In 1981, Tom Silverman took Afrika
Bambaataa into a New York 8-track recording studio called
In The Red. His plan was to recreate the feel of Bambaataa's
legendary live DJ sessions in the Bronx. Though he has
since mislaid the tape, Tom remembers recording a demo
of one song. "It included Kraftwerk's 'Numbers',
Babe Ruth's 'The Mexican', 'I Like It' by B.T. Express,"
he says, "A lot of the songs with breakbeats that
Bambaataa used to use. We used a Rick James song, as
many songs as we could but just the bass lines, whatever
the hooks were, and we tried to string 'em all together
in some way using Oberheim synthesisers. It didn't have
any rapping on it."
These were early days in hip-hop history. 1981 was the
year in which the New Jersey based Sugarhill Records
released "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On
the Wheels of Steel", Grandmaster Flash's amazing
quickfire collage of cuts and scratches. In that era,
there were two stories to hip-hop. The story you knew
depended on how and where you were listening to the
music. Rap vinyl had existed since 1979, yet already
a recording studio sound had developed that bore little
relation to the live experimentation of pioneer Djs
like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa.
Not all of the top old-school crews were securing recording
contracts. Those who had the mixed fortune to sign deals
found themselves in a compromise situation. Instead
of rapping over breaks cut up between two turntables
by a DJ, they were being presented with slick backing
tracks, played by musicians. The results often made
great party music but their connection to the reality
of hip-hop was slim.
A graduate student, studying environmental geology in
Kalamazoo, Michigan, Tom Silverman's real passion was
music. Before graduate school he had hosted oldies shows
and disco party live-links on college radio in Waterville,
Maine. In 1978, an old room mate suggested they work
together on a disco magazine. Disco then running at
boiling point, he left his thesis unfinished to plunge
into the unstable world of dance clubs, record stores,
bootleggers, tipsters and 12inch singles.
Running a paper called Disco News, Silverman started
to make contact with the underworld characters who ran
with the beats. He recalls a dance promotor, a woman
who had worked for Downstairs Records in Manhattan.
In 1979 she told him about the Zulu Nation, Afrika Bambaataa's
Bronx DJ sessions and the secret breakbeats that were
being collaged into a revolutionary form of music.
"She said there was this place in Downstairs Records,"
says Tom, "which at the time was on 6th Avenue,
in the subway. You had to go down a step right before
you got into the subway, down off of 6th Avenue near
42nd Street. There was this record shop and they used
to be an oldies record store. They had current records
but they had an enormous oldies section and they knew
about all the doo-wops and everything. I used to go
down there when I was in high school to buy doo-wops,
so I knew the place. But she said they had an annex
right next to them where you could go and buy these
b-boy records. I'd never heard the term before in 1979.
I said, 'Well what's that?' And she said, 'They're paying
a lot of money and they're buying these records just
for like 10 seconds of the record. Then they mix 'em
together and make that beat go on for like five minutes
or so'.
"I went down to the place and I saw this little
annex. Maybe it was a room that was about 8 feet by
10 feet, if that big, or maybe even 6 by 8. It had a
three |
|
|
