I was in seventh grade, 1978. We were all in the schoolyard and Billy Morris, who was in the eighth grade, he wasn’t like a thug or a gangster, but he knew all of them. We thought he was going to try to make us smoke cigarettes and drink Night Train or Thunderbird, that 99-cent liquor. When we got over there, he had this tape recorder and said, “Check this out.” He pushed play and a beat came on and we heard this voice say, “When you keep the pep in your step you don’t stop ’til you get on the mountaintop/And when you reach the top, you reach the peak, that’s when you’ll hear Eddie Cheba speak.” That was the first time I heard hip-hop on tape.

Billy let me hold that tape for a weekend. He saw how bad I wanted it. I listened to it from Friday night all the way up to Sunday night at 10 o’clock. My moms was like, “Boy, you better get your butt in bed. You got school in the morning!”

Summer vacation comes, and now I’m seeing hip-hop at the park parties and the block parties. All that was probably going on all this time but it wasn’t until the tape that I paid attention to it. By having that tape with me for the weekend it became part of me. Now I’m open for that vibration. This was in Queens. I didn’t know anything about the Bronx. I couldn’t even leave the block!

My brother, who is three years older than me, comes home talking about getting a turntable because his friends were all getting turntables. So long story short, we didn’t sell weed. My brother and I were broke. All I had was this huge Marvel comic book collection. So my brother says, “Yo, we ain’t got no money, but D, you got a lot of comic books. We are going to do a comic books sale so we can buy some turntables and a microphone.”

Me and my brother buy the turntables. Every time he would leave, I would go to the basement and try to figure them out. It wasn’t until I heard Grandmaster Flash that I really got interested in D.J.ing. In Queens we called them Flash tapes. These were live performances that were going on in the Bronx, Harlem and Manhattan that were coming into Queens via cassette tapes being sold like records in every hood. Flash tapes, DJ HOLLYWOOD tapes, Zulu Nation tapes were all going around Queens.

Everybody is playing that “Rapper’s Delight” song. And the only thing I really paid attention to on that song was that Superman rhyme. It was so different from all the other raps. Because I was a good student, I listened to “Rapper’s Delight” three times and learned it from start to end.

My brother brings home a record called “Superappin’” by Grandmaster Flash, the guy from the tape who had these Furious Five M.C.s. It changed my life because it came on with so much power. “It was a party night everybody was breaking/The highs were screamin’ and the bass was shakin’/And it won’t be long ’til everybody knowin’ that Flash was on the beat box!” It was so different from “Rapper’s Delight.” It resonated with my youthful rebellious nature. That was the day Darryl McDaniels became Easy D.

I think because I was into comic books I understood the alter ego thing. Melvin Glover is Melle Mel. Mohandas Dewese is Kool Moe Dee. They had these alter egos so I knew I could play into that.

The ones that made me want to get on the mic, of course it was Melle Mel and KOOL MOE DEE. But the artists that changed my life was DJ Charlie Chase, DJ Tony Tone, and the Cold Crush Four who were Grandmaster Caz, JDL, Easy A.D. and the Almighty Kay Gee. They are the greatest group in hip-hop that a lot of people don’t know about. They kept it raw on the M.C. performance thing. I changed my name to DMC because of GMC, Grandmaster Caz.

“Rapper’s Delight” and “The Breaks” were cool. But the greatest period in hip-hop is the time before recorded rap. It was a live tape of the Fantastic Five vs. the Cold Crush Four at Harlem World that changed what I thought about rapping. They was playing Billy Squier’s “Big Beat,” they were taking Spoonie Gee’s “Love Rap,” and they were making routines out of them! They were flipping everything that had been done and taking it to another level. That made me say, wow, you can be a rock star with this. The attitude they had reminded me of AC/DC or Iron Maiden mixed in with George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic and James Brown.

For me, I took real vocal inspiration from Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant and Mick Jagger. Especially Mick because Freddie was usually very melodic. He could do opera, but Mick was different, raw. I’m the king of rock. I didn’t want to be the king of rap. All I cared about was comic books. Black music was in my house, but I saw it as my mother’s and father’s music back then. It was 30-, 40- and 50-year-olds. They are listening to all this great Black music by people like Aretha and James Brown. I didn’t get it as a kid, but with ’70s rock radio there was a station in New York City called 770 WABC. Harry Harrison and Dan Ingram, they would play James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Aretha Franklin. But they also played Harry Chapin, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, the Stones and Joni Mitchell.

So the reason why I love rock more is not only the voices were stronger, louder and powerful and they looked like superheroes, the drums and the guitars were stronger and louder. It was like the Incredible Hulk to me. So the confidence that I had was like, “OK, I may not be as eloquent in words as Moe Dee and the rest of the Treacherous Three. But if I rock this mic like I’m a member of the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin? If I bring that persona to hip-hop?” Man … it worked. Chuck D said it: Run-DMC showed hip-hop could be done on rock star levels. That’s why I said, “I’m the king of rock/there is none higher!”

Bonus
DMC ON PUBLIC ENEMY

Related Artists
DJ HOLLYWOOD
LL COOL J
BUSTA RHYMES
BIG BOI


~~~~~~~~~
"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz