Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (33 1/3) (4 page)

Despite being tortured by art-terrorists Atari Teenage Riot, slowed down for Nine Inch Nails, drowned in bass by 2 Live Crew, surrounded by plush Dr. Dre interior and rapped over by practically every MC on the planet from 1988 to 1991, no one made “Funky Drummer” more arresting than Public Enemy. They practically own it. By the time Chuck and Flav were dubbed the conscience of the hip-hop generation, naturally given the final word in the landmark 1989 anti-violence benefit record “Self-Destruction,” the faint echo of “Funky Drummer” played in the background, a familiar bustle that everyone recognizes is there to clear the way for the prophets of rage.

Stubblefield claims that the beat was influenced from the rumbling trains and appliances of his childhood. James Brown went even further back, taking a little credit for himself (as he was wont to do), saying the “beat of rap” was based on “the old drums of passion, my personal combination of the drums of Africa and the drums of the American Indian, both of whom I claim a heritage from.”
¹⁸

“Funky Drummer” is a tricky, ineffable thing full of ghost notes. Biz Markie says he never heard anyone
beatbox it. None of the videos of people playing “Funky Drummer” on YouTube even come close. And even if the Bomb Squad didn’t sample it on “Rebel,” they certainly tried to capture its human element. The Bomb Squad huddled around samplers and pressed buttons in fractured unison, making sure it never looped perfectly. Flavor Flav tapped the snares in by hand on the Akai S-900 drum machine. They used him because Flav’s feel was different, something uniquely Flav — an example of the Bomb Squad going with what felt good over what felt right. Hank would later fill
Nation of Millions
with near silent ghosted notes so even the drum-machine beats sounded like breaks. There are extra kicks tacked in “Rebel” like drum fills so the beat never repeats itself. The beat isn’t a static loop: it’s a living organism. According to Hank there are four beats at play in “Rebel,” each with a different turnaround, all mixed and programmed and played so as to not repeat themselves. He says, “It gives you the illusion that the record is getting better instead of just staying linear.”
¹⁹
It’s truly a performance piece, closer to James Brown than the rap groups that sample him, the sound of a bunch of people sitting in a room and creating.

After the Bomb Squad opened the floodgates, chopped-up loops of Brown became the soundtrack of hip-hop’s greatest year. Copyright lawyers and “traditional” musicians had some bones to pick. “Tell the truth, James Brown was old,” responded original
hip-hop band Stetsasonic, “‘til Eric and Ra’ came out with ‘I Got Soul.’” The hardest-sampled man in show business recognized the loops’ import, as heard via James Brown’s official rebuttal on the Full Force track “I’m Real”: “All you copycats out there . . . Take my voice off your record until I’m
paid in full
.”

* * *

1970: Bassist William “Bootsy” Collins, his brother, guitarist Phelps “Catfish” Collins and drummer Frankie “Kash” Waddy were teenagers in a local Cincinatti band called the Pacesetters. They never really played for money but would play benefits and parties for a good time. A&R guy Charles Spaulding spotted them one night and invited them to be the recording band for King Records — “Yeah, King’s,” Bootsy said. “Ain’t that where James Brown is?”
²⁰

It was, and the band laid down a couple of sides for Brown associates Hank Ballard and Marva Whitney. Meanwhile, the World’s Greatest Entertainer was busy running his notoriously tight ship, and his band was ready to mutiny. James Brown was famous for fining these guys, docking their pay for dirty uniforms, unshined shoes, late attendance, flubbed notes, clumsy steps — and may God help you if you showed up drunk. One afternoon in March 1970, at a hotel in Columbus, Georgia, Brown heard rumblings that his band was disgruntled, refusing to go on that evening,
demanding more money. As if negotiating with terrorists, Brown saw giving in to the ultimatum as the ultimate loss of control.

The Pacesetters were 500 miles away at the Wine Bar in Cincinnati, pretty much just playing to the bartender. According to Waddy, the band raked in a total of $15 that evening. In the middle of one of their bar-rattling numbers — the band always played
loud
— the bartender walked up to Bootsy and delivered a message: “Hey, Bobby Byrd wants to talk to you about playing with James Brown.” The band laughed off this joke until they heard the intrepid sideman’s voice on the other end of the phone.

A plane was on its way — “No, no way. James’ jet! No way,”
²¹
said Bootsy. Hell, none of them had ever flown anywhere. According to Bootsy, Byrd was there within 45 minutes with no time to fix up his hair. “Next thing you know, we was on an airplane, my Afro was in the back of my head, and we was flying up 40,000 feet in a Learjet. And I had never been on a plane before. I’m 17 years old, flying on the Godfather of Soul’s plane, and I’m like, What is going on? Talk about a kid trippin’.”
²²

In Georgia, Brown told the restless audience to be patient. Byrd brought the Pacesetters downstairs and taught them some quick licks, arrangements and cues. No worries; they already knew the songs inside and out. Right there, Brown fired his whole band. Maceo Parker, Melvin Parker, Jimmy Nolen and the rest of
Brown’s band cleared their equipment from the stage and left. The Pacesetters lugged their gear onstage and, without so much as a rehearsal, the guard was changed. On the biggest stage they had ever been on, in front of the largest audience they’ve ever seen, going from Dodge Dart to Learjet in a night. Baptism by fire. That night Brown dubbed the Pacesetters the “New Breed,” but they would go on to rewrite the rules of funk as the JB’s.

The fresh-from-the-clubs grit, youthful energy, wide-eyed wonder and deadly chops of these five kids would be captured most ferociously on their first solo single, recorded only two months after gracing the stage with Brown. Compared to the jittery, popcorn-popper funk of the previous year’s James Brown model, 1970’s “The Grunt” was white noise, a hailstorm, pure adrenaline. From the second the needle hits the groove, Robert McCullough’s tenor sax explodes with the most hellish, inhuman screech imaginable. A bottle rocket, the screeching tires before a car accident, a tortured animal — certainly not a sax. Even if you had been thoroughly prepped for a heavy JB’s funk slab with the just-released “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” nothing could prepare you for the icy glissando that opens “The Grunt,” a siren that whines like bombs are coming next. Clearly this was the four seconds that Public Enemy needed.

In “Rebel without a Pause,” the Bomb Squad used only two seconds, borrowing just that original shock.
“Rebel’s” loops were produced on the only sampler that Hank Shocklee could get his hands on at the time: the Ensoniq Mirage. One of the earliest samplers in common use, it was decidedly lo-fi — 8-bit resolution, 32khz sampling rate, three seconds of sampling time. The next step up was the Synclavier, and that was out of the question, as Hank Shocklee remembered: “Oh man, it was, like, $250,000, and the only person that had one was Stevie Wonder!”
²³
The Mirage left a fraction-of-a-second delay at the end of each track before it looped around again. So each sample was just the tiniest bit off. The Bomb Squad went intentionally lo-fi and sampled “The Grunt” with a mere 2-bit sampling rate for extra gnarl. They turned a two-second warning sign into an adenoidal wail that keeps screaming at you for five minutes.

They did the final mix at Chung King House of Metal studio in Chinatown. Owned by John King, a friend from Def Jam co-owner Rick Rubin’s days of hanging out at the Danceteria, Chung King was a single-room, sixth-floor, graffiti-splashed, piss-stenched hole where Def Jam had already recorded knockout albums by Run-DMC, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. The place was listed in the phone book as “Secret Society,” but Rubin didn’t want the industry to know they recorded in such a dump, so he renamed it in LL Cool J’s
Radio
liner notes in 1985, and the name stuck. There, the Bomb Squad taught themselves new things every day. In the middle of recording
“Rebel,” Chung King got the new Akai S-900 sampler — 30 seconds of sampling time! — which ended up on the track too, though Hank ultimately preferred the personality of the hiccupping, skuzzy Mirage. They didn’t have automated mixing boards at Chung King, so the Bomb Squad would do mixdowns with five or six guys manning the faders, each one with three to six faders to look after, ducking them or raising them to create the huge switches in action.

And so in addition to the rock vibe of the Jefferson Starship and Chubb Rock, “Rebel” contains this skipping loop of James Brown’s band at their heaviest, the most “rock” of any lineup in his six-decade career. The fresh-from-Cinci JB’s brought a combination of daring and pure cockiness that was surely embraced by Public Enemy, a group whose “sole intent was to destroy music.”
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Bassist Bootsy Collins, still a teenager, may well have been playing on a $29 electric guitar that he had rigged to play like a bass: The result was a snapshot of kids learning new ways to swing, sampled by adults learning new ways to rattle.

All the pieces fit. Chuck knew “Rebel” was something special when they played the instrumental for three high school kids who were hanging around the studio, all of whom immediately started bugging out and dancing like crazy. (Those three kids would later be known as Busta Rhymes, Disco D and Charlie Brown of Leaders of the New School.) Chuck locked himself in his house for two days trying to get the vocals right.
He listened to the song over and over again. His mom, hearing McCullough’s tenor squeaking from the other room, asked, “What’s this teakettle?”
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Once in the studio, it took Chuck two more days to nail down the vocal tracks — exhibiting a dangerous perfectionism in an age when studio time was a precious and costly resource. Clearly no longer intimidated by the shadow of Marley Marl’s “I Know You Got Soul,” Chuck kicked “Rebel” off with a resonant “
Yes
. . .,” an affirmative inspired by the opening of Biz Markie’s “Nobody Beats the Biz.” That record was one of Marley’s masterpieces and Chuck’s favorite record at the time. Later in the song, in a nod to the record that set Public Enemy into a writing frenzy, he even says, “I got soul too.”

It was time to release the second single off
Bum Rush
, the “ultimate homeboy car” anthem “You’re Gonna Get Yours” — and Public Enemy wanted “Rebel” for the B-side. Def Jam balked at the idea since they felt B-sides cut into album sales. At the time, Public Enemy had sold about 82,000 copies of
Bum Rush
, so they countered with, “What album sales?” They followed Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons all the way to JFK Airport to harangue him before he left for London with Run-DMC. “We were so glad those guys were always late,”
²⁶
said Hank. They rushed up to the door of a PanAm flight about to take off. According to Chuck’s autobiography, Simmons didn’t want to be bothered with the B-side — “I don’t know. I’ll talk to y’all when I get back” — and walked onto
the plane. Run turned around, looked at them and said, “Go ahead and do it.” Chuck said they just needed the go-ahead from somebody and Run’s word was good enough. They went to the offices of Def Jam distributor CBS, filled out the paperwork, and the single was etched to vinyl before the Def Jam brass caught wind. Simmons didn’t even know they had pressed the record at all until it started tearing up radio. And even then, he couldn’t exactly scold them. The B-side won: “Rebel” was an instant smash.

When Public Enemy got the test pressing, they didn’t even listen to it, they just drove it straight to KISS-FM. It was a Saturday night and Chuck Chillout was on the air. Public Enemy couldn’t get inside, so they left their test pressing with the security guard — “Please, just give it to Chuck Chillout,
please
.” They left, walked to the car, and the minute Chuck started the car, those sax screeches poured through the speakers.

Lady B, host of Philly’s fabled “Street Beat” show on Power 99, was next to catch on. That summer, P.E. hit Philly’s Greek Picnic — a celebration of African-American fraternities and sororities — and said they heard it out of every car system and portable stereo. Months later, they would debut it on
Soul Train
and Public Enemy would go national. Even former critic Melle Mel recognized its brilliance. Whenever that record came on at Latin Quarter, he would grab the mic excitedly and pump up the crowd along with it.

“Just a little bit of the taste of the bass for you,” Public Enemy later responded in “Don’t Believe the Hype.” “As you get up and dance at the LQ . . .”

In the spring of 2008, the strange story of a Georgia widow was tearing up the AP wire. In 1995, her 33-year-old husband, Terry, had committed suicide, ending his life with a single shotgun blast. His heart was salvaged and donated to a man at risk for congestive heart failure, 57-year-old Sonny Graham. Grateful for his new lease on life, Sonny tracked down the widow to thank her. When he met her, he felt like he had known her for years. Exactly like the previous owner of the heart beating in his chest, he fell in love with her. They got married. Eventually, he too killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.

Scientists say they’ve documented more than 70 cases of organ transplant recipients who adopt the personality traits of their donors. Parapsychologist Gary Schwartz told the
New York Post
that living cells have memory cells that store information that can be passed along when the organ is transplanted.
The examples read like
Twilight Zone
episodes. A 68-year-old woman suddenly craves the favorite foods of her 18-year-old heart donor, a 56-year-old professor gets strange flashes of light in his dreams and learns that his donor was a cop who was shot in the face by a drug dealer. Does a sample on a record work in the same way? Can the essence of a hip-hop record be found in the motives, emotions and energies of the artists it samples? Is it likely that something an artist intended 20 years ago will re-emerge anew?