Can't Stop Won't Stop (14 page)

He started searching for songs by the sound of their break, songs that he would make into his signature tunes: the nonstop conga epics from The Incredible Bongo Band called “Apache” and “Bongo Rock,” James Brown's “live” version of “Give It Up Turn It Loose” from the
Sex Machine
album, Johnny Pate's theme to
Shaft in Africa,
Dennis Coffey's “Scorpio”—Black soul and white rock records with an uptempo, often Afro-Latinized backbeat.
⁷
Then he soaked off the labels, Jamaican style. “My father said, ‘Hide the name of your records because that's how you get your rep. That's how you get your clientele.' You don't want the same people to have your same record down the block,” Herc says. Here was one source of hip-hop's competitive ethic and beat-this aesthetic.

In a technique he called “the Merry-Go-Round,” Herc began to work two copies of the same record, back-cueing a record to the beginning of the break as the other reached the end, extending a five-second breakdown into a five-minute loop of fury, a makeshift
version
excursion. Before long he had tossed most of the songs, focusing on the breaks alone. His sets drove the dancers from climax to climax on waves of churning drums. “And once they heard that, that was it, wasn't no turning back,” Herc says. “They always wanted to hear breaks after breaks after breaks after breaks.”

To accommodate larger crowds, Herc moved his parties further up Sedgwick Avenue into Cedar Park. He had seen construction workers hooking up power by tapping the lightposts, and so he started doing the same. “I had a big Mackintosh amp. That thing cost a lot of money and it pumped a lot of juice. It was 300 watts per channel. As the juice start coming, man, the lights start dimming. And the turntables, I had the Technics 1100A, the big ones, so it wouldn't turn.” Finally they found a tool shed in the park. They would send a young boy through the stone-broken window to plug into enough juice for the sound system.

The results shocked the borough, and brought in new audiences. Aaron
O'Bryant, who would later become DJ AJ, was a marijuana dealer living near St. Mary's Park. “Everyone was talking about this guy DJ Kool Herc. And I was really excited. I knew all the women was gonna be there. I was excited by Herc but I really wanted to see could I bag something!” he laughs. “I became a Kool Herc freak. Everywhere he played I was there.”

A teen from Fox Street in the South Bronx named Joseph Saddler, who called himself Flash, also heard about Herc's exploits and went up to Cedar Park to see it for himself. “I seen this big six-foot-plus guy with this incredible sound system, heavily guarded. People just enjoying themselves from like four years to forty. I'm like, wow! He looked sort of like this superhero on this podium playing this music that wasn't being played on the radio. I liked what he was doing and what he was playing, and I wanted to do that, too.”

The gangs were dissolving and Herc was popularizing a new hierarchy of cool. Turfs were still important but in a different way. Jazzy Jay says, “Instead of gangs, they started turning into little area crews where they would do a little bit of dirt. In every area, there would be a DJ crew or a breakdance crew. They would be like, ‘Okay, we all about our music and we love our music but you come in this area wrong and we all about kicking your ass.' Competition fueled the whole thing.”

Herc's parties drew in the crews, gave them a chance to strut their stuff and make their names. He kept the peace by taking a live-and-let-live policy and skillfully working the mic. “Everybody had to make money, even the stick-up kids. The guy selling weed would come to me, ‘A-yo Herc, man, say I got weed.' I'd say, ‘You know I can't say you got weed!' So I'd say it indirectly, ‘Yo, Johnny, you know I can't say you got weed, right?' He'd take the heat.”

“Or if I know there's a certain party up in there starting trouble, I never would say their name, I just say, ‘Yo kill it, cut the bullshit out. You're my man, cut the dumb shit.
You
know and
they
know who I'm talking about. Okay? Alright.' They'd be like ‘Oh shit, Herc gave me a little warning.' I might be playing music but I'm no sucker.”

The real action was in the dance ciphers, with the kids who had come for Herc's “Merry-Go-Round,” and were becoming personalities in their own right. They were too excitable and had too much flavor to conform to the precision group steps of dances like The Hustle. They would simply jump in one after another
to go off, take each other out, just “break” wild on each other. Herc called them break boys, b-boys for short.
⁸

There was Tricksy, Wallace Dee, the Amazing Bobo, Sau Sau, Charlie Rock, Norm Rockwell, Eldorado Mike, and Keith and Kevin, the Nigger Twins. They did dances like The Boyoing, where a b-boy sported a Turbans-like pom-pom topped hat, and stretched, wiggled, and shook back and forth to make the ball go “boyoing.” “It was called that because that's basically what they see,” says Jazzy Jay, “just bounce all over the place, hit the ground, go down. It wasn't like a lot of the acrobatics. It was more from style and finesse. You could do a whole routine standing up before you even hit the ground.”

“Another kid uptown called it the cork-and-screw,” says Jeffrey “DOZE” Green, a Rock Steady Crew member and second-generation b-boy who first saw The Boyoing in the North Bronx in 1975. “It's ‘cause they used to spin down, pop up, do a split and then go whoop! Come up, and then go down again into a split into a few baby-rocks into a little baby freeze. People were spinning on their butts then, too.”

“Tricksy had a huge afro,” says Cindy. “And he had that soft hair because his hair grew. And he did a move where he would jump up and his afro would start to bounce also. There was also a move called the Frankenstein move, where he'd start moving like Frankenstein and his afro would start bouncing. It was like a show, you know?”

Herc assembled his own clique of DJs, dancers and rappers, and dubbed them the Herculords: Coke La Rock, DJ Timmy Tim with Little Tiny Feet, DJ Clark Kent the Rock Machine, the Imperial JC, Blackjack, LeBrew, Pebblee Poo, Sweet and Sour, Prince, and Whiz Kid. He refused to call them a crew. “That name ‘crew' took the place of gang. When they said, ‘crew', we knew it was a gang. So it was never the Herculord crew. That's what people start calling us. But we never had on our flier saying ‘The Herculord crew.' It was billed with the sound system we called the Herculoids.”

After reinvesting his money in a few different sound system sets, Herc was ready to take it to the next level. By 1975, he was doing all-ages dances at the Webster Avenue P.A.L. But he was turning twenty, and didn't only want the kiddie crowd anymore. He found a club called the Twilight Zone on Jerome Avenue near Tremont, and started hosting parties there with his clique and his
sound system. He says he screened Muhammad Ali videos until they said, “Yo Herc, stop showing them Ali fights, you souping them motherfuckers up!”

At a hot spot called the Hevalo, he passed out flyers for his Twilight Zone shows until he was chased out. One day, he vowed, I'll play this spot. On a stormy night, Herc emptied the Hevalo by playing a party at the Zone. “Rain,” he says, “was a good sign for me.” The Hevalo owner quickly called him up to make a deal. Soon, Herc was playing there and at another club called the Executive Playhouse for a full-fledged adult crowd.

They came to hear Herc rap: “You never heard it like this before, and you're back for more and more and more of this here rock-ness. ‘Cause you see, we rock with the rockers, we jam with the jammers, we party with the partyers. Young lady don't hurt nobody. It ain't no fun till we all get some. Don't hurt nobody, young lady!”

Coke and another crew member named Dickey let the crowds know: “There's no story can't be told, there's no horse can't be rode, a no bull can't be stopped and ain't a disco we can't rock. Herc! Herc! Who's the man with a master plan from the land of Gracie Grace? Herc Herc!”

By 1976, he was the number-one draw in the Bronx. No more roach killers. DJ Kool Herc dressed the role, sporting fabulous Lee or AJ Lester suits. All the high rollers, bank robbers, and hustlers from Harlem were coming up to see him. He says, “The reputation was, ‘Who is making money up in the Bronx? Kool Herc and the guy Coke La Rock with the music.' ”

1977 started off very well for Herc. But as it would be everywhere, trouble was ahead.

It was not, as many well-meaning journalists and academics would later erroneously write, that the block party or sound system showdown had replaced the rumble or the riot. That notion was as misguided as Robert Moses's contention that nothing good could ever again come from the Bronx. The truth was, in fact, much less dramatic and much more profound. In the Bronx's new hierarchy of cool, the man with the records had replaced the man with the colors. Violence did not suddenly end; how could it? But an enormous amount of creative energy was now ready to be released from the bottom of American society, and
the staggering implications of this moment eventually would echo around the world.

By 1977, Herc and his competitors had divided the Bronx into a new kind of grid. In the South Bronx from 138th to 163rd streets, where the Bachelors, the Savage Nomads, the Savage Skulls and the Ghetto Brothers had once run, Grandmaster Flash, backed by the local Casanova Crew, was emerging as the area celebrity. In the Southeast, formerly the territory of the Black Spades, P.O.W.E.R. and the Javelins, Afrika Bambaataa held sway with his Zulu Nation. In the north, there was DJ Breakout and DJ Baron. And the West Bronx neighborhood and the East Bronx nightclubs were still Herc's. Herc remained the undisputed king of the borough by virtue of his records, his loyal crowd, and his sound system.

“It was ridiculous. He was god,” says Zulu Nation DJ Jazzy Jay. At a legendary Webster P.A.L. contest, Herc drowned out Bambaataa's system with little effort. “Whenever Kool Herc played outside, shit was loud and crystal clean. When we'd play outside, we'd be hooking up a whole bunch of little wires, a bunch of four or five amps and—errnt! Zzzzt! Shit would be blowing up.” And every time Grandmaster Flash came to a Herc party, Flash chuckles, “Herc always used to embarrass me.”

After being threatened by some cops for his drug selling, Herc's fan Aaron O'Bryant moved on to promoting parties. He rented the Savoy Manor nightclub on 149th Street and the Grand Concourse. “I wanted to have Kool Herc versus Pete DJ Jones. Back then Pete DJ Jones was number one on the disco set and Kool Herc was just number one, period,” he recalls. “So I had a commitment from Pete DJ Jones because he was a businessman, he took on all bookings. The first thing Kool Herc wanted to know was where did I get his telephone number from. And he was explaining to me that I was not a proven promoter. Plus, he also insinuated that he could go to the Savoy Manor and rent it himself and do that battle if he wanted. He didn't want to let me eat.”

By the end of the spring, Herc noticed his audiences were declining. “People are getting older now, it wasn't all about me. All of a sudden now you're not eighteen no more, you're twenty-four and twenty-five. You can drink now. You ain't coming to no little seventeen-, eighteen-year-old party,” he recalls. “And other people was coming up.”

After the blackout and the looting, there were plenty of new crews with brand new sound systems in the streets, and Herc's main rivals were luring away his crowd. Flash had precision, sophistication and an entertainer's flair. Bambaataa had his records and the power of Bronx River behind him. O'Bryant himself had begun DJing. As DJ AJ, he teamed with a new turntable tutor, Lovebug Starski, and expanded into Harlem. Herc says, “I stayed behind, I didn't move with them to downtown. I stayed up in the Bronx.”

Herc finally agreed to play with DJ AJ at a back-to-school party at the Executive Playhouse. It was sold out, AJ recalls, but Herc was no longer the main draw. “Flash was at my show. I let Flash get on and I let Melle Mel get on the mic,” AJ says. “But it didn't help Herc's career at all because he was fading fast.”

A few months later, Herc was preparing for another night at the Playhouse, now renamed The Sparkle, when he heard a scuffle breaking out. “Mike-With-The-Lights had a discrepancy with somebody at the door,” Herc recalls. Mike was refusing to allow three men into the club and they had become increasingly agitated. When Herc went to mediate the situation, one of the men drew a knife. Herc felt it pierce him three times in the side. As he put his bloodied hand up to block his face, the attacker stabbed him once more in the palm before disappearing with the others up the stairs and into the night. “It made me draw back into a little shell,” Herc says, exhaling for a long moment.

It was 1977.

Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin's ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism's crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero.

In the Bronx, Herc's time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx.
Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.