KOOL HERC BEFORE HIP HOP'S BIG BANG

Today the pioneering DJ was elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

In June 1978 I was a twenty years old attending New York’s St. John’s University and working as an intern at the Harlem based black weekly the Amsterdam News. I also selling free lance articles to Billboard magazine thanks to my mentor Robert ‘Rocky’ Ford. After seeing a flyer at Times Square’s Downstairs Records for a party in the Bronx, I took the D train with Rocky from midtown to uptown, getting off at the 161 Street station next to the old Yankee Stadium and then walking up the Grand Concouse towards William Howard Taft High School on east 172nd Street.

In the schoolyard where small clusters of young people, waiting by the metal fences or standing around smoking cigarettes and sipping beer. They were black and Puerto Rican kids in Pro-Keds, Pumas, tank tops, bell bottoms and dungaree jackets. Despite the bad rep the Bronx had at the time, the crowd was chill. A van pulled up, depositing Herc aka Clive Campbell and his team of helpers on the sidewalk. The opened portable tables within the yard, rolled out large speakers and used industrial wire to connect turntables to the base of street lights. I had no way of knowing that the piece I would publish in the Amsterdam News’s July 1, 1978 issue was the first profile of Kool Herc, the description of legendary hip hop partys in public parks or would be historically significant.

Today Kool Herc was elected into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in its musical influence catagory and there’s no doubt that the musical choices he made in the ‘70s still impact musical culture to this day. I’ve never been a huge fan of the Rock Hall, though I am a voter, but in hip hop’s 50th anniversary year there’s no question that Herc’s inclusion made sense.

Below is the piece I wrote about Herc, which is full of a lot of period detail as well as my innocence as a scribe. Still very grateful to the late Rocky Ford for showing me the ropes of music journalism and encouraging my curiousity about culture. Rocky would be so taken with this emerging scene he could go on to co-produce Kurtis Blow’s breakthrough rap records “Christmas Rappin’” and “The Breaks.”