Tag: De La Soul

Jrnl Entry No. 9.13.2000 “MY HIP HOP STORY” PART VI

When my friends and I would drive to New York we’d spend like half the day on 125th, and the other half at The Fulton Mall. We didn’t even spend the night in the city because we thought hotels were too much, and plus we didn’t know anywhere else to go anyway, no clubs or nothing like that. One time my friend Burton and I went for New Years. I think it was New Years 1993. We got a $40 room on 125th Street. One of those places with the bathroom down the hall. Except for the bathroom situation, it was a pretty comfortable room, nice and warm. The heat was kickin’ so, we had to open the window to survive.

We got there on a Friday night and New Years Eve was that Saturday night. Late in the night, I went walking around 125th and the surrounding area. He didn’t come with me because either he was scared or cold, or tired. I had had a forty of OE and I was wired, not tryin’ to go to sleep. I just walked around. It felt good to me to walk around the streets of New York City. I was fly too. Come to think about it, I could have gotten robbed. I had on some $80 Brand X Girbaud Jeans, some black chuckers Timberlands, a red black and white long sleeve Tommy Hilfiger shirt, and a green and blue check goose down Nautica coat, with a green and black hat with the flaps over the ears to match the coat. I ran into some Spanish kids and we were talking. They asked me if I liked Hip Hop, and of course I said yeah. I told them I was from Ohio, etc. At about 3 A.M. that night, I returned back to the room and went to sleep. We got up that morning and took our bath in the bathroom down the hall. It was disgusting, but hey, a nigga had to wash his ass you know that.

He had an appointment to get his dreads done at a shop in Brooklyn on Vanderbuilt called Tendrils. We found our way there. We were talking with the lady who was doing his hair, asking her where was a mall, like the ones we have at home? While doing his hair, she told us to drive straight up Flatbush Ave for about 45 Mins to an hour and we would run into a mall on the left hand side. We had heard on the radio about this bomb concert that we definitely were attending later that night. It was A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and The Souls of Mischief. We loved all of those groups, especially The Souls with their debut album. The way they flipped rhymes on that album was incredible to us. So after his hair was finished, we went driving down Flatbush and we ran into the mall. Just as I was about to run left, a car came along and scrapped against mine. DAMN!

So this guy gets out his car talkin’ loud, saying for me to give him $300 or something, or he hopes that I have insurance or I was going to jail that night. I got back into my car because it was cold, and the talk of jail scared me. I was stretching down toward the floor, and he thought I was reaching for a gun. He started saying that he had one too. I think my car was still running. I just put it in drive and made a break for it, I WASN’T GOING TO JAIL! FUCK THAT! So it was on. He ran back to his car and started chasing us. Burton was in the car calm and cool saying, “why are you doin’ this, we goin’ to jail, we goin’ to jail.”

In the chase, I slid and hit the back of a parked car. I backed out of that, and then on my next speedy turn in the snow, I ran off the road and hit a brick wall. I backed out of that, and the guy got out of his car and started running toward my car. Burton said he had a nine cocked to the side ready to fire, but he didn’t shoot. I was driving off and I guess he just gave up and stood back there outside his car.

I went and parked my car in a parking lot, and got out and hid for a moment to calm down. After about 15 to 30 minutes we got back into the car and started driving trying to decide if we should attempt to go back into Manhattan to try and go to that concert. We came up with all kind of crazy country shit that probably wouldn’t have happened. Like we were thinking there would be cops at the Brooklyn Bridge waiting to see if we tried to get on or off the bridge. And we were also thinking that maybe a cop would spot my car in Manhattan while parked and at the concert, and when we we’d get back in the car they’d surround us and arrest us.

We decided not to take the chance and that we should head back home, but the problem was, how did we get back to route 80 from Brooklyn? See, we usually headed straight down Amsterdam from 125th St and drove to like 178th and see a sign that said George Washington Bridge, hit 95 South, which turned into 80 and go home.  We just started driving and somehow we got back to 80. I still don’t know how we did to this day. We passed the Science Center and seen that statue of the guy with the world on his back where Tribe and De La shot the video for “Award Tour.” I live here in New York now, and that is on the Grand Central Parkway. To get from the Grand Central Parkway to 80, you have to cross the Tri-Boro Bridge which cost you $3.50, and I don’t remember paying to go across it. I don’t remember crossing the Queens Boro Bridge neither, so I don’t know how we got back on the road to get to Ohio but we did; made it back like right around 12 or 1 A.M. just as the New Year was coming in.

When we got back, I told my mom that someone hit the car while it was parked on the street at the hotel we stayed at.

Jrnl Entry No. 9.13.2000 “MY HIP HOP STORY” PART II

Then we started moving on to bigger and better Hip Hop concerts like at The Front Row in Cleveland, OH. They (Samuel, Clay, Shaneequa, Shaniece) had tickets already. I didn’t have my ticket and had no clue how I was gonna get one. I had planned on standing outside until they came out. It was the summer before I entered the ninth grade, and I was freshly dipped in my Korea Fila suit that no one in my town had ever seen before. I also had a satiny Adidas one. I knew nothing about ticket scalpers. So I was standing there in line, and a guy asked me if I needed a ticket, I said “yeah.” He got his boy and they sold me one for $30.

The concert was legendary. A Fresh Fest starring LL Cool J performing fresh off his platinum Bigger and Deffer album. The other groups were: Stetsasonic, Public Enemy, Eric B & Rakim, Dougie Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew, and Whodini. The way The Front Row was designed was stadium seating and you could see from back to front. It was a circular hall with a rotating stage. I remember at the end of the concert Estacy of Whodini complimented me on my Fila suit. There was a second show so most all the rappers were hanging out by the tour buses. LL was probably on one of his sexual episodes because he was nowhere to be seen. He was the big star anyway so he couldn’t come outside. The next show we went to was also in Cleveland, a Fat Boys show, featuring U.T.F.O. U.T.F.O. rocked the house, doing dance moves and what not. This was the biggest concert hall I’d ever been in. This was like my third time seeing The Fat Boys. They were performing their “Chrushin’´album which I had bought that summer.

There was something about U.T.F.O.’s performance that struck me and made me want to become a rapper who performed out on tour. When I got back home that night, which was a Sunday, and school was the next morning, I wrote my first rap song called “Dance”. I finished it at like 1:00 AM. I wrote another song about two days later which included my cousin Donavan. It was called Doc and Don, describing how two guys treated girls; me treating a girl kind, and Donavan treating a girl cruel. We rehearsed the song, but Donavan didn’t take it serious. I eventually a month later, took his name out the song, and just made it as another personality of me.

My older cousin Mantrix had a little recording studio down in his basement. He said he’d charge me $25 to make a tape of the two songs. I had produced two little beats in my head and beat boxed them onto a tape to rehearse the songs before I went to the studio. I had one problem though, my mom said that she was not going to give me the $25 to do the tape. Well, that problem was easily overcome. I made the appointment to do the tape and I just stole the money out of my mom’s purse. She found out and asked me about it. The last whipping I had was when I was 12. She wasn’t mad or anything, she didn’t do nothing, but she still mentions it to me to this day.

So I went to my cousin’s studio. He had a Casio little drum machine that he didn’t know how to program. I called Clay and asked him how to program it because he had the same one. He explained something to me and I tried it. I had the sequence going but the beat wouldn’t come out right. I just played it manually. I played the whole drum track from pad to pad: bass, hi hat, clap, hi hat, bass, clap, open hi hat. I still know how that beat goes. I did the vocals, overdubbing the whole song, to give it a stronger voice my cousin said. The songs were pretty wack for the most part. The second song with the two personalities was the better of the two. I had my cousin play the bass guitar. It was the bass line from LL’s “I’m Bad”. I didn’t think about it at the time when making it, but that’s what it was as others pointed out to me when I let them listen to it.

When the tape was finished, I went over to Samuel’s house and got addresses off of the back of his records to record companies. I had like twenty addresses. I sent the tapes off with just one stamp on them. About two days later, they all came back “insufficient postage”. The maintenance man had them all in a bucket and gave them to me. I put like two more stamps on them and sent them off again. I probably got about two of those infamous letters in the mail like six weeks later. “Thanks for submitting your material, however, at this time we are not looking for new material.” I’d always get a letter back from Profile Records. I got one back from Virgin Records saying they didn’t accept unsolicited material. I called their office to ask what that meant. They told me it had to be submitted by a lawyer.

Later that year I got hooked up with some guy, who was a beginner DJ by the name of Nelson. We got hooked up through some guy who talked a bunch of shit like he was a manager. He even had me do this one song for Nelson’s brother like I was auditioning or something. Nelson’s brother named Remmington was just a working man with a wife and kidz. But Nelson and I hooked up and he was the DJ and I was the rapper. We later named ourselves TWC (The Warren Crew). Nelson had two turntables and a mixer with a little button on it to help with transformer scratching. He had basically taken over his cousin’s little Casio sampler. I think Prince Paul used the same sampler on the De La Three Feet High and Rising” album because I heard the lion roar on the album, the same lion roar from that little sampler.