like 1984–85. It was like, “What the fuck?”’ he says before recreating the sample from the JBs’ ‘Blow Your Head’ with his mouth to emphasise the point.
If you’ve heard it, it’s easy to imagine. If not, the noise is not completely dissimilar to the prolonged wail of a crying baby, albeit one with an unnaturally deep voice. But this baby has decided to hold his crying note like Bill Withers at the end of ‘Lovely Day’. Chuck had been a fan of ‘Blow Your Head’ for a long time. He originally heard the song when he attended Roosevelt Roller Rink as a teenager. ‘Let me tell you I was a rollerskating motherfucker,’ he confirms with a laugh.
The idea to loop the song came from DJs who couldn’t mix the record properly. Many DJs couldn’t extend the groove properly and weren’t mixing and blending (or back-to-backing if you prefer that term) the two copies of the same record in time anyway. There would always be the tiniest gap between the old ‘waaaaaaaaaaah’ and the new one. And as Rakim would insist in a year or two there ‘ain’t no mistakes allowed’.
At this time the term loop didn’t exist, there still weren’t any machines a producer could load a beat into. All Chuck knew was that it didn’t sound right. ‘I was like, “They need to hold that shit”.’ Determined to get it just right, the Public Enemy camp happily used the (now super old-school method) of twin cassette decks. Just as it had done with the turntable, hip-hop revolutionised the way cassette decks were used. ‘When cassette decks first came out black people took them cassette decks and made pause tapes,’ Chuck says. ‘And pause tapes was the first remix tapes.’
Significantly, ‘Public Enemy Number One’, which went through many incarnations, was the first song to feature Flavor Flav and Chuck D on a song together. Flavor opens up the song by rehashing the real conversation he had with Chuck about the Play Hard Crew coming for his neck. Then, at the end of the song, Flav praises Chuck for a job well done on some ‘that’s right, you showed ’em’-type shit. It marked the beginning of a great musical partnership, one of the greatest in music history.
However, it didn’t really matter how anxious Rick Rubin was to sign Chuckie D (he still hadn’t shaved the ‘ie’ from his rap moniker) and Spectrum (despite recording ‘Public Enemy Number One’ they were also yet to change their name). They still didn’t want to sign to Def Jam, or any label for that matter. The Spectrum massive were still very interested in emulating the success of radio personality Frankie Crocker. But they were having a hard time. ‘This is before there was an Oprah, this is before Spike Lee’s big, before Denzel’s big, no one’s really big yet,’ observes Bill Stephney. ‘The big people in the community were the radio stars.’
Not even Jam Master Jay, who stayed on their case about releasing the song, could change Chuck’s mind. Flavor remembers picking up Jay and DMC to take them to the studio one day. ‘I remember Jay telling Chuck, “Yo come on, man, why don’t you put that record out, man”. They were telling Chuck that shit for some months. Chuck was like, “Man, fuck that”. It was really Jam Master Jay and DMC that talked Chuck into doing that Def Jam shit. So right now my hat goes off to Jam Master Jay ’cos he’s really part of the start of PE. Of us being a recording group.’
But while DMC, and Jay in particular, never stopped trying to persuade Chuck that a career as a professional rapper was a good idea, it was obviously going to take something uniquely powerful to change his mind when it came to taking that leap of faith. ‘I knew it would automatically just change my whole life,’ Chuck explains. Def Jam tried to diversify their offer, giving Chuck the opportunity to write for other groups like The Beastie Boys, but he wasn’t keen on that either.
A variety of factors combined to eventually change his mind. The historic show that Run DMC played at Madison Square Garden as part of their Raising Hell tour set things in motion. Once again Bill Stephney was the main link between the Rush and Spectrum camps, but Jam Master Jay also made sure his homies were invited. Rick Rubin was hopeful that they would attend the show. Unlike the show Run DMC played in Long Beach, California, soon afterwards, the show at the Garden would be legendary for all the right reasons. This was the concert where Run famously told the 20,000-strong crowd to hold their Adidas trainers in the air prior to their performance of their historic song ‘My Adidas’. Chuck, like everyone who saw or heard about this feat, was greatly impressed. (Wily old Russell Simmons also made sure that Adidas representatives saw the breathtaking response.)
But, despite the raw power of this spectacle, the media response to the Long Beach concert may have been even more crucial. Where Run DMC’s show at the Garden had been an unqualified success, the show at the Long Beach Arena was nothing short of disastrous. Not only did the Crips and Bloods fight each other with scant regard for the concert that was supposed to be taking place, they also decided to rob and assault some concert-goers. Forty people were badly injured. The predictably hysterical media response which sought to blame Run DMC, and hip-hop by association, greatly vexed Chuck (as it did all hip-hop fans).
Away from all things Run DMC, the cold hard realities regarding the lack of opportunities open to young black men at the time also reared their ugly head. The people who would form PE had to reluctantly admit to themselves that the job in syndicated radio they hoped to win was just not realistic. Chuck realised their choices were severely limited. ‘It was sorta like the only direction that was left because they wasn’t gonna give us any shot on the radio, on professional radio in New York City. It just wasn’t that time. Regardless of our skills in that field.’ That’s when Bill Stephney, Chuck and Hank all sat down and decided that instead of just doing another single they should try to come up with a concept. ‘One of the concepts that I had obsessed about personally,’ says Bill, ‘was that we didn’t have any political rap groups at that time.’ Bill was a big fan of ‘Sandinista’ by The Clash. He wondered, ‘Can we do something like that with a rap group?’
The mid-eighties was a volatile time to be a young black man in New York. Black America as a whole was feeling the effects of the Reagan administration’s ‘trickle down’ theory. It was a good lie. They promoted the always false idea that if the rich got richer, the wealth would eventually trickle down to the masses. The citizens of New York were hit harder than most. The fast-developing crack trade that would be dissected in ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’ wasn’t helping anyone.
Caught up in the middle of all the madness, and directly affected by it, the crew would spend hours discussing these issues. ‘Other young men of our time were hanging out smoking and drinking or doing drugs, or dealing drugs,’ Bill reflects. ‘All we did was talk about music and politics till 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning.’ The idea was to direct that energy into their musical output. In this respect, they would have more in common with the punk rock movement than they would with the majority of mid-eighties rappers. This notion was irresistible to the people who would soon become PE and was the reason they eventually signed on the dotted line with Def Jam. The prospect of being able to put their politics into practice proved to be too enticing. Not even their deep-seated suspicion of the music business could deter them.
It was around this time that the graphic designer in Chuck surfaced to design the infamous PE logo. The image of a black man in the middle of a target is perhaps the most iconic logo in hip-hop history. It is certainly one of the most enduring and easily recognisable. Bill Adler, who, like everyone else, hadn’t witnessed anything like it before at Def Jam was totally nonplussed. ‘It was completely astonishing,’ the former press officer recalls. ‘Here was a group that said, “We’re going to change the consciousness of an entire culture.” Which is titanically ambitious to begin with. And they succeeded.’
PE stepped on to the scene at a time when the whole idea of black leadership was a thing of the past for America’s black youth. J Edgar Hoover’s tactics had worked: in the late sixties, soon after declaring
