by Wyclef Jean
AT AROUND THE SAME time that I understood music as something to be learned and studied at an academic level, I got my first experience with it as a legitimate career. And from the get I learned how everyone surrounding that career could be. I’m not the first to say this, but musicians are the meat in the shark tank. You know what I’m sayin’? The people who make their money from music are always circling, looking for their next meal.
I had a gym teacher, Mr. Wendall, who got obsessed with this rap group that I started to be in. We were called Exact Change. Exact Change featured me, Robin André, who was the Muslim guy who taught me the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, this kid named Chris, a kid named Todd, and this other kid named David.
In Jersey, just the way they do it all over America, there were high school talent shows that were a regional thing. People from other schools could enter, and if you had a music group of any kind, that is how you did some kind of little tour when you were still a kid and your group wasn’t shit. You’d compete and you’d meet other kids who did music from other schools; it was like a social network for hip-hop.
Mr. Wendall saw us perform regularly at these talent shows and he realized that we had some chemistry. Robin and I always did vibe like that and onstage we flowed tight because we had each other’s backs. The other guys fit in well with us, too. For a bunch of very different kids, we were a cohesive unit.
Mr. Wendall came at us hard; he wanted to manage us and he promised us all that fame and fortune if we signed a contract with him, which we didn’t.
We had another big figure influencing us at the time too—a woman named Jan Berger who worked for RCA Records. Robin and I, who were inseparable at the time, met her through an internship program that her company did as an outreach to schools from rough areas in the New York metropolitan area. She was in charge of this program that got internships in the music industry for kids who were musically inclined. It really was a scouting program for business and creative talent.
Jan approached Robin and me at some talent show and asked us if we wanted to be in the program. Of course we did; it would give us a way to be in New York City working at a record company. It didn’t pay, but it got us there and that was good enough. Jan became our manager because she was connected in New York. She did have to sell my father on the idea, though.
Jan was good at selling, and once I told her how my father felt about hip-hop, she figured out how to make it all work. She told my dad how the program was focused on the business end of music. She made it sound like I would be assisting music executives and learning how to make music my day job, rather than to be an artist. I remember so clearly the afternoon she came to our house. I’d told her about my father, but nothing could prepare her. Regardless, she knew what to say right away.
“He will start working in Manhattan in the record industry,” she said. “I know the hours are long, but it’s a competitive field. It’s good to start young.”
That’s what my dad needed to hear. He looked at her long and hard. “Okay,” he said. “As long as I know where he is 24/7 and I can call you any time, this job is okay with me.”
I did have a real internship in Jan’s office, but it didn’t involve anything that would help me get a real job as a music executive or anything else. I was just an intern. I did what needed to be done, whether that meant getting coffee or taking papers to someone or picking up dry cleaning. What it did was get me into the city, and get me in and around the industry. It also got me away from my house and offered me plenty of time to work with the rest of Exact Change under Jan’s leadership, in an effort to get us a record deal. Jan was a pro: when she spoke to my dad, she made it sound like she was running a school-sponsored program and we were going on a field trip.
What we were really doing was going into the studio with Kurtis Blow. Yeah, that’s right, Kurtis Blow produced our demo. At the time, in the late eighties, Kurtis was the most high. And I don’t know how he was connected to Jan, but she got him to record us and he tried to shape us a little bit. No one we knew could even think about being able to do that for real. On the East Coast at that time, Kurtis Blow was our Dr. Dre.
While that was happening, Mr. Wendall was trying to push us to perform his way, which was at a more local level, and involved a hokey concept. He demanded just as much of our time as Jan, who had much better connections, and a very different idea of what we should become.
Jan put us together based on looks. She had me, and she thought Chris would be the next Michael Jackson, and each one of us was a specific type of dude: I was the Caribbean kid, Chris was MJ, Robin was our serious-minded Muslim type, and the other two were fly B-boys. I wrote almost all of the rhymes for the group, but she had me handing out parts to everyone else. I had written a song called “Rap Translator” that was multilingual, and that did something to her. After hearing the possibilities in that, she made sure we had a Spanish dude, a black dude, a white dude, and she gave each part to one of us based on how closely we looked to be natives of that language. I could have done all of them myself because I’d written all of them. I thought it was bullshit that she was handing them out. I was sacrificing my art, for what? I wanted credit for my talent as the cornerstone of this act. I was feeling like this was some bullshit.
Jan had come along first, before Mr. Wendall, but once he saw us perform, he wanted to manage us, too. And so a power struggle began. Mr. Wendall was more focused on managing me however. He saw me as a talent and also as his retirement fund, if he played my cards right. Mr. Wendall had seen every single show we ever did in school, and he saw how people reacted to us, which was unilateral: everyone loved us.
We trusted him, too, because we’d known him for years. He was our gym teacher—and every member of Exact Change spent more time in gym than most of our other classes. Mr. Wendall wanted us to stand out, so here’s what he came up with: he thought we should wear tuxedos and carry canes at all times. I guess he saw us as Boyz II Men at a junior prom. How he thought this would give us cred, I don’t know. None of us were old enough to sign away our rights, so Jan and Wendall were vying for some kind of future return and hoping to get us to devote ourselves to their own visions and not the other’s.
Their ideas couldn’t have been more different: Jan had us doing straight hip-hop and Wendall had us doing this overdressed young talent thing. But the songs were the same, and they were a mix of languages, styles, delivery—all that. Exact Change wasn’t exact at all. Depending on the day, we might be $2.50 or we might be $.75, you know what I’m sayin’? It all depended on who was counting.
The truth is that Jan met us first and was molding us, and Mr. Wendall got involved once he saw there was something there. Aside from his very strong ideas about what we should wear and how we should present ourselves, he also tried to poach me from the group. He was real cool to me in gym class and it started from there. Once he saw my musical talent, right away he told me he wanted to manage me. And once he saw Exact Change, it seemed like he tried to drive a stake through the group by pulling me out of it. I guess he saw me as his money-maker and wanted me all to himself. He was driving the group apart and making a play to grab it, all at the same time. He would constantly tell me that I was the only one who had a future and that I didn’t need the other guys. At the same time he was telling the other guys shit about me to get them to want to leave the group. He was playing puppet master all around.
Wendall was smart to know that I was the talent in that group, and he began to take me out apart from the rest of them to show me that there was a world beyond Exact Change and whatever Jan Berger had lined up for us. He acted like a college scout courting a top high school point guard, and the way a good scout would, he tempted me with the perks. The best of them was the night he took me to Amiri Baraka’s house.
Amiri is a poet, a writer, a college professor, and one of the most controversial minds of our generation. He had parties a few times a month where people would get high and read their poetry, and he’d have a jaz
z band playing. Live poetry with jazz was the sickest performance and knowledge I’d ever seen, and it made an impression on me. Wendall might not have had the right intentions, but he did know that I needed to see beyond my world and for that I thank him.
These two sharks were swimming around us hard, waiting until we were old enough to be able to actually promise them something. I was seventeen, and would be eighteen soon, and as that date came closer, they began fighting. They couldn’t help it; they’d start yelling in front of us. It was verbal sparring over who would get the group when we turned legal. Each one of them pleaded their case to my family, hoping that they would sway me to sign their way. My dad realized that I wouldn’t be signing up for a business job if I signed a contract with Jan. Once he heard that loud and clear, he had no interest in whatever else she had to say. As for Mr. Wendall, well that went even worse. Wendall was not a businessman; he was a gym teacher, so his brand of negotiation was aggression. His whole pitch to my dad was that I’d never do better than what he was offering, which was based on commitment to his team and some kind of management contract for life. I don’t remember the details of it; I just remember what my dad said to him.
“Get out of my house now, devil!” he shouted. “You will not do this to my son. I turn you to sand!”
That pretty much ended Wendall’s campaign to be my manager and to break up Exact Change.
The funny thing is, man, even once we were dedicated completely to Jan Berger, we didn’t get any further with our band. We’d play gigs in Hoboken, at all these small clubs, and even though I was underage, I’d be let into the bars with my little tuxedo on. That was the funny thing, too: even after Wendall was out of the picture, we kept the tuxedos, which was always the thing I hated the most. Who raps in tuxedos? It would have made sense if we were R&B, but this was hip-hop. We’d sneak into poetry festivals to perform and try to get into clubs with fake IDs, hoping our outfits made us look older. That was the only advantage of them. We got a regular gig in Hoboken after a while because the owner of that spot thought we were over twenty-one.
The other side of my music life was a community church band I was in, called Helping Hands, which got big enough that we played other churches besides my dad’s, and then I was in the jazz and choir bands at school. With those two bands I played all kinds of talent shows, either in high schools or in churches and gospel competitions all over the Eastern Seaboard.
This was my triple life: one was the two church bands, both of which I had to do because of my father and my family; the second was truly musical, in the jazz and choir; and the third was hip-hop—my education in what I thought was the coolest form of music because I identified with it. Within hip-hop, I had to hide the fact that I loved and played the other two, because I thought they’d think I wasn’t cool anymore for listening to jazz and classical music—not to mention playing Christian music for my father. There was nothing cool about that from a hip-hop standpoint. I had the church band going on Monday through Sunday, and Wednesday through Saturday I rehearsed with Exact Change. Before I expanded my horizons, all I wanted was for Exact Change to get me somewhere. If only Exact Change had been as big as the church band; every kid in the neighborhood wanted to be in that band, and none of them gave a shit about Exact Change. I’m telling you, we were the Beatles of the church bands in New Jersey.
That was my week-to-week life in high school. Most days I stayed after school late on purpose because by the time I was fifteen, I didn’t like being home that much. I’d do the jazz and choir practice thing after school, then go practice with the church band and get home as late as I was allowed to. The later I stayed at school the less a chance there was of anyone in my class knowing where I lived.
The first album I ever recorded was a church album with Helping Hands. We did it in a studio in a few days when I was seventeen, thanks to Joe Servelis, who was our teacher and guide, the way Mr. Hayes was in the jazz band. He helped us record an album of church music done our way, which was like a cross between reggae, rock and roll, and traditional gospel music.
Joe became our manager in a way, the one who got us booked into playing other churches, for which we were paid, too. Joe was there watching every show, giving us tips. Usually he’d tell me to tone it down. He usually said I was jumping too high or performing too much. He was right, too, because I was doing backflips in church. I can see now that it was a little bit much. Your performance should be directed by your location and your audience, and there I was acting like I was headlining Madison Square Garden in a place were people came to worship. Jesus was the main attraction, not me, but I didn’t see that at the time.
“You can’t do that in church,” Joe would say.
“Yeah I know. But yo, church got to be lively when we play because the rest of it is boring.”
I was the youngest one in that band. Jerry Duplessis was in that band on bass, because he’d become the adopted brother. His brother Renel Duplessis was in the band, too, on guitar. I played with this band when they’d go do gigs, and I also ran the band with my brothers and sister in my dad’s church.
Helping Hands was a hot band and Joe knew it. He sold copies of that album and he started getting good money for booking us. It didn’t take me long to realize that everyone was coming to see me, the little skinny kid who did backflips and led the band.
I was jumping in the name of the Lord. I was the main attraction: I was the James Brown of the church band. People would show up and be like, “Where he at?” I realized I had power in this band. I saw him charging people for tickets, but we got nothing. I began to go to maestro Joe Servelis and ask for the money we’d made. He always had an excuse.
“I had to rent you a PA. That cost me, so here’s twenty dollars. That’s all that’s left.”
Every time I asked about it, that twenty dollar cost went up slightly. It became forty dollars, then sixty dollars.
“Those PAs getting more expensive?” I’d ask him. We kept drawing bigger and bigger crowds, but the size of our PA stayed the same. That opened my eyes.
In high school, I really started to clash with my father because of the rebellious nature of what I wanted to do with my life. His thing was education and he had a specific plan of how he wanted my life to go. He had a plan for Sam, too; he became a lawyer. Sam and Sedek were both on that path because in high school, they were both on the debate team, while I did music. Their grades were always better than mine because you have to be good at school to even think about doing debate club.
I wasn’t terrible at school when I put my mind to it. One time when we took some national achievement test, I got a very high grade because my mom asked me to try. I studied hard and I did it for her.
“You can do this if you want to, you see?” she said when she saw my grade. “Why don’t you score well on your tests all the time? You just need to try.”
“Because my brain is thinking of other stuff,” I said. “This stuff is done already, Mom. It’s easy because I know how to do it.”
I put myself out there on that test for my mother. I did not do the same for my father, who demanded that I come home each night by a certain time. This became the reason why we clashed day and night once I was a teenager. At a certain hour it was lights out, and he locked the doors and everyone was in bed—no questions asked. As I began to participate in all of these musical groups, I’d still be out at rehearsal with Helping Hands by lights-out most days of the week. Even if I were spending all my time rehearsing with Helping Hands, playing nothing but church music, my father would have wanted me home by then. It was one of the rules he lived by, and he demanded his children did, too.
My father would bolt the doors, but that didn’t worry me because I knew the door wasn’t the only way in. Sometimes there was a basement window open and if all else failed, I knew I could climb up the drainpipe that led to my room and crawl in my window. My friends in Helping Hands started calling me Spiderman. They’d walk me all the way home just to see me do it. Tha
t is why I started wearing Spiderman gear when I started performing hip-hop outside of Exact Change. Not a mask and all that, but there was always a spider reference somewhere in my outfit. It was partly an inside joke, partly a rap alter-ego.
If I was any kind of Spiderman, I was the one in the black suit—because I didn’t stop crimes. If anything, I gave in to my impulsive nature and committed them. I’m ashamed to say it now, but the theft I did most was to steal from my family—namely the money from my father’s church funds. I took a little here, a little there, and after a few times without getting caught, I got out of control. The thing was that I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong or anything selfish because I never even used the money for my own good. I usually gave it out to friends and kids who needed it more than I or my family did. I guess I thought I was Robin Hood. It got to the point where it had to stop, and I definitely put an end to all that with a bang. At the time I did that last burglary of my own house—which was the last petty crime I ever did in my life—I was fighting with my dad so much I didn’t care how mad he got. I figured he’d throw me out once he found out I did it, and that was fine because I was ready to live somewhere else anyway. I didn’t know where and I didn’t know how, but I knew that all I cared about was doing hip-hop, and that sure as hell wasn’t going to happen under my father’s roof.
At the time I had a hooptie old Datsun that I used to get around in. And that day I had my cousin Nason and my brothers, Sam and Sedek, in the car waiting for me as I went into the church safe and put all the money in a bag. Then I went out to the car to drive us all to the Burger King where we worked. I didn’t tell them what I was doing, but as soon as I put this brown bag of money stuffed to the top with about a thousand dollars in small bills back there with them, they knew something was up.
“Clef, what you doing?” my brother asked me.
“Don’t you worry about it.”
“Dad gonna kill you.”
