“Before ‘The Show,’ I started in the church. I was playing in the church at age nine. My mother made me go up there to play the piano because the piano player was absent; there was nobody else there to play. When I was 11, I moved to another church, Universal Temple, where Red Alert was the DJ when we had certain gatherings. And Jazzy Jay was the drummer at my church—he would later become the DJ for Afrika Bambaataa. A few years later, as a kid growing up in Harlem, I was fortunate enough to have an uncle named Willie. He actually took me under his wing performing in his nightclubs. He allowed me to make money and stay off the streets because I was getting in a lot of trouble. I got busted when I was 16-years-old for selling drugs. I got kicked out of Martin Luther King high school. This all changed my life.
I transferred to another school, and that’s where I met Doug E. Fresh. We would walk by each other because we didn’t know who each other was *laughs*. Then we finally got introduced over the phone and we put two and two together and found out, ‘Hey, we go to the same school!’ So they were getting help fixing this one record called ‘The Show.’ And my friend told Doug E. and them, ‘Man, I have the perfect person to help fix this record.’ That’s when we got introduced. This was all in the same time span I was starting to produce for Classical Two and Kool Moe Dee.
We did everything at my house in the projects—225 West. 129th St. I lived on the first floor and Doug E. Fresh came over with Chill Will. Doug was asking me what I would do to the song? I told them to take out all of the commercials on the track because they had these mock commercials every 16 bars. I told them to make the commercial the bridge. I restructured the whole song and that’s how it came out. And then they came back with Slick Rick! The thing about it is I didn’t know anything about credits back then. I never knew anything about putting my name on a record. All I wanted was to hear something that I was a part of on the radio. I was proud of being involved with “The Show.” It’s a classic song. We even got the chance to perform it at Doug’s graduation, and that’s how people knew I was a part of the song. That was a big moment for me.”