Ask anyone under 25 if they’ve heard of Billy Squier, and the answer is likely no. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t heard him.
Squier has one of the most unusual stories in all of pop culture: a one-time superstar who, in the ’80s, straddled glam, pop and hard rock. Then, in 1984, after his unintentionally camp video for “Rock Me Tonite” hit MTV, featuring Squier prancing around in fluffy hair and satin sheets, his career was over, just like that. “Flapping his wrists like a French chef whose souffle has just fallen,” said Rolling Stone.
Thirty years on, the most famous of rock ’n’ roll exiles has a stealth second career as the most sampled musician in the history of hip-hop.
“I think he has millions of fans that love his body of work but probably thousands of fans that love him,” says Big Daddy Kane, who has sampled Squier’s “The Big Beat” so often he’s lost count.
“He’s definitely someone who helped mold and shape hip-hop with his music,” Kane says. “I would put him in the category of James Brown, the Honeydrippers and Chic. He gave the B-boys and B-girls a track to dance to, but it would only be a DJ or an MC who knows who Billy Squier is.”
Or a producer — like the legendary Rick Rubin, who sampled “The Big Beat” on Jay Z’s “99 Problems” and Squier’s 1981 hit “The Stroke” on Eminem’s “Berzerk.”
“People sometimes write that Billy is the king of hip-hop,” Squier said in 2005. “I didn’t even know what hip-hop was back then.”
Nor do many of the artists who sample Squier know much, if anything, about him.
“My producer found that beat,” says Mickey Avalon, who heavily sampled “The Stroke” for his 2009 single “Stroke Me.” “I didn’t even know what happened to Billy Squier.”
‘That video’
Billy Squier was born on May 12, 1950, and grew up middle class in Boston. After graduating from Wellesley HS in 1968, he began playing in local clubs, at one point forming a band with Jerry Nolan, who went on to join the New York Dolls.
In 1980, Squier signed with Capitol Records and decamped to Woodstock to record his debut album, “The Tale of the Tape.” His secret weapon was the late drummer Bobby Chouinard, whom Squier dubbed “Mr. Big Feet.”
“I’d always envisioned ‘The Big Beat’ leading off ‘The Tale of the Tape’ with the BIGGEST drumbeat the rock world had ever heard,” Squier wrote on his Web site last month. “I knew I had something good . . . but I had no idea just how good.”
For his follow-up, Squier had a vision. He was a massive fan of Queen, and when they hit New York on tour in the fall of 1980, he made sure to run into their producer, Reinhold Mack, in a bar at the Waldorf-Astoria.
“I didn’t know who he was,” says Mack. “He introduced himself and said, ‘I’m Billy. I’d love to talk to you.’ He was very credible, very determined. He said he already had an album out and had something even better.”
The next day, Squier returned to the Waldorf with his acoustic guitar and played a couple of sketched-out songs for Mack. Exhibit A went on to become “My Kind of Lover,” Exhibit B, “The Stroke.” He told Mack the sound he wanted for the latter would be like a rowing crew plunging oars, funneling water.
“I saw that as a challenge,” Mack says. “I think I translated it pretty successfully.” Released in May 1981, “The Stroke” went to No. 3 on the charts and was the first single off “Don’t Say No,” which went triple-platinum.
“He was prolific and quick,” recalls Mack, “even in singing. I’d say, ‘Can you do that again?’ And he’d say, ‘I don’t think I’ll do it any better or worse.’ He did ‘The Stroke’ in two or three takes.”
By the time Squier went to record 1982’s “Emotions in Motion,” he was such a star he was able to get Andy Warhol to do the cover art. Freddie Mercury sang backup on one track, and while Squier began touring with the record as Queen’s opening act, he was soon headlining his own arena tour.
“Everybody Wants You” was the record’s biggest hit, holding at No. 1 for six weeks on the Billboard chart.
“That first album we did was dead simple,” says Mack, who also produced “Emotions in Motion.” “Then, all of a sudden, it was big time. He had this little Timex watch on ‘Don’t Say No.’ This one, he had the Cartier watch. He bought a Porsche at the factory at Stuttgart. He’d been very down to earth. Things changed.”
By the time Squier released his next album, 1984’s “Signs of Life,” he was a megastar. “Rock Me Tonite,” the first single, was the biggest hit he had ever had. MTV was relentlessly promoting an imminent world premiere.
He became the only rock star in history to have his entire career killed by a single video.
In their 2012 oral history, “I Want My MTV,” authors Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks gave an entire chapter to it.
“When I saw the video, my jaw dropped,” Squier told them. “It was diabolical. I looked at it and went, ‘What the f- -k is this?’ ”
Directed by choreographer Kenny Ortega and shot two weeks before its premiere, the video opens with a shirtless Squier lolling on a bed of satin sheets, bouncing around a pseudo-industrial loft, pawing his way along the floor and ripping off his shirt, all filtered through a soft pink neon haze. The video is so unironic it seems as though it must be ironic.
“My girlfriend said something like, ‘This is gonna ruin you,’ ” Squier recalled. “I was a mess . . . It’s like ‘Rock Me Tonite’ is an MBA course on how a video can go really wrong.”
Within days, he said, “I was playing to half-houses. I went from 15,000 and 20,000 people a night to 10,000 people. Everything I’d worked for my whole life was crumbling, and I couldn’t stop it. How can a four-minute video do that?”
In its aftermath, Squier retreated to his apartment in the San Remo on Central Park West. For a time, he abandoned music altogether. “I got out of the business because I went from being the biggest artist on my record label to someone they didn’t even want to have around,” he said in 2005. “I woke up one day and said, ‘I don’t need this.’ ”
‘Future of the funk’
Just as the rock world was abandoning Squier, the hip-hop community was discovering him, stripping his singles for parts and, in the process, proving just how unerring and malleable a songwriter he was.
“The Big Beat” — the song that would change everything — never charted, but the record did, and in 1983, Run-D.M.C. sampled the song on “Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse).” It’s the first known commercial hip-hop sampling of Billy Squier — one of nearly 200 today.
“For a rock star, he was always someone who put the rhythm track first,” says Rob Sheffield, writer for Rolling Stone and author of the karaoke memoir “Turn Around Bright Eyes.” “ ‘The Big Beat’ was not a hit, but that immense drum track got a lot of attention. I don’t know if Billy Squier thought he was becoming part of the future of the funk, but that’s the way hip-hop works.”
Since then, Squier has been sampled by everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Kanye West to Alicia Keys to A Tribe Called Quest to Jay Z, who used “The Big Beat” as the spine to his monster hit “99 Problems.”
“Billy Squier was one of the rock stars who learned from Led Zeppelin that massive drums do a lot of the talking,” Sheffield says. “He was the first guy to really figure out their production trick — that isolated thunder.”
Hence the hip-hop appeal: “You can put anything on that.”
Oscar-nominated songwriter Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne agrees. “Billy Squier had a tendency to start his singles with the drums ‘in the clear’ for a few bars — i.e., playing alone before the rest of the band comes in, which makes them really easy to sample,” he says. “ ‘The Big Beat’ and ‘The Stroke’ both start this way. And Chouinard played really big, simple John Bonham-esque beats that work great for rock and hip-hop.”
It’s estimated that Squier has earned millions of dollars through sampling alone — and a mostly uncredited second life as a Billboard superstar.
Avalon says that for his track, Squier demanded a fee up front along with 75 percent of the royalties. “If you want the fattest drums, you go for Billy Squier,” says Cisco Adler, who produced the track.
“It’s not about who he is or what he ever did,” Adler says. “But it’s incredible when a sample shines a light on a really good artist in reverse.”
Over the past 30 years, Squier has tried to move on. He got married, wrote a screenplay that won an award at Sundance and bought a house in Bridgehampton. He maintains his residence in the San Remo, where, in 2007, he got into a court battle with Bono over a fireplace. Today, at 63, he’s a passionate member of the Central Park Conservancy and tends 20 acres.
“I would never dispute the fact that music is my greatest love,” he told Newsday last summer. “But it takes a back seat to gardening now in terms of time. Gardening I can do every day, and it’s not dependent on a hit record or somebody wanting to book me.”
He plays the occasional gig at small clubs around the country and this year donated a track to a charity compilation for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
He’s still slightly puzzled by his preeminence in hip-hop and is bitter the rock establishment hasn’t re-embraced him in the same way. “I wouldn’t want to end up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the ‘Master of Hip-Hop Samples,’ ” he said in 2005, “but you take what you can get.”
Here’s where you’ve heard Billy before
“The Stroke,” 1981 has been sampled in:
- Eminem, “Berserk”
- Mickey Avalon, “Stroke Me”
- Company Flow, “Wurker Ant Uprise”
- Grandwizzard Johnny O and the Might Sorcerer Crew, “When It Breaks”
“The Big Beat,” 1980 has been sampled in:
- Jay-Z, “99 Problems”
- Kanye West and Pusha T, “Looking for Trouble”
- Dizzee Rascal, “Fix Up, Look Sharp”
- Nas feat. Will.i.am, “Hip Hop is Dead”
- Puff Daddy, “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down”
- A Tribe Called Quest, “We Can Get Down”
- Big Daddy Kane, “Put Your Weight On It,” “Get Down,” “Ain’t No Half Steppin,” “The Beef Is On” and “3 Forties and a Bottle of Moet”
- Ice Cube, “Jackin’ for Beats”
- Alicia Keys, “Girl on Fire”
- Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “Magic Carpet Ride”
- Run-D.M.C, “Here We Go”