has been rarely touched on was the use of live instruments, which were essential to the album’s overall sound. At the time, Stetsasonic and Run DMC were probably the only other hip-hop groups who didn’t fully rely on samplers. In years to come, when PE incorporated the baNNed into their live shows the usual suspects – the self appointed ‘real hip-hop heads’ who hate anything even slightly leftfield – began complaining about how much their favourite rap group had changed. These critics probably never realised that PE were one of the first groups to use a combination of the ‘old’ (live instruments) and the ‘new’ (samplers). Bill, Eric and Flavor were the main musicians. The trio had been playing together for a minute. In addition to his less serious contributions like ‘Claustrophobia Attack’, Flav also penned some heartfelt love songs. Bill would play bass and guitar, Eric would also play the axe as well as keyboards and Flavor took care of the drums. There was no set pattern that determined whether a live instrument or a sample would be used. They simply went with the flow and did what worked best for each song.
‘It was an incredible combination,’ Bill recalls. ‘We took advantage of the fact that we were part of that generation of folks who also played in bands on Long Island. We’re the last generation, before the DJs took over.’ All those who insisted PE’s work wasn’t real music probably never knew or cared that the ear and skills of a ‘real musician’ were brought to bear on their debut album. The combination of an old-school musicianship and the fact that Hank and Keith made music from the DJ’s perspective is what has made PE so uniquely powerful through the years.
Instead of having the same uncomplicated drumbeat run through a song like far too many of his contemporaries, Eric would add subtle little changes that he imagined a real live drummer would incorporate. The hi-hat rhythm would change as the song progressed or here and there would be an extra kick drum or snare fill. He strove to break up a track a little bit and mix up the groove. He’d had very good practice. ‘Before I did the PE stuff, I’d programme jazz drums, with thirty to forty patterns in a whole jazz song. As a musician I had friends who went to Berkeley. We’re playing Crusaders and Tower of Power. I’m coming from that aspect. The combination of myself along with Hank and Keith and Chuck was a good combination, although Keith was kinda in and out from time to time. I was very technical. Keith and Hank especially brought to it what I would call a “musical ignorance”. All they knew is, “Look, get funky motherfucker”. It was the smartness and the ignorance that made the music really complicated and interesting.’
As time progressed they began to understand each other’s quirks; where the other half was coming from musically. This allowed them to meet in the middle. Keith and Hank generally felt the songs didn’t have to make sense musically, as long as they were banging. But Eric understood that while they could certainly bring the noise and make something new, at a certain point things did have to resolve themselves musically. Or as he puts it, ‘It’s fine if it’s off a little, but somewhere it has to come on.’
Naturally, there was a degree of Spectrum City flavour in the mix. It wasn’t just ‘Public Enemy Number One’ that was a product of WBAU. ‘Timebomb’ came about because Keith knew that Chuck had always jammed hard when he used to drop joints by The Meters when they were playing out. The sample from ‘Just Kissed My Baby’ is so good that ten years later EPMD would use it for their comeback single ‘Never Seen Before’. So despite the fact that, by his own admission, Keith was kinda in and out, his fingerprints were still all over the album. He wasn’t only responsible for putting together the song that won them the deal in the first place.
Once Chuck had laid his practice vocal and the songs had been Flavor-ised, it was time to bring the DJs in. For Bum Rush this largely meant Johnny Juice, but Keith also got busy and Terminator X played his part. Even Chuck got busy on the ones and twos. ‘Chuck would call me and go, “I got these parts”,’ Eric says, ‘and he would come in and do some old fucked-up scratching but what was brilliant about it was it was fucked-up, like really kind of off, but once you repeat that offness it creates another rhythm, which no one in life would’ve ever figured out or thought of.’
Sometimes The Bomb Squad would juxtapose all the different scratching styles. But for the most part it was The Johnny Juice Show: ‘Johnny Juice would come in and just tear it up,’ Eric continues. ‘Cos he’s a technician, he would do the majority, but then we’d bring in Terminator who would do the kind of rubbing, kind of scratching slow style. And that would add a whole ’nother dimension to the fast stuff ’cos it was a different style.’
Of all the scratching he did on the album, ‘Raise the Roof ’ is probably most personal to Johnny Juice. It was the first PE song he ever performed on. Being an ex-graffiti writer from The Bronx, he wanted his first studio session to involve the Wild Style soundtrack. Charlie Ahearn’s 1982 movie Wild Style was the first film to feature all the four elements of hip-hop – emceeing, breakdancing, DJing and graffiti – being practised under one roof. The title referred to a style of graffiti popular in The Bronx as the seventies became the eighties. Juice trawled the album for something to scratch. ‘Wild Style was a big thing for me back in ’79, I was totally ingrained in that shit,’ he reminisces. Back when it was all so simple, his aunt used to take him and his other cousins to the local park jams. But as he had only just reached double figures, he was told in no uncertain terms to ‘hang out over there by the swings and stay the fuck outta trouble’.
‘I threw in that 10, 9, 8, and I scratched it in, just like that.’ Sometimes, when the other guys weren’t fully on point ‘they’d be like, “Can you fix it?”’ says Juice, ‘and I would go back and go over the track that they did and do it tighter. I did almost all the records.’ This is obviously why Johnny Juice is credited with rhythm scratching in Yo! Bum Rush the Show’s liner notes. Although he scratched live, Terminator X didn’t perform a lot of the scratches that appeared on the records. Lack of time was the main factor. There were also financial concerns. As he himself would assert years later on the popular single from his second solo album, ‘It All Comes Down to the Money’; the second line in that song’s chorus lays it out clear: ‘Whether it’s rainy, or snowy or sunny’.
PE’s meagre budget of $17,000 meant they had to record in a hurry. ‘A lot of times me and Terminator would be there at the same time,’ Juice recalls. ‘We didn’t have a lot of opportunities to keep going over and going over to get it right. They’d give Norman two tries, and if Norman couldn’t do it on the third try, they’d be like, “Juice, see what you can do”,’ and I’d normally knock that out on the first take. I was superhyper man. My hands would be moving even if I wasn’t touching a record.’
While the self-contained unit didn’t have to worry about interference from producers, in the late eighties hip-hop acts definitely had to worry about incompetent engineers. Like most at the time, the engineers felt that because they were rappers, these guys must be idiots. Eric was particularly pissed off. ‘I’m like, “You know what guys, I’ve been in the studio a million times, we don’t even need this guy”.’ As they knew nothing about hip-hop, the engineers would shoot down most of PE’s suggestions. It’s a good job The Bomb Squad never listened to these fools. ‘They were basically telling us, “Well you can’t do that, you can’t put that much reverb on it, you can’t push up that channel. You’ll just have noise.”’
Years later, Eric still sounds vexed about the situation. ‘I was like, “I know what we can do and what we can’t do. It’s a new form of music, we’re gonna do what feels good and what we want.” They would be like, “You know what? It’s gonna take a little time for us to get the sound.” I’m like, “No it’s not,’ cos I know how to work this stuff, don’t give us this bullshit.”’
Def Jam kept their word and gave PE the complete creative control they had promised. Rick Rubin visited the studio just once, said, ‘Wassup’, and bounced soon after. The only other person to get involved was a pre-Living Colour Vernon Reid, who was brought in by Bill Stephney to play
