The two Demmes, Freddy, and a young director named Pam Jenkins had been invited to direct sections of the video. Freddy, stretching out in the cab, was smiling to himself. The cabdriver turned his radio up. A toxic smell from New Jersey wafted in one window, mixed with the air freshener on the dashboard, and blew out the other side. It was a bright morning with a wind that came in startling chilly puffs.
No rain was imminent. The Demmes, KRS-One and his associates, and various technical advisers had pulled their chairs into a circle in the middle of the loft and were discussing the logistical challenges of shooting a video in Harlem with four directors, countless interested onlookers, and a three-thousand-dollar-a-day Steadicam.
The conversation stopped when we walked in. Freddy and KRS have some history. He nodded to KRS and sat down, reached for a pen, and nodded genially at the others in the room. Everyone turned back to the business at hand. In this circle, he seemed uncharacteristically unanimated.
KRS, a bulky, soft-faced man with a rolling bass voice and a soothing, professorial manner, did most of the talking, describing a plan to distribute four million copies of a book he had written challenging the basic assumptions of Western education. A discussion of laminated security passes followed. It was close to noon. Jonathan Demme stood up, excused himself to go to another meeting, and headed for the door.
He then shot Freddy an urgent look. Many things make Freddy extra happy. Working with someone well established and successful, like Jonathan Demme, is one of his extra-happiest experiences. He is unabashed about it. In fact, he aspires to it.
When he got interested in painting, he cultivated friendships with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. When he did graffiti, he did it alongside the graffiti star Lee Quinones.
He scored a movie, when movie scoring caught his attention, with Chris Stein, of the band Blondie. People like Freddy; almost everyone he has sought to attach himself to has said yes. The trade-off is that Freddy has a gift for getting himself and his undertakings, and therefore his collaborators, noticed. He manages, seemingly without effort, to create an aura of noteworthiness. His philosophy of career advancement is not a matter of being a successful hanger-on.
Freddy has all these knacks. There was always a very heavy music thing in our house. Max Roach is my godfather, and Max and my dad are like brothers. They were beboppers together—black intellectuals. My parents just got cable about a month ago. I was going to Medgar Evers College and I got the idea to be a painter. That was when all these dudes would tag up their names. I wanted to be a famous artist. Somewhere in there, I started reading about Pop art.
I started reading Interview and making my plans. I knew you had to have some kind of plan to move into the media. It was then the mid-seventies. By Pop standards, anyone was eligible to make art. Anyone could have a punk band. Anything anyone declared to be sculpture was sculpture. Anyone could have his own cable-television show and invite his friends to appear on it and just act like themselves , and the show would be conceptually complete.
This did indeed happen. He saw, first hand, the power of being a smart spectator and a collector, and the satisfaction of making yourself and your tastes well known. For me and Jean-Michel, coming from where we were coming from, being young black males in this happening downtown scene, we were just operating on another planet, and Andy was it.
Uptown, and in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the notion of populist street art was nothing new, but the forms it was taking—rapping, break dancing, and graffiti painting—were. Freddy would often ride the subway to the city parks in the South Bronx where rappers and break dancers set up and performed. He was, he says now, just a fan, but a fan with interesting connections. So this was my synthesis.
I was credited with bringing rap downtown. I went onstage and rapped at the Mudd Club, which was a new-wave hangout.
I knew whatever I did down there would look interesting. I wanted people to see this whole hip-hop street-culture thing bubbling up under their noses. This might seem obvious now, but at the time the three were considered separate, transitory impulses at best and discrete forms of public nuisance at worst. In the end, Freddy helped Chris Stein produce the soundtrack. He also wound up with a major role, even though acting happened to be one of the few job positions in the film he had not been interested in filling.
That was my idea. His incredible talents lay more in his charisma, his ability to form relationships with a huge number of people, and to have this unique vision of street culture, and to have the desire to bring the ghetto scene downtown.
In a way, he was the one who brought it all together. Freddy plays a fast-talking, cynical smoothy named Phade, who has no particular job but lots of important positions: he appears to be, at various times, a club manager, a concert promoter, a businessman, a tour guide, a master of ceremonies, a negotiator, and a general all-around operator.
When word gets out that a reporter from a downtown newspaper is coming to the South Bronx to write about the graffiti artist and his friends—rappers and break dancers—most of them are wary.
Phade, on the other hand, positions himself to escort the reporter and act as her agent. He laughs at the notion that it would be better to keep hip-hop unexposed.
It is a jammed, jumbled, slightly seedy street, which seems to generate its own constant buzz. The sidewalks are skinny and sooty. Flyers advertising band jobs and guitarists for hire flutter in the gutters. Hand trucks stacked with Bose speakers and Fender guitars line the sidewalks.
The buildings are low and plain-faced, and have unglamorous storefronts, with amplifiers, mixing boards, guitar strings, and computer consoles piled haphazardly in their windows. It is one place where the fraternity of musicianship prevails over the diffusions of musical genre.
As our cab worked its way down the street, I noticed country-and-Western guitarists and heavy-metallists and soul singers side by side, window-shopping for equipment. Recent episodes have been filmed under the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Roosevelt Island tram, on th Street, and in an airplane flying down to a rap convention in New Orleans.
During a shoot on the Roosevelt Island tram, he spotted Grandpa Munster, a famous person but not a friend. Other things were on his mind when the cab was on its way to Sam Ash. The conversation then turned to the Oscars. I was at that restaurant Columbus one night. Joe Pesci! Is that a rug, or what? The two of them laughed wildly and then, after a moment, sat and mused. So this weekend we could peep some locations uptown for the KRS video?
Freddy shrugged. We were now in front of Sam Ash. Freddy emerged from the cab and surveyed the gathering crowd with deliberate aloofness. I began pouring over art history books zigzagging through the entire history of man making art, from those wall paintings in pre-historic caves, which are a lot like graffiti to me, to Caravaggio, Duchamp, Dali, Rothko and Johns.
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