Well written by Mark Skillz and since this was written 10 years ago alot of fact checking has been done. Just because you were mentioned do not mean you were there in the very beginning...
R.I.P TO THE LATE PETE DJ JONES AND KOOL DJ AJ!
One Night At the Executive Playhouse
Pete DJ Jones vs. Kool DJ Herc
By Mark Skillz
MarkSkillz@aol.com
Back in the good old days of 1977 when gas lines were long and unemployment was high, there were two schools of
deejays competing for Black and Latino audiences in New York City: the
Pete D.J. Jones crowd and the devout followers of
Kool D.J.
Herc. One group played the popular music of the day for
party-going adult audiences in clubs in downtown Manhattan. The other
played raw funk and
break-beats for a rapidly growing, fanatic - almost cult-like following
of teenagers in rec centers and parks. Both sides had their devotees.
One night the
two-masters of the separate tribes clashed in a dark and crowded club on
Mount Eden and Jerome Avenue called the Executive Playhouse.
The First Master: The Wise Teacher
You can't miss
Pete D.J.
Jones at a party - or anywhere else for that matter, he is
somewhere near seven feet tall and bespectacled, today at 64 years old
he is a retired
school teacher from the Bronx, but if you listen to him speak you
immediately know he ain't from New York - he's from 'down home' as they
say
in Durham, North Carolina. But no matter where he was from, back in the
'70's, Pete Jones was the man.
"I played everywhere", Mr. Jones says in a voice that sounds like your
uncle or grandfather from somewhere down deep in the south, even though
he's been in New York for more than thirty years. "I played Smalls
Paradise, Leviticus, Justine's, Nells - everywhere."
"Looky here", he says to me in the coolest southern drawl before he asks me a question, "You ever heard of Charles Gallery?"
"Yes", I said, as I tell him that I'm only 36 years old and I had
only heard about the place through stories from people who had been
there.
"Oh", he says in response, "that was one helluva club. Tell you what,
you know that club, Wilt's 'Small's Paradise'?"
"Yep", I said, "that place is internationally known - but I never went there either."
"That's ok", he says still as cool as a North Carolina summer breeze, "When I played there GQ and the Fatback Band opened for
me."
"No way - are you talking about 'Rock-Freak' GQ, the same people that did 'Disco Nights?'
"One and the same", he says. He suspects that I don't believe him so he says, "Hey, we can call Rahiem right now and he'll tell
ya." As much as I would love to speak with Emmanuel Rahiem I pass, I believe him.
In his heyday Pete DJ Jones was to adult African- American partygoers what
Kool Herc
was to West Bronx proto- type hip-hoppers, he was the
be all to end all. He played jams all over the city for the number one
black radio station at the time: WBLS. At these jams is where he blasted
away the
competition with his four Bose 901 speakers and two Macintosh 100's -
which were very powerful amps. At certain venues he'd position his Bose
speakers
facing toward the wall, so that when they played the sound would deflect
off of the wall and out to the crowd. The results were stunning to say
the least. His
system, complete with two belt drive Technic SL-23's (which were way
before 1200's) and a light and screen show, which he says he'd make by:
"Taking a white sheet and hanging it on the wall, and aiming a projector
that had slides in it from some of the clubs I played at." These
effects
wowed audiences all over the city. He went head to head with the biggest
names of that era: the
Smith Brothers,
Ron Plummer,
Maboya,
Grandmaster Flowers, the
Disco Twins, "Oh yeah", he says, "I took them all
on."
On the black club circuit in Manhattan at that time - much like the
Bronx scene - deejays spun records and had guys rap on the mike. "I ran a
club
called
Superstar 33, ask anyone and they will tell you: That was the first place that
Kurtis Blow got on the mic at",
says a gruff voiced gentlemen who, back then, called himself
JT Hollywood - not to be confused with
D.J. Hollywood, whom JT
remembers as, "An arrogant ass who always wanted shit to go his way."
"I wouldn't call what we did rappin' - I used to say some ol' slick and sophisticated shit on the mike", said a proud JT.
"We spun breaks back then too", Pete Jones says, "I played "Do it
anyway you wanna," 'Scorpio', 'Bongo Rock', BT
Express, Crown Heights Affair, Kool and the Gang, we played all of that
stuff - and we'd keep the break going too. I played it all, disco, it
didn't
matter, there was no hip-hop per se back then, except for the parts we
made up by spinning it over and over again."
There have been so many stories written about hip-hop's early days
that have not reported on the guys that spun in Manhattan and Brooklyn
in the early
and mid '70's, that many crucial deejays of that time feel left out.
"Kool Herc and guys like that didn't have a big reputation back
then", explains Jones, "they were in the Bronx - we, meaning guys like
myself and Flowers, we played everywhere, so we were known. Their crowd
was anywhere between 4 to 70. Mine was 18-22. They played in parks -
where anybody
could go, no matter how old you are you could go to a park. We played in
clubs."
With a sense of urgency Mr. Jones says, "I have to clear something
up, many people think that we played disco - that's not true. There were
two
things happening in black music at that time: there was the "Hustle"
type music being played - which was stuff like Van McCoy's "Do the
Hustle" - I couldn't stand that record. And then there were the funky
type records that mixed the Blues and jazz with Latin percussion that
would
later be called funk. Well, hip-hop emerged from that."
He places special emphasis on the word 'emerged'. He says that
because "If you know anything about the history of music, you know, no
one
person created anything, it 'emerges' from different things.
The Second Master: The Cult Leader
There must have been a height requirement
for deejays in the '70's, because like
Pete DJ Jones,
Kool DJ Herc
is a giant among men. In fact, with his gargantuan
sized sound system and 6'5, 200 plus pound frame, the man is probably
the closest thing hip-hop has ever seen to the Biblical Goliath. Today,
some thirty
years since his first party in the West Bronx, Kool Herc is still larger
than life. His long reddish-brown dreads hang on his shoulders giving
him a regal look
- sort of like a lion. His hands - which are big enough to crush soda
cans and walnuts, reveal scarred knuckles, which are evidence of a rough
life. During our
conversation, Kool Herc, whose street hardened voice peppered with the
speech patterns of his homeland Jamaica and his adopted city of New York
made several
references to 'lock up', 'the precinct' and the 'bullpen', all in a
manner that showed that he had more than a passing familiarity with
those types of situations.
As the tale goes Kool Herc planted the seeds for hip-hop in 1973 in the West Bronx. Along with his friends
Timmy Tim and
Coke La
Rock, and with the backing of his family - in particular his
sister Cindy, the parties he threw back then are the food of urban
legend. In the 1984
BBC documentary "The History of Hip Hop" an eight-millimeter movie is
shown - it is perhaps the only piece of physical evidence of those
historic
parties. In the film, teenagers of anywhere between 17-20 years old are
grooving to the sounds of James Brown's "Give It Up or Turn It Loose".
Young men wearing sunglasses and sporting fishermen hats with doo rags
underneath them, are seen dancing with excited young women, all while
crowded into the
rec room of hip-hop's birthplace: 1520 Sedgwick Ave.
As the camera pans to the right, the large hulking figure of Kool
Herc takes the forefront. Sporting dark sunglasses and wearing a large
medallion around
his neck, Kool Herc is decked out in an AJ Lester's suit. He isn't just
an imposing figure over his set; he looms large over his audience as
well. His
sound system - a monstrous assemblage of technology, was large and
intimidating too, so awesome was it that his speakers were dubbed the
'Herculords'.
When Kool Herc played his gargantuan sized sound system - the ground
shook. And so did his competition.
Legend has it that with his twin tower Shure columns and his powerful
Macintosh amplifiers, he is said to have drowned the mighty
Afrika
Bambaataa at a sound clash. "Bambaataa", Herc said with the
volume of his echo plex turned up and in his cool Jamaica meets the
Bronx voice,
'Turn your system down…"
But the mighty Zulu chief was unbowed.
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