Beinhorn was also floored. “It was amazing because he knows these rhythms so well he was able to create the feel of three guys playing together.”

The track was slowly coming together.

Laswell wanted to use scratching as an element, so he called his friend Afrika Bambaataa and asked, “‘Who’s the guy I should use for the turntable?’ And Bam said, ‘Whiz Kid.’”

Whiz Kid & MC Globe, of Soul Sonic Force, had a popular record at the time, “Play That Beat Mr. DJ,” (Tommy Boy, 1983), which was one of the first records with scratching. “So I called Whiz Kid and he had just joined the army or some shit like that — he wasn’t available — so he told me to call his protégé, DJ Cheese,” recalls Laswell. Laswell wasn’t sure he wanted to bring a guy named Cheese to L.A., so he decided to use someone he already knew, D. ST.

D, who hailed from the Edenwald projects of the northeast Bronx, was one of the first hip-hop DJs to spin at the Roxy — even before the Zulus. “I was never a Zulu DJ,” he clarifies, “I was an associate of the Zulu Nation.”

D showed up at BC studio one night with some buddies in tow — a Puerto Rican gypsy cab driver from the Bronx, Mr. C. (“not that Mr. C, the original Mr. C,” says D.), and Booski, one of the MCs from his group Infinity Rappers. Though he brought his own turntable and some records, Bisi says, “I think Bill imagined getting creative with the choice of vinyl to scratch.”

There was a pile of Celluloid Records sitting on the floor, including a 12-inch called “Change The Beat” by Fab Five Freddy, which had been recorded by Material in that very same studio. At the very end of the record, there is a snippet of a guy saying, “Ahhh! This stuff is really fresh” through a vocoder. While one would naturally assume it was Freddy, who had been rapping all over the record in both English and French, according to Laswell, it was really the voice of one of his associates — a guy by the name of Roger Trilling, who happened to be in the studio during that session.

Grandmixer D.ST

“I took the ‘Change The Beat’ record and I took fresh, and I did that rhythm — if you see the end of Wild Style, that’s what I was doing, though I changed it a little — I did my ‘Good Times’ scratch with fresh,” says D, referring to the Chic hit “Good Times,” whose groove was also used as the basis for rap’s first-ever hit, “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979.

“Everybody was like, ‘Yo! That’s it,’” recalls D, who recorded his contribution in just one take. Because there was little else on the track besides the rhythm, D, a former drummer, had plenty of room to let loose and show off his skills. “That’s the first record with a musical style of scratching,” he says. “That’s the first time a turntable was used as a soloist instrument in an ensemble, you know what I’m sayin’?” Due to his choice of scratching that one word, fresh, “Change The Beat” also went on to become the most sampled song in history according to the website WhoSampled.com.