WILDSTYLE SPECIAL 5: GRAND WIZARD THEODORE

This is my first time performing in Amsterdam. I was here last year with Sugar Hill Gang, Kurtis Blow and Melle Mel. We came here on our day off, we parked our bus a little bit out of town. We’re all good friends man, everyone, Treacherous Three, Sugar Hill, we all go back like baby’s and pacifiers, haha.

De turntable-tovenaar is groot geworden door naar school te gaan. Dit klinkt enigszins misleidend, aangezien het niet de wiskunde- en geschiedenisboeken zijn die er voor gezorgd hebben dat de DJ zijn geld verdient met het strelen van vinyl. Theodore brak namelijk door in de kantine van zijn school.

I started DJ’ing when I was twelve. I just wanted to do something I really liked. The thing I remember most, was when I was in high school. Whenever we all went to the lunchroom to have lunch, the principal used to play music through the loudspeakers. So you would be sitting down, eating your lunch, and the principal would be playing The Village People, Donna Summer, a lot of disco music. And at a certain point, everybody just got tired of it, it was always the same shit. So a friend of mine went up to the principal and said ‘hey listen, why won’t you let my friend make a cassette tape, and play it through the loudspeaker’. So our principal said ‘ok, let him make the tape, I’ll listen to it, and maybe I’ll play it’. I went home, made the tape, and that’s how I created the scratch, too.

You see, back in the days, we didn’t have crossfaders. So when I was playing the music, I had one record playing on the left, and I had the other ready to play on the right. So I was moving the records back and forth, and forth and back, while they were playing. Then my mom came in, and I was like ‘aaaw shit’. When she left, I rewind the tape back, and I listen to the part where my moms was in the room. And suddenly I heard myself scratching the record, and I was like ‘wow!’. So I started to experiment with it a couple of hours. After a couple if days, the scratch was official.

Back the to the tape for school. I tried to make the BEST tape I ever made in my life. I had stuff like Aerosmith, cutting up their beats, Bongo Rock, the breakbeats from Ike Turner, Isaac Hayes and James Brown, a lot of stuff like that. I was using the old Teqnique turntables at that point. The mixers that we used back then were HUGE, man. And during that session, my mom came busting into the room, screaming at me. That’s how I created the scratch. When I finally finished that cassette tape, I gave it to my principal, and it took him about three of four days to put it on. So after that, everybody started coming into the lunchroom, like ‘damn, there playing some good music’. So everybody was having their lunch, just groovin’ man, it was crazy!

Na zijn succes op school ging het allemaal vanzelf. Het grote voordeel voor DJ’s als Grand Wizard Theodore en Grandmaster Flash, was de geringe competitie. Hiphop stond in haar kinderschoenen en deze DJ’s hadden de taak om de cultuur naar een hoger niveau te brengen.

When I first started, there wasn’t really anyone out there. Just me, my brother and Grandmaster Flash. My brother was down with Flash, so that’s how we hooked up, that’s how I got introduced to the whole DJ culture. As time passed, Flash formed his own group, and me and my brother, Mean Gene, formed our own group. That were the first two DJ crews in hiphop. But I never thought I was an originator. I didn’t really recognize it, untill time went by. I was just doing something I really enjoyed and loved.

Everyday my skills were getting better and better. I was in demand all the time. I was the first DJ that was needledropping. I was the first person that was scratching. I was the only person playing RnB music with hiphop, rock and other styles. I was the only one doing all that, so everyone came to the parties to see what Grand Wizard Theodore was about. That’s how I got to be Grand Wizard, because of how I was just playing with records. That has evolved to me doing so many different things, even nowadays. I play housemusic at weddingreceptions, I play salsa and merengue at office parties. I play Elvis, Dean Martin, all the Motown stuff, Frank Sinatra, all that. Sometimes a little hiphop in between, haha!

De bescheiden DJ werd van begins af aan omringd door het handjevol mensen dat ook hiphop als beroep uitoefende. Zo kwam hij al snel in contact met Afrika Bambaata en zijn Zulu Nation.

It must have been around ’79 or ’80 that I was asked into the Zulu Nation. Bambaata never asked me, I just made myself a member. We all try to accomplish the same goals, as far as educating people on the early days of hiphop, on themself, on the government, stuff like that. We were all thinking in the same direction. Things didn’t really change when I became a member of the nation. We just had occasion meetings, we did barbeques every summer, we do stuff for the kids every summer. And we still do all those things, Zulu Nation is still going strong! It’s just things that we love to do and to give something back to the community.

Sinds de jaren ’80 is het DJ landschap enorme ontwikkelingen ondergaan. In tegenstelling tot twintig á dertig jaar geleden, is het erg eenvoudig om de DJ wereld te infiltreren. Dit resulteert in een scenario waarin elke knuppel met draaitafels en tenminste zeven werkende vingers zich een DJ kan noemen. Tot frustratie van échte DJ’s.

You got guys that come in and play twenty minutes on a turntable, and think they’re a DJ. It don’t work like that. Myself, whenever I played music, it was for eight hours at the least. The only time I gave myself rest, was when I went to the bathroom, went for a drink or was talking to a girl outside. Plus, I played reggae, hiphop, rock, everything. Not just hiphop music, ALL the genres. To be a DJ, you have to play everything. You can’t just get on stage and play 80’s stuff or 90’s stuff. You gotta play everything.

The same goes for the use of CD’s. I use a computer from time the time, like when I go to a club and they want me to play a RnB set for three of fours. But 99 percent of time, I’m straight up vinyl. Like tonight, I’ll be doing everything on vinyl. When you’re using a computer, you’re not really capturing the essence of DJ’ing, man! You can compare it with a person flying a virtual reality plane. That doesn’t make you no pilot! You’re not really doing it. I rememeber when I was in Switserland not too long ago, and a person came up to me like ‘yo, I’ve been DJ’ing for like six or seven years’. And I asked him what kind of turntables he used, and he was like ‘Oh I don’t use turntables, I use CD players. I told him he wasn’t a DJ. You’ve got to have the feeling of vinyl in your hands.

We carry like twenty or thirty crates of records to parties. But if you see an oldschool DJ using a computer, you can’t really be mad, because they’ve been carrying records all their life, for like twenty or thirty years. But if you’ve only been DJ’ing for five or six years, and you come in with your laptop? Doesn’t make any sense.

Is er dan helemaal niks positieve uit te krijgen bij Theodore? Gelukkig wel. Als ik de driftige DJ kalmeer met enkele verhalen over twee van mijn vrienden, die door het CD-tijdperk een grotere kans hebben op een carrière achter de draaitafels, stemt hij in.

I must admit there’s an upside to DJ’s using CD’s. For example, I teach at the Grandmaster Flash Academy in New York. When the class is over, I always do a demonstation with turntables. But their is a laptop on the side, for one of the instructors. So he’s watching me do it on the turntables, and copies is on the laptop. And the students can learn a lot easier doing it on the laptops. So I guess the good thing about this technology and CD’s, is that it gives a lot of young people nowadays a better chance to get into DJ’ing. And trust me, there are a lot of DJ’s out there man! When I came out, there were a handfull of us. Now you got the Million DJ March in New York!

Tot zover alweer deel 5 van de Wild Style special op House of Hiphop. Volgende keer praten we met Charlie Ahearn, de man die Wild Style vanuit zijn regisseurstoeltje realiseerde. Deze zesde en één-na-laatste special staat garant voor mooie verhalen, vanuit een heel bijzonder perspectief. Stay tuned!

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