Twenty-five years ago three Brooklyn teenagers became beloved ambassadors – alongside Run-DMC, Whodini, and a small pool of other acts – spreading Hip Hop beyond its then limited regional borders to become a worldwide phenomenon. Twenty years ago however, those same, then college age, Brooklynites known as The Fat Boys had already worn out their welcome in the culture they helped introduce to millions, decried as an overdone gimmick.
Discovered in 1983 after winning a talent show arranged by the trio’s future opportunistic career guide (not unlike the fictional competition in the classic Hip Hop flick Krush Groove the Boys are shown besting in), and subsequently assigned the conspicuous moniker Fat Boys by said shrewd manager after allegedly witnessing his then somewhat stout group of former football players run up a $350 room service breakfast bill, lead emcee Prince Markie Dee, supporting spitter Kool Rock-Ski (now known simply as Kool Rock), and pioneering percussive sound creator Buff (a.k.a. The Human Beat Box) were fun-loving kids, self-deprecatingly rhyming about their girth and supposed love affair with food. And that arguably unsophisticated approach to song making surprisingly worked for The Fat Boys first two live-music driven discs (their 1984 self-titled debut, and ’85 follow-up The Fat Boys Are Back). But by the late ‘80s, and a management imposed directive to move away from their initial street-approved sound and record Hip Hop cover versions of baby boomer era Pop-Rock confections from The Beach Boys and Chubby Checker, the Boys from BK had officially crossed over, selling more records than they had previously but sacrificing any credibility they once had to attain momentary pop success with 1987’s Crushin’ and 1988’s Coming Back Hard Again.
Now, 20 years removed from The Fat Boys’ last full-length offering as a trio, 1989’s return-to-their-roots but commercially unsuccessful On And On album, surviving group members Prince Markie Dee and Kool Rock are attempting a comeback of sorts, with planning underway to release a new Fat Boys project to a generation of Hip Hop fans whose familiarity with the group is likely limited to late night cable viewings of the Boys’ comical foray into film, 1987’s Disorderlies.
Recently, HipHopDX spoke with Kool Rock to learn more about his and Mark’s plans to introduce themselves to the millennial Hip Hop community. A fitness fanatic for well over a decade now, Rock is currently working to develop his own line of protein shakes, and is slated to appear in the second volume of fellow former chubby rapper turned workout enthusiast Lil Cease’s HardBody Fitness DVD. And in addition to mentoring new artists (including his 16-year-old nephew, Lil Streetz), Rock has been sporadically recording his own solo material in recent years (after taking time off from the rap game while mourning Buff’s passing from cardiac arrest in December 1995), having just unveiled an EP of new material, Party Time. But clearly, Kool Rock’s current focus is getting his group back into the game. And in his incredibly revealing discussion with DX, Rock breaks down how the Fat Boys rose, fell, and plan to rise again.
HipHopDX: What was the Fat Boys [click for more info] impact on Hip Hop? Why are we still interested in FB 20 years after y’all's last album together?
Kool Rock: We were one of the first successful Rap groups…as far as crossing over to a whole different audience – without planning to cross over. It’s just that Hip Hop was expanding, and the cross over audience kinda just took us under their wing. ‘Cause we was full of fun. We was full of life. Everything around us was just a huge party… And the marketing strategy [for us] was pretty good. So I guess to this day people are still trying to emulate that marketing strategy we had back then. I think when it came down to us doing Hip Hop back in the ‘80s, we were the first ones to have a marketing strategy. Chuck D told me one time at a celebrity softball game a lot of the stuff that [Public Enemy] [click to read] did, that they were doing at the time [to market themselves], they got from us.
DX: I don’t ask the following to be cruel, but simply to inform our younger readers: Why is it inaccurate to label the Fat Boys a comical novelty act?
Kool Rock: It’s inaccurate because we didn’t set out to be that. Our manager, he had more of a Ringling Brothers kind of [vision for us] in his brain. So he put us more into a situation where he wanted to keep us away from the norm [of what was going on in Hip Hop], and wanted us to be more zany and funny. And, as we got older we wanted to try to get out [of] that image. But you know when it comes down to an image in music or entertainment period, people once they see you as that it’s hard to get out of that. They typecast you in a heartbeat. So we was trying to make that stand of saying we’re not all about the eating aspect. Our first album, that Kurtis Blow did, was all about the [more traditional] R&B and Hip Hop [sound]. We got away from that, and that’s what made us become a cross over act. Once we lost that sound that Kurtis Blow gave us, we started getting different, [more commercial] sounds from other people.
DX: Unfortunately, or fortunately – however you choose to look at it – the commercial masses remember you guys more for “Wipeout” [click to watch] than for “Can You Feel It” [click to watch].
Kool Rock: Right, [or] “Jailhouse Rap” [click to watch], “Stick ‘Em” [click to read] and all those [less commercial] songs. It’s a double-edged sword, man. You damned if you do and damned if you don’t, because [our cross over success] was good [in terms of] giving Hip Hop to the masses, but at the same time we got away from our core audience. Which we weren’t too happy about because…we were getting no more airplay from black radio [at that point]. Only people that was picking it up was white radio stations. We still had our hardcore fans though… And they loved “Wipeout,” but they couldn’t get with “The Twist” [click to watch]. It was big over in Europe. And it sold gold over here. But, we weren’t comfortable with doing that stuff. It was kinda force fed [to us]. You know how record companies are, once something is big and they see that there’s a fire somewhere [for it], they gonna go put more gasoline on the fire… They saw how big “Wipeout” was – they seen it went platinum – [and so they said], “Okay, let’s [cover] Chubby Checker next.”
DX: I understand they actually wanted you guys to keep going with the covers and remake a Little Richard song?
Kool Rock: Yeah, a freakin’ Little Richard song, and…
DX: What, “Tutti Frutti” [Laughs]?
Kool Rock: I don’t know what damn song it was [Laughs]. All I know was we put our foot down [and] we was like, “Enough is enough with this BS.”
DX: So this was all Charles Stettler’s doing?
Kool Rock: Oh yeah.
DX: Why is there always an evil white man behind every Hip Hop tragedy [Laughs]?
Kool Rock: Exactly [Laughs]. And the funny thing about it was, he loved black music… But this is the record company, [and] this is the music industry. And like I said, anywhere they see there’s some kind of action going on they gonna attack that kind of action. Whether it’s a cross over hit, or whether it’s an all black hit, they don’t care as long as they can make some money off of it.
DX: That’s him in Krush Groove ain’t it…as the rival label owner?
Kool Rock: Yeah, that’s him [as] Terri Beiker. And let me just make a statement about Charlie: I don’t have any animosity against him, because he was doing his job. He is a manager. And manager’s, that’s what they do. Only [bad] thing about him was that he took control of a situation [and] wasn’t giving no credit to us. Everything was, “Follow my lead.” And then when [he] started sensing some kind of backlash [to The Fat Boys, he was like], “Okay, woah.” So by the time we did the On And On album in 1989, our last album together as a group, we sat down and said, “We gon’ do this album the way we wanna do it. Let’s get back to our kind of music, our kind of audience.” The record company didn’t support it. Charlie didn’t support it. [He was] like, “You’re on your own.” [But] whether it succeeded or failed, we were like, “Okay, at least we [accomplished what] we sat out to do, what we came here to do.” We left [the Rap game] the same way we came in.
DX: Yeah, I think it’s unfair to burden you guys with too much responsibility for what happened with the group. I mean, you were just kids at the time, correct? You were still in high school when the first album dropped, right?
Kool Rock: Yeah exactly, we was in high school… Me and Buff used to go to the same high school, and Mark went to a different [school]. We went to Thomas Jefferson; Mark went to Canarsie in Brooklyn. And the same people we saw everyday in school, once [the single] “Fat Boys” [click to watch] came out [in 1984] and we went back to school that Monday – ‘cause it played [on the radio] from Friday to Sunday, played that whole weekend – these same people who wasn’t paying attention to us, the cheerleaders and all them, now they’re surrounding us asking for autographs.
DX: Any Hip Hop luminaries in your school? You go to high school with Big Daddy Kane or anything like that?
Kool Rock: The guys who were down with him in [his] first group, Magnum Force, we went to school with them. [Also] I was in the same class with [former heavyweight champion] Riddick Bowe. We were in the same history class, and same homeroom.
DX: And y’all got fat to play football in high school, correct?
Kool Rock: No, we got fat from being on tour. [Laughs] But the football thing, we would just run the streets all day. And a lot of our parents, and the mothers around there especially, would come outside and tell us not to play tackle football in the streets. We would play tackle football in the streets. Not no kind of two-hand touch. We would actually try to kill one another. And we figured that would just make us tougher for when we’d go to high school to play football. So we were real active [before the music]. I’m 167 [pounds] now, and I haven’t [weighed] 167 since…damn, maybe ’78. [Laughs]
DX: [Laughs] So how much of that exaggerated gorging in videos, like in “Jailhouse Rap,” and in the infamous Sbarro scene from Krush Groove [click to watch], was really how y’all was living, and how much was pressure to purposefully overdo it?
Kool Rock: They overdid it. I mean, they had spit buckets right there, especially in Krush Groove… And that food [had been] sitting around all day – flies and shit flying around the place. [We’d] eat the food and spit it right out… Yeah, a lot of that [gorging] stuff [was exaggerated]. Michael Schultz, who shot Car Wash and Cooley High, he did Krush Groove. And he did Disorderlies. [So] yeah, a lot of that stuff [he had us do for those movies] was exaggerated. The [gorging in] “Jailhouse Rap” was exaggerated as well.
DX: Were the powers that be forcing you guys to stay fat? Did you guys ever try to lose weight and they just wouldn’t let you?
Kool Rock: In ’88, I went on a diet, and I started losing weight. And being that I was young, [still in my early twenties], it was coming off pretty quick. And I could remember [our] manager – we was at a record signing in California – pulled me to the side and asked me what was going on. So I thought he just wanted to do some small talk, and [so] I was like, “Pretty much nothing.” And he was like, “Why are you losing weight?” I said, “Well because, I’m finding it hard to function being overweight. So I wanna take a few pounds off.” So he kinda left it at that. But then he started like picking and poking like, “Kool Rock over here is trying to sabotage the group guys. He’s losing too much weight.” And I’m looking at it like, you try to do something good for yourself… I’m like, “Why you going in so hard on me [for] just trying to do something to take care of my health?” So that kind of bummed me out for a minute. But [the other guys in the group] supported it, especially Mark. He was like, “I don’t see nothing wrong with it.”
DX: Speaking of, how unfair was it that Mark had to be a Fat Boy and he was really just kinda husky [Laughs]?
Kool Rock: Oh, yeah [Laughs]. Yeah, that was crazy. A lot of people [used to say], “Well he the skinniest of the three.” The crazy thing about it was we didn’t grow up overweight. The success and the money kinda made us overweight. [Laughs] [On] the tour buses, you don’t have a good eating habit. And you try to live up to that [Fat Boys] name [as well]. So, we were like, “Well, we’re called the Fat Boys. We can’t be called the Fat Boys for nothing. So let’s just have a 20-piece McNugget at two o’clock in the morning…People expect us to be fat, so let’s just live up to the name.”
DX: Switching gears here, you mentioned him earlier and so I wanted to ask, was Kurtis Blow a good guy or a bad guy in the Fat Boys saga? He produced some of y’alls best songs (“Fat Boys,” “Jailhouse Rap,” “Can You Feel It,” “The Fat Boys Are Back”), but I also understand he pushed, along with Stettler, for you guys to embrace the Fat Boys concept and image.
Kool Rock: Kurtis Blow was…first of all, he was a good guy. Kurtis wanted us to have a [distinct] sound. He gave us a sound. [But] him and Charlie had a fallout because Kurtis was getting a lot more credit [for our success] than Charlie. Everywhere we’d go they was like, “Well Kurtis did this, and Kurtis did that. Kurtis gave y’all the sound. He gave y’all the image.” It was really Charlie who gave us the image, but Kurtis did give us the sound. He played a huge part in our success. And him and Charlie had a falling out over that. Because Kurtis wanted to do the third album, [but] Charlie wanted to get some other producers. And Kurtis to this day think it was us that said we didn’t want him as a producer. I told him like 10 years ago – we were at a party MTV was hosting [for] some kind of tribute to Hip Hop – him not having anything to do with us as a producer anymore wasn’t [a decision] on our part. I said, “Charlie was feeding us a lot of [tainted] information about [you].” A lot of bad information. [And] we were young at the time. We didn’t know any better.
DX: Some divide and conquer there.
Kool Rock: Exactly.
DX: I guess in some strange way it’s a good thing that somebody pushed for you guys to take that name [Fat Boys]. ‘Cause if you had remained the Disco 3, there’s a strong possibility the nation, and subsequently the world, would’ve never heard of y’all.
Kool Rock: Yeah, that’s true. And we got [our original] name from the Disco 4, that’s the crazy part about [that].
DX: Yeah I heard you ganked the name [from another group]?
Kool Rock: [Laughs] Yeah, we took it from the Disco 4. We were like, “Well if they’re Disco 4, why can’t we be Disco 3?”
DX: Now, this is the must-ask question: How important was Buff to the Fat Boys? For a guy who didn’t rhyme, it seemed like he did more with his mouth to shape the sound of the group than even Kurtis Blow, Larry Smith (Run-DMC, Whodini), or any of the producers did.
Kool Rock: Buff was like the last piece to the puzzle, for the fact that he distinguished us from any other group that was out there, except Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick. But we were the first ones to put down the acapella version of the beatbox [on wax]. Buff was a huge part [of the group] because everywhere we went it was like, “Can you guys rap for us?” And before we would [even] start rapping they would be like, “Woah hold up, we gotta get the beatbox in there.” So he was a huge part. And he did it so well. It wasn’t like he was just doing it and anybody could just do what he did. They tried it, [but] they couldn’t do it the way he did it.
DX: And the quarter-century old question, who was first with the beatbox, Buff or Doug E. Fresh?
Kool Rock: Well Doug E.’s from Uptown, and we’re from Brooklyn [so I wouldn’t know for sure]. And I knew Buff first. I never heard of Doug E. Fresh [at that point].
DX: I’m sure you’re bias, but you think Buff was better?
Kool Rock: Oh yeah, by maybe 10 miles. It was like a Rolls Royce versus a damn Lamborghini.
DX: Did I read correct that Buff’s motorcycle jacket from the Coming Back Hard Again cover, with the forks and the knives instead of the studs, [is] in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?
Kool Rock: Yeah, they put that in I forgot what year that was…I think it was ’91.
DX: So do the Fat Boys as a group deserve to be in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame you think?
Kool Rock: It would be a great honor. I mean, all of our albums went [gold or platinum]. And we had a huge impact on Hip Hop. I don’t know if [that] would ever happen [though], ‘cause shit, Vh1 didn’t even honor us yet… But I mean, Run-DMC, they definitely deserve it. Grandmaster Flash [click to read] definitely deserves it. But I don’t think we’ll ever get that kind of [recognition].
DX: Well I understand you guys aren’t quite ready to retire yet anyway. There’s gonna be a new Fat Boys album coming soon?
Kool Rock: Yeah. What I got out now, the Party Time EP, is like a prelude to the Fat Boys album. We’re trying to get people warmed up to the name again…
DX: The Fat Boys, it’s not an insult to say y’all had trouble competing with the deft lyricism that Rakim, Big Daddy Kane and others brought to Hip Hop in the late ‘80s. But with Soulja Boy and others unknowingly reintroducing that early Hip Hop ethos of putting sound and style before intricate rhyming, the Fat Boys are remarkably well-timed for a comeback.
Kool Rock: I kinda sit back and watch what other people do. You don’t try to emulate it, but you just try to say, “Alright, let me keep up with the times and what everybody else is doing.”
DX: Are you guys aiming to bring that fun element back to the game?
Kool Rock: That party element. Not the kind of party element when you say “Do The Stanky Leg” and that type of stuff [Laughs], [but] the grown and sexy kind of party element.
DX: And I hate to put it so crudely, but you plan on replacing Buff? Or is this just gonna be a duo?
Kool Rock: [Our manager] Louie wants to have a contest [to find a new third member]. I was thinking more of [going with this] guy named Kenny X. I don’t know if you ever heard of him, but he’s pretty good. A lot of people say he’s better than Rahzel [click to read]. A lot of people say he’s way better than Doug E. Fresh. Not putting Doug E. Fresh down, but you gotta check out Kenny X. He’s crazy. I won’t say he’s as good as Buff, but if Buff was here he would approve of Kenny X.
DX: I wanna end where we began and just have you breakdown what the Fat Boys legacy is. One platinum (Crushin’) and three gold (Fat Boys, The Fat Boys Are Back, and Coming Back Hard Again) albums, your own movie (Disorderlies) long before rappers had movie deals, but The Fat Boys weren’t larger than life - no pun intended - like Run-DMC, or have the classic songs that Whodini had, so what made you guys such an endearing group in Hip Hop?
Kool Rock: I think the fact that every parent saw in us just pure fun. Like, those guys are clean. They’re not rapping about sexual [stuff]. They’re not rapping about raising hell. [Laughs] They’re just being who they are. They just being funny. And they’re young. A lot of kids gravitated to us ‘cause they just seen these young faces. [And so] the legacy for us is just that a lot of people gravitated towards us because we brought that fun element into Hip Hop.
DX: Hey, no matter what any detractors might say, nobody’s looking to interview the Skinny Boys 20 years later [Laughs].
Kool Rock: Exactly, right [Laughs].
DX: The Human Jock Box – fuck outta here.
Kool Rock: [Laughs].
DX: That was Chuck Chillout rippin’ y’all off, wasn’t it? [The Skinny Boys] were his little project.
Kool Rock: I think so. Yeah, Chuck is a crazy S.O.B.
DX: Yeah, well, nobody wants to talk to his Skinny Boys.
Kool Rock: [Laughs] Or The Fat Girls [Laughs].
For more information, visit OriginalFatBoys.com or [click here].
Discovered in 1983 after winning a talent show arranged by the trio’s future opportunistic career guide (not unlike the fictional competition in the classic Hip Hop flick Krush Groove the Boys are shown besting in), and subsequently assigned the conspicuous moniker Fat Boys by said shrewd manager after allegedly witnessing his then somewhat stout group of former football players run up a $350 room service breakfast bill, lead emcee Prince Markie Dee, supporting spitter Kool Rock-Ski (now known simply as Kool Rock), and pioneering percussive sound creator Buff (a.k.a. The Human Beat Box) were fun-loving kids, self-deprecatingly rhyming about their girth and supposed love affair with food. And that arguably unsophisticated approach to song making surprisingly worked for The Fat Boys first two live-music driven discs (their 1984 self-titled debut, and ’85 follow-up The Fat Boys Are Back). But by the late ‘80s, and a management imposed directive to move away from their initial street-approved sound and record Hip Hop cover versions of baby boomer era Pop-Rock confections from The Beach Boys and Chubby Checker, the Boys from BK had officially crossed over, selling more records than they had previously but sacrificing any credibility they once had to attain momentary pop success with 1987’s Crushin’ and 1988’s Coming Back Hard Again.
Now, 20 years removed from The Fat Boys’ last full-length offering as a trio, 1989’s return-to-their-roots but commercially unsuccessful On And On album, surviving group members Prince Markie Dee and Kool Rock are attempting a comeback of sorts, with planning underway to release a new Fat Boys project to a generation of Hip Hop fans whose familiarity with the group is likely limited to late night cable viewings of the Boys’ comical foray into film, 1987’s Disorderlies.
Recently, HipHopDX spoke with Kool Rock to learn more about his and Mark’s plans to introduce themselves to the millennial Hip Hop community. A fitness fanatic for well over a decade now, Rock is currently working to develop his own line of protein shakes, and is slated to appear in the second volume of fellow former chubby rapper turned workout enthusiast Lil Cease’s HardBody Fitness DVD. And in addition to mentoring new artists (including his 16-year-old nephew, Lil Streetz), Rock has been sporadically recording his own solo material in recent years (after taking time off from the rap game while mourning Buff’s passing from cardiac arrest in December 1995), having just unveiled an EP of new material, Party Time. But clearly, Kool Rock’s current focus is getting his group back into the game. And in his incredibly revealing discussion with DX, Rock breaks down how the Fat Boys rose, fell, and plan to rise again.
HipHopDX: What was the Fat Boys [click for more info] impact on Hip Hop? Why are we still interested in FB 20 years after y’all's last album together?
Kool Rock: We were one of the first successful Rap groups…as far as crossing over to a whole different audience – without planning to cross over. It’s just that Hip Hop was expanding, and the cross over audience kinda just took us under their wing. ‘Cause we was full of fun. We was full of life. Everything around us was just a huge party… And the marketing strategy [for us] was pretty good. So I guess to this day people are still trying to emulate that marketing strategy we had back then. I think when it came down to us doing Hip Hop back in the ‘80s, we were the first ones to have a marketing strategy. Chuck D told me one time at a celebrity softball game a lot of the stuff that [Public Enemy] [click to read] did, that they were doing at the time [to market themselves], they got from us.
DX: I don’t ask the following to be cruel, but simply to inform our younger readers: Why is it inaccurate to label the Fat Boys a comical novelty act?
Kool Rock: It’s inaccurate because we didn’t set out to be that. Our manager, he had more of a Ringling Brothers kind of [vision for us] in his brain. So he put us more into a situation where he wanted to keep us away from the norm [of what was going on in Hip Hop], and wanted us to be more zany and funny. And, as we got older we wanted to try to get out [of] that image. But you know when it comes down to an image in music or entertainment period, people once they see you as that it’s hard to get out of that. They typecast you in a heartbeat. So we was trying to make that stand of saying we’re not all about the eating aspect. Our first album, that Kurtis Blow did, was all about the [more traditional] R&B and Hip Hop [sound]. We got away from that, and that’s what made us become a cross over act. Once we lost that sound that Kurtis Blow gave us, we started getting different, [more commercial] sounds from other people.
DX: Unfortunately, or fortunately – however you choose to look at it – the commercial masses remember you guys more for “Wipeout” [click to watch] than for “Can You Feel It” [click to watch].
Kool Rock: Right, [or] “Jailhouse Rap” [click to watch], “Stick ‘Em” [click to read] and all those [less commercial] songs. It’s a double-edged sword, man. You damned if you do and damned if you don’t, because [our cross over success] was good [in terms of] giving Hip Hop to the masses, but at the same time we got away from our core audience. Which we weren’t too happy about because…we were getting no more airplay from black radio [at that point]. Only people that was picking it up was white radio stations. We still had our hardcore fans though… And they loved “Wipeout,” but they couldn’t get with “The Twist” [click to watch]. It was big over in Europe. And it sold gold over here. But, we weren’t comfortable with doing that stuff. It was kinda force fed [to us]. You know how record companies are, once something is big and they see that there’s a fire somewhere [for it], they gonna go put more gasoline on the fire… They saw how big “Wipeout” was – they seen it went platinum – [and so they said], “Okay, let’s [cover] Chubby Checker next.”
DX: I understand they actually wanted you guys to keep going with the covers and remake a Little Richard song?
Kool Rock: Yeah, a freakin’ Little Richard song, and…
DX: What, “Tutti Frutti” [Laughs]?
Kool Rock: I don’t know what damn song it was [Laughs]. All I know was we put our foot down [and] we was like, “Enough is enough with this BS.”
DX: So this was all Charles Stettler’s doing?
Kool Rock: Oh yeah.
DX: Why is there always an evil white man behind every Hip Hop tragedy [Laughs]?
Kool Rock: Exactly [Laughs]. And the funny thing about it was, he loved black music… But this is the record company, [and] this is the music industry. And like I said, anywhere they see there’s some kind of action going on they gonna attack that kind of action. Whether it’s a cross over hit, or whether it’s an all black hit, they don’t care as long as they can make some money off of it.
DX: That’s him in Krush Groove ain’t it…as the rival label owner?
Kool Rock: Yeah, that’s him [as] Terri Beiker. And let me just make a statement about Charlie: I don’t have any animosity against him, because he was doing his job. He is a manager. And manager’s, that’s what they do. Only [bad] thing about him was that he took control of a situation [and] wasn’t giving no credit to us. Everything was, “Follow my lead.” And then when [he] started sensing some kind of backlash [to The Fat Boys, he was like], “Okay, woah.” So by the time we did the On And On album in 1989, our last album together as a group, we sat down and said, “We gon’ do this album the way we wanna do it. Let’s get back to our kind of music, our kind of audience.” The record company didn’t support it. Charlie didn’t support it. [He was] like, “You’re on your own.” [But] whether it succeeded or failed, we were like, “Okay, at least we [accomplished what] we sat out to do, what we came here to do.” We left [the Rap game] the same way we came in.
DX: Yeah, I think it’s unfair to burden you guys with too much responsibility for what happened with the group. I mean, you were just kids at the time, correct? You were still in high school when the first album dropped, right?
Kool Rock: Yeah exactly, we was in high school… Me and Buff used to go to the same high school, and Mark went to a different [school]. We went to Thomas Jefferson; Mark went to Canarsie in Brooklyn. And the same people we saw everyday in school, once [the single] “Fat Boys” [click to watch] came out [in 1984] and we went back to school that Monday – ‘cause it played [on the radio] from Friday to Sunday, played that whole weekend – these same people who wasn’t paying attention to us, the cheerleaders and all them, now they’re surrounding us asking for autographs.
DX: Any Hip Hop luminaries in your school? You go to high school with Big Daddy Kane or anything like that?
Kool Rock: The guys who were down with him in [his] first group, Magnum Force, we went to school with them. [Also] I was in the same class with [former heavyweight champion] Riddick Bowe. We were in the same history class, and same homeroom.
DX: And y’all got fat to play football in high school, correct?
Kool Rock: No, we got fat from being on tour. [Laughs] But the football thing, we would just run the streets all day. And a lot of our parents, and the mothers around there especially, would come outside and tell us not to play tackle football in the streets. We would play tackle football in the streets. Not no kind of two-hand touch. We would actually try to kill one another. And we figured that would just make us tougher for when we’d go to high school to play football. So we were real active [before the music]. I’m 167 [pounds] now, and I haven’t [weighed] 167 since…damn, maybe ’78. [Laughs]
DX: [Laughs] So how much of that exaggerated gorging in videos, like in “Jailhouse Rap,” and in the infamous Sbarro scene from Krush Groove [click to watch], was really how y’all was living, and how much was pressure to purposefully overdo it?
Kool Rock: They overdid it. I mean, they had spit buckets right there, especially in Krush Groove… And that food [had been] sitting around all day – flies and shit flying around the place. [We’d] eat the food and spit it right out… Yeah, a lot of that [gorging] stuff [was exaggerated]. Michael Schultz, who shot Car Wash and Cooley High, he did Krush Groove. And he did Disorderlies. [So] yeah, a lot of that stuff [he had us do for those movies] was exaggerated. The [gorging in] “Jailhouse Rap” was exaggerated as well.
DX: Were the powers that be forcing you guys to stay fat? Did you guys ever try to lose weight and they just wouldn’t let you?
Kool Rock: In ’88, I went on a diet, and I started losing weight. And being that I was young, [still in my early twenties], it was coming off pretty quick. And I could remember [our] manager – we was at a record signing in California – pulled me to the side and asked me what was going on. So I thought he just wanted to do some small talk, and [so] I was like, “Pretty much nothing.” And he was like, “Why are you losing weight?” I said, “Well because, I’m finding it hard to function being overweight. So I wanna take a few pounds off.” So he kinda left it at that. But then he started like picking and poking like, “Kool Rock over here is trying to sabotage the group guys. He’s losing too much weight.” And I’m looking at it like, you try to do something good for yourself… I’m like, “Why you going in so hard on me [for] just trying to do something to take care of my health?” So that kind of bummed me out for a minute. But [the other guys in the group] supported it, especially Mark. He was like, “I don’t see nothing wrong with it.”
DX: Speaking of, how unfair was it that Mark had to be a Fat Boy and he was really just kinda husky [Laughs]?
Kool Rock: Oh, yeah [Laughs]. Yeah, that was crazy. A lot of people [used to say], “Well he the skinniest of the three.” The crazy thing about it was we didn’t grow up overweight. The success and the money kinda made us overweight. [Laughs] [On] the tour buses, you don’t have a good eating habit. And you try to live up to that [Fat Boys] name [as well]. So, we were like, “Well, we’re called the Fat Boys. We can’t be called the Fat Boys for nothing. So let’s just have a 20-piece McNugget at two o’clock in the morning…People expect us to be fat, so let’s just live up to the name.”
DX: Switching gears here, you mentioned him earlier and so I wanted to ask, was Kurtis Blow a good guy or a bad guy in the Fat Boys saga? He produced some of y’alls best songs (“Fat Boys,” “Jailhouse Rap,” “Can You Feel It,” “The Fat Boys Are Back”), but I also understand he pushed, along with Stettler, for you guys to embrace the Fat Boys concept and image.
Kool Rock: Kurtis Blow was…first of all, he was a good guy. Kurtis wanted us to have a [distinct] sound. He gave us a sound. [But] him and Charlie had a fallout because Kurtis was getting a lot more credit [for our success] than Charlie. Everywhere we’d go they was like, “Well Kurtis did this, and Kurtis did that. Kurtis gave y’all the sound. He gave y’all the image.” It was really Charlie who gave us the image, but Kurtis did give us the sound. He played a huge part in our success. And him and Charlie had a falling out over that. Because Kurtis wanted to do the third album, [but] Charlie wanted to get some other producers. And Kurtis to this day think it was us that said we didn’t want him as a producer. I told him like 10 years ago – we were at a party MTV was hosting [for] some kind of tribute to Hip Hop – him not having anything to do with us as a producer anymore wasn’t [a decision] on our part. I said, “Charlie was feeding us a lot of [tainted] information about [you].” A lot of bad information. [And] we were young at the time. We didn’t know any better.
DX: Some divide and conquer there.
Kool Rock: Exactly.
DX: I guess in some strange way it’s a good thing that somebody pushed for you guys to take that name [Fat Boys]. ‘Cause if you had remained the Disco 3, there’s a strong possibility the nation, and subsequently the world, would’ve never heard of y’all.
Kool Rock: Yeah, that’s true. And we got [our original] name from the Disco 4, that’s the crazy part about [that].
DX: Yeah I heard you ganked the name [from another group]?
Kool Rock: [Laughs] Yeah, we took it from the Disco 4. We were like, “Well if they’re Disco 4, why can’t we be Disco 3?”
DX: Now, this is the must-ask question: How important was Buff to the Fat Boys? For a guy who didn’t rhyme, it seemed like he did more with his mouth to shape the sound of the group than even Kurtis Blow, Larry Smith (Run-DMC, Whodini), or any of the producers did.
Kool Rock: Buff was like the last piece to the puzzle, for the fact that he distinguished us from any other group that was out there, except Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick. But we were the first ones to put down the acapella version of the beatbox [on wax]. Buff was a huge part [of the group] because everywhere we went it was like, “Can you guys rap for us?” And before we would [even] start rapping they would be like, “Woah hold up, we gotta get the beatbox in there.” So he was a huge part. And he did it so well. It wasn’t like he was just doing it and anybody could just do what he did. They tried it, [but] they couldn’t do it the way he did it.
DX: And the quarter-century old question, who was first with the beatbox, Buff or Doug E. Fresh?
Kool Rock: Well Doug E.’s from Uptown, and we’re from Brooklyn [so I wouldn’t know for sure]. And I knew Buff first. I never heard of Doug E. Fresh [at that point].
DX: I’m sure you’re bias, but you think Buff was better?
Kool Rock: Oh yeah, by maybe 10 miles. It was like a Rolls Royce versus a damn Lamborghini.
DX: Did I read correct that Buff’s motorcycle jacket from the Coming Back Hard Again cover, with the forks and the knives instead of the studs, [is] in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?
Kool Rock: Yeah, they put that in I forgot what year that was…I think it was ’91.
DX: So do the Fat Boys as a group deserve to be in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame you think?
Kool Rock: It would be a great honor. I mean, all of our albums went [gold or platinum]. And we had a huge impact on Hip Hop. I don’t know if [that] would ever happen [though], ‘cause shit, Vh1 didn’t even honor us yet… But I mean, Run-DMC, they definitely deserve it. Grandmaster Flash [click to read] definitely deserves it. But I don’t think we’ll ever get that kind of [recognition].
DX: Well I understand you guys aren’t quite ready to retire yet anyway. There’s gonna be a new Fat Boys album coming soon?
Kool Rock: Yeah. What I got out now, the Party Time EP, is like a prelude to the Fat Boys album. We’re trying to get people warmed up to the name again…
DX: The Fat Boys, it’s not an insult to say y’all had trouble competing with the deft lyricism that Rakim, Big Daddy Kane and others brought to Hip Hop in the late ‘80s. But with Soulja Boy and others unknowingly reintroducing that early Hip Hop ethos of putting sound and style before intricate rhyming, the Fat Boys are remarkably well-timed for a comeback.
Kool Rock: I kinda sit back and watch what other people do. You don’t try to emulate it, but you just try to say, “Alright, let me keep up with the times and what everybody else is doing.”
DX: Are you guys aiming to bring that fun element back to the game?
Kool Rock: That party element. Not the kind of party element when you say “Do The Stanky Leg” and that type of stuff [Laughs], [but] the grown and sexy kind of party element.
DX: And I hate to put it so crudely, but you plan on replacing Buff? Or is this just gonna be a duo?
Kool Rock: [Our manager] Louie wants to have a contest [to find a new third member]. I was thinking more of [going with this] guy named Kenny X. I don’t know if you ever heard of him, but he’s pretty good. A lot of people say he’s better than Rahzel [click to read]. A lot of people say he’s way better than Doug E. Fresh. Not putting Doug E. Fresh down, but you gotta check out Kenny X. He’s crazy. I won’t say he’s as good as Buff, but if Buff was here he would approve of Kenny X.
DX: I wanna end where we began and just have you breakdown what the Fat Boys legacy is. One platinum (Crushin’) and three gold (Fat Boys, The Fat Boys Are Back, and Coming Back Hard Again) albums, your own movie (Disorderlies) long before rappers had movie deals, but The Fat Boys weren’t larger than life - no pun intended - like Run-DMC, or have the classic songs that Whodini had, so what made you guys such an endearing group in Hip Hop?
Kool Rock: I think the fact that every parent saw in us just pure fun. Like, those guys are clean. They’re not rapping about sexual [stuff]. They’re not rapping about raising hell. [Laughs] They’re just being who they are. They just being funny. And they’re young. A lot of kids gravitated to us ‘cause they just seen these young faces. [And so] the legacy for us is just that a lot of people gravitated towards us because we brought that fun element into Hip Hop.
DX: Hey, no matter what any detractors might say, nobody’s looking to interview the Skinny Boys 20 years later [Laughs].
Kool Rock: Exactly, right [Laughs].
DX: The Human Jock Box – fuck outta here.
Kool Rock: [Laughs].
DX: That was Chuck Chillout rippin’ y’all off, wasn’t it? [The Skinny Boys] were his little project.
Kool Rock: I think so. Yeah, Chuck is a crazy S.O.B.
DX: Yeah, well, nobody wants to talk to his Skinny Boys.
Kool Rock: [Laughs] Or The Fat Girls [Laughs].
For more information, visit OriginalFatBoys.com or [click here].
