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Geoff Edgers is a journalist and author.
He lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with his family.
Trashy or cool or ironic or just plain undecipherable.
The beauty of those days and that place was how you could really be anyone.
Like the cartoon grapplers onWWF Championship Wrestling, you could adopt whatever persona the moment called for.
Gather around Robin Byrds nasty soft-porn cable show or discuss the merits of French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville.
The drinking age had just gone to twenty-one, but nobody seemed to care.
People were throwing statues off the roof.
It kind of felt like the inmates were running the asylum.
It was at the center of his life.
Rubin had massive Cerwin-Vega speakers that boomed through the dorm walls.
Some called him Rick Rock.
Some used other names.
Because they have nothing to hide.
He had a nice Gibson guitar and he liked to play power chords loud.
Later, Espindle would become the lead singeror screamerin Rubins punk rock band, Hose.
And when I met him he had three very cool things he had done.
He had been in the Pricks.
I think he worked for some of the wrestling magazines doing photography.
Really before wrestling broke out.
And he had some relationship with the Plasmatics.
I dont remember what it was exactly.
Those were the things that sort of impressed me.
The beard came later.
The sunglasses, too.
We went and saw the Dirty Harry movieSudden Impact, said Espindle.
Harrys wearing a specific kind of sunglasses.
Rick went out and got those when it happened.
He was developing the persona that we know.
He did nothing to hide that he had grown up in comfort in suburbia.
He was an only child.
Mickey worked as a shoe wholesaler.
They always supported Ricky.
As a boy, he had become obsessed with magic.
When Espindle visited the house, he saw that Rubin had done up his room to resemble the Danceteria.
There was stage seating along the walls, club-style bleachers.
The one thing his parents did that others didnt is that he was just very secure in that upbringing.
He invited him to meet the parents.
The images Harrison captured are stunningly unpretentious.
Mickey has his hand resting on his sons elbow.
Linda, under the covers, puts her right hand on his wrist.
That position, a reflex not a pose, tells you everything it’s crucial that you know.
This was a special boy.
He thought a green boogie man lived in the closet, Linda said.
When he comes home without a girl, Mickey confided, sometimes he still sleeps with us.
Rick Rubin had arrived at Weinstein without a whisker, a freshman surrounded by books and papers.
But he was already impossible to miss.
By the fall of 1982, Rubin had transformed his surroundings.
That September, Adam Dubin arrived at Weinstein, ready to move in and start his freshman year.
An older kid met him and helped load everything onto a cart.
They rolled down the hallway, the upperclassman looking back.
Your roommate is some kind of musician or something, the older kid said with a shrug.
He did not sound impressed.
At the door, Dubin paused.
He can regenerate that mental snapshot even decades later.
The shades were drawn.
The dressers and every other surface in the room were covered with boxes of records and speakers.
Sitting on the bed was a pudgy kid all in black.
Where are you supposed to do homework?
They got to talking.
That was also Dubins plan.
A wave of relief washed over the freshman.
Dubin asked about the turntables.
He had never seen that kind of rig.
Rubin told him that he DJd a lot and then asked Dubin what bands he liked.
I dont know, Dubin stumbled.
Before long, Rubin began to offer the younger kid his version of a musical education.
Then Rubin got into the hip-hop records.
Kurtis Blow, the Sugar Hill Gang, and, his favorite, the Treacherous Three.
Rubin explained why he had two copies of AC/DCsBack in Black.
To mix the beat.
He also showed him a record of his sloppy slash band, Hose.
But even as he continued with Hose, Rubin seemed to be moving on from punk.
He could see a hardcore ceiling, a limit to that musics reach.
Hip-hop was where he saw the future.
It was, as his friend and later producing partner George Drakoulias described it, black punk rock.
Its got possibilities, not commercial possibilities, but momentum possibilities.
A feeling of seeing something you love shared and having more people to talk about it with was exciting.
The punk rock world was a small world and getting smaller.
And the hip-hop world was a small world growing and getting bigger, and that felt good.
It felt like an energetic pull.
There was one thing that bugged him about hip-hop, and it was no small thing.
Rubin would go to a live gig and be blown away by the energy.
Then he would hear those same groups on record and theyd be soft, flatted by the production.
Call it the curse of Rappers Delight.
What made those records so dull wasnt that the early rap producers were amateurs.
It was that they were actually too professional.
A hit record should be slick, radio-friendly, produced.
Because thats not what it was supposed to sound like.
To us, anyway.
You would hear drum machines.
You would hear breaks from rock records and funk records.
And MCing over that.
That was the most exciting energy.
This problem wasnt exclusive to hip-hop.
He cared about the sound in his head.
This extended beyond hip-hop.
As a music lover first, Rubin cared deeply about getting the sound right.
Itstillbothers Rubin that nobody could capture his favorite go-go band on vinyl.
If you listen to Trouble Funk live, it was the most incredible thing, said Rubin.
Because they didnt understand.
There would be two mentors, each of them invaluable.
Ric Menello and Ed Bahlman also, without intending to, showed Rubin something else.
The limits of misfitdom.
He was the first guy anybody entering Weinstein would meet.
He ran the front desk.
Menello seemed much older than his years, what with his beard, bald pate, and extra pounds.
But he was only in his early thirties when he and Rubin met.
Crazy in a good way, is how he would often be described.
Not only did he know everything, but Mr. Ric went kind of beyond that.
The day kind of moved toward midnight, and at midnight this great thing happened, said Dubin.
He was like an Orson Wellestype character.
He loved movies, said Giordano.
But he was an invaluable resource for us.
Students would come downstairs to pick up mail, leave notes, or use a pay phone.
Menello, at his perch, was less a security guard than an intellectual gatekeeper.
During the day, Rubin might go to one of William K. Eversons film classes.
Theyd talk Hitchcock or horror films.
Everson showedCurse of the DemonandTargets, the latter an early Bogdanovich classic thats more suspense than gore.
There was alsoSeconds, the John Frankenheimer mystery starring Rock Hudson.
Everson was terrific in that he was profound and erudite, remembered Dubin.
Director James Gray picked Menellos brain, and he and Rubin began paying his rent.
He knew every movie, I can tell you that, Anderson offered.
I probably learned more from him than I did in film school, he said.
Ed Bahlman, Rubins other mentor, was everything Menello was not.
front man and former Sex Pistol John Lydon.
Ed, I perceived him as more of a retiring punch in.
One sensed he was quite a complicated person.
I dont think I really socialized with him.
I felt he was an honest, honorable punch in.
As to whether I got any money, I dont really think I did.
I think he gave me some money, he gave me an advance.
Im guessing it was a couple of hundred.
Maybe five hundred dollars.
It wasnt completely nothing.
He grew up in Brooklyn, sharing a room with his younger brother, Bill.
His father was a postal clerk.
His mother raised her boys.
And in those cramped quarters, it was Bill who remembered being the music kid.
He imported speakers from London.
He even became a DJ.
The Gay Activists Alliance held Saturday night dances at a firehouse in SoHo.
This was in the early days of club disco.
Herbie HancocksHead Hunterscame out at the time.
This was going on every Saturday night.
Ed led a far less glamorous life.
He worked as a building superintendent during the 1970s.
He got the record business because of a girl.
In 1978, he walked into Gina Franklyns punk rock clothing shop on MacDougal Street.
But the sisters werent really punk, she felt, and Franklyn decided to leave.
She rented a space at 99 MacDougal in the Village for her own shop.
Ed read about me owning the store and he came down the first or second day I opened.
We talked and he asked me out to dinner and thats how the relationship started.
They expanded that relationship when Franklyn suggested Bahlman take over half of the store to sell records.
Bahlman also recruited his younger brother.
He dropped a bunch of records off to Bill to entice him.
I listened to them and I was like, Wow, this is really amazing.
One of them was a group called Sham 69.
He understood my passion for music and trusted me and all that stuff.
Almost immediately, I said, Sure, Id love to work with you.
Youd just go through bins and look everywhere.
It was a real treasure hunt.
And sometimes, its amazing the way things come to you, almost magical.
I got the first Fela record I ever heard.
A record called Zombie, which became one of the first touchstones for the band.
I was listening to the Contortions.
Im listening to James Brown.
Wed buy crazy things like Augustus Pablo instrumentals.
We were listening to the Curtis Mayfield soundtrack that we may have bought for a dollar.
And we were all living in the same place, this cheap place on Eightieth Street.
Every week, hed say, You have to hear this and this and this.
99 was not the only store with imports.
Bleecker Bobs, just around the corner, was famous.
But Bleecker Bobs was not for everyone.
He had the big, trained German shepherd behind the counter.
And if he got mad at you, its like, No soup for you.
Heres the record Nazi.
He was like an insult comic and not funny.
I never bought records there.
Bob was so nuts and paranoid, said Franklyn.
It was funny, because he was so nuts.
I guess you could say, in a way, that Ed was everything Bleecker Bob wasnt.
I hated going there, said McGuire.
Then I heard about 99.
He had a little turntable in the corner.
Rubin made his first trip to 99 when he was in high school.
He ended up going by almost every day once he started at NYU.
Around February 1980, Bahlman launched his label.
Stop thinking about it.
It only takes a couple of thousands of dollars to get going.
1, for Bahlman in 1980.
Bahlman followed with a series of singles.
He signed ESG, made up of the four Scoggins sisters and a friend.
Their music would eventually be sampled by everyone from the Beastie Boys to TLC and the Wu-Tang Clan.
GoldmansDirty Washingwas the fifth release, coming out in 1981.
McGuire had met Branca at a gig and learned about Bahlmans plans to put out his music.
He was also dating one of the members of the three-girl band Ut.
She told him 99 was going to release their record.
I was like, Holy, fucking shit, said McGuire.
That turned out not to be true, but it spurred me to give Ed a tape.
He liked it, and he just said hed like to see us play live.
And we couldnt get a gig to save our souls.
And we got us a gig at Pier 2.
But Ed, once he saw us, he really got it.
I remember him saying, Lets do a record.
And I was like, Holy Crap, this really is happening.
It wasnt their technique.
They could jam for hours, settle on a groove and let it swim through an entire single.
Their crowning moment came with Caravan, a twisting dance track that 99 released in 1983.
Rubin heard Caravan and came up with his own idea.
He didnt have a record label yet, but he was developing his philosophy.
It seemed like inconceivable craziness, said McGuire.
This was, like, 1982.
I remember the energy was very tense.
People there for the hardcore stuff were onstage for that.
They stepped back when the Treacherous Three came on.
It felt uneven and strange.
Just the fact that he was thinking to do that, I thought was brilliant.
Running a label, for Bahlman, was entirely hands-on.
He and McGuire would make the rounds, in Bahlmans beat-up car, to record stores to deliver singles.
The bassist remembered Rubin picking Bahlmans brain about how to press a record, distribute it, make labels.
Just each step of the process he would walk me through how to be able to do it.
Hose had a dirgy, distorted sound modeled more after the California-based Flipper than traditional hardcore groups.
There would be two Hose singles.
One came in a sleeve with a color scheme straight out of a Mondrian painting.
The other slid into a brown paper bag and had song names scratched out in the vinyl center.
In those days, Rubin charted his album sales by making the rounds with Dubin.
Hed say, I need to check my inventory, said Dubin.
At night, theyd head to the clubs, an activity Dubin describes with a kind of awe.
Whatever shyness Tolkin remembered emanating from that kid from Lido Beach, it seemed to be gone.
We would go to the Roxy, said Dubin.
They actually had a gun check.
You could come in and check your guns and knives.
And we would go and see the rap acts.
We went and saw the Treacherous Three.
Theres seventeen guys in the band and bringing them all from D.C.
There was nothing in it for him personally.
He wanted to see them and he wanted to bring them to a New York audience.
He was just completely divorced from the idea of making money.
Even if Rick didnt know him, he would introduce himself and theyd start talking records.
It was just weird.
Sometimes wed go to the World.
Again, a really nasty neighborhood.
We would go there, and theres a line to get in and Jazzy Jay is DJing.
Wed say, Rick, how are we going to get in?
Hed say, Watch this.
He goes over and finds Jazzy Jays car on the street.
Its like an Oldsmobile thats been pimped out a bit.
Jazzy Jay comes out to see if someone is trying to bust into his car.
He sees Rick and said, Okay, lets go in.
As Rubin got his bearings, one of his mentors started to lose his.
Things began to go very, very wrong at 99 Records.
On closer inspection, very little of Tolkins story adds up.
So the tale: Bahlman sued Sugar Hill for stealing Caravan for White Lines (Dont Do It).
As Tolkin told it, Bahlman won in court, but it was a pyrrhic victory.
By then, Sugar Hill had declared bankruptcy and refused to pay a dime.
Bahlman, emotionally beaten and terrified, shut down his label and retreated.
A few problems with this sad tale.
There are no court records in New York or New Jersey of a case involving 99 and Sugar Hill.
In addition, Bahlman dodged interviews about the label for decades.
I spent months trying to track him down.
Every phone number listed for him over the years seemed to be disconnected.
I found court papers showing he had briefly been married to the artist Lisa Krall in the mid-90s.
She did not take kindly to a call.
I have no time to talk about this, Krall said before hanging up.
I hated Ed Bahlman.
It was a mistake.
Then he admitted that he and Ed hadnt talked in years.
He wouldnt tell me why, and after that stopped taking calls.
Tizte, listed as a German professor and film critic, did not return e-mails or calls.
So on a crisp afternoon, I headed to Prospect Park to see if I could get lucky.
I asked an older couple taking photos by the water if they had seen Bahlman lately.
The woman shook her head.
Oh, I havent seen them for a while, the woman said.
A few blocks over, I headed to the housing complex that was Bahlmans last stated address.
A weather-beaten plate on the apartment door showed Bahlmans name.
I left a note but never got a reply.
Glenn Branca, for one, never bought Bahlmans story.
He had a more cynical take, and did buy the Sugar Hill story.
Heres the deal about Ed, said Branca.
He took everybodys royalties and ran.
As well as the master tapes.
He was the most charming thief and bastard who ever stabbed anybody in the back.
Thats how he got away with it.
Franklyn had her own account of 99s demise.
I called her up and she said, Why dont you talk to Ed.
I was so infuriated.
I dont think I was in love with Ed, but I was infatuated with him.
He could also be hurtful and cruel.
That day, Franklyn boxed up all her merchandise.
She later opened up another store, called 99X.
He wouldnt ever see or talk to Bahlman again.
He probably had learned everything he needed to learn, said Sommer.
I can remember, he walked in.
This is the shit man, this is the shit, said Dubin.
Run-DMCs Its Like That with Sucker M.C.s on the B-side.
