As a young man, Hypnote-man began his storied music business career in 1984 in the mailroom of the independent dance music label StreetWise. Our hero had purposely gotten himself fired from his first job out of college and, miraculously awarded unemployment benefits, set out to find a record company to work for. With nothing but time on his hands and this simple focus, he literally became a pest at some of New York's hottest dance labels-- West End, Personal, Prelude, Profile, Sleeping Bag and 4th & Broadway-- until word finally got around that there was a kid who was actually willing to work for free as an "intern", which was still relatively uncommon in those days. And that this kid knew his dance music.

The people at StreetWise could not for the life of them understand why anyone would want to work for free, but they liked the idea! Ensconced in the mailroom (and given the nickname "Freebie"), it was made clear at the outset that as long as all of the company's packages went out, Freebie could do whatever he wanted in his chosen area of interest, Marketing and Promotion, as long as he didn't "knock over any of the furniture", so to say.

StreetWise was an extremely important and also a quite unique label for many reasons. It was actually owned by some Harvard MBAs who had grown tired of the grind of working at the prestigious McKinsey consulting firm, and who had somehow through some friends met a hot young producer by the name of Arthur Baker, who also had his own state of the art studio. The label started out very strong, going straight to the top of the Dance chart with a Baker-produced cover of an Eddy Grant song called "Walking On Sunshine", by Rockers Revenge. With some production help from Jellybean Benitez, a talented young artist and a DJ at New York's mostly latino b-boy club the Funhouse, but who is of course now probably better known for having, um, discovered Madonna, the record was enormous and the label was in business.

Then they made several unremarkable records until their tenth, when they stumbled onto one of the biggest records of 1983, "I.O.U." by Freeez, produced by Baker and his team which included sequencer genius John Robie and Jellybean. You couldn't go anywhere in New York that summer without hearing that song, or "Planet Rock", the Afrika Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force classic that Baker and Robie penned and produced for emerging StreetWise "sister label" Tommy Boy. While these were smash hit classic records, they were soon to be dwarfed, as were many things, when a man named Maurice Starr walked into the StreetWise offices and sold the owners on a group of black teens from Roxbury who were supposed to be a sort of Jackson Five/Menudo group designed to appeal to young black girls. While having the New Edition on the StreetWise roster shot the label immediately to the top of the Pop, R&B and Dance charts, it also put them into the sights of many people within the industry who were ready for their taste of the action, if you know what I mean.

By 1984, when Freebie showed up, StreetWise was already in litigation with Starr over New Edition, who wanted his boys on a major label. His specious case was based on the "Menudo defense", which meant basically that you can keep your Browns, Bells, Bivs and DeVoes-- that like Menudo, the New Edition "concept" was bigger than all of them and was meant all along to have a similarly revolving membership-- yet unfortunately it was precisely the boys themselves that the label had inked. That the young men themselves actually were talented and in fact not really part of a plan like this was obscured as much as possible by Starr, who was by then probably already fleshing out his white version, another group from Boston to be called New Kids on the Block. Whichever way the New Edition case was headed, it did not seem that the label was going to be able to hold on to its top act for long.

Meanwhile, between his groundbreaking work with the Tommy Boy acts and the high-commission remixes he was doing for such big major label stars of the day as Hall & Oates, Mick Jagger and Diana Ross, Arthur Baker was no longer anywhere to be found. His partners were barely able to get him on the phone, let alone get him to make an appearance at the label offices which he owned along with them. But with the label's firm hold on the Dance chart, StreetWise soldiered on into 1984 with a spate of releases that would prove to galvanize the world of dance music, and yet briefly and for the last time before it splintered off into a million pieces once and for all and the label with it.

StreetWise started off the year auspiciously enough with, of all things, a Dr. John 12", which did pretty well because there was a video for it on MTV. Then there was the now-legendary one-off slab of 80's Electropop called "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" by an artist enigmatically known only as Dominatrix. Through some very hard promotion work, the label was also able to score simultaneous #1 and #2 dance hits in Billboard with ex-Freeez leader John Rocca's "I Want It To Be Real", an infectious "Funhouse record" that was big with the breakdancers and wallflower b-boys alike; and longtime disco diva Loleatta Holloway's "Crash Goes Love", an uptempo Dance/B-Boy number with the prescient Pop-crossover feel of Shannon's soon-to-be-seminal "Let The Music Play". With that in mind and amidst the scoffs of the rest of the staff, and yet on the grounds that it would knock over no furniture, Freebie serviced a bunch to the NY chart-hit Radio stations, in the hopes that this record would catch on. While perhaps the scoffing was well-deserved-- for it was widely known that you had to PAY to get your records on these stations-- Freebie nonetheless felt it warmed up programmers to records like Shannon's, and ultimately to those by artists like Stacey Q and Taylor Dayne who went on to dominate the 80's pop airwaves after all. Freebie also did a full college radio servicing of all the high points of the StreetWise catalogue, taking time out to chat about it with college programmers during the afternoons. This marked what I believe was the first time that a label ever did a full servicing of black dance music to college radio, with promotion, which is something I still take a measure of pride in today.

Energized by this recent wave of success and with Baker's focus elsewhere, it was up to the label's hip young staff to find the next big thing. And, boy did they! While staffers Greg Riles and Yvonne Turner had things covered at Larry Levan's legendary Paradise Garage and were very tight with New York's top remixer Timmy Regisford, staff A&R man Apache Ramos had a number of interesting acts in his pipeline as well. An interesting character who had actually appeared in the film "The Warriors" and who was also a college friend of Baker's, Apache signed a young man who went by the name of Dougie Fresh to the label. He also added a tall man with a deep voice who walked around New York wearing a Colonel's outfit. "Music Is The Answer" by Colonel Abrams was the next, and sadly the last, big single for StreetWise. Its deep chunky basslines and deep-voiced vocals were favored at the Paradise Garage and "Music Is The Answer" ushered in and epitomized the sound that we used to just call it "that Garage sound", but which was a strain of what we now know as House Music.

There was no such thing as "House Music" back then but another of Apache's signings was one of its pioneers. Rachel Cain, known also as "Screamin' Rachel", was from Freebie/Hypnote-man's hometown of Chicago. From summers spent home from college, I knew firsthand what kind of scene was going on in Chicago at the Warehouse, and centered around local DJs like Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles as well as a loose group of crazy-talented Radio remixers known as the Hot Mix Five. An ex-punk rock chick from Chicago who had put out a single in 1980 as "Screamin' Rachel & Remote", she was now into a different scene altogether and in fact was the first person to start putting on "Warehouse Parties" where Frankie Knuckes would spin. Possibly drawing on Rachel's punk background, they sometimes even did all-ages shows.

Embryonically and etymologically speaking, it was House Music, though thankfully it would not yet be saddled with that moniker for a couple of years to come. Her single "My Main Man", if released by StreetWise at that exact time, would probably be widely considered the first House Music single ever. That it was never released by StreetWise was probably one of the best things that never happened to her. She and I became pretty good friends because of the whole Chicago connection and I loved her single and couldn't wait for us to put it out. On one of her trips to New York, she brought her friend Jesse Saunders with her, a young artist, DJ and entrepreneur who was actually from my neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. That we had friends in common from Kenwood High School, three blocks from where I grew up, made us nearly instant friends. Rachel was hoping to get him signed to StreetWise too, an idea which I helped promote to everyone as best I could. His stuff was really good. He had a lot of great records out under weird pseudonyms and stuff but they were all really good. Soon, when it was clear that probably neither of them was ever going to get a record out on StreetWise, they headed back to Chicago and, along with a third friend Vince Lawrence, started Trax Records, the seminal Chicago House Music label. (Jesse eventually also got signed to Geffen but not too much came of that). Trax helped build the story of House music from there, even managing to capture the imagination of the UK music press, changing that country's pop music forever, and even finally putting out "My Main Man" as the tenth release in its catalogue. It stands as the most important Chicago record label, and reflection of Chicago music, since Chess Records.

Some of the most meaningful moments in my life at StreetWise were still to come. StreetWise also had a more "street" imprint called PartyTime but it wasn't really too "street". In fact it was even sort of a lousy label until we put out a little record called "It's Yours" by T La Rock and Jazzy Jay. Interestingly, though not at all typical of a second imprint, it carried with it the markings of yet a third imprint... Def Jam. It also had an adjunct catalogue number of DJ-001.

While technically there was actually one Def Jam release preceding it-- an album by Rick Rubin's own punk band Hose-- "It's Yours" was probably the first real "street" record ever. Now Run-DMC, easily my favorite recording artist of 1984, were pretty street but this was RAW, to the BONE... STREET. Nothing to gloss it up for anyone besides hard beats, cuts, scratches and rhymes, "It's Yours" can now looked back upon as one of the most important and influential records of all time in popular music. Intended to be a pairing of Special K from Sugarhill's old-school-even-for-then the Treacherous Three and his brother Jazzy Jay from Bam's Zulu Nation, this record was a monster that sold about 40,000 records in one week just in New York alone. And all with no airplay or marketing. I deduced right from there that that was part of what a "street record" was! It set the gold standard for all future scratching, and is still THE record to sample if you want scratchin'. But Special K dropped out before the session and a lot of the slack was picked up by Rubin and apparently by his other NYU cohorts who were by then calling themselves the Beastie Boys.

They were also more from the hardcore scene, (although I was so into black dance music that I didn't really even know that expression) and had had a record out on Rat Cage records, called "Cookie Puss", which even by their own admission was essentially a novelty record of mind-numbing stupidity, hence of course notoriety and cult popularity. (In New York, there is an ice cream chain that carries a line of special yet awkwardly ugly ice cream cakes, one of which is the Cookie Puss. The record basically consisted of a series of incredibly sophomoric-- perhaps even literally!-- and inconclusive telephone inquiries to a local Carvel store about the cake, set to some terrible music).

I met Rick Rubin where I met nearly everyone... in the mailroom. Directly opposite the executive office of StreetWise, the mailroom was a great place to be an intern (although by this time, they were actually PAYING ME because I was a good mailroom guy), because you could hear all but the most confidential discussions of the label owners. I actually think that I (incidentally, everyone had actually stopped calling me Freebie after only a few days) probably knew the most about what was going on at StreetWise and most of our visitors would poke their head in and say hello, even if it was just by accident. I still remember as clear as if it were yesterday HUGE ARGUMENTS with Rick INSISTING that the T La Rock single MUST BE PACKAGED WITH THE SPECIAL DEF JAM TONE ARM logo, that anything else was just a travesty and that if StreetWise ever makes a decent record, they will one day understand this (unbeknownst to him, they had shipped off the first batch of the single in the generic PartyTime sleeves). That he was met with derision and poo-pooed by the owners for his aesthetic vision is also not something I will forget. Often he would stop off in the mailroom to cool off after one of these arguments. I can remember telling him, a bit out of school perhaps, that while I wasn't sure who was legally right about this, that he should hold fast to his vision.

But nothing would prepare me, or indeed most of the staff for what was about to happen. One Friday afternoon, they called us all into the executive office to let us know that as of that very day the label was officially closed. While I am now in absolutely full knowledge about the exact particulars surrounding the owners' dilemma and their ultimate decision to sell off the company, I don't know if it is exactly in my best interests health-wise to divulge them. Let's just say that it has been suggested that their choice of a label name was in the end an ironic one.

I do know that it was enough to make a 22 year-old man cry.

Coming soon: CHAPTER TWO: We talk on rekkits...