The Slow Life and Fast Death of DJ Screw
He was one of the most influential cultural figures in Texas—a generous godfather to a generation of rappers, an entrepreneur of Houston's mean streets, the master of a scene fueled by codeine cough syrup and hip-hop beats.
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Something had to be done, so Screw set a time to sell: from eight to ten in the evening. Cars would start lining up down the block, bringing hundreds of fans, some from as far away as Dallas, who would crowd into the front yard. At around eight, Screw, who stood five feet seven inches tall, would open the security gate to his driveway, and the fans would line up at his back door. Accompanied by a .45 pistol and a dog (and later by his girlfriend Nikki and friends in the SUC), Screw would stand there and sell grays and chat with fans, some of whom were in such awe they couldn't speak. Then they would drive off, pop the new tape into their decks, and listen to what the SUC was rapping about: their clothes, the latest slang, the new toys they had found to put in their cars. But it wasn't all just about the material world. "Screw would speak to you through the turntable," longtime fan Tosin, who used to sell Screw CDs from his Web site, told me. "Say one of his friends died. He'd play certain songs with an RIP feel, keep doing it over and over, chopping words to make a point. It's like he knew what you were going through by the way he was playing." Patrick Lewis, head of Jam Down Entertainment, told me he thinks Screw's music had a lot to do with the decrease in Houston gang violence in the mid-nineties. "He was all about slowing down, chilling out, smoking a little weed. No more hating. Screw became a part of life."
For a rapper, or anyone with visions of rapping, performing on a Screw tape was like getting asked into the Game. "That was everybody's dream—to be on a Screw tape," said Lil-O. Girls were more likely to notice you, for one thing. Maybe more important, your songs were getting heard on the street, eventually leading, as it almost always did, to a record deal. Screw and his tapes became a kind of underground radio station. "When Screw had it," fan Mike "Doc" Green told me, "he was going to break it in the South—Memphis, New Orleans, Lafayette, Oklahoma." C-Note of the Botany Boys, who had never released anything before, remembered people on the streets coming up to him and quoting his raps from a Screw tape. Besides being a launching pad to fame, Screw's home studio was a place to hang out. And it was a lab for aspiring artists. "We were all growing, feeling ourselves out," said Hawk. C-Note told me, "Without Screw, I'd probably be on the streets or in jail or dead." Instead, he became a local hero. "We was trendsetters."Screw, the underground hero, actually came to the surface in 1995 to do his first legit release, All Screwed Up, on BigTyme, but he was clearly more comfortable down below. The problem was, he couldn't always control things down there. Screw lived by the bootleg (his mix tapes were, legally, unauthorized uses of other artists' material), but he also suffered from them. Anyone in Houston could make copies of his tapes, slap on a label, and sell them on the street at a huge profit. And they did. Sometimes bootleggers used cheap tapes and put Maxell labels on them, often getting the titles wrong. Others would make their own mix tapes, slow them down, put Screw's name on them, and sell them at flea markets. As home CD-making technology became affordable, some began making digital versions of Screw tapes.
Screw had achieved true fame, some of it spread by the bootleggers: His name had become a verb and an adjective. To "screw" a tape meant to slow it down, and a "screwed" tape was one that had been slowed. His business-savvy friends tried to get him to protect his name and consolidate his operation—set up a distribution system, get on the Internet, join the modern world. Finally, in January 1998 Screw stopped selling from his house and opened his own store, Screwed Up Records and Tapes, on Cullen. It wasn't your typical music store. There were no CDs, records, or tapes in the main room, no listening stations or magazines. Just Screw tapes (which by now were clear-plastic cassettes, or "clears") sold from behind bulletproof glass.
But the store was a minor fix. Nothing could deter the pirates, who were selling mass quantities on the Internet and directly to the stores, some making hundreds of thousands of dollars. Screw would complain, "If you want the real, all you gotta do is call the shop." But the deejay, who was expert at scratching and mixing records and motivating teenagers, knew little of business and was never angry enough to do anything about it. He still expected people to drive for hours and line up for him. Some record stores became pirates themselves, duping and selling their own Screw CDs and cassettes. James Cooper of Musicmania in Austin, one of the biggest rap stores in Texas, tired of asking Screw for product and began buying from bootleggers. "People would say to me, 'You're screwing Screw.' Well, I'd told him I'd buy from him. He wasn't interested in being a businessman. He could never get it together. He could have made a fortune."
True, but Screw was stubborn and, for all his complaining, happy with his life. He certainly made plenty of money—no one knows how much, but it was surely more than a million (Tosin estimates that Screw could take in $3,000 on a good night of tape sales). Screw was a traditionalist: a diligent analog guy in a digital world, a deejay who worked with vinyl when others had graduated to computers, a believer in cassettes when others had left them behind. He took his time with projects, working long and hard, sometimes two or three days straight. Russell Washington told me Screw took almost a year to make 3 'N the Morning, Part Two, his second legit release. As it was in his music, time was irrelevant in Screw's life. "With Screw," rap producer TJ Watford said, "your days turned into nights and your nights turned into days." Screw dressed for work in comfortable Dickies pants and Fubu ("For Us By Us") shirts, and he would wear his shoes until his feet came out of the sides.
He didn't care about his shoes. He cared about the music. And keeping the rappers, his friends, happy. "He'd give you the shirt off his back," Hawk said. "As our careers were blossoming, he never wanted any credit." He was generous in other ways too. "He had guys calling him from prison," remembered his mother. "He would send them money. I'd say something to him and he'd say, 'Mom, they just want to talk.' He never said no to nobody." Wannabe rappers would approach him on the street and start rapping at him. Screw would listen, no matter how awful they were, and sometimes give them his phone number. But like any artist, he also had his eccentricities. Screw didn't like banks, and he had to be persuaded to open an account. He was the kind of guy, said his former manager, Charles Washington, who would have buried a bunch of money somewhere. Screw paid for everything in cash, trafficking in $100 bills.
In spite of his unique business practices, in 1998 Screw was at the top of the Houston heap. That year he released about one hundred tapes, as well as All Work No Play on Jam Down Entertainment. Screw worked steadily on other projects—deejaying at shows with SUC members and doing an album, Screwed for Life, with rappers Hawk, Fat Pat, and Kay-K under the name DEA. "People been listening to my shit so long they're all screwed up," Screw boasted in an interview. "When they listen to the radio at regular speed, it sounds like the Chipmunks to them."Screw himself was getting pretty screwed up too. BigTyme's Washington last saw his friend in 1999. "He didn't look the same as he had a year or two earlier," he told me. Codeine was taking its toll. "Screw was really a small person, but the drug made him bigger." More accurately, it was his lifestyle: the long hours sitting in the studio, the fried chicken Screw loved (Popeye's, Church's, and his favorite, Hartz Chicken in Missouri City), and the lethargic, slowed-down world of codeine cough syrup that had caused his body to balloon to more than two hundred pounds.
It's hard to say how the drug abuse influenced Screw's work, but in 1999 he put out only a dozen tapes, and they weren't as adventurous as they used to be, in Tosin's opinion. There was less freestyling, Screw didn't play with the turntables much, and he was using the same songs on many of the tapes. Washington thinks maybe Screw was losing interest in the tapes or maybe just in being an underground hero. "I heard he was going to stop making them completely," he told me. In 2000 Screw released only eight tapes. Other deejays, like Michael 5000 Watts and others at the north side label Swisha House, were picking up the slack, feeding the growing market for slowed-down rap. Screw kept himself busy with other projects. Last May he opened a second record store, in Beaumont. His goal, he said, was to have one in every city in the country. In October Screw moved his studio to a large warehouse. He planned to expand it, open a front office for his label (including a room for taking Internet orders), and set up a room where his rappers could write. Finally, it seemed, Screw was taking care of business.
But drugs, it seemed, were taking care of Screw. Only two months earlier, rap producer TJ Watford and University of Texas film student Ariel Santschi had shot an interview with Screw for a documentary they were making on his life called Soldiers United for Cash. Watford was shocked when he saw the deejay, who had been up for three days recording and looked awful. "Screw didn't seem to have any direction," Watford said. "He was talking in circles. I thought I saw a dead man walking." In video from the interview, Screw is smoking cigarettes that appear damp, as though they have been dipped in something.
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