Metro Pulse/Cover/The Music Issue

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Guitar Man
Johnny rushing doesn't just make music — he makes the instruments, too.

Why Do You Play?
Local singers, songwriters and musicians of all kinds tell us what makes them make music.

Independents' Day
Local DIY labels run on love, not money

Bo Knows Music

Just In It for the Music
Brainchild of musical wunderkind Wendel Werner, this all-woman jazz choir has just arrived on the local scene — but it's already setting its sights abroad

Roderick Wisdom was there when Bob Ritchie became Kid Rock

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

The first thing Roderick Wisdom shows you when you walk off the porch of his Brooks Avenue home into his living room is a framed gold record. The glass front is emblazoned in red with the graffiti-style logo of Detroit rapper Kid Rock. A brass plate at the bottom reads, "To Roderick 'Bo' Wisdom."

"The first 500,000 records sold," Wisdom says, shaking his head as if he's still amazed his old friend Kid Rock actually sold that many. "I got the first gold record, before his family, before anyone."

He has more gold and platinum discs, from Rock and Rock's DJ Uncle Kracker. "I'm gonna put them all up there," he says, gesturing at the open wall above the mantel. He and his wife Constance just moved into the airy house on a hill in East Knoxville.

Bo Wisdom, as his friends in Detroit call him, has stories to go with the records. Dressed in shorts and a faded football jersey, he talks expansively about his past and his plans for the future. With more than two decades of experience working in and around music, he's a case study of a certain kind of character—the guys who are always looking for an angle, the promoters and managers and talent scouts, the ones who are more interested in being backstage than on stage. You don't hear a lot of stories about them, and when you do it's usually the bad ones. But without them, an awful lot of music just wouldn't happen.

"I started DJing when I was 11 or 12 years old," Wisdom says. "Basement parties—for profit. Everything I did was about money. At that time, basement parties were 50 cents [to get in]. So I started charging a dollar." He laughs.

He grew up in Mt. Clemens, Mich., on the east side of Detroit. He was introduced to pop music by his older sisters, and by the time he was in elementary school he was looking for a way into the field. Basement parties were common around the neighborhood, and when Wisdom realized you could make good money by playing good records, he knew he'd found his niche. His first party was his sixth-grade class graduation, which he hosted in one sister's basement.

"She used to call me ET," he says of his sister, "for 'Entertainment Tonight.' [She'd ask], 'What's going on tonight, Bo? What's the haps? Where's the party?'"

But his family assumed the DJing and partying would eventually pass. Even he didn't consider it a career possibility until a friend told him there was a word for what he was doing. "He said, 'You're a promoter.' I was about 14. He said, 'You're always selling something, putting up fliers, always out doing something.'" The friend had a point. Besides his increasingly frequent parties, Wisdom over the years took to all manner of small-scale entrepreneurship—selling candy at school, organizing group bus trips to New York City, always looking for transactions where he could make a few bucks by meeting a market demand.

His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he split his adolescence between his father's home in Jackson, Tenn., and his mother's in Detroit. He maintained his Motor City music ties. When he went up to stay with his mother for a weekend, "I'd have a party set up Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night. So I was promoting in two cities when I was a teenager."

That's how, in the late 1980s, he met a young man named Bob Ritchie. Like Wisdom, he was a DJ who wanted to work big parties. Unlike Wisdom, he was from an affluent family on another side of town. And he was white.

"I said, 'A white boy who do what I do?'" Wisdom says. "Oh, hell—you know how much money I can make?"

The Ritchie guy was going by the name of Kid Rock, and Wisdom promptly recruited him to work some of his parties. The first was in a basement on a Tuesday. "We charged $2 that night," Wisdom says with satisfaction. The place was packed. And he says that when the new kid stepped up to the turntables, every head in the place turned.

"Everybody stopped, like little kids—eeerrrk," Wisdom says, jerking his head in mock astonishment. "You got a white boy in here spinning, mixing?

"We burned up the scene for about, truthfully, three or four months. He was DJing every night, making $250 a night. So we did well."

Wisdom was prominently featured in interviews in a recent VH-1 Driven special about Kid Rock's career. Besides the music scene, he says he and his friends introduced their white friend to other aspects of African American life. He remembers Kid being stunned by how much food Wisdom's mother served at family dinners: spaghetti, pork chops, corn, fried chicken. "He was like, 'Spaghetti's a meal,'" Wisdom says, chuckling. "I told him, 'Naw, it's a side dish.'"

Wisdom's business, Groovetime Productions, was clicking along smoothly, booking Detroit shows by hip hop stars like Boogie Down Productions, Rob Base and MC Lyte. When Kid Rock decided to add rapping to his repertoire, Wisdom helped land him some opening slots. "When Kid got on the show, he rocked it," he says. "He got it because he kept it real on that stage, he got skills. He can rap, he can DJ, he can play all the instruments."

The Beastie Boys' 1986 debut Licensed to Ill had just proven that white boys rapping could sell a lot of records, so no one in Detroit was surprised when Jive/RCA signed Kid Rock. But his 1990 debut, Grits Sandwiches for Breakfast, had the misfortune of arriving just as another Caucasian rapper was climbing the charts. "Vanilla Ice came and hurt us," Wisdom says. He still grimaces at the name. "It really hurt what we were doing."

At the time, Kid Rock was sporting the same blond high-top-fade hairstyle as Vanilla Ice. And by the time Ice's one-hit-wonder career turned cold, partly because of revelations that he had lied about his upbringing to make himself sound tough, the record industry wasn't much interested in another white rapper. Besides, the West Coast gangsta rap scene was cranking up, with its insistence on ghetto authenticity. Over the next several years, Kid Rock bounced around small labels, playing to large crowds in his hometown but never breaking into the big-time. Wisdom, who was part of Rock's personal management team, hung with him. "I'm always in his camp," he says. "As he progressed in life, he always had a place for me."

That progress eventually paid off, with 1998's Devil Without a Cause album. As rap-influenced rock bands like Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine went multi-platinum, the door was finally open for a real rapper with a rock mentality. Since then, Kid Rock has sold millions of units, dated Pamela Anderson, and built himself into one of the biggest stars in the country.

Wisdom moved to Knoxville in the mid-'90s after meeting his wife here while visiting a cousin at the University of Tennessee. He has continued to operate as a promoter and marketer for local businesses. But he says he's just getting started. His new company, Man O Man, is working with a few local bands (including a group of teenagers at West High School called 1220—"They're hot!", he enthuses) and hoping to recruit more. Wisdom thinks Knoxville's music scene hasn't done enough to think big and promote itself.

"I'm the Berry Gordy of the New South," he says, with a cocky grin that suggests he knows what an outsize claim it is but also dares you to prove him wrong. "I'm going to bring the best out of here, if there's any to be brought."

Always attuned to opportunity, he says he's not only interested in promoting hip hop shows (although he's hopeful Knoxville's new hip hop radio station, Wild 98.7, will help open the market). He thinks the city doesn't bring enough bands that would appeal to the small-town populations outside Knox County. He mentions Bob Seger, Hank Williams Jr. and Charlie Daniels—"That's where the money's at," he says.

Such big-picture thinking is what got Kid Rock where he is too. Wisdom remembers when Rock started tailoring his music and image to court white, working-class Southerners. And he knows how manufactured it was, with the wife-beater T-shirts and Confederate flags deliberately added for effect.

"He's a Yankee, like me," he says, shaking his head and laughing. "We're both from Michigan. He's got a little black son. He's got a son by a black girl! It's all concept."

And concept is something Bo Wisdom knows a lot about.