BLACK LOVE & THE ORAL SYNDROME

My 31st birthday is tomorrow. I can't help but think of what I was doing ten years ago around this time.

I was taking the stage at a club called The Roxbury. Yes, the same Roxbury that Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan's Watabi Brothers used to frequent. It no longer exists-- in its stead is a bar and sushi grill known as Miyagi's.

Our band had taken up residency at The Roxbury. The booking was handled by a character named George Lyons. George was young, suave, good-looking, and loved to make money. He reminded me of Kyle McLachlan for some reason. He really dug our music and was no fool-- he saw how many people our band brought in to The Cellar, which was the bottom level of the club where all the unsigned bands played.

George Lyons believed in us enough to let us invite our guests for free, because all of them were drinkers and would head straight for the bar. That was the first big lesson I learned about playing live music:

It doesn't matter how good you are, or what kind of music you play; if you can get every one of your guests to buy at least two drinks from the bar, then you will be very popular on the club scene.

Saturday, January 21st, 1995: our last gig as Black Love & The Oral Syndrome. We didn't intend for it to be the last show, but it was. After that night, the band imploded, and we were all burnt out and discouraged by the lack of communication that went on within the group.

That night, I turned 21 at the stroke of midnight. Up until that point, I had to wait outside the clubs or make promises not to drink any alcohol if I wanted to play. I wasn't the youngest member, but it was still a thorn in my side up until I turned legal to drink. As I look back on it now, it was a rite of passage for me, my initiation not only into the early phase of adulthood but an indication of where my future path would head.

As I took to the stage, with my blonde imitation Rickenbacker underneath my arm, I was very tipsy, very high, and very happy. A sea of people were waiting for us to bring the noise. We were becoming notorious at The Roxbury for siphoning the crowds away from the second level dance floor or the third level VIP lounge. Hootchie skanks were into us, and even though it wasn't my scene at all I could tell that people liked our energy and our sound.

When George Lyons announced us and the floodlights went on, I had a slight out-of-body experience. I had to ask myself: How the fuck did I get here?

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Two years prior to that night, if you had told me that I was going to be playing bass in a hip-hop group, I would've looked at you like you were smoking crack.

Not that I didn't love rap, or try to sneak in some handwritten verses in-between sets with the garage bands I was kicking it with; not that I didn't keep my pulse on the latest rap albums and groups; not that I didn't want to explore the methods of creating the kinds of rap beats that producers like Dr. Dre or DJ Premier were making at the time...

It's just that I didn't know anyone who was serious about that kind of shit. Hell, I didn't know anyone who was serious about anything. In the bands I was in, I was always the one who wanted it more than life itself. I was the one pushing people to go above and beyond, and of course I know now that not everyone is wired the same.

So when you meet someone who is just as serious as you are, everything tends to fall into place.

Fast Eddie, the guy who first let me touch a set of bass strings, christened me "Oral-B" after a rehearsal with our metal/punk/high-school band. He thought the name was funny, and so did I. At the time, everyone was doing the single surname initial thing: Eazy E, Schooly D, Spoonie G, Heavy D, Cool V, Hi-C... either that or they were stealing their names from consumer products, like Ice T or Mack 10 or Smif 'n' Wessun.

That band morphed into Stone Buddhas, but that didn't get anywhere either. I was out of high school, unemployed, leeching money and meals off of kind-hearted girls and sympathetic homies, and spending my time either going over to Eve's house in the dead of night to sneak her out or partying with my buddies.

College was not something that appealed to me. I wanted to live a real life, not some deferred simulation of what life should be like.

It was then that I met Purple Paulie through some mutual friends. Paulie was three or four years older than me, and had his own apartment. He was also "the man with the bag" and so me and my friends would spend our jobless afternoons hanging out at his pad in North Hollywood, smoking weed and acting foolish.

Paulie played guitar and listened to hard rock bands like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin, but he was also curious about rap music. I told him that I could rap, and he asked me to bring my 4-track cassette recorder over to his place. I had a microphone and a primitive drum machine, and he and I would fuck around and make joke songs. He would get me lit and set me free on the mic, where I would go on for half an hour learning to flow.

Back then, my style was mad wack-- I've come quite a long way, believe me. But it was the beat-making process that had the both of us staying up late, trying to emulate the newest producers and their tracks.

Paulie was honest from the get-go-- he only wanted to make money off of rap. "It's so simple," he said. "Anyone can do it. These rappers are making tons of dough."

"Yeah," I said, "but it's not so clear-cut. These guys are good at what they do, and rap audiences know what's dope and what's wack. We have a ways to go before we can start making money off of this rap shit."

I gave Paulie an education on hip-hop: what sounded good, what sounded booty, what was acceptable and what was merely a passing fad, who the most respected MCs were and who were the flashes in the pan. I also showed him how to work the 4-track recorder and gave him some tutorials on how to produce tracks. He took to it like a madman, and by the time I was sharing the apartment with him, Paulie had turned into a full-fledged studio rat.

After a while, I stopped going out all the time. I got a job to pay my share of rent. I didn't hang with the homies anymore, because they didn't have any serious goals in mind. They were content to hang out, party, and blow their money on bars and movies and concerts... and weed. The only times I saw my friends were when they'd stop by to smoke or purchase bags.

However, I heard rumblings through the grapevine, mutterings about how I was "Paulie's bitch", how I had turned on everyone and changed as a person. This really hurt me, because I didn't feel like I had become a different person at all. Rather, I had found a focus for my aspirations, and if it meant that I was going to have to put on hold all the silliness and slacking, then so be it. Besides, Paulie and I were having just as much fun, dropping acid while learning how to manage a 24-channel mixing board and things like that.

Paulie was just as serious as I was, and he was sometimes even more serious than me. Paulie went out and bought a sampler and learned how to use it. He and I split the cost on a real drum machine and started learning how to program beats that didn't sound like colliding tin cans.

The only thing that wasn't right was my rhyming. I still didn't have the knack. I was struggling with the fact that my voice was too nasal, and that my flow was too stilted. My lyrics were getting better, but the delivery was stale and uninvolving.

After about a year and a half, Paulie and I had become pretty good at making hip-hop beats. We still jammed on rock songs, but more often than not we found it was easier to make a beat using the sampler and the drum machine. We started to audition drummers but they were few and far between.

Then, we met some rappers.

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First we met McQueen, a former thug who was trying to stay out of jail. He introduced us to Johnny Love, a former sax player for local ska band The Specks and an aspiring MC. He in turn introduced us to Ronnie a.k.a. "Rist", a tagger and breakbeat dancer who knew how to toast in a Jamaican patois: "Ja-fakin" is what we called it, since Ronnie wasn't really a Rastafarian.

Johnny and Ronnie brought in their mentor, a roughneck from Boston named Donald. He went by the name of "Kool Don Farrar", and he was the best rapper I have ever had the privilege of working with and meeting.

Donald was amazing. He was like Charlie Parker with words. From the moment he entered our apartment and picked up a mic and started busting, I was in awe of his talent. He was a skilled writer; he was an unmatched freestyler; he liked to talk and he could never shut his mouth for a moment.

Donald was constantly writing and re-writing rhymes. He encouraged Johnny and Ronnie to become better MCs. He was intimidating, intelligent, and raw.

He had a lot of problems as well. Anger management, alcohol, and a bitterness towards anyone who wasn't black. Donald could be an insufferable prick and a pain in the ass to work with sometimes. But as an artist, he was a shining star.

I learned an important lesson about rap music from Donald, one that has stayed with me until this very day. I once asked Donald what was the secret to his flow.

He looked at me with a dangerous grin and said:

"It's all about words that rhyme."

That's all he said. And then we jammed with him, Paulie manning the sampler, myself running through beats that I had pre-programmed, and Donald on the mic. We would play this game where Paulie and I would try to throw Donald off, by either changing the tempo completely or stopping the track dead or pulling out some off-kilter jazz time signature shit, and Donald never fell off.

I mean, never. Lord knows we tried, and he would laugh if we came close, but the boy was too fucking good. A never-ending stream of words poured out of him, some of them memorized lines that he would re-incorporate into his free verses, some of them completely new inventions of his consciousness, all of them dazzling displays of poetic street rhythm, half-improvised and half-calculated.

This was the "New Jazz" that Shock G of Digital Underground spoke of, the collision of the Old Players mentality and the New School of rap artistry. I've played with lots of cats over the years, lots of good players, musicians, singers, and rappers, but the magic that we created with Donald, Johnny and Ronnie during those years was so intense, so inspired, that I look back with a romantic view upon those days, a rose-colored perspective on an era that seems to me so long ago and yet not that long ago at all.

Paulie and I were known as Oral Syndrome. The name was the mashing of my Oral-B moniker with Paulie's handle, Syndrome. Johnny, Ronnie, and Donald were calling themselves Black Love, taken from the incense of the same name. So it made sense that we were collectively known as Black Love & The Oral Syndrome.

Our angle was that we were going to do our shows with a live band, consisting of Paulie on guitar, myself on bass, and whoever we could find on drums. At the time, the rap scene in L.A. was as follows: an MC or two, a DAT tape or a CD, and nothing else. We had an instant edge on every group out there by having live accompaniment. This tactic bridged the gap between people who thought rap music was just "noise" and rap fans who were sick of the same old shit, who were sick of going to shows where the CD skipped in the middle of the gig.

My friend A-Dogg, late of Stone Buddhas, was recruited to play the skins in our group. We had to strip him down and basically teach him how to play less. Less was more, in our eyes. We took away his toms and crash cymbals, leaving him with only the bass drum, the snare, the high-hat and the ride cymbal. It was a trap kit, really. We instructed him to keep the beat steady, with the occasional flourish here and there. It took him a while to get it, but he did.

There was a lot of turmoil in the group, of course. Six motherfuckers, comprised of three African-Americans, a Mexican-Japanese, a Persian and a Jew? It was tough sometimes. In fact, our first gig almost went down with a different line-up: The rappers had a falling out with us, and so we auditioned some female MCs for a pay-to-play show at The Whiskey on Sunset Boulevard. A-Dogg was still on the fence about playing with us, so we had a different drummer. But the chicks spilt with half of the tickets, and the Black Love guys came back into the fold.

That show was about as good as first shows go, but a friend of Paulie's saw us at that show and pulled some strings so that we could play the late great Al's Bar. Like The Roxbury, Al's Bar is no more, but it was more to my liking. The outside of the place was graffittied up and down, and a lot of punk bands passed through there. By this time, A-Dogg was with us, but he and Ronnie and I had to wait outside the venue because we were underage. We played that Halloween show to three people, which gave us a chance to fuck around and experiment with our stage show.

And, of course, a booking agent was there, and she knew George Lyons from The Roxbury, and she knew that he wanted something hot for his weekend nights at least once a month.

Our first Roxbury gig paid the six of us $50 (for the whole group, not per person), two free drink passes each, and a free BBQ Chicken Pizza from the kitchen. George Lyons liked us so much that he had us play once a month. We played every month for a little over a yar.

And so it was that, ten years ago this weekend, I played my last gig with Black Love & The Oral Syndrome, after a wild year with enough drama and turbulence to ground a DC-10. We played other gigs during that time at other places, but the Roxbury shows were the ones that I recall the fondest.

Maybe I'm coming off as an aging musician who is merely reliving his salad days, but I don't care. I am so proud of what we did as a group, because it came from our soul, and it was fun, and I learned a lot about life, music, and business. Not many regrets in regards to the experience. I grew up in those years, and I can safely say that I'm kind of glad we came close to making it but never quite got there... because knowing what I know about us now, I'm positive that we would have let money and ego get to us, and we would've been chewed up and spit out by the industry, just like so many other young artists out there.

I still have countless tapes of the North Hollywood sessions, of the live shows, the studio tracks, the insane rehearsals and the fuck-around vamps. One of these days, I'm going to put up a site devoted to the greatest rap group that never was.

But first, let me tell you the rest of the story, because it doesn't end here.

NEXT WEEK: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE UNDERGROUND IN LOS ANGELES...