Juice – Catch A Groove
Grand Wizard Theodore – Live Convention ’82 Excerpt
No one could have known it at the time, but on this day in 1973, for all intents and purposes, Hip-Hop was born. It’s hard for me to quantify the effect Hip-Hop has had on my life. I wouldn’t be a DJ without Hip-Hop. I wouldn’t be a collector without Hip-Hop. I wouldn’t hear music the way I do without Hip-Hop. I wouldn’t have my PhD without Hip-Hop, since my dissertation was on Hip-Hop. So, given that, I had to post something on this day and pay respect. For, it was on this day 50 years ago, in the rec room of 1520 Sedwick Ave. in the Bronx, that Kool DJ Herc did something he’d never done before…deciding to just focus on the break beats of certain records, in some cases running that break between two records and that innovation, Herc’s “Merry-Go-Round,” is what started it all.
For me, so much of what really caused me to love Hip-Hop was the break, and how so much of the music was literally based on pieces of the past, used in ways that the musicians and the record labels never could have dreamed of. Instead of taking the record as a final product, Hip-Hop DJs & producers created something brand new. And in many cases, certainly the case with this record from Juice, the music itself just sounds like it was recorded with Hip-Hop already in mind. If Hip-Hop wasn’t still so insular in 1976 when this 12” was released, a case could be made that the record had been made with Hip-Hop in mind, but the sound and the scene was still too young. This record wasn’t made for Hip-Hop, it’s meant to be on Disco soundsystems, but once Herc lit the spark, it was only a matter of time before a record like this would find its way into DJ’s collections and in performance on the 1s and 2s. The break itself is so long, and flows nicely into another instrumental passage, and there’s that mini-breakdown just before the drum break, perhaps the most iconic part of the song, that makes this is a rare double break, one that can be picked up in multiple places and extended in ways that you couldn’t with other songs.
According to Davey D, “Everybody want to flow over Juice, ‘Catch A Groove.’ If you were rapping and that record came on, man, you’ve got to get a piece of it. Everybody would be fighting over it. You’d hear somebody saying, ‘Come on, finish that rhyme so I can get in there.’” “Catch A Groove” became a staple in Hip-Hop circles in that period of time where Hip-Hop first became popular, after 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight,” became an international hit. But there was a disconnect between what you might have heard in clubs and parks in NYC and what you heard on record. The DJ was essentially removed, replaced by a band of musicians, who would recreate versions of the breaks that DJs spun (and in time become breaks themselves). Just before Style Wars and Wild Style created a document in film of this moment in Hip-Hop, you had “Bee-Bop’s Live Convention ’82: #1 Cut Creators,” likely recorded live at T-Connection in the Bronx, and one of the rare places you can hear Hip-Hop as it existed in that first decade before the genre began to diversity and multiply into dozens of dozens of sub-genres in the 1990s. Hearing the original break from the recorded song (and kids, please remember, that drum break is only on the 12,” not, I repeat, NOT on the 45!), and then hearing all of the ways Grand Wizard Theodore cuts it up is amazing. Just one of many examples of the creativity that was unleashed in the wake of Kool DJ Herc’s moment of inspiration. On this day, August 11th, 1973. The day Hip-Hop was born.