Joe Mama

It’s a little after 10 p.m. when Joe Good takes the stage for a Saturday night show at the Flying Monkey Brewery in Olathe. And, as usual, he’s got a fan.

This is not just any fan — Good has plenty of those, all bunched up near the stage waiting to hear him dictate rhymes like some sort of smooth-talking hip-hop carnival barker.

Good’s biggest fan is his mom, Necia Gamby. Gamby is standing just to the right of the stage, silver dreads in tow, singing every lyric without missing a beat.

Tonight, she makes her way to the back of the room after a few songs to work the merch table and hopefully make a few bucks for her boy. But most of the time, Gamby doesn’t come to Good’s shows to work.

She may be the mother of Joe Good — better known to her as Robert Jamal Gamby — but that relationship changes when the lights go down and the records start spinning.

“I’m just a fan. I love his music,” she says in the living room of her midtown home a week and a half later. “He’s a really private person — he keeps his own counsel. When you live with a person who’s a private person, it’s hard sometimes to know what’s going on inside them. That’s why I always show up — to see what he’ll do next.”

But Gamby is interested in more than her son’s shows. If she had her way, she’d be at a different show every night of the week — and most weeks, she is.

“I’ve always been looking for an extended tribal family that I could fit into,” she says. “And that’s what hip-hop is — it’s a worldwide happening.”

Gamby is a hard woman to miss, and not just because the 53-year-old mother of two stands out in the clubs. More than anything, it’s because she’s become a motherly figure for much of the Kansas City hip-hop scene.

Besides being a mom to Good, one of the most prominent MCs in Kansas City, and his brother, Jaz “The Engineer” Brewer, who owns and operates recording shop 64111 Studios (the zip code of his mother’s home), Gamby is the founder and operator of HipHopKC.com, a nexus for rappers and DJs throughout the metro and Lawrence.

“I’m forcing myself to learn technology,” she says. In her home office are a PDA, a laptop and a Mac desktop computer. She calls the devices “Necia 2,” “Hazel” and “Beulah the house slave,” respectively. “That’s the key to hanging in there and staying relevant,” she says of her technological menagerie.

Although her kids first taught her about hip-hop, Gamby has been surrounded by music her entire life. After moving to Kansas City from Tulsa, Oklahoma, at age 7, she became engrossed in Kansas City’s legendary jazz scene through her mother, Sandra “Sandy” Brown, a prolific jazz musician who was named an Elder Statesman of Kansas City Jazz in 1988.

A graduate of Southeast High School, Gamby married at 17 but divorced four years later. Forced into the working world, she changed jobs repeatedly over the next decade before eventually finding her calling as a massage practitioner at age 28, around the same time that her first son was born. It’s a career path she continues today, having operated her own business out of her home for more than 25 years.

Gamby says her two boys showed signs of their future interests in music at an early age. For Jamal, that meant mixing beats on the computer as a teenager while his grandmother practiced with her band, and bringing his mom hip-hop CDs so she could learn about things like cadence, rhythm and the difference between East Coast and West Coast rap. For Jaz (the gearheaded one), it meant taking apart clocks in the house to figure out how they worked or stealing the tape recorder from the living room to practice recording.

“They let me be involved with them. They don’t separate me out,” she says. “They don’t judge me or make me feel old. They said, ‘If you want to be part of this, you have to learn,’ and I did.”

Now, Gamby uses that knowledge to help others in the local scene. Through another of her Web site ventures, 64111clinic.com, she’s able to teach up-and-coming musicians in what she calls “come to the table” sessions on how to treat their music careers as a business in order to be successful.

“You can’t manage a band if you don’t have management skills,” she says.

Those skills, she adds, are even more important in Kansas City, a place where talented people often give up because they can’t afford to survive day-to-day as artists.

“This place is an incubator,” she says. “Incubators are interesting, because you’re in an incubator because there’s a problem. While this city wants art and it wants culture, it doesn’t want to support it.”

So, in typical Gamby fashion, she has come up with what could be the solution: another Web site. It’s little more than a domain name and an idea so far, but her next project, Middlegroundhiphop.com, could be the solution to problems such as distribution, marketing, recording and touring for artists throughout the Midwest.

“I can understand this because I’m an artist’s child, I’m an artist myself, and I’m the parent of two artists,” she says. “I don’t want another writer, musician, artist, dancer or painter to have to leave Kansas City to make a living.”

Middlegroundhiphop.com may not provide a panacea for all the area’s artists, but it could at least give local hip-hop purveyors a way to connect, collaborate and find audiences outside the metro. Gamby knows exactly what the problem is; the next step is to figure out how to make Middlegroundhiphop.com the solution. For now, she’s in the right place to begin that process.

“I like the quiet life,” she says. “I get to do what I want to do from back here. When you’re out in front, people can be critical. It feels nice being in the background.”

That is, when her son’s not onstage.