Grandmaster Caz, aka Casanova Fly, remembers the old friend who “borrowed” his name and lyrics for “Rapper’s Delight”.
When I met “Big Bank” Hank he was the doorman at a club called the Executive Playhouse in The Bronx. It was 1977 or 1978, I’m not sure. I was performing then as Casanova Fly, and he’d be at the door. We got cool. He was a funny guy, jolly. We were always snapping and telling jokes. That’s how he was. That eventually led to him hanging out with us, the group that I was in before I joined the Cold Crush Brothers called the Force Five. At the time I was a young DJ trying to come up in hip-hop. We didn’t have promoters and booking agents and publicists and all that. I did everything. And I couldn’t do everything. Grandmaster Flash had a manager, The Funky Four had management, and it looked like hip-hop was headed in that direction, so I asked Hank to manage us. [read the entire article on medium.com]