Hey —
An 11-year-old in a Seventh-day Adventist house, no secular music allowed, finds a Slick Rick cassette in an Oklahoma grocery store parking lot — and plays it every night after his parents fall asleep. That's where the funk started for Rusty Belicek.
From there: the DC area via his stepfather's Air Force career, meeting Frank Cueto in the one corner of a community-college music program that wasn't heavy metal, and building All Good Funk Alliance into one of the defining acts of mid-tempo breakbeat — a sound so between-the-lines the record stores never had a bin for it. Residencies at 18th Street Lounge, opening for James Brown, then giving up touring to raise two kids on wedding gigs.
Here's the moment. Those DC park parties — every other DJ playing house to an empty field, nobody caring. Rusty and Frank get on, drop classic funk and soul, and the park just fills in: old folks, kids, everybody. They became the headliners of the free show. That's the AGFA thesis in one afternoon.
Heard it before? This is the third chapter of the DC nu-funk story. In Episode 4, Qdup told his side. In Episode 13, Fort Knox Five told theirs. This episode closes the triangle — Rusty confirms he's the one who got Qdup into wedding DJing, and backs up Steve Raskin's account of the whole DC family. One scene, three episodes, told from the inside.
🎧 Listen: Episode page · YouTube · Spotify · Apple
Coming next: Kelly Reverb returns — Part 2 — for the Dallas scene the history books skip, and the harder story underneath it.
Keep digging,
Deckard
The oral history of dance music, told by those who created it.