The Making of Kurtis Blow’s Classic Recording The Breaks”
By Mark Skillz
 | |
| Kurtis Blow sometime in 1980 |
It’s eleven o’clock
Sunday morning and the choir is in full swing. The organist and drummer are
locked in tight syncopation. But this ain’t like the “chuuch” that your
grandmoms used to make you go to. No, there is a guy on the turntables doing
call and response and the beat is too funky for a gospel staple like the “Upper
Room.”
This is the Hip-Hop
Church.
The guy behind the
turntables isn’t your ordinary choir director either, he’s a rap legend, in
fact, he’s rap royalty: the first guy to record a RIAA certified gold rap
twelve-inch hit: Kurtis Blow.
Back before Kurt
Walker (his real name) wore a robe and a collar, he was the first bare-chested,
gold-chain wearing, Jheri Curled rap sex symbol. In a recording career that
spanned twelve years Kurtis planted the seeds for Run-DMC, Whodini, Will Smith,
Hammer, Kanye West, Dr. Dre, Nas, Jay Z, the College Boyz, Heavy D and a whole
bunch of others.
Today hip-hop finds
itself in a quandary: it is a youth-driven, image obsessed culture in constant
search for what’s good in the hood, or hot in the streets. Many years ago it
was a sub culture that disdained commercial success and pop sensibilities, now it’s
a commodity dominated by artists with pop aspirations who are backed by major
record corporations in partnership with Madison Avenue. If hip-hop began as a
reactionary movement, as some have asserted, then the beginnings of its
relationship with mainstream acceptance can be traced back to one man and his
classic recording.
The Producers
 | |
| Robert "Rocky" Ford Billboard writer turned record producer |
In 1979 Billboard record critic Rocky Ford was scared. He was thirty years old with little money and his girlfriend was expecting a child. Ford needed a break – a big break. To make some quick cash he had an unusual plan for the time: record a holiday season rap record. Problem was Rocky had never written a song, didn’t know how to sing and couldn’t play an instrument to save his life. But he knew a guy who could.
James Biggs Moore,
III was a thirty plus year old ad salesman at Billboard. Born and bred
in the Midwest, he describes himself as a “Rhythm and Blues player in rock and
roll bands.” He was a white guy who loved everything: jazz, country, doo wop,
rock – you name it, Moore had an ear for it. It was in a group called Kilroy
where he met some of the best session musicians in the city. The group recorded
out of studio in Manhattan called Greene Street, which would later become the
recording home to acts like RUN-DMC, Jimmy Spicer and LL Cool J. Between Rocky
Ford’s music biz connections and JB Moore’s musical expertise, God couldn’t
have put two people together better than this.
It was from Moore
where Ford got the tip about “something new happening on the streets.” Rocky
Ford was the first journalist to cover the burgeoning hip-hop scene before
there were any records. Combining efforts they decided to make a record, though
they would both write and produce the song, the technical aspect (arrangement,
mix down and editing) of it would be Moore’s department; the marketing would be
Ford’s. All that was missing was the right vocalist. In the summer of 1979 they
went looking for him.
The Rapper
 | |
| DJ Lovebug Starski at The Fever |
In 1979 the most
popular rappers in the city were DJ Hollywood, Eddie Cheba and Lovebug Starsky.
According to Ford’s recollections, “Based on pure talent alone, hands down,
Hollywood was the man.” But he didn’t have the right look.
Eddie Cheba,
Hollywood’s partner in crime, was intelligent and like Hollywood, “had a very
large ego.” A quality that made him all wrong for the job. Ford and Moore were
looking for someone they could mold and who would take direction.
Next, they
checked out Lovebug Starsky, whom they described as, “The kind of guy, you
could meet in a bar and enjoy a beer with,” remembers Ford. But there was
something about him too that wasn’t right for their project. “I remember he
said something in our interview,” Ford recalls, “that didn’t sit right with me.
It was something to the effect of: I’m into rap right now because everybody’s
into rap; if everyone was into surfing – I’d be doing that.” Onward they
pressed. They were looking for someone who would have that ‘it’ factor.
One day, by chance,
Ford came across a kid posting up flyers for a jam. The kid referred him to his
older brother - the promoter, a short, light- skinned college dropout from
Hollis, Queens, whom many remember as being a good dancer, a fast talker and a
sloppy dresser with a restless spirit. His name was Russell Simmons.
 | |
| The fast talking visionary Russell Rush |
Simmons knew some
of everyone on the rap scene. If they promoted shows anywhere in the five
boroughs Simmons knew them and could rattle off the names of groups associated
with them within a flicker of an eye. Moore and Rocky Ford were immediately
impressed with him. “There were other promoters,” Ford recalls of that time,
“with other motives, but Russell wanted to make money.” This was the kind of
guy they were looking for.
Russell sold them
on a rapper he knew, a college friend of his who was eager to make his mark on
the rap scene. He was both book smart and street smart, ambitious, competitive,
talented and a natural performer. There wasn’t a rapper or rap group around
that he didn’t know something about, for he had directed all of his energy into
this new scene that was barely heard beyond the rivers that border New York
City. His name was Kurtis Blow. “Russell kept selling us on Kurtis,” Ford
remembers, “he kept saying, “you gotta check him out, you gotta check him out.”
One night at a crowded party at the Hotel Diplomat Rocky Ford and JB Moore went
to go see him in action.
Listening to tapes
from that era, it’s difficult to see what Moore and Ford heard that night. On
many live cassette tape recordings from the time Kurtis sounds nervous and
unsure of himself. At times he strays off beat. At other times it sounds like
he’s forgotten his rhymes. Harlem deejay and rapper William ‘B-Fats’ Bowden who
recorded the late 80’s rap classic “Whoppit” recalled for hip-hop historian
Troy L. Smith, how he remembered a young, eager Kurtis, “hanging out…carrying
crates,” at neighborhood parties. Occasionally, he’d grab the mic., B Fats says
he and his brother, the late Donald ‘D’ Bowden weren’t impressed. “Without any
experience,” Bowden recalled, ‘he sounded horrible.” Many of his rhymes come
straight from his heroes: Mele Mel, Hollywood, Lovebug Starsky and Eddie Cheba.
But Kurtis had something that everyone else on the scene lacked: a lethal
combination of ambition and charisma. No amount of critics was going to stop
Kurtis Blow.
 | |
| Billy Bill the first rap songwriter w/ Kurt @ the Fever |
His best friend
back then was a short, stocky, brown skinned guy named William Waring whom
everyone called Billy Bill. Waring, who would later author rap classics
‘Basketball’, ‘Games People Play’, ‘Hard Times’ and many others, summed his
friend’s early struggles up with one word: “Rejection,” he told me in a phone
interview. “You know… wanting to be good and not getting the chance. You see,
back then, MC’s had large ego’s and didn’t really want to see the next man come
up. And Kurtis wanted to prove that he belonged.”
It was on August 31st
1979 at the Hotel Diplomat where Rocky Ford saw something special about the
young man on the mike. Kurtis recounted for then Daily News writer Bill
Adler how he and Grandmaster Flash “blew everyone off the stage that night.”
According to Ford, “Kurtis was good looking, intelligent and well spoken.” From
their initial conversation he was able to tell that he was serious minded and
had been bought up pretty good in a nice family. But mostly what he and JB
Moore liked about him was that he had no ego to stroke. “Kurtis hadn’t really
written anything at that point,” Ford remembers, ‘he was just saying rhymes
from other people.” This worked out perfectly for them because they already had
the first part of the song written.
“To be honest I
thought they [the lyrics] were corny,” Kurtis told me in a phone interview. “It
wasn’t real authentic rap that I would do in a club,” he told me. “But I had a
vision that we could make it work.” And he did. At the time Blow was twenty years
old and was working like an immigrant, “I worked at a liquor store on 86th
St, doing deliveries” he told me, “I drove a Gypsy cab, I was a deejay – and on top of all of that, I was in school.”
For the young,
bright eyed and hungry Kurtis the recording studio experience was
awe-inspiring. “I’ll never forget sitting down with Denzil Miller and Larry
Smith,” he laughs as his voice becomes more animated, “and them asking me what
kind of sound did I want? I was like “sound”? What do you mean what kind of sound do I want?” I had no idea what they were talking about,” he laughed.
For many b-boys of that era James Brown was God. For Kurtis there was no doubt
that he wanted some elements of the Godfather of Soul’s music in his own
recordings. However, in the late 70’s the hottest band on Black radio and in
discos was Chic, their music featured funky, good time feeling lush string
arrangements flavored with high minded thematic lyrics which appealed to those
who aspired for the finer things in life. It was funk with a sports jacket and
designer jeans. “My sound is between James Brown and Chic,” he told me, “I like
to think of it as progressive funk.”
 |
| The first real hip hop record producer the late Larry Smith |
Larry Smith, Rocky
Ford’s childhood friend from Queens, who at one time was bassist for the group
Brighter Shade of Darkness, who’s song “Love Jones” was a hit on the R&B
charts in the early 70’s, replayed Chic’s “Good Times’ bassline making it hit
even harder over drummer Jimmy Bralower’s funky groove. Denzil Miller, whom
Moore remembers as being, “a bit bi-polar and a bit of a flake”, but a superb
musician who’s timing was “exquisite,” played keyboards.
If Blow sounded
like a nervous wreck live on stage at clubs like Randy’s Place and the Jamaica,
Queens Armory, in the studio, he found confidence. Blow’s timing was
incredible. And he did it in one or two takes.
Determined to make
the song work he practiced the rhymes everywhere. “I noticed that the meter was
different,” he recalled. “It was a new flow. It was faster; the rhymes are
coming not at every four bars – which was common back then, but every two bars.
It was a challenge.” And it was one that he was more than capable of meeting.
Sometimes he practiced in his cab, other times while doing his deliveries
around the city, but mostly it was either in the studio or out in Queens at a
club he and Russell ran together called Night Fever Disco. The more he did it
the better he got at it.
“About a red suited
dude with a merry attitude…” was an example of the speed of the rhymes. For him
those initial experiences in a recording studio were like a dream. “The
microphone was sounding like I never heard a microphone sound before,” he
recalled for me. “The headphones sounded better than any I had ever heard. The
music sounded great.” But for Kurtis one of the biggest bonuses was that the
beat would be steady, “there was no deejay, I didn’t have to worry about a
deejay losing the beat,” he laughed, “Because in the studio the beat was locked.”
The transformation
from nervous upstart to super rapper was coming to fruition. Billy Bill chalks
it up to “trials and tribulations,” he says. “Everyone has their water shed
period. I guess it was his metamorphosis, it was him turning into a butterfly.”
One night while
Billy was playing at Dante’s on 160th and Broadway Kurtis bought a test
pressing to the club. “When I heard it on that system in that club, I couldn’t
believe it. Everyone [in the club] knew he was my friend, but they couldn’t
believe it was him. I was blown away.” Slowly word started to travel through
the streets about Kurtis’ new record. One night at the Renaissance Club on
Parsons Blvd in Queens, he and Russell gave a copy to DJ Eli, the two watched
as the “crowd went wild.”
And then Frankie
Crocker played it on WBLS. The response was overwhelming.
JB Moore and Rocky Ford
had a good feeling about the song. However, knowing what they knew about the
music business, they were cautious. One day during a subway ride from 42nd
St, Ford and Blow had a heart to heart. “Look man,” Ford told him, “you have to
understand that you may not have another hit again. I told him how most artists
go their whole careers without any hits. I didn’t want him to get his hopes up
too high. I told him that we had to be realistic.”
But little did any
of them know how big they were about to get.
The Breaks
As a boy in
Michigan, JB Moore would listen to the radio late into the night. He loved
Chuck Berry. It was from his love of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and many other
singers that he would grow to love the double entendre. Moore loved the art of
a song lyric that had more than one meaning. But there was one record heard on
just about every jukebox in America that would have a profound effect on the
young James Moore.
Eddie Lawrence has
been a comic and a performer since at least the 1930’s. Sometime during the
late 1950’s Lawrence came up with a character called Sentimental Sam, a
character for whom some of the worse things in life would happen to. It was out
of the Sentimental Sam character that gave birth to the Old Philosopher. It’s
highly doubtful that there has ever been or will ever be another comedy record
as popular as “The Old Philosopher.”
The sentiments are
about the cruel ironies that life throws our way; Lawrence’s light-hearted
approach makes it sound funny:
“You say your wife
went out for the weekend to get a corned beef sandwich, and the corned beef
sandwich came back, but not your wife? You say your furniture is all over the
street because you can’t pay the rent?”
There is nothing
funky about ‘The Old Philosopher’ nor is there anything even remotely soulful
about it either, in fact it’s hard to even call it a song. There’s no way it
ever played on any black station in the country. But it resonated with JB
Moore, who would later wonder what would happen if he took the sentiments of
‘The Old Philosopher’ and gave it a hip, funky, urban twist. The results: a
song called ‘The Breaks.’
During the transit
strike of 1980 the team of Moore, Ford, Miller, Bralower and Blow headed back
to Green Street Recording Studio.
 | |
| Kurtis Blow w/ drummer Jimmy Bralower and producer JB Moore |
“I wanted to make a
record with a bunch of breaks for the b-boys,” Kurtis remembered. “When I said
that JB Moore got real excited and said, “Oh great!” because he had a song
concept in mind along the same lines.
Like any rap song
of that era the music was inspired from other sources, in this case the bass
line was based on Steely Dan’s “Royal Scam.' “Tommy Woke,” Moore tells me,
“played the one and three from that song.” Woke would later play bass for Hall
and Oates. Using a sixteen track Neve board, engineer Rod Hui compressed the
hell out of Tommy Woke’s bass and Jimmy Bralower’s funk drumming. Moore, not
content to sit on his laurels for the second record, pulled out all stops and
enlisted John Tropea on guitar. Tropea’s credits include Paul Simons ‘Fifty
Ways’, Harry Chapin’s ‘Cats in the Cradle’ and a bunch of other hits. Kurtis
really wanted to bring out the break beat element and it was he who suggested
percussion, thus the services of Jaime Delgado were enlisted to play timbales.
Delgado had been a member of salsa singer and musician Ray Barretto’s band.
As on ‘Christmas
Rappin’ they wanted to capture the feel of a real party so they enlisted
friends and family for the party track. Among the studio audience shouting
“That’s the breaks, that’s the breaks” was future author and filmmaker Nelson
George and Rocky Ford’s two sisters and mother. “I had to stop my mother from
clapping,” Ford recalls laughing, “because she couldn’t clap on beat.”
‘The Breaks’ was
the first adult themed rap record and was openly embraced by both Black radio
and adult listeners. It also helped that Moore and Ford’s adult realities were
reflected in the record: unemployment, rejection, lack of money, no cars, these
were things that made the song appeal to more than just kids with a boom box and
a bag of bamboo.
Steeped knee deep
in double and triple entendre’s from the beginning to the end ‘The Breaks’ was
a watershed moment in rap music. For b-boys the term ‘breaks’ had one meaning,
for adults the term had a different connotation. In the midst of a deep
recession, double digit inflation, sky-high unemployment rates and long gas
lines, the phrase “that’s the breaks’ resonated with a whole lot of people. For
the first time there was a rap song that poked fun at life’s different
calamities.
Now if your woman
steps out with another man
That’s the break,
that’s the breaks
And she runs off
with him to Japan
That the breaks,
that’s the breaks
And the IRS says
they want to chat
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
And you can’t
explain why you claimed your cat
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks.
And Ma Bell sends
you a whopping bill
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
With eighteen phone
calls to Brazil
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
And you borrowed
money from the Mob
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
And yesterday you
lost your job.
Throw your hands up
in the sky
And wave em round
from side to side
If you deserve a
break tonight somebody say alright
Breaks on stage
breaks on screen
Breaks to make your
wallet lean
Breaks run cold and
breaks run hot,
Some folks got em
and some have not.
You say last week
you met the perfect guy
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
And he promised you
the stars in the sky
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
He said his
Cadillac was gold
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
But he didn’t say
it was ten years old
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
He took you out for
a Red Coach Grill
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
But he forgot the
cash and you paid the bill
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
He told you the
story of his life
That’s the breaks,
that’s the breaks
But he forgot the
part about his wife
For b-boys the
funky guitar line, percussion and drum breaks were heaven sent. The phrase
‘breakdown’ was a call to get down and dance, or “go off” as we used to say.
But in adult life a breakdown could literally be your car not working or the
stress of life getting the best of you, which could literally make you scream
and holler and breakdown crying. But like ‘The Old Philosopher’ record, ‘The
Breaks’ was about not taking these things seriously. It was like someone saying
to you, “Smile, they’re just the breaks.”
To this day,
thirty-one years later because of “The Breaks” Kurtis Blow still travels the
world and he’s thankful for it. “You have to understand something,” he said,
his voice flowing with a mixture of pride and amazement, “I had the number
one record in the country when I was twenty-one years old, that’s what kept me grounded. Being a pioneer for hip-hop is what kept me
grounded. Russell and I believed that hip-hop could crossover; this is what we
set out to do. And we did it. Look at hip-hop now, it’s everywhere. It’s taken
me everywhere. I was a kid from the ghetto in Harlem…and here I was getting on
planes going to London. Man, God is good. And now look at it now.
Just look at it now. It’s in every country and in every language. And I was one of the first to do it? Thank you Jesus,” he said to me, “Praise
God. I’m one of the pioneers of hip-hop. Praise Jesus. God is good. I’m enjoying
life…”
Special shout to Bill
Adler for the old newspaper clips!
Mark.skillz@gmail.com
originally published in Wax Poetics Magazine
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