So You Wanna Be A Rapper: The Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs of Spyder D
By Mark Skillz and Russell Simmons
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So You Wanna Be A Rapper - Mark Skillz
So, You Wanna Be a Rapper
The Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs Of
Spyder D
Written by Spyder D and Mark Skillz
Copyright 2013. All rights reserved. Duane Hughes and Mark McCord
This book is dedicated to my Mom, Doris Garrett, who passed away on May 10th, 2010, the day after Mother’s Day, as if to say, I will give you this one more Mother’s Day son. Then, I must go home...
Mom, I love you and hope you are proud, though I was not able to give you back all that you gave to me.
Your loving Son,
Spyder D
Foreword
Spyder and I, along with Davey D, went to JHS 109 in Queens Village together back in the early 70's. It was a wild era, one that many of our peers didn’t come out of. Or at least in one piece.
Thankfully, Spyder and I were brought together again as adults through the culture that today we know as Hip Hop. As a rapper and a producer, Spyder caught my attention with his unique style and sound. From 1983-1988, I had the honor of serving as his manager, a period during which he was both prolific and innovative.
Like many of us, Spyder has had his setbacks. But unlike many, he was also able to adjust to those setbacks on the fly. It was almost like he was free styling this journey we call life. Through the ups and downs, Spyder has always embraced the process of being not only a man, but a human being as well. And when you do that, you’re always going to get the most out of your life.
So, you wanna be a rapper, huh? This is Spyder’s story.
Russell Simmons-
Spyder D's Manager from 1983-1988
Chapter One
It Was Our Exit Out of Hell.
That lyin’ piece of shit,
I said as I threw the phone across the room.
Whaaaaat in the hell?
My girl Sparky screamed as the phone sailed through the air, just missing her head by a few inches.
That no-good, lyin’, piece-of-shit Jack, that’s what’s wrong
, I said as the phone exploded against the wall into big chunks and pieces.
What did he do?
That mutha fucka took all of our money!
"What?"
That lyin’ mutha fucka said I signed all of my rights and royalties over to him. And he says he’s got the documents to prove it. That’s bullshit; there ain’t no way in the world I’d pull some shit like that.
I ran into my room and pulled the .45 out of the dresser. I was so mad as I was fumbling around looking for the ammo clip, that I just started throwing shirts up in the air while I was looking for it. The conversation kept playing over and over in my head, making me madder and madder the more I thought about it:
"Somebody embezzled all of the money."
Sparky’s record ‘Throwdown’ has sold over 200,000 records.
How in the hell did my name get removed from the writing and production credit?
I signed all of my rights and royalties over to him?
When in the fuck did I do that?
Ira Allen is the writer and producer? Who in the fuck is that?
He’s broke and any money he gets off of those records is for his family?
Fuck that shit.
Found the clip.
Moments earlier, I had yelled into the phone, "Well, what about mine, son? Sparky had just given birth to our daughter, Special, so what was this guy thinking? What about our money? So he’s saying
Fuck my daughter?" Is that what he’s saying? Is he saying that his children are better than mine? What, my daughter can’t eat? Oh hell no!
I told that cowboy-boot-wearin’, lyin’, cock-suckin’ piece o’ shit that he’d better start wearing a bulletproof vest if my money didn’t show up real quick.
"This is the Bronx, motherfucker, are you threatening me? Is that what you’re trying to do?" he said with the calm nerve of a businessman who has the world at his fingertips.
I spoke right into the phone so that every word could be understood: The Bronx, what’s that? Fuck the Bronx. I’ll flood that block of yours with half of South Queens, mutha fucka don’t play me.
That’s when I threw the phone.
Damn! There it was, that’s what it all came down to: Over ten years of putting in work in this rap shit, and I got nothing to show for it. Nothin’. See, these guys at B-Boy Records were the last in a long line of record labels that I had been working with since 1980. Those shysters owed me $80,000 and they didn’t wanna pay me. Fuck that and them. This one’s claiming that that one’s embezzling money, that one says it’s this one. If I gotta go up there and blow that fucking place up—please believe, I’m going to get paid.
Jack Allen thinks he’s slick. He thinks the way to get outta paying me my money is by switching the writing and production credit on Sparky’s record ‘Throwdown.
Who the fuck does he think he’s dealing with? Those documents he’s talking about are forged. I don’t know who he got to forge my name on his paperwork, but—it damn sure ain’t my signature.
I wanted to kill him, but just as I had my .45 loaded and was headed to the South Bronx to off him, I saw my baby girl Special and it hit me: If I kill him, who’s gonna take care of my daughter? I couldn’t be a father to her if I was locked up. I already had one daughter that I never had the chance to establish a relationship with, and if I kill him, it’ll be a second child that I wouldn’t know.
Fuck.
I had a crying baby that needed milk and diapers and I didn’t have a dime to my name to get ’em. I had no income and wasn’t going to be getting a royalty check from Profile Records for at least three or four months. I needed some money now. That eighty grand was going to change our lives.
So there we were: me, Sparky and our baby daughter Special, living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This was hell. We were living on Cornelius and Knickerbocker Avenue, in 1989, drugs and guns had turned the streets of Bushwick into the O.K. Corral. Of all places to live, this was the worst. On a routine night, any night, I could walk passed somebody with a gun in their hand. We heard gunshots constantly. I’ve been in the ghetto all my life, but this was some other shit. There wasn’t nothin’ but crooks and killers out there.
Sparky D (a.k.a. Doreen Broadnax) and I had just gotten back together and decided to live together again. We were going to give it a real try this time. All the things that we had put each other through over the years was gonna be left in the past. I gave her money to put down on an apartment and she picked that place—of all places. I’ve always wondered what in the hell she was thinking when she chose to live there. It was the grimiest place in the borough; no one had any hope—hope packed up and left a long time ago. Everyone was desperate.
I think the shit finally hit the fan for me when, one day, I stepped outside onto my stoop, and there was this young boy sitting there, who couldn’t’ve been more than fourteen years old. Blood was slowly spilling out of his chest, all over his black jacket and onto the brown-painted steps. He was lying on the stoop alone about to die. No one stopped to help. From what he was able to tell me, someone shot him in the park, and it was while he was trying to walk away that he stopped and collapsed. I tried to keep him calm by talking to him; I knew he was about to go into shock. After calling the ambulance, I waited for them with him. No one else cared. The people in the neighborhood were looking at me like I was crazy. What was I supposed to do? Just let him lie there and die?
Sometimes, I would sit there and think to myself, "Damn, how am I supposed to raise my daughter in this bullshit?" I never wanted this for her. But my options were very limited at that moment, because that money was supposed to give us a new start. It was our exit out of hell. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.
At that time, crack was out of control it made everybody crazy.
In Bushwick, it took on another dimension: nobody trusted anybody, and everybody was suspect for something. One day, the Channel 2 news came around asking people questions. I was walking to the store with my daughter in my arms when the reporter approached me.
What do you think has happened to your neighborhood?
he asked me.
So I told him, I think it’s crazy how off the hook things are.
And that was that.
Well, the next thing I knew, I started to hear whispers: Spyder’s a snitch.
Shit like that gets people killed. Once people think you’re a snitch, your life is in danger. I started to hear these whispers, I could see it on people’s faces, and I knew that any day, someone was going to be coming after me. I started carrying a gun because I was prepared to take out whoever was coming for me. That’s when I knew that it was time to go.
Sparky was the love of my life; no woman has gotten from me what Sparky had. Before her, women were like streetcars: I got on one, got off that one, got onto another, it didn’t matter to me. Sparky was special, we brought out the best—and the worst, in each other. But here we were on our last legs. Our relationship could not take any more trauma. This was it for us. Either we were going to work it out, or, as much as I loved her, we were going to have to go our separate ways, this time for real.
I hadn’t been getting calls from record labels for projects or anything. I didn’t have a contract with anyone; it was the first time in years that I had no options.
And then the phone rang.
It was Greg Mack, a Los Angeles deejay who had the most popular rap radio station on the West Coast, 1310 KDAY. Greg had a production deal cooking with Motown Records and he wanted me and Sparky to be a part of it. I figured, hell, I don’t have anything going on in New York, so why not? Besides, my mom was out there. This meant leaving New York. But it also meant leaving behind friends and family and all the bullshit that had happened in all of those years. But mostly, it meant leaving Bushwick; which, I didn’t mind. Not one little bit.
Chapter Two
They Were Just as Bad as Any Project Uptown.
It was almost as if time was standing still.
I can still see it.
Everything was silent.
I was standing at the window with sweat pouring down my back and face; I had my brand-new, light-brown wooden baseball bat cocked and ready. All I wanted was for whoever this was trying to come through the window to show his head. That’s all I needed to see was his head, and I was going to smash it into pieces.
Our apartment was at 99-20 Farmers Boulevard in Hollis, Queens. Compared to everyone else’s apartment, ours looked empty. There were no lights on, no plants in the windows, no bikes out front, no music playing. It was quiet. Whoever was trying to break-in might’ve thought our house was abandoned because we had sheets covering the windows instead of curtains.
By 1971 the once predominantly white neighborhoods of Hollis were rapidly turning black. And things were getting dangerous.
When I was eleven years old, my parents were divorced. My mother worked long hours as a nurse, so that left me at home with my baby brother, Chris, who was just four years old at the time. I usually played real quiet by myself whenever he was asleep, but on this day, I heard some strange sounds coming from the back room. As scared as I was, I knew I had to grow up right then and there. If anything happened while my mother was gone, I had to handle it. And I was gonna start with whoever this was coming through the window.
I watched as the window slowly slid open. The gentle breeze made the white sheet flutter. My hands were as sweaty as fuck. I was holding the bat tight. Through the sheet, I could see the silhouette of a man. But just as he was making his move to come through the window, I heard him whisper to himself; it was a real low whisper. His sixth sense was talking to him. I don’t know what it said. And I didn’t care. He probably heard my heart beating through my chest. He paused at the window. I wanted to scare him off, but I knew he wouldn’t be scared of my little kid voice, so I deepened it to as low as it could go, Yo, yo, who dat, who dat?
I saw the silhouette back up a little, Oh shit, there’s somebody in there…I’m…I’m sorry ’bout that.
Yeah, yeah, mutha fucka,
I said in this big voice, I live here.
And with that, the shadow was gone. It took me a while to calm down but once I did I was ok. I often think back on that day—I had never known fear until that moment. All of us have certain instincts, and I guess they get turned on during certain events in our lives. For me, that moment set the tone for the rest of my life. I could’ve wimped out and ran out the front door. But even though I was a little kid, I accepted the responsibility of being the man of the house. At that moment, I found out that I had the same protective nature as a lioness defending their young. And there wasn’t going to be anything to stop me from doing it.
_______________
Since every story has to have a start, I guess mine has to start with me. I was born Sidney Duane Hughes on March 15, 1960, in Peoria, Illinois; that’s the same place that Richard Pryor is from. As a matter of fact, my moms and pops grew up with him.
My father had been stationed in Korea for a few years before he was sent to an army base in Oklahoma, where my mother and I joined him at. I have vague memories of living in Oklahoma with them. I can still remember this turtle we had that was so big I was able to sit on it.
Sometime around 1965 is when Pops got out of the Army. That’s when my whole family, I’m talking about all of us: my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins—these were my mother’s people—all moved to New York and came to a place called Hollis, Queens. At that time in Queens, there were all kinds of really popular jazz musicians living there like Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and James Brown. But we didn’t have anything to do with musicians; we were just trying to get by.
Since my family was so large, we quickly got a reputation for being people not to mess around with. Back then, whole families fought in the street. If you started some shit with one of my aunts, you had to fight the rest of them; that meant my aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody. We all lived very close to each other, so if something jumped off, word spread immediately and you had to run.
As wild as we could get,