known as Yo! MTV Raps resident DJ Dr Dre.
During the day WBAU reflected its largely white student population with a largely white line-up of presenters who were constantly competing among each other for laughs. During the day you were likely to hear acts like The Police, Cyndi Lauper, The Alan Parsons Project, Howard Jones and Duran Duran. But at ten o’clock on a Monday night the extremely varied playlist of the Mr Bill Show allowed the students to hear a cross-section of the best new music around. And for the last hour of the Mr Bill Show the Spectrum City crew really let the students know what time it was.
After being impressed by their matching jackets, and more importantly, their skills as a mobile party unit, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before Bill found a slot for Hank and Chuck on the radio. As well as hosting the station’s anchor show, Bill was in charge of WBAU’s weekend schedule. Importantly for the future development of Public Enemy, this show reflected the eclectic nature of the early eighties New York club scene. Songs like ‘Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ were a sure bet, but alongside Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players, you could also hear favourites like ‘Buffalo Gals’ by Malcolm McLaren and the World Famous Supreme Team, plus groups like The Clash and even Bananarama. ‘It was very cutting edge, even though it was college radio,’ Bill recalls. ‘We were playing rap literally before anyone was playing rap, but we were also playing all this other stuff where no one knows where it’s coming from. I think people appreciated the fact that even though we were playing a lot of rap before everybody else, in essence it was a new music show.’
Bill’s show had a unique vibe which was rare within black entertainment. ‘I wound up finding this twelve-inch called “Cookie Puss” by this group The Beastie Boys and when I put that on people were like, “Where do you get this stuff?” And I’m like, “’Cos I’m in different circles.”’ Those circles included WLIR, the local rock’n’roll station. The scholarship that had allowed Bill to acquire an all-important college education had also secured him a job at that progressive institution. Bill remembers how, ‘They were one of the first commercial stations in the States to play imports and also a lot of new-wave punk stuff.’
WBAU presented many interesting opportunites for Spectrum City. In the pre-WBAU years, Spectrum had con tinued making mixtapes for their local followers. But while it was costing money to make these tapes, they weren’t making much back. Going on WBAU was the perfect way to play music for the people for free while promoting themselves as well as the station. ‘We said, “If we can get our mixes on the radio then people can get it for free, we’ll build the radio station with our name and we’ll get our music out there.”’ It was around this time that they first began making songs of their own to be played on the radio. Chuck is anxious to clarify that it was ‘music on other records’. They were still recording their rhymes over the instrumentals of hit records.
Within a few short months the young upstarts were presenting their own show. On Saturday nights the Spectrum Mixx Show lasted for an hour. But before long that wasn’t enough either. Soon they were broadcasting live and direct for a full ninety minutes. It was during this period that Chuck really began to inject pride into the idea of coming from Long Island, which was still suffering from the lack of self-respect that PE would help to eradicate. When it came to their home town few, if any, puffed up their chest and admitted that that’s where they came from. It wasn’t unusual for such a person to namecheck another area of New York. But Chuck was determined to change that.
Keith, Chuck and Hank were the phone operators. Chuck began to get the people who phoned in to shout out their friends and interact more with the station. This approach increased the number of callers rapidly. As Chuck describes it, ‘We wanted to put it out there like, “Okay, you’re in Long Island now. You’re in Roosevelt, you’re in Hempstead, you’re in Freeport, let’s do our thing here.” Giving towns nicknames really set it off. In the sixties and seventies towns had nicknames but they were unofficial. We would make them official. Those that had shaky nicknames? We’d build it up. We built a scenario out of nothing.’ Chuck was well used to the challenges facing Long Island in terms of both local pride and the area’s reputation as being soft. He would put his own spin on those that called in and hype them up personally. ‘Instead of saying, “Charles Chase sends a dedication to his girl Vanessa today,” it’d be like, “C Chase gives a shout out to Nessy Ness out there.”’ Such nicknames would most likely then stick.
Troublemakers had been a constant at the Spectrum parties that took place at venues like the Korean Ballroom in Hempstead, the ballroom at Hofstra University and the Martin Luther King Jr. Centre in Rockville Centre. Fortun ately, a solution was on its way. Due to the long-term friendship between Griff (who had recently returned from the Army), Chuck and Hank, an organisation Griff had started called Unity Force were the perfect choice to do security. Unity Force, like the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, had sprung to life to combat racist attacks. (They weren’t only concerned with militancy. Some members of Unity Force, including Brother Mike, had previously been part of a dance group called Nemesis.) ‘It could happen at any time because racism was more overt then,’ Griff reflects. ‘We patrolled the neighbourhood, that kind of thing.’ The fatal shooting of sixty-two-year-old Eleanor Bumpers at the hands of the NYPD was an important turning-point in Unity Force’s evolution.
‘That was one of the things that triggered Unity Force to come together,’ says James Bomb. ‘You know: “We got to stop this type of senseless killing. Here’s a women who’s sixty-two year old!” Even though she had a knife, you don’t have to fatally shoot her. You’re trained to disarm a lady who has no training at all. Not kill her. It’s just senseless, for a man who has training and experience. There’s no need to kill a person if you can disarm them. You’ve got to exhaust all possibilities. That’s how Unity Force came about. Our main thing was, we were going to police our community.’ Such a unit, with around fifty members, led by an ex-soldier like Griff, could easily adapt to security. ‘We basically controlled the parties, and to secure a party was probably harder than dealing with racist attacks because we had to deal with our own people,’ Griff reflects. ‘People were selling drugs and bringing guns and we had stopped all of that.’ Brother Drew, who has been rolling with the PE massive since day one, is far more blunt. ‘It was like, “If you wanna come to the party and act out, you can get your ass whupped aiight. You can get kicked out.”’ Cos we wanna make it safe for the kids.’
Griff ran a tight ship and gave his crew matching uniforms. ‘Everybody was dressed in a uniform that looked like the S1Ws,’ Chuck recalls. ‘We knew that people, especially young people, were more likely to conform to order. If you don’t set no order, they ain’t gonna follow no order.’
The other key acquisition when it came to making sure that no enterprising thugs from, say, Brooklyn or Queens, could come to a Spectrum party on Long Island and wild out without fear of retribution was the 98 Posse. Professor Griff describes them as ‘a bunch of cats, man, who just possed up, everybody had the same car. And those cats, man, they were some ruthless cats, bro. They were just brutal with how they went about handling different things.’
‘The 98 Posse were basically thugs in the Hempstead area… well, they weren’t really thugs.’ Chuck corrects himself. ‘They were like… they had their own clique, gang, whatever, don’t-fuck-with-them-type guys.’
Initially, the 98 Posse were one of the biggest thorns in Unity Force’s side. Long Island wasn’t the old Wild West, but before too long something resembling a stand-off occurred between Unity Force and the 98s. One night James Bomb got into some static with one of the posse. ‘It was just myself and this guy. We were going at it, and I got the best of him and then the following week we had another party, this time at the Korean Ballroom, and, you know, all of them came down. They were armed down and we ended up being armed down as well.’
Thankfully, the situation could be resolved. Unity Force and their less conscientious
