Exodus Chapter 7: "The Last Train to Woodmere"

Because righteousness govern the world.

Broadcasting live and direct from the rolling red hills on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica from a magical place at the intersection of words, sound and power.

The red light is on, your dial is set.

The frequency in tune to the Roots Land podcast stories that are music to your ears.

This is Glenn Hudloff, General manager of Island Trading Co.

Here in New York City.

So, Henry, I'm not sure what happened on that trip to Jamaica.

Not only do you no longer have a job, you no longer have a division.

Blackwell decided to shut down the whole in house T shirt operation.

I'm sorry to say, Henry, we have to let you go.

We all like you very much and if something comes up in the future, we're going to keep you in mind.

You don't have to bother coming back to the office.

Hey Henry, I got your message.

I'll meet you at the square at 1:30.

When Brian said the square.

When anyone said the square.

If you were a New Yorker in the 90s, you knew exactly what they meant.

Washington Square park in Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the universe where a convergence of diverse characters from far and wide would gather 24 hours a day to celebrate life, love, art.

And in today's world, the art, the unthinkable free thought and the respectful exchange of opposing views.

Artists, musicians, poets, punks, skinheads and breakdancers would all peacefully coexist.

An ever present feeling of hope would be blowing in the wind along with the aroma of strong sense.

Amelia.

Which made sense because per capita, the square had the highest ratio of marijuana dealers to buyers on the planet.

A little something for your troubles.

Washington Square park was always edgy and dangerous.

Still, at the time, it was protected in a pre crack, pre heroin bubble, defended by aggressive Jamaican marijuana dealers who didn't believe the herb they sold was a drug.

They fought to keep chemical poisons from being peddled on their turf.

For moral and business reasons, the Jamaicans had a good thing going.

And they knew harder drugs would bring heat down on the park.

So they violently defended their soil.

As determined as those Jamaican yardies were, they were outnumbered and outgunned.

They couldn't hold the park forever.

The money, power and greed that came with crack cocaine would eventually make its way in and corrupt the once sacred square.

At first, the Jamaicans were relegated to a smaller area within the park reserved exclusively for marijuana sales and forced to pay a hefty tax for the spot.

Eventually, they were banished from the square altogether.

The Babylon system.

Determined to destroy the minds of the city's most Progressive youth fought so hard to penetrate that peaceful world, that idyllic bubble.

In the end, they figured out a way to be invited in.

A Trojan horse named crack cocaine will blow your brain.

Sensimania is iron.

When I met Brian at the square that humid spring afternoon, it was still a sanctuary in the heart of the wealthiest metropolis in the world.

A city whose ethos was time is money.

Had a small oasis where time stood still and countless young people faced the challenges of their future.

Pondered the eternal question.

You want to know what your life is like in view of eternity?

That's it.

That's it.

That's it.

That's it.

Hey, Henry, man, I'm sorry you lost your job, but.

I mean, I feel bad, but yeah.

Thanks, Brian.

I can tell you sound heartbroken.

Honestly, it's probably the best thing that ever happened.

And why is that?

Why do you say that?

That place was sucking the blood out of you, man.

That place was a vamp sucking your blood, Henry.

Yeah, joke around at my expense.

Henry, man, that Bob Marley art exhibit you helped organize out in the Hamptons, that was awful, dude.

You really think so?

If Bob was around, he would have puked.

I mean, really, A bunch of elites paying $10,000 for lithographs of Bob so they can, what, hang them on their walls as trophies?

I mean, it's like a modern day slave auction, dude.

Well, Brian, I didn't see it that way at all.

Yeah, the people who the show, maybe they were that was.

And entitled.

That was awful.

But most were there because they love Bob.

You can see it in their eyes when they looked at those pictures.

I don't think they wanted a trophy.

Maybe they just lost their way.

And deep down, they believe in the power of music to heal.

They just needed something to remind them.

Whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait.

Henry, you sound like you're describing yourself, man.

I mean, before you went corporate, didn't you believe in the power of music to heal and bring people together?

I still do.

I still believe.

And now you want to send resumes out so you can not corporate get in line and work for some other soulless company pushing someone else's dream.

That's your plan for the future.

Well, that was my plan.

But hearing you put it that way sounds depressing.

At this point, I'm not sure what I want.

I know what you want.

You just want to produce music.

I want to sing.

So let's just move to Jamaica.

Are you serious?

Brian?

Are you really serious?

Let's just do it, man.

Clean break.

An exodus.

It's One thing to head down for a couple of weeks or maybe a few months.

But to move there.

Yes, madame.

To Kingston.

Time to go to Kingston.

Time to go all in.

Oh, boy.

I don't know about that one.

Look, you were never ready before.

I don't know now.

There's no excuse, Henry.

I know my potential as a singer.

Oh, Brian, I know your potential.

Nothing can stop me.

Just believe in me.

I know your potential.

I do believe in you.

I won't let you down.

It's just, where do we stay?

How do we afford it?

We can always head down and record a song or an album.

Anyone could go down to Jamaica to record a song or an album.

But to live down there, right down there.

It'll only make us grow as artists and people.

Just believe in me.

I'm not sure how long we were in the park or how much first, second or third hand smoke I inhaled.

But Brian's idea about moving to Jamaica actually started to sound pretty good.

We walked over to my friend Harlan's travel agency on West 11th street and made reservations for a flight to Kingston.

But before I paid and booked my ticket, I wanted to hear how Brian sounded behind the microphone in an actual vocal booth, not just freestyling on the street corner or at a downtown club on their reggae night.

So I booked some time at a studio for the very next day.

Ordinarily, getting studio time in New York City for the next day and last minute is near impossible.

But as it turns out, I knew somebody that knew somebody.

Henry, call me back when you get a chance, please.

I just met such a lovely woman at Beauty Paul.

Finding the right recording studio in New York City was always a daunting challenge, polluted with conmen willing to swear on their mother's grave that you're the next Whitney, Mariah or Michael.

In order to have you block out as much studio time as possible.

At rates starting $100 an hour, they could be pretty convincing.

And that was before Autotune.

Not to mention in the 1980s and 90s.

The music business was one of the preferred methods for mafia dons, gangsters and dealers to launder money and make dirty cash clean.

Like strip clubs and car washes Fly by Night studios would pop up and disappear, often with their clients, unfinished master tapes, and always with their money.

Trust was almost non existent in an industry that revolved around stroking someone's ego to the point of no return.

And many never came back.

People of integrity that valued honesty over money were rare and hard to come by to make it in the music business.

You need someone in your corner, an advocate willing to do the legwork for you.

Someone who believes in you, sometimes even more than you believe in yourself.

Henry, I met this lovely woman at the beauty parlor and you won't believe it.

Her son's in the music business.

My mom always came through in the clutch.

She gave me his business card and I told her you would call him.

The Five Towns on the south shore of Long island next to Rockaway beach, is an enclave of small hamlets that represent some of the wealthiest and most impoverished communities in all of New York.

Lawrence High School, where I attended and was the student government president, was a mix of country club kids who grew up on the manicured private golf courses in the back of Lawrence and underprivileged teens from row houses raised along the Inwood train tracks.

But for the most part it was exceedingly middle class, where blocks upon blocks of single family homes all shared one of three different floor plans and the same size gridded backyards, some with swimming pools, some with barbecues.

Most of the homes like ours, were filled with happiness.

The Five Towns was also an area where no matter how content you were with what you had in life, there was always someone around to remind you about how much you didn't have.

It had the reputation as being one of the most obnoxious places in Long island, where opulent displays of wealth were paraded on a daily basis in the cars, the clothing, the jewelry, and the attitudes.

Fawning mothers were known to spend the majority of their manicures bragging about their gifted children, the doctor, the lawyer, the stockbroker.

Conspicuously loud enough for everyone in the beauty parlor to hear a chorus of scratchy voiced Long island accents penetrating a sea of humming hair dryers.

And then there was my mom, never shy to boast about her son, the struggling songwriter who worked in Jamaica for Bob Andy.

As if any of the women knew who Bob Andy was or cared.

My mother was sure that I was a superstar, and one day the world would know.

Oblivious to the skeptical onlookers, to the snarls and plastic smiles of the Real Housewives of Long Island.

One afternoon after leaving the beauty parlor, a woman who overheard my mother talking about me approached her in front of the Woodmere bowling alley next to the salon.

She told my mother her son was also in the music business.

Not to mind those other ladies or the naysayers, she said, to keep the faith and keep believing.

And she handed my mom her son's business card.

It's D and D Recording Studios 320 W. 37th St. You can ask for David or Doug, either one of them.

So don't forget to call him and call me back.

Love you.

David Lotwin and Dougie Gramma, two kids from the five towns that graduated from Lawrence few years ahead of me.

While their high school buddies were out making a killing in the 80s stock market and climbing corporate ladders, David and Doug were grinding away at their dream of having a successful recording studio in New York City's cutthroat music business.

With old fashioned hard work, sacrifice and non stop hustling, D and D built their business one client at a time and soon started earning the respect and trust of industry players.

They didn't have the fanciest room in Manhattan with the most cutting edge equipment, and it wasn't in one of the city's prestigious doorman buildings.

But D and D had something that no other studio in the city had.

They had David and Doug.

It gave the studio a heart and soul.

And that combined with a group of talented, dedicated engineers and producers, they created a sound that no other room in New York could replicate.

DD became the holy shrine of hip hop, an incubator for an early New York rap scene that pumped out hits like a beat factory, home to such notables as Premier and guru of Gangstar, KRS1's Boogie Down Productions.

Entire stables of street talent from Jersey City to the Bronx that dominated the rap charts of the day, including Notorious, Big Mobb, Deep, Nas and a young rapper from Brooklyn that recorded his first album at D and D named Jay Z. I guess David and Doug saw some of themselves in me.

David had also been to Jamaica when he was younger and worked and toured with reggae legend Peter Tosh.

They looked out for me like I was a little brother when I first started out as a songwriter.

They made their studio my home and it's where I sold my very first song.

Long after the clock stopped ticking on my studio time, they let me hang around surrounded by world class musicians and producers that were happy to share the art and science of production and engineering.

Mesmerized in the presence of such talent, I'd spend hours sitting in on writing and recording sessions by unsigned artists that would later blossom into a list celebrities.

I didn't even realize it at the time, but David and Doug gave me a front row seat to witness a burgeoning east coast hip hop scene at its most pivotal and vibrant moments.

As profound as some of those sessions were, the show didn't end when I left the studio.

It just changed locations to the City streets from my late night march back to Penn Station for the last train to Woodmere.

During the day, 8th Avenue is a bustling parade of garmentos wheeling racks of clothing to showrooms and warehouses, trying their best to avoid New Jersey housewives prowling the sidewalks looking for exclusive sample sales.

After midnight, the city streets transform.

An unseen New York emerges from the cracks and crevices and alleyways.

During the day, they go unnoticed.

At night, it's neither safe to sleep or slumber, so they awake from their daylight sojourns to roam the streets, homeless on instinctively gravitating towards light and noise.

With torn cardboard boxes and shopping carts limping along on broken wheels, they reside in the shadows of the steel palaces, the destitute and forgotten walking back to Penn Station.

There was always something poetic about these barren, dystopian streets.

The way they perfectly echoed the raw, emotional hip hop music created inside the studio by voices that also felt destitute and forgotten.

Voices that now had a microphone.

I had not been back to D and D for a while, but as soon as I saw the white and yellow gray Papaya hot doggery sign on Broadway, it felt like I never left home to the 50 cent hot dog that countless struggling musicians and artists relied on for sustenance in hard times.

For most New York musicians, it's always hard times.

D and D Studios was in the city's garment district on the west side, centrally located between Penn Station and Times Square.

Outside the building, a sonic melting pot of Orthodox Jews speaking Yiddish into cell phones and Hispanic women, factory workers giggling and gossiping on their union breaks.

Inside the Narrow lobby at 320 West 37, you head straight to the freight elevator operated by the same guy since the building's construction in the 1920s.

Right out of central casting, he manually closes and locks a rusty, collapsible metal gate and then pulls a brass handled lever like an old Hollywood version of a time machine.

When you step out on the fourth floor, you're back to the future.

Henry, what's up?

How you doing, brother?

How you doing?

Been a while.

Thank you so much for doing this.

I know you're so busy.

Thanks.

For you, Henry K, anything, you know we're always here for you.

This is my friend Brian I told you about.

Hey, B, what's up?

Nice to meet you.

We heard about you from your boy here.

Hey, guys.

Wow, this place is iconic, man.

It's an honor to be recording with you guys.

Let's get you set up in the.

Vocal booth, see what you got Brian stepped into the vocal booth and Doug eg followed him in and helped him put on the headphones over his long, straight blonde hair.

Then Doug adjusted the microphone stand which had to be lowered to Brian's height, which was obviously shorter than the studio's previous client.

Much shorter.

I placed a record on the turntable which was already connected to the mixing board in the control room.

Then I put the needle on the record and Brian put his vocal on the rhythm.

This a liquor isla in his style.

Badang dung dang.

Don't call me saying this.

A liquor is a liquor, Brian.

A fish at gonna make your move.

I like the one liquor.

Cut up and make your fizzle iri up and move.

Panda Spot 1991 we report this part.

New York City.

We are guana Jamaica we are chattan A liquor is locked.

It must become like you won't.

So Henry, where did you find this guy?

Believe it or not, he found me.

He seems to keep on finding me.

Alright, Dougie, so tell me.

What do you think?

What's the verdict?

Sounds pretty good, right?

I mean, he's great.

He sounds just like a Jamaican.

He can groove.

I know he knows how to rock it.

It's a cool concept for a white guy, but gonna come with its own set of problems.

Know what I mean?

Yeah, I know what you mean.

But he's pretty good, right?

As good as he is, at some point he's going to have to find his own identity, his own sound.

That's not as easy as it seems.

What do you think?

Is he good enough for me to make the move?

Should I pack my bags and head down to Jamaica?

Does Brian sound good enough for you to pack up everything and move to Jamaica?

Is he?

Hmm.

The truth is, Henry, at this point, I don't think it really matters.

I think you're ready to go either way.

You mean that?

Isn't this what you've been dreaming about forever?

Yeah.

It's always been my dream.

You know that.

I've just been waiting for the right time.

This is your time.

If Brian has what it takes, you'll find out soon enough.

Well, that's good enough for me.

And it's not like New York City is going anywhere.

Well, I guess that's what I needed to hear.

Thanks, Doug.

A few weeks after the D and D session, I picked up Brian at the Woodmere train station in Long Island.

We were staying at my parents place the night before leaving for Kingston.

The house I grew up in was only seven miles away from jfk.

One of the Busiest airports in the world.

I lived so close.

The lights from the plane's landing gears would shine through the cracks in the blinds of my bedroom windows at night as a kid, I could sit in my backyard for hours and watch the planes take off and descend.

They would come in like clockwork over my neighbor Richie Tanowitz's tall green pine trees.

Every few minutes, another flight carrying passengers from faraway places that spoke exotic languages.

I would imagine there were people visiting family and friends, traveling for work and fun and some chasing distant dreams with hopes of new beginnings.

I always knew that one day I'd have my chance.

And thanks to Brian from Colorado who convinced me to make this journey, my one day was here.

First thing in the morning, I'd be boarding an American Airlines flight to Kingston, embarking on a life changing, mystical musical adventure to a Caribbean island whose motto is We Licko but we Talawa, which means we're small but mighty.

And from the window seat of a 737, I watched the sunrise over the Long island beaches that I spent my youth.

Before leaving, Brian asked if he could keep some of his things at my parents house for safekeeping while we were in Jamaica.

His most valuable belongings, Things he didn't want to risk bringing to the island.

Looking back, it felt almost ceremonial the way he removed a gold chain from around his neck and carefully placed it in an old cigar box alongside an empty pack of lion of Judah rolling papers with a number scribbled on it and a sterling silver baby spoon.

He took the cigar box and wrapped it in an Abbie Hoffman T shirt that had the image of an American flag and the quote, the only way to support a revolution is to make your own.

He handed it over to me and I stashed it on top of my closet over a set of old encyclopedias.

I remember thinking that all Brian's most valuable possessions could fit in a cigar box with room to spare, not knowing at the time he would never get a chance to come back for them.

But it was never Brian's possessions that made him rich.

His richness was life and his gift, leading me to where I am today and will forever be.

A magical place at the intersection of words, sound and power.

A place called Roots Land.

Have you made say, millions of dollars?

No.

Are you a rich man?

When you mean rich, what do you mean?

You have a lot of possessions, a lot of money in the bank position make you rich?

I don't have that type of richness.

My richness is life.

Thank you for tuning in to the Season two finale of Roots Land and all your support, emails and comments.

Season three will return in April and before then we'll have a couple of bonus episodes with music and guests.

You can also support our show by.

Downloading the Roots Land Music Soundtrack, consisting of classic roots reggae songs by legends of Reggae that will be available on itunes, Amazon or wherever you download or purchase music at the end of this month.

Don't worry about a thing because every little thing is going to be alright.

And Rique Productions.