Stakes Is High

The music in Café Martorano is so loud that anyone brave enough to attempt conversation ends up gesturing like an octogenarian without a hearing aid. An Italian restaurant by menu but a nightclub by design, the newly opened hot spot seasons the $69 veal piccata and other “South Philly favorites” with strobe lights, flashing plasma televisions, and eardrum-punishing bass. Like so much of Las Vegas, Café Martorano is a place of action, not words, and Shecky Green’s table has the former. The retinue consists of two female DJs, a self-described “fetish slut” named Dragon Lily, a trio of Filipino party girls, and three blondes. That’s nine slender, attractive women to one average-looking, bald-headed guy in a crisp, dark blazer—a ratio he’s not complaining about.

After platters of rigatoni and breaded eggplant circle the table, the girls charitably leap up to dance with a rubbernecking stranger in a robotic wheelchair. A scene from Pulp Fiction blares from the assorted flat-screens, Sam Jackson’s excruciatingly loud gunshots melding into the infamous bass-line of “Ice, Ice, Baby.” Seated at the head of the table, Shecky surveys the spiraling debauchery and smiles, then beckons the wait staff for more bottles of Veuve Clicquot Rosé. It’s just another night in the life of an Ivy League–educated hip-hop journalist.

Before there was Shecky Green, there was Jonathan Shecter, a Jewish kid from Philadelphia’s Center City who was hooked on hip-hop from the moment he heard “Rapper’s Delight” at age 10. By high school, he was interning at Philly rap radio station WUSL in an era of payola and lawlessness. It was an experience he would later draw upon as an undergraduate at Harvard; together with fellow student Dave Mays, Shecter wedged hip-hop into the school radio station’s classical format and grafted a partnership that would forever alter the music he loved. (He also grabbed the mic himself for a time, signed to Sire Records as half of the hip-hop group Big Men on Campus.) In 1988, Mays published a one-page newsletter of concert listings—the first issue of The Source. Working on a boxy Macintosh, the budding moguls pulled all-nighters in their off-campus office as they nurtured the leaflet into a magazine. “Instead of going to class, I majored in The Source,” Shecter remembers.

“It started with $200,” he says when asked about rumors that aspiring rapper and alleged Boston underworld figure Ray “Benzino” Scott financed the fledgling magazine. “One hundred dollars from each of us put into a bank account. We never had a big backing, there were never shady characters in the background putting money in.”