The Freshest Kids Page #4

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While the Rock Steady Crew danced and I rapped and the DJ was cutting it up

And that was reviewed in the Village Voice

The Village Voice wrote a big article on that

And from then, like it seemed like it was on

We started doing that, Henry Chalfant put us on

And we what we were doing is we were breaking up Rock Steady Crew into 2 groups

It was Rock Steady and Break Masters, for shows

We just battled each other, but it got to a point to where like "Yo let's make it interesting"

And we were hooked up with a show at the Lincolin Center

Henry Chalfant again, hooked us up with that show

And it was like "Yo, let's battle dynamic in a neutral ground now"

At Lincolin Center, Manhattan...Boom!

And after it was covered by National Geographic

It came out on the front page of the Metro Section of the New York Times

It was also on 20-20

And they showed it on Channel 7 ABC News

I just remember seeing plays on a news mount

Like, "Ooh sh*t!" You know like, "There's Legs!"

And at the end of the battle they were like "Who won the battle?!"

All you heard was "Rock Steady! Rock Steady!"

Like in the middle of Lincolin Center!

One day I was watching TV and I saw Rock Steady on TV and I was like "Woah!"

"If they can do it, we can do it!"

And so I got a group back together and went and recruited Chino and we started from there

To make a long story short,

We met Michael Holman, who was some type of a manager to Rock Steady

And in 1982, they offered us a battle..

I had a night club called Negril

The first Hip Hop club in downtown New York

And I invited them, The Rock Steady Crew, to preform every Thursday night

And believe me, everybody was there..

Ren Ricard, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring..

And so here's where Negril comes in to exposing Hip Hop to the rest of the world

You know because, New York is a media capital

Every important magazine, every important news paper, has a representation in New York City

"The man! The man!"

After a while I started getting a little bit bored with just Rock Steady Crew doing a dance performance

And I said "Legs, what's up with these battles I keep hearing about" I didn't really know

And after a couple of weeks he found a crew called The Floor Masters

Well actually they needed a crew to battle so that they could look good on film!

And they wanted a crew that wasn't as good as them, so that they could look really good on film

And what they didn't know was that The Floor Masters were really good!

And when Floor Masters came down to perform, a light turned on in my head

Because what I saw was Breakers

Who may not have been as good as Rock Steady crew in the finesse and style in their break

What they lacked in that, they made up for it in the athleticism of breaking

They spun longer, faster and harder

And I thought "That's what I want to do, I want a crew that's athletic!"

A crew that would eventually find its way into the Olympics

Michael Holman saw something that he felt like "Wooow! This is a real good thing!"

And, you know, they changed the name from Floor Masters to New York City Breakers

A lot of people think that if you're from New York and you're from the Bronx that you're no good

But we're from the Bronx and we are here to show everybody that we're good

And that the Bronx doesn't just have bums and ghettos, but it got something good too

Cuz we're the freshest kids out there

I had embarked with Charlie Ahearn to make the first Hip Hop movie, Wild Style

My main intent with Wild Style was to show that, Break Dancing, Graffiti and Rap were one

It was connected, nobody had seen these forms as being a part of each other

I sought to make this film to bring all these forms together in one format

So that people could see how they interrelate

Wild Style, that was the one movie that captured more of the true essence of Hip Hop

Around that time, we were just doing it to have fun and gain recognition

We ain't never think we would turn out to be famous or you know be taken world wide

This park right here..

We basically named it Rock Steady Park

Because it was a central meeting place for all the chapters of Rock Steady in the early '80s

We used to come around here and just act up, you know

We kind of like shared the park with everybody, everybody knew each other

You got Rock Steady on one side of the park and then you had all the drug dealers on this side

Like people selling mescaline, loose joints

There's a carpet store now

But, that's where we used to get our cardboard and bring it to the back

Right there it was just basically, roughing it up, concrete style, just doing our thing

And you know, scrapes and bruises, cutting up the back

Getting all the, what what we call the "Bboy burns" on their shoulders and things like that

So many things have gone down here

I mean, you've had like the Buffalo Gals video was filmed here

The lady that was our manager at the time

Kool Lady Blue

Told us that these people saw the show and wanted us in their movie Flashdance

And that was it right there

But, do you remember what we said?

What did we say?

When she said I'd like you to be in a movie, we were all like..

"No! We don't want to do a movie like that where everyone is going to start doing our moves!"

Or, the way we though back then was..

They were going to "bite"

And I remember like it was yesterday

It was in the dance studio, we did not want to do it

But then she said, "You'll get paid! The pay is $1038 Dollars!"

And we were like "......Okay!"

Jennifer Beals didn't really talk to us there

But after the premeire on Broadway New York, when they saw the response

The public and the press on how crazy they were, when the world first saw Bboying, was through us

I mean during the scene, the actual scene people were going out of their minds

Besides chills going through our bodies, you know we couldn't believe it!

We were like "Holy sh*t!" "We're on the screen!"

When we came out, the press was all over us, all of a sudden Jennifer Beals was like..

"Hey! Hi!" You know, she got in the middle with us with pictures

And we were like "Whatever, get in the pictures.."

So, you know she took pictures with us..

And it just, that's when it kind of escalated for us

Breaking hit the West Coast with a fury, in '82

When it came out here it originated really from Flashdance

When that came out, it just spread right from that little scene, just that one scene

And everyone started doing it

Maybe 13-14 years old and I picked up on it like everyone else, they saw it for the first time..

People just knew it was part of them

You know, I found a couple of other brothers that felt the same way

And started up a crew called Shake City Rockers

Which were influenced by New York style breakers

We were more like into the air moves, you know what I'm saying?

I used to look up to the guys out here in the West Coast

I used to look up to the Shake City Rockers, you know, Pony Express

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