High Price

serious one in terms of taking responsibility; he arranged venues and coordinated transportation. But in his manner, he was actually a jokester who could do wicked impressions when he let loose. In contrast, his brother Richard was the star performer. Richard was six foot one. He had long eyelashes framing big almond-shaped eyes that made the girls wild. Silky Slim rocked the mic. He was so smooth that all the girls wanted to be with him and all the guys wanted to be him.
    Their older brother Cecil—who didn’t deejay but along with Kenneth managed the logistics and the money—was known as Dr. Love. He had twinkly hazel brown eyes and a great smile that women loved. Their friend Adolph was called After Death for his initials and he was the fourth man in our group, although he did not emcee. Another Kenneth—a cousin of Kenneth Bowe, in fact, named Kenneth Good—took the nom de rap Captain Good. He did our lighting with strobes, disco balls, and police siren lights. There were also about a half-dozen honorary members, guys who’d be given black Adidas T-shirts with white lettering, identifying them as part of our crew. In exchange for helping us set up and break down the equipment, they got shirts that essentially told the girls that they were “with the band” and carried that kind of currency.
    Soon 2,500 people would come out for us on Friday nights, paying two-dollar admission to a gym like Washington Park or a skating rink that we’d rented. I’d take my turn at spinning and emceeing and I’d feel like the man behind the Technics SL-1200 turntables. I knew how to keep the house rocking. I could sweet-talk the girls and have them out of their jeans by the end of the night. I thought I had mad skills.
    We kept up with the latest records through a record club; for a few bucks, every week the labels would send us their new releases, hoping to kick-start a hit with club play. Many of them were garbage, but after hours of listening, you’d often come across something that had that sound, something you could build on. At first, virtually all we played was R&B, soul, and funk. In my early days, the big songs were Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love”; Captain Sky’s “Super Sporm”; Herman Kelly’s “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat”; and Freedom’s “Get Up and Dance” (Grandmaster Flash soon sampled that one to death). Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” also got a lot of play.
    When I started going to jams in the late 1970s, hip-hop (or rap, as it was called then) hadn’t yet gained much traction outside of New York. Up there, the mother of rap, a then-middle-aged singer and producer named Sylvia Robinson, had founded Sugar Hill Records earlier in the decade. She named it after Harlem’s most affluent neighborhood. Robinson was one of the first people to see the commercial potential in the emceeing and beats she was hearing from club DJs and at street parties. She put the Sugar Hill Gang together, choosing guys who looked cool to be the performers—in the same way that male producers had previously chosen sexy women to make up “girl bands.”
    Sugar Hill’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap record to win commercial success. Robinson was also behind Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, convincing them to record “The Message,” which was their big hit and brought a political sensibility to early rap. When I started, old-schoolers like Grandmaster Flash were just getting their earliest club gigs and innovating by using the turntable itself as a musical instrument, improvising techniques with their hands. Scratching, backspinning, using multiple turntables, mixing musical genres by sampling records—all of this was brand-new back then in the United States, though Jamaican DJs had been experimenting with these tactics for years.
    About every other jam we held, there’d be gunfire and we’d all have to duck, but no one ever actually got shot. Wannabe gangsters were just firing their weapons to flex, to show that they couldn’t be messed with. In South Florida, our competitors were groups like Ghetto Style DJs, featuring Luke Skyywalker. His real name was Luther Campbell and he’s best known now as a member of 2 Live Crew. In the late 1980s, when he became famous, George Lucas sued him for using the Star Wars character’s name. Also coming up with us were groups and artists like Instrumental Funk, featuring Super Westley J; Opa-Locka DJs with Slick D; International DJs,