MC DJ Flavor. Bazerk needed someone to play keyboards on a tape he was recording for WBAU. Flavor, who was known as a musician around town – he’d also briefly played drums in a band with future Bomb Squad member Eric Sadler – was his preferred candidate.
This true original made the right impression on the Spectrum crew almost instantaneously. After Flav was introduced to Chuck, Hank and Keith, someone, it’s unclear who, made the mistake of starting a game of the dozens while he was present. Flavor Flav remembers this moment well. ‘Back in the days the thing was the dozens,’ he says of the phenomenon more commonly known as ‘yo’ mama’ jokes. ‘We were always snapping on each other’s moms, snapping on each other’s pops, snapping on each other’s cribs, snapping on each other. So, I went up there, and started to snap and everything. Next thing you know I was taking on all three of them. Chuck, Hank and Keith. And I was winning. Matter fact, I wasn’t winning, I won.’ He turns to Chuck, who was sitting on the other side of the tour bus when I spoke to him, and in an excited, playful voice stakes his claim in the snapping game. ‘I showed y’all that fucking night Chuck, you know that shit. That’s why y’all kept me around. That’s why y’all niggas kept me around ’cos I was murdering y’all. I ain’t gonna lie.’ Chuck’s laughs are enough to satisfy Flav that he’s right.
‘I had to defend my title that night,’ he continues. ‘I was killing them that night. Next thing you know I started hanging out at the studio, they let me start staying up there, started letting me get involved. That’s how I ended up becoming part of the entity.’ The humour and light relief that Flavor would bring to PE had always been there. ‘Claustrophobia Attack’, one of his pre-PE songs, featured him rhyming over the Ohio Players’ ‘Fopp’ about the perils of getting caught in an elevator with a woman who has bad breath.
Flav was so good he was beating future professionals at the dozens. One night after a gig, the Spectrum crew found themselves chowing down at a White Castle burger restaurant around three in the morning. A local comedian from Roosevelt named Steve White happened to be present, and a snap battle ensued between Steve and Flavor. Steve was no soft touch and would go on to feature in both film and TV. He has appeared in the Spike Lee films Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Clockers and Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America, and has graced TV shows like Hangin’ with Mr Cooper.
‘He was considered the next Eddie Murphy,’ is how Bill Stephney sums White up. Despite this, like everyone else, he just couldn’t handle Flavor. ‘They went back and forth, back and forth and Flavor just killed him and the whole place just started roaring when Flavor came up with this one line. Flavor has always been a star.’
Nevertheless, as Bazerk already knew, Flavor had even more on offer than his ability to tell ‘yo’ mama’ jokes. He had mastered numerous instruments, and his skills as a musician would become very useful to PE. The first instrument the young Flav learned was the organ. His mother bought his older sister an organ and before long little William had learned to play the theme to Batman. Then, in school, he began learning the drums during sixth grade. From there it snowballed. He started to learn how to read music and after he began playing with the school band, MC DJ Flavor picked up every instrument he could lay his hands on and learned them by ear. ‘I just started messing with all the other instruments in the band room and everything. Just by myself in school, cutting class and going down to the band room. That’s how I learned how to play the flute, the French horn, xylophones, tuba. I can play the oboe, all that.’ As someone who had been in bands before he joined PE, he knew what it felt like to perform and was comfortable onstage. In short, he slotted in perfectly. In time, Flavor Flav would become PE’s secret weapon.
By his own admission his childhood in Freeport was something of a troubled one. Flav was also well known locally for shenanigans that had nothing to do with his skills as a musician. Like a lot of black ghetto families, or any families living in neglected areas, his family consisted of a few different types. There were extremes of good and bad. ‘My family was mixed up,’ he says. ‘My moms and them went to church, my pops and them were street. You know how regular family life shit go.’ Flav describes his young self as ‘a real bad kid, real wild, a real handful’. There was the usual petty thuggery: stealing cars, and things of that nature. But this didn’t last. Before he joined PE, William went to college and got himself a chef ’s degree. At one point he was a school bus driver. ‘I ended up growing up and being mild mannered,’ he points out. Spectrum’s good-natured decision to let other young guns knock out some tunes at their beloved headquarters paid off well. By the end of 1982, Flavor had his own show. His Saturday night slot from ten till eleven-thirty led perfectly into the Spectrum show.
In the mid-seventies Hempstead’s Eric Sadler was the first member of Public Enemy to own office space in 510 South Franklin Avenue. He had been in various bands since the early seventies playing either bass, guitar or keyboards. As luck would have it, his dentist Dr Raymond Gant, who lived across the street, was friends with his parents and had talked to his mother about some space that was available in the building where he worked.
Once the rent of $150 per month was agreed Eric moved all of his equipment in and opened a rehearsal studio. This was a few years before he began working with the guys who would become PE. But, as a local youth, he definitely knew who Spectrum City were. ‘I’d see the Spectrum guys around town doing gigs,’ he recalls. ‘A lot of times they’d be doing a gig and my band would be playing so I’d see ’em from time to time. I didn’t really know ’em, but I knew of ’em.’
Around eighteen months after Eric moved in, he received a phone call out of the blue from Hank Shocklee, whose long-suffering parents had decided to rid their house of all of his noisy musical equipment. ‘I don’t even know how Hank got my number,’ he says. ‘He’s like, “You think we can get into the building you’re at?” I said, “I don’t think it’s a problem.”’ Dr Gant didn’t think it was a problem either. So Spectrum took their partnership with EJ the DJ a step further by agreeing to split costs, and moved into the upstairs office.
Chuck’s description makes it clear that PE love 510 South Franklin Avenue in the same way that The Beatles loved Abbey Road and DJ Premier loves HeadQcourterz. (The studio was previously well known in hip-hop circles as D and D Studios. This was before the hip-hop legend renamed it after one of his dead homies.) ‘510 South Franklin was a very key area, it was our headquarters. It was sort of a record studio for DJs and we would make these records, well, we would make tapes to play on the radio station.’ It was an exciting time. ‘I was just completely taken with the creativity of these people,’ says Harry Allen, who after meeting Chuck at Adelphi began rolling with the extended crew. He had already given himself the title of Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin. ‘A whole conglomeration of individuals were getting together around hip-hop. You’d have people like Run DMC, who were big fans of the Super Spectrum Show, come though. You’d have people like Spider D and DJ Divine come through.’
When it came to their radio show, Chuck’s rapping (which was still only over the hot instrumentals of the day) was still more of a necessity than anything else – there simply weren’t that many rap records – but Spectrum were on their way to becoming a fully-fledged group producing records. Chuck certainly had their listeners thinking this was the case. The promo tapes he would make for the radio, similarly to Son of Bazerk’s songs, were perceived as professional records by WBAU’s listeners. It wouldn’t be long before Spectrum made the jump to actually making records.
Musician
