1973--Rock at the Crossroads by Andrew Grant Jackson

Author:Andrew Grant Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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Clive Campbell was born in Jamaica in 1955 and moved with his family to the South Bronx in 1967, the neighborhood with the largest Jamaican community in the US. He was tall and lifted weights, so the kids called him Hercules, a.k.a. Kool Herc. He decided to become a deejay after seeing how James Brown’s “Sex Machine” drove dancers to ecstasy. His father was a technician for a band and helped Herc score two turntables and a mixer.

His little sister Cindy needed money to buy clothes for the upcoming school year, so she decided to hold a “Back to School Jam” in the first-floor recreation room of their hundred-unit apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. She enlisted her brother to provide the music. Her mother rounded up snacks. Her father handled soda and beer. She wrote out invites on index cards: twenty-five cents for girls, fifty cents for guys, 9 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Kool Herc asked his friend Coke La Rock to be MC (master of ceremonies) so he could concentrate on spinning records. Coke recalled, “The first time I got on the mic, it was just me goofing with my friends. Dudes like Pretty Tony, Easy Al and Nookie Nook, I’d be messing with them, telling them to move their cars.”43 Even though none of them actually had cars. “We were trying to impress the girls.”44

Just as the Jamaican dub producers switched song sections around, Kool Herc extended the intros, instrumental breaks, and drum solos, because that’s when the dancers cut loose. With a copy of the record on each turntable, he could jump back and forth between the discs and stretch out “the break” as long as the crowd seemed to dig it.

He tried the technique (which he later dubbed “the Merry Go Round”) with James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turn It Loose,” then the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock ’73” and “Apache.” The Incredible Bongo Band was a group of studio musicians hired to create the soundtrack for the camp horror film The Thing with Two Heads.45 They went on to release two albums. Hip hop artists later dubbed “Apache” the “National Anthem of Hip Hop.” (Ironically, the drummer and bassist were white, though the percussionist was black.)

Kool Herc: “I was sittin’ back, observin’, watching the crowd who were all waiting for this particular part of the record. And after I did it for the first time, there was no turnin’ back—everybody was comin’ to the party for that particular part of my set.… They always wanted to hear breaks after breaks after breaks.”46

The kids bugged Herc’s family for more parties, and they obliged, staging dance contests with a $25 prize. Herc christened the kids dancing to his breaks “b-boys” and “b-girls.”

Future deejay Grandmixer DXT recalled, “Everybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center. At first the dance was simple: touch your toes, hop, kick out your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around on all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to try to come up with something better.

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