Flavor Flav turns 67 this week: Here are 10 things you may not know about Public Enemy's hype man

The Freeport-raised rapper William Drayton, better known as Flavor Flav, turns 67 on Monday. He rose to fame alongside Chuck D in Public Enemy, launched a second career as a reality TV star on VH1 and became a tabloid fixture thanks to his brushes with the law. He may be one of the most instantly recognizable celebrities around, but we found 10 things you may not know about the clock-wearing hype man:

1. He was a musical prodigy. At a young age, Flav could play piano, drums, guitar and even the oboe, according to various news sources. "He can play 15 instruments," Public Enemy's Chuck D once told The Guardian. "I can’t play lotto."

2. He set fire to his childhood home. As Flav has told the story: At the age of five, he was playing with a lighter under his sister’s bed when the box spring went up in flames. The fire incinerated her toy collection and scorched the walls, he said in 2019 interview with VladTV, adding, "that was a crazy experience."

3. He boasts a food-related background. The man behind the short-lived House of Flavor restaurant in Las Vegas learned how to make fried chicken, mashed potatoes and mac and cheese The Soul Diner, a Freeport restaurant run by his parents, he told The Believer magazine. He also worked as "head cook at the Nassau County courthouse and at Uniondale High School," he said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.

4. He gave Public Enemy its second No. 1 rap hit. Flav was the main writer and only vocalist on "911 Is a Joke," a single released in April of 1990. Following "Fight the Power," it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. Rap Chart.

5. He spent close to $6 million on drugs. That’s how the Hollywood Reporter calculated it based on a 2011 interview with the rapper, who claimed his ’90s-era drug budget was “$2,600 a day, for six years, every single day." (Flav was known to use both cocaine and crack.) He added, "I don’t know how much that is but if you did the math, wow, I went through a lot of money."

6. He was accused of attempted murder. In 1993, police said Flav was arrested and charged with attempted murder after firing a .380 semiautomatic at a neighbor in the Bronx, according to The New York Daily News. The charge was reduced, and Flav was convicted of possessing a weapon, according to The Tampa Bay Times.

7. He came home to get sober. In 1997, according to newspaper reports, Flav attended rehab at the Long Island Center for Recovery, a Hamptons Bays facility that had opened two years earlier. Flav tackled sobriety again in 2020, according to People magazine, and told the publication he had relapsed in April of last year. "If you take a fall, don't lay there and stay stuck," he said. "You got to get up off of that fall and you have to K-I-M — keep it moving."

8. After Public Enemy, he scalped tickets for extra cash. In 2000, while living near Yankee Stadium, Flav sometimes made a few bucks by scalping Yankees tickets, he told Entertainment Weekly. "What happened to Flav during that time?" he said. "I got on drugs more. I got more stressed out. I kept getting arrested for driving with no license. And my personal appearance was not looking too cool."

9. He broke several VH1 ratings records. The 2006 season finale of "Flavor of Love" racked up 6 million viewers, unprecedented for the network, according to Variety. The season premiere of "Flavor of Love 2” drew 3.3 million — a record for any VH1 series premiere — and the finale drew 7.5 million viewers, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "Flav is very happy," Tom Calderone, general manager of VH1, told the New York Times in 2007. "He feels the love."

10. He recently released 22 versions of the same song. "Every Where Man" is a loosely reworked version of "I’ve Been Everywhere," the place-name ditty first popularized by singer Hank Snow and later recorded by Johnny Cash. Flav raps the lyrics in 22 different languages, from English to Afrikaans to Swahili, with help from AI technology. A multilingual-ized Chuck D appears in the song’s intro.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com