Chuck and Flavor were the only people actually signed to contracts at Def Jam. Everybody else was a hired employee on a wage. Although it wasn’t a great situation, nobody was starving. And once they started gigging things gradually improved. Some years later, Terminator X got his own contract.
For his part Eric sorted a deal that was different from everyone else’s. When he was approached about working on the album he confirmed he was definitely interested but that he didn’t want to work for a pittance. But that didn’t change the fact that there wasn’t much money to go round. ‘I said, “Aiight it’s near Christmas time so I won’t charge that much, but I need to get a hundred dollars a jam,”’ he remembers telling Chuck and Hank. His work on PE’s debut album would amount to $1,200.
Once work on the album was properly underway in the second half of 1986, the group was focused. ‘You’re talking about a process where myself and Hank especially were involved 1,000 per cent in every second of the album,’ Chuck remembers.
Public Enemy’s debut album was called Yo! Bum Rush the Show because it was designed as the first installment of what was only meant to be a two-year programme. The first album’s purpose was to kick in and bum rush the industry’s door. No one ever thought the group’s fortunes would skyrocket in the way they subsequently did. ‘When Public Enemy happened, it was really beyond our wildest dreams,’ says Harry Allen. PE have managed to last more than ten times longer than their initially planned lifespan.
The recording process proceeded fairly quickly. INS studios in Lower Manhattan – which is not too far from where the World Trade Centre once stood – became their home for four to five weeks. Sports-mad Chuck recalls that they were right down the street from the New York Mets when they were winning the ’86 World Series.
For the first couple of weeks Eric, Chuck and Hank got together and laid down the basic backing tracks. Studio expert Eric used about five or six different drum machines. Once the skeletal backing tracks were down Chuck would rap over the beat so Eric could take it back and see how vocals would alter the soundbed, and what additional changes needed to be made. ‘Once Chuck liked something we’d get him on it, and then I could tell where the track should head,’ he says. ‘Now I can put the drum rolls where they’re supposed to go. I can take away stuff, add stuff.’
After that the next few days were devoted to Flavor. He went back and forth with Chuck about how and where he should contribute. Once that was decided he went in and did his thing. Flavor was already prepared for what he had to do with ‘Too Much Posse’, the first in a long line of classic Flavor Flav solo songs. Every PE album contains one or two Flavor songs. It would be easy to compile a respectable Flavor Flav Greatest Hits set.
Bill Stephney is credited as the album’s producer. In 1987, a producer was someone who oversaw a project and took care of its overall direction. These days, that’s the role of an executive producer. Nowadays, a producer is a person who comes up with the beats and the music. Eventually, Bill Stephney wasn’t required in any production capacity. ‘People ask me, “How come you stopped producing on Public Enemy?”’ reveals Bill, ‘and I say, well, “More than anything I thought Chuck and Hank did a fantastic job musically with getting everything together and they can handle it within the studio.”’ There were also practical reasons, extraneous to the group. When Def Jam’s sales started to go through the roof with the success of LL Cool J, The Beasties and Oran ‘Juice’ Jones, Bill had begun ‘essentially running the label for Rick and Russell’.
One of the key things about Yo! Bum Rush the Show that has been rarely touched on was the use of live instruments, which were essential to the album’s overall sound. At the time, Stetsasonic and Run DMC were probably the only other hip-hop groups who didn’t fully rely on samplers. In years to come, when PE incorporated the baNNed into their live shows the usual suspects – the self appointed ‘real hip-hop heads’ who hate anything even slightly leftfield – began complaining about how much their favourite rap group had changed. These critics probably never realised that PE were one of the first groups to use a combination of the ‘old’ (live instruments) and the ‘new’ (samplers). Bill, Eric and Flavor were the main musicians. The trio had been playing together for a minute. In addition to his less serious contributions like ‘Claustrophobia Attack’, Flav also penned some heartfelt love songs. Bill would play bass and guitar, Eric would also play the axe as well as keyboards and Flavor took care of the drums. There was no set pattern that determined whether a live instrument or a sample would be used. They simply went with the flow and did what worked best for each song.
‘It was an incredible combination,’ Bill recalls. ‘We took advantage of the fact that we were part of that generation of folks who also played in bands on Long Island. We’re the last generation, before the DJs took over.’ All those who insisted PE’s work wasn’t real music probably never knew or cared that the ear and skills of a ‘real musician’ were brought to bear on their debut album. The combination of an old-school musicianship and the fact that Hank and Keith made music from the DJ’s perspective is what has made PE so uniquely powerful through the years.
Instead of having the same uncomplicated drumbeat run through a song like far too many of his contemporaries, Eric would add subtle little changes that he imagined a real live drummer would incorporate. The hi-hat rhythm would change as the song progressed or here and there would be an extra kick drum or snare fill. He strove to break up a track a little bit and mix up the groove. He’d had very good practice. ‘Before I did the PE stuff, I’d programme jazz drums, with thirty to forty patterns in a whole jazz song. As a musician I had friends who went to Berkeley. We’re playing Crusaders and Tower of Power. I’m coming from that aspect. The combination of myself along with Hank and Keith and Chuck was a good combination, although Keith was kinda in and out from time to time. I was very technical. Keith and Hank especially brought to it what I would call a “musical ignorance”. All they knew is, “Look, get funky motherfucker”. It was the smartness and the ignorance that made the music really complicated and interesting.’
As time progressed they began to understand each other’s quirks; where the other half was coming from musically. This allowed them to meet in the middle. Keith and Hank generally felt the songs didn’t have to make sense musically, as long as they were banging. But Eric understood that while they could certainly bring the noise and make something new, at a certain point things did have to resolve themselves musically. Or as he puts it, ‘It’s fine if it’s off a little, but somewhere it has to come on.’
Naturally, there was a degree of Spectrum City flavour in the mix. It wasn’t just ‘Public Enemy Number One’ that was a product of WBAU. ‘Timebomb’ came about because Keith knew that Chuck had always jammed hard when he used to drop joints by The Meters when they were playing out. The sample from ‘Just Kissed My Baby’ is so good that ten years later EPMD would use it for their comeback single ‘Never Seen Before’. So despite the fact that, by his own admission, Keith was kinda in and out, his fingerprints were still all over the album. He wasn’t only responsible for putting together the song that won them the deal in the first place.
Once Chuck had laid his practice vocal and the songs had been Flavor-ised, it was time to bring the DJs in. For Bum Rush this largely meant Johnny Juice, but Keith also got busy and Terminator X played his part. Even Chuck got busy on the ones and twos. ‘Chuck would call me and go, “I got these parts”,’ Eric says, ‘and he would come in and do some old fucked-up scratching but what was brilliant about it was it was fucked-up, like really kind of off, but once you repeat that offness it creates another rhythm, which no one in life would’ve ever figured out or thought of.’
Sometimes The Bomb Squad would juxtapose all the