Space’ (a record that could only have appeared during the over stylised and slightly pretentious early years of the eighties) by Key-Matic featured some of Charles’s friends like Najee, a session musician from Queens and a girl named Sharon. Keith Shocklee, credited as The Wizard K-Jee, was the DJ. ‘Breakin’ In Space’ was a hit in the New York area, and gave those involved a chance to travel a little and do some promotional gigs. One of their gigs, a promo for Kiss FM, featured a young Madonna on the bill. Charles also recorded a single with Butch Cassidy, who used to roll with Spectrum and who Chuck describes as ‘my radio partner’. Butch filled the hype-man role Flavor would later occupy. Interestingly, he was using the same studio that PE would later use for Apocalypse ’91: The Enemy Strikes Black.
The third and most crucial record Spectrum were involved in that year was ‘Lies/Check Out the Radio’ which dropped on Vanguard Records. This happened through a connection of Hank’s who, at the time, was holding down a day job as the manager of a record shop. Tim Olphie, the regional manager for this particular chain of record shops, had links with a dance DJ named Pinky Velasquez and the entrepreneur who funded BT Express’s records in the seventies. Tim was their guide to this strange new world of recording rap. Hank brought the rest of Spectrum with him, they booked some studio time in Manhattan and recorded ‘Lies’, a song made in the Run DMC mode.
It’s very important to note that they wanted to promote themselves as radio DJs rather than as a recording group. This is why when they found themselves with some extra studio time they decided to record a cut called ‘Check Out the Radio’. Later on, when that song was played on the radio, it became a firm favourite for The Beastie Boys and Run DMC.
Unlike ‘Lies’, on ‘Check Out the Radio’ Chuck ‘was saying things on there that were kinda fly’. He recalls, ‘It was totally the antithesis of “Lies”,’ cos “Lies” was a record that we probably knew we wouldn’t play ourselves. It wasn’t even saying “check out the radio”, it was “check us out on the radio”. It was all about WBAU.’ These songs, and other songs they made around this time like ‘It’s Working’, represented a massive step forward.
‘Check Out the Radio’ represented the first time Eric ‘Vietnam’ Sadler officially recorded with the crew who would become The Bomb Squad. Against the advice of his musician friends who felt that ‘rap is garbage, rap is not real music’, Eric had accepted Chuck’s invitation to ‘help ’em out with the music and mess around’. He had a slightly more modern attitude to hip-hop than most musicians: ‘I didn’t care at all. I was like, “Hey y’all upstairs, I’m downstairs. Y’all don’t know how to work this stuff. I’ll come up there and do some stuff,” because I had been in the studio with my boys for ever.’
PE owe Eddie Murphy, who by now was well known around Long Island, a small debt for Eric’s skills. Eric had natural talent and had been a musician for around a decade at that point. But when the comedian asked Eric to look after his equipment, he gave the future Bomb Squad member the chance to familiarise himself with the latest keyboards and relatively new innovations like the DMX drum machine. ‘He was like, “Yo man, you guys can help produce my record, I did the Saturday Night Live thing, I just made some money and I’m a be moving from one side of town to the other side of town. I was like, “Oh, okay great”,’ Eric says. ‘He didn’t have any place to leave his recording equipment so he left it all at our rehearsal studio. I was like, “Damn, I better learn all this stuff while it’s there.” For twenty-four hours a day, I was learning that stuff backwards and forwards.’ Over the years, Eddie had emceed at shows where Eric’s band was playing. Occasionally, he was the comedy act before a talent show Eric was involved in.
Unfortunately, Eric and his boys never produced Eddie’s record. When Eddie moved from Roosevelt to Baldwin in Long Island his new management felt they had to dish out a dose of reality. ‘His managers were like, “You’re not understanding what you have here,”’ Eric recalls. ‘They talked him into getting away from all his neighbourhood friends and moving out to Jersey.’
At the same time a deal was worked out with Prince for the then rising star to produce Eddie’s record. So when it was time for Prince to send out the two-inch tapes, he sent them out to 510, where Eddie’s equipment was. Eric, a big Prince fan, was suitably impressed. ‘When we received the tapes coming from Paisley Park, nothing even said Prince on it, it said Jamie Starr and Alexander Nevermind. It was two songs but I remember one of the songs was called “Chocolate”.’ After a few weeks plans changed again. This time it was decided that King of Funk Rick James was going to shape Eddie’s album. So off Eddie went to have many of the adventures that his brother Charlie would eventually relive in the classic ‘True Hollywood Stories’ segment of Dave Chappelle’s all conquering Chappelle’s Show.
Eric simply shrugged and carried on as normal. ‘It was like, “Well at least I got to hold on to the equipment for a while, good luck with what you’re doing”.’
Although he had spent days and nights learning this new equipment, when he first turned up to the studio to record with Spectrum Eric discovered he was surplus to requirements and was sent home. ‘I was like, “Okay, no problem”. I went back and started playing cards with my boys. Pinky was going to produce the record so they didn’t need me any more.’ But on the very next day, Chuck called him back complaining about Pinky’s hip-hop studio shortcomings and asking him back to knock out one jam real quick. Eric agreed, he was picked up and driven to the city and they banged out ‘Check Out the Radio’ in about an hour. ‘And that was kind of it,’ Eric says. ‘After that, I’d still mess around with some junk with them while they were upstairs and I was downstairs.’ They weren’t about to take over the world just yet.
It was around this time that Eric discovered, quite by chance, that Hank and Keith Shocklee were his cousins. One day after making some beats at 510 South Franklin Eric went to the Shocklee household to hang out. After playing football the three of them went into the kitchen for some drinks. ‘My grandmother always sat by the kitchen,’ says Keith Shocklee. ‘And she looked at Eric and said, “Eh Eric, you look just like Joe Sadler.”’ A surprised Eric confirmed that Joe Sadler was his grandfather.
It took Grandma Shocklee about five minutes to piece the whole thing together. She had grown up in a part of St Kitts chiefly populated by Matthews and Sadlers. Of her nine brothers and sisters, some had moved to England and some to America. ‘It was crazy,’ Keith continues. ‘We knew each other for two and a half years, me, him and Hank were all working together, hanging out, going to parties, till my grandmother saw him and that’s how we figured it out.’
Even though they were developing artistically, Spectrum City’s debut twelve-inch failed to set the rap world alight. In 1984 it was going to be very hard to outdo the likes of LL Cool J, Run DMC and Whodini, all of whom were selling healthy amounts of records.
For a brief moment, it seemed like things were going to fizzle out. Harry Allen was not alone in feeling very nervous that this could end up being the case. ‘I always felt like if these guys had a break, if people were to hear their music, it would really be amazing, and so when their first break came with the Vanguard record, I thought that was going to do it and then it didn’t. After that, they weren’t doing as many mobile gigs and I kinda thought, “Wow, I guess that was it”.’
But it transpired that the lull caused by the failure of ‘Lies/Check Out the Radio’
