Many rappers and hip hop icons have come and gone like the one hit wonder singles they have provided for us over these past few decades. Only fairly recently has hip hop truly invaded the modern psyche of the 21st century. Sure in the 80's, cute child actors in sitcoms released “rap” albums to capitalize on the growing success of the genre and, yes, in the 90's Rodney Dangerfield released aan album called “Rappin’ Rodney”, but today it is a global machine generating billions of dollars and has taken over the entire world.
Like many other styles of music, Hip Hop has legions of imitators and posers putting out countless forgotten CDs and albums only to be regarded as casualties of the industry. Some make it, most don’t. It’s a tough “dog eat Dogg” world out there for DJ’s and MC’s and only the strong survive.
One of the most prolific and often sampled “casualty” of this sensation is none other than Belt, Montana’s own “crazy boy who plays the mic like a toy” Party Ice.
Born Hamish Schmeckel in 1977 to Polish immigrant parents that owned a turnip and sauerkraut stand in Belt, he would go on to become one of the genres most outrageous and controversial artists.
“My pops wanted me to go into the business,” Party Ice told me recently in an interview, “but I was all ‘nah G...I gots ta do my own thing’. Word.”
A skinny and very pale Hamish was often ridiculed and teased as a child.
“My spine was all f**ked up yo and my eyes were like all crazy ‘n s**t, so I had to wear this wack ass helmet and neckbrace. Dude I cold looked like a spaceman yo. Like wires and s**t comin’ out and goin’ all over the place. It was wack yo. It made me fall over in kickball.”
Through the hardships of his health and working after school at the turnip stand, Hamish knew he was destined for something great.
“Dude, I was cold born’d in the year ‘Star Wars’ came out. And that’s, like, a big movie and s**t. Chewbacca’s and s**t runnin’ all over your dome. Made mad money yo. So I was all, I wanna be like that Ham dude. Be a straight pimp of the galaxy.”
Hamish tried all sorts of options to make a break for the big time.
“I put on puppet shows yo,” he said in his Los Angeles apartment over looking a taco stand. “Like that Muppet dude was all crazy with cash yo. So I was like, I wanna make mad cash too.”
Hamish’s first puppet show was part of his grade school’s talent competition. At age 7 he constructed puppets out of brown lunch bags and made a set using materials from his uncle’s rumpus room. It was a 5 minute interpretation of the hit adult classic “Debbie Does Dallas”.
“I like’d that movie yo,” he explained. “Chicks were doin’ all sorts of crazy s**t. That movie made money, that Muppet dude had money so I just combined the two. It was fresh man. People freaked out yo.”
He was expelled the next day.
A move out to California to get the turnip stand a new life, his parents ended up in West Covina.
“That’s the first time I saw a black dude,” Party Ice said. “I ran for my life and hid in the bushes. I thought he was the devil yo. Turns out he was the electrician turning our power on.”
With a new environment came new opportunities. Hamish began doing Mime down on the famous Venice beach boardwalk.
“I wore a ski mask and a cape,” he told of his performance artist days, “and I jumped around like all insane. I’d go up and grab peoples hats and step on them or I’d chase old people acting like a gorilla. Sometimes the police would come and I’d take off my shoes and pretend to eat them. I was the youngest and best mime on that boardwalk yo. No one could touch me. No one wanted to.”
It was the summer of 1986 that seriously changed Hamish forever. A trip to a record store so his father could purchase a compilation of the most depressing polka songs, Hamish came across an album that would set the gears in motion.
“Yo, I picked up this record right. It had a dude on it that looked like that electrician man. It had a catchy title, so I put it under my shirt and walked out. I told the guy at the front counter that I didn’t speak English to explain why my shirt was all square and s**t.”
The album in question, “Zip Zap Rap” by Devastatin’ Dave the Turntable Slave is considered one of the worst hip hop albums of all time. But it changed Hamish forever.
“I stayed up all night listenin’ to them songs yo,” Party Ice recalls with a sweaty neck. “It was like magic. I didn’t know what Devastatin’ Dave was saying but...it spoke to me.”
That’s when Hamish began writing down lyrics and practicing his rapping.
“I had this old Casio piano thing and I’d set the ‘marching band’ beat to slow and rap over it. My first song was called “Cornflakes Get Soggy” which was about my alienation and rebellion on society yo.”
His attire changed as well. His usual appearance which consisted of plaid pants, terrycloth shirts and cleats soon changed to leather pants, sleeveless shirts, baseball caps and tap shoes.
“I wanted everyone to know when I stepped in the room, “ he said. “Nothin’ like that stone cold ‘click click click’ of them tap shoes yo to turn everyone’s heads. It was on.”
Through the years he practiced and honed his MC skills and in high school he discovered something that would finally give him a new name
“Man, I went through all sorts of rapper names,” Party Ice said over a cold glass of MD 20/20 with an umbrella sticking out of it. “Like my first name was Kid Scruffy cuz I was like a werewolf on the mic yo. Then I was MC Skidmark cuz my lyrics took off like a race car. Then I became Griddle Master because I had a job at Denny’s.”
At age 16 Hamish was popular for not only being a talented rapper but also for being able to drink copious amounts of beer and destroying classmates homes during a party.
“I could drank so much beer I would pee foam yo,” he explained excitedly. “I was the party master. Dude I threw so many TVs out of windows and stole so much silverware no one ever wanted me back in their home. I was notorious.”
A trip to the local 7-11 brought him face to face with destiny.
“There it was,” he said, “staring me right in the face. Right there, yo, in the freezer. Big bags of the stuff. All it said was ...Party Ice.”
The frozen cubes used to go around kegs to keep them cold was now his new MC name and would stick throughout his entire career.
At age 18 came a break. A local TV station was having a battle of the bands and Party Ice knew that was his big chance.
“Yo all I brought to that station was my boom box, a tape with those marching band beats on them, my fresh fly threads and my skills yo. Oh and my dad brought some turnips to sell. That man taught me everything about business.”
Party Ice performed two songs, “Party Level Radio” and “I’m Gonna Eat This Microphone.”
“Those were my party anthems yo,” Party Ice clarified as he flossed his toes. “Man I was all up in that studio. The audience just sat there yo. Stunned. They couldn’t take it. My lyrics were rippin’ them up like a Martian wearing Freddy Krueger claws that was on a sugar high yo!”
Party Ice didn’t win the competition but he did catch the attention of a local producer, Jackson Ficklebarrel, known for his unusual lifestyle and pandering of novelty records.
“Jackson liked short people yo,” he recalls with wet eyes and spittle on either side of his mouth, “so he had these records with midgets singing funny versions of pop songs. Like Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” would be “Short Stuff” and that song “Short People” became “Tall People Suck”. S**t like that”
A year later Party Ice’s first album hit, 1996's “Nuts in the Mouth”.
“That title explained it all yo,” he justified. “Because I was the new party king on the block and my words were insane. What came out of my mouth was just plain nuts. I couldn’t be touched. I was wrecking stages and carpets at every show.”
That album spawned an almost hit, the floor rocking “Crotch Waffle” which dictated getting ‘gooey’ with a ‘freak’ at a party then making her pay for breakfast.
“That song is autobiographical yo. I only speak the troof.”
A year of constant touring and hooking up with random ladies across the US gave him a new perspective on life. His next album, “Ho Hotel” was his ode to lovemaking in the most graphic way possible.
“I love them bitches,” he told as he gently scraped his navel. “And dem bitches loved me. Seeing as I write what I know back then I knew p***y. So I wrote that s**t. I was on top of the world.”
The club hit “Gooch Lollipop” described in full detail about his neither regions being a lollipop for some willing lady and introduced the world to something called the “clamdip volcano”, something I cannot render in print for it will surely have me arrested in most states.
“This limbless fisherman in Canada told me about that clamdip volcano,” Party Ice recounts. “I couldn’t thank him enough. I went to go shake his hand but he just started crying so I gave him a copy of my first CD.”
“Ho Hotel” landed him an opening spot to the newly reformed 2 Live Crew and took him to new heights.
“One night I was doing a show and this girl was on the stage lookin’ at me like I was some kind of object,” he said with a sad face. “I don’t play that yo. You the object bitch! So I threw the mic down and found God.”
A year of living in a monastery that housed both lepers and recovering game show addicts, Party Ice knew that he was going down a new path. When he got back in the studio he put out his most ambitious release to date.
“Heaven Smells Like My Pew” is Party Ice’s foray into faith inspired song writing.
“That was a deep ass record yo. I had Jesus on my back. I just laid down and let him take control. I was happiest on my knees sitting in my own pew. It was awesome.”
“Heaven Smells Like My Pew” debuted at #19,224 on the Billboard chart. Something had to be done.
Fearing failure and threats from his manager and label, Party Ice got back on track and went to the label Deaf Roe Reppards and changed his image to a hardcore gangster.
In the year 2000, Party Ice released the menacing “Unload On Yo Face” depicting him on the cover sticking a gun between the eyes of a man resembling Rush Limbaugh except that he was black and wore glasses.
“People thought I was straight racist yo,” Party Ice depicts with wild hand gestures. “They was all ‘why you gotta be hatin’ on Al Roker?’ I’m like, naw son, that aint Al, that’s muthaf***in’ Rush Limbaugh yo. See, he be all fat and stupid ‘n s**t. I hate Rush Limbaugh. Al Roker be my n***a.”
The album did moderately well and the single “Till The Gun Goes Click Up Yo Azz” was fairly well received, especially in the small yet intimidating faction of gangsta rap homosexuals.
“I aint with them dudes yo. But they bought the album so...whatever.”
That year, Party Ice was on a float in San Francisco’s gay pride parade. He wore dark sunglasses to conceal his identity and a mesh top to let you know he was down.
That’s when things began to spiral out of control for Party Ice. The failing records, the constant partying, the waning image to uphold, the itching, it all began to collapse on him and one night on stage he broke.
During a 2002 concert in Kansas City, Party Ice began to get extremely dizzy.
“I was doin’ my tune “Pump That Rump” and, you know, kickin’ them midgets in the balls,” (I did fail to mention that his manager insisted on at least one dwarf toss and midget crotch kick during his shows, it was contractual) “when all the sudden the room started spinning. I was like, was it the ten fo’ties I drank before? Was it the mef? The paint I done huffed? The PCP? The ballpeen hammer to my temples? Naw...couldn’t be.”
It was, in fact, a piece of cheese he ate the night before.
“Aw snap! I forgot that I was all lactose intolerant and s**t. Cheese f**ked me up. So after I kicked that little dude in the nuts I collapsed.”
Immediately rushed to the hospital, Party Ice recuperated in the emergency ward and banged about three nurses.
“Them nurses be freaks yo. Plus they got the good drugs too. I didn’t want to leave.”
And leave he did not. Party Ice overstayed his welcome at the hospital for a whole ten months, racking up unpayable bills and shooting other patients morphine drips up his nose. Eventually he was caught and sent to prison where he served five years for theft, destruction of property, unpaid bills and back taxes, obscenity, reckless endangerment, exposing himself to a nun, bestiality, conspiring to assassinate Andy Dick, grand theft auto, scalping tickets to a John Tesh concert, misconduct in a cafeteria and illegal use of a tackle box.
When he was released in 2007, Party Ice went back to LA and worked at his family’s turnip stand. He then got an apartment on Sunset, across from said taco stand, and started planning his comeback.
Today, Party Ice has just finished a new album titled “Still Insane And Off The Chain” which should hit stores this summer.
That is, if he can get his boombox to work...
-Mark Whittaker
1 comment:
jesus that's hilarious!
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