half-inch demo tape, topped the
Billboard soul chart in 1973 and rose to
No. 3 on the Hot 100, thrusting Sylvia
back into the spotlight. She shimmied
on Soul Train, but her shyness was
unmistakable — she seemed more
comfortable in the studio than onstage.
Kerr’s turn as an All Platinum artist,
with a song called “Three Minutes to
Hey Girl,” had come with a price — a
shared production credit with Sylvia
where none was warranted and a
knowledge that he wasn’t being paid
his fair share.
“I made a lot of money with Sylvia
and Joe,” says Kerr. “But about a quar-
ter of the money I should have made.”
His grievances weren’t unique.
The notorious ties that assured the
Robinsons would themselves get paid
also meant that those who expected
payment from them thought twice
about pressing the issue. Joe could
be a true friend, but to know him was
to know that he carried a pearl-han-
dled pistol.
In the mid-1970s, All Platinum made
an expansion play for the venerated
Chess Records catalog with the help
of PolyGram. But when the Robinsons
couldn’t monetize the assets, that
partnership ended in litigation. Joe’s
under-the-table dealings resulted in a
payola investigation and a conviction
for tax evasion, after which Sylvia’s
artists fled rather than forfeit their
careers. By the end of the 1970s, All
Platinum had filed for bankruptcy.
I
T WAS IN THE MIDST OF THIS
tumult that Sylvia visited Harlem
World, a two-story nightclub on
the corner of Lenox and 116th
Street that had become by the
summer of 1979 one of the few spots
in New York that brought the flour-
ishing culture of beats and rhymes
indoors from the blacktops and parks.
Sylvia’s nieces had taken her there
for a party, but she was floored by
the sight of Lovebug Starski rapping
over the break from Chic’s “Good
Times,” the hit of the summer. Fresh
from a religious retreat to salve her
burdened soul, she decided that she
had found her personal and financial
deliverance. She turned to her sister,
Diane, and said: “Imagine if they were
rapping for the Lord!”
The creation story of “Rapper’s
Delight” is oft-told: how Sylvia’s
teenage son Joey assembled three of
his friends, none of them experienced
rappers — Henry “Big Bank Hank”
Jackson, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien
and Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright
— at her studio to write and perform
the rap; how Sylvia instructed her
studio band to replay the instrumental
to “Good Times” as the song’s musical
bed; how the resulting 15-minute-long
track caught fire at radio at a pace be-
yond even Sylvia’s divine vision; how
fans across the country grappled and
then grooved with this strange talking
record. Sylvia’s epiphany birthed a
million musical revelations. Perhaps
no people were stunned as much as
the creators of this rapping style who
were across the Hudson River in New
York and had never heard of any crew
called The Sugarhill Gang.
Sylvia named the act after the fancy
Harlem neighborhood that loomed
over her own childhood home on
137th Street. She rechristened her
label with the same moniker, making
a clean break from the All Platinum
debacle. The new record was Syl-
via’s brainchild: produced by her, but
financed, in an arrangement that Joe
had brokered, by Levy. She slapped a
writing credit for herself on “Rapper’s
Delight” even though many of the
lyrics were cribbed from Curtis Fisher,
known as Grandmaster Caz, who had
tossed his notebook to Big Bank Hank
with a shrug. And the studio band
played music composed by Chic’s Nile
Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, who
had to retain an attorney to secure
their rightful credit.
None of this impeded the rise of
“Rapper’s Delight,” which many
retailers called their best-selling
12-inch single since the format had
launched. And by 1981, the Robin-
sons had cornered the market on rap
records, building Sugar Hill Records
into a multimillion-dollar empire with
a global reach.
Sugar Hill remained a family affair,
with Diane and Sylvia’s niece Donna
playing promotion roles and Joey
acting as both A&R rep and artist (as
one-half of the duo West Street Mob).
Doug Wimbish, a young session bassist
who had left All Platinum when the
money got funny, returned at Sylvia’s
sweet-talking behest to form the house
band with drummer Keith Le Blanc
and guitarist Skip McDonald.
There were some new faces,
too, like Milton Malden, a balding,
thin-mustachioed Yugoslavian who
boasted that he had worked for
dictator Josip Tito. In the trades, he
described his bailiwick: “All adminis-
tration — papers, documents, labels,
contracts, shipping, distribution
— goes through me ... I control the
overall situation.” But Malden had
scant previous industry experience.
“He was a military guy,” says Wim-
bish. “Morris Levy put Milton Malden
in there to watch the money.”
The sudden influx of cash meant
that Wimbish and his peers got paid,
albeit in ways that pointed to the com-
pany’s complicated finances. “When
we got our first checks, they were
cashier’s checks that were written out
in Arabic,” recalls Wimbish.
The parking lot at 96 West St. filled
with expensive automobiles. Joe rose
early to talk to distributors in Europe
and stayed up late to hit radio pro-
grammers on the West Coast. But the
engine of this money-making machine
was the studio that Sylvia ran.
“She could see things,” says Wim-
bish. “Somebody might come up with
an idea, and she knew how to take key
elements out of it, magnify it and turn
things into a recording.” He remem-
bers Sylvia and her arranger, Sammy
Lowe, mapping sessions out: “Maybe
there was a bassline that was written
out, or they would hum it to me. We
would construct the rhythm section
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By the time of “Rapper’s
Delight,” Sylvia had been
producing hits for two
decades. Clockwise from
top: Her artists Grandmas-
ter Flash & The Furious
Five in 1984; The Funky
4 + 1 in 1980; The Sugarhill
Gang in 1980.