3 Kings

by Zack O'Malley Greenburg

  The beat may have always been there, but the innovators showed up on their own schedules. Closest to the Bronx, geographically, was Sean Combs—alternately known as Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, and Diddy—born on November 4, 1969, in Harlem. Roughly three years later, his father, Melvin Combs, was gunned down in a parked car on Central Park West; someone in his circle thought he’d been preparing to talk to the authorities about a sensitive business deal.19

  As Dan Charnas points out in the first line of his excellent book The Big Payback, Harlem was home to Alexander Hamilton—the man who essentially invented American money (and later inspired the most successful Broadway musical in a generation). And over time, the neighborhood has been home to many experts at making and flaunting it. The elder Combs boasted a portfolio of operations that was quite diversified, if not always legal. He made money by driving cabs, owning bars, operating limousine companies, and distributing narcotics. An associate of drug lord Frank Lucas, the titular character played by Denzel Washington in American Gangster, Combs would bring his young son to Lucas’s home on occasion. (The young Diddy didn’t like to share: “My daughter used to push him off the [toys],” Lucas once said.20) Though Melvin Combs passed away very early in his child’s life, he left a lasting impression.

  “I learned early in life that there’s only two ways out of that: dead or in jail,” explained Diddy in 2013, speaking of his father’s lifestyle. “It made me work even harder… I have his hustler’s mentality.”21

  Though not quite as conspicuous as Lucas, who famously caught the attention of the feds after showing up at a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier wearing a $100,000 floor-length chinchilla coat, Combs’s flashy fashion preferences earned him the nickname “Pretty Melvin.” Says Dillard Morrison Jr., a contemporary of the elder Combs: “You can see him through his son. He was immaculate. Every hair was in place. He stood out among most guys because of the way he carried himself.”22

  Despite the challenges of his early life, the younger Combs came away from his childhood with a certain fondness for the era. “I feel blessed because I was able to be born in nineteen sixty-nine,” Diddy told me in 2014. “Then I got to grow up in the seventies as a child, and be trained with that music and that whole vibe around me, and then I got to grow up with hip-hop in the eighties.”23

  As a youngster, he lived in Esplanade Gardens, an affordable-housing complex near the 148th Street subway terminus in Harlem, just a ten-minute drive from Herc’s Sedgwick parties. Diddy was raised by his grandmother and mother, Janice, who recognized her son’s comfort with being the center of attention. This facilitated his appearance in a Baskin-Robbins television commercial at age two; later, he modeled alongside The Wiz star Stephanie Mills in Essence magazine. When Diddy reached middle-school age, Janice moved the family to the middle-class Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon. As a teen, Diddy continued to show an interest in fashion, selling shirts and ties at Macy’s; he also grew his income by delivering newspapers.24 (“I didn’t settle at one paper route,” he explained in a Cîroc commercial. “I went and got four.”)

  At his new home in Mount Vernon, he became annoyed that his white neighbors didn’t invite him over to swim in their pool, so he badgered his mother into installing one of their own—bigger than the one next door—and his house became the place kids of every race wanted to be.25 He continued to enjoy popularity at Mount Saint Michael Academy, a Catholic high school across the county line in the Bronx, where he starred on the football team. Friends noted that he always walked around with his chest puffed out and gave him a nickname: Puffy. He helped his varsity football team win a division title, but a broken leg during his senior year ended his career prematurely. “That dream got deferred,” he says. “God had another plan for me.”26

  The cultural and economic realities of Harlem and the Bronx during the 1970s were separated by a gulf far wider than the narrow river that runs between the two areas. In the Bronx, things got so bad that landlords would pay to have their own apartment buildings burned down, often shelling out as little as fifty dollars to petty criminals in hopes of earning a low-six-figure insurance payout (a fate suffered by Starski’s first childhood home).27 One fire, visible from a 1977 World Series game at Yankee Stadium, prompted commentator Howard Cosell to famously declare, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Bronx is burning.”

  Harlem, on the other hand, claimed a historic position as the informal capital of black America, home to the Apollo Theater and Maya Angelou and the Harlem Renaissance. It was also where elite gangsters like Frank Lucas and their midlevel counterparts lived and worked. Money flowed through the streets, not just from drugs, but from an informal—and illegal—citywide lottery known as the numbers game. Players would scrawl three-digit jackpot guesses on slips of paper that they’d hand to their neighborhood runner. (Depending on the neighborhood, the winning number was taken from published horse racing results—the last three digits of the cash taken in at the track on a designated day, for example.) Harlem pulsated as the epicenter of this informal economic engine, which at one point employed an estimated hundred thousand workers and resulted in some eight thousand arrests per year.28

  All this bustle created an economy that allowed DJ Hollywood to become a celebrity among Harlem’s power players, who paid him as much as $5,000 per night to rock glitzy uptown parties. Beyond the traditional DJ patter, he often laid down extended, syncopated rhymes over disco beats.29 Some therefore consider him one of the first true hip-hop acts, while others strenuously disagree. “When the first school of hip-hop started, we were against what was going on then,” says Caz, who grew up near Herc in the Bronx. “All these club and disco DJs… they’d kick us right out of their party.”30

  Hollywood attracted plenty of followers who couldn’t make it to his shows. He used an eight-track recorder to create mixtapes of himself rapping over disco rhythms, spreading them through a growing community of listeners in Harlem and the Bronx in the early 1970s. Starski remembers visiting a friend just to sit in his Cadillac, which had an eight-track player capable of broadcasting Hollywood’s music.31 “When I heard [DJ Hollywood] spit that fire, I knew that was what I wanted to do,” says Starski. “And nothing in the world was going to stop me.”

  As a teenager, Starski had gotten his start working as an assistant to a Harlem Globetrotter turned disco DJ by the name of Pete DJ Jones, who would pay him five dollars a night to help carry his equipment—and, rather frequently, to cover for him. “Sometimes he’d overdrink and he’d say, ‘Well, Starski, I need you to play this program right here,’” the rapper recalls. “‘And don’t say nothing on the mic, because I don’t want them to know I’m not playing.’” Then the towering Jones would find a quiet corner in which to pass out, waking up hours later to rave reviews of his set. Soon Starski was getting $300 per night for his own gigs, and by 1979 he’d joined Edward “Eddie Cheeba” Sturgis and Hollywood as the top rapping DJs in town.

  That same year, the late Sylvia Robinson—a Harlem native who’d reached the top fifteen on the charts in 1957 as soul prodigy Little Sylvia, and later started a small label called Sugar Hill Records with her husband, Joe—was invited to a cousin’s birthday party at Harlem World, a club on 116th Street.32 She and Joe had moved across the river to New Jersey and hadn’t even wanted to go to the celebration, but the invitation included a note that Sylvia would be in attendance. “You don’t want to upset your fans and not go there,” Sylvia’s niece, Diane, had told her.33

  When she arrived at the club, Sylvia immediately saw Starski electrifying the crowd. His audience obeyed his call-and-response orders like army cadets as he rapped over “Good Times” by Chic, tossing out soon-to-be-famous directives such as “Throw your hands in the air, wave ’em like you just don’t care.” Recalls Starski: “She had never seen anyone like me on the turntables and on the microphone.”34

  As Sylvia soaked up the spirit of the club that night, she saw the potential for something even larger: a for
m of music that could make the jump from parties to vinyl. She suspected that the listeners shaking their hips at Harlem World would pay to get their own copies of such records—and she decided to produce them in her studio. “She was always an entrepreneur,” says her son, Leland Robinson. “When everybody else said, ‘No,’ she said, ‘Yes.’”35

  Sylvia sent Diane up to the DJ booth to tell Starski that she’d like to record him. He thought she was kidding, and jokingly called for security. Undeterred, Sylvia contacted Starski after the show, only to discover that he was under contract with a booking agent who refused to do business with her because he didn’t like Joe, a former numbers runner with underworld ties.36 The Robinsons had launched Sugar Hill with the help of a $20,000 to $25,000 loan from Joe’s associate Morris Levy—a music executive notorious for stiffing talent and, eventually, worse. (Levy was convicted of extortion charges alongside a member of the Genovese crime family shortly before his death in 1988.)

  But the Robinsons needed a hit to maintain their lifestyle. When Sylvia couldn’t get Starski, she went searching for guys in Englewood who could rap. She soon found Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson working at a slice joint called Crispy Crust Pizza, along with her sons’ intermittently homeless friend Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright. As they talked, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien walked up and informed them that he could rap, too. Sylvia dubbed them the Sugarhill Gang and hired a band to replicate the rhythm of “Good Times,” telling them, “I’ve got these kids who are going to talk real fast over it; that’s the best way I can describe it.”37

  The three youngsters recorded their verses, cribbing most of their lyrics from Starski and Caz. The latter would go on to be a part of the seminal hip-hop act the Cold Crush Brothers; in 1979, though, he mainly focused on his group Mighty Force, for which Hank served as a bouncer-manager hybrid. Before “Rapper’s Delight” came out, Hank actually mentioned it to Caz and even borrowed his songwriting notebook. “We didn’t discuss any business,” Caz told me. “I just figured, if you down with me and you make it, or something happens, then it’s going to trickle down to me.”38

  Much like the Reagan-era economics of the same name that promised prosperity to communities like the Bronx, the trickle down never happened. After Wonder Mike opened the song with the classic line, “Now what you hear is not a test, I’m rapping to the beat,” Hank delivered the first verse of “Rapper’s Delight,” and lifted the lyrics of Caz—also known as Casanova Fly—word for word, not even bothering to change his name: “I’m the c-a-s-an, the o-v-a and the rest is f-l-y…”

  “They didn’t know a lot about rap,” says Starski. “They knew just enough to rap sixteen minutes on this record.”39

  The track debuted in September 1979 and became known as the first hip-hop single to crack the Top 40 on the Billboard charts, though to this day, many of the genre’s founders don’t even consider it hip-hop. The song generated $3.5 million in revenues for Sugar Hill40 and a major lifestyle upgrade for Wonder Mike. (“He bought the classic Lincoln—and went and bought another one the next day,” says Leland Robinson.)41 And that’s how a child star from Harlem brought hip-hop’s first major cultural moment to life in a New Jersey studio with the help of a trio of teenagers who borrowed their lyrics from the genre’s Bronx forefathers.

  “Nobody knew about rights or publishing or royalties or anything like that,” says Caz.42 Adds Starski: “There wasn’t no lawsuits back in the day. It wasn’t like, ‘You stole my rhyme, I’m going to sue you.’ Niggas didn’t know music like that, the politics of it. They weren’t business oriented.”43

  A year before the release of “Rapper’s Delight,” Shawn Carter discovered hip-hop right in his own backyard. On a sweaty summer afternoon in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses, a bleak public-housing project much like the places that had produced Herc and Bambaataa, a nine-year-old boy soon to be known as Jay-Z noticed a group of kids standing in a circle. One of them, a local rapper called Slate, freestyled about everything—anything—that crossed his mind, from the sidewalk to the crowd around him to the quality of his own rhymes. He rapped until dusk fell, spitting lyrics as though possessed.

  “That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought,” Jay-Z wrote in his autobiography. “Then: I could do that.” He went home and immediately started filling spiral notebooks with rhymes of his own. (Later, paranoid that rivals would steal his lines, he started stashing songs entirely in his head.)44

  The Brooklyn of Jay-Z’s youth was about as far from its current craft-beer-and-yoga-pants reality as “Rapper’s Delight” is from the big-budget singles and videos of today. Jay-Z came into the world on December 4, 1969—exactly a month after Diddy, and barely a decade after the borough lost its beating heart, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The team left Ebbets Field, two and a half miles south of the Marcy Houses, and moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Owner Walter O’Malley had initially wanted to stay in the borough, setting his sights on a downtown location near the Atlantic Yards transit hub. But Robert Moses made it clear that he’d stymie any attempt O’Malley made to stay in Brooklyn, offering only a spot in his planned stadium in Flushing, along with a price tag that would have cost the Dodgers millions more than the package from Los Angeles.45

  Faced with those choices, O’Malley took his team west. (Ebbets Field would be razed in 1960, replaced with yet another drab housing complex.) Moses managed to deflect the blame for the Dodgers’ departure onto the shoulders of O’Malley. (A common Brooklyn question: “If you had a gun with two bullets and walked into a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, who would you shoot?” A common Brooklyn answer: “O’Malley—twice!”) Others left too—428,000 residents between 1950 and 1980,46 as tens of thousands of jobs at places like Spalding and the Brooklyn Navy Yard disappeared47—and working-class Brooklyn devolved into another urban wasteland. “Outside, in Marcy’s courtyards and across the country, teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers,” Jay-Z noted. “Broad daylight shoot-outs had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house.”48

  To make matters worse within his own home, when Jay-Z was ten years old, his father abandoned the family, causing the young rapper to become less trusting and more reclusive.49 His mother sometimes struggled to put food on the table, and he’d often have to eat at friends’ apartments because there wasn’t enough at home. To escape his reality, he would listen to his mother’s soul records and hone his rap skills, pounding out beats on the kitchen table, often staying inside to scour dictionaries in search of new words while his friends played basketball outside.50

  Jay-Z’s ambitions might not have outgrown Marcy if it hadn’t been for a few early mentors. Among them: his sixth grade teacher, who took the class to her house on a field trip, one of his first excursions outside the ghetto. “She had an ice thing on her refrigerator,” Jay-Z told Steve Forbes in 2010. “You know: you push it and the ice and the water comes down. I was really amazed by that. I was like, ‘I want one of those.’… I saw a whole different world that day, and my imagination grew from there.”51

  Then, in 1984, Jay-Z met Jonathan “Jaz-O” Burks. Sensing a potential pupil, the elder rapper instilled in Jay-Z an understanding of metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, and other crucial concepts. “I basically taught him structure as far as writing songs,” says Jaz-O. “I taught him some of the intricacies like vocal projection [and how] convincing people of anything, regardless of what you’re saying, is the way you say it.”52

  Shawn Carter soon became Jay-Z, a portmanteau of his childhood nickname (Jazzy) and two of the subway lines that stop near the Marcy Houses (J and Z), as well as, it seems, an homage to his first musical mentor. One of the first songs they recorded together—a track rapped so fast that it seemed someone had simply fast-forwarded an early hip-hop tune—was called “The Originators.”

  Before hip-hop could become a billion-dollar business, it had to move from housing projects and public parks into its own venues. Starski, Hollywood, and their ilk were practici
ng an early form of hip-hop in discotheques, to be sure, but disco itself was declining rapidly.

  Enter twenty-five-year-old Sal Abbatiello, an Italian American guy from the Bronx with slicked-back hair, a mustache, and a purple Cadillac. His was one of the few white families that hadn’t yet fled the neighborhood, sticking around to operate lounges and nightclubs. Sal grew up helping his mother tend bar, and in 1976 he took charge of the family’s newest offering, the Disco Fever. At 167th and Jerome, a twenty-minute walk south from 1520 Sedgwick and just six blocks north of Yankee Stadium, the club was generally rocked by disco DJs until its 6 a.m. closing time, but sometimes they’d leave early and put an aspiring turntablist named Sweet G in charge.

  “At the end of the night he would start rhyming and emceeing on the mic,” recalls Abbatiello. “Now, back in the day, in our disco, nobody spoke on the mic. DJs didn’t have a mic in the DJ booth because there was no business being done on the mic.”53

  But every time Sweet G told the members of the crowd to wave their hands in the air like they just didn’t care, the place erupted. Abbatiello suspected that he’d stumbled upon something—perhaps a youth-centric genre that could replace disco. He became friends with G and asked him to take him to the parks where other DJs of his type were playing. Flash and his crew of emcees, the Furious Five, impressed Abbatiello the most.54

  “I am going to make you a star,” he insisted when he finally met Flash, promising a fifty-dollar-per-night weekly gig.55