I lay on the couch early on a Tuesday morning watching the Lucy Ball Show. I fell flat as I got up to turn the channel. I soon discovered that I could not stand up. After being rushed to the hospital, I found out I was paralyzed from my waist down and told that I would never be able to walk again. My dreams of becoming a celebrity and changing the world disappeared. Running through my mind were thoughts of "What happened? How did this happen? Where do I go from here?"Disco was now taking over the airwaves, leaving the funk and R&B era behind. DJing became a new profession, and in New York, this underground movement spread all over the boroughs. At the time, we had no name for it, only to associate it with a new sound that can only be described as "talking shit.

" We called it rap. By the end of the 1970s, the new sound had hit the airwaves, making it the most added and requested in America. A local artist from the Bronx named Cowboy renamed it Hip-Hop, and the term rapping became the latest form of music. My djing and rapping caught the attention and influenced a high school friend named Guy O'Brian, who would later create the moniker "Master Gee" and become the first rap group to hit the airwaves as The Sugarhill Gang.The early days of Hip-Hop were exciting because we were venturing into something totally new and unknown. It was ours to create and shape. Those days were also filled with guns, drugs, sex, and fame, and as an agent, I had a front-row seat to it all. These are the backstage stories of a Hip-Hop agent.