Grandmaster Flash Explains How Rap First Started

This thing that you just felt like everyone else felt it too and still feels it to this day. It's crazy. DJing was the way for me to take my scientific thoughts and take kinetic energy and take mathematics and make it tangible hip-hop. Gene Page. This is so dope. This is so dope. The breakage used to go nuts off this shit. This was that joint. I'm like, oh my God, this is, if you pulled the drums from this kind of production, it'd be almost like opera. But what makes it R&B, what makes it dope is the drums. And you can tell the engineer makes the drums high because you hear the snare and you hear the kick and you hear the hi-hat. That's what makes it so dope. This is one of my favorite records. All right. Jay. Just introduce yourself right here. My name is Grandmaster Flash. I think a good place for us to start is what we were just looking at and some of the stuff that was catching your attention. Right. Because we were talking a couple weeks ago and you were telling me about high school and some of the things that you learned in high school and the tube in this amp caught your attention. Yes. Tell me about that. Well, I come from the vacuum tube age. And the beginning of solid state beginning to show up. And we had to understand what the vacuum tube stages and what they did. But the 12AX7, which is in this Macintosh, was like the actual tube that turned electrical energy into sound energy. So when I seen it, it just took me back. I don't want to show my age, but it took me back there. 12AX7 is a very, very, like I see this in a lot of in our world. Well, we do production in studio equipment, but it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very expensive, you know, to have a system in this day and age that has, like, you know, the vacuum tubes in it, because what they provide is such a warmth to sound. Whatever you're playing on the turntable, it just makes it warmer. And the actual digital world right now, they want to replicate what this thing does. The reason I ask about that is because I found when we were talking earlier, so much of your interest in music is connected to this sort of early obsession with the technology and your, like, decision to go to a technical high school to learn about mechanical engineering and the time you spent. This is something that you were just obsessed with and interested in was the mechanics and the music and how they intersected with each other. Can you talk about that? The big why. Yeah. Like, why? You know, and it started with my dad. You know, he would take one of the square things. Can I take one? So he would take, he would go to the closet and take one of these square things and go over to the brown box. But before he went to the brown box, he would get to take the round thing out of the square thing, and the square thing may have a picture of a train, a face, writing, and that perplexed me. Like, where's he going with this? So he's walking over to the brown box. And he's putting it inside the brown box, and he's doing the steps and the procedures on how, you know. The procedure. The procedure is taking the round circular thing and putting it on a silver stick, and then he's pressing this button, and this button starts to process. The record drops down, plop, and then the amp comes alive, and then it goes over, and then it goes down, and then there's sound coming out of this brown box. And this totally amazed me. Like, wow. Like, Dad is, like, so incredible. He's a magician. So that was my journey in this whole thing. What's coming out of this brown box? And I can remember I would watch him when he came home from work and do the procedure, and do the procedure, and I would watch him, and I would watch him, and I would watch him. And then I said to myself, what is that little red light at the bottom of the brown box? And the red light had a little picture of a dog, and the letters were R-C-A. And Victor, I'm like, what are all these things? You know, so I watched Dad do the procedure for a couple of weeks. Here we go. Maybe. This is the kind of thing that he would have been playing. Hell yeah. Yeah. This was the jam. This was the jam. It kind of represented him, too, because his hands were like sandpaper. And the reason for that is because his little brother was the 1957 champion of the world, Sandy Sadler. So both of them had. So his younger brother was a champion, and his hands were just. Him and his little brother's hands were just totally sandpaper. So when I used to get the. I'm going to be. Very proper here. When I used to get my hiney tanned, I could go to the other level, but I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in a respectable place, so I'm going to just say reprimand. When I used to get reprimanded, it was a big thing, man. Big, big thing. And you would get reprimanded for pulling the squares out of the closet. Yeah, I had no business doing it. You weren't supposed to be playing with the speaker system. No, but you got to say, I had to watch him do the procedure. Yeah. And then when he went to work. When mom was home sewing, so I went over to the closet. First, I had to go get a chair from the kitchen. Climb up onto the chair, turn the knob, and then I go in there, and I just pulled out whatever. And I went over to the brown box, and I. But before I did that, I watched what he did. He took it out of the paper. Oh, yeah. And the black circular thing. And he was very careful, and he put this in. And I remember to put it on the silver stick, press the button, it would drop, the arm would go over. Sound was coming out of the brown box. I'm in the living room dancing. My mom, whatever she was doing, she rushed out and said, If Joe catches you in his collection in the living room, he's going to kill you. And once again, I'm going to tell you, you're going to get highly reprimanded. You know what I want to say. We're in a respectable place, but it was fire, the fire hand. So after a while, I was like, listen, he come home, he tanned my hiney, and I get my meal, and I get sent to bed. And when he left again, I went back in the closet, and I did the whole procedure again. And after a while, you're going to tan my hiney, and I'm going to be in that brown box with the black circular things in it. And after a while, you know, mom and dad, they divorced, and he left. And so years went on, and I started to understand a few more things. But I was always perplexed on where does the music live? Because when the box didn't have, when the brown box didn't have the black circular thing, it was quiet. So where does the music come from and why? I was hooked. Like, I'm going to do whatever it takes to figure this whole process out. Then I started falling in love with objects that were plugged in a wall, unscrewing the back, looking at a lot of those tubular things, like big ones, small ones, all these different sizes. It's like, what do all these things do? And then it got to the point where my mother and my sisters were totally pissed at me because I was unscrewing the table. Taking everything apart. I didn't know how to put it back together, but it was just my fascination. With these things, the table radio, the hair dryer, the stereo, the television, I was public enemy number one in my mom's house, for sure. But eventually then your mom decides to send you to technical high school because it's like, okay, if you're going to keep doing this, we got to make the most of this situation. That's a nice way to say it, but it was another way to say it. You got to apply this obsession with these things. This technology and unscrewing things and putting things back together. I guess if you're going to take everything apart, you got to learn how to put it back together. And have to understand what the parts are. You know, so she sent me to Samuel Gompel's Vocational and Technical High School. I started learning about these people like Marconi, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse. I think the one that probably caught me the most was Tesla and the things that he did, you know. And then from that point on, I started to understand what the vacuum tubes was. And then I started to understand what alternating current is versus direct current. Understanding what solid state is versus vacuum tubes. Started to learn what is resistors, what is capacitors, what is transformers, and how they all work. What is the breadboard? And learning these things, at the end of the year, we had to build a very small amplifier as part of our, you know. Class project or whatever. Yeah, class project, correct. You know, so from that point on, it was going into the junk. You know, we had to build a big backyard and find it. Now, I can just put my own stuff together now that I understand how the whole thing, how the thing works, the schematic diagrams, and the diodes, and the resistors, and the capacitors. And now, I got an understanding of what it is. And then I went back to the vinyl and the turntable, so with my fascination with electronic things, the electrical things, and the black tunnels and the turntable. Now, I'm taking my teenage years. And I'm not going outside and chasing the girls. And I'm not going to the basketball court to play basketball or do the crazy things that 18-year-old people do or 14-year-old teenagers do. I had to figure out why music was made that it was. And there was this one song by Curtis Mayfield, and it was called Move On Up. Move on up and keep on wishing. Great song. And I noticed that when I see this song played at a house party or whatever in a jungle. drum part came, the backsides would move more. So I'm saying to myself, oh, so the best part of the song is the drum breakdown. So now I'm looking at records in a whole different way now. So now I'm going around to people's houses of families that I know, and I'm asking them, do you have any records in the closet that you don't want? And that's how I acquired my first collection, going around to friends and families in China. And then from there, I'm playing the records, and I'm listening to the drum beats, Jody, like four bars, eight seconds. I'm like, no, this is. How do we make it longer? No, this is, I'm mad first. Why isn't the drum. Because Curtis Mayfield's drum solo was like almost two minutes. So why is it. I'm playing all these different. records. Why is the drum beat so short? So I was pissed off first. I'm saying, oh, maybe it was just this song. Then I play another one. I play an R&B. I play a funk. Same situation, same problem. Why is it that the drum beat is so short on all these other songs? But Curtis Mayfield, the drum break is really long. That's when I was saying to myself, I don't like the way records were made. I think the drum beat should be the prior. The most important part. And I had to figure out a way how to do that. And that was the long three-year process of just staying in the crib. And I. Staying in the crib. Staying in the crib. And I'm saying to myself, the way the turntable and the tone numbers traditionally used, I have to figure it out that way. And I'm like, okay. I play the drum beat, and I'm saying, I'm going to try to keep the beat on time by taking the second, second turntable with a duplicate copy of the same record in the same area, but it was crashing into each other. I'm like, no, I have to make it where it's seamless. How do I do that? I kept trying to make this drum beat elongate by using duplicate copies and playing the turntable and the tone in a traditional way. And it just didn't work out. So I said to myself, what if I can somehow go counterclockwise, leaving the tone arm down and getting to the top of that area, throw it, hold this one at the beginning of the drum break, throw that, and where I would be, I would be staying in the same area of the song. Yeah. The biggest problem was this. Let's go over here. Let's go over here. When you buy a turntable, right, hold your baby, hold your baby. This was the enemy, this, this thing right here. And a reason why it is the enemy is because when you start the turntable and I'm saying to myself, if I can go counterclockwise to re-arrive to the top of the break, the vinyl has to comfortably go clockwise, but the platter must always go clockwise so that I can go counterclockwise and throw it. And the biggest problem was this. When you go backwards, the whole platter goes backwards. So this. It's the enemy. For disrespect. No, please, please. This is exactly, this is exactly what we wanted to see. Okay. So mom was a seamstress. So I understood what polyester, cotton. I'm just seeing if we have, I don't think we have one. Rayon, silk, silk. And I remember I said to myself, I got to find a material. So something, a light bulb goes off in my head. I grabbed my records. I grabbed an album and I run over to the nearest fabric store in town. And I, I go through all the aisles and I'm touching, I'm touching silk, touching rayon. I'm touching cotton and I'm touching all these different things. And then when I got to felt, I said felt, felt, and I remember felt, because in grade school we would cut out letters and we did a lot of things in grade school with felt sort of the material was very familiar to me. So, so the mat, there's enough tension that it's grabbing it, right? It's pulling the record around, but if you touch it, it stops. But the platter underneath. So here's the thing. Like I had, I had to find two. Pieces of material that would allow the platter to be happy in a clockwise direction all the time, but it had to be a material that would interface with the vinyl. So what I did was I got the felt and then the felt was limp when I, you know, when I cut it and made it a circle, it was very limp when I put it on my wrist. So I remember that mom had spray starch. So I had to make this piece. And then I had to make this piece. area where there is more shiny that means that there's these band members playing there and sometimes i would drop the needle down on it and it'd be somebody playing a flute some bullshit like fuck but once you break the shrink wrap you own them so i would take those and put them in this crate called stiffs but then if i got lucky what i did was to hide the name because we was we was all very secretive it's a competition yeah so as opposed to me rudely like just kind of just always striking it out with with a magic marker so what i did was the stiffs that are in the crate i would take those two and the ones that had the jams and i would soak both of them in the bathtub and so the labels got soft and then i would switch the labels because the respectful thing to do is if of a rival dj comes to your party it's kind of like invisible respect you got a little behind the ropes he could see what you're playing so the rival dj probably went and bought this is like reminds me of when i was in when i was probably in middle school and i would want to buy like a rap cd that had parental advisory in my pocket and i would buy like a rap cd that had parental advisory in my pocket and i would buy like a rap cd that had parental advisory in my pocket and i would buy like a rap cd that had parental advisory in my pocket and i would buy parents didn't want me to have that so i would take those cds and i would put them inside another case like like a classical or whatever and then they wouldn't know that i had it it's the same thing you gotta do what you gotta do you gotta do what you gotta do it's for me like at any period of time kuhlherk may have the the the heat at that time or bambada may have the heat at that time or breakup might have the heat at that time or flash may have that heat at the time if i had the heat at that time i was taking two steps soaking them in the bathtub and i was switching the label so you can tell if i'm playing it at that time that rival dj is standing there he's he's done he's not he's not physically doing this what he's like he's what is that record let me find that he's not asking me he's not asking me yeah in his head in his head and then he's and then he has to buy the cello i can tell i'm not like i know what you're gonna do so let me ask you a question culturally at the time the competition amongst the djs must have pushed the the music forward and the artistry forward right because and it wasn't just like it was how you guys are actually enacting this work and this practice is in parties is showing it to people is who's getting the most people dance who's having the coolest party right yeah and that's what pushes the music forward so quickly i think i think what it pushes is the variations of music that because when you're shopping jack i looked in the pop bin the rock bin the jazz bin the funk like we checked everything music had no color yeah it was like the dopest track of the month might be and the break might be a white group it might be a jazz one jazz uh funk r&b pop rock it didn't matter it just said whoever had it his flock wasn't coming to my party because i'm not going to be there for you a lot of the people i learned was coming to my parties right when i found this when i found this record what is this bob james take me to the mardi gras who's bob james bob james this is like an unexpected yeah but the album cover the app is that what that did that grabbed me like why is the gold hand holding the apple what the fuck is going on here And then it changes. And this is the whack part. This is the part where a DJ should never let it get to that part. Just that part. And if it goes anywhere else into the instrumentation, and Bob James, I love you, I want to see it. None of your music is whack, but I'm just calling the terms that we called it. That's 30 seconds, which is probably even pretty long, 30 seconds of drums. But you would see that on the vinyl. I would see that because you could look at a record and you could tell, like if you held it up in a light, you could see that it's minimal things happening right there. Maybe it's just the bass player playing. But the matte areas is where the full band is playing. So a lot of times I would look up at a light and buy one and then take it home. And if it's what I think it is, I'm running back down to get a second copy. But these are the tricks that I used to play. And also. My secrets was like this drummer on Bob James crew. Let's just say the Bob James band broke up, right? I want to know where that drummer is going, because nine times out of 10, out of 10 cuts in an album, he's going to get us, he's going to get a little something. He's, he's going to get a little something. So a lot of my, a lot of my breaks are ancestors of bands of where that drummer went. Oh, that dope ass bassist where he went, like you do what you have to do to become special in our full DJ world. So me, I had my way of doing things unbelievable. So it's a combination of bass. I mean, it's, it's all just curiosity. It's just intense curiosity, curiosity about the technology, curiosity about how do I find more and more of these breaks. So then you apply it to this situation where you're playing at a party and it grows from there, but really it's, it's all this time. You're spending alone and focused on. Yeah, I, I, my, my best friend stopped knocking on the door saying, come outside and play. It's like, like he ain't coming outside to play. He's doing what he's doing. But what I was trying to do is not my, my thing was Jack was to still try to figure out how I can play it traditionally. And it turns out I never did. I had to put my, I'm not going to put it on your record, but I had to, in order for me to get back to the other, to get back to the top of the break. I had to put my fingertips on the record and I had to put a crayon mark to know where the spot is because I played in dark places. So I had to be able to get the tone on over there as quick as possible. Get to that area, boom, and get the other one ready before it goes to the whack part and just make this whole long drum thing. But me doing this, when I put my hands on a record that went through the Bronx, like wildfire flash has his new way that he plays, he plays music. And I can remember trying to get a, a side job at it. I had to go to a disco club or something. And some of the, the actual DJs that played there were my friends. I'm like, yo, tell the boss, you know, I need a job. You know, they're like flash. They, they already know what you do. You put crayon on the record, you put your fingertips on the record. Like you, I'm like, you're my boy. We hang out together. They're like, I don't want to lose my job. So I had to keep trying and keep trying and keep trying until I met a guy who had a disco club and I convinced him. His name is Sal Abatello. And he convinced, I convinced him that I can bring a crowd and it would be good. And I said to him, can I play? Can you give me a Saturday? He said, hell no. My Saturdays do very well. It was a disco club. I says, well, how about Friday? He says, no. I says, well, how about Thursday? He says, no. He says, I'll give you a day that the club is closed. And he said, just looking at me, a little disrespect by it, disrespected by it. He said, I'll give you, I'll give you a Tuesday. So I called him. I said, I'll give you a night, terrible Tuesdays at Disco Fever, and too much time, it rivaled Saturday, it rivaled Friday. He eventually turned his whole club around to accommodate this new thing called hip hop and the style of DJing that I was playing. So Sal Abatello, like he, he, he, he gave me the platform where I could play every Tuesday and play my way and play the songs that I was playing. And this drew stars that were playing concerts at the Garmin. The Garmin, you know, they would come up, up to the Bronx to Disco Fever to jam with me. So with me putting, being the first DJ to make the turntables an instrument and getting my behind whacked by my dad, it kind of turned out pretty good after a while. Here we are. Tell me about the, like, when, when this starts happening. Okay. The microphone. Okay. So when my best friend stopped knocking on the door and asking for me to come outside and play. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. After, you know, close to the third year, Jack, I learned how to take a Led Zeppelin drum breaker and mix it with a James Brown. Like, I was actually kind of like making a bed of drum breaks. And I said to myself, now it's time for me to show people. So I went out to the nearest park and I set up my little horrible sound system. And I says, everybody in the park is going to dance. They're going to go wild. And it was as quiet as his room. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, my God. And I'm like, what's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong? And then eventually what I did was I came, I went back out in the park after I cried for like almost two weeks. I says, let me try something different. So I took a microphone and I put it on the other side of the table. And I said, any human being could say anything that could accommodate this style of DJing, you know, will be a group. Quite a few people, they came up to the mic and said whatever. But it wasn't really incredible until Keith. Keith Wiggins, known as Cowboy, he started saying and doing things that made people stop staring at him. at me because I hate it being stared at. You're also like this. I'm in my own world. You gotta focus. I need to be in my own world. Leave me alone. Cowboy was the one that got the crowd to move to these things that I was doing to this pop. These pop breaks and rock and jazz and blues and funk and disco and R&B. I'm playing breaks from all these different genres of music and then eventually Jack, what happened was there was this guy about six feet tall, six feet and some change. I could see him standing outside the fence every time I would play. I seen him. Eventually after the multiple amount of times that I played in this park, he approached me. He says, my name is Raymond and I've been watching you for a while and I think that what you're doing you can make money with and I kind of told him to go to hell. I've been doing this for free making money with this, how does that work? And he hounded me and he hounded me and he hounded me and then people said, oh, do you know who he was talking to? I'm like, I don't know, this tall guy's name is Raymond. Raymond Chandler was the, let's just say, the street people of the neighborhood. The ones you don't mess with, the ones that demanded respect. I'm saying to myself, how many times did I curse this guy out? So the next time he came to me, I said, okay, we'll try it. He says, give me a minute, I'm going to make these things call flyers. And we're going to get a spot. So we got a spot on 168th Street in Boston Road called, and it had a black door. So we called the thing Black Door Productions with Grandmaster Flash. So he promotes for like maybe a month or so. We charge one dollar. It must have been the size of this room. And the rest is history is kind of like, we kind of like was a corporations sort of kind of then one by one, one after another was asking to join me. Cowboy was already with me. And then it was another one at Daniel Glover's. His name was Kid Creole. And then Kid Creole says, I got a younger brother. And he, he says rhymes too. And his name is Melvin, you know, and his, his name was Mellie Melvin. Mellie Melvin had a best friend and he was Scorpio. And then the fifth phone we got from somebody that, we used to call him Scorpio. used to compete with that disbanded and we said we need to get him we can't let him go anywhere so he became the fifth and that's how it became you know grandmaster flasher phrase five and this is years before making records it was just you know playing in gymnasiums playing uh in venues and then after a while the schools yeah was hiring us for the you know the graduation party so and i can remember you know like ray chandler played a major role in in getting us from the parks playing for free to making some money so was it ever on your mind the idea of taking what you were doing with the records and turning it into records yourself that you got like how how distant was that idea of like this actually isn't just a performance we could so we we play a party in harlem we're my pr person is there's an old man in the back casanovas is my security i'm saying keep an eye on this dude he's either looking for his child or he's the police if he does anything wrong you guys know what to do he didn't do anything wrong we watch him as he went to the bar to buy a drink he sat back down who the fuck is this guy the party was over everybody left obviously his daughter or his son was not at the party he approaches me and he says flash my name is bobby robinson i have a small label called enjoy records and i would like you guys to sign to my label to record what you guys do when you perform and i'm looking at this guy like what are you talking about like you want you want to record us while i'm playing records and you want to make a record out of that he says yes i'm looking at bobby robinson like no he tries on a few occasions i still say no jack about a year goes by and there's this record on the radio to the hibbity be hibbity hip hop i said a hip hop the hibbit the hibbit to the hip hip hop you don't stop the rocker do the bang bang boogie say up just the boogie to the rhythm of the now there's a a code with us i know when herk is playing i know when bam is playing and i know when breakouts playing i know i know who's playing who's doing what so i'm saying to myself who is this group i'm turning on the radio i'm hearing this record i changed the station i'm hearing this record again i'm changing the station i'm hearing this record again i do the research i find out it's some group from englewood new jersey but one of the guys that is part of the group was security at a club and he steals somebody's rhymes and he puts it on the record i'm saying what is the name of this record it's called rapper's delight i'm like oh shit that's what bobby robinson was trying to get me to do first oh i missed that boat for sure yeah you know and that's your first taste of oh this is the music business yeah a little bit now we're going into the music business we're going into a world where we don't know jack we had everything we could do we played all the major gymnasiums we played all the major events we played the biggest event ever which was the autobahn ballroom yeah 3 000 people in it you know there's no other place really to go so i guess when this record business thing came in um it was kind of like the next step because now all these record labels started coming into the bronx trying to get their hands the next thing yeah to try to get their hands on a group that was doing this well these are the ones that was rocking it yeah you know we and we happen to be one of them how is that that transformation process and and like where it went where you went from even a 3 000 person room to all of a sudden you have a record that people are hearing in other countries around the world um is that is that i'll tell you it starts with you in the in the room yeah with like this i and then this idea sal abatello gives me the residency at disco fever uh i played every tuesday there's this woman that comes in there she's draped in jewelry she looks like a walking million bucks she parks her rolls royce downstairs every tuesday to see what's happening at disco fever and the way the dj booth was set up it was like high and then the bar was maybe two three feet away so she had the primary seat to see the dance floor and to see me she's coming for weeks and weeks and weeks and eventually she sends her son to the dj booth to say that she wants to meet with me who is this lady and then they say she's a lady behind rappers delight i'm like holy crap ola so we ended up being with them we made a few records that we did very well it's like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how i keep from going later and you realize that this thing that you do is universal i mean like can you describe the reaction even from the first time you were practicing in your room for three years you bring it out to the streets people you bring it to clubs you see how people are actually moving the way you anticipated and then you realize that that's universal because i'm i'm thinking about when you first held the needle to the vinyl and you felt the vibration yes that same thing is happening when you're playing these breaks back to back and the people are vibrating to the music that you're generating yeah but it it's like everywhere it's like in germany like it's happening it's like there must have been i don't know like validating like this this thing that you just felt like everyone else felt it too and still feels it to this day it's crazy you know i you know jack i sit back and i think about it and i say no i said wow like i don't want to sit here and say i don't want to sit here and say i don't want to sit here and say i'm the only one it was her bam flash you know so at that period of time to answer your question i'm saying to myself like damn because this thing this whole thing could have missed when people first see me do that they could they could have just said ew that's just whack but they were like what is he doing and then to have you know these five voices join me and we become a group is i think i looked at it deeply a few times and it was just too scary to just really to capture it in my mind like from the streets of the bronx to being in these different countries it's like even now i go i go to more countries than ever now you know uh i'm going to serbia london japan and i'm going to and when i get to serbia i'm going to um meet the family of the estate of my hero tesla so um it's just it's it's still overwhelming and i try to just look at it very calmly and just not look too deeply. You know, I have people who walk up to me and say, you saved my life. Like, I met my wife at your party. If I wasn't going to your parties back in the days religiously, I don't know what might have happened to me. I have people walk up to me to this day, you know, and it almost makes me cry to just think because what I did was just what I did. And it affected so many people. Like, in the book, in the first section of Birth of a Culture, I got to interview the fans who came to the parties. And I got to tell you, Jack, I can't let too much of the book go, but some of these people had to catch three trains and two buses in the deepest of snow every week in the wintertime to come see me. And they said to me, Flash, when you guys became stars, we were lost. Like, that shit fucked me up. Yeah. You know, because I'm, Jack, I'm playing the music. Yeah. And I'm playing this DJ style that I invented. But that's as far as I'm thinking. So I'm in the moment. What am I going to play next week? And how am I going to play it? And this and that. And these people are saying to me what it took for them to come. You know, this is a lot to think about. Yeah. In this book, I got other people in it because I couldn't write this book alone. You know, LL Cool J, DJ Premier, Rakim, Queen Latifah, Dr. Dre. Like, because I had to get other people's perspectives. What made them want to jump in? And I've been doing this 54 years almost. What's crazy about it is it's just like this organic thing. Like, I spoke to Fat Joe, like, maybe a year ago. Mm-hmm. About his experience growing up in the Bronx. And he's describing just in the neighborhood, this music is like someone's plugging into a lamppost and it's coming from these speakers. It's coming from me. You just have to be a part of it. They will bring out the equipment, big, giant speakers. Then it will plug into the light poles. And that's how you learn the new dances, too. Yeah. So I would go, they would call them jams, block parties. I would go to the other side of the Bronx or Harlem and I would see the new dance. And then we'll go. I would go back to the block and start doing the new dance. And that's how, it was no social media. It was no other way to find out, but you had to be there. Mm-hmm. And just, it's just like in your blood, like, it's like you have to do it. And that's what all these people that you're talking about, it was the same thing. Jack, you know, sometimes I can't answer the question. It just was, it's just something that was just a thought. Yeah. But God says you got to finish it out. You just, you have no choice. You have to finish this out. You know, and then speaking of Fat Joe, he was a baby then. Yeah. He was a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny, weeny, weeny, weeny, weeny baby. He lived and farmed his projects across the street where I used to play. So it's just, I think about it now, but not a lot now because it's too much to say that the way these kids do this beatboxing thing, I repurpose the drumming. It's called a beatbox for the human being to have a bed of music to speak on. I did it to turn the DJ from just a DJ into an artist playing an instrument. I did that, you know, and to think about these things, Jack, sometimes it scares me because usually something like this is done by a multiple amount of people. So when I tell people that I did these things, they're like, you didn't do that. Or you did that? You know, so I let 40 years, 40 plus years go by. And I said, now it's time to write the book. Time to write it. Yeah, I had to write the book, you know, Birth of a Culture. So they're going to see what I did. They're going to find out the geek that I really am because I'm really a geek. I'm a scientist, you know, and DJing was the way for me to take my scientific thoughts and take kinetic energy and take mathematics. And make it tangible hip-hop. So the book is history. It's your technique. It's the backstory on some of the stuff we talked about, how you invented it. What's the time sort of frame that, are you really focused in on the early years and the development of Quick Mix? Yeah, I, see, because you got to realize back in the days we covered everything. Everything was, you know, high. I took the sheet off of it. I took the sheet off it totally. And I, you know, myself and Scoop Jackson, we wrote it chronologically. So we started with me and we went into the 80s and, you know, 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And we went all the way up. Yeah. You know, so not only will you get my perspective, but you will now get a chronological understanding of how 70s connects to the 80s and how it connects to the 90s and how the things are. And if you point to now, you can go back to the 70s and say, this is what it was in this stage. You know? A lot of the electronic companies, they started making things to emulate the things that I did. Yeah. You know, so it all connects. Yeah. I mean, this, right? We talked like this was just a random turntable. So it's not the same model, right? No, it's not the same model, but the company, Jack, that became the turntable of choice because that KUHR ERC had the 1100A. It's a very expensive machine, but it's by Technics as well. Mine is the SL23, and it was very economical for us poor DJs. And it became the economical standards, and KUHR ERC's became the expensive standard of turntable. But they both were just little. I remember when I finally fell in love with that turntable after trying loads of turntables, Jack. T-E-C-H-N-I-C-S by Panasonic. I'm like, this is an ugly little thing. But it worked, and it served my purpose, you know, on the torque and the whole thing. So here we are. It's not ugly anymore. It's not ugly. It's a cultural icon. It's actually, it's worldwide now. And museums. Yeah. It's like, it became an instrument. It never was an instrument until. Many people hated me for it, but I got a lot of people that do what I invented around the world. So it gets a pass. It gets a green light, you know. That's wonderful, you know, and to be, like, I just made the Hollywood Walk of Fame two weeks ago for being the first DJ to make the turntable as an instrument, it's just, Jack, it just goes on and on. It's just, sometimes it's just indescribable. What I love about music books and music sort of biographies and histories is you learn so much history of what was happening around the world in addition to the music. It becomes, like, this vehicle to learn about cultural history. Absolutely, Jack. And you often get to discover so many songs or rediscover songs. I'm sure there are a lot of songs. There's a lot in the book that you reference that when you're reading, put the headphones on, listen to something. I love that about music books, so that's one of the things I'm most excited about. I mean, a lot of people that was there and when they see how I wrote it and what that song meant in the venue at that time, it just, it kind of gives you a picture of going back to that time, that time frame. So it's something I had to do and took me about two and a half years to put it together, you know. So it's kind of like, you know, a lot of good people are, Harper Collins says, "You write it, we're going to promote the hell out of it." Okay. So here we are. Here we are. And it's a link, so you can buy it right now for people who are watching or listening back at home. Go get it. Yes, sir. Thank you for coming. No problem. Such a pleasure. Thank you, man. Trackstar Podcast is a presentation of public opinion created by me, Jack Coyne, Kieran Coyne, and Henry Kornaros, produced by Haley Sobel, edited by Ryan Dergens, theme and original composition by Kieran Coyne. Mixing by Devin Klein. Our agent is Joanna Orland at UTA. Thanks for listening. See you next Wednesday.