In the late ‘70s the tailored suits and Italian sports cars of Nicky Barnes and his peers in the Council got the press, in New York’s housing projects and education system a younger, less organized, more chaotic gang life thrived. Whether they were Black Spades, the Tomahawks, Savage Skulls or the Seven Crowns, these street collectives protected their turf, committed extortion, and terrorized the unaffiliated. Fresh cut sleeves on inside out jean jackets decorated with gang insignia marked you as a gang member. Many had associations with the larger drug combines but these gangs were really built on a loose sense of community that bound young people who were living in New York’s many abandoned out post. These gangs, which included young Mike Tyson, Russell Simmons and Afrikka Bambaataa, play a central role in the mythology of early hip-hop.
Grand Master Flash 2023
The accepted narrative is that when hip-hop rose out of the South Bronx in the ‘70s it killed off the city’s street gang culture. Well there are several things wrong with that sentence. First of all, hip-hop is not a product of the South Bronx, but the entire borough. Of the three key DJs who nurtured the culture (you could also include DJ Breakout who was their peer) each was in a different area of New York’s only land locked borough. Bambaataa and his Zulu Nation were located in the east Bronx with the Bronx River Projects home base. Kool Herc, whose Herculoid speakers intimidated rival DJs, hosted the first hip-hop parties in a community center at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, which is on the west side of the Bronx. Only Grandmaster Flash, who played his first indoor gigs at the Black Door at 1375 Prospect Avenue, where he built his legend, is in what could geographically be called the South Bronx. DJ Breakout, a major party giver and hip-hop influence, was way up on Gun Hill Road in the north Bronx. So “South Bronx” as the birthplace of hip-hop is a last short hand for a more complex creation tale.
As for “killing” the gangs I suggest we substitute “transitioned” the street gangs. Violence in New York didn’t drop in the mid to late ‘70s even as the city’s notorious street gangs atrophied. Murder, assault, rape, armed robbery all went up even as many ex-gang members moved onto spinning, both records and their bodies, and rapping. The social conditions that had created gang culture hadn’t gotten any better. In fact, they’d gotten worse along with the city’s economic outlook. Members of the Savage Skulls and Tomahawks may have joined Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, or the Nation of Islam spin off the Five Percent Nation, but the streets didn’t much safer.
From the earliest “hip-hop” parties I attended in the ‘70s well into the ‘90s, I never went to a show where there wasn’t a fight, a real beat down of one guy by multiple dudes or a shooting. Didn’t matter if it was at the Armory in Harlem, the Diplomat Hotel in Times Square or later at arena shows at Madison Square Garden or the Nassau Coliseum. That didn’t mean that violence didn’t happen at more mainstream shows (there were robberies after a Jacksons’ show at the Garden that were reported by the tabloid press in the late ‘70s.) But, because hip-hop was happening at teen-oriented venues in post-street gang NYC, the gap distance between stick up kid and paying customer was non-existent.
A significant part of that era’s wildness was impacted by a new drug that became the next hot ghetto trend, one that replaced heroin for a new generation of consumers and that would employ a new wave of hustlers. Angel dust aka PCP aka phencyclidine hit the streets in the early ‘70s. The Star Trek phrase, “Beam me up Scotty,” became associated with smoking dust because it became associated with all manner of mind-altering feelings (hallucinations, euphoria, agitation, suicidal impulses, enhanced ego, deflated ego.) Local news shows regularly featured footage of individuals battling scores of cops in a dust fueled frenzy. Shots of Thorazine administered by local psychiatric hospitals brought people down but often only after series brain damage. Despite all the dangers involved angel dust became the drug of choice for hip-hop’s early adaptors.
Melle Mel, OG rhyme animal as a member of the Furious Five and solo act, remembers his first Kool Herc party at the Webster Avenue in the mid ‘70s. “I was fourteen or fifteen years old,” he told Jim Fricke. “There was this slow-motion thing. People were dusted, smoking angel dust. The acrid smell was in the air. The smoke was visible. Floating on this one level. Flashing in the red strobe light. It was illin’. A hostile atmosphere. People getting high in the bathroom.”
Russell Simmons, future pioneering rap mogul, was a college freshman in 1975 at City College of New York when he sampled his first bag of Red Devil, a popular brand of dust. “It wasn’t a cool rush like cocaine or trippy like acid, but it did something to your head that was unique to each person,” Simmons recalled. “Personally, I loved getting ‘dusty.’ It made me happy… Dust was everywhere uptown and there were competing brands… While attending City College I maintained my angel dust ritual but, instead of going home to Queens, I’d hang out in the student lounge at City College until eleven or twelve at night and then roll over to Charles’ Gallery on 125th Street, a club in the late ‘70s that was one of the first to cater to young people and the emerging new music scene.” It would be at that club that Simmons would see Eddie Cheeba, his first rapping DJ, and be introduced to the culture that would define his career.
The journey of Grandmaster Flash from park legend to nightclub attraction was tied up with the nexus of angel dust, music and gang life. One day an enterprising young man named Ray Chandler saw Flash spinning in the schoolyard of P.S. 163 near Boston Road Avenue. “At that point I had a little club that I was putting together down the block and I hadn’t really opened it up yet,” said Chandler in 2002. “It was still fixing it up. It was going to be a social club for adults.” Back in the New York of the ‘70s a “social club” was a euphemism for private rooms where people could gamble, do drugs, and have whatever intimate transactions they wanted.
The Black Door was a small club that Flash packed easily, so the door scene could be like an uptown Studio 54. This situation got more complicated when a gang called the Casanova’s rolled up one night sixty men deep. “The first one I met was a gentleman by the name of Hootenanny,” Chandler said, “and he had a large medallion. He said ‘We’re the Casanovas and we’re not going to pay any money to come in. We come to all parties free.’” The Casanova’s didn’t get in that night, but it was clear some accommodation had to be worked out.
As Flash’s rep grew, so did the crowds coming to see him. Eventually his weekly party moved from the Black Door to a bigger place a few blocks away called the Dixie Club and, by then, the Casanova’s were basically partners in the party. “We became like one big family,” Chandler said. “I gave them jobs. There were times when I would give them the door and they would have to pay all the expenses so they could split the profits amongst themselves. They’d have to pay Flash. It was their night.”
The Casanova’s provided security for Flash, his crowd and his equipment. A DJ’s sound system was everything and, in the Bronx, circa ‘70s it could be stolen or even held for ransom. The Casanovas prevented that from happening to Flash. That was the good part. The bad part was that the Casanova’s would beat people up at will, whether they thought someone disrespected one of their girlfriends or a customer was from a rival crew or they just didn’t like someone’s look. At times even members of the Furious Five were stuck up by some of the Casanovas inside the club! So, were gangs were really gone? Grandmaster Caz said it best: “The Casanovas were the biggest cats out there. All ex-Black Spades. They just changed their name; they never changed their game!”
In was in that ‘70s New York word phrases “mugging” and “rip off’ entered the cultural lexicon. It was in that New York that wearing certain items of clothing (sheepskin coats, Gazelle frames without the glass) was an invitation to be robbed. In that New York even being on the stage didn’t ensure safety. “One night Cowboy… was on the mic,” Flash recalled. “There was a loud ‘Pow!’ I thought my crossover blew up. Cowboy flew back right into my arms. He pulled his shirt up and he was shot!” Cowboy (aka Keith Wiggins) survived this shooting and would be a crucial part of group’s success. But, tragically, the streets would finally claim him in 1989 when he died of a cocaine overdose.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/bronx-burning-1970s
The violent and desperate nature of that city, the one that raised me and deeply affected my values, was very evident on July 13 and 14, 1977. For twenty-five hours the power in the metropolis was out. In a sweltering city many the poorer residents that the opportunity to take what they wanted from retailers. This civic unrest had a profound impact on hip-hop. While all manner of clothing and house ware was taken electronics’ stores were particularly popular targets. Refrigerators, color TVs, kitchen appliances and were particular targets. I remember a bunch of boys struggling to haul a washer machine down my Brooklyn street in the darkness. Home stereo and disco DJ equipment, as well as speakers, were taken in large numbers.
This kind of DJ equipment, which once been financially out of reach purchase for most teens, was now scattered all around the city. There was an immediate increase in DJs and their crews, an unexpected consequence of the blackout that made party rocking easier. A genre that would soon be defined by celebrating law breakers was, abolutely aided by two of the most lawless nights in New York City history.