I was born and raised in Los Angeles, back before the 105 existed, when a 60-foot Marlboro Man kept watch over the Sunset Strip, and when the only must-have accessory in Silver Lake was a 9mm with an extended clip. I attended a small, private elementary school on the outskirts of downtown called First Lutheran, and in 1989, when it was time to matriculate to the 7th grade, I moved three blocks east to Pilgrim, where I stayed until I graduated in 1994…with 18 other seniors.
To call my school “small” would be an understatement, but with stellar student/teacher ratios, a progressive curriculum and an enviable arts and humanities department, it was (and still is) academically on point. (MythBuster Grant Imahara graduated in 1988.) Socially, however, it had the potential to be tough sledding. Everyone knew everything about everybody, and cliques were tight. Sports all but guaranteed popularity, and if you weren’t listening to hip-hop, you were definitely in the minority. It was the golden era of rap. The West Coast sound was exploding, and its impact reverberated throughout the narrow halls of Pilgrim School. It wasn’t until I graduated college and returned to LA as a music writer that I discovered how deep its influence ran.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be profiling six artists that attended Pilgrim in the early to mid-90s, all of whom have fostered successful careers as musicians, DJs, and emcees: Abstract Rude (Aaron Pointer), DJ Icewater (Rodney Sino-Cruz), Roscoe Umali, DJ StoneRokk (Mike Stone), Brook D’Leau of J*Davey (Brook Davis) and Busdriver (Regan Farquhar). Most of them were friends, a few of them inspired one another, and each has his own unique story to tell about what it was like growing up in our old school.
I knew Abstract Rude as Aaron Pointer, the troublemaking dude in the class ahead of mine with the embroidered New Orleans Saints baseball cap, and as you can see from the picture below, middle school class president. A regular at South LA’s Good Life Cafe and a founding member of Project Blowed, Ab joined Tribe Unique when he was still at Pilgrim, and went on to release music through labels like Grand Royal, Battle Axe, Rhymesayers and Alpha Pup. The collab list on his latest album, Steel Making Trax: The Export, reads like a who’s who of the LA circuit, including two tracks produced by Fat Jack (of the seminal Cater to the DJ mix series) and two tracks with Busdriver. When it comes to figureheads in SoCal’s indie hip-hop scene, they don’t come more OG than Abbey Rizzle.
These days it feels like arts and humanities are valued less in school than they were years ago. What do you attribute that decline to, and what do you think it was about that time period that allowed kids like us to explode creatively?
Abstract Rude: Well, part of its decline should be attributed to music and art being less valued in school. At Pilgrim, we had music, drama and art programs that were pretty much the remnants of what had been there before we started going. I can remember being in elementary school and every kid had some kind of instrument; a clarinet, a violin. Everyone was walking around with one of them things. Then it started to be valued less in the budgeting, and the less you nurture it in a controlled, disciplined environment, the less it’s gonna play out. Those skills and those artistic talents were nurtured within us. We sang in the assembly, we did the hand bells thing. The drama class alone…just having drama as a class. Is that even in the public school curriculum?
Yeah, Mr. Carnovsky taught that class.
Abstract Rude: Okay. He was the teacher I looked at as the least disciplinarian, but he was the chillest guy because he was instilling art into you. I know that now as an adult. He was like Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code. (Laughs) He dressed in those sweaters with those shirts and looked like one of those poetic, artistic, intellectual guys. Even though I was destined to a life of art, in a school with this much discipline, I needed at least one person I could really just fuck with. (Laughs) So I’m in his class and we’re talking about sports and I was bigging up the typical American sports like basketball, football and baseball, and he was like, “What about tennis?” I said, “Don’t nobody care about tennis.” He said, “There are some good athletes that play tennis. You probably don’t even know how to play. That’s why you’re saying that.” I was like, “I know how to play tennis. I play tennis with my uncle. He taught me how to play.” So I kept talking and I finally got in trouble, and you had to do a lot in Mr. Carnovsky’s class to get detention. So he tell me, “For your detention, you gotta go play a game of tennis with me.” So we went right there to the tennis courts at MacArthur Park, but he was dressed different this time. He had his tennis shorts with his headband on. Fool was serious. I was like, “This is the easiest detention I ever had.” We get on the court and I swear he smashed this thing over the net with all his man power. It was like Federer. He damn near beamed me in the chest, then he did six more like that. Basically whooped my ass. I was trying to dodge them because I had no chance of hitting them. But he was showing me, “Look motherfucker. I know you think I’m a punk but I’m a man. Don’t be woofing in my class.” Then you know what he did? He showed me how to play a little bit. By the time we left there, he had shown me how to return one of his fast-ass serves. Few people knew that story because obviously I didn’t want to embarrass myself, but I never acted up in his class again. For all I know he taught me a grip by doing that because I didn’t have a big brother. I had big homies, but no big brother, and he could probably tell that.
How much were you actively pursuing music in school?
Abstract Rude: Good question. I first wrote a rap in 1984 when I was in the 4th grade. I wrote this Say No To Drugs Rap, which is a pretty well documented story. Rappers came to my school and did a thing. Then I used some of my vocabulary words, went home, and wrote a rap on the same sort of theme. Then I wrote another rap when I was in 5th grade. Those were my two raps. That was even before I got to Pilgrim, but because Pilgrim was supposed to be about getting an education and I was competing with all these smart kids, I think that cooled off a bit. It’s funny. If you look back at all those old class photos, you could just point me out and tell, “He’s probably the one that’s gonna rap.” It’s so cliche it’s ridiculous.
What kind of relationship did you have with people like Regan (Farquhar, Busdriver) Roscoe (Umali) and Rodney (Sino-Cruz, DJ Icewater)?
Abstract Rude: Me, Lateef and Justin Sanders gave them hell. (Laughs) We ran the school, kicked ass, took names. They were all pretty much young whippersnappers when I was there. I don’t say that to diss them. All them cats were younger than me, right?
Yeah, I think you’re the oldest one of the group.
Abstract Rude: Even though there were people there before and after me that went on to all kinds of great things, all those guys (you’re talking about) were youngsters. I think we introduced “Scrub Week!” (Laughs) See, the football players gave me and Lateef hell because they could tell we were little scrappy kids from the hood, so they gave us hell just to prove they were athletically tougher than us. Regan will tell you. He remembers seeing us sit back and run the school! (Laughs) What I do remember about Rodney and Regan specifically is when we would play basketball against the younger cats; just talkin’ shit to ’em and intimidating them, like older kids are supposed to do in junior high school.
I remember you and Lateef were always hanging out together.
Abstract Rude: (Laughs) Yeah, Lateef Littleton. He had been there as long as me. We were those kids that had good grades who were plucked out of our little private schools in the hood. Then Pilgrim, Harvard, Crossroads and all of them would go and draft the smartest ones and give the parents half the money for each semester. That was our story. So I found out Lateef had the hip-hop skills, and one of our teachers let us pair off and create a song. I took my rap from 4th grade, broke it into three parts, and gave each one of us a part. Then I took my rap from 5th grade, made that our second verse, and broke it into three parts. People were really impressed by what we did. That was the only time at Pilgrim when my music shit surfaced for a little bit. But check this out. Our music teacher, Ms. Bulber, and this teacher Mr. Skrumbis called me into her office one day and said, “That’s a positive message. We want to get it on (LA radio station) KJLH.” To this day I don’t know if they got paid or what happened, but this is no lie! (Laughs) They recorded me doing the rap at school on a tape recorder and somehow it ended up coming on the radio. “You might have the urge to be in a gang, the next thing you know you’re doin’ cocaine. And everyday you wake up, you put your life on the line. That’s just like saying life ain’t worth a dime.” Rhymes like that, you know what I mean? From there, they hooked up some shit where they picked me and Lateef up and we went to some home studio. The memories are like a haze. It was one day after school, and I had permission from my mom, but we went there and we recorded some shit, but it was lyrics they had already. I remember not liking that. I was like, “I can’t say one of my raps?” And they’re like, “No, you’re gonna say these words.” Believe it or not, that was my first brush with that feeling of, “I don’t want to be the kind of artist that just gets lyrics handed to him.” On my current album, I have a song called “Sadly Ever After” where I touched on that experience. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that, but now I’m sharing that with you.
Words by Rich Thomas (@TheLandfill). Press photo by Lucy Castro. Archival photos by Karena Higgins.
