Jonzhaft the Psychopath. All photos/flyers courtesy Oxygen

North Babylon, which borders Wyandanch to the south, is not a place many people associate with hip-hop. It’s a predominantly white town. But both LL Cool J and Freddie Foxxx grew up here, and the area has produced many other, less heralded rap talents like Bolaji (of Zakia Records fame) and the subject of the below interview, John “Oxygen” Everette.

I’ve known Ox for a few years, essentially since he started up the multi-regional group Sputnik Brown (which also includes another North Babylon native in Howard “Musa” Lloyd) and, since then, we’ve had many conversations like the one you’re about to read. It’s good knowing someone who was in the mix when hip-hop was really jumping off in the area ’80s but still has the enthusiasm of a “new” artist. What I didn’t initially know is that he was making his own records back then with local label LaRhon as Jonzhaft the Psychopath, and, later, with producer DJ Smash as part of the early ’90s acid-jazz project, Jazz Not Jazz. Here he shares some insight on the little-known rap hotbed he calls home, and his own history as an MC.

JS: I don’t want to miss anything here since we’ve had this conversation before so why don’t you start by explaining yourself to someone who might not know who you are?
O: I’m just an ordinary cat that was fortunate to grow up in the building phase of hip-hop on Long Island, and got to see a lot of things and exposed to artists while they were coming up. I’m an MC, former B-boy/breakdancer, graffiti artist, all that.

JS: Growing up, was hip-hop prevalent in your neighborhood?
O: Around the corner from me were a lot of older heads who took us younger ones under their wing. There was a crew, DJ Fantasy Incorporated, that would set up a sound system on our street. My man Greg Rawls, one of my sister’s best friends, let me touch the wheels the first time and taught me about the craft of emceeing. The next block over was a dead end. Once we got the knowledge, we assembled a little crew called Dominating Force MCs and we’d go to the dead-end and rock after school. That was around ‘84, ‘85.

JS: North Babylon is not a place people think of as a Black town, which is what people think of as being hotbeds of hip-hop. It was a very mixed community.
O: It’s probably 70/30 between Caucasians and us. There was two sides to the Black neighborhood. There was what we called “across Mount” and our side. North Babylon produced a lot of talent. In that little pocket where we lived, there was Freddie Foxxx and the whole Supreme Force. LL grew up on the same block as Freddie but further down. We got to see L explode. Too Poetic lived right across the street from me, four houses down. The block I grew up on bordered three towns. Across the street was West Babylon and when you crossed over Straight Path was Wyandanch.

JS: What was the first name you went by?
O: Phew. My first name was Jazzy Jay Dee, then Just Divine. A lot of us were into the Five Percent Nation. Just Divine was my attribute I took on. It was all about knowledge of self back then, so a lot of us started studying the lessons. Once Rakim dropped in ‘86, that was just a way of life. I miss those days, that consciousness. That’s something kids are missing.

JS: Were you cool with Freddie and LL?
O: When I got into high school, Foxxx and Supreme Force were in 12th grade. I used to do graf, little customized pictures on paper that I sold. Eric—”Easy E” from Supreme Force—was one of my biggest customers. He introduced me to the rest of the group. When L lived around the way, he wasn’t really emceeing. He was in our school system until the 8th grade, a grade above me. Once he moved to Queens, he started doing his thing. But he used to ride our bus and snap on people. We had a room in our junior high where they sent you if you got in trouble: 140. I saw him in 140 a lot. [Laughs] Bolaji was another one that lived on the other side of North Babylon. Tone Kapone from Def Squad, Erick Sermon’s cousin, graduated with me. Tone was part of Supreme Force once Fred got his solo situation with MCA.

JS: It’s funny, I grew up just up the road from North Babylon off Deer Park Avenue, and I listened to LL and Freddie Foxxx. But I never knew they were from there.
O: Nobody really claimed the area. It wasn’t until LL wrote his book and explained his life in North Babylon that people recognized that he came from the area. We used to tell people all the time, L’s from Lakeway Drive, he rode the bus with us, but nobody believed us. Long Island in general, nobody took us seriously.

JS: Was North Babylon cool with Wyandanch when you were coming up?
O: They didn’t like us. I guess because we went to school with white people they felt we thought we were better, and there’d be a lot of beef. A lot of them coming to our area and starting fights and leaving. [Laughs]. But when it came to hip-hop, those barriers were broken. Wyandanch Day was always a beautiful thing. We were allowed to go in Wyandanch [Laughs]. When it came to hip-hop, there was no neighborhood beef but when it came to neighborhood parties, it was always a problem. That’s actually how I lost my man Greg Rawls, in one of those neighborhood situations. They came and crashed a graduation party in ‘86. I actually watched him die on the corner where he taught me about hip-hop. Big shouts to Greg Rawls. He was one of those OG cats who loved the culture and made sure we knew about it.

JS: When did you become Jonzhaft the Psychopath?
O: When Dominating Force split up, me and my man Cutwizard Albee stayed with the music. He connected with L.B. Bad, the owner of La Rhon Records who lived the next block from Al, and we all did separate projects. L.B. and Wiz worked on a litle group called the Prince and the Wizard. I just started doing the hip-hop stuff with them. The first thing was I wrote a song called “Why Do Girls Do It” but instead of getting on the track, these other cats from the area did it.

JS: What were they called?
O: In’Fo MCs which was my man Shelton and another cat around the way. Supposedly, Dana Dane was supposed to get it. Somehow [LB] connected up with Dane’s people, or that’s the story I got. But I got the credit and I’m still waiting on my check, LB. From that I started recording with Elbee on LaRhon. Lamont was a hustler. He worked part-time for WBLS so anything Bob Lee was involved in, he’d get us on. He used to have a radio show on that AM station, WGLI, that was back in the cut by some horse stables.

Jonzhaft The Psychopath “Idealism” (1991-demo version)

JS: Why did you spell your name like that?
O: With the Z? ‘Cause it was different. We didn’t want a conflict with Shaft. I always liked the name from when I saw that movie. We couldn’t market it the way it was spelled so I put a little twist on it. Made it look European a little bit. Maybe they’ll embrace it there. It looked kind of German. [Laughs].

JS: LaRhon was mainly a house label, right?
O: His main thing was dance music. He wasn’t really on the hip-hop tip. We started putting stuff out when Doug Lazy was out, in ‘89, ‘90, doing hip-house. I was always a house fan. My style was heavily influenced by Big Daddy Kane in ‘89 and the fast rap. So it was kind of natural. “Groove To Get Down” and another track I did on there called “Come and Get It,” were real uptempo. The original was 130 BPMs. House wasn’t too far from the hip-hop that was coming out. It was a natural progression to put it on a steady-pulse house beat.

JS: How was that label’s reach? I never really heard of it.
O: Around ‘89, we started this label called Red Heat through Apexton Records and they had good distribution. That got the ball rolling for LaRhon the following year. L.B. was in the military overseas so he was connected to DJs out in Berlin and things he did went straight to Europe. No one even knew we were doing music around the way but Mixmag would be faxing us charts, and Kiss FM in London playing our songs. [In New York] people could care less. But we connected with this cat Gilly Dread, who was Bob Marley’s [road manager]. He had a label called Gong Sounds and, in 1990, I recorded a whole album in Miami. When we came back is when I recorded “Groove To Get Down.” I got a whole album’s worth of material as Jonzhaft that never came out.

JS: What happened?
O: Oh boy. I almost signed a deal with Island Records, or 4th and Broadway. I had a meeting with Chris Blackwell in ‘90 around when X-Clan was getting signed to 4th and Broadway. It didn’t pan out, some things didn’t add up. I was young but I still had sense. But it was cool. I got to record with John Holt and Dennis Brown. I did a house track on John Holt’s album, I think it was the only album that came out on Gilly’s label. It was a good time but it was a confusing time for me. It turned out it wasn’t the right situation. I’m glad I didn’t do it that way.

JS: After that you got involved in the jazz thing?
O: At the end of ‘91, ‘92, I started working with DJ Smash, who was a good friend of this acting manager I had named Lenny. We went to his crib one night and he was playing these beats that were different. Some jazz stuff that I liked. That night, I recorded seven songs. Smash had a situation with this label, Eightball, and put together this group, Jazz Not Jazz, in ‘91, and I was the featured artist. That was a great situation. Smash was involved with Giant Step real early and we’d do shows at Village Gate, New Music Seminar. A lot of heads was coming through Giant Step—Digable Planets, Arrested Development.

I recorded two singles, one with Eightball, and another start-up label called New Breed. We were kind of doing the acid jazz early. In ‘94,’ 95 it kind of took off. Yeah, we pioneered that. I mine as well just say what it is. [Laughs]. After 8Ball and New Breed, I had some kidney problems and got ill. I couldn’t really perform and I stopped doing rap. Then I moved away. I didn’t really start emceeing again until I moved back to New York in 2003. And that’s kind of where we picked up with Sputnik Brown. I’ve been working on that ever since.

JS: You’re real serious with the digging but you’ve never done production, though?
O: I just find the records. I got the ear but I never had the patience to sit down and learn the machines. The last machine I worked on was the ASR. Al B had the Korg DDD-1 that was the introduction to the pads, chopping up beats. SP-12s and MPCs was too much stuff for me. My brain couldn’t handle it. I get lots of records and bring ‘em back to the team, let them do what they do because they got the knack for it.

JS: So you have the tape of Biz, Ra and Chill that everyone’s always talking about…
O: The Wyandanch High joint. Belal brought Biz to my house one night, and all Biz wanted to see was my tapes. He took this one box, dumped the tapes out on the bed, sat on the floor and he was like “I got this, I got this,” and then he saw the Wyandanch one. He has the master copy. My copy’s pretty clean but he’s got the one that I want. I just want a copy, Biz. [Laughs]. That’s one of the historic area documents. Biz used to come to our school and different area high schools and hand out flyers around ‘85. I knew Biz through his brother. [Diamond] Shell went to Farmingdale College with some friends I grew up with. I’d go out to Coram where Biz was involved with parties at this firehouse with this guy Tracy, the DJ for Sport “G” and Mastermind. Biz hustled to get his. Once he got on, it was no shock.

JS: Foxxx told me some stories once about some race riots at North Babylon High School…
O: The riots were big in our school, man. I think everytime they showed Roots on TV for the year, we’d just have a big riot. I remember this one dude sitting in his car and Foxxx got off the bus and just cocked him. Dude fell behind the steering wheel and never got back up. The riots were kind of intense. Lots of times, we would be fighting friends, one of them weird things. But I never got involved with that. It was mostly the older guys, Fred’s age group. Once we got older, towards graduation, there was no riots. North Babylon was such a melting pot that we were exposed to everything. We listened to Metallica and Iron Maiden.

JS: Heavy metal was ubiquitous on Long Island in the ’80s…
O: And then there was the alternative they were calling new wave on WLIR, the Smiths and all that. A lot of it sounded like hip-hop, with the beats. That’s one thing I liked about living in the area, and what makes Long Island hip-hop stand out. It just pops from anything else that comes out. Anything from Long Island in ‘86, ‘87 had its own sound. We were exposed to everything. We were free to do anything we wanted. Even getting out on the corner and setting up the big linoleums, the police didn’t bother us. It was like a show to them. We’d blast music all night. They’d stop and look and laugh. We had a ball. It was a good time to come up.

JS: So you’re putting out a solo single on 45 with an old track of yours from the Jonzhaft days?
O: The track is called “Gone Diggin” produced by Gensu Dean. We recorded it a few years ago. This Japanese DJ K Prince, who gave my ‘91 track “Groove To Get Down” exposure on his mix with DJ Muro, lives in New York and has a label called BBP. The record’s coming out on BBP/Big City.

On the B-side is a demo track from ‘88 called “Master Minds In Effect.” That’s one of my first productions. We did it on a TASCAM four-track. I chopped up Isaac Hayes’s “Joy,” and bounced the tracks back and forth. I found it going through some of my old tapes, so we’re gonna put that on the flip for all the random rap heads.