Nevertheless, as Bazerk already knew, Flavor had even more on offer than his ability to tell ‘yo’ mama’ jokes. He had mastered numerous instruments, and his skills as a musician would become very useful to PE. The first instrument the young Flav learned was the organ. His mother bought his older sister an organ and before long little William had learned to play the theme to Batman. Then, in school, he began learning the drums during sixth grade. From there it snowballed. He started to learn how to read music and after he began playing with the school band, MC DJ Flavor picked up every instrument he could lay his hands on and learned them by ear. ‘I just started messing with all the other instruments in the band room and everything. Just by myself in school, cutting class and going down to the band room. That’s how I learned how to play the flute, the French horn, xylophones, tuba. I can play the oboe, all that.’ As someone who had been in bands before he joined PE, he knew what it felt like to perform and was comfortable onstage. In short, he slotted in perfectly. In time, Flavor Flav would become PE’s secret weapon.
By his own admission his childhood in Freeport was something of a troubled one. Flav was also well known locally for shenanigans that had nothing to do with his skills as a musician. Like a lot of black ghetto families, or any families living in neglected areas, his family consisted of a few different types. There were extremes of good and bad. ‘My family was mixed up,’ he says. ‘My moms and them went to church, my pops and them were street. You know how regular family life shit go.’ Flav describes his young self as ‘a real bad kid, real wild, a real handful’. There was the usual petty thuggery: stealing cars, and things of that nature. But this didn’t last. Before he joined PE, William went to college and got himself a chef ’s degree. At one point he was a school bus driver. ‘I ended up growing up and being mild mannered,’ he points out. Spectrum’s good-natured decision to let other young guns knock out some tunes at their beloved headquarters paid off well. By the end of 1982, Flavor had his own show. His Saturday night slot from ten till eleven-thirty led perfectly into the Spectrum show.
In the mid-seventies Hempstead’s Eric Sadler was the first member of Public Enemy to own office space in 510 South Franklin Avenue. He had been in various bands since the early seventies playing either bass, guitar or keyboards. As luck would have it, his dentist Dr Raymond Gant, who lived across the street, was friends with his parents and had talked to his mother about some space that was available in the building where he worked.
Once the rent of $150 per month was agreed Eric moved all of his equipment in and opened a rehearsal studio. This was a few years before he began working with the guys who would become PE. But, as a local youth, he definitely knew who Spectrum City were. ‘I’d see the Spectrum guys around town doing gigs,’ he recalls. ‘A lot of times they’d be doing a gig and my band would be playing so I’d see ’em from time to time. I didn’t really know ’em, but I knew of ’em.’
Around eighteen months after Eric moved in, he received a phone call out of the blue from Hank Shocklee, whose long-suffering parents had decided to rid their house of all of his noisy musical equipment. ‘I don’t even know how Hank got my number,’ he says. ‘He’s like, “You think we can get into the building you’re at?” I said, “I don’t think it’s a problem.”’ Dr Gant didn’t think it was a problem either. So Spectrum took their partnership with EJ the DJ a step further by agreeing to split costs, and moved into the upstairs office.
Chuck’s description makes it clear that PE love 510 South Franklin Avenue in the same way that The Beatles loved Abbey Road and DJ Premier loves HeadQcourterz. (The studio was previously well known in hip-hop circles as D and D Studios. This was before the hip-hop legend renamed it after one of his dead homies.) ‘510 South Franklin was a very key area, it was our headquarters. It was sort of a record studio for DJs and we would make these records, well, we would make tapes to play on the radio station.’ It was an exciting time. ‘I was just completely taken with the creativity of these people,’ says Harry Allen, who after meeting Chuck at Adelphi began rolling with the extended crew. He had already given himself the title of Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin. ‘A whole conglomeration of individuals were getting together around hip-hop. You’d have people like Run DMC, who were big fans of the Super Spectrum Show, come though. You’d have people like Spider D and DJ Divine come through.’
When it came to their radio show, Chuck’s rapping (which was still only over the hot instrumentals of the day) was still more of a necessity than anything else – there simply weren’t that many rap records – but Spectrum were on their way to becoming a fully-fledged group producing records. Chuck certainly had their listeners thinking this was the case. The promo tapes he would make for the radio, similarly to Son of Bazerk’s songs, were perceived as professional records by WBAU’s listeners. It wouldn’t be long before Spectrum made the jump to actually making records.
Musician and record producer Charles Casseus, who had shared half of Eric’s rent at 510 before Spectrum rented space there, was in 1984 chiefly responsible for the first record that would involve future members of PE. As well as Eric and Charles, ‘Breakin’ In Space’ (a record that could only have appeared during the over stylised and slightly pretentious early years of the eighties) by Key-Matic featured some of Charles’s friends like Najee, a session musician from Queens and a girl named Sharon. Keith Shocklee, credited as The Wizard K-Jee, was the DJ. ‘Breakin’ In Space’ was a hit in the New York area, and gave those involved a chance to travel a little and do some promotional gigs. One of their gigs, a promo for Kiss FM, featured a young Madonna on the bill. Charles also recorded a single with Butch Cassidy, who used to roll with Spectrum and who Chuck describes as ‘my radio partner’. Butch filled the hype-man role Flavor would later occupy. Interestingly, he was using the same studio that PE would later use for Apocalypse ’91: The Enemy Strikes Black.
The third and most crucial record Spectrum were involved in that year was ‘Lies/Check Out the Radio’ which dropped on Vanguard Records. This happened through a connection of Hank’s who, at the time, was holding down a day job as the manager of a record shop. Tim Olphie, the regional manager for this particular chain of record shops, had links with a dance DJ named Pinky Velasquez and the entrepreneur who funded BT Express’s records in the seventies. Tim was their guide to this strange new world of recording rap. Hank brought the rest of Spectrum with him, they booked some studio time in Manhattan and recorded ‘Lies’, a song made in the Run DMC mode.
It’s very important to note that they wanted to promote themselves as radio DJs rather than as a recording group. This is why when they found themselves with some extra studio time they decided to record a cut called ‘Check Out the Radio’. Later on, when that song was played on the radio, it became a firm favourite for The Beastie Boys and Run DMC.
Unlike ‘Lies’, on ‘Check Out the Radio’ Chuck ‘was saying things on there that were kinda fly’. He recalls, ‘It was totally the antithesis of “Lies”,’ cos “Lies” was a record that we probably knew we wouldn’t play ourselves. It wasn’t even saying “check out the radio”, it was “check us out on the radio”. It was all about WBAU.’ These songs, and other songs they made around this time like ‘It’s Working’, represented a massive step forward.
‘Check Out the Radio’ represented the first time Eric ‘Vietnam’ Sadler officially recorded with the crew who would become The Bomb Squad. Against the advice of his musician friends who felt that ‘rap is garbage, rap is not real music’, Eric had accepted Chuck’s invitation to ‘help ’em out with the music and mess around’. He had a slightly more modern attitude to hip-hop than most musicians: ‘I didn’t care at all. I was like, “Hey y’all upstairs, I’m downstairs. Y’all don’t know how to work this stuff. I’ll