Reggie Wells: Master Mix Those Number One Tunes

By Mark Skillz

Mark.Skillz@gmail.com
 

Ayo, lemme ask you somethin’… what you know about this: “Hotel/Motel, Holiday Inn, if you don’t tell, then I won’t tell, but I know where you been!” 

That’s official kid, that’s the original version of the chant that Big Bank Hank used in Rapper’s Delight. It started at a spot called Club 371 in 1976. It’s the club where Harlem’s smooth style came to the Boogie Down Bronx. It’s also the place where three Manhattan deejays pioneered the disco side of hip hop. 

“See, after the club, if you met a young lady and you wanted to take her to a motel or whatever, the place to go was the Courtesy in Jersey,” pioneer deejay Reggie Wells tells me in a phone interview. “We called it the ‘Big C’, so if you were at the ‘Big C’ after the club and somebody saw your car there; you’d find a note on your windshield that said: “Hotel/Motel, Holiday Inn, if you don’t tell then I won’t tell, but I know where you been!” 

 Around the same time that a Bronx deejay named Kool Herc was pioneering the break beat style that would later be called hip hop, alongside his partner Coke La Rock, black club deejays in Manhattan were refining a slick style of talk over disco records. 

“It wasn’t really rhyming with the music, just saying slick stuff over the music,” said Reggie. “I’d say something like: This is the man with the golden voice, that talks more shit than a toilet bowl can flush, do more gigs than your grand momma wear wigs, got more clothes than you should wear pantyhose, yes baby sexy lady I hear ya hummin’ I see you comin’, come on momma with your bad self, keep a pep in your step – ain’t no time for no half steppin’. It’s W-e-double-l-s, the worlds exciting and most long lasting sound…WELLS…if you hear any noise, its just Reggie Wells and the boys.” 

Starting in 1974, CCNY student Reggie Wells went on-air at WCCR. One of the students that was there at the time was rap pioneer Kurtis Blow. Wells, who got his inspiration to be a deejay from WWRL radio personality Hank Spann, is one of the few deejays of his generation to play in both clubs and on the radio.

With a changing voice at the age of 13, Wells took to crank calling random people in the phone book, “I would call somebody up and say, ‘Hello, is this the Smith residence?’ and I’d pretend like I was on the radio – I had the radio up real loud so that the person on the other end would think I was from a radio station – they’d be like, ‘Yeah it is!’ and I’d say, ‘If you can name your favorite radio station, I have a grand prize selected just for you.’ They’d go ‘WWRL’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, this is WWRL, and my name is Reggie Wells, and you just won a brand new Panasonic color television set – that doesn’t work!’ Hearing people respond as if I was on the radio, made me think, that, maybe that’s what I should be doing.” 

The first club that Wells started rappin’ on the mike at, was on 67th St. and was called Le Martinique and after that, he did clubs like Cork in the Bottle and Casablanca. But the place that made him a legend in the city was Club 371 in the Bronx, that’s where he joined such legends as rap innovators Eddie Cheeba, DJ Hollywood and the late-but unsung hero DJ Junebug.

A group called the Ten Good Guys owned Club 371, and it was there, that the three deejays bought Harlem’s style to the Bronx. Men wore dress shirts, slacks and dress shoes and women got in their fly wares as well. However, before it was a spot for the disco side of hip hop, it had another reputation, “Club 371 was where big-time gangsters like Nicky Barnes and his crew used to hang out at in the Bronx,” said promoter Van Silk who went by the name RC Pac Jam in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. 

“All the hustler types that went to 371 shopped at AJ Lester’s on 125th St., you had to be making money then to shop there. [You’d see]Ron Isley and Black Ivory [there]. Brothers used to go there and buy sharkskin suits and gator shoes and Al Packer sweaters, we bought nothing off the rack, everything was tailor-made. Brothers today don’t know about getting their pants measured from their waist to their toes,” said Silk. 

 On the hip hop scene at that time, at clubs like the Hevalo and the Dixie, hip hop audiences wore sneakers and jeans and mock necks to jams. But, for the most part, initially, hip hop jams were in parks where anyone could attend. “I remember going to Club 371,” Cold Crush Brothers deejay Toney Tone told me in a phone interview, “and standing in the middle of the place, and a record with a break came on, and we started breaking, and Hollywood, he’s my man and I love him to death, got on the mike and said, ‘There will be no diving on the floor in here!’ That’s the kind of spot that was.” 

 “We played break down parts of records at Club 371, but we didn’t specialize in that,” DJ Hollywood told me in a phone interview. Reggie Wells hipped me to another reason why there was no Breaking in the club. “You couldn’t dance with a young lady, and be spinning on the floor, girls were not going for that.” said Wells. 

 “Harlem was on some smooth shit waaaaay before the Bronx,” said Hollywood. “In Harlem, we were about having money, and rocking nice clothes, and having your hustle game on right. All that diving on the floor shit, naw, that wasn’t happening. See while you down there on the floor, some smooth cat has come along and stole your girl!”

“The real hustlers there didn’t drink,” Reggie tells me. “Their thing was to keep their game sharp, so if they did drink – they drank Perrier water. At that time, we drank Pipers, Moet and Dom P-- drinking Dom P at that time was the equivalent of drinking Cristal today. You see, back then; it was cool to drink a split. Nowadays, you see a brother in the club, and he’s walking around the club, with a bottle of Cristal – back then, you didn’t mind drinking a split. You didn’t have to buy the bottle – and your girl didn’t mind drinking a split either. You never saw anybody walking around with a bottle, we kept it in the bucket.”

“371 was one of the best clubs I ever worked for, "Reggie told me, "the management, the staff, the deejays, I liked working with all of them. It’s rare that you get so many deejays together and they all got along. I met people that would come to 371 from all over, from places like; Connecticut, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Queens, Philly; this was a club that was known by word of mouth,” said Wells. 

The club was doing so well that the deejays could afford to lease cars, “Hey I had a Lincoln Continental, Hollywood had a Cadillac, Junebug had a Cadillac as well; and Eddie Cheeba had a caddy too – except I think he had a driver! I’ll never forget Grandmaster Flash had a yellow Cadillac! And you know that album Kurtis Blow did, where he was wearing the white leather suit on the cover, called Tough? Well, on the back he’s posing in front of a limousine, that was his limo!” 

 Over the years it has been said that the jocks at 371 played disco – and it’s true they did, but they played the popular records of that time, that would play on radio stations like WBLS and WKTU like “Melting Pot” by Booker T and the MG’s and “Double Cross” by First Choice. These are records that deejays play today when they play the type of music called ‘classics.’

“The stuff that guys like me and Hollywood, Eddie Cheeba, and god bless Junebug, the stuff that we were doing, at that time, no one else was doing in any club in New York City. I’d say, to me, rap kind of started there, in that club, even though I heard about what was going on in the parks, as far as in the clubs, on a regular basis, that’s one of the first places you heard rap. But back then, there wasn’t so much hip hop because we didn’t have hip hop on wax, the deejays were considered the hip hop artists, but we did our thing on the club scene over disco records,” says Wells. 

The distinction between what the deejays did at 371 and what Flash, Bam and Herc were doing is important. Both scenes were well aware of each other, however, they played in different markets. Flash, Bam and Herc played in parks, while Hollywood, Cheba and Reggie Wells played in clubs for an older adult audience. What is important to point out is that the deejays did jam together sometimes. “I knew about Red Alert and Kool Herc and the rest of the guys,” said Wells, “but we played in a different market.” “When was the first time you met Lovebug Starski?” I asked him.

“I met Starski, when he and Hollywood did a concert at CCNY, Brainstorm, Evelyn “Champagne” King and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes were on the bill that night, and Hollywood and Starski, they rocked the shit out of that crowd. I mean they totally blew them away. That style of rappin’ where they were talking with the music, I can’t tell you who really originated that style, cause you hear that this one started it - and that one started it; but for me coming from downtown, that was the first time that I had ever seen anyone do the rappin’ with the turntables and the mike on that level.” 

“Were you aware of guys like Kool Herc, Cowboy, Timmy Tim and Coke La Rock?” I asked him, “and was there a difference between what they were doing and what Hollywood was doing?” “I heard about the deejays battling each other with lyrics, but with Hollywood, all he was doing was ad-libbing with the environment that was in front of him, so it was all about the party, just saying slick stuff and have the people respond. The other deejays, to be honest with you, I heard of them, but I really didn’t know them at that particular time, but I knew that their style was different from what were doing.”

 

Wells came up watching the deejays before him like Pete DJ Jones, Maboya, Plummer and the late great Grandmaster Flowers. “Grandmaster Flowers was incredible, what he used to do, he would play with a record, he would take the bass out of a record, he could turn the vocals down and bring them back in…that man was creative with mixing. Not everybody can do that. I’ve been places and have watched the deejay, he’s busy cutting the record back and forth, you look up there and he’s having fun, but nobody is dancing.”

Nowadays, Reggie can be considered one of the godfathers of R&B deejaying. He has a deep understanding of what makes an ordinary deejay a great deejay. “The job is to maintain, sustain, create and motivate,” he tells me. “I hate when deejays play by a format. Because when you play by a format in a club, and you have a consistent clientele, they get to know you and they know what to expect, change it up, crowds are different.” 

 One night at Paradise Garage, Wells got to witness first-hand, the “magic” of the late – but legendary club deejay Larry Levan. “I was in the booth with Larry, and he was talking, just talking a mile a minute, and I’m sitting there watching him, and I’m thinking to myself, Does he know this record is gonna end? And just when I was thinking that, the record ended, and all you heard was zhchczhc-zhzhzhnzk, you know the sound a record makes when it’s at the end? Well, when that happened, he and his light man – they must’ve been in sync or something, cause every time the record would make that sound…the lights went off – and would flash back on. He did that a few times, and then started the record over again, and the crowd lost their minds! See, that was a crowd that wanted to be entertained!” 

 One night at the Red Parrot in Manhattan, there was one audience that was not entertained by Wells. “I had to flip the script on them one night. You see the Red Parrot held about 4,000 people and on this night, there were about 3,000 people in there. So here I am playing, I’m rocking the shit out of them and all of a sudden…the record skipped. The next thing I knew, the crowd started booing me! So I turned the whole shit off, and got on the mike and said, “Hold up, hold up, I been playing good shit all night and I fuck up once and this is how you do ME?” I reached into my crate and pulled out the hottest shit at that time, a record called “Doin Da Butt” and they lost their minds!”

Today Reggie Wells can be heard on 98.7 KISS FM on Friday nights mixing house, R&B and classic soul, with some old school rap.

Club 371 Playlist - straight from the mouths of DJ Hollywood and Reggie Wells… Double Cross – First Choice Soul Makossa – Manu Dubango Pipeline Galaxy – War Runaway Love – Linda Clifford Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me – Peter Brown Shame – Evelyn Champagne King Turn the Beat Around - Vicky Sue Robinson Hotshot – Karen Young Busting Loose- Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers Super Sporm – Captain Sky Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is – Olympic Runner Runnin’ Away – Roy Ayers Movin’ On – Brass Construction Dr. Love – First Choice Love is the Message – MFSB Ladies Night – Kool and the Gang Let’s Get it Together – El Coco Bounce, Rock, Skate and Roll – Vaughn Mason and Crew 

When The Fever Was the Mecca

If Hip Hop was your thing in the early 80's there were a few things you understood: The hottest spot in the city at that time was Studio 54 in Manhattan and you weren't getting in there; but the club Disco Fever was in the Bronx; if you wanted to be a legend in hip hop at that time, then your ass had to play at the Fever.

The Front of the Club

 
Disco Fever wasn't just a club; it was the club, not only was it the place to be but it was an experience, if you performed at the Fever, and you rocked it, that meant that you were somebody. You were among the elite. For legions of rap fans at that time it was the Mecca of the South Bronx.


It was a star- studded time for many in the 80's. It was a time when fly girls, b-boys, stick-up kids, coke dealers, hookers, thugs, gamblers, home boys and the everyday man could party in style with the ghetto celebs of that period.

The wall behind the stage, emblazoned in big red and gold graffiti lettering displaying the names of the legends of that time: DISCO FEVER THE HOME OF: Lovebug Starski, Junebug, Grandmaster Flash, Sweet G, D.J. Hollywood, Sugar Hill Gang, Eddie Cheba, Kurtis Blow, Sequence, Brucie Bee, Furious 5, Reggie Wells, Kool Kyle, Disco Bee, Ronnie DJ and Star Child. Those were the names of some of the immortals that blessed the mikes and the deejay booth; that's where you wanted your name to be. 

Mr. Magic and Flash on stage

"When I went there," Fab 5 Freddy recalled for me, "the vibe was definitely celebratory." At the time Freddy served as sort of an ambassador between the hard-core underground hip-hop scene and the downtown art and punk rock scenes. "You definitely got hit with the aroma of cocaine burning with cigarettes or weed; you smelled angel dust being smoked once you got in the club. It wasn't like going to the Dixie or somewhere like the Smith Projects - although that hard-core element was there, the vibe was different. It was more of a celebration."

"The Fever was way different from Krush Groove," Grandmaster Caz takes pleasure in pointing out for me. "There wasn't no Fat Boys and RUN-DMC and LL all in the Fever, hell no, it was mother fuckin' drug dealers man, all they showed was the front room, they didn't show the back room!"

"We played whatever was hot at that time," said George "Sweet G" Godfrey, who was the clubs manager as well as a deejay, who also recorded the classic 12-inch Games People Play. "On any given night seven days a week, you'd come in there and hear something like Catch the Beat by T Ski Valley, or All Night Long by the Mary Jane Girls." Godfrey remembers Catch the Beat as being "a club classic!"

In the Beginning

"When the Fever first opened up, we couldn't get in," said Furious Five emcee Mele Mel, "because we were too young, only Flash and Lovebug Starski were able to." Mel and crew couldn't enter because initially, the club catered to an older audience. In the 60's and early 70's the Abbatiello family owned a jazz bar in the Bronx called the Salt and Pepper Lounge that catered to a mostly adult black clientele.

"Sal's dad, Ally, was a musician," Sweet G told me, "he used to have all kinds of people come down to that bar for jam sessions, people like George Benson for instance, he used to come in and jam three or four nights a week." 

"In 1978 my dad decided to buy a bar down the block from the Salt and Pepper Lounge," Abbatiello told me. "When Ally bought that bar," Sweet G added, "I was there when it was being built, I'm talking literally, I mean, I had a hammer and nails and was helping them build that place."

In the movie Casablanca Humphrey Bogart played a smooth, tuxedo-jacketed, cigar- smoking, tough-talking yet sensitive character named Rick, who's connections with the underworld and cops alike made him the man to go to in Morocco; Sal Abbatiello was the Rick of the South Bronx. He fondly recalls how, "People used to come around the clubs and say to each other "Hey...who's the white kid?" Like I came from somewhere else, when, I didn't. I'm from the South Bronx; I was born and raised in the Bronx. My family is from the Bronx. We have been involved and owned nightclubs here for years. So all of my dealings have been with black people. At my dinner table, during holidays, there were black people at the table with us. So, you see, I was no stranger to Black culture."

"So one night we were out at Sal's dad's house in New Jersey," Sweet G says, "and a commercial came on for a new movie called Saturday Night Fever. It came on while we were trying to think of a name for the club, and all of a sudden Sal's mom said, "Hey, why not call it "Disco Fever?" And we all looked at each other and said: "Hey that's it!"

To say that business started off slow would be an understatement. It was dreadful. One of Sal's first promotions was a night with disco act Musique who's hit 'Push Push in the Bush' was in constant rotation on WBLS and WKTU. But no one came. Then he had a night with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, this time thirty seven people showed up. "Do you know why only thirty seven people showed up that night?" Sal asks me. "Because no one believed that Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes would be in some club in the South Bronx."

"So the club is up and going, we had a white deejay there at first playing Top 40, cause you gotta remember, we were still catering to an older clientele," said Abbatiello. "Well, this white guy, he used to get tired and want to quit early, it would be 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and he'd be ready to go."

Sweet G says that, "When he [the white guy] would leave or take a break I would take over. Now, I'm not a great deejay or nothing, but I had watched Flash and all of those guys and knew all of the hot break records from that time like Cheryl Lynn's "Got to Be Real." I would turn down the music and talk between her singing like she would sing: "What you find.' I'd say: "Sweet G," she'd sing. "What you feel," I'd say: "D.J. Junebug,' what you know: 'Disco Fever,' and that was my routine."

"Well, one night I'm there at the club and I see G go into this routine, and I'm saying to myself, 'What in the fuck is G doing?' He was saying things like 'Throw your hands in the air and wave 'em like you just don't care' and all of this other stuff and I'm looking at the crowd and I'm noticing that he's bringing people together. And then it clicked: This is what the club needs. So I talked my dad into letting me have a night and after a while he agreed. He wasn't sure about this rap stuff, but he let me try, so I went out to find the best: and that was a guy named Grandmaster Flash."

 "So when I got Flash to play, we charged a dollar and there were only four of us working the whole club - 600 people showed up that night. I was calling home and the Salt and Pepper Lounge pleading with my dad, "Dad, Dad please, send more people; we're swamped in here."

The Place to Be

inside of the club

To be sure, hip-hop was not born at The Fever, its birthplace is said to have been 1520 Sedgwick Ave. in the West Bronx. What the Fever was was the hot spot where the stars of that era went to chill and be seen in high fashion. Hip-hop fashion at that time was different from what it is today; there was no specialized hip-hop designer gear, because people in general didn't have a lot of money back then. Party-goers wore leather bomber jackets, sweaters, mock necks, Polo shirts, leather pants, British Walkers, Calvin Klein or Lee jeans, and Kangol hats; hip-hop fashion has come a long way since then.

Even though it has been said that the Fever had a dress code, according to promoter Van Silk, then known as R.C., "Yeah right the Fever had a dress code. Do you know what the dress code was? It was money. If you had enough money in your pocket then you could get in there regardless how you were dressed. But you knew you were going out that night and you wanted to look right, so you wore your leather pants."

According to Silk, "I was one of the first promoters Sal let in there do his own night. As a matter of fact, me and Sal were trying to start a video show out of the Fever; it was going to be called 'Video Fever'. This was before MTV. We had Nyobe and some other people on that show. Sal has it to this day on a beta tape," said Silk.

"The Fever was like a second home to us." said Mele Mel, "We could be overseas in Italy or Germany or somewhere like that and we would be calling the Fever, right into the deejay booth, and would be talking to Junebug on the phone, we would be like, "Yeah yeah, so what's going on over there, who's there tonight? If we were in New York, like say, the Roxy, we would hang out at the Roxy and then leave there at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and then go to the Fever when we were done. No matter where we were we always ended up back at the Fever."

"People that went there regularly they were called "believers" - "Fever believers", said Grandmaster Caz adding, "And then the girls that used to come all the time but they ain't look all that hot, we used to call them "Fever blisters".

As hot as the Fever was there were certain pioneers that didn't play there, most notably: Afrika Bambaataa. "Bambaataa did not play the Fever, nor did he play Harlem World," said Van Silk, "You have to understand something, 125th St. was Harlem, and Bam came from the gang days, there were still groups out there with that kind of mentality. Bam is not a violent man. Now, the people around Bam were violent. So Bam didn't travel everywhere, anything beyond 225th was Uptown, and that's when you get into some 'Warriors' type shit."

Unlike other hip hop spots at that time like the Ecstasy Garage, The Dixie, and the T Connection; the Fever had the style of a downtown club - uptown.

"Yo there were three kinds of cats in the Fever: there was the rappers - the emcee's the hip hop cats, the drug dealers and then there was the regular pedestrians I like to call them", said Grandmaster Caz, "They would be in there with their eyes wide open, but there weren't that many of them in there because everybody was pretty much somebody. The Fever wasn't like a big, big, club - you know what I mean? The regular crowd of people would pack the club alone, it wasn't about no outside people coming from out of town and shit like that, they wasn't fitting in in the Fever."

"The Fever crowd were the type of crowd that liked to sing a long with the record", said D.J. Rockwell who spun there from 1980 - 1985, "I would mix something like "Do You Wanna Rock" by the Funky 4, and the crowd would be singing along and then I would go into "Before I Let Go" by Frankie Beverly, from there I would go into "I Found Love" by the Fatback Band and the crowd would lose their minds. That's the way the Fever crowd was."

"I held down a night, Brucie Bee had a night and Disco Bee had a night too. A lot of times when people thought that it was Flash spinning there - it was really me, because Flash would spin for an hour or so and then stop, and when he stopped, that's when I would come on", said Rockwell.

For Sal, the one night that stands out for him that made him see just how popular the club was. "One night, I'm outside looking at the line and there's this guy out there who wants to get in, he's a young guy, good-looking guy, somebody taps me on the shoulder and said, "Yo that's the guy with the hot record out", I said "Let him in", turns out, it was Kurtis Blow." 

Junebug the Baddest Deejay Ever
 

DJ Junebug in the booth

"I could be at the bar sipping a drink or whatever, and all of a sudden Junebug would play the Philadelphia Orchestra's version of McFadden and Whitehead's "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"; and that would be my cue for us to get into our thing," said Sweet Gee.

Out of all of the deejays from that era, the name Junebug is revered. He was a young Puerto Rican deejay from The Bronx, who had a bearded face and a long Afro with a neck full of gold chains and the sort of playful smile that only a mother could love.

"Nobody could do what Junebug did. He was the absolute best. Flash was bad, but Junebug was better." Sweet Gee told me.

"I agree", Sal added, "all the other deejays scratched or just threw a record in, Junebug, mixed records in, and he did it extremely well. He didn't really need headphones. I used to go to Club 371 and check the deejays out, and Junebug, was one hell of a deejay. He was D.J. Hollywood's deejay. I stole him from them [Club 371], and made him the main house deejay along with Sweet Gee."

"As far as a club deejay - Junebug was a really nice", says Grandmaster Caz, "But really, when I went there, I thought all of the disco deejays were the best there: Junebug, Starski, Starchild, but yeah, I have to say Junebug stood out. Sweet Gee was the host, he'd be the voice, he'd be biggin' up everybody in the spot."

But that wasn't all that Junebug was best at; he also made his money on the street. According to Sweet Gee: "Junebug had two apartments: one for where he lived; the other, was where he kept his stash."

"He was a nice guy," Mele Mel says. "He would give you the shirt off his back, he was a stand up dude, he just happened to be a deejay who also sold cocaine. You know, he, like the rest of us, we all got caught up in something that was bigger than what we could deal with at the time", said Mele Mel.

The Other Bronx Disco

DJ Hollywood on the mic at Club 371

"When the Fever opened up there was an immediate rivalry with Club 371, I'm talking about a heated rivalry," said Sweet Gee, "You have to understand, once the Fever opened the owners of the place started looking around and they noticed that most of their black clientele was disappearing, this became a major problem."

Club 371 was the spot where four deejays from Manhattan bought Harlem's smooth style to the Bronx. Deejays: Reggie Wells, Hollywood, Junebug and Eddie Cheeba had all been spinning R&B since at least the early 70's; two of them: D.J.'s Hollywood and Eddie Cheba were godfathers of rap.

"When I was first investigating the rap scene, Club 371 was one of the places I went to. When I went there I was in awe of this big fat guy, with this golden voice and he had absolute control over the crowd. He was the best entertainer ever; this guy rapped and sang, he mixed, he was a star, I mean a real star, even back then: his name was D.J. Hollywood. He had a Spanish deejay that used to spin for him named Junebug; I wanted both of them at my club. At first, only Junebug came over, but Hollywood didn't; it took a long time to get him [Hollywood] to come over. He didn't think the Fever was the right spot for him, I guess it was because he was used to playing for older adults who listened to a more R&B type music, he used to tell me "I don't know man, I don't think that's my kinda crowd; but I'd tell him "Yo, all you gotta do is come on down and play for them. They'll love you", said Sal.

One of the early greats DJ Eddie Cheba

"When I first got to Club 371 in 1978, the owners were looking to expand the place, Hollywood was so popular at the time, and they needed somebody just as good as he was", said Eddie Cheba, "So they built an upstairs - but nobody was going upstairs - Hollywood was so good nobody wanted to leave that part of the club, so they got me. So, upstairs it was me and my deejay EZ Gee and Reggie Wells, and downstairs it was Hollywood and Junebug; people were running downstairs and upstairs all night."

"But eventually I got Hollywood", Sal says. "I got all of them: Eddie Cheeba, Reggie Wells, Junebug, Hollywood; we were doing it then."

"It got to the point where the fire department would show up and we'd have to empty the place out because somebody called and said that there was a fire. After this happened a few times, we figured out what was going on, we found out it was the guy's that owned Club 371 that were calling the fire department on us, and it was on from then on. For a while there, we played a game of one upmanship with them meaning: they called in and said we had a fire, we'd call the cops and say that there was a bomb in their place. This went on for a while, and got even worse when Sal stole Junebug", remembers Sweet Gee.

"After a while the two owners made a truce and the beef was over. Their owner came over to our place for drinks; Sal went over there for drinks, everything was good."

Chillin' V.I.P. Style

"You have to understand the neighborhood, I'd have a pimp here, a doctor here, a lawyer here, a hooker here and gangsters all over. So, once we started frisking people - as a matter of fact, we were the first with the metal detectors, once we started frisking people, we started turning up guns. People thought I was crazy, they were saying things like, "Sal, what kind of club are you running? Come on, metal detectors?" Now in this neighborhood, certain people needed guns. There were just certain people whose guns you couldn't take away. So, we started a gun-check policy. Our thing was: Ok, you have a gun. However, you may not bring that gun in the club. So, we would take the gun and lock it - and the ammunition - up in the office." said Abbatiello.

"People were getting high snorting coke out in the open and shit so we created a room, the "get high room" for them to do that in, it wasn't like we could really stop them."

"This was the cocaine era", Grandmaster Caz reminds us. "Girls would come in from Connecticut cause they knew all the rap cats was gonna be there, they knew that the drug dealers were gonna be in there, this was the cocaine years baby - pre crack."

Patterned after the speakeasies of the 1920's, the VIP areas were an elaborate set of walls enclosed in walls. They also set up red alarm lights behind the bar, in the deejay booth, and in the offices in case the cops raided the place. "When the red light went off, the deejay would make an announcement: Code Red. That meant hide the blow. Code Blue meant the cops were gone, go back to doing what you were doing", Sweet Gee recalls."

All kinds of stuff went on back there", said Mele Mel, "If you were back there, you were royalty. You got the best that the club had to offer. I would leave that place at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning with 2 or 3 females and depending on what was going on: if we were gonna do our thing locally there was the Alps, which was a little roach motel. Or there was the Courtesy in Jersey which had rooms with Jacuzzi's and mirror's on the ceilings and all that kind of stuff", said Mele Mel.

"Things were going so well that after awhile, there was this place around the corner from the club on Burnside Ave. that I made into an after hours spot I named it "Games People Play", we had gambling and all that kinds of stuff going on over there. That's where the name of the record that Gee did came from", said Sal.

"The V.I.P areas were strictly for celebs, we had one room for the artists, where they would be sniffing coke out of dollar bills; or they had a gram of blow or something and they had a female with them, that was the spot for them for all that", said Sweet Gee, "Now, in the other room we reserved that for the high rollers, I'm talking about guys that were dealing with more than a 8 ball of blow, they were the one's dealing in some serious weight."

Sal puts it bluntly, "You'd go back there and everybody would be back there, I'm talking about your Russell Simmons, your Lyor Cohen's; everybody that was in the rap business back then was who you could find back there with their noses open - including me."

RUN-DMC LIVE AT THE FEVER

For close to a decade The Fever had been the Mecca of Hip Hop, it was the place where Mele Mel was king, Kurtis Blow was a star, Flash was a legend and Lovebug Starski, made you a believer. But there was something new on the horizon.

"I was with Run and them all that day when we performed at the Fever", said Spyder D, whose hit record "Smerphies Dance" was a Fever classic. "I was there every step of the way that day. It was me, Run and D and Larry Smith. It was just like the song said: "Larry put me inside his Cadillac", that literally happened that day."

Spyder continues, "To be from Queens and to perform at the Fever was the highest honor. You have to understand, Uptown cats didn't respect Queens cats, so for us to be performing there, that was a big deal, because previous to that, if you were from Queens, you got no love."

When the three ambitious MC's from Queens stepped into the Fever at 2 o'clock in the morning, they were immediately in awe of the club, the mystique of the Fever had more than met their expectations. They had all probably secretly dreamed and privately whispered to friends what that moment would be like, and they weren't disappointed.

They had all performed earlier that day at gigs around the city; their first show had been a disaster: While he was performing, DMC's glasses fell off of his face and fell flat on to the stage. Run, full of nervous energy could hardly control himself.

According to Spyder, RUN DMC's producer and mentor Larry Smith screamed at them on the way to the Bronx, "If y'all niggas are anything like that tonight at the Fever, you're gonna get shot. New Edition performed there last week and niggas were turning over tables shooting at them. You mother fuckers better get it together.' I was like, "Yo, yo Larry man iksnae on the guns man."

Spyder remembers that night like it had happened last week, "So we get there, and Starchild was the deejay that night, we stepped in there and it was like, "Yo, this is about to go down."

Performing after a "Smerph dancing" Spyder D, Run and D, were not quite yet the black leather-jacketed, Stetson hat b-boys yet. "You should've seen them in those checkered jackets and turtle-neck sweaters", laughs Spyder, "It was a far cry from the RUN DMC of the future."

"I watched them from early that afternoon when they were like, these two total amateurs who were too scared to be on stage, to that night at the Fever, when they turned that place out. I saw D and Joey become: RUN-DMC, right before my eyes, and I'll never forget it. They were rookies coming into that night but they were superstars by the end of the night - that's how fast they transformed", said an emphatic Spyder D.

Performing "It's Like That" and "Sucker MC's" before a stunned late-night, coked- up Bronx audience, Run and D were laughed at by a couple, fronted on by a few, but warmly received by everyone else.

A few coked-out Bronx veterans that were there that night peeked out of the VIP section and dismissively said: "Who's them niggas?"

They were the future. The days of the Bronx being the Mecca were coming to an end.

The Party is Over

As the 80's progressed the record industry machine rolled closer and closer toward the tiny sub-culture from the Bronx. Deals were being made and labels were being born at a dizzying pace. A new breed of hip hoppers was coming into being. The older crowd was slowly being phased out.

"One night me, Junebug and Mr. Magic were supposed to go to the movies together", recounts Sweet Gee, "I called Bug's house all that day, and got nothing. I called Sal and told him, "Man, something ain't right, I'm worried, I haven't heard from Bug all day, this ain't like him. So the next day somebody went around to his stash house to go and check on him and there he was, somebody had killed him."

"When I was writing 'White Lines" I was thinking about Junebug", Mele Mel says, "This was before I got hooked on cocaine. I used to buy it; I used to buy it more than I actually used it. I think I was just hooked on buying it. When I wrote the song I was thinking about Junebug, he wasn't the inspiration for the song, but I was thinking of him because even though he was a deejay he was our little connect. He was the dude that we used to get our little packages from. I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah we gonna have some fun when this comes out."

"But, a couple of weeks after "White Lines" dropped Junebug had gotten killed", Mele Mel remembers somberly.

"I grew up around wise guys all of my life, they were in our clubs and everything, so I was no stranger to that kind of element. There was this notorious gangster in the Bronx named Crazy Eddie who used to come around to the club, he had my back against this guy named Tommy [another notorious gangster] for a while, and then, Eddie and I had a falling out. Oh man, shit was hectic", Sal remembers remorsefully.

"I was having problems with this gangster named Tommy because he was trying to shake me down for a whole lot of money. For a year and a half I was walking around wearing a bulletproof vest. It was crazy. I wasn't able to be around everyday to run the businesses, so things started to go bad. Everybody that worked for me was strung out on coke. Things were really going bad", remembers Sal.

Things eventually worked themselves out: Eddie shot Tommy, Tommy shot Eddie, things went back and forth until eventually they both ended up going to jail. Today both men are dead.

As bad as things were looking, it looked like the Fever was about to get a second life, the movie Krush Groove was being shot there. Hollywood had aimed their cameras at the Bronx. Things were looking up. That was, until the last day of filming.

"We were celebrating Mele Mel's birthday party at the club, when all of a sudden I get in trouble for not having a cabaret license. It was all a result of that year and a half of being on the run; my paperwork wasn't being kept up. We finished Mel's party in the street that night. The cops put a lock on the front door, but that didn't stop somebody from coming along later and breaking in through the roof and stealing everything. All I did for the neighborhood, and that happened."

"You gotta understand, there were many nights that people came to me and asked for help paying rent. I'm talking about people from the neighborhood that attended the club, they would come to me and say, "Sal, Sal we're about to be evicted, can you help us? And I would. I can't tell you how many abortions I paid for - that I had nothing to do with - young girls would come up to me crying and shit talking about they're pregnant, and how their mother was gonna kill them. I'd reach in my pocket and give them the money. I cared about the neighborhood. I really did", Sal says.

Between 1976 and 1983, guys like Mele Mel and Lovebug Starski were the toast of the streets. They ruled in the period before trunk jewels and the bling era. They were ghetto celebs at a moment when hip-hop wasn't fabulous. Time and circumstance cheated them out of the pot of gold that is said to over the rainbow. When their reign came to an end, so did the Fever's. Every generation has that moment in time when their youth is celebrated, when their child-like innocence becomes the food of legend, before grown-up realities create jaded adults. Today, men well into their forties get misty-eyed when they recall their heyday of twenty-five years before. They weren't ready to leave the scene, but time dictated that they must.

Mele Mel breaks it down like this: "You know people don't understand that we came through a rough era back then. Yeah, ok, we would be in the V.I.P. section of the Fever, but we would be back there with cats like Corley and Supreme and Fat Cat and them from Queens. Now these were some thorough brothers back then. We'd be back there with gangsters like that. A lot of us got lost in that era. A lot of people didn't survive from all that went on back then. If you survived all that and you got it together now, you a strong cat. Because you had to be strong to come through all of that."

Requiem For A Rapper

Jimmy Spicer may have been the most influential rapper you never heard of. He was to early rap what Robert Johnson was to the Blues. His three recordings ‘The Adventures of Super Rhymes Rap,’ ‘Dollar Bill Y’all,’ and ‘The Bubble Bunch’ never went gold or platinum, but they are seared into the music and styles of Snoop, Warren G, the Wu Tang Clan, Busta Rhymes, Coolio and MC Lyte. He passed away last week at 61 years old from brain and lung cancer.

I first heard his music in 1980. I was walking up Colden Avenue to Kissena Boulevard, in Flushing, Queens when I heard a voice echoing off of the surrounding red brick buildings like a ping pong ball. “Look up in the sky,” the voice commanded, “it’s a bird, it’s a plane…No, I’m Supe, Supe, Supa Rhymes.” Then a conga break mixed with the chest pumping bassline from ‘Bounce, Rock, Skate and Roll’ by Vaughn Mason and Crew came in.

I didn’t know who he was but I could tell he had a knack for theatricality and an ear for what was hot in the street. And one of the hottest things on the street at that time was the five second drum break from Captain Sky’s “Super Sporm.” Every black kid in the Five Boroughs – who was up on it, wanted to be a “death” deejay like Flash or Starsky and cut the phrase ‘Super Sporm’ to pieces.

Rap records were a new thing in 1980, when a new single came out it was the talk of the street like the hottest drug on the market. Any aspiring emcee back then memorized this new joint “Super Rhymes Rap” like it was a sacred scripture. You prayed to it, you lit incense and burned sage while it played trying to absorb its essence. I had to have it. There I stood in Jimmy’s Music on Main Street (this was long before the massage parlors) looking up at the black cover and black label with silver graffiti writing. 

The cost of a twelve-inch single in 1980 was $3.69 ($4.15 with tax) I was thirty-five cents short that day. I had spent forty cents on the latest X Men comic book. Had to have that too. I didn’t get “Super Rhymes” that time and it would be a couple of years before I would come across it again. By then I practically knew the song backwards and forward. When I met Jimmy thirty years later he was amazed at how well I knew the record. “I don’t know,” he would say when I would ask him a question about his discography, “you probably know better than I do.” In some cases I did.

Jimmy proudly told me how Dazz Records had no logo or anything when he signed with them. Grabbing a pencil he sat down and in one sitting drew the graffiti style lettering on a piece of paper.

“Super Rhymes” was a departure from anything back then. It was one singular smooth, at times animated voice, telling long stories over a hardcore version of Vaughn Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate and Roll.” But unlike other rap storytellers he changed his voice when assuming a character like Dracula or Cowway Hossell.

“The guy you see on KBC while Joe Frazier box Muhammad Ali.” It was funny, it was funky and it was def.

For much of its formative years Hip hop was a subculture. Its traditions were born and bred in the streets and were nurtured in isolation. No one had pop culture aspirations back then. You were either a neighborhood hero or if you played in all Five Boroughs you were called a legend. Only a handful of acts became stars in the early days like the Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Kurtis Blow. Everyone else – even though they had hot records, they were the underground. Jimmy figured prominently amongst that bunch.

As legendary as his recordings were on the hip hop scene, by the time he was twenty-six years old, he was fading into obscurity. Maybe he felt like he couldn’t compete with the newer acts like RUN-DMC, Whodini and The Fat Boys. When I asked him why he stopped recording in the mid-80’s, he told me that he was married with a family and he wanted to be a stay at home dad.  That answer never sat well with me. There had to be something more to it. Turns out he did do some recording from time to time and he worked in the offices at Russell Simmons RUSH Artist Management. But it’s something that James Brown once said that seems to apply here. Brown said the longer an artist stays away from performing the more you start to doubt yourself. As a result Jimmy became hip hop’s version of Bobby Fisher.

I located him in 2008 after years of searching for him. At first he wouldn’t consent to an interview. And then he finally did in 2010. I found him to be just like his records: funny, animated and insightful. We talked and went clubbing in Brooklyn until the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps one day I’ll recount my story of hanging out with Jimmy.

I hadn’t spoken with him in months when a picture showed up in my twitter feed for a GoFundMe page, which said “I Need Help Fighting Cancer.” The man in the photo looked familiar to me, it was Jimmy. According to the ad he was suffering from advanced brain and lung cancer. I didn’t believe it.

I was shocked. Jimmy took care of himself. He was an avid roller skater, he danced, jogged and didn’t eat pork. How in the hell someone like him gets cancer is beyond me. I immediately called him to see what was going on. He said he was walking down the street one day and his leg started dragging. He didn’t know what was going on. It went on for a couple of days before he went to the doctor. After running some tests they wanted to do an MRI. It came back with a grave diagnosis: stage four brain and lung cancer.

“I wanna live!” he told me on the phone as he rattled off all of the lifestyle changes he was making. He was a man determined to fight. It made me think back to when I first met in him in 2010. I asked him how he was able to do all of the many activities he did. “Man,” he said to me with a touch of incredulity in his voice, “did you hear me when I said, ‘I wanna be a hundred before I’m through?’ I meant that,” he said with his eyes burning with sincerity.

I wanted to see him do it.

On August 29^th my phone rang back to back to back. I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line. It was Jimmy. “Hey, I’m just calling to say thank you brother.”

For hip hop fans my age Jimmy didn’t have to thank us for anything. We have to thank him. His voice and his music fired our imaginations. “Super Rhymes Rap” was an integral part of us learning how to rap. He had a funky almost Dr. Seuss like impact on many of us.

“Of course brother,” I told him before I asked what was going on.

He hesitated a moment before saying, “Well, it looks like my battle with cancer is coming to an end… they’re saying any day now.”

Tears filled my eyes. There isn’t much you can say when someone tells you that their time is short. I thanked him for his influence on me as a young teenage aspiring emcee for whom ‘Super Rhymes’ and ‘Dollar Bill’ were like a flashlight on a roadmap down a long dark windy road in the middle of the wilderness in unknown terrain.

“Jimmy, I was really hoping you were gonna beat this thing and make it to 100.”

He slightly chuckled and said he wished he could too.  

I thanked him for sharing his story with me. He thanked me for telling his story. “Listen,” he said to me, “I want you to tell everyone that I appreciate all the love that has been shown to me over the years, and I thank God for giving me a talent I could share with the world.”

Sadly Jimmy lost his battle with cancer on September 27^th 2019 he was 61 years old. May God be pleased with him.

                                                                

ROUND ONE: ROXANNE SHANTE VS SPARKY DEE

By Mark Skillz

Nowadays, Lolita Gooden and Doreen Broadnax are the best of friends. Theirs is a sisterhood forged in rap and made stronger in a bonding process over a period of two and a half decades. Hardly a week goes by when they don’t speak. But it wasn’t always like that. 

Once upon a time, back in the mid-80s, Lolita was known as Roxanne Shanté, and Doreen was known as Sparky D. They were locked in a heated feud, the first of its kind, which would come to involve two of hip-hop’s most popular radio deejays, their respective stations and two boroughs. Their legendary battles set the precedence for any rap feud that followed it.

It all began when a fourteen-year-old runaway from the notorious Queensbridge Projects fired the opening shot in what would become known as the “Roxanne, Roxanne” wars. 

                            Why’d Ya Have to Make A Record ‘Bout Me?

In 1984 Select Records boss Fred Munao was crazy about a song called “Hangin’ Out.” The track was by three Brooklyn kids: one wore glasses, another wore a doctor’s suit and the third wore a Kangol hat. Individually, they were the Educated Rapper, Doc Ice and Kangol Kid. Together they were UTFO.

As much as Munao loved “Hangin’ Out,” DJs everywhere hated it. Select even made a video for it. Still, no one liked it. DJs everywhere preferred the flip side, a song called “Roxanne, Roxanne,” which utilized a harder drum sound, funnier lyrics and more intricate wordplay. It was a fictional story about a girl named Roxanne who rejects the romantic overtures of all three MC’s. The song was a hit. UTFO were on their way. And then the worst thing happened: someone assumed the Roxanne identity, hi-jacked their beat and dissed them over their own track. 

Munao and UTFO were madder than a pit bull in a cat shelter. 

The men behind the song were WBLS DJs Mr. Magic and Marley Marl and Magic’s business partner and friend Fly Ty Williams. UTFO either purposely missed or accidentally missed a show in Philly that the BLS crew was promoting. Figuring that UTFO had gotten full of themselves, the three men wanted to take UTFO down a peg or two. They wanted to publicly embarrass them. They wanted them to feel their wrath. But how were they gonna do it? Just then, a neighborhood girl that Marley knew walked by... She was the answer to their problem.  

On New Years Eve 1984, the opening shot in the “Roxanne, Roxanne” wars was fired on Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack: Well my name is Roxanne and don’t ya know, I just cold rock a party and do this show. I met this dude by the name of a hat, he didn’t even walk away I didn’t give him no rap. From that opening line UTFO were pissed. Rap fans didn’t know what to think. If the song was fictional, then who was the girl on the record?

                                                  … In this Corner 

Turns out the girl who jacked their concept was a fourteen-year-old runaway from Queens named Lolita Gooden. In the annals of rap history, Gooden occupies interesting territory. She was the only female member of the legendary Juice Crew and was the first successful solo female rapper of her era. More important, she is the Godmother of the modern battle record. Back in the day, she took it to some of everyone. And they hated her for it. Ask anyone and they’ll tell you: in her time, Shanté pissed off many of her peers, inside and outside of New York City.  

It was her opening shot at UTFO that set off the imitators. By some accounts, there were twenty-five answer records – from “Roxanne’s Parents” to “Roxanne’s Granny” and “Roxanne’s A Man” most of which were total garbage. 

When Munao heard Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge,” he was livid. Not only had Shanté jacked their concept and their beat, but her label was making money off of it as well. “Roxanne’s Revenge” reportedly sold 250,000 units in a matter of weeks. Munao wasn’t having it. He sued Shanté’s label Pop Art Records for copyright infringement. Shanté’s manager Fly Ty and Pop Art Records head Lawrence Goodman ordered the song to be remixed. This time, they made a variation of Billy Squire’s “Big Beat” and incorporated the same turntable cuts UTFO had used for their recording. Shanté’s record became the talk of the industry. 

However, the same night “Roxanne’s Revenge” premiered on BLS, someone was plotting their own attack against Shanté, and this person was determined to make her mark. 

                                         …And in this corner her opponent…  
Doreen Broadnax has been to hell and back. She lost her rap career to substance abuse decades ago. Today she’s an evangelist who ministers to youths about the dangers of substance abuse and street life. Despite all of those battles, to this day, she remembers the night her career shot into the stratosphere. 

New Year’s Eve 1984 was the turning point in the lives of Duane “Spyder D” Hughes and his then-girlfriend Doreen ‘Sparky D’ Broadnax. Spyder already had one hit under his belt, “Smerphies Dance,” a gold-selling single on Telstar Cassettes. However, he was having all sorts of problems with his record label, ie; the severe lack of promotion and the insufficient flow of ducats to his bank account. Spyder wanted out of his contract, but they wouldn’t let him go. 

Sitting in Sparky’s room on the 14^th floor in the Van Dyke Projects in Brooklyn, Spyder made a promise to himself: No more mister guy. It had gotten him nowhere. Just as he had made this life altering decision, “Roxanne’s Revenge” came on the radio. Spyder smelled opportunity. Spyder was struck by the audacity of a young girl, challenging not one but three MC’s. Spyder, who had no affiliations whatsoever with UTFO, Select Records or Full Force thought out loud: We can’t let her get away with this, these are our people. And then he turned to his girlfriend and said prophetically, “It’s your turn Doreen.” 

Thus the song “Sparky’s Turn” was born. Spyder wrote the rhymes within an hour while sitting on Doreen’s bed. The next day, the pair went to Power Play Studios in Long Island City, Queens. Doreen nailed the vocal in one take.  

Knowing he had a hit on his hands, Spyder reached out to The Fantastic Aleems, a pair of cock diesel twin brothers who played in Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. They liked what they heard, and in a handshake deal pressed the song up on NIA records. Within a week, Spyder and Sparky were picking up the first shipment of 10,000 records at a Greyhound bus station in midtown Manhattan. When the song hit the radio, Shanté hit the roof.

                                                     The Preliminaries

Marley and Shanté were furious when they saw who was behind “Sparky’s Turn.” Marley knew Spyder. Shanté had even met Spyder on one occasion. To say that she was pissed would’ve been an understatement.  

“Spyder, you know me,” he recalls her saying. “How could you do that song?”

“It’s just business,” he told her. As far as Shante was concerned it probably was business but she was going to make it personal too!

“Gimme that bitch,” Sparky growled days later backstage at the Roxy, while lunging at Shanté. The two women had to be separated. Sparky had heard that Shanté had made a disparaging remark about her mother. The younger, smaller, quicker of wit Shanté incensed the bigger and older Sparky. “Yeah, she had a mouth on her,” Sparky told me over dinner. The more Shanté spoke, the madder Sparky got. 

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. If the beef had turned physical, the ramifications for both sides would’ve been ugly. Sparky’s crew from Brownsville were gangsters whose exploits had been well documented in the papers. Shanté was from the notorious Queensbridge Projects, and had a serious crew of people behind her too. No one wanted the situation to escalate into a Brooklyn-Queens thing.

And it could have done just that, when one night, Spyder and Sparky did a show in a rec center in the Queensbridge Projects. “There was one way in and one way out,” Sparky remembers. “She had to respect me. I came in her ‘hood and did a show.” No guns were drawn, and no fists were thrown.  

It certainly didn’t help that Sparky’s DJ Red Alert spun for rival station KISS-FM and Shanté’s DJ Marley Marl was on WBLS. They frequently taunted each other on air. The whole city was locked into the feud. 

Though neither lady could stand the sight of the other there was money to be made. They did shows on the same bill, precautions were taken to ensure that they wouldn’t bump into each other because, well, after all there was money to be made.

One night on tour in Toledo, the promoter couldn’t pay Shanté. Sparky and crew saw her outside of the hotel crying. At first Shanté was leery, but after some prodding, she opened up to Sparky. “She was like, ‘Yo, they ain’t got my money, I can’t buy diapers for my baby or nothing.”  

“This touched my heart,” Sparky remembers thirty years later. “I reached into my pocket and pulled out a one hundred dollar bill and gave it to her. I said, I’ll give you this if you promise to dance at my wedding.” 

Shanté looked at her and said, “Better than that… I’ll do your wedding.” 

Money or no money, they still didn’t like each other. It all culminated in a huge battle in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. The show was hyped up on the radio, so the lines were wrapped around the venue. 

“It was unplanned,” Sparky explains to me. “She did her song and I did mine.” And then the two women went head-to-head on stage. “It was win, lose or draw,” Sparky remembers. “It was like being in a lions den.” 

Spyder recalls that when it came to vocal skill, Sparky won in that category. But when it came down to rhyming off the top of the head and snapping, Shanté easily won that. 

After the success of the battle in North Carolina, it was decided to put the conflict to rest. They met in a studio, they agreed to record two versions of the battle: one, in which Spyder produced where Sparky would win, the other, Marley Marl would produce and Shanté would win.  

Sparky came at her with lyrics that pounded like a sledgehammer. You call me fat but I’m also fly, say it once again and I’ll punch you in the eye… listen my girl you’re much too skinny, if I was you you’re worth a penny…

But Shanté, light on her feet and quick with jabs responded: A penny? A nickel? Hone you fucked yourself with a motherfuckin’ pickle. It was the first time two MC’s went mic-to-mic on a record.  

After the session, the beef was over. They shared a cab ride. Sparky went her way, and Shanté went hers. They still didn’t like each other.                                         

The Aftermath

Sparky had one last hit in the late ‘80’s a single on B-Boy Records called “Throwdown.” Displaying all the fierce grit and tenacity that she was known for, Sparky slayed all with a Boz Scaggs sample of “Low Down.” Not long after that her life went into a tailspin of drug abuse and domestic violence. As Sparky’s star descended, Shanté’s continued to rise with the classics “Have a Nice Day,” “The Big Momma,” “Live On Stage” and “Feelin’ Kinda Horny.”   

Sitting across from me in an Asian Bistro, Sparky, who could be a dead ringer for Billie Holiday, gives her one-time rival, now friend, her props. “I’m doing this interview with you, but I’m biggin’ up her. She’s the greatest. And I mean that. I love Roxanne Shanté, it is what it is. I’m her biggest fan.”

“Her life and my life are very similar. She dealt with people who were in drugs, she went through the abuse, thirteen-years old having a baby, livin’ in a foster home, getting in the music business, getting robbed. I can’t stand here and say she ever did drugs, I’m quite sure she didn’t. But we dealt with similar situations.” 

As Sparky recovered from years of drug abuse, she and Shanté made little overtures toward each other. The once fierce rivals were saying nice things about each other in interviews. And then one night in 2006, Shanté was in Atlanta, Georgia where Sparky resides, missed her plane back to New York. Sparky invited her to spend the night at her house.  

“We slept in my bed together,” Sparky told me. “A bed on the floor with no rails. We watched TV, we laughed, we shared our past, we laughed and cried, that’s when we got close.”  

Three decades later, when Sparky got married, Shanté made good on her word from that night long ago in front of the hotel: she emceed Sparky’s wedding. 

It’s a friendship that only warriors can understand, a respect, somebody gave you their best and you took it, and you gave them your best and they took it. “Thank God [for Nicky Minaj, Lil’ Kim and Trina] they kept the music alive. But the way I see it,” Sparky explains to me, “in order to be the queen, you gotta come through Roxanne Shanté and Sparky D… and they ain’t come this way.”

 

For more info about the lives of Spyder D and Sparky read the book “So, You Wanna Be A Rapper?” by Spyder D and Mark Skillz available on Amazon, iTunes, barnes and nobles