Can't Stop Won't Stop (12 page)

The Father.
Photo © Marlon Ajamu Myrie

 

 

. . . the logic is an extension rather than a negation. Alias, a.k.a.; the names describe a process of loops. From A to B and back again.

Paul D. Miller

It has become myth, a creation myth, this West Bronx party at the end of the summer in 1973. Not for its guests—a hundred kids and kin from around the way, nor for the setting—a modest recreation room in a new apartment complex; not even for its location—two miles north of Yankee Stadium, near where the Cross-Bronx Expressway spills into Manhattan. Time remembers it for the night DJ Kool Herc made his name.

The plan was simple enough, according to the party's host, Cindy Campbell. “I was saving my money, because what you want to do for back to school is go down to Delancey Street instead of going to Fordham Road, because you can get the newest things that a lot of people don't have. And when you go back to school, you want to go with things that nobody has so you could look nice and fresh,” she says. “At the time my Neighborhood Youth Corps paycheck was like forty-five dollars a week—ha!—and they would pay you every two weeks. So how am I gonna turn over my money? I mean, this is not enough money!”

Cindy calculated it would cost a little more than half her paycheck to rent the rec room in their apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, whom she knew as Clive but everyone else knew as Kool Herc, was an aspiring DJ with access to a powerful sound system. All she had to do was bulk-buy some Olde English 800 malt liquor, Colt 45 beer, and soda, and advertise the party.

She, Clive and her friends hand-wrote the announcements on index cards,
scribbling the info below a song title like “Get on the Good Foot” or “Fence-walk.” If she filled the room, she could charge a quarter for the girls, two for the guys, and make back the overhead on the room. And with the profit—presto, instant wardrobe.

Clive had been DJing house parties for three years. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, he had seen the sound systems firsthand. The local sound was called Somerset Lane, and the selector's name was King George. Clive says, “I was too young to go in. All we could do is sneak out and see the preparation of the dance throughout the day. The guys would come with a big old handcart with the boxes in it. And then in the night time, I'm a little itchy headed, loving the vibrations on the zinc top ‘cause them sound systems are powerful.

“We just stay outside like everybody else, you know, pointing at the gangsters as they come up, all the famous people. And at the time they had the little motorcycles, Triumphs and Hondas. Rudeboys used to have those souped up. They used to come up four and five six deep, with them
likkle
ratchet knife,” Clive says. He still remembers the crowd's buzz when Claudie Massop arrived at a local dance one night. He wanted to be at the center of that kind of excitement, to be a King George.

Cindy and Clive's father, Keith Campbell, was a devoted record collector, buying not only reggae, but American jazz, gospel, and country. They heard Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole, even Nashville country crooner Jim Reeves. “I remember listening to Jim Reeves all the time,” Clive says. “I was singing these songs and emulating them to the fullest. That really helped me out, changing my accent, is singing to the records.”

In the Bronx, his mother, Nettie, would take him to house parties, which had the same ambrosial effect on him that the sound systems had. “I see the different guys dancing, guys rapping to girls, I'm wondering what the guy is whisperin' in the girl's ears about. I'm green, but I'm checking out the scene,” he recalls. “And I noticed a lot of the girls was complaining, ‘Why they not playing that record?' ‘How come they don't have that record?' ‘Why did they take it off right there?' ” He began buying his own 45s, waiting for the day he could have his own sound system.

As luck would have it, Keith Campbell became a sponsor for a local rhythm and blues band, investing in a brand new Shure P.A. system for the group.
Clive's father was now their soundman, and the band wanted somebody to play records during intermission. Keith told them he could get his son. But Clive had started up his own house party business, and somehow his gigs always happened to fall at the same times as the band's, leaving Keith so angry he refused to let Clive touch the system. “So here go these big columns in my room, and my father says, ‘Don't touch it. Go and borrow Mr. Dolphy's stuff,' ” he says. “Mr. Dolphy said, ‘Don't worry Clive, I'll let you borrow some of these.' In the back of my mind, Jesus Christ, I got these big Shure columns up in the room!”

At the same time, his father was no technician. They all knew the system was powerful, but no one could seem to make it peak. Another family in the same building had the same system and seemed to be getting more juice out of it, but they wouldn't let Keith or Clive see how they did it. “They used to put a lot of wires to distract me from chasing the wires,” he says.

One afternoon, fiddling around on the system behind his father's back, Clive figured it out. “What I did was I took the speaker wire, put a jack onto it and jacked it into one of the channels, and I had extra power and reserve power. Now I could control it from the preamp. I got two Bogart amps, two Girard turntables, and then I just used the channel knobs as my mixer. No headphones. The system could take eight mics. I had an echo chamber in one, and a regular mic to another. So I could talk plain and, at the same time, I could wait halfway for the echo to come out.

“My father came home and it was so loud he snuck up behind me,” he remembers. Clive's guilt was written all over his face. But his father couldn't believe it.

Keith yelled, “Where the noise come from?”

“This is the system!”

Keith said, “What! Weh you did?”

“This is what I did,' ” Clive recalls telling his father, revealing the hookup. “And he said,
‘Raas claat,
man! We ‘ave sound!!!

“So now the tables turned. Now these other guys was trying to copy what I was doing, because our sound is coming out monster, monster!” Clive says. “Me and my father came to a mutual understanding that I would go with them and play between breaks and when I do my parties, I could use the set. I didn't have to borrow his friend's sound system anymore. I start making up business
cards saying ‘Father and Son.' And that's how it started, man! That's when Cindy asked me to do a back-to-school party. Now people would come to this party and see these big-ass boxes they never seen before.”

It was the last week in August of 1973. Clive and his friends brought the equipment down from their second floor apartment and set up in the room adjacent to the rec room. “My system was on the dance floor, and I was in a little room watching, peeking out the door seeing how the party was going,” he says.

It didn't start so well. Clive played some dancehall tunes, ones guaranteed to rock any yard dance. Like any proud DJ, he wanted to stamp his personality onto his playlist. But this was the Bronx. They wanted the breaks. So, like any good DJ, he gave the people what they wanted, and dropped some soul and funk bombs. Now they were packing the room. There was a new energy. DJ Kool Herc took the mic and carried the crowd higher.

“All people would hear is his voice coming out from the speakers,” Cindy says. “And we didn't have no money for a strobe light. So what we had was this guy named Mike. When Herc would say, ‘Okay, Mike! Mike with the lights!', Mike flicked the light switch. He got paid for that.”

By this point in the night, they probably didn't need the atmospherics. The party people were moving to the shouts of James Brown, turning the place into a sweatbox. They were busy shaking off history, having the best night of their generation's lives.

Later, as Clive and Cindy counted their money, they were giddy. This party could be the start of something big, they surmised. They just couldn't know how big.

Clive Campbell was born the first of six children to Keith and Nettie Campbell. Nettie had moved to the city from Port Maria on the northern coast. Keith, a city native, worked as the head foreman at the Kingston Wharf garage, a working-class job with status.

Keith was something of a community leader, he held the kind of job title that drew the attention of politicians. But he chose not to take sides when the JLP and PNP began their violent jockeying for position. The year before Clive left for the United States, Edward Seaga had unleashed the West Kingston War in Back-O-Wall.
Clive says, “I remember police riding around in big old trucks, tanks. And some people who were brothers or friends would turn on each other. It was like a civil war.”

By then, the Campbells no longer lived in Trenchtown near the frontlines. They had moved east across the city to a house in Franklyn Town, a quieter urban neighborhood of strivers below Warieka Hill and the upper-class neighborhood called Beverly Hills. It was a modest but lush property near the famous Alpha Boys School.

“We had like seven different fruits growing in our yard. We had different types of peppers, flowers, you know, it was tight!” Clive recalls. “We wasn't too far away from the beach. So, as a matter of fact, it was a traditional thing with us for my father to take us to the beach on Sunday. Every Sunday we'd look forward to go out to the beach after church.”

The Campbells were able to afford a housekeeper. Their grandfather, aunts and older cousins all pitched in to raise the children, a fact that would become significant when Nettie decided to supplement the family income by working and studying in the United States. Many other Jamaicans were already leaving for Miami, London, Toronto and New York City to escape the instability and seek their fortune. During the early 1960s, Nettie had departed for Manhattan to work as a dental technician and to study for a nursing degree. She saved money to send home and returned with a degree, convinced that the United States offered a better future for the family.

Cindy says, “She saw the opportunities. The public schools were free, because in Jamaica we went to private schools. So she told my father that when she finished with school that what she wanted was for the family to live here. And he didn't want to come.”

But Keith could see Nettie's reasoning. Even his own friends and relatives were leaving the country. Before Nettie returned to New York City in 1966, they agreed to move to America. Clive would be the first to join her, then the rest of the family would follow. Cindy says, “A lot of immigrants have to do that. You have to make sacrifices. It breaks up the family for a small amount of time but eventually the family gets back together.”

Clive and Cindy agree that Keith remained a Jamaican at heart. “He just said, ‘America was a place for you to excel and do better for your kids.' But after
a while you go back home, you go back to your country. And he believed in that. He loved his country,” Cindy says. Years later, after raising his children with Nettie in New York City and becoming an American citizen, he returned to his beloved island for a visit. While swimming in strong currents off Bull Bay, he had a heart attack. The Campbells buried him in Jamaica.

From Kingston to the Bronx. Stones that the builders refused.

Clive Campbell came to New York City on a cold November night in 1967. A fresh snowfall lay on the ground, something the twelve-year-old had never seen before. He took a bus from Kennedy Airport into the gray, unwelcoming city. This wasn't the America he had seen on his neighbor's television, or imagined from his father's records. He had no idea how to begin again, he says, “All I could do was just look out the window.”

His mother's apartment was at 611 East 178th Avenue, between the Bronx's Little Italy and Crotona Park, in what had been the Cross-Bronx Expressway's most contested mile. “Now I'm living in a tenement building. There's no yard. This is all boxed and closed in,” Clive recalls. His mother feared Clive would fall prey to the heroin plague. She told Clive, “Don't let anybody tell you they're gonna stick something in your arm. Don't let them trick you by calling you chicken.”

Clive looked and spoke and felt like a country boy. “Here I am all hicked out, got a corduroy coat on, with the snow hat with the flip-up-and-come-over-your-ears. I had that on with these cowboy boots,” Herc recalls. “And this girl at school started teasing the hell out of me. She was calling my shoes ‘roach killers.' She had the whole hall laughing, ‘Ah roach killers, roach killers!'

“At that time, being Jamaican wasn't fashionable. Bob Marley didn't come through yet to make it more fashionable, to even give a chance for people to listen to our music,” he says. “I remember one time a guy said, ‘Clive, man, don't walk down that way cause they throwing Jamaicans in garbage cans.' The gangs was throwing Jamaicans in garbage cans!”

Herc was learning the ways of the Bronx. He found himself hanging out with young Five Percenters, absorbing their slang and science. For a time, he even rolled with the Cofon Cats, the same Tremont gang that Benjy Melendez had
joined when he first moved to the Bronx a few years before. It wasn't much of an experience. The Cofon Cats spent one long afternoon getting chased out of Little Italy by the Golden Guineas.

At Junior High School 118, Clive began running cross-country and track and winning medals. His physicality won him American friends. After school, he began hanging out with a Jamaican American named Jerome Wallace, who was a unicyclist. Jerome had already been through the transition Clive was going through. He taught Clive how to ride on one wheel, and how to balance his Jamaican past and his Bronx present. Clive began to see the Cofon Cats as punks who were nothing without the security of the gang. “The gang members started asking us to be division leaders because they see we have respect. So we didn't need that anymore,” Herc says. “And I had a few other things to worry about besides the gangs, like getting my ass whipped by my father.”