Based on all I’ve come to surmise about Dr. Dre, an adventure beyond the confines of Compton in February of 1983 had an indelible impact on him and — by extension — hip-hop culture as we’ve come to know it. Maybe not as important as the day Eric “Eazy-E” Wright picked up one of Dre’s mixtapes at Compton’s Roadium swap meet and told the booth’s owner to put Dre in touch, put pretty damn close.

Here’s how I came to to know about that weekend:

In early 2008, the late rock historian and promoter Brendan Mullen sent me a note about meeting Lonzo and Andre at a festival Mullen created in 1983. The Scotland native had breathlessly cornered me a few weeks earlier, just after I stepped down from a panel discussion at Barnsdall Art Center. Brendan Mullen told me I had a story no one had told.

In his email, Mullen wrote that the Club Lingerie festival was “the first full-spectrum hip-hop event outside of New York, according to one key participant, DJ Afrika Islam, Son of Bambaataa, icon of the Zulu Nation b-boy tribe that Bam sent as his West Coast emissary.”

(Islam was contacted for this story, but did not respond to the interview request.)

The corner of Pico and La Brea in Los Angeles, CA

Uncle Jam’s Army

As early as 1981, Los Angeles nightclubs outside of South-Central were trying to figure out the hip-hop thing. Rodger Clayton’s Uncle Jamm’s Army had the party scene popular with working class people of color locked down since 1978. The broader world experiencing Los Angeles via media could see local hip-hop culture represented in TV commercials, via Venice breakdancers and the occasional graffiti throw up. There was, however, no L.A. County corollary to Bronx artists having taken the new goods downtown. And industry standard MC’ing, such as it was, could hardly be found in a Los Angeles live setting.

“We used to laugh at Ice-T when he was on the mic, he was so lame. But he got better,” recalls Europa Macmillan, the rare female DJ in early 80s Hollywood clubs. Black hipsters on the late-night tip too were a rarity — both as performers and fans. Macmillan does recall Larry Fishburne, young members of a developing young band called Fishbone, and, eventually, Jean-Michel Basquiat making the scene.

Hip-hop was a bird of another variety.

“Sad to say that the French would have taken to it before we were able to in Los Angeles,” Mullen wrote, referencing November 1982’s “New York City Rap Tour,” when Celluloid Records took Grandmaster D.St and Grandmaster Flash, as well as breakers and rapping graffiti artist Futura 2000 (The Escapades Of Futura 2000), to France, “though it did take me a long time from mid-’82 to finally convince the club’s owners to go for it.”

Club Lingerie, on Sunset Blvd. between Highland and Vine, was a hub of the town’s alternative music scene. This was when Los Angeles’ rockers were playing sets on a qualitative par with anything coming out of New York or London, punk and new wave’s acknowledged origin cities. Black Flag, X, Los Lobos, and my personal favorite, The Minutemen were just a few of the seminal L.A. artists making important noise. As Mullen explained, the next logical progression for a scene steeped in all manner of diversity, were stabs at hip-hop.

As mainstream as the music can seem now, one can forget it was generally taken as an affront to music well into its second decade. Mullen, who had a Saturday night DJ set before he began promoting live music at the club, began slipping a deliciously dated “Rapper’s Delight” into his Saturday night set in 1981. Sure he dug the tune, but dude spun it equally because punk rock chicks would dance to it.

Brendan Mullen in 1979

Five years earlier, Mullen founded the legendary Hollywood punk club The Masque, where many rockers first saw X, the Go-Go’s and The Germs, among others. He was now at the height of his powers a spotter of talent and trends . Nineteen-eighty-three was also the year that neophyte artists Anthony Kiedis and Flea walked into Club Lingerie and found themselves on the way to a career. Jane’s Addiction and other future stars were on the Peppers’ heels.

Forever on the lookout for the fresh, Mullen recommended that the nightclub’s owners, Dave Kelsey and Kurt Fisher, spring for the costs of “bringing out a posse of kids straight off the street in the South Bronx, most of ‘em loosely associated with the Zulu Nation as confirmed b-boys.” The two-day event was christened “The South Bronx Invasion Goes West.” Album cover artist Mike Doud (Breakfast in America, A Golden Shower of Hits, Houses of the Holy) did the fliers.

Mullen told me that Celluloid’s Alex and Bernard “Change the Beat” Zekri, along with “dopefiend French artist” Alex Jourdanov pitched in to help organize. On the heels of the label’s French tour, they were prepared to fly enough of its hip-hop talent—Dondi, Futura, Fab 5 & the turntablist formerly known as D.St—into LAX and fulfill its two-day commitment. Club Lingerie footed transport, lodging and per diem, according to Mullen.

“The advance buzz on the Lingerie show in the LA Weekly, the LA Reader, BAM music zine, and the LA Times was huge,” he wrote. “Not just MCs, jokers or otherwise, but mind-blowing DJs, b-boy breakers and graffiti artists” and their promise produced an air of anticipation. Not all of it was favorable, according to Macmillan, who spun Lingerie that weekend.

“Everyone was really freaked out,” Macmillan told me, “like, ‘Oh my god, they’re from the South Bronx! Are they going to wreck the turntables? Are they going to graffiti up the club?’” She said her only mild annoyance resulted from Futura 2000 taking forever to spray paint his name onto a big stage backdrop and from the one visiting crew member humping her derriere while she bent over the turntables in an extremely short skirt.

Macmillan recalled that most of the cast from Charlie Ahearn’s film Wildstyle performed over the weekend. It is unclear whether the Cold Crush Brothers or Busy Bee rocked the Club Lingerie stage. Saturday’s show was poorly attended, but Sunday’s day-long event drew many more people. Grandmaster Flash spun and Fab 5 Freddy, whom Mullen said told him the trip marked his first time on a plane, rocked the mic.