Tom Silverman [Tommy Boy/NMS] – The Unkut Interview

Here’s the complete transcript of my talk with Tom Silverman, who created the Dance Music Report and Tommy Boy Records in addition to co-founding the New Music Seminar, home of the MC and DJ Battle for World Supremacy. There’s a lot that I couldn’t fit into the NMS oral history piece from last month, so I thought it was worth printing in full seeing as though it paints an interesting picture of the

Robbie: What was your first exposure to hip-hop?

Tom Silverman: I went to the T-Connection to hear Bambaataa thing after learning about breakbeats in 1980, healing about this whole breakbeat phenomenon/b-boy concept in 1980 and wanted to find out about it. I called up Bambaataa and went to see him at T-Connection in the Bronx, and that’s how I first heard him and Red Alert and Jazzy Jay spinning the most amazing variety of music in a way that I’d never heard before. I just asked him if he wanted to make a record and that was kind of the beginning of Tommy Boy, when he said yes. To hear Kraftwerk and Billy Squier and Bob James and Cerone and The Monkees mixed in with normal James Brown and Sly Stone and all of this funk music was the thing that was the real revelation. And then to see how they cut it up and extended beats and found breaks and turned them into something more was just crazy at the time. Imagine seeing that in 1980 when no one had ever experienced it before? It’s like fire! ‘We’ve never seen fire before. What is that?’

When did the NMS begin?

The commencement was 1980, it was a one day event that year. In 1981 we did it in a club venue and it became a two-day event. The place was called Privates, and for the first time we did an event, it was called ‘a DJ spinning exhibition’ where we showed people what was happening in 1981 with spinning. We had a guy called Jeff Broitman, who was a disco DJ, showing how DJ’s mix records in a normal club situation. Then we had a guy called Whiz Kid – who later made records for us at Tommy Boy – who was a quick-cut DJ from the Afrika Bambaataa school of the Zulu Nation. He was from the Bronx and he was one of the greatest masters of fast spinning. It was a DJ’s exhibition to show how they did it, and people were just blown away. Nobody had seen people cutting two bars back and forth between records before. Everybody started talking about it, the room was packed to the gills and people were so excited about seeing it.

That next year was ’82 and we moved to the Sheridan Hotel, and I’m pretty sure we did Jazzy Joyce – a female DJ who was left handed and put the turntable sideways instead of the normal direction – and we dropped the disco DJ style thing. The battle might have started in ’83, which was the fourth seminar which was at The Hilton Hotel. There was all kind of spontaneous hip-hop things that were happening at the conference that year. People were breakdancing to a boombox on the second floor of the New York Hilton Hotel and I remember seeing picture of these kids lying around in a circle watching the breakdancing in the center and one of them was Mike D from the Beastie Boys, before they were the Beastie Boys. [laughs]

How did the Battle for World Supremacy develop?

It was my idea to do this [battle], I came up with the idea of the counting clocks. It was just DJ’s for the first two years and then we introduced MC’s, which created the MC battle, which is still popular today. We had a pro wrestling belt that I designed that was the award, so it became a big thing. We had celebrity judges and a whole team of people that just worked on this event because it became so popular that everybody wanted to show up for it. We’d have like a thousand people in the audience. One year we did it at the Webster Hall and it was totally packed. I think that was the year that Melle Mel stole the belt, he went and took the belt away from the winner. Classic. He got down and did one-arm push ups with the belt over his shoulder, then he ran out with the belt and everyone in the audience was chanting, ‘Give back the belt! Give back the belt!’ He was like the bad guy in wrestling. Every time I see him I say, ‘Melle Mel! When are you gonna give back the belt?’ [laughs]

Do you have much footage from the battles?

There might be a little bit – we don’t have anything unfortunately. I separated from my partner in the Seminar in 1992 and he ran the Seminar for two more years before it stopped. I brought it back in 2009, but all of the [recorded] archives of the Seminar were misplaced or lost by him. We had taped every panel from the second one, so we had recordings – albeit on cassette – of everything. All that stuff would have been amazing to have today it it exists anymore.

It seems to have been an important focal point for the ‘who’s who’ in hip-hop at one stage.

We wanted to try to represent different areas like Miami and LA and the Bay and Philly, early on. Freshco and Miz won one year and Tommy Boy signed them and put them together as an act that didn’t work. Ice-T used to come with his wife Darlene at the time, and then he performed with Bodycount right there in the ‘Cop Killer’ era when tempers were at the highest level, post ‘Fuck The Police’ when that whole Time-Warner thing was happening. We were on the cutting edge. There was a lot of interesting issues with homophobia in black music at the time that would come out at the Seminar, and there were all kinds of accusations of racism that would happen at the Seminar as well, and dirty laundry that would be aired. ore of that would be happening at the Seminar, ‘cos there was no space for that in the Battle for World Supremacy.

There were two different venues. We did hip-hop panels at the Seminar, and those were pretty contentious. There were screaming matches and accusations during the panels themselves, and you never know what was gonna happen. Then it would go into the battles, where all hell would break loose. We created the rule set for the competitions and then Tony Prince kinda took our model and did the DMC battles. He used to take a [DMC] booth at the Seminar and sell their record bags and all that stuff.

Was Busy Bee the winner of the first MC battle?

85 was the year we moved in the Marriott Marquis. Busy Bee did his famous ‘Squirrel and the Nut’ rap that day. King Sun D Moet, who was signed to Profile as an artist, won one year too. Jazzy Jeff won, and when you talk to Will Smith today he considers the New Music Seminar the place where he got his start.

Were you ever involved in the judging panel yourself?

Never. I was busy running the New Music Seminar, ‘cos it was a three day event with five thousand or more people and hundreds of speakers and artists performing. We had a whole committee who would come and meet at our office and plan who we would invite to participate in the battle each year, and they were the ones who did the invitations [for] who would be in the competition. We set the round robin competition rules and it moved through that way, so we could figure out how long it would take. We had to get the bugs out over a period of time. We did exhibitions for years before we actually started the battle, I remember we did spinning exhibitions with a group from LA and from Chicago that had three or more DJ’s all playing at the same time, so we had six turntables and three DJ’s all mixing simultaneously together. We had all kinds of exhibits of where turntablism was going throughout the whole thing. The New Music Seminar was unique in that it was conference that was built around DJing. My publication was Dance Music Report and Marc Josephson was my original partner who had a thing called Rockpool, which was a DJ pool and newsletter for rock DJ’s.

How long did the elimination process take?

We tried to make sure it would be a few hours, which wasn’t always easy. [laughs] That’s why we had the countdown clock, so that we knew that each battle would only be sixty seconds and then they had to move on to the next one. It went eight to four to two. I don’t know if we started at sixteen or we started at eight. I’m pretty sure we started at eight, at least in the beginning. So we had to have twelve battles, and then there was time in between for the voting and the announcing and people booing and all that stuff! [laughs] I couldn’t go to all of them ‘cos I was running the conference at the same time. I went to a lot of the early ones. We used to do it in the hotel and then we moved it into The Ritz, which is Webster Hall, and we started doing it at night.

How were the results decided?

The audience influenced the judges sometimes, but the judging panel was supposed to be judging things based on creativity, uniqueness, skill, and then they held a number up just like the Olympics. Between the Olympics judging, the belt and the pro wrestling thing and basketball countdown clock, all this stuff made it really exciting. These were all the ideas that I had put together to create the format for the battle.

Do you have a particular memory that stands out?

I think Melle Mel stealing the belt was the most memorable. Not neccassarily the best, but the most memorable. When the lead artist from Stetsasonic went on the stage and started throwing turntables and screaming – that wasn’t a great memory, but it was a memory! [laughs]

Was that Daddy-O?

Daddy-O, exactly. I’m sure he was upset at Tommy Boy for something. We signed them in 1983 and by 1985 they were kinda done. That must have been later on, I’m not even sure if they were still signed to us at that point. A lot of anger would come out at the Seminar, different crews would get into a ruckus with other crews. Luke Skyywalker‘s crew got into a fight with the guys from LA, people were saying it was gang violence. They were throwing tables at each other. Luckily it didn’t get into anything worse. This is the era of rap when there was the east coast/west coast battle, we’re lucky we never had any sort of violence that was serious with guns or anything. We emerged unscathed from that era.

This list of winners, particularly in the DJ battles, features some of the most significant names of the day.

Some of the more established ones didn’t want to battle, ‘cos just like boxers they didn’t want to fight someone where they could possibly lose and it would affect their reputation. There were many people who turned it down.

Apparently Treach lost to one of the Cleveland guys in a battle. That must have been embarrassing for him in front of his home crowd.

And yet Treach has had many platinum records and is still making a living today. The guys from Cleveland have other jobs, they’re not in the music business anymore. Treach was the big winner in the long-term. The message was that battle rapping has nothing to do with the sort of rapping that can sell records or make a musical contribution. It’s a different skill altogether, and why can’t they both work together is something I’ve never really understood. I guess being creative and musical doesn’t win you a battle – talking about your momma wins you a battle. That’s entertainment. It got down to the lowest common denominator. This started with the DJ’s first, before the MC’s became a part of it. I think ’84 might have been the first year for the DJ battle, I’m not sure.

What about the beatbox battles?

We had a beatbox competition, ‘cos it looked like that was gonna emerge as a new area. Fruikwan [Note: May have him mixed up with Wise] from Stetsasonic and there were a number of beatboxers who were evolving at that time and it looked like that was gonna turn into an art form that was significant, but it never did.

What do you think the legacy of the Seminar was?

We were right at the epicenter of hip-hop and the evolution of hip-hop and the New Music Seminar was the only place where everyone got together in the 80’s and the early 90’s to really talk about it and how it was evolving – even DJing. We had a DJ’s and Remixes panel every year, we had panels on hip-hop, we had panels on dance music and all of the new trends were always discussed. We gave DJ’s a voice, and producer’s panels and songwriter’s panels and other places where DJ’s never were represented as full citizens in the music industry.

It was honouring those who rejected the old model of what music had to be for a new model. Whether it’s beatboxing or DJing using turntables as an instrument, or rapping rather that singing. The idea of throwing the rulebook out and being able to create music in an entirely new way with an entirely different sound is something to be honoured. No one knows this, but the early pioneers used to have to go out and fight rejection every day, because people hated rap music. They felt it was a threat to everything. They hated DJing and hey hated drum machines because it was a threat to drummers. Everybody was afraid from the past of being disrupted.

Hip-hop really disrupted the music industry. Now it’s really ripe for disruption itself, it’s unfortunately forgetting it’s most important lesson, which we learned here by elevating hip-hop to the world stage – which the Seminar and Tommy Boy both focused on for more than a decade. Hip-hop now is taking it for granted now they’ve been around for thirty five years they need to reinvent themselves into something new, because they’re gonna become just as luddite as the people who fought them in 1980 to ’85. It’s either gonna reinvent itself or it’s gonna be disrupted by something new and left behind. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, just like old rock & roll is still happening.