Photo Credit: David Bober

As a youth growing up in the Bronx, David Bober, aka DJ Sophistifunk, became infatuated with R&B music. This led him to meet Jonathon Cameron Flowers, aka Grandmaster Flowers, one of the earliest DJs to mix records together in sequence. This friendship gave Bober a front-row seat for what would be the foundational elements of Hip Hop.

The Hip Hop Museum caught up with David to discuss his donation to the Museum of JBL bullet tweeters, originally found in New York City traffic signals, his friendship with Grandmaster Flowers, and what the Hip Hop Museum will mean to him.

Adam Aziz: How did you become involved with Hip Hop?

David Bober: I’m a little older. I’m turning 68. We’re talking about the early 1970s. There was no Hip Hop yet. I grew up in the South Bronx, Highbridge, near Yankee Stadium. I always loved R&B. There was a little record store where I would hang out all the time, and I bought my first 45s there, following the WWRL top 16 sheets they would put out every week.

During that period, in my mid-teens, there was a lot of gang stuff going on in the Bronx that I was involved with. I had a good family, but I really turned to the streets and street life.

I always loved music, and I began hacking together some speaker cabinets with a single turntable and playing house parties. That morphed into going to clubs, and that’s where I first ran into Cameron, also known as Grandmaster Flowers. Everyone just called him Flowers.

AA: Talk to me about your relationship with Flowers.

DB: He stood out to me as being on a whole other level. We were all getting high and chasing girls. He really blew a lot of people’s minds back then. He was one of the first DJs who really blended cuts. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and was a savant at mixing beats and finding things that blended together.

A lot of the DJs at the time were just doing quick cuts, but he did this thing where he extended breaks by having two copies of the same record.

I joined Flowers’ crew and began hanging out with him religiously. He became a friend, like a brother to me. I lived with him at a couple of addresses in Brooklyn. I hung out with him for about four years, living that life. A lot of things happened that made me drift away from it. I was out of that life by the time Hip Hop really exploded in the early 1980s.

I loved Flowers. He was a true friend and a brilliant guy in so many ways. He wasn’t a big drug guy; I was doing a lot of drugs. A lot of cocaine. And that really fucked me up, and I had to drift away to get away from it. I ran into Flowers many years later, in the 90s. He was panhandling and crack-addicted outside of Tower Records in New York, and he eventually died from what the crack did to his heart.

AA: How did the bullet tweeters come to be in your possession?

DB: I think the statute of limitations has probably long passed. We were building our systems. I forget how we discovered these JBL bullet tweeters were up in some New York traffic signalling devices. I forget who discovered it. These traffic signalling things were only on major thoroughfares at certain intersections. They weren’t everywhere. They were on the Eastern Parkway or the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. They were high up on these poles, and they would emit a little ticking sound. I would shimmy up the pole, and Flowers would look out for me from a van. We would do this at three or four o’clock in the morning. I would be up twenty feet off the ground, hanging off a pole, and you would have to undo this little nut on the device, remove the tweeter, and then slide back down the pole.

We began collecting the tweeters and selling them, so the four I donated to The Museum came from there.

Photo credit: David Bober

AA: What does it mean to you that Hip Hop will have a physical museum space where people can learn and celebrate the culture?

DB: As mentioned, I was around for the foundational elements of Hip Hop but had drifted away by the time the culture really exploded. I followed it a bit from a distance but drifted into House and club music. But the importance of The Museum is of such cultural and historical significance. If you look back at the societal impact of Jazz music as an example, that was looked at originally as radical. Same with Rock and Roll.

The Museum is very important historically, not just for the black experience in this country, but also for all movements of resistance and artistic expression that are genuine.

Read more interviews on The Hip Hop Museum!