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Flash is Fast, Flash is Cool [1981]
http://www.djhistory.com/features/flash-fast-flash-cool-1981
unbedingt den Bericht anhören, der dem Beitrag zugefügt wurde, absolut lohnenswert, wie die gesamte Page.
Have fun to read and hear
Hyline
----------------
----------------
THE SOUTH BRONX lies just across a thin stretch of the Harlem River from Manhattan, but it could be worlds away. Year by year Manhattan becomes more and more an island of privilege, the Bronx a wasteland. Cypress Avenue, the South Bronx, does not conform to one’s image of the typical urban ghetto. It’s not crowded and chocked, it’s never been industrialised. The street doesn’t give you that boxed-in feeling. There is space and sun and air. But the evidence of advanced decay is everywhere. The buildings at the end of the block are abandoned, their windows smashed or boarded up. Garbage and rubble is piled on the sidewalk. The vacant lots that dot the landscape are also strewn with rubble. Grandmaster Flash lives on this block.
The first thing you notice going into his building is that there’s no lock on the front door. To a Manhattanite this is extraordinary. The hallway has some graffiti on the walls, the old lift has seen better days. Enter Flash’s apartment, into a different world, The living room floor is stacked with electronic equipment. The walls are lined with bright memorabilia of Flash’s career – a gold record for the single ‘Freedom’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, another one for labelmates the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘8th Wonder’ certificate of Honorary Citizenship from the City of New Orleans, an autographed pic of Flash hanging out with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
Flash comes out smiling. The king of the Bronx has a soft, slightly raspy voice. He apologizes for his crew the Furious Five, not being present. “Don’t think I could get them all here this early,” he says. It’s 4pm. Do they have day jobs? “No, but you know, sometimes we hang out, party a little bit, have a little street fun, and it’s hard to get up these hours.
We head down to the street for photos. Across the road is a schoolyard, and we stop in front of a graffiti-covered handball wall. Some boys interrupt a lively game of basketball to yell and wave at us. It’s clear he is a local hero on his block. Only one young girl seems unimpressed. “Come on, play Double Dutch!” she yells to her friends who’ve left off jumping rope to stare at us.
“Flash is fast, Flash is cool,” you’ve probably heard it said, on Blondie’s ‘Rapture’.
“Grandmaster cuts faster...” you may also have heard said, and it’s true.
“Flash is the King of the quick mix.”
Flash’s crew of MCs, the Furious Five, are also superbad, and their singles, especially ‘Supperrappin” and ‘Freedom’, are among the best in the rap field. But Flash’s quick mix technique at the turntables is something extraordinary, something that nobody else has. It’s made Flash and the Five the undisputed champions of the Bronx.
And it’s been remarkably captured: on ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’ (Sugarhill 12”). You should know about this record, It’s been called IMPOSSIBLE and IMPORTANT in the Singles column. It’s been voted right up there in this paper’s half-year poll. It doesn’t work like any ordinary dance record. It’s a record to slip into a party tape and amaze thye dancers, confound all expectations. It’s weird, it’s a surprise, with its stops and starts, its stringing together sections of different dance hits, its spin backs an d crazy rumblings, all of which never miss a beat.
“I DID THAT live in the studio,” Flash says of The Adventures’ “But to get it locked took a day or two. Maybe I’d set the cue down too soon and have to stop and go back all over. Or I might cue in too late. Too late, too soon. If you listen to it, even down to the spaces where there’s no music, where it pauses and then comes in, the timing is absolutely perfect.”
The only thing more incredible than hearing ‘The Adventures’ on a dance floor is seeing Flash in the flesh manipulating three turntables at once while the Furious Five do their vocal trade-offs and smooth jive patter,.But the change represented by Flash’s quick-mix style met with resistance from disco DJs and dancers when Flash first introduced it.
“It took long enough for people to get into it. People would say ‘What’s this guy doing?’ It was heavily criticised. I’d ask DJs in clubs if I could play for a few minutes and they’d say, ‘Naw, you might mess up the turntables, you’ll scratch the records.’
“With this type of DJ’ing it does put more wear on the records, because I’m skating back and forth on the record. But I feel that whatever it takes to get the crowd to rock, and come back to rock, and keep coming back to rock, is something that you must do. Um hmm.
“There are those who are not into the quick mix, who are just into the blending, who are used to hearing the music constantly flowing. They hear a space and they say, ‘Shit, what happened to the music?’ But, when I’m spacing it, when I pull the keys down, you can believe that by the time they put their right foot down I’m on it, I’m on the one.”
Along with acceptance, perfecting the technique didn’t come easy. “I started playing with the quick mix back in ’75. The problem was, I was relatively fast by picking the arms up and mixing one certain part of a record over and over. It was fast but it wasn’t fast enough. So I developed a technique, it took me three years to perfect it, called the spin back, taking a record and making it repeat as fast as you want, without having to pick the arm up, For a long time it wouldn’t track.
“It was a thing of going out and finding the correct turntable, the right kind of needle, the right tracking force on the needle, the right mixer, the right cueing system. There were certain things you had to do to the record and the arm and the cue at the same time, and I finally mastered it.
"But that was three years in the making, three years of scratching up records, this and that, breaking stuff, staying up crazy hours of the night, sleeping and dreaming about it and then getting up in the middle of the sleep, turning everything back on and everybody knocking on the door complaining. But I had to get that thing perfected. The MCs were going down, I had a bad crew of MCs, but I had to pull my end too. So then with what they were doing and with what I was doing, wherever we went we would constantly cram, jam, pack the place.”
GRANDMASTER FLASH was born Joseph Saddler on Barbados and moved to the Bronx when he was “very young”. His father worked for the Lonq Island Railroad but had a ‘hobby of collecting records.
“He has a collection that’s out of this world,” Flash says “I still can’t touch it. He has some old Ventures 78’s, closets high full of those things, He was into building amplifiers too, messing around with TVs. That’s how I caught on. I used to sneak into the closet, grab some of the records and play ’em. I used to get beat for it, but then I’d turn around and do it again. And I used to take little junk amplifiers, tear them apart and make them work.
“So when I got of age my mother sent me to vocational school, a technical school to learn electronics. I was supposed to be a TV repairman. That was really my thing, repairing TVs, washing machines. Then for some reason, it changed over I got into DJ’ing, gave a few parties, and they got pretty crowded.”
For an innovator who deserves to boast, Flash is a modest fellow. The two things about which he does like to brag are how good the Furious Five are, and how big the crowds they attract are. He makes point of telling me about a show they played in Connecticut where they needed a police escort to get from the venue to their car. Then, when Easy Mike, Flash’s assistant at the turntables, breezes into the flat, Flash shouts at him, “Hey Mike, tell him about Connecticut.”
“Awesome, awesome,” Easy Mike says, shaking his head. “We had to run out of there.” With Flash operating live with three turntables these days, Easy Mike’s job is quite important. He gets the records and turntables ready. “When we started.” he says, “we didn’t think it would turn into a thing of making records. It was just parties in the street. A lot of people don’t understand that rapping didn’t come from bands, it came from discos.”
“Not even discos,” Flash interjects. “From B Boying.”
“So that’s why we’d rather perform with our turntables. The crowd might not understand it, but we’re giving them the image of where it came from’
FLASH’S TURNTABLE magic is pure South Bronx roots, but the showbiz flash of the Furious Five, with their sharp suits, choreographed dance steps and routines, are in the same tradition as black vaudeville and the glory days of the Motown Review, when The Temptations, The Miracles and The Supremes would bundle onto a bus and tour together.
Flash and the Five have played some storming gigs at usually-white rock clubs like the Peppermint Lounge and the Ritz. But their two night stint opening for The Clash in New York was a disaster with the hard rock fans throwing things at them and booing them off the stage.
“Boy!” Flash says about those nights. We really weren’t prepared for the other side. We rock disco crowds and B Boy crowds but we were never prepared for the punk rock crowds. The Clash came over here and I guess we must be pretty well-known in England as far as our name is concerned, so that when they came to America they requested Flash.
“We never knew it would be like that We came out maybe a little too flamboyant, and it didn’t go too well. Then the second night we went down there with our regular street clothes, and it went down a little smoother.’
How did you feel about getting booed off! Were you pissed off?
“No. Maybe we were a little egotistical .We were sure we could handle any crowd. Then we went out there and oh my God!”
Does the racial aspect bother you, the fact that this was a crowd of white kid, being presented with a black music and rejecting it?
‘No, it’s like this. I’m not prejudiced.
But the kids in the audience were.
‘I forgive them for that, ’cause they don’t understand it. It’s like teaching a baby to talk. It takes a while to learn. Like with this mixing thing, a lot of people don’t know about it. I put out ‘The Adventures’ and a lot of people bought it but a lot of people didn’t buy it ’cause they don’t understand it.
But Flash sees his role as entertainer, not as a crusader for black street culture. He developed the quick mix to entertain, to give the crowd something extra. And he says he’d be happy to bend with the wind.
“The next time we get called by one of these groups that deal with this type of music we’re gonna be prepared. This way I’d go get some punk rock records, learn how to mix them, do my homework on what they enjoy and try my best to be flexible. Rather than just go on playing disco, which they can’t relate to, go out with some punk rockish records for that one particular day. They might buy our records because they enjoy our show, so that would be to our advantage.”
I ask Flush if he’s heard any of the English rap-inspired music, like Funkapolitan.
“No, but I’d like to. And they say rap’s gonna die. Out of this world, No way. It’s to the point now where even professional singers, they use it in their records to get hot. like Lakeside, Teena Marie, Stacy Lattislaw, quite a few groups. So rapping’s not going to disappear.
“I say to myself, God, this is something we created and now it’s being taken over by people that’s been in the business a long time.”
BACK OUT in the afternoon sun, we walk to another school yard for some more photos. Flash asks the kids playing handball if he can “borrow” their court for a minute, and the court is instantly vacated. To the kids of the Bronx Flash is both genuinely one of their own and genuinely a star, bringing their sounds to the world. I think about this, and hope he never plays that punk rock set.
Of course, like all stars, he’s getting a bit conscious about his image. When Joe suggests a photo in front of a particularly wasted-looking shell of a building, Flash screws up his face in distaste at the idea.
But then he smiles, laughs, and invites us back to go hang out with him at Disco Fever any time we want. And he and Easy Mike go off to rehearse some new bits of quick mix tricks.
© Richard Grabel
Originally published in the NME, SEP 26, 1981
Quelle: http://www.djhistory.com/features/flash-fast-flash-cool-1981
http://www.djhistory.com/features/flash-fast-flash-cool-1981
unbedingt den Bericht anhören, der dem Beitrag zugefügt wurde, absolut lohnenswert, wie die gesamte Page.
Have fun to read and hear
Hyline
----------------
----------------
THE SOUTH BRONX lies just across a thin stretch of the Harlem River from Manhattan, but it could be worlds away. Year by year Manhattan becomes more and more an island of privilege, the Bronx a wasteland. Cypress Avenue, the South Bronx, does not conform to one’s image of the typical urban ghetto. It’s not crowded and chocked, it’s never been industrialised. The street doesn’t give you that boxed-in feeling. There is space and sun and air. But the evidence of advanced decay is everywhere. The buildings at the end of the block are abandoned, their windows smashed or boarded up. Garbage and rubble is piled on the sidewalk. The vacant lots that dot the landscape are also strewn with rubble. Grandmaster Flash lives on this block.
The first thing you notice going into his building is that there’s no lock on the front door. To a Manhattanite this is extraordinary. The hallway has some graffiti on the walls, the old lift has seen better days. Enter Flash’s apartment, into a different world, The living room floor is stacked with electronic equipment. The walls are lined with bright memorabilia of Flash’s career – a gold record for the single ‘Freedom’ by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, another one for labelmates the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘8th Wonder’ certificate of Honorary Citizenship from the City of New Orleans, an autographed pic of Flash hanging out with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein.
Flash comes out smiling. The king of the Bronx has a soft, slightly raspy voice. He apologizes for his crew the Furious Five, not being present. “Don’t think I could get them all here this early,” he says. It’s 4pm. Do they have day jobs? “No, but you know, sometimes we hang out, party a little bit, have a little street fun, and it’s hard to get up these hours.
We head down to the street for photos. Across the road is a schoolyard, and we stop in front of a graffiti-covered handball wall. Some boys interrupt a lively game of basketball to yell and wave at us. It’s clear he is a local hero on his block. Only one young girl seems unimpressed. “Come on, play Double Dutch!” she yells to her friends who’ve left off jumping rope to stare at us.
“Flash is fast, Flash is cool,” you’ve probably heard it said, on Blondie’s ‘Rapture’.
“Grandmaster cuts faster...” you may also have heard said, and it’s true.
“Flash is the King of the quick mix.”
Flash’s crew of MCs, the Furious Five, are also superbad, and their singles, especially ‘Supperrappin” and ‘Freedom’, are among the best in the rap field. But Flash’s quick mix technique at the turntables is something extraordinary, something that nobody else has. It’s made Flash and the Five the undisputed champions of the Bronx.
And it’s been remarkably captured: on ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel’ (Sugarhill 12”). You should know about this record, It’s been called IMPOSSIBLE and IMPORTANT in the Singles column. It’s been voted right up there in this paper’s half-year poll. It doesn’t work like any ordinary dance record. It’s a record to slip into a party tape and amaze thye dancers, confound all expectations. It’s weird, it’s a surprise, with its stops and starts, its stringing together sections of different dance hits, its spin backs an d crazy rumblings, all of which never miss a beat.
“I DID THAT live in the studio,” Flash says of The Adventures’ “But to get it locked took a day or two. Maybe I’d set the cue down too soon and have to stop and go back all over. Or I might cue in too late. Too late, too soon. If you listen to it, even down to the spaces where there’s no music, where it pauses and then comes in, the timing is absolutely perfect.”
The only thing more incredible than hearing ‘The Adventures’ on a dance floor is seeing Flash in the flesh manipulating three turntables at once while the Furious Five do their vocal trade-offs and smooth jive patter,.But the change represented by Flash’s quick-mix style met with resistance from disco DJs and dancers when Flash first introduced it.
“It took long enough for people to get into it. People would say ‘What’s this guy doing?’ It was heavily criticised. I’d ask DJs in clubs if I could play for a few minutes and they’d say, ‘Naw, you might mess up the turntables, you’ll scratch the records.’
“With this type of DJ’ing it does put more wear on the records, because I’m skating back and forth on the record. But I feel that whatever it takes to get the crowd to rock, and come back to rock, and keep coming back to rock, is something that you must do. Um hmm.
“There are those who are not into the quick mix, who are just into the blending, who are used to hearing the music constantly flowing. They hear a space and they say, ‘Shit, what happened to the music?’ But, when I’m spacing it, when I pull the keys down, you can believe that by the time they put their right foot down I’m on it, I’m on the one.”
Along with acceptance, perfecting the technique didn’t come easy. “I started playing with the quick mix back in ’75. The problem was, I was relatively fast by picking the arms up and mixing one certain part of a record over and over. It was fast but it wasn’t fast enough. So I developed a technique, it took me three years to perfect it, called the spin back, taking a record and making it repeat as fast as you want, without having to pick the arm up, For a long time it wouldn’t track.
“It was a thing of going out and finding the correct turntable, the right kind of needle, the right tracking force on the needle, the right mixer, the right cueing system. There were certain things you had to do to the record and the arm and the cue at the same time, and I finally mastered it.
"But that was three years in the making, three years of scratching up records, this and that, breaking stuff, staying up crazy hours of the night, sleeping and dreaming about it and then getting up in the middle of the sleep, turning everything back on and everybody knocking on the door complaining. But I had to get that thing perfected. The MCs were going down, I had a bad crew of MCs, but I had to pull my end too. So then with what they were doing and with what I was doing, wherever we went we would constantly cram, jam, pack the place.”
GRANDMASTER FLASH was born Joseph Saddler on Barbados and moved to the Bronx when he was “very young”. His father worked for the Lonq Island Railroad but had a ‘hobby of collecting records.
“He has a collection that’s out of this world,” Flash says “I still can’t touch it. He has some old Ventures 78’s, closets high full of those things, He was into building amplifiers too, messing around with TVs. That’s how I caught on. I used to sneak into the closet, grab some of the records and play ’em. I used to get beat for it, but then I’d turn around and do it again. And I used to take little junk amplifiers, tear them apart and make them work.
“So when I got of age my mother sent me to vocational school, a technical school to learn electronics. I was supposed to be a TV repairman. That was really my thing, repairing TVs, washing machines. Then for some reason, it changed over I got into DJ’ing, gave a few parties, and they got pretty crowded.”
For an innovator who deserves to boast, Flash is a modest fellow. The two things about which he does like to brag are how good the Furious Five are, and how big the crowds they attract are. He makes point of telling me about a show they played in Connecticut where they needed a police escort to get from the venue to their car. Then, when Easy Mike, Flash’s assistant at the turntables, breezes into the flat, Flash shouts at him, “Hey Mike, tell him about Connecticut.”
“Awesome, awesome,” Easy Mike says, shaking his head. “We had to run out of there.” With Flash operating live with three turntables these days, Easy Mike’s job is quite important. He gets the records and turntables ready. “When we started.” he says, “we didn’t think it would turn into a thing of making records. It was just parties in the street. A lot of people don’t understand that rapping didn’t come from bands, it came from discos.”
“Not even discos,” Flash interjects. “From B Boying.”
“So that’s why we’d rather perform with our turntables. The crowd might not understand it, but we’re giving them the image of where it came from’
FLASH’S TURNTABLE magic is pure South Bronx roots, but the showbiz flash of the Furious Five, with their sharp suits, choreographed dance steps and routines, are in the same tradition as black vaudeville and the glory days of the Motown Review, when The Temptations, The Miracles and The Supremes would bundle onto a bus and tour together.
Flash and the Five have played some storming gigs at usually-white rock clubs like the Peppermint Lounge and the Ritz. But their two night stint opening for The Clash in New York was a disaster with the hard rock fans throwing things at them and booing them off the stage.
“Boy!” Flash says about those nights. We really weren’t prepared for the other side. We rock disco crowds and B Boy crowds but we were never prepared for the punk rock crowds. The Clash came over here and I guess we must be pretty well-known in England as far as our name is concerned, so that when they came to America they requested Flash.
“We never knew it would be like that We came out maybe a little too flamboyant, and it didn’t go too well. Then the second night we went down there with our regular street clothes, and it went down a little smoother.’
How did you feel about getting booed off! Were you pissed off?
“No. Maybe we were a little egotistical .We were sure we could handle any crowd. Then we went out there and oh my God!”
Does the racial aspect bother you, the fact that this was a crowd of white kid, being presented with a black music and rejecting it?
‘No, it’s like this. I’m not prejudiced.
But the kids in the audience were.
‘I forgive them for that, ’cause they don’t understand it. It’s like teaching a baby to talk. It takes a while to learn. Like with this mixing thing, a lot of people don’t know about it. I put out ‘The Adventures’ and a lot of people bought it but a lot of people didn’t buy it ’cause they don’t understand it.
But Flash sees his role as entertainer, not as a crusader for black street culture. He developed the quick mix to entertain, to give the crowd something extra. And he says he’d be happy to bend with the wind.
“The next time we get called by one of these groups that deal with this type of music we’re gonna be prepared. This way I’d go get some punk rock records, learn how to mix them, do my homework on what they enjoy and try my best to be flexible. Rather than just go on playing disco, which they can’t relate to, go out with some punk rockish records for that one particular day. They might buy our records because they enjoy our show, so that would be to our advantage.”
I ask Flush if he’s heard any of the English rap-inspired music, like Funkapolitan.
“No, but I’d like to. And they say rap’s gonna die. Out of this world, No way. It’s to the point now where even professional singers, they use it in their records to get hot. like Lakeside, Teena Marie, Stacy Lattislaw, quite a few groups. So rapping’s not going to disappear.
“I say to myself, God, this is something we created and now it’s being taken over by people that’s been in the business a long time.”
BACK OUT in the afternoon sun, we walk to another school yard for some more photos. Flash asks the kids playing handball if he can “borrow” their court for a minute, and the court is instantly vacated. To the kids of the Bronx Flash is both genuinely one of their own and genuinely a star, bringing their sounds to the world. I think about this, and hope he never plays that punk rock set.
Of course, like all stars, he’s getting a bit conscious about his image. When Joe suggests a photo in front of a particularly wasted-looking shell of a building, Flash screws up his face in distaste at the idea.
But then he smiles, laughs, and invites us back to go hang out with him at Disco Fever any time we want. And he and Easy Mike go off to rehearse some new bits of quick mix tricks.
© Richard Grabel
Originally published in the NME, SEP 26, 1981
Quelle: http://www.djhistory.com/features/flash-fast-flash-cool-1981
