April 15th is the day most of us dread because we only think of it in terms of the statements we submit to the Internal Revenue Service, but April 15th should be an American holiday. Today is also the day that Jack Roosevelt Robinson played his first game as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Without this watershed moment in our country’s history we might still be using separate water fountains across the nation. It bears remembering that Jackie Robinson was as proactive off the field as he was on the diamond. He was an activist for equality in every walk of life and one of the greatest examples of the American ideal.
Let his memory make every April 15th a day to look forward to.
That NYTimes article depicts a time long past in NYC history. I remember the nights of going to some spot that would have an open bar and a $5 dollar cover charge, but we wouldn’t even have the $5 to get in so we would dig someone’s pocket beforehand. Silly kid shit is all it was to us. We had no consideration for what happened the following day as long as we were in the club that night. This was a daily operation too.
As we got older and doing dumb teenage shit lost its luster we moved into other business. Still going out to the clubs almost nightly and still living just enough for the city. For several years the city made it impossible for any nightspots to play Hip-Hop music. The clubs would open one week and be shuttered the next. The city has passed quality of life ordinances which would levy fines on establishments for complaints they received corcerning noise or trash on the sidewalk. During this time in the late 1980s-early 1990s there were several pop-up parties in loft spaces along Broadway. Milky Way, PayDay and $100,000 Bar come to mind because of their candy bar references. Wild Pitch was another party that accessed various Broadway loft spaces during its tenure.
Rap music didn’t have a dedicated home until the TRIP party opened up inside a former warehouse on Manhattan’s westside meat packing district. What was ill is that you could smell the blood on the sidewalks as you congregated in front of the club called Mars. The architects that I worked for knew every single club owner in the city because their office was where everyone passed thru to get the design assistance you needed to comply with some of the City’s arcane building and zoning code laws. Since I did the drafting for these projects I would visit the spaces long before they opened up and I would survey the spaces in order to complete the floor plans. I would mingle with the owners and managers and when the club’s opened I knew the right names to drop to get past the velvet ropes.
Mars was one of the dopest spaces I worked on because it wasn’t simply a wide open party area, but several different floors and rooms that were all interconnected. There was a floor for every genre of music that was underground at the time. There was the Hip-Hop floor which was the primary residence of DJ Clark Kent. Clark was the dude that crafted the Run-DMC ‘Peter Piper’ scratch. I remember seeing De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Brand Nubian perform in the Hip-Hop room on different occasions. Mars also had a dancehall room, a house music room, a punk rock room and from time to time there was a techno room. The TRIP party brought all of these genres together for at least a few hours. The lead promoter was named Beasly and he was a skateboarder and club kid from the Chelsea projects.
Beasly knew all the club kids by face and he distributed a laminated card to everyone that he wanted to attend the TRIP party. Your laminate got you in the building without having to pay a cover charge. The TRIP laminates also put you down with other heads you might encounter walking the streets. Washington Square Park was the meet up location back then. I would have gone uptown during my lunch break to copp some weed or some tabs from Lexington Ave and then I would link with Soundwave or Polotron who would have a 40oz.(or two) of that Old Gold and the plan was in effect. We would be goofy on goofballs all night. Mars had this incredible sound system in every space where you felt like you were inside of the speaker and the beat was supplanting your heartbeat. The only respite from the sound would be up on the roof which is where I would go to burn my trees.
What made Mars so fux’n dope was how it intermingled the fans of all types of underground music. There were Hip-Hop heads who were finally exposed to house music and rock fans were getting their first taste of rap or reggae. Mostly it was this freeform environment where you could enjoy your favorite grooves while you were really high and no one said shit to you sideways. I credit Beasly for that vibe more than anyone else. If you were blessed with a laminate then you were going to have a good trip.
TWitter users have a popular hashtag designation when they want to “tweet” about music they are listening to. They type #MM for ‘music Monday’. It’s silly groupthink (we’ll talk about this later) similar to the #FF (follow Friday) hashtag, but at the end of the day the internets is a bastion for silly groupthink memes.
Maybe that’s why I bought two(2) vinyl copies of Gil Scott-Heron’s latest album ‘I’m New Here’. Maybe I thought I could zig while the rest of the world zags. I suppose the idea of trying to be an individual is also groupthink on some level. I like the vinyl edition mostly because of the art that was issued inside of the album jacket.
Gil Scott-Heron is an amazingly honest artist. In the sense that what you see is what you get and the pretense is removed and thrown away. His greatest characteristic in his music is his frailty, his vulnerability. I think Gil Scott-Heron’s honesty with this characteristic is what makes him so great. He sits before you naked [ll], yet unafraid. There is nothing that you can steal from him that he won’t just give you of his own volition.
Editor’s note: Our good friend Willis Still Sunsweet forwarded this review he posted online elsewhere…
Had Gil Scott-Heron’s (b. 1949) superb I’m New Here not come out recently, this might have been a threnody. Sixteen years had passed since Heron’s previous album, 1994’s invigorating Spirits; more than a decade lay between that and its predecessor, Moving Target. In the interim he’d been adduced “proto-rap”— reductive praise for America’s greatest living blues singer but that doesn’t get it all either; Heron’s brilliance is too vast to summarize.
Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 debut, Small Talk At Lenox & 125th, set the lyrical tone, a black Phil Ochs via Langston Hughes, “Whitey On The Moon” with spare percussion grooves. His 1971 follow-up, Pieces Of A Man, was the musical future, with pianist/composer Brian Jackson’s avant soul-jazz arrangements allowing Heron to speak and increasingly sing of everything: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” “Home Is Where The Hatred Is,” “Who’ll Pay Reparations On My Soul,” “We Almost Lost Detroit,” “B-Movie,” an epic evisceration of Ronald Reagan and more. Then darkness veiled his eyes.
In November 2001, as New York State prisoner number 01R5191, Heron began serving eighteen months for “Crim Poss Contr Substance 5th.” In July 2006, as 06R3165, twenty-six months more; again, possession of cocaine. Which travails make I’m New Here all the more staggering. He stares down Robert Johnson and Bobby “Blue” Bland, tries to write a letter but can’t get past “Dear Baby, how are you?” He triumphs anyway. Welcome back, brother.
‘I’m New Here‘ is unlike any R & B we are accustomed to because the ‘B’ that normally represents the shallow themes of selfish bullshit has been supplanted with the spiritual ‘B’ that belongs to blues music. The blues isn’t supposed to make you feel bad either. The blues should make you reflect on what you can do to make your soul complete. The blues is your humanity and everything that you love. I’ll cherish my memory of Gil Scott-Heron as the most honest, real artist I ever listened to and I thank him for reminding me of my great-grandma.
