My
brother [Russell] was his own individual self. My other brother
was always following my thing, like if I collected comic books
my younger brother would collect comics. Russell wasn't into it.
He was establishing his own identity. I noticed that because he
stood out. He used to do things to tease us. Like if we made a
comment to him he'd go "no, no, no not today, not tomorrow!"
He would invent certain words or phrases that our friends in the
neighborhood also picked up and they would copy what he would
do.
Rza lived in Staten Island and we used to go over to each other's
houses a lot. In the mid 80's, they started coming around my house
a lot more because they got tired of staying in Staten Island.
We had a DJ system in the back room and I would literally take
a head phone and put it under a shoebox and play beats. We would
crank up the volume so it would be amplified and you could hear
the beats coming through the box. The Fat Boys came out with their
first album- which they got to reissue, that's a classic. I remember
putting the headphones to my mouth and I did the human beatbox.
My aunt walked into the room and thought it was a record and I
told her that was me. She flipped out! Rza was like, let's make
a record. Rza was gifted even then because he would do these rhymes
that didn't sound like the standard UTFO , Grandmaster Flash,
Melle Mel type of rhymes. It had that same type of a style but
it was different. That's the thing about Rza and Russell, they
had individual styles. They had individual things that established
them apart from us. Their friends would copy what they did. So
they had this language and interaction between them that my other
brother and I were outsiders to. I retreated into my music. I
was playing keyboards in the room, making tapes. I would turn
on the drum machine and play keys and make songs up on the spot.
We moved and all the tapes got lost. I'm a great archiver but
that stuff got lost when we moved.
One of my best friends was a keyboardist and used to live upstairs
from me. He used to come down to my house and play and I would
bang out beats on the telephone book because my family couldn't
afford a drum set. |
