Slipped Away

All these years later, Philly folks still question what brought Cool C and Steady B to the point of armed robbery. Were they in debt to drug dealers? Were they stealing funds to advance their recording career? Were they simply desperate to maintain their Big Willie images? While it may feel difficult to get a regular nine-to-five after tasting hip-hop fame, many old school rappers have done it. Cool C and Steady B made a different choice.

Philly-based alternative rap/rockers G. Love & Special Sauce included a dedication to the fallen officer on their third album, 1997’s Yeah It’s That Easy, titled “Slipped Away (The Ballad of Lauretha Vaird).” “I wrote that song differently than anything before or since,” Garrett Dutton, the group’s G. Love, says 18 years later. Told from the perspective of one of Vaird’s children, the track is a haunting retelling, with G. Love mournfully singing in its final verse:

The gangsters killed our mother dead / All is lost from our family / They tried to save our mom in vain / She drowned in blood, and she was not saved.

Garrett Dutton pka G. Love from the band G. Love and Special Sauce | photo by Mark Mainz

Having grown-up in Philly, Dutton was a young hip-hop fan in the 1980s listening to Lady B spin Steady B and Cool C records on the radio. “I researched the whole story, read all the articles I could and then just tried to figure it out,” he maintains. “I feel we told the story that needed to be told. Here were these two famous MCs who’d been a part of my life, and I was like, ‘What happened to those guys that they went from being stars to robbing banks?’ Meanwhile, this policewoman drops off her kids at school, goes to work and never comes back home. It was tragic.”

Philadelphia transplant Boo Rosario’s mother was a PPD officer at the time, despite his own occasional walks on the wild side. “It hit me from both sides, because the lady cop they shot was a friend of my mother. That was her buddy buddy,” he says. “When it started to become known who was behind the bank robbery and cop killing, it was crazy. Everybody thought they were getting it as rappers, because we thought everybody who was signed got money, but apparently not. It was a façade.”

In the 1980s, when Cool C and Steady B were coming of age on those mean streets, West Philadelphia was transforming from the gang era into the crack era. “Back in the day, in the 60s and 70s, there was the Moon Gang and others who called themselves protecting their neighborhoods,” Gene Harris, a local contractor, explained. “But as they got older, a lot of the old gang members became drug addicts. First it was heroin, and then later it was crack. There were a lot of small shops in the area like barbershops, beauty salons and grocery stores, but, by the mid-80s, as crack and guns became more widespread, a lot of the businesses were chased away.”

In the middle of the chaos was Overbrook High. The stately school, built in 1934, has alumni that includes basketball icon Wilt Chamberlain and members of the soulful Delfonics. Lifelong Philly resident Courtney Carter attended classes there with Steady B and Cool C, and knew them both well. “I’d known Steady B since we were in middle school, but me and Cool C became friends in ninth grade when he was a starter on the varsity basketball team. He was so nice on the court.” Off the court, both Steady B and Cool C, as well as their schoolmate Fresh Prince, performed the Miss Overbrook Pageant and other local venues in West Philly.

DJ Cash Money in 1988 | photo by David Corio

Philadelphia turntable master DJ Cash Money, winner of the New Music Seminar DJ Battle in 1987, is widely credited with pioneering the art of spinning. “Whenever the early days of rap is discussed, Philly is often written out,” Cash Money says. “It usually goes from New York to Los Angeles to Atlanta. I’m like, really, Atlanta wasn’t even making any doggone rap back then.” Still dwelling in the city, Cash remembers those long gone nights when he shared the bill with the Hilltop Hustlers crew, performing on stage at the Wynn Ballroom, the Spectrum or at Lady B’s classic After Midnight jams. “In Philly, there might’ve been only five of us making noise outside of the city, and Steady B and Cool C were two of them. Those guys were pillars.”

Filmmaker, animator and former Source magazine cartoonist Tramp Daly grew up hanging at the same spots. “Cool was a mild-mannered dude,” he says. “If something jumped off, he would jump in, but he wasn’t one to start any mess. Steady was always more grimy, always talking shit and causing beef. You just knew that one day it would get him in trouble.”