Fact #117479

EYEWITNESS FEATURE : THE BIRTH OF RAP ON RECORD
Compiled by Johnny Black

Joey Robinson Jr : I was at school in Engelwood, New Jersey, at this time, and my mother, Sylvia, was the owner of All Platinum Records. She'd had hits as an artist in the fifties, as half of Mickey and Sylvia, and she'd stayed in the business and done well for herself, but in 1979 we were going through a lawsuit with Polygram records.

Sylvia Robinson (founder, Sugar Hill Records) : At the time, things were rough for my company ... and I didn't know how I was going to get out of this trouble.

Joey Robinson, Jr : I used to go to clubs and house parties in New Jersey and we would see the rappers rapping over records. I didn’t even know that over in New York City there was a whole rap scene with Cool Herc and Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaata … I never heard of these guys, because we were based in New Jersey.

Guy 'Raheim' Williams (New York rapper) : Disco was too bourgeois for us. It was for older people. We couldn't get into the disco clubs because we weren't dressed properly. And disco was against everything we represented.

Joey Robinson Jr : I didn’t know about this scene until my mothers birthday party on 29 May, 1979, when my cousin threw a party for her at Harlem World - a very big night club in New York City, USA.

I was really tired that night and I didn't want to go but my mother asked me to please drive her over there and during the party she saw these guys talking, rapping, over a record, and she saw the response from the crowd, like, they'd say, 'Throw your hands in the air', y'know, and everybody would go wild.

Sylvia Robinson: I was sitting there (in Harlem World night club, New York) and saw children out on the floor dancing, and this guy was talking over the records. Anything he said made them go crazy. All of a sudden, a voice said to me, 'If you put a concept like that on wax, you'll be out of all of the trouble you're in.' ... I didn't even know you called it rap.

Joey Robinson Jr : She said to me that night, 'Joey, I got an idea to do a rap record.' So I said, 'What's a rap record?' She says, 'Well, like those guys are rappin over a record.'

So, the day after the party, my mother says, 'Joey, I want you to find somebody who can rap.' There was a gentleman in New Jersey who went by the name of Casper The Friendly Ghost, and he was rappin’ in a local band, Sound On Sound, with another rapper called Wonder Mike.

So I went to Casper and told him what was happening, and he gave me a tape of him rapping which my mother listened to and she loved it. We were going to record him as the first rapper.

Good Times by Chic had been the hottest song in the clubs, on the street and on the radio, during the summer of the year before.

Nile Rodgers (Chic) : As soon as we released it, the whole hip-hop thing developed and the rappers in the clubs were rapping over our record.

Joey Robinson Jr : So when we went in the studio, my mother had the idea to use the riff from Good Times but to add another beat, which is the two breaks of our song - at the beginning and in the middle. We didn't sample anything. We re-recorded the instrumental track using the group Positive Force, who were already signed to us, who'd had a big hit with We Got The Funk.

So now my mom has the track, and she's waiting for Casper to come over the following day and do his rap. But he didn't show up. And he didn't show up the day after either. So the third day, I went out and found him and asked, ‘What's goin' on?’, and he said his father had advised him not to do it with us, because of the legal problems between All Platinum and Polygram.

So when Casper said he wouldn't come with us, she was real down by it, because she believed in him, in his voice. I said, 'OK, ma, let's forget Casper and find somebody else.'

A friend of mine called Warren Moore had told me about a guy who working in the Crispy Crust pizza parlour on Palisades Avenue, who could rap. It was the main shopping street, about five minutes from our studio, so me, mom and Warren drove down there in my Oldsmobile.

Warren and I go into Crispy Crust and we talk to the pizza guy, Henry Jackson, known as Big Bank Hank, but he's like 380 lbs, real heavy, and I said, 'Man, I don't know.' But he said, 'Hey, listen, I can rap real good. Just gimme a chance.' Now there's people eating in the pizza parlour, but Hank just all of a sudden closed the whole place down, kicked everybody out, and came out with me to my car.

Sylvia Robinson : Jackson left the pizza parlour with his apron on and the flour all over him and jumped in the car.

Joey Robinson Jr : He jumped in the back, I introduced him to my mother and Hank started rappin’ right there, to my mother.

There was lot of commotion by now, and another friend of mine is walking by with Guy O'Brien, and put his head in the window, and says, 'That guy's good, but you ought to listen to my guy.' So Guy O'Brien gets in the car and starts rappin, so by then it was getting pretty wild in the street, and we were attracting a lot of attention.

Another guy we all knew, Wonder Mike, Michael Wright, was across the street in MacDonalds, and he had his guitar with him, so he walked over and joined in too. Everybody's like, crammed in the car, and we drove up to my mother's house, went into the library and started playing the track for them that we'd done for Casper.

My mother decided she wanted to use just Hank and Guy to rap on the record, but Wonder Mike was real upset that he was being left out, so he started doing that 'A hip, a hop, the hippy' thing, which my mom really liked and of course, it ended up being the start of the record, and we had all three of them on it.

There was briefly an idea that I might be the fourth rapper on the track but my mom said no, because I was still in school and whatever.

It really was kind of miraculous. We found the guys, went in the studio the next day, and for $700 recorded Rapper's Delight in one take.

Henry 'Big Bank Hank' Jackson (rapper) : One take, no mistake, didn't stop or stutter. A seventeen minute record done in seventeen minutes and fifty seconds. When you're hungry, you want to do something right.

Guy O'Brien : We all wrote our own raps, mine only took about an hour to do. The M-A-S rap, I wrote in the studio.

Joey Robinson Jr : As a record company, we understood that all the raps were totally original but, before we met him, Hank used to rap with a group in New York City which included a rapper called Cazanova, Grandmaster Caz, who later claimed that he helped Hank write certain parts of the song. Hank did acknowledge that some of his rap was by Caz, but we didn't know that when we recorded them.

Adrian 'Eazy AD' Harris (rapper, Cold Crush Brothers) : Caz is one of the greatest lyricists/writers ever ... Caz's manager was Big Bank Hank of the Sugarhill Gang. If you listen to Hank in Rapper's Delight, those are Caz's lyrics. Hank was supposed to compensate Caz, which never occurred.

Grandmaster Caz (rapper) : He didn't even change it to 'Big Bank Hank', he just said the rhyme the way it was in my notebook - the rhyme about Superman and Lois Lane, that's my rhyme too. People knew me for my rhymes.

Joey Robinson Jr : Things were not the best for us as All Platinum, so my mother wanted to start a brand new company for this record, which she called Sugar Hill after a street in Harlem which was a very important street years ago, where all the bars were, when my parents had lived there in the old days.

Once the record was made, nobody but my mother had any faith in it. All these producers and other music business people were saying, 'Sylvia, a fifteen minute record just ain't going to work.' And also nobody understood what rap was about.

My father was out of the country at the time, but when he came back even he said we were going to have to make a short version for radio. My mother said, 'No, I'm leaving it like it is. They can play it or not play it, but I'm not changing it, it's a masterpiece.' It was hell of a decision to make.

Joe Robinson Sr (co-founder, Sugar Hill Records) : Sylvia brought this to me, a fifteen minute record on a 12" disc. No fifteen minute record had ever got played on the radio, so I said, 'What am I gonna do with this?' But all I had to do was get one play anywhere and it broke. Radio was difficult at first, but you only needed one play. First time I'd ever seen anything like that happen.

Adrian 'Eazy AD' Harris : History has to be put in its place. I pick up magazines and they always have the Sugarhill Gang. They stopped the culture in 1979. Before records came out we (Cold Crush Brothers) sold close to 500,000 tapes. We had a person that came to our shows called Tape Master. he taped all our shows and sold the tapes. It was tapes before records came out.

Joey Robinson Jr : As soon as we put out Rapper’s Delight on the 12", people started phoning up the radio stations, and orders were coming in for 10,000 copies a day. The demand was so huge we couldn't press them fast enough and we had to get CBS and other companies to press them for us, because before long it was moving 60 to 70,000 records a day.

Afrika Bambaata (rapper) : People were very negative about records at first. They felt it would kill the parties, that it would change everything.

Jeff Myree (rapper, Funky 4+1) : We were shocked that someone had actually put a record out. They sounded to us like they were real amateurs.

Chuck D (rapper, Public Enemy) : I was in my second year of college when Sugar Hill Gang came out with Rapper’s Delight, off the Chic back-track … this is an interesting story …. Eddie Cheaber was going around New York in the spring of ’79 telling everybody he was going to make a record. But he had soared over people’s heads because people couldn’t imagine taking a three hour party vibe and condensing it to a record. Eventually, when the record did come out, it wasn’t by Eddie Cheaber, it was by the Sugar Hill Gang. If you remember, Rapper’s Delight was about fifteen minutes long. Now, the irony of it all is that when Rapper’s Delight came out as a record, people were in amazement at how short, not how long the record was.

MC Melle Mel (rapper, Furious Five) : When Rapper's Delight first came out, every traditional rapper was fuckin' mortified, It was like, 'What the fuck are they doing with our art form?' It's like they axe-murdered the shit.

Grandmaster Caz : People said, 'I heard you on the radio.' 'That ain't me.' 'No, but I heard your rhymes.' 'I know, it's not me though.' 'Well, I know you're gettin' paid.' Yeah, well ... it's fucked me up ever since.

Grandmaster Flash : I felt we should have been the first group to do it. We were the first group to do this - someone took our shot. Every night I would hear this fucking record on the radio. I would hear this shit in my dreams.

Wonder Mike (Michael Wright, Sugarhill Gang) : The New York guys didn't really appreciate it, but I can't help that. I was in the right place at the right time with the right people.

Joey Robinson Jr : Rapper’s Delight went platinum by the end of the month. The biggest day I had was 96,000 units. We were topping the charts in every country on the face of the planet.

Kurtis Blow : Sugarhill had the biggest-selling record of all time, like 17 million copies, not only putting rap on the map, but also standing on its own up against any other form of music. In fact, after hearing Rapper's Delight, my producers, J.B. Moore and Robert Ford, decided to produce my first record and ended up producing my first five albums.

Big Daddy Kane : I look at the Sugarhill Gang as the forefathers of the rap industry who made the impossible possible. Rap back in the '70s was something that you thought would never go on wax, somethin' we'd always be doing in the clubs and the parks. But when Rapper's Delight hit on wax, it made us really want to go after this rap thing.

MC Melle Mel : You just had to get on that train, because it was rollin'.

Arthur Baker (producer) : Rapper's Delight changed my life. If you were in New York when it came out ... it was everywhere you went.

Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) : For three years I bought every Sugar Hill record that came out.