and a half foot
counter and the guy had a turntable behind it. All over
the wall he had 45s.
Some of them were bootlegs, some of them were original.
Then they had some albums too. I remember seeing The
Eagles' The Long Run album there. The guy would write
on them, you know, "Rare break beat, Bob James
'Mardi Gras'." There was "Son Of Scorpio"
and stuff like that. All these weird records. Some of
them were cut-out records that they probably bought
for 99 cents. They were selling them for 19 dollars
in 1979.
"And there'd be these black kids that would come
in that were about 15 years old, or maybe 14. There'd
be 2 or 3 of them and they'd chip in together and buy
the record as a group so they could share it for DJing.
I didn't know who any of them were but the room was
always filled with these little kids and they were mostly
from the Bronx. That's where Kool Herc was, that's where
Grandmaster Flash was, and Bambaataa. They were taking
breaks from rock records and that's when I really got
interested in going to T Connection to go and hear Bambaataa
DJing."
Silverman drove up to the Bronx where he found the club,
an upstairs room on White Plains Road. "Nobody
was drinking and people were just sort of standing around,"
he remembers. "Not really anybody was dancing.
There were people on the dancefloor but they weren't
really moving that much. There was a very small stage
that almost never was used because all the action was
in the DJ booth.
"Bambaataa was Djing but a lot of the time he was
just picking the records and giving them to Jazzy Jay
or Red Alert who were the two DJs that he had at the
time. They would put the records on. They were spinning
these records. A lot of them had scratched-out labels
so you couldn't see what they were and I realised this
was one of the sources of where these kids were finding
out about these records. I heard 'em playing Kraftwerk.
The invitations would say, 'James Brown tribute' and
it would say, 'Invited guests Kraftwerk'. None of them
ever appeared but kids would still turn out. I remember
Whiz Kid was playing bass on the stage once while the
music was going and then somebody else was up there
rapping. That was the first time I heard people actually
rapping to these breakbeats. Most of the time it was
just beats going on and on and there was no MC.
"Bambaataa would mix different things. Like he
used 'Mary Mary' by The Monkees, 'The Big Beat' by Billy
Squier, just dun-daa-duh-dun-dun-dak. Jazzy Jay, was
more of a technician. Bambaataa was the master of records.
He owned the records and could programme the music.
It was amazing. I was immediately comfortable and immediately
witnessing a merging of cultures. There were no white
people in the place and the average age was around 16,
17, something like that. I was probably around 23, 24.
I went right up there and I got with him afterwards
and talked to him about this and other things."
Silverman had already made the decision to launch his
own record company. Taking sale-or-return copies of
Disco News to record stores in 1979 had given him first-hand
experience of the business. This was the moment when
The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" started
flying out of shops, booming from every car radio on
the street. "I saw what Sugarhill was doing,"
he says, "and the games they were playing with
their artists. I thought if these guys are doing it
I can do it. It wasn't like they were experts. They
didn't really know what they were doing. They were just
doing it."
Cautious at first, he released his first dance record
through another label. Conscious that he needed some
instant business acumen, Silverman attended a two-weekend
school for entrepreneurs. "There were people who
had medical ideas, petro-chemical, health. Mine was
starting this record company," he says. "I
talked about how you could make 12inch records and presented
my business plan. The guy who ran this thing said, 'You
have no chance. You might as well go to Harlem and find
a drug dealer to put the money up for this, because
nobody in their right mind will put the money up.' I
was totally dumbfounded."
|
|
|
