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Grand Wizard Theodore is hailed as the 13 year old that invented one of the first scratch techniques with the ‘needle drop’. Grandmaster Flash was in the same crew as Theodore’s older brother Mean Gene Flash apparently saw the potential in the young boy and taught GWT what he knew about playing records and the rest they say is history….. If you’ve watched Wildstyle you’ll have seen Grand Wizard Theodore representing the Fantastic Five and squaring up against DJ Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers...but this time we left it simple n' put him up against ukhh.com's own MollY Malone. 
So Grandmaster Flash says that you invented the needle drop; tell me how you discovered that?
It just goes back to practising and trying to make yourself better at your craft. If you’re an MC or a DJ or whatever you do, Your always going to want to try and take yourself to the next level and basically I’m sure everybody’s mother had a little turntable in their house and I used to play the 45’s on my mothers turntable and I used to play the 45’s and when the 45’s got to the break part of the record I used to skip the needle back to the break part and I was doing that for so many years messing up my mothers 45’s till when I finally started dj'ing I developed a skill called a needle drop I was developing the skill and didn’t even know I was doing it so finally when I was able to actually play on a pair of turntables I had already developed my style which was called the needle drop, I developed this before I actually created the scratch How was the response and how young were you when you were getting up and doing that? I was probably about 11 years old when I pretty much came up with the needle drop and 12 and half years old with scratch, the summer of 1975, which marks 30 years of the scratch this year. I was just basically in my room just practising and playing music a little bit too loud. My mother is the kind of person that doesn’t argue or fight or fuss she just start swinging you know like Mike Tyson. I’m in the house trying to make the tape and back in those days you didn’t have no tape decks or anything like that its just take a big boom box and put it in front of the speaker and that’s how we made our tapes. I was making a tape and she came in the room and banged on the door and I was like ‘oh man..’, she looked at me and the look was like either turn your music down or turn the music off, so I had one record playing on my right hand side and I was holding the record on my left hand side and back then we didn’t have no cross faders like the up and down fade, so I had all the up and down faders all the way up and whiles she was screaming at me in the doorway I was rubbing the record back and forth and forth and back, so when she left the room I realised what I was doing and practiced it and perfected it and it became a scratch and the rest is history.  "...This culture is here, it was made from the people and by the people and we have to make sure that we preserve this..." So instead of hiding the sound of you queuing up the records you let everyone hear it? Exactly, well back then, we had to listen to the record before you played it, so if anyone is making a tape or doing a party you got to be moving the record back and forth before you actually play it for real in front of the audience so basically what I was doing, I was already moving the record back and forth while the other record was still playing, so you can hear me basically moving the record back and forth and forth and back, I just incorporated it into what I was doing. The DJ’s and MC’s and people at the parties back then must have been quite proud of you were you as you were so young – were you like a little mascot for the parties and stuff? I had a gift, I had a gift from God and I didn’t know at the time, I was just in love with playing music and was happy to see people enjoying what I was doing, I really didn’t care bout the money or anything like that I just cared about people coming to the party and having a good time.  What was it like being a kid, growing up around when hip hop was first starting out, because you were quite young when you started? Did you think that it would get to how it is and how its become now?
When I was growing up I was pretty much growing up with my brothers Mean Gene and Cordial. My brother Mean Gene was down with Grandmaster Flash and that’s how I got introduced into the whole world of Dj’s and stuff like that. As far as growing up in the South Bronx, Hip Hop was everywhere around me, you could go in the parks and see the b-boys in the parks with their little boom box and them b-boying in the park. When you go near the subways and all the trains stations you can see the graffiti all over the trains and stuff like that. You can walk down the street and see guys huddled up in a little bunch and everybody’s like doing their little freestyles and shit. Hip Hop was like everywhere, people didn’t really care how far it was going to go it was just that everybody was doing it, everybody was into it, it was something that everybody loved, nobody really thought that it was going to evolve into what it has evolved into today. Now we’ve got loads of DJ’s, loads of hip hop records, but in those days there weren’t hip hop records it was about the breaks, it was about other music apart from hip hop like funk jazz and rock, what tunes were you cutting up? Well back in those days we didn’t have instrumentals where we could just cut up the instrumental and scratch accapella to those instrumentals, we basically had, most of the breaks that we played were pure breaks. We cut up an Aerosmith break we were pretty much like cutting up the break from the album there was no instrumental, we had to cut the breaks up ourselves. A lot of breaks were probably like ten seconds or eight seconds long, we pretty much had to extend the break ourselves.
As far as the kids today are concerned they need to study the early days of hip hop and know who the true players were, like Kool Herc, myself Grand Wizard Theodore, DJ Charlie Chase, Cold Crush Brothers, the Fantastic 5, Busy Bee Starsky, DJ Jones, DJ Hollywood all these guys that contributed a major part to what hip hop is today. When we used to make our flyers we used to pretty much call up the graffiti artists and the graffiti artists would make a flyer for us, they’d probably do a flyer with a nice big car on it, a guy and a girl dancing and stuff like that. All the elements were intertwined with each other. And then when you get to the parties you see the b-boys, you could look at a person and tell whether they were a b-boy by the way they dressed and stuff like that. It was about having fun, you come to the parties you’ll see the graffiti artists there and the b-boys there doing their little dance, some of the b-boy crews would bring their linoleum down and spread it down on the carpet, on the pavement and they just start breaking right then and there.
People look at hip hop as ‘this is a way for me to express myself’ and I think its good that Hip Hop is around the world, you got so many different styles of Hip Hop but its always still Hip Hop. French Hip hop, Hip Hop from London, Japan, China, Italy its all around the world and these individual are expressing hip hop in their own language which I think is good, I hope it stays around for a long time so that my kids, your kids, can enjoy it just like we are enjoying it.
They’re trying to wipe out vinyl in hip hop and stuff like that, vinyl should be here forever because vinyl paved the way for what’s going on today. New technology and machines well its just another way for people to express themselves and people are always looking to take things to the next level because there so used to the norm. When I see someone’s trying to take an element of the hip hop to the next level, I think its good because things are going to always change no matter what, no matter what you say or what you do. I just feel that when it comes to the people that created the art form, people shouldn’t try and dictate to them what the art form was when they were the ones that created it. How you going to dictate to someone something that they created, you can’t say well okay you guys created the first car so I’m going to tell you what a car should be like. That’s wrong.
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© ukhh.com 2005
DJ
Grand Wizard Theodore Interview 
People have to understand that if a guys going to rhyme about being a gangster and selling drugs at least at the end of the rhyme they have to tell people that ‘that’s what I used to do and now I’m an mc - I’ve turned my life around’. These younger kids today think that being a person into hip hop is having and selling drugs and shooting people its not about selling drugs and stuff like that, it’s just being wild and hip hop is about having fun. They’ve got to learn about the early days of hip hop, that’s why I tell some people when they ask me about how things were in the early days and sometimes basically I just tell them look at the movie Wild Style. You look at Wild Style you can pretty much tell what was going on back in those days, 95% of things in Wild Style was what was happening, we wasn’t acting that’s what we were really doing. We played basketball in the park, that’s what we did.
How do you think we can preserve it, technology and production techniques are constantly changing, at the moment there’s a lot of artists in the UK making a type of music called Grime, it has rap in it, some might call it Hip Hop. Do you think Hip Hop can progress and evolve so much that maybe in years to come we’ll be looking back and thinking ‘well what we used to call Hip Hop was so and so but now this is what we call Hip Hop....’
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