SILVER FOX. CONT.
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‘cos they let me get on there every week. So every week I’m writing new stuff and I’m trying it out on the crowd. Mostly I would try to battle people. I was looking for Moe Dee, but he didn’t want to see me! [laughs] I was basically a renegade – I was a rogue with my stuff. I’d just go places and jump on they mics and I hit it and I’m out! A lot of these guys like Moe and ‘em, they were from around my block. I grew-up on 125th Street and Amsterdam in New York. The Fearless Four – they’re from around my area. Doug E. Fresh is from 126th Street, Moe Dee is from 129th Street, so we were all close to each other. My thing was, in order for me to get on the map I gotta find out who’s good and take ‘em put! I gotta battle somebody so they can know who I am. I’m known by MC’s – all the rappers know me and they know what I do. When they guys were recording I was still out there trying to get a name for himself.
I used to go to the projects in Manhattan ‘cos there’s thousands of people living on a block, and in each of these neighborhoods there’s somebody’s who’s the best in that hood. So I’m like, ‘OK, I want to battle him!’ I go to clubs or I go to their spots – I was a crazy guy in my younger days, man. I’d be smoking weed, I’d be drinking brew, and a lot of the times when I went to these places I didn’t know who these cats was – all I knew was I was ready to battle. There was a lotta cats that knew about me already, before I got there. I would be in a dark spot, leaning against the wall – listening to ‘em, lookin’ at ‘em – sizing them up. Going, ‘Yeah, I could take them’. A lotta cats that I battled – they ripped their rhyme books up and go start writing some more. I had no mercy. And then I started to shake hands with guys [afterwards], ‘cos I’m thinking, ‘C’mon man, it’s alright. I’ll tell you what you did wrong!’ So now I got people that know me, that be like, ‘Yo, Silver Fox? That’s my dude, man. I remember when we hung-out one night.’ Now this guy is talking about, in my lifetime, this cat is talking about one night that he hung out with me. I will break bread with rappers – I’ll sit down and share a sub with you. But I do that and it’s, ‘Yo man, Fox is alright, man. I remember that time, man, I was hangin’ out with him, man. We battled, and then we sat down and we had a sub, man! And some chicken! And he said such-and-such to this girl!’ I’m like, ‘How I am I to remember all of that?’Nah, I did a lotta stuff by myself. But I had this one guy with me who called himself Kev-Ski. He was part of the hip-hop scene since the real old school with guys like [DJ] Hollywood and Eddie Cheeba. He knew the places to go to where the MC’s were at, ‘cos I didn’t know. Fantasy Three was me, Charlie Rock and Larry D. We had an independent label, we was on Specific Records. We did a record called ‘It’s Your Rock’, and what got us over was OC’s remix on the b-side. So now people playin’ the b-side and all I had to do was go,