Coo Coo Cal’s rise and fall
Milwaukee’s only rapper with No. 1 song focus of documentary
In recent years, Milwaukee hip-hop has gained greater recognition, in the city and beyond.
But to date, there is still only one Milwaukee rapper who has a No. 1 song to his name — Coo Coo Cal.
It was Aug. 17, 2001, when Cal’s Southern rapinspired track “My Projects,” the lead single from his album “Disturbed,” topped Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart. It was his only hit, and “Disturbed” was his only album for Tommy Boy Records, a seminal label that launched the likes of Queen Latifah, De La Soul and other gamechanging hip-hop artists.
Now a new documentary, “The Rise and Fall of Coo Coo Cal,” shows how the rapper achieved unprecedented success in the Milwaukee hiphop scene — and how his career fell apart.
The movie began streaming on Amazon Prime this month. It’s free to watch for Prime members.
“A lot of people have wondered after his big hit what happened to him, and there’s been a lot of hearsay,” said Ramon Sloan, the film’s Milwaukee-based director. “We wanted to set the record straight by putting this story out.”
Coo Coo Cal was an “Army brat” named Calvin Bellamy. Born in Louisiana, he moved around with his family, including some time in Germany, where he started making mixtapes.
He came to Milwaukee in 1982 when his dad taught at the ROTC at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“I was young and curious, and the drugs came into play,” Cal says in the documentary. He was also drinking heavily. “My body got so immune to it, you couldn’t tell I was drunk.”
It’s also when he started rapping, and by the mid-1990s, he was dropping tracks like “Why They Call ‘Em Crazy” on local label Infinite Recordings.
His 1999 debut album “Walkin’ Dead” got some regional attention, and Cal’s team started taking meetings with major record labels, and giving A&R teams a listen to Cal’s next single, “My Projects.”
“I just felt, ‘Oh my God, the world is going to love this,’ “Eddie O’Laughlin, the vice president of A&R at Tommy Boy in 2000, says in the film. “This is going to go big.”
The label offered a $50,000 advance for the record. Cal filmed a music video in his neighborhood, and the video eventually went in heavy rotation on BET.
But as Cal’s stardom started to rise, his addictions got out of control. He burned his bottom lip because he was smoking so much. He forgot some of his lyrics during an on-air performance on WKKV-FM (100.7). He didn’t show up to a promotional photo shoot, a TV commercial, and a couple of concerts promoted by hip-hop radio stations in Atlanta and Phoenix. Those stations stopped playing the song after that, Cal says in the documentary.
Doors that opened up for him, based on the success of that song, started to close.
“It was a downfall with the drugs,” Cal candidly admits in the documentary.
Today, he’s driving semitrailer trucks in Milwaukee, and occasionally recording songs and playing shows.
“For him, this was inspiring,” Sloan said of Cal’s reaction to the film. “He really wants to continue to try and be the best person, regardless of what happened in his past. He is a fighter, and the man is still fighting.”
Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or plevy@journalsentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.
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