“White Lines” was a worldwide smash for Grandmaster Flash and his crew — and white lines brought them crashing down.
The iconic 1983 anti-drug anthem — along with seminal hip-hop hit “The Message” — made the group a household name. But by the time “White Lines” hit the airwaves, cocaine had already torn the group apart, a split that would send many of the members spiraling into addiction, obscurity, even the grave.
Founding member MC Kidd Creole’s hit rock bottom on Wednesday when he was arrested for the murder of a homeless man.
Cops cuffed Creole after finding him in an 8-by-10-foot hovel at a Bronx rooming house, where he lived when he wasn’t working as a security and maintenance man — a world away from the lifestyle he once enjoyed, touring the world and headlining sold-out theaters.
“Kidd Creole is one of the ones who started hip-hop . . . He’s good people, but things happened to him,” said neighbor and longtime friend Guy Stevens, 48, a former actor who appeared in the 1979 cult classic “The Warriors” but now lives directly below Creole in the run-down Mount Hope house, where on Thursday the 4 train rumbled deafeningly overhead while a man smoked drugs on the stoop.
“We learned the politics of movies and music together. And that’s how we both ended up here.”
The building is just a few miles from where Creole — born Nathaniel Glover — and his little brother Melvin, a k a Melle Mel, created a new way of reciting rhymes on the streets of Morrisania, first learning poetry from sister Glander, then coming up with their own lyrics, and finally trading refrains back and forth.
When they met Grandmaster Flash — a local kid born Joseph Saddler — showing of his break-beat DJing styles in a local park in 1975, they knocked the turntablist’s socks off.
“Creole swam like a fish. He had a smooth glide to match. Even his hair — braided in tight, thin rows — looked like scales on top of his head,” Flash wrote in his 2008 biography, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash: My Life, My Beats.”
“Rhyming on the mic was what truly brought this kid’s soul to life . . . . if you gave him a word, Creole would flow with it for five minutes, going off like a marathon runner. In a word, Creole was fluid.”
Along with rappers Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins, Eddie “Scorpio” Morris and Guy Todd “Rahiem” Williams, they formed Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
The group quickly moved from playing parties and parks to bigger and bigger clubs, released their debut single in 1979 and signed with Sugar Hill Records — the year the label’s signature group, The Sugarhill Gang, released hip-hop’s first Top 40 single, “Rapper’s Delight.”
In 1980, the group had more hits with “Freedom,” “Birthday Party” and Flash’s influential single “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”
But by the time their politically-charged breakout track, “The Message,” hit the streets, the wheels were already coming off. The song, despite being released under the group’s name, only featured Melle Mel. The rest of the band had been cut out.
Still, the whole group was able to enjoy the party lifestyle that came with their fame — and that included the growing presence of drugs in their lives.
“We had been dabbling from 1979 ’til about ’83. It came to a head in about ’83 — especially for me,” Rahiem told Tha Foundation in 2005.
And their drug of choice was cocaine.
“It was the think to do. That was before crack came out. Cocaine was like the high-profile drug. Good cocaine was like $100 a gram. All the pretty girls and the entertainers liked cocaine. It wasn’t like it’s seen now,” Melle Mel said in a 2003 interview with AllHipHop.
Tensions were also growing among the band members and their record label.
By 1983, when Melle Mel released “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It),” Flash had stopped touring with the band, was nursing a serious coke habit — and was suing Sugar Hill for past royalties.
The track — which once again featured no other members of the group — started out as an ode to cocaine, but ended up including the pious “don’t buy it!” refrain to make it more radio friendly.
“Now the guys are saying no to drugs on this new record, but I bet they’re out looking for the dope man just like me,” Flash wrote in “My Life, My Beats.” “This song’s one big hypocritical joke.”
The next year everything came to a head and the group finally split.
Melle Mel, Scorpio and Cowboy stayed with Sugar Hill and formed Grandmaster Melle Mel and the Furious Five — but Creole turned away from his brother, instead sticking by Flash and Rahiem and moving to Elektra Records.
Hitching his wagon to a junkie would not turn out to be the greatest life choice. While his crew enjoyed some commercial success, Flash smoked his way into oblivion, finally winding up hospitalized in a coma for two days in 1984.
Meanwhile, Melle Mel’s career was soaring. He appeared in the film “Beat Street” and had a hit song off the title track, before rapping on Chaka Khan’s Grammy-winning “I Feel for You” in 1985.
The group reunited in 1988 with the album “On the Strength,” but it wasn’t a success, and the Furious Five broke up for good.
The next year, Cowboy died of a crack overdose.
Even Melle Mel says he succumbed for several years.
“I didn’t get hooked on coke all that much. But when, crack came out, I did crack. I was a crack head at one time,” he told AllHipHop.
Creole, meanwhile, faded into obscurity.
His path to living in a tiny room with a shared kitchen at Mount Hope Place and Jerome Avenue isn’t entirely clear.
Friends and neighbors said they didn’t know whether the demons that plagued his bandmates had played a role, abruptly ending the conversation when asked.
“I don’t know about that. I’m not about that,” said Stevens.
Neighbors say Nathaniel Glover lives a largely civilian life and rarely talks about his former fame.
“He walks through crowds of people who don’t know who he is, young rappers, and he never tells them that he started hip-hop,” said neighbor and rapper Jaime Dobson, 25. “Most of the time he’s coming and going to work. But every once in a while he’s dressed up real nice and getting into a limo outside, going to an awards event.”
One of those events was when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, when he sported a dapper purple waistcoats and bow tie.
Flash still isn’t on good terms with Glover, Rahiem told HipHopDX on Thursday. “He’s not close with his family, so I don’t believe anyone in his family is in contact with him,” he told the site.
Glover has also had some run-ins with the law. He was arrested in 1995 for possession of a loaded 9mm handgun and live ammo and again in 2007 for packing a gravity knife.
These days, he always carries a steak knife strapped to his arm for protection, a court heard Thursday.
That’s the weapon cops say he used to fatally stab derelict John Jolly, 55, on Tuesday night — allegedly whipping the blade out of his sleeve because he thought the bum was trying to hit on him by saying, “What’s Up?’’ as they passed on a Turtle Bay street.
Glover was arraigned on one count of second-degree murder.
“He thought the complainant was hitting on him and thought that, ‘If this guy was hitting on me, he must think I’m gay, too,’ and that infuriated him,” Assistant District Attorney Mark Dahl told Judge Phyllis Chu, successfully arguing for remand.
Glover tried to ignore Jolly, who was leaning against a wall sipping a beer at East 43rd Street and Third Avenue, at first and kept walking, he told authorities. But he became concerned that Jolly, a registered sex offender, might rob him, Glover allegedly said.
As he looked over his shoulder, the victim allegedly moved toward him and barked, “All I said to you was, ‘What’s up?’ the prosecutor said.
Glover pulled the knife from his sleeve and allegedly stabbed Jolly twice in the chest, then ran.
Glover told authorities that after the stabbing, he reported for a shift at the building where he works.
He greeted his co-workers, then headed to the bathroom, where he washed the alleged murder weapon.
He changed into his work clothes but 15 minutes later decided he wanted to head home, Glover allegedly told authorities.
When Glover got off at his stop in The Bronx, he tossed the knife in a sewer, the prosecutor said.
Additional reporting by Shawn Cohen and Tina Moore