, not accepted as nostalgia or cultural outreach or forward thinking, and I had to suffer lots of teasing. Philadelphia was a small big city, which meant that the scene was close-knit and loyal, but also not very culturally progressive. Every step forward was followed not by a step back, exactly, but by a suspicion that the step forward was somehow going to leave the city behind.

Around that time, I went to work as an intern at Ruffhouse Records. Two local guys, Chris Schwartz and Joe Nicolo, had founded Ruffhouse back in 1989 as a joint venture with Columbia Records, and immediately the label started to churn out hits and top artists. Kriss Kross was their biggest signing at the time, two little Georgia kids who were discovered by Jermaine Dupri at a mall, earned a spot on Michael Jackson's Dangerous tour, and went to Ruffhouse, where they released the Totally Krossed Out alb.u.m. It was preceded, slightly, by the single "Jump," which came out in February 1992.

Philadelphia has its own Hall of Fame, which is like a miniature version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame: notable figures in music, movies, literature, and so forth in the concrete. That year, my father was inducted, and at the ceremony, I met a woman who worked at Ruffhouse. I was starting to take steps to move out of insurance and get more involved in music. I had s.h.i.+fted my hours at the company from a daytime, ten-to-five schedule, to a nighttime one, and I planned to use the days for music. I explained that all to the woman from Ruffhouse, and she told me that they needed an intern. "You can start tomorrow," she said.

When I got to Ruffhouse, I made a point not to tell them what my true aspirations were. I didn't want to be known there as an aspiring hip-hop star or a drummer or even a musician of any kind. I was there to learn the business. And what the business involved, I soon found out, was lots of street-level energy. This was before Sound-Scan, before the whole record business became computerized and predictable and-some would say-lifeless. We would call mom-and-pop record stores across the country and ask them if they needed more posters, more ca.s.settes, more CDs. And then we'd tell them how to answer the question we were asking. It seems so quaint now, but I would actually have to call up these stores-say, Funk-O-Mart Emporium on 13th Street-and finesse the numbers. "Look," we'd say, "when Billboard calls you to find out how the record is doing, we need you to tell them that you did thirty-five pieces of product."

"Well," the store manager would say, "I only did fifteen pieces."

"That may be," we'd say, "but we need you to report thirty-five."

Then there would be a pause. Thinking was happening. "Well," the manager would say, "that's fine, but if that's what I'm going to tell Billboard, I'm going to need two tickets to the Johnny Gill concert." It was the lowest level of payola, wheeling and dealing to try to give these indie records a chance. Those few months at Ruffhouse taught me how the old record business worked. You had to barter and pay for your position, develop relations.h.i.+ps, shake hands, kiss babies.

Ruffhouse also stripped away another layer of my naivete. There was an artist then who was well known in the Northeast. I can't be any more specific than that. But the man was a star. He projected an image of family values, wife, kids, pillar of the community, that kind of thing. One of my first days at Ruffhouse, someone told me to go into the supply closet and get a stack of Kriss Kross posters. I went in and found the posters and then, right next to them, this famous artist f.u.c.king a girl who was definitely not his wife. I don't know if they saw me. I took the posters and left quickly and quietly.

One day, one of Tariq's rhyming buddies, Malik B, met a prominent jazz ba.s.sist at his mosque. This ba.s.s player, Jamaaladeen Tac.u.ma, told Malik that he was looking for a rap group to take to Germany for some kind of rap-jazz thing. Malik offered us up right away: "I'm down with the Square Roots," he said, as if Jamaaladeen Tac.u.ma knew who we were. But he trusted Malik, and he told him to feel us out to see if we would be interested.

But who were we, exactly, at that point? At the beginning of the summer of 1992, the Square Roots consisted of me; Tariq; Josh, the ba.s.s player; and Kenyatta, the other rapper. But then the stresses of a fledgling music career started to take their toll. As September approached, Josh's parents became adamant about him going back to school to continue his education. Kenyatta, who was becoming more involved in his Muslim faith, began to have a problem with the way that hip-hop was evolving, specifically in terms of the racial makeup of the audience. He started to feel like we weren't black enough as artists, or that hip-hop was being distorted and distended by its broader acceptance among white kids, and he left, too. It's hard now to recreate the strangeness of that moment. The Source magazine reamed Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain" for appealing to white kids. De La Soul stifled their hippie side so that they could appeal to black kids. The idea of doing a show and seeing more white kids than black kids in the audience was a crazy mindf.u.c.k, and it was happening more and more.2

We had a catalog, so to speak, the few songs that we managed to get down on tape with Rich and Joe that first night of recording: "Pa.s.s the Popcorn," "The Anti-Circle," and "Popcorn Revisited." Joe had thought that he would be the producer of the actual record and that Rich would handle management, but as it turned out, Rich was a very good engineer. He was the king of vocal takes, which is something that I'm horrible at, and he was excellent at mixing, which I didn't know how to do yet. I didn't know much, to be honest. I sat behind the drum set unaware that I was supposed to do anything other than tune the drums or tape them. I didn't even use a click track. We just performed like we did on the streets of Philadelphia, and luckily it sounded awesome on the recording.

But we still only had three songs when Malik got us that gig with Jamaaladeen Tac.u.ma, and it didn't seem like we were in a position to get many more. For starters, we were down to only two permanent group members-Tariq and I. We quickly picked up a replacement for Josh in the person of Leonard Hubbard, whom we called Hub. Hub was a trained musician who gave us a strong foundation with his ba.s.s playing. He was also a little older, and he had in experience what we had in enthusiasm. Malik officially came on board as a second rapper. And then, because of the fascination that we all had with "4 Better or 4 Worse" by the Pharcyde, we became obsessed with the idea of putting a Fender Rhodes piano in our songs. That was the sound we wanted. When we said that, Rich told us that he knew just the guy. There was this lanky white kid named Scott Storch who used to hang out at Rich's place. He was a walking karaoke machine, and we were all fascinated with his keyboard skills the same way that Tariq had been fascinated with my drum skills in high school. Scott knew every Stevie Wonder lick, every Bernie Worrell part, everything Junie Morrison did with the Ohio Players. It was a trip to see my record collection come alive inside this guy's fingers.

In this new configuration-me, Tariq, Malik, Hub, and Scott-we started playing around town. We opened for the Goats, who were an overtly political group signed to Ruffhouse. Their debut, Tricks of the Shade, was a sprawling, ambitious record that had lots of promise, but they soon faded out when groups with a clearer political agenda, particularly Rage Against the Machine, came onto the scene.

And we went back into the recording studio. Rich had this brainstorm that we needed to build a buzz. He said that we would use the trip to Germany to sell our debut record and become the kings of America. We thought he was crazy. We didn't have a hit. We didn't have a song on the radio. We didn't even have a full alb.u.m. But he led us back in, Pied Piperstyle, and after four marathon nights in the studio we had eighteen songs. We made finished work of everything we had jammed on during the summer. We mastered the record, made a simple text-treatment cover that was very similar to the Beatles' White Alb.u.m, called it Organix (we wanted to emphasize that we were playing real instruments), and just like that, we were legitimate recording artists. At that point, we made the final evolution in our name. It wasn't completely voluntary: There was a folk group in Philadelphia called the Square Roots, and even though they hadn't copyrighted their name-it was an expensive proposition-they went a cheaper route and registered it as a fictional character for use in a theatrical artwork. Whatever the case, they blocked us, and we dropped the "Square" off the front of our name. Sometimes less is more: Silver Beatles to Beatles, Square Roots to Roots.

It was a stroke of luck. Names are a big deal for bands. They aren't just something to fill the line on the poster over the band you're opening for, or a way to take up s.p.a.ce on an alb.u.m cover. They're an attempt to make sense of something that's often so chaotic and dynamic that it's hard to capture, let alone label. But "The Roots" was tight and streamlined where "the Square Roots" had been blocky and felt unwieldy. "The Roots" made us look cool, whereas "the Square Roots" had made us look, uh, square. Most importantly, it created the impression that we were musical conservators, that we respected the past and kept a stubborn hold on the funk and soul that had come before us.