style="font-size:15px;"> Despite this initial rejection, Chuck did do some Spectrum flyers. Meanwhile, his mic skills were developing at a prodigious rate. If only because he could not endure lesser-skilled emcees. He used to get on the microphone every once in a while just to shut other guys up. ‘Back then you had a lot of wack-ass cats getting on the mic, and everybody swore they had rhymes for the music.’ During the late seventies a song like MFSB’s ‘Love Is the Message’ would prompt a line of hopeful mic controllers to swarm the DJ box. This annoyed the young Chuck. ‘Sometimes you’d be trying to get your dance on with a chick and some cat would just get on the mic and disturb the groove, man. I would just joke with my fellas like, “Well I’m gonna get on the mic just to get these motherfuckers off!”’
They say necessity is the mother of all invention and, in order for Chuck to have a good night out, and, perhaps more importantly, some luck with the ladies, he had to invest a little time showcasing his skills. His natural ability would also lead Hank to change his mind about Chuck becoming Spectrum’s emcee.
These days any kid with even minimal equipment can knock out demo-quality songs in a bedroom studio. But nearly thirty years ago, sound equipment, particularly that used for hip-hop functions, just wasn’t up to scratch. Therefore, in order to be an effective rapper, for the crowd to actually be able to hear what you were saying, you had to have a voice that could cut through the distortion, feedback and whatever other sonic ailments were present. Carlton Ridenhour just happened to have one of those voices.
As 1979 progressed Chuck decided to sit out a couple of semesters from Adelphi, but he was still regularly attending Spectrum’s Thursday Night Throwdowns and getting on the mic. Luckily for many future generations of rap fans, Hank heard him spitting there one night, and was suitably impressed. ‘He was surprised to find out that I was the same dude who came to him with the flyers. He was like, “Yo man, I need an emcee. I want an emcee for my group but it’s gotta be a special kind of emcee.” I was flattered. I was honoured. I was just a fan.’ But the fan still managed to play it somewhat cool. ‘I said, “Give me the weekend, and I’ll think about it.”’
‘Hank came back screaming like, “Yo, I found this kid, he can do flyers, he can rap, I’m gonna check him out, get him to come to a party”,’ says Keith. Keith Shocklee was one of the first to benefit from Chuck D’s knack for coming up with rap monikers. ‘When Chuck came on to the scene I picked up the name KG, Chuck threw in the wizard and so it was like The Wizard K-Jee and from there it just took off. I was DJing at a party right around the corner from his house and not too far from where his friend passed away.’
Sadly, the house party took place on the same day as the funeral of one of Carlton’s friends. But he did his best to spit a couple of rhymes. Today’s hip-hop kids would struggle to recognise it as rapping. It was most definitely not the type of rhymes you would hear nowadays. What Chuck was doing at the time was more on the MC tip. Instead of spitting sixteen (or more) consecutive bars, he would come up with a series of two-and four-bar phrases. During the next week they hooked up and Chuck did his first gig way out in Riverhead, all the way at the end of Long Island, near the Hamptons. By all accounts it was a great experience, and the first seeds of PE were sown.
While all of this was going down hip-hop was still steadily developing and forging its identity. Chuck describes the summer of ’79 as ‘just a total hip-hop summer. I never ever recall anything being so hip-hop crazy like the summer of ’79.’ This was despite the lack of rap records in existence. Everyone just knew that there was something in the air. That something genuinely different was about to take place. Popular DJs at the time included Play Hard Crew, DJ Pleasure, Groovy Loo, Mechanic and Tommy T. Another important milestone occurred when famed DJ Eddie Cheeba premiered ‘Good Times’ by Chic. A few months later this song would form the bedrock of the first globally popular rap record, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by The Sugar Hill Gang. This introduced hip-hop to the world, while simultaneously making many of its originators in The Bronx sick to their stomachs.
‘Good Times’ broke new ground for the band that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards put together. They were mostly known for uptempo records like ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsa, Yowsa, Yowsa)’ and ‘Le Freak’, which at the time was their biggest hit to date. ‘Good Times’ would surpass both. Chic slowed down the tempo and made it funky. This helped it become an anthem with the emerging hip-hop community, and the hit of the summer. All the while, Spectrum City continued to do their thing, but with the added extra of Chuckie D (as he was originally known) on the mic to hype the crowd.
The lack of a large selection of rap records meant that they were still playing a healthy amount of funk and r’n’b, but hip-hop was changing the way a party got started. ‘Rap music was so new you couldn’t play it all night long. You know some of these girls like to hear the singing records. They want to hear Midnight Star. They want to hear, “I’m curious about your loving girl”,’ Keith explains. ‘But at the same time they also want to hear the DJ scratch.’ Spectrum City also made sure they never played a record twice in one night.
Their party-starting business continued in this vein until 1982 when Chuck met Bill Stephney. This was the other crucial meeting that led to the eventual formation of PE. Stephney was the programme director at Adelphi’s college radio station WBAU and he had seen Spectrum doing their thing around Long Island. ‘They DJed all the parties where hundreds if not thousands of kids would show up,’ he says. ‘And they gained a great reputation like, “This is the cool gig to go to”.’ Chuck D had not only been using his graphic design skills for Spectrum’s flyers. ‘We were one of the rare DJ groups that all had jackets with logos on them,’ he says. ‘Bill had seen us running around the neighbourhood as Spectrum. He had noticed this and was like, “Oh, Spectrum, wow”. This was marketing before there was such a term.’ Bill remembers it well. ‘At that point there were 11,000 students enrolled at Adelphi University, and of those 11,000, 10,000 of them were white. So you’re gonna notice anybody who’s African American anyway. But when I saw this guy walking around the campus with a Spectrum City jacket on. Woah! Yo, who is that? He’s down with that crew?’ One day Bill happened to go over to this guy and introduce himself. ‘It turned out to be this guy named Carlton Ridenhour who was down with Spectrum and was familiar with the radio station and the radio show that I was doing and wanted to bring his crew up there. I said, “That’s fantastic, I’m a huge fan of Spectrum.”’
The Spectrum parties were still doing very good business, probably better than ever. By this time the guests included nascent versions of now classic groups like the Fat Boys and Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three. ‘We’d put ’em on the radio, everybody would hear them on the radio and then we’d go right downstairs to the party and party,’ enthuses Keith. ‘It was crazy.’ Things were good, they were having fun, making a little bit of money and they weren’t, as Keith puts it, ‘in the streets going nuts like our friends that used to hang out with us used to do’. Significantly, while hip-hop had not yet become the big business it is today, they still had their eyes on the prize. Keith recalls how: ‘In the back of our minds we were hoping we could turn it into a big business.’
There were still a couple of legendary members who were yet to join the fold, but some of the key individuals who would eventually be known as PE were forging alliances.
After meeting Bill Stephney things changed for Chuck, Hank and the rest of Spectrum. If who you know can get you to the next level in life, then making friends with the programme director
