Ok...let me start this by sayin', Eye have no stories with me staring down the barrel!!! LOL....not to say Eye was never @ any function where cats popped off, but usually it was outside of the venue or Eye was not close enough to the static for it to be more than, "we heard shots, and we bounced"....hahaha. In fact, Eye think that the only time Eye was directly effected by gunplay was @ a show we (Eye was one of the cats that replaced the original members of Newcleus....another story for another time) were playing in Miami. The lineup was Too Tough Tee, 2Live Crew (who hadn't quite broke out nationally yet), The Real Roxanne & Howie Tee, Schooly D...and Eye don't remember if Mikey D. & The Symbolic 3 did this particular show but, they were supposed to be there. Anyway, 2Live had already earned a reputation locally for having wild shows, so naturally they drew a rowdy crowd. Newcleus was supposed to be going on last, after Roxanne & Howie but, unfortunately, that never happened. The Real Roxanne was seeing Bobby Brown at this time and dude came through to see her. This was pre-"My Perrogative", he had only had that 1st solo album, which didn't really blow up but, bottom line...his New Edition fame was still in full effect. So when Roxanne hit the stage, Bobby came out in the middle of her set....place went crazy....pop pop pop pop pop....end of show, promoters had to shut it down...we never touched the stage....but Eye digress.......
....Being as young as Eye was when Hip Hop was first entering my consciousness, Eye didn't understand it the first time Eye came in contact with it. You have to remember a few things....first - it wasn't called Hip Hop @ the time...in fact, Eye don't know if it had a proper name at all early on....in those first couple years we called it "DJ'ing" for the mixing side and "rhyming" for the rap part of the equation (in fact, "Rap" wasn't even a term Eye heard used for it until Rappers Delight...it had become commonly referred to as "MC'ing" up until that point).......2nd - there was no real medium to see this other than live...it would be a couple of years before the cassettes started circulating city-wide. So all Eye knew in the earliest days was when the mobile DJ's rocked block parties and park jams...and later, when everybody started their own local crews. In the earliest days (for me), it was just about the older heads bringing out the monster sound system and playing all the hot joints...as shorties on the block, we would post up by the speakers to feel the bass vibrate our chest cavity. If it was a block party, we would have a little dance contest or whatever. I've heard accounts of cats B-boying (the dance) as early as '75 but Eye wasn't exposed to seeing anybody actually rock til about '78. So when we were out there bustin' a two-step, it was dances like the Flintstone, The Patty Duke, The Rock, The Bus Stop, The Bump (hahaha), the Hustle (tho Eye had no skills there) and later, The Freak, which frequently resulted in dudes gettin' clowned for getting a little too excited, if you know what I'm sayin'!
Anyway, the art of mixing, which to me is what set Hip Hop apart from pure mobile DJ'ing, was probably the very first thing Eye was exposed to that was distinctly Hip Hop. My older brother had been messing around with the stereo equipment my pops had, which included this cassette deck. Don't remember what brand that joint was but, it was a relatively large deck that had all the controls and cassette bay on the top surface of the deck (as opposed to the front facing controls of most latter-day decks). All amped up, he calls me in the room as says, "check this out"...swag on 1000 and whatnot. He presses play and it's Rick James, "You an I". The song plays on for several minutes and he's got that, "yeeeeeeah boy" look goin' on....and I'm standing there looking at him like, "what's the big deal?!?" Finally, Eye just ask him..."what???"...and he says, "you don't hear that?!?!?"...Eye said, "yeah, it's, You and I....soooo???"......what Eye wasn't noticing was that he had paused mixed the song in several places...a tribute to my pops' deck and my brother's skill because, as Eye would later learn, a lot of machines made a nasty sound at the points where the pause happened and even if they didn't, precision was not easy to achieve when editing your songs with the pause button.
Eye just figured Eye was listening to the "long" version of the song....something that wasn't uncommon back in the day. Album cuts for some songs ran much longer than the single...and actually, that was the case with this song in particular as well but, what Eye was hearing was my brother editing the long version....a fact that was completely lost on me at that moment. Even after he explained it and played me the original parts for comparison, Eye gave him the generic, "oh, ok"...Eye just wanted to go back to playin'. My man was done! He couldn't understand how Eye did not recognize his genius!!!! He threw me out of the room. Hahahahahahahaha!!!!!
Ultimately, it wasn't a minute before everybody was trying to mix and it trickled down to my age group. Eye got with my friends and we started pause mixing and then puttin' together our equipment and callin' ourselves a crew. In junior high everybody tried to claim they was down with this crew or that crew...it was just as much a status symbol as anything else. King Tim & Rapper's Delight would drop in my freshman year of high school and it was on after that.
I'll try to remember some other stuff from back then....great times!
