I didn't get on my first airplane until I was almost 20 years old.

It was 1979 and I was managing a rapper from Harlem named Kurtis Blow. When our label, Mercury Records, found out that Kurtis's song "Christmas Rapping" was starting to get big in Holland, they decided to send us over to Amsterdam to help promote the record and further introduce the Dutch people to this new thing called "hip-hop."

Sitting...