A fat vein, throbbing, rises from his T-shirt collar and disappears into a graying underbrush of beard. His wet brow bulges like an angry knuckle under his brimless leather hat. Abiodun Oyewole of the Last Poets is hemorrhaging language. "When the revolution comes, guns and rifles will be taking the place of poems and essays ..."
The conga player's hands are speaking in a ceremonial staccato of pops and booms. And Oyewole's vocal partner across the stage, Umar Bin Hassan, is laying down a third layer of sound: When the revolution comes ... when the revolution comes ...
"When the revolution comes," Oyewole's deep, smooth voice continues, "white death will fall off the walls of museums and churches, breaking the lie that enslaved our mothers, when the revolution comes... ." These words were cut into black vinyl more than two decades ago. They're being recited this night before hundreds of wide-open ears inside a Howard University ballroom in honor of Malcolm X's birthday.
"... But until then, you know and I know, niggers will party and bull{ -- }..." The poet's pace slumps as he repeats the last three words, again and again, a mantra of frustration. A well-dressed woman in the audience smiles with recognition, then mouths it along with him. "Some might even die," Oyewole pronounces, "before the revolution comes."
Precisely 25 years earlier at another Malcolm X celebration, this one in Harlem, the Last Poets came into being. They were products of a 1960s cultural explosion, a big bang of capital-B Blackness and worldwide radicalism. They would become, in turn, one of the most influential underground recording groups of the '70s, combining the romantic rhetoric of armed struggle, the profane vernacular of the streets and the flamboyant performance standards of jazz. Plus a solid dose of African American machismo.
Hailed today as forefathers of rap, the Last Poets may be pop culture legends, but their story is largely unknown, even among their admirers. Perhaps because it is such a tangled story. Seven men in all have recorded as the Last Poets, though never at the same moment. They have feuded among themselves almost from the beginning, their rifts resulting in two competing sets of Last Poets, a court fight, street fights and a lingering rancor over who can legitimately claim the name.
So ... beyond the still-rousing preachments, beyond their standing as elders in "the struggle," the Last Poets can be seen as a classic rock-and-roll tragedy: friendships complicated by ego, ambitions complicated by fame, and the deep desire to come back, years after their time, and do it all again.
"Niggers do a lot of shooting. Niggers do a lot of shooting... ." It is Bin Hassan's turn to take the Howard crowd back to the days. He's doing it with "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution," one of the most famous pieces in the Last Poets canon, and one that epitomizes their use of the word "nigger" -- frequent and damning -- as a symbol for all they see wrong in black people.
"Niggers shoot off at the mouth. Niggers shoot pool. Niggers shoot craps." Bin Hassan stands there in sneakers and well-worn jeans, microphone pressed to mouth. Words fly fast from the loudspeakers -- big, hard shards of sound. "Niggers cut around the corners and shoot down the street. Niggers shoot sharp glances at white women. ... But where are niggers when the revolution needs some shots? ..."
His murky eyes fall slowly shut. His cheeks draw up taut and round. His voice turns hoarse while the percussion simmers and Oyewole bobs and grins, chanting only that word. By the time Bin Hassan rolls into "This Is Madness" some minutes later, his keen, soaring voice is reduced to a rasp, a roar of static in a revivalist's cadence.
The people give the Last Poets a standing ovation.
Birth Up close, Abiodun Oyewole's overgrown beard and booming, embracing voice are even more dramatic. Umar Bin Hassan's opaque eyes and smoky-voiced reticence are more mysterious.
These two men, now in their mid-forties, have done a world of living since they recorded the first Last Poets album in 1969. Oyewole has been a convict and a schoolteacher. Bin Hassan is a produced playwright and a recovering cocaine addict. They count three marriages and five children apiece.
They sit here in a downtown Washington health food store not as relics of the "black power" movement but as active street poets once again, applying a more worldly-wise black consciousness to the crises of a new generation.
They sit here, too, as recording artists with fresh product on the market. Bin Hassan's first solo album, "Be Bop or Be Dead," came out this summer to critical acclaim, and a new Last Poets project, "Holy Terror," is on the way. So when they revisit their past, it's with a mind to learn from the mistakes, to make this comeback thing work. "It's not like shooting hoops," Oyewole says. "It's serious."
Let us return, then, to Harlem, 1968. America was sending men to the moon while tearing itself apart over Vietnam. In big cities, black people were challenging as never before the "white power structure," as Bin Hassan calls it -- the police, the public education system. Art and radical politics had already been forged into a heavy blade by writers such as Amiri Baraka ("We want 'poems that kill.' Assassin poems ...") and Larry Neal. These were, says Bin Hassan, "fellows who made us aspire to a certain standard."
But before that, Oyewole confesses, "I was writing love poetry in French." David Nelson, with whom he worked in an anti-poverty program, was sweetening his own verse with Spanish. "We were trying to woo the ladies," Oyewole says with his generous grin.
Invited to share some culturally correct poetry at a Malcolm X commemoration in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park), Oyewole and Nelson and a third poet, Gylan Kain, decided to take the stage as a group. "But nobody had any idea what to do," Oyewole recalls. "So I said, 'Let's try to sing. "Ooo Baby Baby" or something.' But they couldn't sing, so that was out." Then he remembered a chant sung by Howard University student protesters during their campus takeover of March '68: Are you ready, niggas? You've got to be ready! Are you ready, niggas? You've got to be ready!
"And I thought that was so hip," Oyewole says, grinning again. "I mean, I never heard nothing like that on television. So we sang that as we went onstage. Had the entire park singing that." Oyewole, Nelson and Kain then proceeded to kick their political poems.
"From that moment on" -- May 19, 1968 -- "we got gigs."
They didn't have the name, though. Nelson came up with that, inspired by a poem by South African-born K. William Kgositsile that concludes: "When the moment hatches in time's womb there will be no art talk. The only poem you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted in the punctured marrow of the villain ..." "Therefore," amended Nelson, "we are the last poets of the world."
David Nelson, ironically, would be the first of the Last Poets to leave. Now a minister near Siler City, N.C., he recalls an early disagreement over the group's direction: Should the Last Poets be a fixed trio or, as he preferred, a "free-flowing" collective of writers? Essentially, though, Nelson believes the falling-out was a matter of "black men just learning to work together."
Nelson was replaced by Felipe Luciano, a Puerto Rican ex-con and aspiring writer to whom Kain had taken a liking. It was this lineup of Last Poets -- Oyewole, Kain and Luciano -- that changed the life of a young man in Ohio named Umar Bin Hassan.
The group was performing at Antioch College, and Bin Hassan, "into my black militancy thing" at the time, was working security. "It just blew my head," he remembers. "I guess I understand what people be gettin' from us {because of} what I got from them. It's that feeling, that very spiritual thing that comes out and just pulls you in and makes you become part of the pain, the diaspora... . That was it. I wanted to become a Last Poet."
Oyewole invited him to stop by the East Wind, the 125th Street loft where the group was headquartered, the next time he was in Harlem. "I left about six months later," Bin Hassan says, "with a book of poetry and a little raggedy country suitcase."
Fissure The East Wind became a cultural epicenter, a space for political workshops and art happenings, where you might find H. Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael dropping knowledge or see a yet-unknown comic named Jimmie Walker doing his thing. Or witness the Last Poets giving motion to the spoken word.
The father figure of the group, according to the lilting reminiscences of Felipe Luciano, was Gylan Kain, now living as an expatriate in Amsterdam. "If ever there was a Christ, it was Kain," says Luciano, now a TV reporter for New York City's Fox affiliate. "He had an aura around him. Satin blue-black, intense probing eyes, Semitic features, a resigned smile. Humility, compassion. The ultimate poet. And he suffered. His brow exuded that kind of pain."
To illustrate Kain's demanding "honesty," Luciano tells of a poem that Kain wouldn't allow him to read. "Pig Woman" described Luciano's hatred of white women, though he happened to be deeply in love with one. "You must never, ever get onstage and lie," Kain told him.
In 1969, Kain's desire to bring David Nelson back into the group led to a bitter fight with Oyewole. And so the two remaining original Last Poets split apart, with profound consequences. Oyewole took two writers who were hanging around the East Wind -- Umar Bin Hassan and Jalaludin Mansur Nuriddin (then Alafia Pudim) -- and continued as the Last Poets, with the East Wind as their base. Kain and Luciano joined with Nelson, and they performed as the Last Poets as well.
The animosity between the two camps got so intense, it actually came to blows. By the accounts of Nelson and Luciano, Bin Hassan and Nuriddin "jumped" Nelson on the street and double-teamed Kain at the East Wind. According to Bin Hassan, the fights were "one-on-one." "We were young, man," he explains. "It was like a turf war. We didn't see the big picture."
Kain was beaten so badly that his protege Luciano proposed the maximum retaliation. He was, by then, leader of the Young Lords -- New York's Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panthers -- so "there were revolutionaries, black and brown, ready to take them out," Luciano says. But Kain wouldn't allow it. He told Luciano, "The moment we take our brothers' heads, we're perpetrating the evil."
Fame Flash forward to 1990. Something remarkable is going on. Gylan Kain, Abiodun Oyewole, David Nelson and Felipe Luciano are seated abreast in a lounge of some sort, thinking back two decades and trying to make sense of what happened. A video camera is taking it all in. A planned "resurrection tour" has brought the founding Last Poets together for the first time since '69, but this isn't a joyful scene. A brotherly bond is evident between them, but the air is weird with tension.
Oyewole, surprisingly, turns a finger on himself. You see, back when Kain was leading the original Last Poets, he'd declared: "We're not going to do a recording." As Kain himself recalls, with his head hanging heavily and a cigarette smoldering in his grip, "I didn't want any white person being the business behind {us}."
"I understood that," Oyewole says, frowning. "I breached that entire thing when we broke up as the original members of the group and I went on to hook up the other brothers {Bin Hassan and Nuriddin} ... and did an album. Because the white man waved some dollar bills ... and evidently I lost my mind for one minute.
"I didn't get into the Last Poets to become wealthy," he says, stabbing the air. "I didn't do none of this for no fame and glory."
Of course, without the white man's dollar bills -- specifically those of record producer Alan Douglas -- poems such as "When the Revolution Comes" and "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution" wouldn't have been put on wax (and now on compact disc), and rappers wouldn't be sampling them, and folks in 1993 wouldn't fill a Howard University ballroom to hear the Last Poets, and no one would care about these middle-aged men and their bickering.
"The Last Poets" was released in early 1970. Radio stations wouldn't touch it, but it created such an underground buzz in the black community that the Poets were booked into the Apollo Theatre on a bill with Jerry Butler and the O'Jays. The album exploded above ground that summer, catching on with radical-chic whites. "All the razzy, jazzy, sassy sounds of black culture meet and mingle in the chants of these uptown medicine men," opined Albert Goldman in the pages of Life magazine. (He and other commentators tended to ignore the group's less-than-progressive references to homosexuals and Jews.) "The Last Poets" sold more than 300,000 copies.
Oyewole, who brought all this about, wasn't in a position to savor any of it. After cutting the record, he left the group. "I thought I was a fake revolutionary" is what he says now. "I wanted to be a real revolutionary." Instead of rapping about that distant day when guns and rifles would replace poems and essays, Oyewole went down South and ripped off hardware stores for weapons and cash.
Sentenced to 20 years for armed robbery (though he wound up serving less than four), Oyewole was behind bars in North Carolina in 1970, just as his voice was booming from record players across the country. "People coming in the joint talking about the Last Poets, and I couldn't even tell them who I was," he says. He already stood out as a militant from up North. If word got out he was one of them fire-breathing Last Poets, it wouldn't exactly endear him to the guardians of North Carolina's penal system.
Kain, Nelson and Luciano earned their own piece of the media spotlight. They'd shot a movie titled "Right On!" in 1969, but it didn't get much attention until the other Last Poets got hot. It was hailed at European film festivals and by the group's artistic forebear Amiri Baraka. The New Yorker gave it a rave.
Of course, the movie and its soundtrack LP were bankrolled by white people. "Can it be said we went against our principle?" Luciano asks today. "Possibly." Again, though, it allowed these "Original Last Poets" to survive in the mass memory. A lawsuit by the rival group's manager eventually forced "Right On!" off record store racks, but Nelson's "Die Nigga!!!" remains a Last Poets classic. "Niggas know how to die. ... Niggas plan beautiful lives for when they're dead. ... Die niggas! Die niggas! So black folks can take over!"
Recrimination Use of the name Last Poets remains a source of conflict 20 years later. Oddly, the last two men even to become Last Poets -- Jalal Nuriddin and Suliaman El-Hadi -- are the most vociferous in claiming the name for themselves.
Through the 1980s, long after the others had gone their separate ways, Nuriddin and El-Hadi continued to perform as the Last Poets. In 1985 they put out a book of their writings, "Vibes From the Scribes," as the Last Poets. As recently as this year, they gigged at European music festivals. And they've persisted in spite of what Nuriddin has called a "covert conspiracy" to keep them from getting a record deal. "We don't know exactly which federal agency was behind it," he told a reporter in 1986, "but we do know it was a federal agency."
Suliaman El-Hadi, oldest of them all at 57, speaks disdainfully of the 1990 "resurrection tour" by the founding members, which lasted only four dates. "They put in the papers that the Last Poets are being 'resurrected,' when we've been working all this time," he says from his Brooklyn home. "My vibe is, 'Why didn't you jump on board when it was hard times?' They wasn't there to raise money for {imprisoned '70s activists} JoAnne Chesimard or Reverend Ben Chavis, or the Black Panther Party. They ain't been there for none of that... .
"I have nothing to gain by reaching back to 1968 to grab David Nelson," El-Hadi goes on. "Nobody asks me about him when we're onstage." To which Nelson, the minister, responds: "God on high put the words 'Last Poets' in my mouth and nobody else's. Suliaman is not in a position to define who the Last Poets are."
Nuriddin and El-Hadi's beef with Umar Bin Hassan is another story. Record producer Bill Laswell, a longtime fan, had revived the Last Poets' recording career in 1985 with an EP called "Oh My People," featuring Nuriddin and El-Hadi. He maintained a working friendship with Nuriddin, now living in London, ever since.
Last year, as Laswell tells it, he invited Nuriddin, El-Hadi and Bin Hassan to his Brooklyn recording studio after the trio filmed a brief scene for John Singleton's movie "Poetic Justice." The session wasn't fruitful, he says, but Bin Hassan returned the next day, alone, wanting to do better. This, along with his soaring vocal chops, impressed Laswell. Bin Hassan kept dropping by the studio, and thus evolved his solo album, "Be Bop or Be Dead."
"It was like a stab in the back, man," El-Hadi says. "Umar didn't say to me, 'I'm going back over to the studio.' When we heard about it, it was a done deal." This feeling of betrayal is compounded by the fact that Nuriddin and El-Hadi had reenlisted Bin Hassan for "Poetic Justice" as he was rebounding from drug problems. "We reached out for Umar," he says. "We tracked him down."
To Laswell, the solo deal was simply a matter of Bin Hassan's determination and talent. Bin Hassan says it was all about "who was a little more ready to do the album." And it's hard to argue with the finished product. "Be Bop or Be Dead," released on Laswell's own Axiom label, includes remakes of "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution" and "This Is Madness," but its most moving pieces offer mature reflections on life, love and the deadly seductions of the street.
Bin Hassan doesn't write directly about his addiction to crack cocaine, but in person he's straight about it. "I had come out of the streets. And when I got frustrated, when I quit the group {in the mid-'70s}, I went back out into the street, man. Dibbling and dabbling, a little selling here, a little smuggling here. I was dancing to the piper, I had to pay the price... .
"I thank Allah for allowing me to get back to this point," Bin Hassan says, "to be able to express myself and share some of my experiences."
Already Bill Laswell has built a second project around Umar Bin Hassan, the upcoming "Holy Terror" album, which includes Abiodun Oyewole and the veteran rapper Grandmaster Melle Mel. They will be called the Last Poets. For this, El-Hadi calls the white producer a "cultural bandit." "God willing, he's going to have a lawsuit on his hands," he says.
"Who is Laswell to come and make a recomposition of our group? ... I'm beginning to believe he's hooked up with the CIA and FBI or something like that," El-Hadi says. "It looks like an organized attempt by the government to destroy the group, to destroy our credibility."
"Being real about it," Bin Hassan says sharply, "the division is based on silliness and pettiness. We're talking about getting black people together. How are we going to do that when we can't come together amongst ourselves?"
Dreams Onstage at Howard University for Malcolm X's birthday, Oyewole spoke of the once and future Last Poets as "a fraternity of brothers." He gave respect to each of the seven by name. This wasn't so much a false public face as a defining bit of wishful thinking.
The next day, he and Bin Hassan met at Oyewole's home with David Nelson and Felipe Luciano to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the birth of the Last Poets. It was "momentous," says Nelson. "We met as men who are living our lives, surviving, respecting one another."
Painful as their past has been, these men still talk hopefully of bringing all seven Last Poets together, for the first time ever -- though Jalal Nuriddin and Suliaman El-Hadi want nothing to do with it. "One of our goals," Oyewole says, "would be to recapture the East Wind, the place we once had as our home base."
David Nelson's dream is for a black philanthropist to come forward and fly all seven poets off to a Caribbean island, or maybe Africa, for a "retreat." There they would settle all their differences, and return a unified group.
"I think what we need," says Felipe Luciano, "is a 'word-chestra,' in which the seven of us, with seven different experiences, get together and lead our folk. Especially our young people... .
"There is nothing -- other than ego, fear, mistrust and pure bull{ -- } -- that keeps us from making money," Luciano adds. "A word-chestra! With a video... .
"If it can be done with rock groups, why can't we?"
To hear free Sound Bites of the Last Poets, call 202-334-9000 and press the following four-digit codes: "The Last Poets" (Celluloid Records reissue), 8181. "Right On!" (Rhapsody Films home video), 8182. "Oh My People" (Celluloid), 8183. "Be Bop or Be Dead" (Axiom/Island), 8184.