Grand Wizzard Theodore

Bio

Here is how the scratch got invented.

It is the summer of 1977. Theodore Livingston is thirteen. He is in his bedroom in the Bronx, practicing on his older brother's turntable setup. His mother is yelling at him. The volume of what he is playing is part of the reason his mother is yelling at him. So he reaches out and presses his hand down on the spinning record to stop it, so he can hear what she is saying. The needle, still going down the groove, makes a noise. He lifts his hand. The record keeps playing where it was. He pushes the record backward against the direction the turntable is going. Same noise, but stretched and reversed. He does it again. He does it again on the beat. He does it on the next beat. His mother keeps yelling. He keeps scratching.

He is thirteen. The scratch is invented. Hip-hop has been a thing for four years and it already has a fundamental technique that nobody has done before, and the person who invented it is a kid who was supposed to be turning the music down.

Theodore, who would soon perform as Grand Wizzard Theodore (double-z, a teenager's flourish, he kept it), had been mentored by Grandmaster Flash since he was about twelve. Flash had taught him Quick Mix Theory and let him hang around the Casanova Crew. This is, by the way, the first formal pass-down of hip-hop DJ technique from one generation to the next. The genre has been around four years. It already has a teaching tradition.

Theodore took the scratch and made it a discipline. He developed the needle drop, which is when you land the needle on a precise groove of a record without cueing through it. He learned to scratch in time, in patterns, with his eyes closed. He performed with the L Brothers, then the Fantastic Five, then on his own.

If you want to see the proof, watch Wild Style. Two minutes in, Charlie Ahearn shoots Theodore performing on top of a rooftop water tower. Theodore scratches the Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" — the breakbeat Herc had been running since 1973 — but instead of just running it, he plays it. He manipulates it under the needle. He makes the percussion say things it does not say on the original record. You can find the clip on YouTube. It still works.

He is alive. He still DJs. Every turntablist who came after takes the scratch as a given. Q-Bert. The X-Ecutioners. DJ Premier. Funkmaster Flex. DJ Shadow. Theodore is the given.