DX: At the time, did you recognize the influence that you and your staff had?

RD: Within the confines of Hip Hop — of course! But much of it came from being in the right place at the right time. There was so much going on in the world that affected us, but there really weren’t many places where we could have our say. Let’s just take rap music for an example. When Ice Cube left NWA, the first I’d heard of it was in his interview in The Source. This was a pretty big news story, but since it wasn’t a mainstream story, it wasn’t really a story at all. Today if The Game leaves G-Unit for a week there is 24-hour coverage. But back then, it was felt that if The Source didn’t cover certain things, then perhaps no one else would either. So that was the biggest influence the magazine had. We were in a position to sell water to people who were dying of thirst in the dessert. The circulation was low in those days, maybe 40,000 copies printed. If you weren’t at the record store when it arrived then maybe you didn’t get a copy that month. There were riots in prisons all across the country because inmates were literally fighting over copies of the magazine. There were fistfights in record stores when cats simultaneously tried to grab the last copy on the rack.

In many instances we were the only link people had to this kindred community we all seemed to be searching for. We were so much more than a music magazine to our readers. I remember coming in to the office early one morning and taking a phone call from a distraught reader who had just watched the Rodney King beating on the news and wanted to know how we were going to cover it. He needed to be reassured that The Source would have something to say about the situation. During the first Gulf War I got a letter from a female soldier stationed in Saudi Arabia requesting her subscription be forwarded to her wartime address. She wrote that even though her unit was preparing to roll into Kuwait they very much needed to know the latest Hip Hop developments. I forwarded her subscription and did her one better — I mailed her a box of 100 copies of the latest issue so they could be distributed around the base. A few weeks later I received a package of my own, a thank you note and a small container of Saudi Arabian sand.

In a short period of time we were able to build up an enormous amount of good will, but for me it wasn’t about celebrity access or perks. It was about being able to connect with people all over the country. It was like suddenly finding yourself surrounded by thousands of long lost family members, folks who understood exactly where you were coming from — your tribe. We were simply the conduits for this energy. We were the staging ground. Continued on page 5 »