Found the interview with Rick very interesting. Having been Rick’s teacher/mentor in HS i can shed some light on his origin story. First Micky (Rick’s father did not dress up as a cop at the CBGBs show. I drove the band to CBGB for an open mic night. The performance (if you can call it that) was very brief as The Pricks knew very few songs. The band was formed by Rick while a Junior at Long Beach High School in Long Island. Another LBHS student Tom Donnelly was a member along with a ever-changing cast of drummers. Rick had red t-shirts (which i still have one) printed with the band’s name “The Pricks” silk-screened on them. I had introduced Rick to the guitar showing him an open tuning so he could play power chords in punk-like songs. In showing Rick the fundamentals of songwriting he and i wrote a song called “New Format” about a radio station in NY which suddenly swithed from New Wave/Punk to mainstream rock, That was the beginning of the short-lived Pricks.The name Def Jam came about when Rick heard a fellow student Chris Jones, who is African-American, always talking about what a def jam he had heard on the radio. Def jam was not in the vernacular of white boys in suburban HSs at that time, The fact that the first letters of def and jam happen to be dj was just good fortune.Rick would subsequently take the school’s Tascam 4-track and record his first “rap” single.On future episodes i would like Malcolm ask Rick about his outlier theory. Rick could be described as an outsider but definately not an outlier as he happened upon fame at 19 and many of those he produced like LL Cool J and the Beasties were in HS when they found fame. I would also like Malcolm to ask Rick about his break up with Russell when he suddenly split with DefJam and moved to the west coast to start Def American.Look forward to future episode. Great podcast.