It all started because Phase thought Fred didn’t have the right to put fab five in front of his name because he wasn’t one of the original five.
When my book came out, Fred exploded. This was certainly a major blow to his integrity as an artist.
When I’d first met Fred, I could have bought a dozen of his paintings on canvas for under a grand. I’d just paid Futura $100 for a signed and framed copy of his “Break” train. Why it didn’t occur to me to pay Fred the same for a copy of his Warhol train, I’ll never know. I just focussed on Futch because I thought he was out in front of all the others.
Many, many times in my life I have let a fortune slip though my fingers. All those Fred paintings I could have had for $100 are now probably worth $10 or $20 grand each.
Fred came to see me and presented his defense.
He was the biggest fan of the original fab five, but they were no longer writing. It was just Lee alone and nobody even knew who he really was. So Fred went on a quest to find Lee. And when he found him, told him he was a grandmaster and it was time to saddle up and ride into fame and glory, and if he inducted Fred into the Fab Five and they restarted the vibe, this goal could be achieved. Lee was like, who is this guy so amped up about me? But he shrugged and went along, and next thing he knows he’s the star of the first film on hip hop, and Fred is a major character, playing Phase 2, only Fred changed it to Phade. Fred had never met Phase, although he was like a god to Futura.
Michael Holman was a major player. He knew how important Phase was and they formed a company and signed up the best breakers to form The New York City Breakers, as the alternative to the Rock Steady Crew, who were already signed up by Blue, a recent arrival from England who started the first downtown hip hop shows. Technically, the first was Bam at the Mudd Club, something Fred arranged, but Blue made it a weekly event, and quickly moved it to the Roxy roller rink near the West Side highway. Soon Phase and Holman go different ways as Phase concentrates on publishing the definitive fanzine on graffiti, and Holman gets involved in Beat Streat and MTV.
About a decade ago, Holman was going through his archives, reading a pretty much unedited and extensive interview with Bam that had been published by the East Village Eye and discovers the words: “hip hop.” He calls up Leonard Abrams and tells him, “You’re the first person to put hip hop into print!”
For decades, that honor had fallen to me. But Abrams has a bit of a vendetta against me, as I only worked for his paper for a year before I quit to found a downtown weekly that was competing against his quarterly newspaper that had no regular schedule and he only paid the art director and not the writers and photographers. New York Beat paid everyone, except me. I didn’t need money as my film deal with Orion had gone through to make the first big budget Hollywood hip hop movie. I also had the first hip hop book coming out on St. Martins with the title: Hip Hop.
Holman was also doing books, TV, and films. His book was designed to look like a comic, his TV show was called Rap Attack, and nowhere did he use the words hip hop for maybe a decade.
So Abrams was pulling the rug on my legacy, claiming he put “hip hop” into print first as his greatest crowning achievement. It was so absurd, yet, he managed to sell this story to the NY media. It was pretty insulting and when Abrams held a promotional event blowing the horn for his taking credit for something I’d done, I decided to attend.
Later it would turn out a that community newspaper in Philadelphia had beat the East Village Eye by a mile. But nobody in media but me understood the importance of the words, and I was the first to move it from being buried in small type onto the front page of the Voice as a headline and cover story and making a big deal about changing the culture from “rap” to “hip hop” because there was a lot more than rap going on.
The same way I started a legalization campaign around the number 420 because that might be enough to get us religious rights protections.
I could not resist attending this event with my video camera and getting a front row seat. There were a couple cameras there, and many reporters, and Fred was the main attraction. Leonard was managing everything and told me to turn off my camera. I wasn’t allowed to have any footage on what was about to happen.
A tall figure dressed in black entered the room, his face completely obscured by a veil. But I instantly knew Phase had arrived and wanted to continue his vendetta with Fred, but in public for the first time.
The first time Phase snorts at something Fred says, Fred whips around and snarls angrily and lets Phase know he will not stand for shade, however slight. Phase has already hurt him deeply.
The guy Abrams had brought in to film this promotional event has a meltdown halfway through and his camera malfunctions, so there might not be any tape on this confrontation because Abrams wouldn’t let me film it.
It was just a silly feud between two of the greatest figures in hip hop history, and so similar in many ways to the feud between me and the asshole whose name must not be mentioned. Only that feud revolved around the fact this dude did not have the right to call himself Mr. 420, and pull the rug on my legacy.
What was probably bugging Phase was the fact he got disappeared, while Fred rode into glory. I know that’s exactly what was bugging me about the asshole whose name must not be mentioned.
to be continued