Dynomite!: Good Times, Bad Times, Our Times--A Memoir by Jimmie Walker, Sal Manna Read Free Book Online

asked suspiciously.
    “I work the Apollo all the time,” I boasted.
    He knew I was lying, shook his head, and returned to his conversation.
    “I see you talked to Joe,” the manager said.
    “Yeah, we’re buds. We go way back. What time do I go on? Eight o’clock?”
    He looked at me with a smirk. “No.”
    “Well, when does the show start?”
    “Eleven-thirty.”
    “That’s almost midnight!”
    “That’s right, three shows—eleven-thirty, one-forty-five, and three.” He looked me over. “Can you drink?”
    “I don’t really drink.”
    “Let me put this another way: Are you old enough to drink?”
    “No.”
    He told me I could sit in the supply room in back. I waited there alone for hours. Finally, the emcee came to me and asked for my intro. Naturally, I told him to say I work at the Apollo all the time.
    “You work at the Apollo?”
    “Yeah! All the time!”
    I nervously walked onto the stage, which was elevated above the seventy-five-foot long bar. I had heard that if the crowd didn’t like you, they would throw shot glasses up at you—if you were lucky. Because looking down from the stage, I could also see guns and knives in the belts and jackets of men at the bar.
    My “act” was what I had done in class. But here, after the first minute everyone in the club went back to their conversations or whatever else they were doing. It was like I wasn’t even there. I did another minute or two before thinking that maybe I should just leave. Not that anyone would notice. So I walked off the stage.
    The manager came to me. “You’re a comedian, huh?”
    “Yeah! I do a show at . . . ”
    “Show? You didn’t do five minutes. From what I heard, I’m glad you didn’t do your show.”
    “I’ll be better at the one-forty-five.”
    “Let me tell you something. The one-forty-five show is going to be great—because you won’t be on it.”
    I was disappointed, but I plugged onward.
    “I’m going to get paid for this show, right?”
    He stared at me without saying another word. At midnight I walked to the desolate 125th Street subway station and contemplated my failure all the way home.
    I needed a new plan.
    I had yet to even get a shot at being a disc jockey in the city. I spent months auditing a speech class at the New School that SEEK paid for to help me get rid of my regional accent. But I was still behind the board. So when a friend said there was a DJ job available at an R&B station in Norfolk, Virginia, I left WMCA and headed south. Jim Walker was on the air!
    I had the early afternoon shift, a couple hours every day, on WRAP, 850 on your AM dial. That’s right, people, I was rappin’ on WRAP. This being my first job behind the microphone, I guess I wasn’t very good—at least that was what the ratings said. Personally, I was a city boy alone in the country and had a hard time adjusting to the lifestyle, just like those summer days in Birmingham. After only a few months I headed back to New York. This time I would check out the Last Poets at the East Wind.
    The Last Poets had formed on May 19, 1968, when David Nelson, Abiodun Oyewole, and Gylan Kain teamed up to perform in Mount Morris Park at a celebration for Malcolm X’s birthday. They were politically charged and radical. At that first appearance they walked on chanting, “Are you ready, nigger? You got to be ready!” Soon after, Felipe Luciano, Nilija Obabi, Umar Bin Hassan and Jalal Nurridin joined, creating an ensemble that many today credit as the foundation of rap and hip hop.
    Revolution, creativity, and something called “ritual drama” oozed out of the East Wind and onto the streets of Harlem. I went to their third-floor loft at 23 East 125th Street, down the street from the Apollo and adjacent to the Celebrity Soul on Wax record store and Olatunji’s African Drum and Dance Center, to offer my services as a comedian.
    Nelson and Kain were not interested at all, saying, “This cat’s full of shit. We don’t have time