Stretch Armstrong – Interview w/ Eli Escobar

Turntablelab posted an interview that NY’s Eli Escobar did with Stretch Armstrong a few months ago.  Along with Mr. Magic’s show, Strecth & Bobbito could have had the most strongest influence on hip-hop – in regards to what radio could accomplish for the culture.  He drops some gems about Mobb Deep and other people that visited the show. For those that actually read KTl – all 25 of you (we’re moving up!), there is a audio treat in the form of a link at the end of the interview.

Eli Escobar writes:

1. So let’s get the obligatory stuff out of the way. How and when did you start djing? Was there a dj in particular who made you say “I wanna do that!” How long was it before you started playing out at clubs?

One of the things that people really don’t understand was how djing, of any kind, used to be a relatively underground thing, depending on where you lived. If you lived in Harlem or the Bronx, for example, you knew what djing was, because every neighborhood had its share of local dj stars, which, if added up, was still a pretty small group of people. I grew up on the border of the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem, on 96th Street between Madison and Park Ave, just where the train comes out from the tunnel. Needless to say, I rarely ventured north of 96th Street, and being just a kid, never got to witness anything that involved djing. I was too young to go to clubs. My initial introduction to hip-hop was via Sugarhill Records and Enjoy Records, which were the two most prominent labels releasing early hip-hop, but those records were for the most part covers of disco records with a rap vocals- never any djing. It’s kind of ironic that the first few years of hip-hop on wax removed the dj from the equation even though it was the dj that laid the foundation for hip-hop music by isolating the break in the first place. When I discovered weekend mix shows on WBLS, Kiss-FM and WNWK, I was transfixed by what I heard- records being played on top of records, and of course, scratching and repeating sections of music. But I had never even seen a dj in person until I went to the Pier to see The Clash, who, on that night, had Kurtis Blow and AJ Scratch opening for them. AJ had that big ass DJ coffin, and I couldn’t believe the shit he was doing with records. Finally, I got to see what I was hearing on the radio. With the little money I had, I was already been buying 12″s because that was the only format most of the new joints were coming out on, but I hadn’t even considered djing. But the sum-total of listening to the radio and seeing AJ Scratch sparked my curiosity to the point where I knew I had to get in on this. I bought a gray market 1200 and borrowed a belt-driven Kyocera from my parents’ stereo, but I still didn’t have a mixer. Instead, I plugged one turntable into the left phono input and plugged the other into the right, put the receiver in mono, plugged in headphones, and used the balance knob as a L-R fader. I soon graduated to a shitty Gemini which picked up all kinds of radio noise, and finally copped a legit 1200. Soon, I’d be at Columbia University, where the parties that a friend of mine and I were throwing uptown became so successful that we were able to bring them downtown to Big Haus and MK, and combine our crowd, which had already expanded beyond just students, with the downtown crowd. But even at this point, while already djing in clubs, I still didn’t actually know any other djs. I was basically on my own. This was 1989. It was around this time, and a little earlier that I was spending a huge amount of time in clubs and record shops. There were several djs that I’d see on the regular in clubs, but only a few really stand out in my memory. Frankie Inglese was at Nell’s, and while he wasn’t necessarily the best dj technically, his taste was impeccable and he had incredible records. Tne atmosphere at Nell’s in 1988 was electric, and hugely inspirational. Being there absolutely made me determined be in that booth. I actually have a copy of the demo tape I gave to Thomas, the manager at the time, who I am pretty sure never listened to it. I was naïve enough to believe that djs were hired on some kind of merit system. I’d have to say that my biggest inspiration was Duke of Denmark, who came to New York after catching the hip-hop bug in Europe when he saw the Fresh Fest. Duke fully embraced b-boy style, would rock fresh gear, even Gazelles, and would play the best hip-hop, classics and house. If Duke was playing somewhere, I’d make a point of being there. We’d later become good friends. I eventually landed a weekly gig in the basement of Mars, where I had already been hanging out at frequently, so I suppose I was a familiar ace. One day, I walked into the basement extrance with my records and saw Clark Kent, who I already idolized for both being Dana Dane’s dj and from seeing him KILL parties when he would guest for Duke on the 2nd floor of Mars’ Trip party that my friend Eli Gesner, whom I previously mentioned, was throwing. Clark came up to me and asked me who I was, and I introduced myself, as did he. I don’t remember the conversation, but that meeting started a long friendship, and Clark has always been a huge inspiration and a friend. A little later, when KRS-One’s brother ICU, after an incident at the radio station, stepped to me at Soul Kitchen when it was at Wetlands (Frankie was the dj), Clark had my back, telling ICU that if he touched me, he’d have a problem. But back to music- I learned so much just watching Clark, who was so damn nice on the turntables.

2. I can vividly remember when I first heard RUN DMC, and Shannon, Freeez and just all that heavy drum machine oriented music playing on WBLS and it really had an impact on me and I knew it was a new era. Something I could call my own that my parents did not relate to. When did you really take notice of Hip Hop and how did it affect you?

I don’t think I had the sophistication to appreciate what a cultural shift hip-hop was when I first heard it, but I was also pretty young. I mean, when you are in 5th grade, every day has it’s own eureka moment. Still, I remember with perfect clarity the moment I was introduced to rap. It was during a 5th grade lunch recess, and I was on the 5th floor handball court at Manhattan Country School, where we played a a made-up game called Sockey (soccer with a tennis ball), and while we played, some of the African-American and Latino student were reciting the rhymes to Rapper’s Delight, over and over. It was bugged out how every kid that wasn’t white knew it, almost over night. That weekend, I copped the 12″ from Island Sounds in Southampton, and I too was a rapping fool. I had already been more than familiar with Chic’s “Good Times” (my older sister constantly had her radio on WABC, which used to pump out all the big disco tunes), but hearing emcess rapping over it fucked my head up. I remember picturing in my head everything that was said in the rhymes. The literal directness of the rap made for such a different musical experience and it was not lost on me even at that age. It did feel very new, and I guess as kids, we did feel like we had something that was ours. Not too long after, The Message came out, and even though it was a much darker record, it was on the tips of everyone’s tongues at school. The same can be said for “It’s Like That” the following year. These records were huge- and we were too young to stay up to listen to the radio or to go to clubs, but somehow, probably through older siblings, they made it to our ears.

3. So how did you meet Bobbito and get the radio show off the ground? Tell us about the early days with Kurious Jorge and handing out flyers on the train.

After I started getting a bit of a rep downtown, I started to meet some of the characters that worked at record labels, and was soon going to labels to pick up records to play out. One day I was on my way to Def Jam when it was on Broadway an I bumped into a girl I knew, who, upon learning of my destination, told me that when I get to the label to say hello to Robert Garcia, an employee who she mildly fancied. When I got to Def Jam, the place was virtually empty, and I wondered if anyone worked there. I walked past reception and into a conference room, where I asked this guy if Robert Garcia was around. He said that he was Robert, and we started talking, and immediately hit it off really well. He later admitted to me that he wanted to be friends with me at first because I was dating a really beautiful girl at the time and he wanted to meet chicks through me. But really, we shared a sense of humor and a love for music and we were friends quickly. I had been at Columbia University, where I had made some fruitless attempts at getting on the radio. One day, my friend Ed Case, who passed away during school sadly, came up to me with a big enthusiastic smile on his face, telling me that there was a hip-hop show starting on KCR. This was a shitty surprise because I had basically been told that there would be no hip-hop on KCR. I started my campaign, raising a bit of a stink with the station, more out of principle than any real belief that my complaint would achieve anything. But to my surprise, I was given a chance to get on the air, every other Thursday, alternating with the other show. Talk about being careful what you wish for… Here I was, about to be on the radio, with no idea what I would do. I didn’t have an FCC license, I didn’t have a cool dj or radio name, and I was a little nervous about speaking on the air and sounding like a nerdy white guy! Coincidentally, before KCR was even a possibility, Bobbitio and I had been talking about how cool it would be if we put together a radio show and tried to get it syndicated. So when the KCR opportunity appeared, I asked Bobbito if he would be the voice of my radio show. We also enlisted Kurious, who was doing his own particularly relaxed version of A&R duties at Def Jam, where I too was “interning” instead of going to class. I took on the pathetic name “Skinny Bones” after graph legend Aaron Goodstone aka SHARP (Wild Style) who had been a friend of my sister’s, started calling me that. I loved graffiti as a kid, and SHARP was all over the Upper East Side and omnipresent on the 6 train, so meeting him was a big deal. Later, he and one of my best friends Claudia Gold (CLAW) became a couple, and Aaron and I became friends, but I still revered him, and took his humorous disparagement with a smile. Some of the early shows from the 1990 have radio drops for DJ Skinny Boned by SHARP, DMC, comedian Doug E Doug, Slick Rick Queen Latifah and The JVC Force. For those early shows, my good friend Eli Gesner, who founded Zoo York and who had started calling me Stretch, would design flyers which I totally forgot about until this interview. Jorge liked to spend more time on Broadway than in the Def Jam offices, so he would hand out flyers, as would Bobbito and I, on the train. The format of the show early on was four hours of me playing records with Bobbito leading hosting duties with me chiming in here and there, and Jorge was the in-house freestyle emcee, trading verses with whoever was guesting. On our first show ever, October 25th, 1990, we had Latee and Def Jeff. Two weeks later we had Percee-P, Two Kings in a Cipher (D-Dot as MC) and MC Serch. On November 29th we had Large Professor. The December 20th show featured Dinko D and Busta Rhymes, who had dreads that were about an inch and half long. A few weeks down the line we had Biggie Smalls and The Poetical Prophets who would become Mobb Deep. It wasn’t too long after we started that we went from every other week to every week. 1991 had an ill guest list: KMD, Percee-P, Akinyele, Nasty Nas, Lord Finesse, DMX The Great, Organized Konfusion, Ultramagnetic MC’s, Son of Bazerk, Craig G, Cypress Hill, Prince Rakeem (RZA), Asaan Unique (Ol’ Dirty Bastard), Total Pack, Powerule, Jaz, WC, Mr. Cee, Kool Keith, Onyx and OC, to name a few.

4. It’s hard for someone who didn’t live in New York during the early-mid 90’s to really understand what the Stretch and Bobbito show meant to everyone. I think a lot of younger people might imagine it as a very underground thing, or a “backpack” thing with a very limited appeal. I remember it completely differently. Every Friday it seemed like EVERYONE was talking about what had happened the night before, what new records had been premiered or who had rhymed live on the show. I sometimes wonder if I might have done better in high school if I wasn’t half awake on Fridays (probably not). It was absurdly influential throughout the city. Were you and Bob aware of this at the time? If so, do you remember a defining moment where you realized the level of success you had achieved?

I think the beauty of the show was that it meant something different to everyone but still, everyone that knew about it loved it. Ours wasn’t the only college/community hip-hop show on the air at the time, but I don’t think I’d be out of line in acknowledging that it was the most influential and accomplished. The rep of the show just grew and grew so I was never really aware of how widespread the fan base was. Bobbito may have had a better sense because he was on the phone all the time while I was immersed in the music. There was a piece on Main Source in The Village Voice and our show was mentioned several times. That was very cool to me, because throughout the 80’s, The Village Voice was a great source for writing about the emerging hip-hop scene, and being in it like that was a big time validation. When Cypress Hill accepted their award at The American Music Awards, which was broadcasted on primetime network TV, B-Real specifically thanked Kid Capri and me for making Cypress Hill happen in NYC.

We would get a lot of mail, but again, it was a gradual thing. This was all pre internet, so the interaction was by phone and mail, and with only ten phone lines (which were ALWAYS lit up) we couldn’t really tell. But still, we had a belief that we were running shit, even if we never voiced it. We were always very vocal in our support of other shows, and I think this was huge in cementing what became a scene for a while.

5. Another thing I remember was how early you would get certain records. Sometimes it felt like you guys were playing a song for a year already before Flex or whoever, would play it. Can you name 5 records you can safely say took off due to their rotation on WKCR?

I was a beast when it came to getting new records. But the whole spirit of the show was to be new- new records, new artists, no matter what label or where they came from. Early on, I don’t think that we had the kind of listenership that could make a record a hit just by me playing it, but I know that once I was on a record, the ball would start rolling and heads would then request the record at the record shops and then on Hot 97 which made it’s switch to hip-hop and r&b in 93-94. But I know that had I not played certain records, they would not have gotten off the ground. With that being said, I can name many really good records that I was really big on but that never caught any traction outside of my show- “Can’t Escape The Hypeness” by Blvd. Mosse, “Stitch By Stitch” by Ron B., “Now They Wanna See Me” by Percee-P & Ekim, the Pelon-released 360 Degrees, “Juvenile Techniques” by Company Flow… There are many, many records like this which were KCR staples that didn’t become hits, and I think we were fine with it that way because they remained ours. We were the first to put many seminal acts on the air- Jay-Z, Biggie, Nas, Large Professor, Organized, OC, Big L. Records like “Lookin’ At The Front Door”, “Live At The Barbecue”, “Halftime”, “Who Got The Props” all started at KCR. It’s true, no one was fucking with Cypress Hill at first but I was killing “Pigs”. For a while, I was the only radio dj playing “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me” and I used to get calls from Rap-A-Lot thanking me. I didn’t care that it was from Texas, and I already loved Geto Boys from when they were on American.

6. At the same time as the radio show you were killing it in the clubs. One thing I always noticed about you was how differently you played in clubs verses the radio. What style came more naturally to you or was it just a no brainer as far as the two different approaches? Tell us about some of the early parties you were involved in like Crazy Eddie’s and Sheets and Pillows. Looking back what would you say was the most memorable party of that era?

Having to switch modes between radio and clubs was necessary, because I was intentionally doing two different things, but it was such a pain in the ass to go through my records every week to prepare for the radio. I was a club dj first and foremost but when I got on the radio, decided to do a hip-hop show. At the time, I felt like the tradition of great NYC hip-hop radio had fallen off from its 80’s glory, and I wanted to fill in the gap. I didn’t have any idea that it would turn into a ten year run! Had I known, I maybe would have done it a bit differently, perhaps as a more open format to allow me more room to incorporate all of the music that I liked. Playing on the radio was the no-brainer. My thing was to start out strong, to entice listeners, but to not give it all away too early- to pace the show so that listeners had to rock with me for the four hours if they could. So I wouldn’t drop the new bombs too close to each other and too early. When one week was a little light in the music department, we’d talk more. Eventually, I couldn’t really function as a dj past 4am, so we’d talk and open the phone lines, and that’s how the last hour, often called “Krunchtime” came to be. But overall, djing on the radio didn’t have the component of the crowd on the dance floor, which at times made it less exciting, but also less demanding. In the club, I approached djing with a lot more thought- it was almost tactical, giving consider tempo, song order, routines that could lift a crowd up to a whole new level, and doing clever shit that made me stand out from other djs playing downtown. I’d stay up on all the new hip-hop, reggae, house, imports (I was at Downtown Records at least 4 hours a day), an I’d have to figure out how to put all of these records from different genres together so that they made sense, and kept people dancing.

7. So let’s talk about the end of the Stretch and Bob show. What happened exactly? I remember it pretty well and I was hanging out with Bob a lot at the time. It seemed to me that both of you went a little too far in opposite directions, you with more thuggish ruggish rap and Bob with backpack indie stuff (obviously these are ridiculous titles and I’m just kind of using them to poke fun at the whole scenario). How do you feel about that whole situation when you think back to it now?

More than anything, doing a genre specific radio show just became more and more challenging over time. Hip-hop, which for a while had an iron grip on my imagination and passion, was becoming less and less appealing to me for various reasons. It was getting to the point where I was having a hard time filling four hours with records that I loved, which wasn’t the case when I started. I suppose the routine of it was getting to me too, and the fact that the show required so much preparation on my part was frustrating because I had to do all the work by myself, from getting the music, to setting up the turntables and monitors, to engineering the show the best I could while djing to breaking it all down and traveling all the way downtown at 6am. It was physically really demanding. But more than anything, I was falling out of love with hip-hop music to be honest, and finding myself playing records I wasn’t so into. As the scene became more fractured, I did gravitate towards the harder stuff but not because it was thuggish. I have always listened to music before lyrics, which are secondary to me. I was always into beats, and over time, the more hardcore hip-hop just had better beats to me. The jazzier, lighter stuff- the backpack rap- to me was always very derivative. It was like heads were trying to recreate what De La Soul and Tribe had already perfected, as if they were trying to reincarnate an era that had passed. To this day, I think the best music walks that line between familiar and avant-garde. If it goes in either direction too much, then it becomes either cheese or experimental, and I’m not down with either. As I started to show up to KCR with less consistency, or show up late, Bobbito emerged as Cucumber Slice, and he got a chance to decide what got played on the show, which tended to lean heavily in the experimental direction. I was not too happy with that, but I guess i didn’t bug me enough to show up for every show. What bothered me most about it was that people were starting to associate me with music that I was practically allergic to.

8. When did you really start losing interest in rap and why? How did it affect your sets in the clubs? I really associate the early 00’s with rock music becoming popular in clubs and a few dj’s like you, me and Roctakon being in the forefront of that. Tell us about Tribeca Grand Mondays and that whole pre-Serato era.
My interest in rap started waning in 1996, which, ironically, is the year that I got on Hot 97. There were so many factors that went into it. As hip-hop became more mainstream, the whole scene lost a lot of its meaning. Artists were making music with the goal of getting on radio, and the music suffered for it. And as hip-hop became a lucrative business, it saw the influx of all kinds of people I was less than thrilled to interact with, whether it be drug dealer managers or clueless neophyte label heads who overnight started wearing sneakers, baggy pants and rocking Caesar cuts. The music started to sound like a corny minstrel show, and even though I was into some of it, by 2,000 I knew that it was only because I was on the radio that I was even paying attention to hip-hop, and that if I didn’t have a show, I’d probably care very little about it. So when my show was taken away from me so unceremoniously, I was able to take a deep, long breath, feeling a little bit free from what started as a love but turned into a burden. Tribeca Grand Mondays, which started at 60 Thompson, was a chance to do me without any expectations. For a few weeks, it was actually just me in the 60 Thompson lounge playing records for a handful of friends. I decided that I would only play music that we would never hear in clubs which ended up being a mix of 1970’s AM gold, light rock, 80’s pop, heavy metal, 60’s British rock, really whatever. This was pre-Serato, all vinyl, and I really dove deep into it. After two months, we had moved the party to the Tribeca Grand and we were pulling 1,600 people – on a Monday night! A lot of djs came to that party and I feel that it was really influential in opening up the stale downtown dj format to incorporate a lot more variation as well as turning a lot of djs on to specific records. Looking back at some of the trainspotting, I laugh.

BONUS LINK: The Shook Ones (Beatnut remix) is located here.