Interview with B-Boy Teenie Rock
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| B-Boy Teenie Rock |
conducted by Sir Norin Rad (The Intruders / Germany)
SIR NORIN RAD:"Where are you from originally?"
TEENIE ROCK:"I was born and raised in the Bronx. Right there on 183rd Street....West Bronx. Between 183rd & University Avenue...... Andrews Avenue. I went to preschool in the Bronx and junior high school in the Bronx. When I was thirteen I moved to Harlem where my grandmother and my mother was raised. So I got a lot of background from the Bronx. All my dancing materials come from the Bronx. Coming into Harlem I just took what I knew and I ran into some friend... Dancin' Doug...my partner. I lived on 154th Street......between 8th Avenue & Bradhurst Avenue...one block away from the Polo Grounds."
SIR NORIN RAD:"When were you born?"
TEENIE ROCK:"I was born in 1959."
SIR NORIN RAD:"So you moved to Harlem in 1972, right?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah."
SIR NORIN RAD:"What exactly is your name as a dancer? I have come across both Ma Teenie and Teenie Rock but which one is it?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, my mother's name.....we used to call her Teenie. Friends used to come around all the time to my house and I always used to call my mother Mama Teenie or Ma Teenie. That name stuck with me through basketball and dancing. So Teenie Rock is the dancing name and the basketball name. Ma Teenie comes from the song that's behind me and Dancin' Doug. The Song is called "New Bell" (by Manu Dibango)....(sings to the melody of "New Bell")..Ma Teenie.....Dancin' Doug!!! Ma Teenie....Dancin' Doug!!!! That's where Ma Teenie comes from!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"What kind of music where you exposed to when you were a child growing up?"
TEENIE ROCK:"It was all Soul music. My mother was a dancer and a singer and she played every kind of artist but it was all Soul music. Our favourites growing up was definetely James Brown...... because James Brown played a lot of music in the 1960's. Almost every month it looked like a new song was coming out......and Michael Jackson. Those were the two that were really deep in our heart."
SIR NORIN RAD:"I guess you had already been dancing prior to attending Kool DJ Herc's parties. Please describe how you developed your dancing skills at an early age? What were your main influences?"
TEENIE ROCK:"When we were little kids our family had a lot of gatherings. My grandmother always used to have her grandkids on the floor and they would throw quarters on the floor... 25 cents....they would throw quarters out for us to dance. So whoever would dance the best would get the quarter. My brother..Carl Wright... is who I looked up to. Me and Doug looked up to him because he was the better dancer than both of us, he just never came out to dance. He went to the Apollo and won amateur night dancing. His name is Carl Wright, he doesn't have a nickname. I was influenced by him and also by James Brown...his dancing....The Jacksons... we got a lot of moves from there but we weren't even knowing that we were doing B-Boy moves, we were just having fun dancing."
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| B-Boy Teenie Rock |
SIR NORIN RAD:"How did you find out about Kool DJ Herc's parties and when did you start going there?"
TEENIE ROCK:"1973/74.......we all used to hang out and go to parties locally but Dancing Doug...he went to Cardinal Hayes (High School)...which was in the Bronx opposite our high school which was John F. Kennedy.......Doug would always come back with flyers because I guess the guys at his school they knew a lot about parties. He would come back with flyers and we always used to go to parties so we said,"Okay, we gonna go up there to this Kool Herc party!"It was like,"We gotta go up there 'cause they got some good dancers. Let's go get it in!" So we started to practice and then we just started going up there until finally we just threw ourselves in it. You know, they had their crew already. We just went up there and they didn't know us, they didn't accept us, so we had to jump in and do our thing! That's how we got on."
SIR NORIN RAD:"Do you recall where your very first Kool Herc party took place at?"
TEENIE ROCK:"It was the Hevalo. That was the first one that we went to. Starlight.....there was a couple of them (clubs) but the Hevalo was the main one we went to."
SIR NORIN RAD:"Please describe the atmosphere at those Kool Herc parties in the Hevalo."
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, like the first time we used to go up there we basically had to stand in line. It was always kinda dark and gloomy. Everybody was out there. It wasn't like the movies where you got all these fancy cars and everybody out there with diamonds and pearls and stuff like that. No! I t was a lot of boys and girls just waiting in line, just wanting to have fun..go dance and have a good time. The music you could hear it down the block. As soon as you got out the cab you could hear the music because every time they opened the door to let people in, the music was blasting out. So it took us about an hour and a half, two hours to get in and you know we never went early because we knew right around 12 o'clock is when Kool Herc always went into his break music. We knew we had to get there around 11.30 at night because that's when everybody was getting ready to do their thing. So maybe from 8 o'clock to 12 people were having a good time but all the B-Boys, all the dancers knew at 12 o'clock it was on."
SIR NORIN RAD:"How did you get to the Hevalo? You mentioned something about cabs?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah, our crew...it was a lot of us...so we would just get cabs from Harlem. We'd jump in cabs, it would be about four or five cabs full of us and we'd just ride up to the Bronx. Back then it costed no more than 2, 3, 4 dollars....back in those days. You know, we'd get a cab. Coming home it'd be hard to catch cabs. The place was really near the train station, so basically we would just walk down the street and get on the 4 Train and take it back to Harlem. But most of the time we just jumped in them cabs and we was ready to go up there to have a good time. There was no fighting, it was no really nothing going on. Nobody getting mugged or anything, it was just a lot of fun, a lot of good dancing, meeting girls, meeting guys...we were forming friendships with people that we didn't even know we would have friendships with. The music was loud, it was different. The music was completely different from Harlem. Kool Herc was playing the beats and from there that just was the staple. We was already in love with music but now we were in love with music even more. We used to stand right next to the big speakers and wait till 12 o'clock and then the next day our ears would be ringing for a week."
SIR NORIN RAD:"How would you dress for a Kool Herc party? I mean your partner Dancing Doug was known for always dressing very fly, so what was your approach to dressing?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, we went to Delancey Street a lot. Everyone went to Delancey Street from different parts of the city. You could get everything there! Leather coats, Cortefiel coats, everything you can name. You would get some tailor-made pants, plaid pants. You'd get them hemmed, you'd get them customized. I always had on a cashmere sweater with a t-shirt under it. I had a fisherman Kangol, I didn't wear any glasses or anything like that just a little hat to throw it over my head. We didn't really dress too much, we didn't get too flashy 'cause me and Doug had a lot of moves. We didn't wanna overdress."
SIR NORIN RAD:"In which way did the music at parties in Harlem differ from the music that Kool DJ Herc played at his jams in the Bronx?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, the thing about the music with DJ Hollywood (famous Disco DJ from Harlem) and the music for Kool Herc is that when we were in Harlem we really went to a lot of parties away (in the Bronx) 'cause nobody was dancing like that in Harlem. Remember we were in Harlem but we came back. People was hearing about us in Harlem, so then we started getting challenges. Then we had to start to go off on people in the Battlegrounds (legendary park in Harlem), the community centers but most of our damage....we took our dance to the Bronx 'cause that music up there was different. Kool Herc was cutting different breakbeats, they wasn't doing that in Harlem. He was bringing music that we hadn't heard before. Those beats were turning our bodies into a different person. We had to get ready. A lot of the music that we was hearing... we started buying little cassette tapes, we'd record the music at the parties and we'd take it back and we'd play it. We started throwing moves, we started just practicing things 'cause we had to be at our A game. Every weekend we had to bring our A game 'cause the guys in the Bronx were really, really good. They really were but me and Doug murdered them! We murdered them all and they know it (laughs)!!!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"All of the B-Boys from Kool DJ Herc's parties that I have spoken to so far stated that the music literally coerced them to dance and put them in a zone. Like they felt those beats in their soul...."
TEENIE ROCK:"That's what I was just telling you a little while ago when that music came on it did something to us!! It was like being at a concert 'cause the music was so loud and you could hear every instrument and you knew when to move, what beat to look for and when you was on point...the music is really what turned you into a B-Boy!! Every one of your moves was with the beat, on the sound. Whenever he changed it over we knew exactly when to come in on. James Brown "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose"...... we waited for certain parts of it and we had it all down pat. And "The Mexican" came on...we was waiting for different parts of it. Like I said we had so many songs that we didn't know but we already knew 'em 'cause we heard them over and over again. Our body reacted to every beat that Herc put on because like I said it touched your soul and it just brought out so much in you. That was our national championship as young men! Going to Kool Herc's parties and dancing!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"Do you also agree with the notion that Kool DJ Herc's parties were like the most prestigious arena for B-Boys to go off at back then? That it was like playing basketball at Rucker Park?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah, and that's where I'm at 'cause I did both. I had my name from the Rucker. You know, that's how I went to college because I was an All-City basketball player. So all of that intwined because that's how my name reacted with basketball because my dancing name took over in the streets, in the parks. They found out, "Oh, that's Teenie Rock! Yo, Teenie Rock do your thing!" And that's how we did it! But Ma Teenie was a song that my crew would sing and the guys in the Bronx they heard it. When that song came on ("New Bell" by Manu Dibangu) almost everybody would march to the circle. We just drew a crowd.....everybody was like, "Yo, they're here!!! They're getting ready!" We was ready, we walked in ready. "
SIR NORIN RAD:"Please elaborate on how you met Dancin' Doug!"
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, I used to go down to my grandmother's house...for the weekend.... She lived in the projects right next to Polo Grounds....that's the Colonial Projects. When we moved down to Harlem we already knew some people in building 1 in the Polo Grounds so we met Doug and his crew. His friends were just friends, we just hung out, played basketball across the street a lot. We danced, did different things a lot. I met Doug probably my first month when I moved to Harlem and from there we just connected, you know? We liked the same things and we supported each other. There was like thirty of us as a crew. There was many of us. Me and Doug we lived two lives, when we were in Harlem we were one way but on the weekends we'd leave with our crew and go dance and the people in Harlem didn't know about us until later on in the years because they wasn't doing what we were doing. Doug was always the promoter. He knew where to go, "Let's go here! Let's go there!" We went wherever he took us. We used to skip school and go to college parties, down in City College on Thursdays at 2 o'clock. We used to skip school and go down there. That was for the mature, so we went down there to see if we could hang out with the mature people, too. We would just dance, do the Hustle and all that. There we didn't do the breakdancing...I mean, I never called it breakdancing. We could be just nice there and dance and people would still gather round. You know, we went to different types of parties, we was well rounded. We could go to Disco which we didn't do a lot but we could Hustle and hang out with the Disco people. We definetely was grimey in the street, dancing up in the Bronx and then we was mellow, too with it."
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| Dancin' Doug at the legendary Executive Playhouse (one of the clubs where Kool DJ Herc used to rock at) |
SIR NORIN RAD:"I was told that there were also a lot of battles of B-Boy duos at Herc's parties and I heard that you and Dancing Doug had some fierce battles against Trixie and his cousin Wallace Dee (RIP). Please describe how these battles went down from your point of view."
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, me and Doug we basically always danced together. Like we'd dance together.... if you wanna go, I'll be right here....tag team.... you dou your thing, I do my thing but when it was time to go against guys, we always had to dance against two. I remember the first time that we danced against Wallace and Trixie. We was dancing, man, and they went first! I think it was Trixie....he threw out......can I say this? He was dancing and he threw out a dildo on the floor! Oh my God!!! The crowd went crazy, man!!!! Me and Doug were like, "What is this, man???" They would dance and they would really be moving fast when they danced. Me and Doug came back 'cause we always had a bunch of stuff but what we killed them with was we got these moves where we slapped each other's hands, turn around...then I threw Doug under my leg and then he'd come back, falling back through..... Then I threw him up on my shoulders and then we turned to Mr. Jekyll & Dr. Hyde. It was over! The crowd went crazy!!! But, man, that battle in particular was hard. The Bronx cats was on our head when Wallace and Trixie threw that dildo out. I was like, "Oh, my God!" Yes, the battles was intense but the Bronx accepted us, man, 'cause we wasn't no lame ducks. We were going against their best and their best was really, really good, so me and Doug were ready. It wasn't easy but we finally got to the point where they respected us. You know, because we was there and we was getting it in. And then when the other cats came we was just giving them the battle! Goin' off on everybody!! Every week we'd come back with something different and they just couldn't understand. You know, Doug had the motorcycle (routine)......We started the drop! Me and Doug! The drop people are using now where you go down on one foot and you put your leg behind your back, spinning, then you come back up We started that drop!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"That corkscrew type of drop...."
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah!! Exactly!!! We started that! We was doing that and then Doug was doing his little motorcycle thing. I would come under men and then I would do my thing and then I'd take the guy's shirt and flip it up and put my head under him and then just come back under. Like I was touching people's bodies. I made up a move where I would act like I was falling, man, and I'd just fall on the guy, break my stuff, catch his shoulders and pop back up! Man, it was.... It was great, man!! We was doing acrobatic stuff but it was kinda not at a high level. It was dancing acrobatics. We wasn't doing all that jumping around, doing flips behind our back. Nah, we was keeping our feet on the ground and we was dancing."
SIR NORIN RAD:"What were your favourite beats to go off to?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Number one is definetely "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose"....James Brown! That's number one! Always! "The Mexican"..I like that one because when they hit that beat after they come out of that chorus and it comes right into that guitar beat......oh my God!!!! That one! There's so many of those beats! Anything James Brown I can come back to. "Listen To Me"...I put that in there. That was always good 'cause when he hit that beat when my man be screaming. (hums the melody of "Listen To Me") Boy, I'm telling you, that's that Bronx music right there!!!! Them cats come at you when you play "Listen To Me". For some reason they come at you after that one. "
SIR NORIN RAD:"What was the dance called when you were doing it?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Matter of fact we were just burning people......going off!!! We didn't call it B-Boying, people would later call us B-Boys."
SIR NORIN RAD:"Who were the most outstanding B-Boys in your era to you besides Dancing Doug and you?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Wallace Dee, Trixie, Sasa. I think Clark Kent, The Twins ( Keith & Kevin), Rossy they were young. They were watching us, they came after us. It was some other cats' names but the outstanding guys those were the ones that I just named. Oh, and Bosco Rock was in there, too! I forgot. He was doing his thing, too! "
SIR NORIN RAD:"What do you remember about the Chuck Center? Did you ever dance there?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Okay, if you really wanna go at it NOTHING is gonna compare to Kool Herc's parties. Now the Chuck Center was kool, we went down there a couple of times, did our thing. The Battlegrounds was good, up on Amsterdam Avenue, on The Hill. But our name was made in the Bronx. We had already had our names when Chuck Center was going on, you know? We'd go to Chuck Center every now and then but there was much stronger competition in the Bronx. The guys in the Bronx was nice with it. I mean me and Doug, we're probably the first out of Harlem. I can't see nobody else 'cause nobody else stepped to the plate. When we came home guys tried to come at us but it was over! It was over before it got started. We were just practicing on those guys 'cause they wasn't into that."
SIR NORIN RAD:"Okay, and what do you recall about The Promenade in Marble Hill?"
TEENIE ROCK:" We beat everybody in The Promenade, me and Doug. Matter of fact, we went to school right next to The Promenade...John F. Kennedy High School. You could walk to the school, that's how close The Promenade is. We used to go up there, they had some cat there named Charlie Rock...another Charlie Rock (not Cholly Rock) and some other kids from Marble Hill Projects that thought they was nice with it.. Same thing with Dyckman Houses. All them guys up there thought they was nice with it. We went up there 'cause we went to school there and we destroyed them, man. I'm not trying to brag but me and Doug we went up there and we got our footprint in Promenade, we got our footprint in Marble Hill. We had great parties up there!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"When did those B-Boy parties at The Promenade take place?"
TEENIE ROCK:"1975/76.....that's when we danced at The Promenade. The Promenade used to have great parties, man!!! It was everybody coming from that part of the Bronx. Then you had some guys coming from across and down from Harlem and up from New Rochelle and Mount Vernon. It was a good mixture of people dancing in those days. Lot of pretty girls, lot of pretty girls, man. Everybody was going there. The Promenade is one huge building and it was very very nice 'cause you had security doormen and stuff like that. You probably had to have some money to live in that building. Those people looked like they were middle class people that lived there. They had a big center downstairs and for whatever reason they'd let the kids have parties there. But yeah, we took care of that Marble Hill crew, trust me! They came through, they thought they was nice with it and they all went to John F. Kennedy High School, yeah. We took care of them. We also destroyed a couple of guys that came from the Bronx...they was in the Black Spades...they came over from Stevenson High School and they tried to dance against us. We got them, too. So we had a lot of respect in the Bronx and Harlem, everywhere we went dancing. Later on after we had left in the 1980s here come these guys talking about they're B-Boys, they're original.......Wait a minute! Where's the time table at? You gotta be kidding me!!! (laughs) Wait a minute! They just scratched out five years of us dancing out of the whole equation."
SIR NORIN RAD:"From what I have heard The People's Choice Crew was the first DJ Crew in that part of Harlem that played that Bronx Breakbeat Sound, followed later on by The G-Force Crew. What was it like to dance in the Battlegrounds?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Well, then everybody knew that the dance was burning each other. By that time everybody knew that if you went parties you would have to burn somebody. We went to the Battlegrounds. Everybody knew us, they thought we was okay. We let these cats go off first. They started going off....the crowd was so thick in there that night that we only had a tight spot to dance in. They kept getting closer and closer. Man, we probably just had six feet to dance that night. These cats was coming so me and Doug did our thing. We went off! When we went we didn't just go and play around. No, we practiced our moves. Every week we'd throw in new moves and we practiced. We had good moves, we were natural with it but I'm not gonna say we were anywhere without practice. No! We were already good but we always had creative minds. We had to make sure it worked. We didn't have every beat that Kool Herc played with us while we were practicing. So the thing is we were practicing without the music!!! So when we went to Kool Herc's parties whatever he threw on we'd put our routines in it and we just did it. It just was so amazing that what we put in without listening to the music worked so well...it was almost like being in the studio, laying the tracks. We made hits!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"That's very interesting as other original B-Boys have told me the same thing about their approach to practicing."
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah, and we didn't do it like (counts), "1,2,3,4.....1,2,3,4." A lot of times we didn't even know which routine we were doing! We just went out there and we did it. It wasn't like, "Yo Doug, when this song comes on we gonna throw this move on." Nah! It was just like we kinda vibed off each other. When he was ready, he started getting it in.....I was getting it in and we had so much stuff, man that when I saw what he was doing, I was right on top of it. When he saw what I was doing, he was right on top of it. You know, it was instinct."
SIR NORIN RAD:"It seems as if almost all the B-Boys from Kool DJ Herc's parties used to do certain characters as part of their dance. Like James Bond would do the Get Smart..... Did you do something similar back then?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah, I think all of our dance was characters because what we did was we took a lot of stuff like from The Wizard Of Oz. You know when the scarecrow and them jumped on top their shoulders.... That was our routine! When I threw Doug on my shoulders we would go into our Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde move. That was a couple of our routines. Like The Wizard Of Oz, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein. We kinda combined a lot of that into some of our routines. Especially when I threw Doug up my shoulders....nobody did that! Nobody ever in those B-Boy days when they did those team tandems. Then we went back to the old days of the 1930s when they used to do the Lindy Hop. We took moves from there. Like when I threw Doug under my legs and he'd come back and I'd swing him back up through my legs. I mean we had so many different routines I wish I could remember them all. We did a lot of the Three Stooges moves, too."
SIR NORIN RAD:"You and Dancin' Doug also used to have a B-Girl from Drew Hamilton with you that was called Dancin' Doll. What do you recall about her and her style of dancing?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah Darlene Rivers....Dancin' Doll...she was the female version of us. She was part of our crew. She danced solo but she came in with a couple of routines with us, too. She could go down on the ground and do the corkscrew, she could go down and do her own thing because she had her own style. The thing about her is Dancin' Doll would dance against boys.... there wasn't too many girls trying to go at her 'cause she was nice with hers, too."
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| Dancin' Doug and Dancin' Doll goin' off |
SIR NORIN RAD:"What kind of effect did Coke La Rock shouting your name out on the microphone have on you when you were going off back then?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Okay, Coke La Rock he had that echo chamber going on. So when he'd say your name, the echo would go, "Teenie Rock Rock Rock!!!!!!" And he just knew how to do it. That's like your name up in lights. Like once he say that...yo, you gotta go!! You gotta go!! You gotta throw everything you got, man!!! Because for that minute, man, you're on cloud nine. For that minute you're the best in the world 'cause Coke La Rock is saying your name! Oh my God! It really gives you character 'cause it gives you the personality to not be afraid, to be fearless.....to go out there and be successful. It was packed, everybody in there was screaming. You felt like a superstar, all eyes on you. It was nobody screaming, "Whack!" or nothin' like that or, "Boo!" None of that stuff. I never heard that at any of those parties. Everybody was cheering for everybody. We had to come correct 'cause at first they didn't even tell people that we was from Harlem. Everybody was just going at each other. They just had to find out we was from Harlem and they went at us even harder!"
SIR NORIN RAD:"So is it accurate to say that in order to gain recognition as a B-Boy back then you had to be able to entertain the crowd with your dancing?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Yeah, you had to and really we wasn't doing no talking. Everything was dancing, it wasn't like staring at people, in their face, "Yo, you suck, you whack!!!" We wasn't grabbing our genitals and all that stuff. No, not at all. I mean that's just one move and if you get a rise out of grabbing your nuts........That's not dancing. That's just one move. It is over, you know what I'm saying?? I'm like, "That's really all you got?" You spin down and then you put your hand over your legs and you put your other hand over your head....freezing, looking at somebody. That's over! You had to bring more. You had to have showmanship, dancemanship......You had to keep the party going! Your dancing had to be like Herc's breakbeats. Herc kept the party going, you had to keep the dance moves going to keep the crowd going. It was no stopping.
SIR NORIN RAD:"Thank you very much! Would you like to give some shout outs at the end of this interview?"
TEENIE ROCK:"Oh yeah, I'm shouting out everybody from Herc and his crew. Everybody that was there....Trixie, Sasa, Wallace Dee, Bosco Rock, The Twins, Chip, Rossy, Dancin' Doug...my crew, everybody!!! Coke La Rock......if I forgot your name it's so many people.......and shout out to you Norin Rad 'cause it's been fun!"
