Freestyle music traces its origins to New York City and it took flight in Miami, but one key link in its commercial breakout can be traced to a chance encounter in San Jose.
Drummer Donnie Macala lived here for about 17 years, from 1984 to 2001, and he remembers the day well. His family had moved to the mainland from Hawaii following his high school graduation. “I was living near Capital Expressway and McLaughlin. I played bass, drums and keyboards,” Macala says. “Stevie did a show over at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds. This was back in December of ’87.”
“The show bombed,” laughs Steven Bernard Hill, who’s better known as Stevie B. The Miami native had moved to White Road in San Jose’s Berryessa neighborhood and was collaborating with Upstairs Records’ John Lopez. He played local clubs such as Harry Evans’ Tropicana.
Macala remembers Hill walking around the Fairgrounds after his set and being introduced to San Jose freestyle producer Dadgel Atabay. Macala handed Hill a cassette tape of a song called “Love Me for Life.”
As Hill tells it, “I said, I’m looking for a keyboard player. You want to go on a road with me? This was three days before Christmas. They both came with me and have been with me now for almost 35 years.”
The team recorded in New York and the debut album came out in 1988. It featured three blockbusters, including “Party My Body” and “Spring Love,” two of the biggest hits of the freestyle era.
Between 1988 and 1991 Stevie B had seven singles that charted on the Billboard 100, including five in the top 40 and one that spent four weeks as the chart’s number one hit. That one, “Because I Love You (The Postman Song),” knocked Whitney Houston’s “I’m Your Baby Tonight” out of first position in December 1990 and blocked Madonna’s “Justify My Love” from reaching the top spot until January 1991.
Today he’s known as “The King of Freestyle” and the movement’s most successful artist. Stevie had spent much of his youth navigating the hardscrabble neighborhoods of South Florida, before heading to Tallahassee for college on a tennis scholarship. “I came back to Miami, started my studio.”
Later, San Jose became his second home. “I developed my love affair with San Jose and the Bay Area. And that was before Silicon Valley.”
Evans, who ran the Tropicana and Studio 47, says Stevie B was his biggest draw. “He always did well for me,” Evans said.
Former San Jose city council member Xavier Campos recalls, “I used to see him walking around the Valley Fair Shopping Center.”
I will admit I was a bit surprised when this month’s July 25 Stevie B show became Music in the Park’s fastest selling show of the 2020s (Metro’s team has managed the series for four seasons now). And even more surprised when Stevie B himself called from Miami and related how he put his genre-defining band together while living in San Jose and then went on to become the top selling freestyle artist. It’s a story that hasn’t been reported much anywhere.
During that era, I’d spent more time at One Step Beyond seeing bands like the Ramones, Jane’s Addiction and the Replacements than showing up at the dance clubs like downtown’s Club Tropicana at 47 Notre Dame Ave., which morphed into Studio 47 and was torn down in 2005 to make way for the Axis residential high-rise.
The coverage desert is in part a story of media bias. Freestyle didn’t show up on the covers of Rolling Stone, Spin or the Village Voice. The music press and its critics were enamored with indie, grunge and alternative rock, staples of college radio, rather than the flashy, danceable beat of popular culture.
The freestyle movement emerged sometime after the late ’70s dance music era remembered for artists like Donna Summer and the Bee Gees, and movies like Saturday Night Fever. There were some chart topping hits, until the Seattle bands replaced gold chains and hair product with the ripped jeans aesthetic.
But it never went away, and the elitist disdain memorialized in memes like “Disco Sucks,” turned out to be mainstream society’s way of marginalizing LGBTQ culture and communities of color, as well as a convenient way out for music writers who couldn’t dance. The fusion of electro pop, hip hop and dance music ensconced itself as an underground counterculture when the previous alternative movements became dominant cultural forces.
A musical fusion that had begun in New York’s Puerto Rican, Dominican and Italian American communities found its way to South Florida and was then embraced by the Bay Area’s Mexican American and Pacific Islander communities, with San Jose as its California epicenter.
In Miami last month, a stage full of break dancers, spinning on their heads, was on full display at the Dolphin Mall’s Vivo venue. Band after band and deejay after deejay took the stage before headliner Stevie B, who carried the vocal duties with the help of a backing track due to losing his voice earlier in the evening.
July 25: Stevie B, Jaya, Shannon, Cutso
Music in the Park
Plaza de Cesar Chavez
CalTix.com
