1980s
Public Enemy: Our 1988 Interview With Chuck D and Flavor Flav
This article originally appeared in the January 1988 issue of SPIN. Critics don’t like them. Black radio stations won’t play them. But in less than a year Public Enemy has managed to sell 275,000 copies of their debut LP, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and has toured the U.S. and Europe with L.L. Cool J. They hit the stage like an alliance of shock troop and rap group. Behind them stand the S1Ws (which stands for Security of the First World), their gun-toting, Muslim backup crew (the guns are unloaded). The music is hard and the message is strong—maybe too strong for some. Chuck D is the meat of the message, and Flavor Flav is the spice—the younger sidekick who tempers the militance. “You wear a clock to know what time it is. And when you know what time it is, that means you are aware. And w...
Messin’ With the Hook: Our 1986 John Lee Hooker Feature
This article originally appeared in the April 1986 issue of SPIN. A battered motel room in Watts, the Glen-Dora Motor Lodge. When you come in, John Lee Hooker is standing at the stove in the cramped kitchenette. He’s cooking him up some red beans and rice, some biscuits and gravy, some neck-bones. Battered neckbones. Or no, better—it’s a woman at the stove. A middle-aged black woman, thick at the hips, wearing puffy bedroom slippers. And John Lee Hooker’s settled in at the yellow linoleum dinette table with the rusty chrome legs. He has an old undershirt on, and as you come in, he looks up and says (nigh-perfect ZZ Top–imitation growl), “How how how how…” No. John Lee Hooker is in bed. On the eighth floor of Santa Monica’s Bay View Plaza Holiday Inn. Half under the covers a...
Norman Mailer on Mike Tyson: Our 1988 Feature
This article originally appeared in the September 1988 issue of SPIN As an arena for boxing, the Convention Hall at Atlantic City is not one of the happier architectural palaces of the world. It drops the kind of pall an audience that would come from witnessing a cockfight in a bank. Lyndon Johnson was nominated there in 1964 with two identical sixty-foot close-up photographs of himself on either side of the podium. The Hall looked on that occasion like a coronation chamber for a dictator. Now on the night of June 27, 1988, thousands of seats were laid out on the great flat floor and people in the seventeenth ringside were paying $1,500 a ticket to see Tyson-Spinks heavyweight championship. Since the gala glitz of Trump Plaza was but a connecting corridor away from Convention Hall, the Tru...
The Outlaw at 50: Our 1988 Interview With Waylon Jennings
This article originally appeared in the January 1988 issue of SPIN. Waylon Jennings was born on June 15, 1937. In on honor of what would have been his 83rd birthday, we are republishing the interview here. “You’re gonna get in trouble if I write this.” “I don’t care. You write what I tell ya.” Waylon Jennings, looking more like an outlaw biker than a cowboy, is dressed in black except for his nylon racing jacket. His trademark black hat never leaves his head. He turned 50 this year and he looks it. He also looks healthy, if weathered. There is no sign of his 20-plus-year addiction to pills and cocaine. He chain-smokes. He’s slightly nervous, but becomes more relaxed as the interview progresses Waylon is in New York, a city he first visited as one of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, to promote ...
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