‘Hank came back screaming like, “Yo, I found this kid, he can do flyers, he can rap, I’m gonna check him out, get him to come to a party”,’ says Keith. Keith Shocklee was one of the first to benefit from Chuck D’s knack for coming up with rap monikers. ‘When Chuck came on to the scene I picked up the name KG, Chuck threw in the wizard and so it was like The Wizard K-Jee and from there it just took off. I was DJing at a party right around the corner from his house and not too far from where his friend passed away.’
Sadly, the house party took place on the same day as the funeral of one of Carlton’s friends. But he did his best to spit a couple of rhymes. Today’s hip-hop kids would struggle to recognise it as rapping. It was most definitely not the type of rhymes you would hear nowadays. What Chuck was doing at the time was more on the MC tip. Instead of spitting sixteen (or more) consecutive bars, he would come up with a series of two-and four-bar phrases. During the next week they hooked up and Chuck did his first gig way out in Riverhead, all the way at the end of Long Island, near the Hamptons. By all accounts it was a great experience, and the first seeds of PE were sown.
While all of this was going down hip-hop was still steadily developing and forging its identity. Chuck describes the summer of ’79 as ‘just a total hip-hop summer. I never ever recall anything being so hip-hop crazy like the summer of ’79.’ This was despite the lack of rap records in existence. Everyone just knew that there was something in the air. That something genuinely different was about to take place. Popular DJs at the time included Play Hard Crew, DJ Pleasure, Groovy Loo, Mechanic and Tommy T. Another important milestone occurred when famed DJ Eddie Cheeba premiered ‘Good Times’ by Chic. A few months later this song would form the bedrock of the first globally popular rap record, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by The Sugar Hill Gang. This introduced hip-hop to the world, while simultaneously making many of its originators in The Bronx sick to their stomachs.
‘Good Times’ broke new ground for the band that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards put together. They were mostly known for uptempo records like ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsa, Yowsa, Yowsa)’ and ‘Le Freak’, which at the time was their biggest hit to date. ‘Good Times’ would surpass both. Chic slowed down the tempo and made it funky. This helped it become an anthem with the emerging hip-hop community, and the hit of the summer. All the while, Spectrum City continued to do their thing, but with the added extra of Chuckie D (as he was originally known) on the mic to hype the crowd.
The lack of a large selection of rap records meant that they were still playing a healthy amount of funk and r’n’b, but hip-hop was changing the way a party got started. ‘Rap music was so new you couldn’t play it all night long. You know some of these girls like to hear the singing records. They want to hear Midnight Star. They want to hear, “I’m curious about your loving girl”,’ Keith explains. ‘But at the same time they also want to hear the DJ scratch.’ Spectrum City also made sure they never played a record twice in one night.
Their party-starting business continued in this vein until 1982 when Chuck met Bill Stephney. This was the other crucial meeting that led to the eventual formation of PE. Stephney was the programme director at Adelphi’s college radio station WBAU and he had seen Spectrum doing their thing around Long Island. ‘They DJed all the parties where hundreds if not thousands of kids would show up,’ he says. ‘And they gained a great reputation like, “This is the cool gig to go to”.’ Chuck D had not only been using his graphic design skills for Spectrum’s flyers. ‘We were one of the rare DJ groups that all had jackets with logos on them,’ he says. ‘Bill had seen us running around the neighbourhood as Spectrum. He had noticed this and was like, “Oh, Spectrum, wow”. This was marketing before there was such a term.’ Bill remembers it well. ‘At that point there were 11,000 students enrolled at Adelphi University, and of those 11,000, 10,000 of them were white. So you’re gonna notice anybody who’s African American anyway. But when I saw this guy walking around the campus with a Spectrum City jacket on. Woah! Yo, who is that? He’s down with that crew?’ One day Bill happened to go over to this guy and introduce himself. ‘It turned out to be this guy named Carlton Ridenhour who was down with Spectrum and was familiar with the radio station and the radio show that I was doing and wanted to bring his crew up there. I said, “That’s fantastic, I’m a huge fan of Spectrum.”’
The Spectrum parties were still doing very good business, probably better than ever. By this time the guests included nascent versions of now classic groups like the Fat Boys and Kool Moe Dee and the Treacherous Three. ‘We’d put ’em on the radio, everybody would hear them on the radio and then we’d go right downstairs to the party and party,’ enthuses Keith. ‘It was crazy.’ Things were good, they were having fun, making a little bit of money and they weren’t, as Keith puts it, ‘in the streets going nuts like our friends that used to hang out with us used to do’. Significantly, while hip-hop had not yet become the big business it is today, they still had their eyes on the prize. Keith recalls how: ‘In the back of our minds we were hoping we could turn it into a big business.’
There were still a couple of legendary members who were yet to join the fold, but some of the key individuals who would eventually be known as PE were forging alliances.
After meeting Bill Stephney things changed for Chuck, Hank and the rest of Spectrum. If who you know can get you to the next level in life, then making friends with the programme director at the local college radio station was not a bad move for a DJ collective such as Spectrum. Other Adelphi alumni include Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin Harry Allen, and Andre Brown, who would become better known as Yo! MTV Raps resident DJ Dr Dre.
During the day WBAU reflected its largely white student population with a largely white line-up of presenters who were constantly competing among each other for laughs. During the day you were likely to hear acts like The Police, Cyndi Lauper, The Alan Parsons Project, Howard Jones and Duran Duran. But at ten o’clock on a Monday night the extremely varied playlist of the Mr Bill Show allowed the students to hear a cross-section of the best new music around. And for the last hour of the Mr Bill Show the Spectrum City crew really let the students know what time it was.
After being impressed by their matching jackets, and more importantly, their skills as a mobile party unit, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before Bill found a slot for Hank and Chuck on the radio. As well as hosting the station’s anchor show, Bill was in charge of WBAU’s weekend schedule. Importantly for the future development of Public Enemy, this show reflected the eclectic nature of the early eighties New York club scene. Songs like ‘Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel’ were a sure bet, but alongside Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players, you could also hear favourites like ‘Buffalo Gals’ by Malcolm McLaren and the World Famous Supreme Team, plus groups like The Clash and even Bananarama. ‘It was very cutting edge, even though it was college radio,’ Bill recalls. ‘We were playing rap literally before anyone was playing rap, but we were also playing all this other stuff where no one knows where it’s coming from. I think people appreciated the fact that even though we were playing a lot of rap before everybody else, in essence it was a new music show.’
Bill’s show had a unique vibe which was rare within black entertainment. ‘I wound up finding this twelve-inch called “Cookie Puss” by this group The Beastie Boys and when