THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

I want to say it was 2002 or 2003, I was already established in skating and I was riding for a company called USD. My problem was that I had my head wrapped around a lot of projects. I had one distribution company that I worked with making my wheels/hardware, another company I was working with doing a street contest called IMYTA, and there was also this video game that was coming out that was called Rolling and I put many hours in on that project. But that’s a whole different story.

“During this time period, I was also working with a bunch of music artists like Sage Francis, Sole from Anticon, and Masta Killa from the Wu-Tang. I was making a DVD surrounding all those artists and rollerblading.”

During this time period, I was also working with a bunch of music artists like Sage Francis, Sole from Anticon, and Masta Killa from the Wu-Tang. I was making a DVD surrounding all those artists and rollerblading. I was organizing concerts/shows with these artists for skating related events.
On the flip side of it all, the popularity of blading was at an all time low. Blading was dropped from the X Games and TV exposure was none existent. I was only getting older and I was at a point where I needed to pick a direction to go.

I was on this summer tour from Spain to Sweden and I ended up in the UK for a sick promotional event for this video game that’s supposed to come out internationally, called Rolling. It was on this trip on my way to the UK, where thoughts of starting a real skate company began. My original sponsor, Roces, have made rollerblades since the beginning of skating. They were going to take on the production side of my brand. They were a family run business based in Italy. I knew if I could work with them, we could manufacture an amazing product.

(click on the above image for a Jon Julio interview @ believeinone.com)

Starting a skate company was a dream that became a reality. I started Valo in 2003. My take on skate design was to push the whole sneaker fashion direction. Our initial line of skates were all made in Italy. We had a great advantage because everything was produced in house at our own factories.

Since day one it has been full on, pushing the shoe, the skates, the fashion, getting people more interested in the product rather than the skating. Obviously, the skating always spoke for itself. In the earlier days skating had always lacked image and fashion with regard to the products.

The first two years brought frustration. I had a lot at stake, a lot of money at stake. It was a tough road. After the first two years, sales weren’t looking so hot. My personal feelings on the industry were that it was shaky at best. In a kind of seesaw industry I was like, “Where is this market going? Where are all the shops going? What brands were the shops buying? Where were all the skater run shops at?”

I was definitely introducing a high-end product into the market. It wasn’t until the third year that things started to turn around. People started to understand what I was trying to do with the brand. And the website, that was key. Getting the skaters, shops, events and magazines involved was so important. It took some time to establish Valo.

I was making a decent living skating for someone else. Starting my own business was a big change. I am 32 now, and part of coming up in these types of sports, for anyone who wants longevity, is the business end. I look a lot to industries like skateboarding and BMX, because it shows the potential for rollerblading. Pros in those sports are in their mid 30s making a living and running their businesses. By seeing how far they can take their sports, it sheds light of how far rollerblading can possibly go.

So yeah, that is part of my come up. I’m in it for the long haul, and this is how I did it. Starting as a sponsored skater, to running my own business. It feels good to work everyday on something that is mine. I work hard to get people on skates.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

When I first started Beautiful Decay Magazine, one thing we always did was throw release parties. At the very beginning, the release parties were vital to the business because advertising didn’t cover the cost of publishing the magazine, let alone making a profit. So my friends and I would throw warehouse parties, to raise money to put out the issues.

“He opened up the trench coat and pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and was just working the crowd with it, threatening everyone.”

The great thing about Baltimore is that space is cheap, and you can rent out an entire level of the warehouse for $400 to $500 a month. I was friends with a lot of bike couriers at the time and they loved to party. All they cared about was having enough money to pay their rent and buy cheap one dollar canned beer. I became friends with a courier who lived in a large warehouse downtown, and was willing to rent me his entire warehouse which was about 3,000 to 4,000 square feet for about $100 and all the beers he could drink for the night.  I would rent out these warehouses and get a DJ to play, and maybe pay them fifty bucks a night. Actually, one of the guys that always deejayed our parties is Chris Devlin, who is now one of the members of the hip hop group Spank Rock. It’s funny because back then he was just my next door neighbor and my graffiti friend, and for fifty bucks a night he would just stand straight for six hours and spin. Now he gets flown all over the world and gets paid thousands of dollars to perform for half an hour. The B/D parties were one of the first gigs that Chris performed at.

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Anyway we would get the warehouse space for a hundred bucks, a deejay for fifty bucks and would buy three kegs of beer for sixty bucks a keg. The whole party only cost like $350 at most. Everyone who worked the event would work for free. It was usually just me and four of my friends. One person would work the door. One person would work the keg. Another person would walk around and make sure the warehouse didn’t get trashed. And another person would sell copies of the magazine, various graffiti videos, and a couple of other things that we sold through the magazine.

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The best party we ever had was for the Bucket Brigade. It consisted of graffiti artists painting directly on the warehouse walls. It was a cool concept for the show because the graffiti writers could do whatever they wanted, as long as they didn’t use spray paint. We had everything– from a tent sculpture, to record album covers, to flying skulls painted on the wall. All the graffiti letters were done in house paint with brushes. It was a pretty eclectic show. At that show we had about 400 to 600 people show up from all parts of the country. We had people drive down all the way to Baltimore from New Jersey, New York, Boston, Virginia, DC, and Tennessee. For a party that wasn’t promoted online, didn’t have any kind of marketing budget or even flyers for that matter, it was pretty powerful to get people traveling from other cities to a shitty town like Baltimore.

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So at the Bucket Brigade there was a set of graffiti writers that wanted to come to the party. A couple of friends and I had some problems with these guys and we were not going to let them in if they showed up. For whatever reason, they decided they would show up to the party and try to get in anyway. I got a phone call on my cell from one of my friends who was downstairs working the door, and he tells me that these kids had showed up to the party, and they’re trying to get in, and that I need to come down and take care of it. So, a group of friends and I go down there to see what the commotion is about.

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Now there were two cars of people that showed up and I was just trying to make sense of the situation and in the process was getting a little bit pissed and loud. I was in one guy’s face and wasn’t looking at was going on around me. Someone got out of one of the cars with a trench coat and as he got out he lowered a ski mask over his face. He had something in his jacket. I didn’t even notice him until everyone started screaming and running to the door in panic. Someone grabbed me from behind and dragged me back inside because I was the one he was gunning for. He opened up the trench coat and pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and was just working the crowd with it, threatening everyone. A bunch of people got stuck with nowhere to run. You would think this would put an end to all the yelling. But even with the shotgun pulled, the threatening and calling each other names was still going on. All over this graffiti bullshit! Everybody was screaming and they just dragged me upstairs. I had absolutely no idea what was going on.

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When we got upstairs, people started telling me that one of these kids had a shotgun, and it was pointed at me, and I totally didn’t see it. I was ready to start punching the kid in the face, and who knows what would have happened? Luckily, somebody else saw them, and pulled me in. Eventually, they left. An older graffiti writer from the area went outside and talked him down, and got them to go home.

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It was probably one of the craziest parties that we had. The most successful, but most hectic. Ever since then we have done parties all around the country to promote the magazine, but nothing was crazier than the Bucket Brigade party.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

There was this spot on other side of my town that I started hearing about when I was really young. Some of the older kids said, ‘’You got to go to the spot on the other side of town; it’s called “The Bowl.” We had our own jumps that we called “The Brook” because you had to jump over the Brook. The Brook was right down the street from my house. I lived in Clifton, New Jersey and it was a pretty big town. The Bowl was on the other side of Clifton, which was probably still close to five miles away. When you’re in the fourth or fifth grade that’s really far. We had our own local scene and we didn’t go that much further, but one day we did a little voyage over to the bowl and it was just the sickest spot ever.

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“This dude Hodges, that crazy motherfucker. I still remember him burning all his hair off. He used to do a lot of acid and he had some braids. He bugged out one night and burned off all his hair.”

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The bowl had this sick ditch fly out where you just come from one side and go as fast as you can. You would dip into this big U and pump it as fast as you could and it was a straight fly out. There were mats that kids stole from Clifton High School wrestling team and that was the landing. The mats were there to cover some roots. I probably went there for the first time in like ‘88 maybe ‘87 and it was such a popular spot that there would be a line of people. You had the local kids that raced; we’d be jumping crates, tires, having height contests, and things like that. And the whole back of it was like rhythm sections and there was a buried car, that was “The Car Jump”. There was a car frame and you could jump over one side and land into where the hood would be. Then there was “The Barrel Jump” where there was just dirt up to the edge of the barrel, so you pretty much just ride as fast as you could and go up the little bit of dirt and bonk into the barrel. You would just go as high as you wanted to go. There were these abandoned trailers where all the burner heads would be hanging out and smoking. They would come out running into people and stuff, being all shot out, and this dude Pablo used to be hanging out in there, he used to come out and kill it. There was some like older race heads that would be chilling over there. It was wild.

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The second time I went back there I got introduced to the whole crew and they called themselves “The Dirt Nerds.” It was Barry, Kipakash, LaMendola and Hodges. It was all the local heads; they were racer heads but they were sick jumpers at the time. And they were all cool. I never really even saw people kill it like this in person. I saw it in videos, but they were doing everything from all kinds of limbless variations, to 360 variations, just killing the track, doing tricks over the double. We had the hang time jump where Barry used to jump from the top of this hill and just go as fast as he could, and land at the bottom. Half the time he would just get killed. So I started going there all the time and started riding with these guys, and they really got me souped, like they really got me onto another level, we had a great time. These guys were on the next level. They were making their own bash guards before anybody was making bash guards, and grinding on pegs before people were even grinding on pegs. These guys were really pushing stuff and killing it. The Bowl was like the melting pot spot where all the towns would just get together and have crazy sessions.

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This dude Hodges, that crazy motherfucker. I still remember him burning all his hair off. He used to do a lot of acid and he had some braids. He bugged out one night and burned off all his hair. We came back the next day and he camped out at the bowl all night, when we left that night he had a full head of braided hair. When we came back the next day, he was bald with just clumps of hair. Ha ha. Crazy shit went down there.

“I was sitting in back of the cop car thinking that the dude had reported the bike stolen and I was waiting to get locked up, but they ended up arresting a dude who didn’t even know he had a stolen bike. They didn’t end up running mine. They got lazy and I got the hell out of there. That worked out good.”

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The Bowl was not far from Newark, so it would get sketchy sometimes. I remember cops used to come and throw us up against the walls and search us and take our bikes. Some of us had stolen frames. I remember one time, I got a Free Agent Limo and an Elf Double Cross from this dude Tito from Newark. I paid thirty-five bucks a piece, for seventy bucks I got two dope frames and forks. I knew what was up but I didn’t even ask, I knew he was a sketchy dude. He told me that he had them and after I got them and put them together I figured they were stolen. I mean… well, I really didn’t know but… yeah, I kind of knew. So the kid whose bike it was that got stolen knew that I had the bike, but I didn’t care, I was still riding it. He knew that I didn’t steal it, and I was like kind of an older head compared to him. I was maybe like fifteen and he was like thirteen, maybe not even that old I think we were younger. Shit, I don’t remember. Anyway, the cops came and I remember there was like twenty of us, and they threw us all in cars. They came in like four cop cars and a van, and they went through each bike. I was sitting in back of the cop car thinking that the dude had reported the bike stolen and I was waiting to get locked up, but they ended up arresting a dude who didn’t even know he had a stolen bike. They didn’t end up running mine. They got lazy and I got the hell out of there. That worked out good.

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Sometimes heads from Newark would come over to steal bikes. If it wasn’t dudes from Newark, then it would be other guys from Paterson and Pasaic. Dudes used to roll up with a van. If you saw a van roll, everybody would take off because everybody knew it was some older heads coming out. One guy would get out with a bat and the other dudes would grab the person and throw them off the bike and take the bike, throw it in the van and take off. I remember one time I went to The Bowl by myself. It was the first time I went over there by myself, and when I got there nobody was there. This crew of kids rolled up with some ghetto ass bikes. Nobody ever stole a bike from me. This was the closest I ever got to getting it stolen. First the dudes come up trying to be nice and I’m just riding like, “yea, what’s up blah.” This one kid picks up this big ass tree branch and comes after me with the tree branch, swinging it at me and I was like, “WHAT?” As soon as I see this guy doing this, all of a sudden I look over and I see the crew. Barry, Kipakash, Lamendola, Pablo, and Hodges. All these guys were riding up the street. The guys trying to jack me were just like, “Oh shit!” These dudes have a couple of years on me, and these dudes just got the hell out of there. Nobody ever tried to steal a bike from me after that.

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But yeah man, coming up that was our local spot. The Bowl. That was an amazing spot. I don’t think there has been another spot that was that chill and around for that long. But it all came to an end. Like everywhere else, little by little, before you knew it, the whole thing got covered by condos. That put an end to The Bowl.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

Conversation with Fred Gall’s Mom:

Freddy got his first skateboard on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. He won one of those real cheesy boards. Freddy was playing one of those big spin wheel games and he won, but it was one of those games where you could win really big prizes. They had washing machines, TVs, and things like that, but all Freddy wanted was the skateboard. So what were we supposed to do? He wanted the skateboard so we got him the skateboard even though we could have gotten all these expensive prizes. But he took that cheesy skateboard and that’s all he cared about and he did really good with it. So next Christmas, I got him his first real professional skateboard, a Lance Mountain. I can’t remember what kind of wheels or trucks we got him but that doesn’t matter. Freddy loved that Lance Mountain.

“Tracker Trucks called, all the way from California they heard about Freddy, the little guy with the big moves, and they wanted to come see him.”

After that I would take him every weekend to the contests under the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember the fourth time we went there Freddy put his skateboard down and charged the bank. At that time Freddy was just a little kid. He put the board down and rushed right toward the bank and over into the street in the middle of traffic, like a mad man. I almost had a heart attack.

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Some time after that Fred started to get famous from doing the contests under the Brooklyn Bridge. They started to call him “the little guy with the big moves.” He was even in the Daily News, the local New York City newspaper. Fred was in there could you believe it? The headline read, “The little guy with the big moves.” I still have the article. When you walk into my house, it’s right there by the front door.

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So anyway every weekend I took Fred under the Brooklyn Bridge to go skate. I remember Harold [Hunter], God bless his soul, Jeff Pang, Bruno from Zoo York – there were so many people that would go there. I remember I would go to the store, get a beer in a paper bag and come back and sit down and watch them all skate. I would go to McDonald’s and get french fries and hamburgers for all the bums at the Brooklyn Banks haha. They would go crazy when they saw me. When they saw me coming they would get all excited because they knew I had food.

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Freddy started getting really good, I mean REALLY good, and then it happened. Tracker Trucks called, all the way from California they heard about Freddy, the little guy with the big moves, and they wanted to come see him. I couldn’t get over how they heard about him all the way out in California. So we arranged to meet two of them.

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They met us in Pennsylvania at a skate park right outside of Philly. What was that skate park called Fred? Fred: [from the other side of the room laughing]. “I don’t remember. Dude are you getting all this? This is good shit right?”

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Anyway, Freddy went to school that morning and when he got out of school we drove all the way, three-and-a-half hours to Pennsylvania. Once we arrived we found out their plane was delayed. They didn’t end up meeting us until after 11:00 at night. This poor kid, he went to school all day, drove three-and-a-half hours, and on top of it didn’t eat anything because he was so nervous. Freddy looked drained, but when they got there Freddy kicked ass.

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Half way through, they even stopped him. They were like, “Enough, your signed!” So that was Freddy’s first sponsor, Tracker Trucks. Alva was next then New School, Alien Workshop, then Alien Workshop split and the list goes on. I signed him out of school when he was 15 and he became pro.

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And do you know what Freddy did with his very first pro paycheck? He took me to the Bahamas. It was awesome. I remember it like it was yesterday. Fred: “Haha. Somehow I got a $10,000 check and I took my moms to the Bahamas. It was chill.”

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

Okay, so I moved to New York City when I was eighteen having grown up and spent my real formative years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I started my life in San Francisco, California and spent my first four years in the Los Angeles area. When I was seventeen I managed to graduate high school. I got out a year early and used the year between seventeen and eighteen to plan and fantasize and get the dream together that I could take with me to New York City. By the time I moved to New York I set up some jobs, internships, and some other opportunities. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, maybe I thought I would go to college. Within those few months all my plans and my sort of initial infrastructure I tried to lay out for myself fell through or I quit at basically.

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“I was singing that and the Bill Gates looking guy said, “and I think it’s going to be a long long time till you ever play in this venue… get the fuck out!” He was serious and that’s when the tears welled up in my eyes and I lost it.”

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Out of all the things I thought I was really going to enjoy I didn’t enjoy them as much as I hoped, which included working at an avant- garde fashion company, working at an art gallery and trying to get an internship at an art magazine. So in one hand I was a bit disillusioned and disappointed that when I was growing up back in Michigan all these opportunities of this sort that New York had to offer seemed so thrilling. I then realized that it wasn’t going to be my New York experience and my experience wasn’t necessarily going to come from these particular opportunities. It was going to come from my attitude and what I can do personally in the city, not what anyone else can do for me.

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So at that point I was still looking for some other job. One day I was reading the Village Voice newspaper and looked through the classified ads, this was before the Internet had really caught on so this was like ‘97 or ‘98, and there was always music jobs – drummers wanted, band members wanted and then occasionally something else that was more your day-to-day job that you could really rely on for the long term. I had grown up playing piano my whole life and felt pretty confident as a piano player. One day I saw an ad that said keyboard player needed for nightly performance at one of New York’s greatest clubs and it was like $1,500 a week and I was blown away. It might not actually have been $1,500, it might have been $500 a week but whatever it was it was more money than I ever even had. So I said I can play keyboard, I can learn any song they want me to learn, this will be great. I would get to play with the house band in a bar, it sounds amazing. For some reason I just seemed like a no brainer. I felt very relaxed about this whole idea and could really picture myself doing it, so I called up the club and there was a very nice woman that answered the phone and I told her I saw the ad and that I would like to come and see about the job. She said okay and that I could come down anytime and meet with the owner. He was going to be there that night if I would you like to come by. I said sure. This was good. This is momentum, this is the right kind of inertia and perhaps this is all meant to be.

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I kind of dressed up in what I imagined a session keyboard player in a nightclub would wear. I think I had a sports coat on with the sleeves rolled up a little bit I had jeans with dress shoes and whatever the cleanest T-shirt I had was underneath. That was back when my hair wasn’t very long. I kind of put it back and spiked it up a little bit. I had to look older then I was.

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I took the subway from my friend’s house in Brooklyn where I’ve been crashing on a cot in their living room and these people were kind enough to let me stay with them with what was supposed to be originally one weekend. It turned into about six months and I was living out of a suitcase. They had me sleeping on an army cot in their living room which I was fine with but turns out the whole time I was there it was very unpleasant for them. I don’t think I was very much aware how my presence was affecting them.

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Anyway, I went into the city around 8 p.m. to go this club and to meet with this owner and do what I imagined would be a brief job interview and it never really crossed my mind that I would even play for him but I was sort of prepared to play something on the piano if they asked me too. I really pictured in my head and had a very clear vision of what it was going to be. I imagined a back room almost like a little rehearsal room in the back offices of this club where they might have a piano and a desk or something and I can sit and talk with this guy and maybe play a little piano for him so he can see that I can actually play. I kept playing this over and over again in my mind of how it was going to go. When I got to the club I went inside and there was already a lot of intense energy, more then I had anticipated. The club was really thriving. In fact the whole area, Greenwich Village and the West Village of New York City, downtown, the streets were full of people. I think it was Saturday night. The club was completely packed and there was a lot of music coming from the inside of it. I went out to the coat check area where there was this hostess woman and I managed to find the lady I spoke with on the phone. She said, “Oh great, you’re here, come on in I’ll set you up at a table the owner will be with you in a little bit.” I thought this is amazing. I’m going to get to watch this band and hang out for a bit I was really feeling adult and very confident and very excited. I think I had a Coca- Cola or something like that. I didn’t drink alcohol at the time, I was too young anyway. I started watching this band and the band was really impressive. First of all, everyone in the band was at least twice my age if not three times my age and very accomplished musicians.

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He said, “Ya know Andrew, you shouldn’t have come here if you didn’t expect to be able to play. I said, “Well I didn’t expect to have some guy that looked like Bill Gates yelling at me the whole time.” And the people loved that, they clapped for me.

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The drummer had a very fancy drum set that even had one of those clear plastic plexiglass sound reducing enclosures around it. It looked like a TV show band, real professionals with really nice equipment. I never played with anyone like these guys before who were at this level professionally or musically. So I was really excited about that. I said, “Wow, I wonder if these are the guys I’m going to play with? I’m going to learn a lot from them.” I was checking out the keyboard player. He had an amazing keyboard set up and he was playing at a very high level. Different featured singers were coming out and doing cover songs primarily. In fact that whole area downtown Manhattan specializes in venues that have very high quality cover bands or tribute bands. This was sort of a mix of that and I was really enjoying it and getting into it. The crowd was getting more and more hyped up, more people continued to enter the venue until it was really completely at its capacity which was probably about 200 people but to me looking at it, it might as well been 2,000 people. There was so much energy.

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After I had been there for about fifteen minutes they brought up a Michael Jackson impersonator, who again, was operating at a very high level. He had all these moves down had an incredible likeness and spirit when it came to representing Michael Jackson himself and he went through a few numbers and finished with a huge bang where they even had synchronized lighting. The smoke machine was kicked on and I was really impressed and really inspired by it. It was amazing what they were able to do in the small space. This is what happens when you play music for 50 years. I was sort of looking at it as what a real adult can do when they commit to music.

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Anyway, I was wondering when I was going to go meet with the owner in the back. I was thinking about maybe getting up and looking for that lady again to ask her if I should keep waiting for the guy or should I just go back now but this guy on stage caught my attention. The main guitarist who was sort of the band leader who looked a lot like Bill Gates. He was playing a Fender Stratocaster worn very high up on a strap which I don’t feel as necessarily geeky in it self. I think this guy happened to look really geeky. He had on a blue oxford, khaki pants and gold wired glasses. He looked like he was about 48 and he just really stuck out as the odd ball kind of guy. The rest of these musicians looked much more like musicians. This guy looked like a weekend warrior who happened to get a kick out of playing guitar.

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So I was able to figure out by watching him play and listening to him as he hosted between songs that he was the owner of the club or at least the manager. It all made sense why everyone else was being so nice to him and letting him do what he did. I was wondering when I was going meet this guy. Then I heard this Bill Gates looking guy say on the microphone, “Alright ladies and gentlemen, thank you again for coming out tonight. Now I understand there’s a young man in the audience that’s going to come up here and audition for us. Somewhere there’s a young keyboard player out there who has come to play for you folks tonight and see if he can earn himself a spot in our house band.” I thought, oh that’s funny someone else came to audition too, that’s weird I wonder if this guy set it up to get on stage with them. I was looking around the room to see who this other keyboard player is. I felt a little lump in my throat just over the fact that there was maybe competition for this position. I said, boy I really wish I could go back and meet with this owner now. Then the man said again, “Hey if you’re out there, the board player, what’s his name?” The woman I had been speaking with earlier said “His name is Andrew he’s over there.”

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All of a sudden I realized he was talking about me. At that moment I had two choices. I could either not respond and sit quietly until they moved into their set and forgot about me, run out the door and never go back, or I could completely close my eyes and jump off a cliff so to speak. I came to audition I thought, I moved to New York City to have experiences, this is a New York City experience. No matter what happens this is going to be an amazing story. Nothing could have prepared me for what was happening. I went up on stage. The keyboard player that had been playing the whole night got up and gave me his spot. The Bill Gates guy said, “OK Andrew, what do you want to play?” I said, “Uh I don’t know.” I was already sweating bullets, my stomach felt like it was full of butterflies and going up and down rollercoaster hills. My palms and fingers were sweating, my face was beat red and burning hot. I said, “I didn’t expect to be coming up here on stage.” Before I could even get that out he said, “Come on now, what do you want to play, let’s just name a song we’ll do it.” Again, “I didn’t prepare a song.” I said, “What do you mean you didn’t prepare a song? Just call one out and we’ll play.” For whatever reason, at that moment when he said, “call out a song.” I said Rocket Man by Elton John, a song I never played. I have no idea how it goes and of all the songs it’s probably one of the more challenging songs to try to figure out on the fly because the chord changes are unusual, the melodies are advanced, let alone the fact that he’s singing at a relatively high range for any man. I think I might have been listening to it at home before I came out and that was the song that was in my head. He said, “OK, Rocket Man one, two, three.” I said, “Well I don’t know what key it is in,” and he said, “Folks, we got a comedian here tonight. Come on up here Andrew. Let’s do this OK?” And he started to get a little irritated like I was embarrassing him. And I said, “I’m serious I don’t know what key it is in.” He said, “OK, what key do you want to do it in?”

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At this point the audience is laughing but there was already this sort of tension going over the crowd of “What’s going on here, is this supposed to be funny? What’s happening? Who is this kid?” Then it happened again. The most joyous, rowdy crowd watching one of the most professional shows I’ve ever seen, and here comes this kid who’s making a fool of himself in the most intense way. He said, “let’s do it in C major.” That was the easiest key to play on the piano. There’s no black keys. “Okay, C major Rocket Man,” I said, “Well I don’t know the lyrics,” and he said, “Andrew, you’re a comedian right? Listen folks, we got a comedian here tonight. Andrew is pulling our leg. I hope you are all enjoying this.”

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The crowd was kind of nervously laughing and maybe they were trying to understand what was going on. This guy, this Bill Gates guy who was interacting with me, generally seemed to be getting pissed off. He was trying to look at me out of the corner of his eye and be like what the fuck are you doing kid, you’re making a fool of yourself up here. He said, “OK, I’ll feed you the lyrics. I’ll tell you the lyrics as we go.” So we proceeded to struggle our way. I proceeded to struggle my way through the worst performance of Rocket Man that probably anyone has ever done, the whole time with this Bill Gates look alike guy saying “packed my bags last night pre-flight, packed my bags last night pre-flight zero nine a.m. zero nine a.m.”

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We made it through the song somehow. The band of course sounded great. They nailed it as though it was the album playing. It practically sounded like karaoke and when it got to the part of the song where it goes “and I think it’s going to be a long long time,” I was singing that and the Bill Gates looking guy said, “and I think it’s going to be a long long time till you ever play in this venue… get the fuck out!” He was serious and that’s when the tears welled up in my eyes and I lost it. The audience actually did this miraculous shift, this was a very powerful experience for me as a performer where I realized how an audience can work. They went from booing me to suddenly booing him. Somebody yelled out “Hey give him another chance!” and someone else said “Yea give the kid a chance” and then people started clapping, cheering and clapping like “go, go, go, go.” Then we did a blues jam in C which was much easier for me and kind of what I planned on doing. Then I finished it on a somewhat positive note.

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I did actually get a little dig at the guy. He said, “Ya know Andrew, you shouldn’t have come here if you didn’t expect to be able to play. I said, “Well I didn’t expect to have some guy that looked like Bill Gates yelling at me the whole time.” And the people loved that, they clapped for me. The bass player and the band came over and said “Hey kid you did fine don’t let him get you down, you did good.” I got up and I went back over to my seat for the absolute minimum amount of time that I felt I could sit there before running out without making a further fool of myself. It was probably about five minutes, once the lights went back down again. People forgot about what had just happened.

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The blood in my face felt like all my vessels and my veins were about to explode. I never blushed so hard in my life. I walked back out into the city street into the cold air and sort of came down from the experience, still with tears in my eyes and still a lump in my throat. This almost self conscience understanding that I had done something really important. I didn’t know exactly what it was, what it meant or if it would have any kind of lasting impact. I guess it really didn’t other then it’s this great story. If nothing else, what I learned is that experience proved to me that I could do something I had never done before, make a complete and utter fool of myself and humiliate myself to the core in the completely ego destroying way, and live to talk about it and be fine, possibly a little bit stronger.

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I didn’t realize it, but the name of this venue I’m telling you about was Cafe Wha?, which is probably the most famous venue in New York because it’s where Bob Dylan first went to get his start, the first venue he ever walked into. It’s where Jimi Hendrix was first playing and it’s actually an extremely notorious place for similar experiences to have happened. The fact that I was drawn there as this young musician with no concept of it being this famous place and to have that kind of primary, really early musical rite of passage ended up becoming very meaningful. But it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to see sort of the miraculous quality of that. I didn’t realize at the time that the people who play in venues like that are session players that memorized 5,000 pop songs and can play them on command with all the cord changes and have all the lyrics memorized, have all the backup vocal parts memorized as they are on the album, that’s how they get the big bucks. That’s what they do and what made them valuable over someone like me, someone who could make up something on the spot but couldn’t play a song that someone could name off the top of their head. They spent 50 years doing that.

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I ended up having a lot of respect for those people and for that situation. I think that it set the tone for me trying to maximize all I could out of New York City – all the experience, all the raw interaction with the legacy of the city, with the people of the city, with the energy of the city and that’s what you pay for. That’s why people go to New York City, for the opportunity and for experience. That’s why it costs so much more but it’s worth every penny.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING MAGAZINE ISSUE #1.

For me it all started out in North New Jersey. Most people know my history with Lords of the Underground, but I guess what they don’t know is that before Lords of the Underground I was also a solo artist.

New Jersey kind of ran the hip hop scene in the 90’s. You had Lords of the Underground, Naughty by Nature, Queen Latifah, Redman, Lakim Shabazz, The Outsidaz, Rah Digga, Channel Live and the list goes on and on. Before that, before we all got noticed, I was one of the groups who ran New Jersey on the Underground tip. What people don’t know is that while I was grinding to come up and get noticed that Redman was my DJ.

“What people don’t know is that while I was grinding to come up and get noticed that Redman was my DJ.”

Redman and I were a crew, we had the whole little dancers, the wonder twins – Red’s name was DJ Cut Killa. He was my DJ but he was always a good free styling dude though. In the quest of trying to get heard and trying to get signed, I made a relationship and bond with Def Jam.

I believe it was Faith over there at Def Jam, got cool with them so they started to invite us to Def Jam parties and the industry parties. This one time they gave us tickets to the EPMD gold party but that same weekend I had won two tickets on WBLS in New York, so I had four tickets. I said OK I’m gonna take myself, of course Redman and we took two of our friends as well. We met EPMD there. Redman and my other friends were telling Erick Sermon, “Yo, I got this MC you got to hear, his name is DoItAll, whenever y’all come I want y’all to hear him.” So long story short Erick came to club called Club Sensations in Newark, New Jersey. He called us one day and said, “Yo I’m ready to hear your MC man, tell him to come to Sensations.”

Well low and behold I got sick! Redman said, “Yo, I’m going to go down there and represent for the crew.” So Redman went down there with another friend of mine called Bre. We call him Bre Da’ Begga. He’s actually the guy doing the hook on the Lords of the Underground record called “Never Faded.” If you ever see that video online, Bre is the one that’s doing the hook, that’s the dude Redman took down to the club Sensations with him. So when they get there, Erick was like “Where’s the rapper? Where’s the dude?” And he’s like, “He’s not here but I came to represent for my crew,” and Parrish [Parrish Millennium Ducats, that’s the PMD in EPMD], he was like, “Well do you rhyme?” Bre Da’ Begga said to Red, “Yo, go ahead and rhyme Red.” Red rhymed and the rest is history. That’s how you got Redman and that’s how you didn’t get DoItAll with The Hit Squad.

“I’m thinking we are about to pull off and about five minutes later Marley Marl gets in the limo with a bottle of champagne and he’s like “Yo, what’s up?” I’m just like WOW!”

So I was almost in The Hit Squad. I didn’t give up though man, I promised my moms I would go to school if the rap thing didn’t pan out so the year that I thought I was going to get on, my DJ got on before me. I went to the University of North Carolina. Fast forward through my college years, I meet a dude Anthony Coldstine who in college went by the name of DJ Jazzy A and later turned out to be DJ Lord Jazz. He said he had a friend Derek Jackson who also went to school with us who just happened to be Marley Marl’s cousin. I didn’t believe NONE of it. Derek was the type of dude who always talked fast so you always thought he was lying.

I was coming from Newark, New Jersey where people always telling you stuff that never be true. Derek was like, “Yeah yeah yeah you know Marley Marl my cousin, soon as I graduate,” because he was about to graduate and I was just a freshman, and he’s like, “As soon as I graduate Marley Marl going to get me a job ya know? Marley’s working with Heavy D and LL Cool J right now, I’m telling you.” I was just like yeah WHATEVER. He said Marley was coming down to our school for the Juice Crew Tour. They were coming on The Juice Crew tour bus. The night before they are supposed to come, I have a fight in our gymnasium and break my hand!

The next day I got a cast on my hand and Derek says, “Yo, come downstairs we’re going to meet Marley Marl.” I go downstairs to the dorm and I see no Marley Marl, I knew he was lying, I knew this dude was lying man. And he’s like, “No, he’s at the hotel,” so we go to the hotel. Now let me rewind a little bit here is the thing that got Marley Marl interested in us. Like I said DJ Lord Jazz was the big DJ at our school. Derek Jackson, I’ll tell you later who he turned out to be, but Marley told him to put together a group.

I was always going up to the Jazz radio show in college and tearing it down on the weekends. It was really a jazz station but Lord Jazz used to sneak hip hop in there for an hour. I used to go up there and freestyle and then Funke Man used to come and try to freestyle the parties and when Lord Jazz invited him up we freestyled together. He was like, “Derek told me to put a group together. Y’all should do a group together.” Funke and I were two solo artists, so we were like I don’t know about a group, but we’ll do a song together. So we did the song to Black Sheep’s “Flavor of the Month” joint, and the first song we ever wrote together was “Psycho,” done to that beat. So really that’s the song and the beat that Marley Marl signed us off of, so thanks to Dres, Lords of the Underground got signed and we wasn’t called Lords of the Underground, we was called NJ Funk. [Laughs] “Man, your getting some history, I don’t think I ever said any of this in an interview.”

Now back to the Marley thing. We get to the hotel and I still don’t see him, I still don’t believe Derek, but he’s like, “Na Na, he’s here.” I’m like, man this dude is just lying. But there’s a limo out front, so I’m like, OK there’s a limo. We get in the limo and still no Marley Marl. I’m like man this guy is the biggest fronter I ever met. I’m thinking we are about to pull off and about five minutes later Marley Marl gets in the limo with a bottle of champagne and he’s like “Yo, what’s up?” I’m just like WOW! I got a broke hand and he wants to see us perform. He was like, “Who are the two that made that “Psycho” song?” and we were like it was us. “Y’all going to perform that tonight for us?” We show up to the Juice Crew Show. We got on first and did our thing, we did the “Psycho” thing to the Black Sheep joint and tore the house down. As we used to say back then, we caught wreck. [laughs] and that was it. Marley put his hands around our shoulders and was just like, “When you going to come up to The House of Hits?”

That’s the story about how I walked into the game. It was just history to me man, coming into the game, meeting everybody, learning everything and coming up that way.