When The Bomb Squad’s Keith Shocklee told me about this song in 2008, I was thinking I didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell to ever hear it. Luckily, Long Island resident Lloyd Means has taken the time to upload his extensive collection of Spectrum City / The Mr. Bill Show recordings from WBAU, featuring such sure-shots as the echo-soaked intro to the MC Flavor show, a roller-skating style promo jam from Chuck D and Flav dropping ‘Claustrophobia Attack’.
Hank Shocklee: We picked-up the Roland CR-8000 with the Roland TB-303 Bassline. I was the only cat rockin’ the beat box and bassline around this area. Nobody understood that. When that came into play at the beginning of ’80, everybody thought I was rocking some new break beat records! I used to mix it in just like I was doing records. That was the start of the craziness that we was getting’ into. It was so nuts, man. I used to plug-in all kinds of basslines, and I had my presets and my pattern and my book set-up – ‘cos everytime I made a bassline I had to write the notes down, because they didn’t store very well. If the battery power went out on it and it was saved in the memory? You was done. That was a wrap! So we had to figure out a way how to save it. I had two of ’em. I broke the first one! Then had to go buy another one. [laughs]
So I’d be playing my break beats and I’d be hitting my drum machine to the point where everything was right – the levels, the whole nine – nobody would know, then all of a sudden I’d throw my infamous ‘Bahdahdahdahdh! Boom tudda bah!’ Then all of a sudden I come up with a bassline. I came up with the infamous bassline that crushed everybody around my way, and it was so hot that Chuck, this other crew that we had called The Townhouse Three – which later became Son of Bazerk – we made up this joint called ‘The N41’, and the bassline was so sick, this became almost an anthem around where we lived at. Because the N41 bus started from Freeport, which was where The Townhouse Three was, ran through Roosevelt, which we lived at, ran through Uniondale, which the Leaders of the New School lived at – it was one big bus line – and ended in Hempstead, where our studio was at the time. So this one bus connected the three hottest towns together. We called it ‘N41’ because everybody when we was growing up had to ride that bus. Everybody. You could not be in our way and not ride that bus. That’s why we had everybody on that little infamous break record. That became the anthem of the radio station. That was our hottest record that we did back then – we call it a record, but back then it was our hottest demo we ever made for the radio station.
They also did a follow-up, dedicated to the N40 bus route this time: