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Last summer, when concert promoter Ricky Walker first started promoting his concept of a national rap music and breakdancers tour, he recalls going over like Columbus addressing a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. Skepticism was so high that a salesman at a radio station in Greensboro, North Carolina (whose Coliseum was to be the site of the first test date over the Labor Day weekend) didn't want to take Ricky's advertising money. "You're a friend of mine," Walker remembers the salesman saying. "Can't I talk you out of doing this show?"

Walker not only insisted on forging ahead, he accepted the wager by the ticket manager of the Coliseum, who bet Walker a dinner that he wouldn't sell 3000 tickets to the show. When 7500 tickets were scooped up in four hours, Walker won his dinner and got his historic tour off to an auspicious start in the same stroke.

Two headlines bracket the daring and success of Walker's brainchild, the tour that came to be called the Swatch Watch New York City Fresh Fest. The first ran in Billboard on September 29, 1984 and read, "Hip-Hop Heading For Huge Halls." The second ran in Amusement Business on December 22, 1984 and read, "Swatch Watch Tour Grosses $3.5 Million In 27 Performances."

For all of his daring, Walker had known that something was going on when he heard rap all over the radio in Florida, And, having come up with the idea, he knew just where to go to flesh it out-- to Russell Simmon's Rush Productions in New York. Rush's 
Run-D.M.C., Kurtis Blow, and Whodini made up the bulk of the rap side of the show, the lineup of which was filled out with the Fat Boys and Newcleus. The breakdancers -- who performed on a second stage in the middle of the arena while the next rap act was setting up on the main state -- included the Dynamic Breakers, Magnificent Forde, and Unknown Express.

With an itinerary that ranged from Providence to Detroit to St. Louis to Houston to Jacksonville to Los Angeles, the Fresh Fest, according to Russell Simmons, "demonstrated the huge underground popularity of rap. For example, we got to, say, Chicago, where almost none of our records were playing, and we sold out 20,000 seats." And in cities like Philadelphia, where rap is played on the radio, an arena like the 20,000 - seat Spectrum not only sold out, the demand was such that another show was added for the next day, to which an additional 10,000 tickets were sold.

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