With his TRA money, Dixson graduated, got his hair license and rented a booth in a group salon until he could open his very own business, the self-referential Miss Chips, in Ypsilanti. Dixson loved wearing flashy clothes and befriending his clients and other hairdressers. The money was good, too - sometimes more than $300 a day (in 1980s dollars).
He became an expert in black hair and still expounds upon it like the best kind of scientist: precise and analytical, yet rapt, seduced by his subject. At beauty school, he familiarized himself with different kinds of hair, their textures and tendencies. 'Some hair has dermis, and some races have a dermis and epidermis, so the length of the hair makes a difference,' he says. 'Then you have cowlicks, how the hair grows out the bulb. The thickness, the density of the hair makes a difference per square inch.'
Dixson took his craft beyond the salon and into Detroit's nightclub scene, home to a nascent spectacle of flamboyant 'hair entertainment.' In 1985, he channeled his Motown idols and unleashed his hairstyling mojo in the first-ever nightclub hair show organized by local DJ David 'Hump the Grinder the Sweet Spot Finder' Humphries, or 'Hump' for short.
Listen: Hump's Hair Wars soundcheck
A tall, mustachioed man with a perfect radio voice and doe eyes, Humphries had made rap history in 1984, when he worked on the Fresh Festival tour, featuring Run-DMC, the Fat Boys and Whodini. Back home in Detroit, Humphries was awed by the club kids boasting outrageous hairdos and clothes as they danced to early homegrown techno, or 'real hard funk. I call it fast funk,' Humphries says.
He'd felt a calling to promote. 'These people have so much talent. Nobody was doing anything about it. They needed someone to corral them and put them out there.' Humphries' informal nightclub act gained a following and soon evolved into Hair Wars, a runway pageant of 'fantasy hair' creations paired with outlandish costumes, skits, dancing and original music.
A few years into the hair-show craze, an old friend of Dixson's walked through the doors of Miss Chips. In the first week of classes at Alexander Beauty Academy, in Ann Arbor, Dixson had met another laid-off autoworker, a 300-pound bodybuilder who'd assembled carburetors and heat-coat alternators at Ford for six years. Now called Big Bad D (his legal name), the 'biggest, baddest bodybuilder and hairstylist in America,' he made Dixson an incredible offer.
Thanks to his enormous physique, nearly floor-length braid and outrageous clothes - coats with curtain rods at the shoulders, animal skins hanging off his belt - Big Bad D had been discovered by a big-time hair-products mogul named Chappie Cannon Jr., a man infamous for his profligate habits and fleet of Rolls-Royces. As the spokesman for Cannon's company, American Beauty Products, Big Bad D had promoted and demonstrated the use of Jheri curl cream all over the world and now hoped to recruit Dixson as a fellow 'platform artist.'
Big Bad D's offer could not have come at a better time. Dixson had been served divorce papers on his birthday and felt depressed and isolated. 'My oldest son, he's crying, making himself throw up at the school just to see me. It was a mess.' He jumped on the chance to get some distance from the commotion at home and try something new, more creative and adventurous.
'I told him, 'Look, number one, you got to change your name. You gotta get an outfit. You can't come in here with no 'Chester Dixson,'' ' Big Bad D recalls. 'I took him to my boy's place. He designed him some clothes. The day he started touring, he was signing autographs.'
Dixson took the stage name Ali Du'Shua, after an Afro-Canadian ancestor, and adopted the stage persona of a ruffle-shirted 'Prince of hair.' Du'Shua and Big Bad D were on the road for almost three years, touring Paris, London and the Caribbean with American Beauty Products. They also toured with Hump's growing Hair Wars enterprise to cities like San Diego, Atlanta, Miami and Columbus, Ohio. 'It was refreshing,' Du'Shua says. 'I had the best time of my life.'
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