Don't Rhyme For The Sake of Riddlin'. Russell Myrie
scratching he did on the album, ‘Raise the Roof ’ is probably most personal to Johnny Juice. It was the first PE song he ever performed on. Being an ex-graffiti writer from The Bronx, he wanted his first studio session to involve the Wild Style soundtrack. Charlie Ahearn’s 1982 movie Wild Style was the first film to feature all the four elements of hip-hop – emceeing, breakdancing, DJing and graffiti – being practised under one roof. The title referred to a style of graffiti popular in The Bronx as the seventies became the eighties. Juice trawled the album for something to scratch. ‘Wild Style was a big thing for me back in ’79, I was totally ingrained in that shit,’ he reminisces. Back when it was all so simple, his aunt used to take him and his other cousins to the local park jams. But as he had only just reached double figures, he was told in no uncertain terms to ‘hang out over there by the swings and stay the fuck outta trouble’.
‘I threw in that 10, 9, 8, and I scratched it in, just like that.’ Sometimes, when the other guys weren’t fully on point ‘they’d be like, “Can you fix it?”’ says Juice, ‘and I would go back and go over the track that they did and do it tighter. I did almost all the records.’ This is obviously why Johnny Juice is credited with rhythm scratching in Yo! Bum Rush the Show’s liner notes. Although he scratched live, Terminator X didn’t perform a lot of the scratches that appeared on the records. Lack of time was the main factor. There were also financial concerns. As he himself would assert years later on the popular single from his second solo album, ‘It All Comes Down to the Money’; the second line in that song’s chorus lays it out clear: ‘Whether it’s rainy, or snowy or sunny’.
PE’s meagre budget of $17,000 meant they had to record in a hurry. ‘A lot of times me and Terminator would be there at the same time,’ Juice recalls. ‘We didn’t have a lot of opportunities to keep going over and going over to get it right. They’d give Norman two tries, and if Norman couldn’t do it on the third try, they’d be like, “Juice, see what you can do”,’ and I’d normally knock that out on the first take. I was superhyper man. My hands would be moving even if I wasn’t touching a record.’
While the self-contained unit didn’t have to worry about interference from producers, in the late eighties hip-hop acts definitely had to worry about incompetent engineers. Like most at the time, the engineers felt that because they were rappers, these guys must be idiots. Eric was particularly pissed off. ‘I’m like, “You know what guys, I’ve been in the studio a million times, we don’t even need this guy”.’ As they knew nothing about hip-hop, the engineers would shoot down most of PE’s suggestions. It’s a good job The Bomb Squad never listened to these fools. ‘They were basically telling us, “Well you can’t do that, you can’t put that much reverb on it, you can’t push up that channel. You’ll just have noise.”’
Years later, Eric still sounds vexed about the situation. ‘I was like, “I know what we can do and what we can’t do. It’s a new form of music, we’re gonna do what feels good and what we want.” They would be like, “You know what? It’s gonna take a little time for us to get the sound.” I’m like, “No it’s not,’ cos I know how to work this stuff, don’t give us this bullshit.”’
Def Jam kept their word and gave PE the complete creative control they had promised. Rick Rubin visited the studio just once, said, ‘Wassup’, and bounced soon after. The only other person to get involved was a pre-Living Colour Vernon Reid, who was brought in by Bill Stephney to play the solo on ‘Sophisticated Bitch’.
The only other people present at INS studios were Joeski Love, and occasionally his manager Vincent Davis. Keith Sweat was also recording an album at the time and once or twice the PE crew would glimpse him emerging from his jaguar in his mink coat. Was he aware of the sonic maelstrom PE were whipping up just down the corridor?
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