In the early 1980s, I worked in a pop band playing AM radio hits, grooving behind my Yamaha drums and Zildjian cymbals as sweat drenched my body and my ears rang. We danced. We pranced. My shiny silk jumpsuit led upwards to a 2"-high afro, which women ran fingers through in hopes of finding contraband smokes.
I was not proud. Our band was hot, booked year-round in hotel lounges and standalone clubs from Florida to Virginia Beach.
“Beach music” was a popular southeastern style then, an R&B variation on ’40s swing and doowop, with close vocal harmonies, popping brass, and choregraphed dance steps. Like peanut-sized rock stars, we reveled in this insular, south-of-the–Mason-Dixon–line entertainment lifestyle with its small-town intrigues, tasty southern food, and bodacious southern belles. Then overnight, everything changed.
At the beginning of the previous decade, Technics had released the SP-10, the first direct drive turntable. That was followed in short order by the SL-1100. Clive Campbell, aka Jamaican-American DJ Kool Herc, pioneered the simultaneous use of two Technics SL-1100s, initially at his sister’s birthday party in the Bronx, inspiring “block parties” (rigging streetlamps for power) and hip-hop culture. Kool Herc isolated drumbeats from records by James Brown (with drummers Clyde Stubblefield and John “Jabo” Starks) and the Incredible Bongo Band (powered by master studio drummer Jim Gordon), among others, creating “breaks” for heated dance-floor partying. Soon, Lace Taylor (aka Afrika Bambaataa) and Grandmaster Flash (The Message) took Kool Herc’s inventions into the mainstream, and hip-hop went global.
The SL-1100’s successor, the SL-1200, released just a year after the SL-1100, quickly became the deejay’s turntable of choice and continued to be until it was succeeded in 1979 by the SL-1200MK2, the first turntable to intentionally include deejay-friendly features. The world’s most popular turntable was born.
Back to those clubs and hotel lounges. Rooms and audiences that had been ours and ours alone were stolen by a slick dude with a pair of silver Technics SL-1200MK2 turntables, a GLI smiles shrunk with every needle drop. Our snazzy silk jumpsuits were replaced by his louche Hawaiian shirts and flared polyester pants. One room after another fell to the cult of the deejay, who demanded less cash than a band of unruly musicians. Dancers grinded to the pounding music the deejay played, his cueing finger a powerful tool, his control total. A paradigm shift was in full force. The road-band scene was demolished. I left the road to study jazz.
