Byron & Peggy's Son

If you want to understand how the sound of New Orleans hip-hop actually came to be, you have to get off the main highway and find your way to the corner rooms. You have to strip away the corporate stories and the major label myths, and look at the real infrastructure. And in the mid-1980s, that infrastructure was built on family, discipline, and a couple of teenage kids with an unyielding drive to out-scratch everybody within a twenty-mile radius.

I was thirteen years old, living in our family's brick house at fifteen-oh-eight Lizardi Street, right on the corner of North Robertson in the Ninth Ward. My dad was an absolute powerhouse of a man. We had just come out of owning a gas station where he worked tirelessly as a frame attendant, holding down multiple jobs to keep us stable. We were what you'd call "hood rich" — we lived with that clean, structured, respectable Cosby-style discipline. Because of that stability, I had things most kids my age could only dream of. I had money in my pockets from working, I lost weight, my mom bought me the best gear, and I was the first kid on the block rocking fresh Ballys at thirteen years old.

But my real wealth wasn't the shoes. It was the sound system inside my corner bedroom.

I didn't have standard little home stereo speakers. I had a commercial-grade wall of sound packed into a kid's room. I was running eighteen-inch industrial subwoofers, fifteen-inch woofers, major compression horns, and a full Peavey setup — the SP-1s and SP-2s. It was unbelievably loud. I would run that rig all night long, sequencing beats and testing frequencies until the drywall literally vibrated. My sister's bedroom was right next door. Any other parents would have come through that door tearing the cords out of the wall, screaming. But my dad? He'd just walk in, completely calm, and ask me to turn the bass down. That was it. The older I get, the more I look back at that house on Lizardi Street and thank God for my dad's patience. He gave me the literal room to master my craft.

During that era, Mannie Fresh and DJ Baby T got record contracts early. That meant they were locked down — they couldn't do the regular neighborhood house parties anymore. That left the whole city wide open for me. I became the premier DJ around town. I was working constantly, handling almost every major house party in the city, and my dad was my roadie. He drove me to every single gig, helping me haul those heavy crates of vinyl and those massive Peavey cabinets.

When I wasn't running the parties, I was a total studio rat. I kept my mouth shut, sat in the corner of the big commercial rooms on Downman Road and Broad Street, and watched older heads like DJ Precise cut records. I learned how to watch and absorb everything without asking unnecessary questions.

That's how I connected with Baby T. Before the internet, before cell phones, before any of this modern digital tech, we had our own hacker setup.

Baby T would call me up from Uptown on the landline phone. He'd want to challenge me to a scratch battle. He had this little telephone button coupler he bought from Radio Shack. He'd drop his phone receiver into it, lock it in, and say, "Jup, listen to this." Then he'd execute a flawless transformer scratch right through the copper telephone line to show me how it was done. Then I'd grab my mixer, drop my needle, and cut right back through the receiver. We were challenging each other and refining the science of the scratch over landline phones before the world ever conceived of a digital network.

That same community link-up took me down to the Seventh Ward. I'd finish my classes at McMain High School, catch the Galvez bus line, and hop off right by Mannie Fresh's house. I'd walk over to see my Aunt Lou at twenty twenty-six North Prieur Street — a house built by hand by my Uncle Herman, who used to run a historic ballroom around the corner before we were even born. That house was holy ground; back during segregation, legends like Cab Calloway stayed under that exact roof because downtown hotels wouldn't take Black excellence. I'd go check on Aunt Lou, grab a box of fried chicken for us, and then run over to Mannie's room to swap equipment and talk shop.

And let me tell you about Mannie's room. The history books always picture a glamorous studio with big leather couches. That's a lie.

Mannie's room was crammed with bunk beds and crates of vinyl records stacked straight to the ceiling. Right there in the middle of the room, tucked next to the beds, was his E-mu SP-12 drum machine. I'd sit on the edge of that room and watch him program that machine until he became, without question, the greatest drum machine programmer on the face of the earth. Right there in that tight space, by those bunk beds, I remember watching a young Baby and Slim come around, sitting there, watching the music move, and growing into the empire they would eventually build.

The music didn't come from a corporate boardroom. It came from the Galvez bus line, from Uncle Herman's ancestral foundation, from Mannie's bunk beds, and from eighteen-inch subwoofers shaking the brick walls at fifteen-oh-eight Lizardi Street. We were young, we were disciplined, and we were building the future with our own hands.