My Voice: A Memoir (6 page)

I’m just sitting there as they talk among each other for what felt like
ten, fifteen minutes. And as they continue to talk about me like I’m not even there, I start to get irritated.

“Can I say something?” I finally interrupt.

“Yeah, sure, go ahead,” Judy said.

“First of all, I’ve been working here now a pretty long time and I do whatever anybody asks at any time, and I don’t want any credit for that. But I do think that the least I deserve is that if something goes wrong, somebody would ask me what happened.” I paused, took a breath, and then continued. “I think I’ve earned enough respect for you to ask me. You’re talking about what I did. You’re talking about me. Nobody has said to me, ‘Hey, how come you took the van home?’ Nobody’s asked me. You guys are all talking, everybody’s writing notes and making decisions, and not once has anybody asked me, ‘Why did you take the van home?’”

Oh shit . . . did I just raise my voice a little right there?

They were all quiet for a second, and then Judy offers, “Okay, tell me what happened.”

“Well, I had two events that I did back-to-back. Then I took Deborah to Great Adventure. By the time we came back, I only had a four-hour turnaround before I had to do another event,” I explained. “I didn’t want to be late for it. And I didn’t want to show up to a sales event half asleep. My thinking was I could just take a quick nap. And I know it was against the rules, but I just tried to make the best decision I could in that moment.”

“All right, give us a minute. We’ll talk to you later, okay?” Judy said. Her face remained stern as she and the others stayed put and I left her office.

Later, Judy called me back in. It was just the two of us. “First of all,” she said, “don’t take the van home.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not gonna fire you.”

My face must have regained its color. But was there something else?

Judy smiled and went on. “Second of all, can I just say something?”

“What?”

“Can I just say how proud I am of you? You were absolutely right. Not only did we assume that you were just out with the van and did whatever you wanted, but we never asked you your side of the story.”

Judy had just acknowledged me for doing something that turned out to be a pivotal moment for me—when I first saw the importance of finding my voice and using it to stand up for myself. Getting that ticket could have been the end of my career right there. I could have been fired and then I would have been asking myself—
What’s next? Okay, let me go work at the sneaker store or something
. Instead I learned the big lesson that sometimes situations will come up when you will have to fight for yourself—even if you’re humble and happy to be there—when you have to rise up and speak on your own behalf. Otherwise you’ll be finished before you even start.

That was not the last time in my career when it could have been all over before it started. But, without a doubt, Judy Ellis was a champion who saw something in me, I guess. In fact, not only did Judy decide not to fire me, but shortly after that she also went on to hire me to be her assistant. Later she told me I was actually a shitty assistant—even though she didn’t let on at the time. Nor was she overly critical whenever I gave her the tapes I’d record of me doing air checks. Some of the people around the office had been encouraging me to give it a shot.

“Hi, it’s Angie Martinez, on your Hot 97.” They were terrible. But she was always kind about it and would listen.

“You know, they’re not that bad,” Judy said every time. “You’re really not that bad.” Even just “Not that bad” was encouraging. Especially since
I had given my tapes to both the program and music director at the time and their reaction or lack thereof was not so encouraging. So for Judy to say, “You’re not that bad”—to me that was encouraging.

Judy was the first person to believe that I could be on the air. She was supersmart, so when she believed I could, I started to believe I could.

So my next step would be to learn to run the boards. Board operators were always in demand because the pay was low but the job required training to run them. Yet I knew by now that running the boards was going to be my way inside the studio, so I asked some of the board ops if they would start teaching me. I had done only one or two sessions when my program director, Joel, came up to me one day and stood there, tugging on his mustache, and then explained, “Hey, I need someone to run the public service show on Sunday at four a.m. Are you cleared? Are you ready to run a board?”

“Yes!” I blurted out. I was not.

Like, not even close. I’d done two training sessions at the most. But I was so excited to have the opportunity that I jumped out the window with a bald-faced lie. “Yes, Joel. I’m ready! I can do it.”

Running the board involved knowing how to start the reel, stop it at a certain time, and play the commercials. I had done those couple of training sessions, but I was all over the place. Seriously, I had no idea what the hell I was doing, but this opportunity was too important to let that stop me.

I showed up that Sunday morning at four a.m. as Curtis Elder was getting off his shift. In his glasses and comfortable sweaters, Curtis always reminded me of a wise, older soul. A seasoned board op, he had been there since ten p.m. the previous night but was nice enough to help me set up for my shift. I’m sure it didn’t take more than a minute for him to see that I had no clue what I was doing.

As I took everything in, I was overwhelmed. The boards with all
those buttons and switches—everything looked so big and complicated, like I was about to operate an airplane.

Holy shit, I’m totally going to fuck this up
.

Curtis could clearly tell that I was nervous, that I wasn’t ready. He calmly asked, “Well, do you know how to link up the reel?”

“Kind of.” So, without confessing that I’m clueless, I’m trying to set up the reel-to-reel machine, inserting two reels of tape onto spindles cued up at just the right spots. It’s falling off the thing, and the tape is not latching on properly. Nothing is happening right.

Curtis felt so bad for me that he wound up staying with me the whole shift. He walked me through the entire show and gave me a crash course in how to run a board properly. By the next time I came on to run the boards, I was more comfortable. And from then I started doing it all the time.

But that first night, literally, we could have had dead air for four hours. The public service show wouldn’t have aired. And they would have never given me a chance to do that again. Man, people like Curtis are rare! He didn’t get paid for those hours, and he never ratted me out. That type of kindness will get me watery eyed every time. He saved me that night. Once again it could have been over before it began.

•   •   •

B
y the early 1990s, when I was nineteen or twenty years old, at the same time that I was starting to think maybe I’d found my direction in radio, Hot 97 had started to question its musical direction. The question was answered when the station brought in a new program director, Steve Smith, and everyone at the top had this epiphany that New York was the market, if anywhere, where a full-time hip-hop radio station could thrive. I don’t know what led them to that, or at what business meeting it was said that we could build the radio station around hip-hop.

Steve Smith—a tall white guy with a big head of curly blond hair—was not what you’d expect as the person to lead that charge. But who was? The concept didn’t even exist, as far as I knew. So when the whisperings of it started, the thought of it was like a lightning strike.

Wait! What?! How amazing would that be? A radio station that played hip-hop all day!!!!?

We had never heard of such a thing. Anywhere. Hip-hop was strictly for weekends, and if you did hear it during the week, it was for sure after ten p.m.

But sure enough, pretty quickly they started bringing in some possible deejays to interview. There were a few I knew from MTV and other places, but no one seemed official. Just before Steve started, in the spring of 1992, they brought in Funkmaster Flex, who was already a name in a couple of clubs where I liked to go. Club 2000 was popping at the time and he was killing it there. With his dark skin and great smile, Flex had charisma and was the real deal. So when he came into the station for a meeting and brought his hip-hop credentials with him, I started to believe.

Wow! They might be serious here
.

The first thing I remember thinking about Flex was, “He’s good. He’s a real hip-hop deejay!” And when they announced that they were hiring him, I knew this was starting to get real. This was the first step in creating the first ever hip-hop station, and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be in the middle of it all.

Though by no means did it happen overnight, slowly but surely it became apparent that the decision to bring Flex to Hot 97 had been the right move at the right time. People were tuning in. People were talking about Hot and believing that Steve Smith was onto something. But there was also tremendous pushback. While Steve battled for a transition into full-time hip-hop, there were still major remnants of what Hot once was . . . and people fighting to keep it what it once was. Many who
had been at the station for longer periods were wholeheartedly against the transition.

Freddie Colon, a heavyset Nuyorican who’d been in radio for years and was a nighttime on-air personality at the time, made no apologies for saying, “This is the worst thing this company has ever done. Hip-hop is a fad. And they’re going to brand their radio station next to it?! What happens when the fad is over?” I was young and I respected him so much as a jock. So although I knew his perspective on this was wrong, I kept my opinion to myself. And what I have learned over the years is that this type of change—
unprecedented change
—is always accompanied by doubt.

Freddie’s feelings were mirrored by much of the regime in those days. And I got it. They had put time and sweat into the dance station that Hot 97 was. I’m sure it was hard to let it go, especially knowing that it would mean they would eventually have to say goodbye.

Hip-hop wasn’t an easy bet. That’s part of what makes it real. So even as we started to see that it was more than a fad and Flex was proving that now that he was on the air regularly, there was still an atmosphere of not knowing what was going to happen next. As I’d gotten pretty good at running the boards and had been assigned to Flex’s show, I lived that history. And there I was every night—standing next to Flex—running the boards,
excited
as shit! There was one show I’ll never forget, when Flex played “Top Billin’”—
I am from Bed, Do-or-Die / The Audio Two, The two’s Audio / I got a brother and his name’s Gizmo . . .
You would’ve thought I was getting a royalty check. It was like we had arrived at a kind of Promised Land and I couldn’t keep myself from jumping around the studio, singing every single word!
Milk is chillin’, Giz is chillin’ / What more can I say? Top billin’ . . .

You have to understand that before this the programming had been freestyle and dance music all day and night on Hot 97. Up until Flex started to move the needle, we had zero hip-hop credibility. If you wanted
hip-hop, it was public service radio or WBLS and KISS FM on Friday and Saturday nights. But here we were, changing the game. Not only was I feeling it, but so were a lot of hip-hop fans. And the competition started to notice.

KISS FM reacted by adding a few hip-hop songs to their playlist (
only
the bigger hits and
only
at nighttime), and they were still playing scared. For every one hip-hop song they would add, we added five. This was happening and it was happening fast. And Flex was our leader! Even so, he was a far cry from the Flex that fans would come to know. Surprising though it may be—given how legendary a “Flex rant” would later become—in those early days at Hot, he hated talking on the mic!

Talk on-air? Nope! He just wanted to play records. Steve Smith had to force Flex to talk. I’d hear Steve make the point to Flex all the time: “You have to talk to the listeners. They need to know who you are.” In fact, Steve put Flex on a
You must talk at these times
schedule.

Flex
hated
that. He was so weirded out and nervous about it that he would just open the mic and talk to whoever was in the room with him. And lucky me, running his boards, standing there every night . . . it became the norm to get thrown a “What’s poppin’, Ang?” or a “Right, Ang??” Flex would just start talking to me, and that’s how I first started to get comfortable on the air and to feel confident just being myself. This phase didn’t last long for Flex, because once he started getting a taste for talking on-air and seeing the reaction he would get in the streets, he got comfortable on the mic—quick!

There were no two ways about it. Flex was on fire! He had the Tunnel rockin’ every Sunday night. It was the Mecca of hip-hop clubs, the go-to spot for fans, artists, hip-hop label execs, drug dealers, aspiring artists—everyone wanted to be at the Tunnel! And it was Flex’s. By design. He was a student of the game, so he understood the business. He understood how to market himself and he was aggressive about it.
He made the whole team these
N
UTHIN
B
UT
F
LAVOR
F
UNKMASTER
F
LEX
black leather jackets with his logo all over them, and we wore them everywhere proudly.

Hip-hop was now exploding in New York. Loud Records had come up with the street team and had the streets plastered with signs; Bad Boy was forming and Puff was flooding the streets with his Windbreaker Bad Boy jackets and the B.I.G. Mack cassettes with Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear” on one side and The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Unbelievable” on the other.

Flex was on the air from ten p.m. to two a.m. At almost twenty-three years old, I lived at the station. I was there almost every night. Salaam Remi, a gifted up-and-coming producer—who would later produce everyone from The Fugees to Amy Winehouse—was there all the time, too. Salaam wore many hats at that point: He helped Flex with his records and monitored the other stations. Flex used to call Salaam “The Overseer.” Whenever Flex was mixing, Salaam and I would sit in the studio all night, doing what we had to do while cracking jokes and talking hip-hop. We quickly became friends. We had a similar sense of humor and sometimes entertained ourselves with pranks and other dumb shit.