And another favorite accessory is to wear any sort of hat that’s of the utmost wrong era. They also get in your way, but they’re a necessity. And then any brightly colored handkerchiefs or bangles that you can coil up and tie around your knees elbows or wrists. So you spend half your time trying to keep your shoes on as you’re sliding around on a piece of cardboard. So you completely loosen them up, and then instead of putting in an effective cinching shoelace, you put in some brightly colored double-wide lace that’s just there for aesthetic reasons. Well, something I still to this day don’t understand is that you take your sneakers, preferably of the Adidas brand, and you loosen them up to the point of being completely ineffectual and only a hindrance on your feet. What other details helped you to get into the character of Tick-Tock? In the book, you mention that you owned a pair of parachute pants. So to have these denizens of the street living among them and crafting the exact same esoteric movements at their very own skating rink was quite magical indeed. They had seen Beat Street and Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2.
And our audience, all of our fans, had seen the break-dancing movies. Yes, we were absolutely the Illuminati of our community when it came to the electric boogaloo. So when we would play it and dance to it, all seventeen audience members would thrill to the sound and go, “MY CHRIST, HOW DID YOU GUYS GET THIS FRESH?!”Īh, so it seemed like you were part of a secret society and had access to the esoteric literature that fueled it. But “Jam on It” - as far as we knew, we were the only guys in the tri-county area that had managed to nab it off that radio show. But in our house, “Jam on It” tasted more like bacon than “My Adidas.” “My Adidas” was not absent from our mix. You know, “Why is a duck?” There’s no telling why we choose our favorite colors or our favorite flavors. That’s a very good question, the answer to which is unfathomable. Why did that one connect more than, say, “My Adidas”? My cousin and I could still drop it at any moment: Three words to the whack/Set yourself back. The one I remember the most clearly because it was the one I really connected with and learned by heart was the song “Jam on It” by Newcleus. I mean, we could be putting out an entire dance mix with Paddle Your Own Canoe and probably triple our exposure. No, it’s one of those things that my cousin Flip-Flop and I, we constantly say, “My god, I wish we would’ve hung onto those things.” We had no idea the value they would have in an archival sense. I mean, it was decades before the telephone, let alone the Internet.ĭo you remember the artists or the D.J.’s? Because back in the day, the fact that we got these crazy original D.J. And those were absolutely our most prized possessions. Sometimes in the weird little indie section we would find Newcleus, or “Rapper’s Delight.” But mostly we would stay up really late on the weekends and listen to Chicago radio stations and tape songs off the radio, these really static-y, kick ass D.J. And you know, the only big-label stuff we could find was Grandmaster Flash and Run-DMC. So we had to go to the mall and go to the Sam Goody, or whatever the corporate record store was then. There wasn’t even a cool independent record store that we were aware of within driving distance. We could only get the very biggest titles. Is that where you went to find music to dance to? Yeah, I think that would be an accurate estimation of the bailiwick of our influence.
But is it correct to say that you took your break-dancing cues from the scene in nearby Joliet, Illinois? Borderline obsessed with the concept of Offerman’s b-boy days, Vulture felt it necessary to discuss the topic at length with the impressively mustached actor, and he obliged with ruminations on proper break-dancing foot- and headwear, why Newcleus is preferable to Run-DMC, and whom he was rebelling against.Īs with rap, there was an east-coast, west-coast thing with break dancing: electric boogaloo vs. The Parks and Recreation star expounds on his breakin’ past in Paddle Your Own Canoe, his upcoming memoir about how a small-town kid from Minooka, Illinois, wound up married to Megan Mullally and owning a crucial role on one of the best sitcoms on television today. “Break dance has been a very important part of my life,” he deadpanned - and then, against all odds, Ron Swanson began popping and locking with Fallon. Last spring, Nick Offerman revealed on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that, back in the eighties, he and his cousin had participated in break-dancing competitions under the street names Tick-Tock and Flip-Flop, respectively.
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