Bobby Simmons is best known as a member of Stetsasonic, the original “Hip-Hop Band,” but during an extensive conversation with him last week he also shared some classic memories about Melle Mel trolling new rappers in the late 80’s, a two-year stint as a DJ at the Latin Quarters and the escapades of Eric B. and Rakim‘s main muscle, the original 50 Cent. This is part one of a three part interview, so get comfortable…

Robbie: Did you study drumming at school?

Bobby Simmons: I self-taught myself drums, I was six years-old. My brother was in the music business too, he was a session guitarist for groups like Sister Sledge and Dan Hartman in the mid-70’s, so I kinda self-taught myself listening to a lotta the records that he would play and trying to figure out the drum – what does what. The first record that I actually learned how to play – that took me from when I was six to when I was seven – was the Ohio Players. The drummer, Diamond, I was so fascinated how he played drums on ‘Skin Tight’ and ‘Fire,’ I wanted to learn to play how he played. The drum sounds were heavy, the snare was fat, the kick was fat, and Diamond used to do all this fast foot [work] on the pedal.

From there I played in my brothers local band and just kept myself active doing that. Deejaying also helped me how to play drums too, cos in the early 80’s it helped me how to blend timings and beats, with the disco records and the Chuck Brown records and the James Brown records helped me keep great timing. Knowing how to keep timing and knowing what the kick and snare and the hi-hat do, I self-taught myself. I kinda wish I was taught and went to schooling to read for it, but my father took me to drumming school and I never went back. It was taking too long! “I wanna get to this part!” [laughs]

What was your first public performance?

The first time I played for other people was when my brother put me in his band, back in 1976. The band was called The New Experience. We used to open up for Brass Construction and BT Express, cos we all lived in the same neighborhood. They were already popular and they had records out, so for us being a local band and opening for them, it was like, “Oh, shoot!” We used to play a lot of cover songs like George McCrae ‘Rock Me Baby,’ a lot of the Top 40 songs back then.

What was the next step?

My brother was rotating the band members and I wanted to find my own thing to do. Back in ‘78 we were really in the deejaying mode, so I spent most of my time going into the 80’s doing small deejaying, not nothing big, just in the parks. Cats wanted to get on the mic, but it wasn’t really the way cats made it sound like back then, because it really wasn’t about the MC’s back in ‘79 and ‘80. It was really about the DJ. The DJ was the star. It was the MC who knew how to say the DJ’s name and give an introduction. Once guys found a way where they could do routines while the DJ extends the break of a record, we were like, “Yo, this is crazy!” When Sugarhill Records put out their first rap record and we heard “King Tim III” we was like, “Yo, what the hell is this? How do we do this?”

We were not exactly friends, but we would come back and forwards running into Flash and Melle Mel and ‘em, and Sha Rock and ‘em, when we would go uptown to watch them do their shows, or when they used to come downtown to do shows in the Village and play CBGB’s. Even though CBGB’s really was a punk rock club, they used to book rap performers early. I think the punk rock show started at 10, and they would let the rappers do their thing at 7, 8 o’clock. Bambattaa and them used to spin there and play the punk records like ‘Mickey,’ so we used to run into those guys and watch them and try to hone our craft.

Myself, Daddy-O, Fruikwan, Delite – we were actually neighborhood partners. We grew-up in Brooklyn, in Brownsville, in East New York section. Back then we were all part of the same talent events that were going on in the neighborhood. That’s when Daddy-O came up with the idea of having himself and Delite and another guy by the name of Supreme. They were just three MC’s and they were called The Stetson Brothers. They would go out and do these shows, and I used to always tell Daddy-O, “Let me DJ.” They had another guy by the name of Kid Flash who was their DJ. After Supreme left the group, they recruited Fruikwan and Daddy-O was like, “How can we find a way to extend this thing? How can we be like Parliament-Funkadelic? How can we be like Earth, Wind and Fire?”

The first person they recruited was Prince Paul. They saw Prince Paul deejaying at this party in Brooklyn and all Prince Paul saw was these three guys approach him, and Prince Paul, even to this day, he admits that he got scared. “I’m in Brooklyn, I don’t want no problems! Why are these three guys approaching me?” [laughs] DBC was recruited next. DBC’s brother, who was friends with Daddy-O, said, “My man DBC is a DJ and he also creates beats on the drum machine – and he plays keyboards.” Daddy-O’s like, “Yo! That’s dope! We could have a keyboard player and he could play live drum machines on the stage!” When I was deejaying at the Latin Quarters, Daddu-O came up to me and I said, “Yo D, we could do this live drum thing and finally do this Earth, Wind and Fire thing!” Daddy-O was like, “Yo, bet!” That’s how we came up with the concept of Stetsasonic, “The Hip-Hop Band.”

Stet was working on the On Fire album, I rarely was in the studio with them cos I had landed myself a gig. I did a tour with an R&B artists by the name of Lilo Thomas as his drummer. We went out on tour with Alexander O’Neil, the Force MD’s, then I got called for another gig to back-up Natalie Cole. I was trying to figure out a way if the Stet thing didn’t happen, at least I’ve got a good gig to back-up singers and stuff, but when the ‘Go Stetsa’ single took off, we knew something was getting ready to happen. So I had to play my cards right between the Stet gigs and the Stets recordings and the back-up drummer and recording calls I was getting with other artists.

That’s why you don’t really see my picture on the record, cos I was deciding, “Do I stay? Do I leave?” It wasn’t until the In Full Gear album that I decided – when Russell [Simmons] decided he was gonna manage us I said, “You know what? We in good hands. I’m in fellas, let’s roll!” The first record was ‘Just Say Stet,’ it got minor success. It wasn’t until ‘Go Stetsa’ was released, which got huge response, not only from the hip-hop audience but even radio. KISS-FM, which at that time was mainly an R&B station, programmed that song in their afternoon set. We was playing the Latin Quarters, we was laying the Roxy, we was playing the Fever.

Is it true that when that record came on in a club you would have to tuck your chain away?

Oh yeah. ‘Go Stetsa’ was the first record that really represented Brooklyn. Look back on the history of hip-hop, and no one really represented Brooklyn on their records the way we did, beside maybe Cutmaster DC doing a record called ‘Brooklyn’s In The House.’ Even to this day, ‘Go Stetsa’ is the most sampled hip-hop record in R&B music. People have no clue that LL Cool J’s ‘Doin’ It Well’ sampled “Go Brooklyn,” Mary J. Blige ‘Real Love’ sampled from us, and even when you go to Barclays Center, they play the chant when you watch the game. But in ‘86 and ‘87, when that record came on? The first thing you do when you on the dance floor, make sure your chain is tucked in your shirt! Because what the cats used to do when that record came in, they would form a circle around a person who they sought out who was on the dancefloor with their chain on, and they would find a good moment to get the chain. It was funny, because most dudes never realised they chain was gone until a few minutes later – the music was loud, people were hype. Between that record and and Eric B. and Rakim’s ‘Eric B. For President’ were definitely records that caught people on the dancefloor. We’re not proud of it, but at least we know the impact that record had on people.

At that time a lotta rappers weren’t really into using live instrumentation – they were kinda sticking with the Linn Drum machine, trying to get that real big Linn Drum snare and kick sound that Run-DMC and Rick Rubin were famous for and they was using with LL Cool J ‘I Need A Beat.’ We were trying not to really go that format. We wanted to make a different, unique sound, and on top of that we pinned ourselves as being “the hip-hop band,” so we had to clarify what that meant. We were really pretty proud of doing that record. Mind you, ‘Just Say Stet,’ the first single was a Linn Drum machine, and that’s when we realized, “Let’s not go that Run-DMC route.” We had to find a way to create our own style and sound so people could identify us. That’s where the name Stetsasonic came from – “Stet” mean style and “sonic” mean sound.

How did you get that spot as a DJ at the Latin Quarters?

A friend of mine – who has now passed away – his name was Eddie Bell. He worked coat-check at the Latin Quarters and he was like, “Come down to the club one night, get the feel of it.” We went down there, hung out – even worked with him in coat-check! Paradise – he was in the group X-Clan – him and this women Cassandra were the promoters, they booked a lot of the hip-hop acts to perform at the club on Friday and Saturday nights because they were friends with a lot of the rappers that were coming up like Ultramagnetic and Boogie Down Productions. DJ Raoul was the house DJ, cos the Latin Quarters was really about playing Freestyle music. Freestyle at the time was growing, you had Shannon, you had C-Bank, Cover Girls, Lisa Lisa. But they wanted to try this hip-hop thing, so Raoul played hip-hop, but he wasn’t really a thorough hip-hop DJ. He was good though.

For some strange reason, one Saturday night DJ Raoul didn’t show up. He didn’t call, so people were like, “Is he alright? Was he get kidnapped or something?” So they didn’t have a DJ. At the time, Red Alert was the special guest DJ every Friday night, but Red Alert never got there ‘till 1 o’clock cos he would do his radio show on KISS-FM from 9 pm to midnight. Raoul never showed up, so I said, “Yo Paradise, I DJ, I know how to spin.” He was like, “Bet. Go in the booth and hold it down ‘till Red ALert come.” I got on those turntables, and I remember pulling every record that existed back in that time of 1986, from Mighty Mike and the MC’s [I assume he means Mighty Mike Masters], Classical Two’s ‘Rap’s New Generation,’ Kool Moe Dee’s ‘Go See The Doctor’ to Heavy D’s ‘Mr. Big Stuff,’ Biz Markie ‘Nobody Beats The Biz. Is said, “Let me play every record that is gonna get this joint jumping.” Red Alert came in and said, “Who’s the guy deejaying?” “That’s Bobby from Brooklyn!” Red Alert was really surprised to see the dancefloor was packed. I said, “Yo Red, go ahead! You gotta DJ now.” He’s like, “Nah, man. Whatever you’re doing? Keep doing it! I’ll let you know when I’m ready.” That was Red Alert giving me, “You doin’ your thing. You keep rolling.” I kept that job from ‘86 to ‘88.

What was your DJ name?

Brooklyn Bobby! [laughs] So this way it would let people know, “Oh, that’s Bobby from Brownsville!” So no one else could steal your name or steal who you are. Everybody had the same names – you had Kid Flash, Flash this – I couldn’t use Flash, everybody was already using it. So I figured out the three B’s – Brooklyn Bobby from Brownsville. That was my DJ name.

What were some of the best performances you saw there?

The first hip-hop show the Latin Quarters gave was Heavy D and The Boyz – at least on a Friday and Saturday night. After that, Boogie Down Productions, Scott la Rock and ‘em came and did ‘South Bronx.’ That’s when the MC Shan and KRS battle was going on. When they performed that night, everybody was in the house. I have a photo of me and Biz Markie backstage. That was the same night that Grandmaster Melle Mel challenged to battle KRS-One. At the time, KRS-One was coming on his heels and Melle Mel was supposed to have been king back then! He was in the movie Beat Street, he had the hottest record out – ‘White Lines’ – he was supposed to be the king! I have to be honest – KRS-One smoked him! He was young, he was fresh. That was also the night Melle Mel disrespected Biz Markie. He called Biz Markie “Magilla Gorilla.” Melle Mel was goin’ after people! [laughs] Biz never challenged him, he left it alone. He didn’t want to get into that sort of stuff.

Eric B. and Rakim, when they’re second single got released, they used to have a crew called The Strong Island Crew. There was this guy, he was actually the original 50 Cent, who 50 Cent patterned himself after. He wasn’t mentally crazy, but he was this gangster who just didn’t care. His whole thing was to protect his boy Rakim. But you protect someone if they’re in danger – you don’t start the danger. 50 Cent used to start the danger! He would go in clubs – like if someone had a fresh pair of Pumas on, he would tell his boys, “Yo, I’mma go get that guy’s sneakers, and when I get the sneakers meet me downstairs.” He would literally go rob the guy while Rakim and them’s performing on stage. That was his moment to rob people. He passed many years ago, but everybody got someone a part of their crew that’s out there. When rapper’s travelled back then, we called it a “heavy posse.” I remember 50 Cent started something in the club and Eric B. and them couldn’t even finish their show. There was no shooting involved back then, this was basically taking somebody’s chain or sneakers. He was that dude. Cool dude, but he was one of those dudes from the neighborhood who if you say something wrong to him a fight’s gonna break out.

Latin Quarters was set-up where all the stuff was happening upstairs, so once you got into the club you would have to go up a flight of stairs first with some mirrors, you make a left and you go up another flight of stairs with some mirrors and then you enter the club. Latin Quarters was a fancy club back in the 40’s and the 50’s where they had a lot of jazz and Frank Sinatra and them, so it was a sophisticated club. I remember seeing everybody running out of the club – Full Force, UTFO – because a fight really broke out during one of Eric B. and Rakim’s performances. Public Enemy did they first show at the Latin Quarters on a Wednesday night, and nobody liked them. They were booed. And again, here comes Melle Mel! All the new groups that was coming out, ain’t nobody was taking his spot. He’s the king! Melle Mel was takin’ shots at Chuck and that whole group. The audience was quiet, cos nobody knew what they were doing, and he screamed out at the S1W’s “you fake G.I. Joe dolls!”

The thing about Mel is he didn’t stay relevant by harnishing up on his skills as a writer, he kinda felt like, “People already know who I am, what I can do and what I’ve done.” So he lived more on that. A guy like LL Cool J was willing to challenge everybody cos he took the time to stay on his craft as a writer lyrically and style-wise. Mel didn’t do that, Mel kinda figured, “I’mma get up there and do the rhymes we used to do back in the days. I ain’t got to try to polish nothing!” But hip-hop was changing and cats was coming different. He didn’t drown, he just stayed in the water, floating, and he gave cats the opportunity to take shots at him.

It sounds like he was just hanging out at clubs and heckling people.

Exactly. Because that was his moment to let people know that Melle Mel is in the house. That’s how he always kept his name relevant. KRS-One was pretty new – who better to heckle than somebody with a hot record out? So Mel knew what he was doing by trying to stay relevant by challenging these people, but kinda got lost without staying sharp on his skills. I was there that night that Mikey-D and Melle Mel went at it. That was priceless.

Part Two coming soon…

Diamond D is releasing his latest project, The Diam Piece, on 30 September so I caught up with him to find out the stories behind each track and get a little bit of insight into the process of constructing a production project with so many guests.

Diamond D: It’s more or less a production LP, about two and a half years it took. A lot of tracks I didn’t even use. I had about 27 tracks but I only used 18. Some of the artists I was in the studio with, and others – because of their touring schedule and my touring schedule – I just sent them music and they sent me the session back. If the track that I give them has a sample in it that’s giving it direction then they’ll follow that. If there is no sample or concept at the beginning I just let the MC’s paint their own pictures and try to figure out how can make it connect. I use a lot more live instrumentation now. I still chop and manipulate samples, but my sound just sounds bigger now. Just using better equipment so the sample frequencies are better.

1. Rap Life feat. Pharoahe Monch

I gave him free reign to do whatever he wanted to do. The hook that he laid, it was cool but I didn’t feel that it fit song. He was rhyming about rap life – or his interpretation of it – so I put the hook on it and he loved it. I was just following his lead.

2. Where’s The Love feat. Talib Kweli, Elzhi and Skyzoo

When I sent them the track, the “Where’s the love?” sample was in there already, so I just told the MC’s to build the track around that. Talib laid his first, Skyzoo laid his second and Elzhi laid his third. It was done in separate studios but I made sure everyone heard everyone’s verse so the song would have continuity.

3. It’s Nothing feat. Fat Joe, Chi Ali and Freddie Foxxx

Joe went first, Freddie Foxxx went second and then Chi-Ali went third, even though Chi-Ali is the second MC on the track. Since Fat Joe laid his verse first, he had a hook saying, “It’s nothing! I’ve got crack! It’s nothing!” So I just manipulated that to “It’s nothing.” By the time Freddie Foxxx got it, he had a pattern to follow. Then when I played Joe’s verse and Freddie Foxxx’s verse to Chi-Ali, then he knew what to pattern himself after. It’s the producer’s job just to make sure that the song sounds cohesive. You don’t want three MC’s on a track – one is rhyming about apples, one is rhyming about cherries, one is rhyming about oranges.

4. Only Way 2 Go feat. Pete Rock

I had the “Only way to go” sample in there so Pete wrote around that and I did the same thing. That was one of the easier tracks, cos the instrumental already had the direction in it and me and Pete recorded it in the studio together.

5. Hard Days feat. The Pharcyde

I gave them free reign and I love what they did. The picture that they painted on that track? It fits perfect. I like how they incorporated the hook to be in syncopation with the horns. I had no input, all I had to do was just focus on the music.

6. I Ain’t The One To Fuc Wit ft. Scram Jones

I sent it to Scram, he laid his verse and added the scratches so when he sent it back it was already in song format and had a concept I could fuck with. I always knew that Scram could rhyme, he’s a nice MC, but I didn’t know he was nice like that on the scratches too. When I heard what he sent me I was blown away. And his verse is crazy too!

7. Pump Ya Brakes feat. Rapsody, Boog Brown and Stacy Epps

Rapsody is 9th Wonder’s artist. Stacy Epps,she’s done some work with Madlib, and Boog Brown – she’s another female artist out of Atlanta. She’s got a strong underground following. Rapsody laid her parts first and come up with the hook. I loved it, I sent it to Boog Brown and Stacy Epps and said, “Listen to Rapsody’s part” so they knew what to structure their verses around. That’s one of my favorite songs on the album.

8. Take Em Off Da Map feat. Black Rob

My man B.R The General. He painted his picture on there, he had the hook. Again, I liked it so we just kept it.

9. We Are The People Of The World feat. Kurupt, Tha Alkaholiks

I gave them the concept. When I got it back I was I blown away – just the way they structured their verses on it. I like the way Kurupt starts the song off, too. Ras Kass was in the studio when we were working on that together too, out of Las Vegas.

10. Jose Feliciano

I ain’t even know if I was gonna use it, cos it’s just a verse. I called it Jose Feliciano because he’s from The Bronx, like myself. He’s blind but he still went on to win Grammy’s and put out all this great music. For me, he stands as someone – you come from nothing and make something out of yourself regardless of your surroundings or your shortcomings. It’s just a metaphor for all the bullshit I had to overcome to get on my feet and to make my name.

11. Handz Up fea t. Hi-Tek

When I took him the track, the scratches weren’t on there yet. He rhymed about himself and how he came up in the game – hustling and going out of state to make beats – so when I got it back I went into the studio with my man DJ Big Phil from outta Pittsburgh. I told him, “Bring some records and we’ll see what we want.” We sat there for about an hour and he picked out some nice joints to scratch – the M.O.P joint. I had a female come in the studio and just add some background parts just to hype it up a little more. Shouts out to DJ Big Phil.

12. Pain feat. A.G., Chino XL

I always wanted to work with Chino XL, I think he’s real talented on the microphone. That’s one of the most spiritual tracks on the album, talking about different struggles everybody goes through. AG laid his part first and then Chino laid his.

13. Vanity feat. Nottz

Me, Nottz and J. Dilla recorded a song [“We Gangstas” from 2005’s The Diamond Mine album] so we have a history. I respect Nottz as a producer and as an MC so I just reached out to him on that platform. We didn’t record it together. He laid his parts down, I worked on the hook and then I laid my verse.

14. It’s Magic feat. Alchemist and Evidence as Stepbrothers

Me and Al go back a while, and Evidence? I’ve always fucked with him too. On the new Dilated Peoples album, I produced a track called “Let Your Thoughts Fly Away.” That’s all family right there. They’re still doing the Step Brothers thing, even though they’ve got separate careers.

15. The Game feat. Grand Daddy I.U.

We all love Grand Daddy I.U from when he came out back in the day. I reached out to him and he definitely didn’t disappoint me. We’re friends on Twitter and shit like that. I sent him the track and about a week later he got it back to me.

16. Let The Music Talk feat. Kev Brown

Me and Kev go back to the Up Above Records. I put out some music out some music over there, and when Kev came out he put some stuff out there too. It was a Japanese label, that’s where I first met Kev. We just stayed in touch with each other on some producer/MC shit. We both do our thing like that, so it just happened.

17. Ace Of Diamonds ft. Masta Ace

We always wanted to work together and I was able to make it happen. That was one of the first tracks that was recorded for the project.

18. 187 feat. Guilty Simpson, Ras Kass

I first heard about Guilty through his work with J.Dilla back in the days, and I’ve always liked him, so I reached out to Guilty first. I went out to Detroit and we recorded that in the studio together, then I sent it to Ras on the west coast and he laid his part down.

19. Superman – Produced By DJ Scratch

That’s the only outside production, that’s a bonus track. The song is actually three years old, it was supposed to be for DJ Scratch’s album, but he blessed me with it so I put it on my project. I perform it as part of my shows, so my fans are familiar with it already.

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Continuing my discussion with Stetsasonic drummer Bobby Simmons, we discuss touring, Flavor Flav ethering Prince, the rivalry with EPMD, beef with WreckX N Effect and vaulted tracks.

Robbie: Touring must have been essential back then.

Bobby Simmons: The best tour I’ve ever done was that Run-DMC Run’s House tour. Every night I would sit on the side of the stage and I couldn’t wait to watch Run and them’s show. Run and them were just amazing to watch. When you watch Krush Groove and you saw Jam-Master Jay cut that “Run! Run!” You were like, “Oh shoot! They getting ready to do something!” It was really that kind of intensity in the air, waiting for Run to come on, and DMC just standing there with his arm’s folded. You just couldn’t wait to see Run walk out! Then when he came out, Run really controlled you with what he said. You didn’t see that in the movie. You didn’t get to see people take their Adidas sneakers off and put it in the air. When I saw that, I said, “This is it. It’s finished.” Who in the world can get everyone in Madison Square Garden to take off their sneakers and put them in the air? All you saw was different colored Adidas in the air. It was amazing to see that command. It was beautiful.

Did you feel a lot of pressure sharing the same stage as Run?

It did help us step our game, because Daddy-O, Delite and Fruikwan had to be as good at commanding the crowd as well as Run did. When we performed, before the show started you saw the drum kit on the horizon, you saw the keyboard on the horizon and you saw the turntable on the horizon, so people used to get confused. “Is a band coming on? Are they a rap group?” So we had to make it clear to people and step our game up. The first show on that Run’s House tour was Tallahassee, Florida. We shared the tour bus with Public Enemy. We did a hot twenty minutes – ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’ was our second single, and ‘Sally’ was already a big record – and Jam-Master Jay met us on the side of the stage, and he said, “You don’t see nobody in hip-hop doing what you’re doing. Everybody else rhymes over their instrumentals – you guys play your records live.” I’ll never forget that.

Lyor Cohen, at the time when Russell was managing us, he used to always get us and EPMD into a fight. Strictly Business album was the hottest record of the summer of ‘88. You can’t front, even we loved it! But when we played certain cities and certain areas, we were bigger than EPMD, so we used to say, “Let EPMD open us for us.” Lyor used to always be like “No, EPMD got the number one hip-hop record in the city right now and the record is going gold!” We used to be like, “Yo, but DC is our city! ‘Sally’ is a big record in DC.” “No, ‘You Gots To Chill’ just went gold, Daddy-O!” He got us into fights with EPMD so much that when we played overseas we had to flip the bill between EPMD and us. First half of the tour in Germany was EPMD headlining, the second half – in London and France – we headlined. But we killed EPMD every place we went anyway. We murdered them every show! [laughs] It was in fun though, it wasn’t like we hated each other.

Can we talk about the recording process with the Stetsasonic albums?

The first album I wasn’t in New York much because I was traveling with Lilo, so when they were recording Daddy-O would either play it to me by phone and I would let him know, “That’s hot!” or “Do this version.” In Full Gear was pretty much all of us, because at that time in our creative flow we were all coming up with ideas on how to do things. Me and Daddy-O did ‘Showtime,’ ‘This Is It Y’all,’ ‘Float On,’ ‘It’s In my Song.’ Prince Paul did stuff like ‘Pen and Paper,’ Delite did ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’ and Fruikwan did ‘Sally.’ That was the best album for us, we had fun doing that album and spending Tommy Boy’s money.

The Blood, Sweat and No More Tears album was at a time where we weren’t even focusing with each other. Fruikwan had already quit the group, we sold a gold record with ‘Self Destruction’ and me, Daddy-O and Prince Paul were doing production work on other records. Me and Daddy-O was working on Audio Two’s album at the time. Daddy-O did the ‘Top Billin’ record and I did ‘When the Two Are On The Mic.’ We were trying to craft our producing skills to make sure we were good at what we were doing, not only for Stetsasonic but for other artists. And of course there was Prince Paul in the studio working on De La Soul records. That album sold two million copies, so Prince Paul set of mind was going more into production. He did ‘The Gasface’ with 3rd Bass, he got a call to do the Big Daddy Kane album, so his work started becoming demanding. Daddy-O the same way – he got a call to produce the Third World album, he did the Forbidden Love record, he did the Cookie Crew album. I got a call from Vernon Reid to do Living Color’s record, ‘Funny Vibe,’ and me and Prince Paul did that record together. I was producing Whodini’s next record on MCA, cos they had left Jive. I did ‘Judy’ and ‘Freaks.’ After the Living Color record I got a call to produce a song for the ‘Rocky V’ soundtrack. I produced the song ‘Home Sweet Home’ for The 7A3, and it’s actually in the film when Rocky goes back to the old neighborhood. Everybody was just in their old zone, we weren’t even friends. When it was time for us to go back into the studio, cats was like, “I’m working on such-and-such album.” In order for me to get the album to be what it is, I had to tell Prince Paul, “Submit the track, I’ll get the guys to write to it and then I’ll go and mix it. Then you let me know if you like the mix or if you want to do your own versions to it.” I took more control of the Blood, Sweat and No Tears album as far as getting it finished.

Why did the cassette version of the third album have so many extra songs?

That was my idea. CD’s were getting popular in 1991, and we recorded a lot of songs for that album and we had to figure out how to fit most of ‘em on it. So I said, “Let’s put a few on the cassette, put a few on the CD and let the LP be shorter.” I put ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ on the cassette, which was a mistake. I should have put it on the CD.

What was the motivation for making the album if you were all doing your own thing by then? Pressure from Tommy Boy?

We were under contract to Tommy Boy for four albums. After doing the ‘Blood, Sweat and No Tears’ album, Russell offered to pay Tom Silverman for Stetsasonic so he could sign us to Def Jam, like he did for EPMD with Sleeping Bag. Russell offered him money and Tom Silverman wouldn’t let us go. We were clashing with Tom Silverman, because he was pinning Daddy-O and Prince Paul against each other. “Y’all should let Prince Paul produce the whole next Stetsasonic album!” I guess he felt Prince Paul was able to give Stetsasonic a new sound or new concept. Tom Silverman said, “Look, we don’t know how to market you guys as a hip-hop band. We need to find a concept that’s going to work.” But we didn’t want to change who we were. We used to have mad arguments with Tom and Monica. By the time it came to the fourth album and Tom Silverman wouldn’t let us off the label, we said, “If there’s no group, you can’t get no record. So guess what? The group don’t exist no more.” By ‘95 we were no longer under contract with Tommy Boy.

Uptown mentioned you did some songs together that didn’t come out?

I loved the article on my boy Uptown, that was actually the first record I ever did. I did that while we were on the Run’s House tour, the summer of ‘88. Dante [Ross] called me, he was telling me about this kid that they just signed to see if we could work together on something. I believe I still have a cassette somewhere in my house of another track that we did called ‘Let It Drop.’ We did a couple of stuff that didn’t make it that I did final mixes on too. I guess Tommy Boy didn’t know whether or not they were gonna release a full album, and they were just kinda testing him out with a single to see what they were gonna do with him as an artist. They was prepping De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising and Latifah’s album, so they were concentrating on those two albums at that moment.

What did you do after the group disbanded?

I put a band together for Christopher Williams and Mary J. Blige when they were all starting out and everybody needed live bands to do live shows. I was also still producing records, I produced a record for Smif ‘N Wessun, I did a record for them called ‘Do Real Things.’ Daddy-O did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers record, and on the song ‘Higher Ground’ that’s me playing the drums! Daddy-O didn’t like the drums on the original version, “This needs to be beefed-up, this is Stevie Wonder! Lemme call Bobby!” I also got to jam with Prince, I was like a kid in a candy store! My friend Tony Mosley – Tony M – was in the New Power Generation, and Tony invited me to Radio City Music Hall, so I went down at 1 in the afternoon. Prince and them were sound-checking, so I’m thinking, “Sound-check will be over by 2 o’clock.” He was sound-checking from 1 o’clock to 6 o’clock! That’s how much this dude Prince is such a perfectionist! That’s like some James Brown thing. You don’t leave your instrument until he says, “We’re done.” We met Prince prior to that in Minneapolis, he came to see our show when we played the First Avenue club when we did the Public Enemy Bring The Noise tour. When he came to the show it was snowing and the club was packed! He was standing against the wall and he had on this long, black trenchcoat and black gloves and shit, when his hair was real long, like that Graffiti Bridge looking hair-do, and Flavor Flav spotted him in the back while Public Enemy was performing. Flav said, “Yeah we understand we in Minneapolis, we in Prince town, but PE is up in the motherfucker! Let me tell y’all something – fuck Prince! Let me hear you say ‘Fuck Prince!’” The funny thing is everyone in the audience knew he was there and they just did it. He got the audience to say it. “Fuck Prince!” [laughs] I’m not sure if he was on cocaine or he was drunk, but I was like, “Yo Flav, you buggin! What is wrong with you dude?” [laughs]

What caused the issue you guys had with Wreckx N Effect?

‘Anytime, Anyplace’ was a record where we went in the studio the next morning. We had just got off doing some spot dates with Guy, and Teddy Riley’s brother Mark – his group Wreckx N Effect didn’t like how we were saying we were the “hip-hop band” or using instruments in hip-hop songs. I guess Mark and them felt like, “Nah man, ain’t nobody gonna be taken acclaim of the name.” I guess they thought we were trying to take on the name ‘New Jack Swing,’ but we didn’t say nothing about New Jack Swing! Some of these rappers felt like they could take on rappers that came before them. So they did a record and Wise played the part where they said, “Stetsa is the runner-up/and by the way, the new guy – he sucks!” They were talkin’ about Wise, because Wise started rhyming [more] because Fruikwan wasn’t in the group anymore. We saw them at the New Music Seminar and we approached them. Teddy Riley and them had what you call “henchmen”. Gene Griffin was this henchman who worked with criminals in Harlem. Of course we had our Brooklyn guys with us, cos we knew how they traveled. We had pretty much the whole of Brownsville in the lobby of the Marriott hotel. We saw them on the escalator and Daddy-O said, “Yo, what’s the situation about y’all dissing us on your record?” And they got really upset. It was July 1989 and a fight almost broke in the Marriott hotel between us and Wreckx N Effect. Fortunately, security and Teddy Riley also calmed the whole thing down, so we came to the conclusion where we weren’t gonna fight in the hotel, cos we didn’t want to ruin the reputation of the seminar and the hotel. Kedar Massenburg, who was managing us, got Daddy-O and Teddy Riley to talk, “Hold your people back, we’ll hold our people back.” We said, “Don’t worry about it, we’re gonna get at y’all!” We figured we’d get at them on record.

The next morning we did the record and we recorded it in Daddy-O’s house. We told Tom and them, when we put out ‘Speaking Of A Girl Named Suzy,’ put that on the b-side. That kid got shot that same night. Wreckx N Effect was three members – it was Markell, Aquil the rapper and the other guy [Brandon Mitchell], he was the DJ. He got killed at a club. We wanted to make sure he got shot had nothing to do with us, cos people thought, “Yo, they got into something with Stet! Maybe that had something to do with it!” We wasn’t even at the party they went to. Come to find out he got killed over a girl. We were glad that that got clarified, cos we didn’t want nobody thinking we were going around just shooting people for dumb stuff. Daddy-O said, “We the type of dudes that pay our respect to people – but still put the record out so Markell and them know!” [laughs] I kinda felt bad. “But D – the dude got killed!” “Nah, this record is hot! Put it out anyway!” People loved it.

Did you have issues with any other crews?

The only one who approached us, on some slick stuff but never on record, was MC Hammer. This was before ‘You Can’t Touch This.’ We played Detroit, the Joe Lewis arena. MC Hammer was like, “Yo, I’m big in Detroit! We gonna smoke everybody in the show in Detroit!” He was taking shots at everybody. He was the opening act for us, the tour was Public Enemy, EPMD, Big Daddy Kane and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Ice-T was on it too, but MC Hammer and NWA they did spots dates with us. They didn’t do New York , they didn’t do D.C, they only did Oakland and the mid west/west coast area. This is when it was just MC Hammer and his two dancers and 2 Bigg MC. He was friends with Daddy-O too, and he said, “I’m smoking everybody tonight! I’m smokin’ you, I’m smokin’ Ice-T, I’m smokin’ Public Enemy!” To be honest with you, he did good. Hammer smoked, but that was Public Enemy’s night. Then Hammer came to us after he saw us perform and he told us 2 Bigg MC laughed at us. He said, “Look at Stetsasonic! They look like the Silver Screen Band!” [from The Little Rascals TV series] Then MC Hammer looked at 2 Bigg MC and said, “Don’t laugh, that ain’t funny. We getting ready to do that next. We’re gonna do it bigger!” To this day, he’s a friend of ours.

We was always into listening to different styles of rap music, it didn’t have to be what we were doing in New York. When we were on our tour bus it was a lot of different stuff. We heard about NWA through Wise – Wise was friends with MC Ren. When Ren gave Wise a cassette after we left LA, we were on the bus and we heard this song, ‘A Bitch Iz A Bitch’ and we was like, “What the?” But we liked what they were doing. We were the first ones that let Luke Skyywalker co-produce our record [“Miami Bass”], because we were fans of the 2 Live Crew back in ‘87. Everybody in New York? They didn’t want to hear no 2 Live Crew! All they wanted to hear was Rakim and Boogie Down Productions! Once we got into town, we always found people to take us around to the city, cos we wanted to go to the record store to look through the bins find records. Back then, 2 Live Crew didn’t have a record deal, so they were selling cassettes from out of their car, so we were buying from them! That gave Daddy-O the idea, “Yo, we could do a record like this with someone who’s not from New York. I just got a call from Lisa and them, they want me to work with this group called the Cookie Crew.”

What can you tell me about Wise?

Daddy-O always used to call him the “sex symbol” of the group, he would come out on stage and the girls used to go crazy. Wise used to dress in his Bally sneakers, his tracksuit and his big Cazels glasses with the gold frame.

What was the chemistry between the three MC’s in the studio?

Between Daddy-O and Delite, the chemistry was good. When Fruikwan left the group I was sad, cos Fruikwan used to say the illest lines on his songs. Daddy-O was more raspy and hard, Delite was very outfront and Fruikwan had the voice that fit in the middle. They were competitive at times, but competitive so that they could make the record work.

Why did Fruikwan leave the group?

It was in January 1989, we had a meeting at Rush Management, Russell Simmons office downtown in Manhattan. We got a call that there was going to be the first hip-hop awards show ever. It was gonna be at the Apollo. Daddy-O got real excited, “You see what Guy and them is doing? They wearing slick suits and slick outfits. My man has these outfits for us and he’s got these genie pants and we can wear our Ballys with these pants and he’s got these shirts!” These shirts had gold and glitter, sparkle-type black shirts. I think he was so excited about what Guy and Teddy Riley was looking like that he felt like we should upgrade to that look. Everybody in the group is like, “Nah man, let’s just stick to the track pants and sneakers and do what we gotta do.” Daddy-O was firm. “I’m telling you, we’ve got to look better, cos Heavy D and them is wearing suits now!” Fruikwan was the type of dude, like, “Yo man, I’m not wearing those pants, man.” Fruikwan used to tailor his own clothes. “I’ll make my own joints, I’m not wearing these pants.” He just wasn’t having it. Daddy-O started to get mad. “If you’re not gonna wear it then you can just leave! You can be out! This is important to us! Tommy Boy is gonna put money behind us on the next record!” So Daddy-O and Fruik just got into a discussion in the other room and ended up with Fruikwan leaving Rush management and we ain’t see Fruikwan since! Here’s the funny thing – Wise, Daddy-O and Delite wore the suit! [laughs] I’ve got the video tape!

What was the story with ‘Float On’?

That was Delite’s idea. When we originally did it, it was a lot more dusty – we used the original record with the scratches in it – and we used ‘Impeach The President’ as the beat. Russell Simmons told Daddy-O, “Yo. that’s dope! But don’t make it hip-hop. You should get Vinny Bell and Alvin Money to produce it as an R&B rap record.” They was producing for Rush at the time, they was producing Alyson Williams, they was producing Oran “Juice” Jones. We liked the version that they did, we we weren’t mad at it. It was pre-R. Kelly and pre-Guy. That’s the reason of having the cassette – I’ve still got the original version!

Any plans on releasing that kind of stuff?

That’s what I was talking to Prince Paul about. There was a song that was supposed to be on the In Full Gear album, it was a diss to EPMD called ‘You Thought It Was Your Thing?’ We did an answer-back record to their first single, ‘It’s My Thing,’ over the same record, like, “We’re gonna do this better than y’all!” But Tommy Boy never released it. We still got a lotta stuff we did. We’ve got a freestyle trap that we did on the Mr. Magic radio show, allathat. I said this would make a great project for Rhino Records to put out where they could put ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz,’ ‘Sally,’ ‘Go Stetsa’ and add all this unreleased and b-side stuff to it.

Back to Part One.

The always under-appreciated role of the engineer, both in the studio and on tour, is always a fascinating one. Akili Walker, who has worked with everyone from hip-hop production legend Larry Smith to James Brown, Eddie Kendricks, Kurtis Blow, Prince, George Clinton and LL Cool J, took some time out after the release of his new book, Turn The Horns On, to recall some of his best memories behind the boards.

Robbie: Where about did you grow up?

Akili Walker: I grew up in Freeport, Long Island, right next to Chuck D and Flavor Flav. We were like a mile from each other, they grew up in Roosevelt, but they’re a little younger than I was.

Are you a recording engineer by trade?

I’m an audio engineer, I switch between the studio and on the road. I was a musician at an early age – I was a drummer when I was thirteen. I won the ‘Battle of the Bands’ with my band and we was in the Musicians Union of New York at the age of thirteen. My father was an audiophile, he loved music and he had a large jazz collection and an expensive stereo. My drumming career ended when I was sixteen. I stopped drumming to join the hippy generation and do drugs.

What was the next step?

When I was nineteen I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I saw some friends of mine doing sound at as club and I determined that that was what I wanted to do. I started studying under them at this club. They had performers like Roland Kirk, Lee Morgan, Pharaoh Sanders, McCoy Tanner, Sun Ra – all of the great jazz performers were performing at this jazz club called ‘The East’ in Brooklyn. I was there for a little while and I studied under the engineers and started to engineer shows myself. The I got an opportunity to go on the road with Lonnie Liston Smith, a jazz pianist, then Gil-Scott Heron, then Jimmy Castor Bunch. At that point I decided I wanted to be a studio engineer so I took a couple of classes. I got an offer to be an assistant engineer at a studio called Music Farm in Manhattan, this is 1979. Some of the clients in the studio were Brass Construction, Cameo and Lloyd Price. There were so many different musics in the 70s and 80s, and the studio industry was so busy and vibrant at that time. I worked at about 90% of the studios in Manhattan, freelancing with my different clients.

What are some of your best memories from working as a studio engineer?

We did a live album with James Brown, Live In New York. The only time we met him was when we were mixing. He said, ‘The bass is like a ball, and everything has to fit into that ball! OK, that’s it. I’m out!’ Which means that he wanted a lotta bass in his mix and everything has to fit into that. Jimmy Castor was a great performer, he used to teach me tricks on the road. Like when you go to a ladies house on the road, you need to leave a phone number with somebody cos you don’t know what you’re walking into. You might be getting set-up to get robbed. Gil-Scott Heron was a perfectionist. He used to tell me, ‘You tell the promoters what equipment that you need before you get to the gig. It’s called a rider and that’s supposed to have everything. If they don’t have everything that they’re supposed to have, we will not do the gig!’ He wanted things to be right. Phyllis Hyman used to tell me the same thing.

What were some of your favorite studios to work from?

I started at Music Farm and then we bought a sister studio around the corner called Soundworks. They did Steely Dan there, Gaucho album there, they did Stevie Wonder there, they did KISS there. I engineered Eddie Kendricks, Bootsy Collins, George Clinton there, so Soundworks was one of my favorites at the time. Quadrasonic, which was later called Quad Studios where they did a lot of the Biggie stuff, I was there at the beginning of that studio. Those were two of my favorite studios to work at.

Can you tell me about working with LL Cool J?

That was during his Bigger and Deffer album. I did the Def Jam 87 Tour – it was LL Cool J, Whodini, Eric B & Rakim, Public Enemy. That was a great experience. They were on tour already and they didn’t like the way the sound was going. I had been working on the road with Whodini previously on several occasions and they asked me to come out.

Was that when LL was coming out of that giant radio on stage?

Yeah. He was an exciting performer. At one point of the tour we combined with Run-DMC’s Raising Hell tour. The line-up was Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, LL and Run-DMC. LL was so excited because he had his first major tour going on, and he wanted to show the big boys what he’s about! When he first came on stage, his first words were, ‘Akili! We gotta get hyped!’ So I’m in the mood, I’m in the groove, I turn it up, we’re rocking the house. We were using Run-DMC’s sound company, and they didn’t know about LL’s sounds, which somebody described as, ‘Louder than an AC/DC concert.’ I’m doing my thing and they’re trying to turn things down and I’m slapping their hands and I’m telling them to, ‘Get outta here!’ We just rocked the house that night! Later on, Run-DMC came on and I happened to walk back by the soundboard and Russell [Simmons] was back there. He said, ‘Akili! Akili! Do what you did for LL!’ Cos it wasn’t hot like LL. I said, ‘I can’t do that Russell, it’s unethical.’ He said, ‘Fuck that, man! This is my shit! This is my tour!’ I said, ‘OK, just tell the engineer to turn up the highs.’ Of course, it didn’t sound like ours. That was LL’s house that night. When I went back to the hotel, Jam-Master Jay was in the lobby and he said, ‘Oh, I figured you had something to do with this. You’ve been around this business longer than me!’

You might think that the mix doesn’t sound right, but as soon as people are partying? Leave it alone, everything’s fine! Just like when I did Hammersmith Odeon in London, everybody’s blowing whistles and they’ve got foghorns – I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on here? But they’re having a good time, just leave it alone. They must be cool!’ [laughs]

Was that the show that Public Enemy used on their second album?

I believe so. That was the Bigger and Deffer tour, I got to go all through Europe with LL and Public Enemy back in 1987.

Were you surprised at how excited the European audience was?

They were different than US audiences. People were like, ‘Why is LL headlining and not Public Enemy?’ I was like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ LL had this tune called ‘I Need Love,’ a ballad. This song had high accolades, he was arrested on the for humping on the couch – performing a sexual act – in Georgia. So everyone couldn’t wait for him to come to their town to perform that song. Then when we went to London they booed him when he sang that song. That just shows you the diversity of music. They didn’t like that ballad, ‘What the hell kind of hip-hop is that?!’ [laughs] They liked the more aggressive stuff.

Why do you think rappers always complain about the soundman at shows?

Engineers are used to dealing with bands and here we go with these turntables. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ Engineers with sound companies just put the record up and put the vocals on and leave it alone. But you need to EQ the record and bring out the highs and mids so they can hear all the instrumentation in the record, just like you do with a band. I knew the music and I loved the music, so I would add reverbs and delays to the track and to the vocalist to give people a different experience. It’s better than what they’re used to hearing. Whodini did a song called ‘One Love’ and there was a little breakdown and then I used to add reverb to the snare drum. Actually I used to add reverb to the whole track, but it was effective! As an engineer, you have to deal with the little nuances and know the performer’s sound. You don’t just put the faders up and then just leave it alone. That’s what a lot of people do, and I wasn’t about that.

Did you ever get to work with Prince?

Prince was my second artist as a professional engineer! [laughs] This was in 1980, I didn’t know who Prince was. He had come in the studio to do a demo for one of the spin-off groups like The Imperials or The Impressions. He brought Dez Dickenson and Andre Symone from The Revolution in with him. I spent a lot of time trying to get a drum sound that they liked, and Prince wasn’t saying anything, it was Andre and Des that were doing all of the talking. When I finally got the drum sound the way they liked it, the only thing Price said to me all night was, ‘Nice drum sound.’ He was going from instrument to instrument and I was amazed like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’

My next session after that was Humble Pie! The rock group from England, Steve Marriott, Humble Pie. They had come to do a new record in the 80s with a new band and a new label. I mixed the song that was a hit from the album called ‘Fool For A Pretty Face.’ I’ve had a lot of diversity in music, from jazz to rock to hip-hop to soca. I’ve done like fifty soca albums, working with the Mighty Arrow, [Lord] Kitchener and others from Trinidad and the other islands.

What are some of the most memorable albums you worked on?

The Fat Boys album I did with Kurtis Blow, The Fat Boys Are Back, that was a great album with a sound I loved. I did an album with Lester Bowie on Brass Fantasy, he’s a jazz artist. I Only Have Eyes For You is the name of the album, I love the way that project came out. I also did three albums with Eddie Kendricks. I loved Eddie Kendricks, like most of black America.

How wild were the P-Funk guys in the studio?

They were very wild. During my first year, the studio engineer called me, ‘Guess who’s coming in the studio? George Clinton!’ He knew I was a P-Funk fan, and he said, ‘You’re doing the session!’ Peter Criss from Kiss was in the studio at Soundworks, and he was running over time. George, Bootsy and everyone was waiting in the lobby, and I was all nervous. I go up to George and I said, ‘Is there any special mic you wanna use on Bootsy? He said, ‘Nah man, it’s gonna be alright. Just relax!’ In the studio they went back and forth over phrases they wanted Bootsy to say in the session, ‘To pee or not to pee, that is the question!’

Do you have any special techniques to check your mixes?

Some people have a little transistor radio in the studio to listen to it. Everything sounds good in the studio, but you have to listen to it in all different elements. I used to like to listen to it in the car.

How did keep yourself amused on long tours?

Most of my career I was addicted to cocaine and alcohol, so a lot of the road is blurry to me. I guess I took the edges off, I had my routines in every city I went to. But come December, I would have been clean twenty years. I couldn’t get high or be drunk while I was working, because you’ve got 30,000 people that’s depending on you to provide the sound. If you mess it up, that’s kinda crazy! I left my partying to after the gig. Being an audio engineer, you don’t get the accolades like some people do, like Grammys, but there’s nothing like rocking 30,000 people at a concert or hearing a record that you’ve mixed on the radio. Those are your rewards.

Head over to Turn The Horns On for more about Akili and grab a copy of his book for more of his studio memories.

Cole James Cash proves that being a homeless, recovering drug addict who wears a mask is no obstacle to making rap albums and hanging with XXXL XXX gals.

Robbie: Tell me about the BBW album?

Cole James Cash: I was trying to make the shit sound romantic, as ridiculous as it sounds. I was trying to bring a theme of romance, which is why you hear a lot of soft and very melodic type samples.

Were there many BBW porn stars that you wanted involved on the album that refused?

Not so much refused as ignored. [laughs] When we did the song named after Karla Lane, that’s when Kacey Parker was like, ‘I would like a song!’ That’s when she threw her support completely behind it. Everything from being on the cover to doing the intro. She went out of her way yo help me and she didn’t have to. I asked Sophia Rose and she straight ignored every email I sent.

How did you first develop an interest in big girls?

My first girlfriend was this chubby white girl, she was one of those over-developer 14 year olds and she had some huge tits, man. As I got older, I used to hit up the thumbnail sites, because there were no video sites in ‘98. I’d always pick the ‘big girl’ categories and they’d only be like a few. I used to think that something was fuckin’ wrong with me. I used to date this skinny-ass girl, her name was Laura. I was like, ‘I’m dating a normal girl now, so I don’t need to be looking at chubby girls no more.’ That lasted about a day. From then I willfully wanted to be with girls who were bigger or thicker. In college I dated one skinny girl and I discovered that during sex I just couldn’t get off. That’s when I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m coming out the BBW closet!’ [laughs]

Do you feel like you’re on the cusp of an exciting new rap genre?

This is the worst time of my life. Recovering from drugs, losing my family, having the mother of my child look at me and be ashamed, being homeless and being a veteran and having no where to go? It sucks. Making this album has been one of the toughest things of my life. The album is fun but my life is not going great right now. These aren’t a bunch of strip club anthems. It’s called a ‘pornographic opera’ because it’s a melding of things, musically. There are a couple of songs that are trashy but there others that are talking about things in a beautiful way. The theme is romance. Every single song matches the woman [it’s named after], I researched every woman extensively. Not just looking at them fuck – I’m talking about I would look at their Twitters, trying to get a feel for how they are. That song ‘Angelina Castro’ has that Cuban folk sample. ‘Sam 38G,’ that song is supposed to sound epic, because she’s epic! She’s been around for the last fourteen years. If she was a rapper, she’d be Jigga or Nas. Still relevant, still at the top of her game.

You’ve managed to get a lot done this year considering your circumstances.

Nobody has an excuse. I went through several halfway houses, I was kicked out of one for fighting. I was in a homeless shelter in March, so if someone’s telling me they can’t do it for various reasons I understand, but it shows me how serious they are if they can get it done. That’s why I set deadlines. If you can’t get me a song in a month and a half then you don’t want it that badly! Once I was off drugs, I could concentrate and I did everything I could to get my name out. I had to beg my mother to buy me a laptop so I could get back into music and she was nice enough to do it.I went to Texas and produced a guy called Dubwerth and he paid me to do 25 songs. I took that money and I went to LA and I met up with Kacey, who lended me a hand. LEX is the one who organized almost all of the MC’s on the album, and he’s been there to give me advice. He’s a great guy.

How did you find yourself in such a bad situation?

I was addicted [to painkillers] for four years. When you finally sober up and you realise everything that you’ve lost and ruined, to the point where nobody will even let you in their home? People are ashamed because you’re a drug addict, and you cheated on the woman you loved with drugs? It’s painful. That shit takes over your mind, and once you let it go, you’re like, ‘What the fuck did I just do?’ It’s hard to deal with. I sustained an injury to my neck and I was having a lot of depression and some personal issues. In 2010 I began taking [medication] for those reasons instead of just for my neck injury. I continued into a downward spiral because I was hopelessly addicted. I never stole from people, but I changed as a person and to this day I still have to deal with the after-effects of people not trusting me. It hurts when you want another chance and you don’t get one. I didn’t start producing music again until I went extensively through the Unkut interviews. I read every single interview and I completely rebooted how I produce. When you read Unkut interviews you get so much knowledge that you end up sounding like a complete genius. It’s like a rap cheat sheet! I am an official Unkut weed carrier. I hunted down that Source magazine for days, all so I could take a picture of the wrong fuckin’ logo!

What’s your next project?

My Street Fighter album, it’s about hanging-in there when things get tough. I use the game just as a premise, the characters and their stories tie-in with the theme of the album. Another album I started is an instrumental album dealing with a lot of noir themes that deal with living in the city of Oakland. Songs about drug sales, prostitution and drug addiction. It’s basically an album about the city.

BBW: A Pornographic Opera is available for download here.

At one point liner notes were nearing extinction on rap albums, but thanks to the fine work of people like Brian Coleman and the crew at Get On Down, they’re currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts, giving aging, bitter rap fanatics such as myself the perfect excuse to bang on about the first Ultramagnetic album in day-to-day conversation. Most of you would have read Rakim Told Me/Check The Technique by now, so you know that copping the Mr. Coleman’s third tome is mandatory at this point. He took some time out last weekend to trade war stories from the trenches of the hip-hop interview battlefield and discuss the trials and tribulations that go along with such in-depth work.

Robbie: Was the ‘Classic Material’ column in XXL your first published work?

Brian Coleman: I started that column in 1999, that was Elliott Wilson’s idea. I had been writing for XXL before that. I started, I think, in the second issue. I wrote for them until 2004. That Ultramagnetic chapter in Rakim Told Me started as a piece I did for XXL and then I expanded it greatly over the years. In ‘98 Ultramagnetic was supposedly reforming so everyone was like, ‘Oh, we should talk to them about that!’ I had been writing a little bit before that, I’d been writing for URB, The Boston Phoenix, I wrote for this magazine called CMJ, it’s basically the trade publication for college radio. I was a hip-hop columnist there, it was cool because you could write about a lot of indy stuff.

What inspired you to write about music?

I always had a day job, I’ve been a publicist for the last 23 years, pretty much right out of college. I was promoting a lot of jazz stuff back then for a small company in Boston. I never really wanted to be a writer. That was never something that I yearned to do. I’m not an English major, I was a Communications major in college. I didn’t like the way that hip-hop was being covered locally, in Boston. There was only one guy that was writing about hip-hop with any kind of consistency and doing it well – Ken Capobianco at the Tab Newspapers. I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous, this is Boston and this is a major city. Fuck it, I’ll do it if no one else is gonna do it.’ I started writing for this monthly publication called Boston Rock in ‘94 and I just called up the editor and said, ‘If I do a column, will you print it?’ I would review stuff like The Roots‘ From The Ground Up [on Talkin’ Loud] and jazz/soul stuff like Omar out of the UK and Steve Williamson. Some of the re-issues that were coming out, the James Brown stuff. It was whatever the hell I wanted to review, because the guy wasn’t paying me. I was a DJ, I was doing a college radio show at WZBC. I was doing a funk show and an old school hip-hop show at the same time so I was getting some promos that way. I was the only person in Boston writing about The Roots at that time, which shouldn’t have happened, but it did. Eventually I started writing for the Boston Phoenix, which was the local arts weekly paper, and the Boston Herald, which is one of the two bigger dailies. It was all very happenstance, I’m not a very ambitious person in that regard. I’ve always just found certain niches and fallen into stuff. After a while I found out that I was half decent at it and I enjoyed it so I just kept going.

How did the idea for the first book come together?

Rakim Told Me was basically two books smooshed together – Yes, Yes Y’All and Our Band Could Be Your Life. My problem with Yes, Yes Y’All was there was no flow, they were just chunks of text. The text was dope, but it was difficult for me to read. I thought, ‘What if it had more of a linear narrative and there was someone to guide this along?’ That’s what liner notes do, and I was very familiar with classic jazz liner notes, so it was like, ‘Shit, why don’t I just do liner notes for hip-hop albums!’

I did a book proposal and I had an agent shopping it. It was all about the year 1988 in hip-hop. The sample chapter in that proposal was the Ultramagnetic chapter. I had some people who were mildly interested in the book, but this was 2004 and hip-hop books were not a very sexy or interesting thing to most publishers. I was like, ‘Schoolly-D? No one would put his shit out, so he just said, ‘Fuck it’ and did it. Uncle Luke was like, ‘I don’t need a major label.’ I came up in the punk scene in the mid 80’s, and Black Flag didn’t even try to shop it, they were just like, ‘Let’s start SST and do it.’ A lot of the inspirations in my life, musically, have been independant artists. A lot of the times I liked them even more because they were independent.

It was also out of the fact of doing a long interview and having this incredible conversation with someone like KRS-One or Slick Rick and then they [XXL] were like, ‘Oh yeah, give me 500 words!’ So I had all this extra stuff that was just as good as the stuff I included in the piece but they kept shrinking and shrinking the ‘Classic Material’ column to the point where I said, ‘This is not worth it anymore, I’m not even going to bother.’ I just took those interviews and blew them out like they should have been in the first place. If the blog world had existed back then, maybe I would have just put it up online, but that wasn’t a realistic option in 2004/2005. I called up Andre from Wax Poetics and said, ‘Who prints the magazine?’ He gave me the number and I called them up and just did the book. It doesn’t look that great, it’s pretty basic – especially when compared to the new one – but it got the job done. It’s about the content. People took to it – not tens of thousands, but more than I thought would be into it – and I figured I’d just go from there.

How many copies did you print?

The first run was two thousand, and then I did another run of two thousand after that. I haven’t sold all of those yet because I took it off the market for quite a few years when Check The Technique came out. I didn’t want them to be competing with each other.

Having only recently read the Critical Beatdown chapter was amazing. I found out a lot of stuff about the making of that album that I would never have imagined.

That’s the whole thing. You know – because of all the important work you’re doing – it helps so much to understand the process that these artists go through, what they’re thinking at the time and what situations they’re in. I thought that was important as well – they really had to work their asses off for that album, and even after they did it didn’t sell shit. You and I know how influential that album was but a lot of times influence doesn’t mean sales. That album is still underrated to this day, except for people like Prince Paul and Premier – the people that were influenced by it.

That and Criminal Minded still remain as the pinnacles of rap to me.

BDP even more so, in a way. It was recorded for an even lower budget than Critical Beatdown. Some of that stuff was recorded in $25 an hour studios. Will Sokolov [Sleeping Bag Records] told me a funny story when I was interviewing him about Mantronix. After the first EPMD record they got signed to Rush and Lyor and Russell were like, ‘You’ve gotta go to this studio, they have all the best equipment. You’ll love it! We insist!’ They called Will and were like, ‘We don’t like this shit! We wanna go back with Charlie Marotta!’ When you know about the struggle to get those records made, it makes you appreciate them that much more.

How do you decide which albums to cover?

Rakim Told Me was easy, because those were interviews which I’d pretty much already done. There were 90’s albums that didn’t make it because I decided to put all of the 80’s records in. Check The Technique was a little bit different. Sometimes you can’t get the people on the phone, so decisions are made for you, against your will. It still happens to me to this day, which is why I don’t think I’ll do another one of these books. People come up to me all the time, ‘Do you know what album you should do?’ ‘I’m not the one who has the rights to this formula. You should do it, I’ll buy your book!’ Everyone has the right as a fan to be able to do this sort of shit. It’s not as hard to get in touch with these guys as people might think, especially these days with Facebook.

Some people have asked me, ‘Are you trying to make the hip-hop canon?’ What right do I have to tell you what the hip-hop canon is? My goal is to cover albums that I find important, and they’re not necessarily the most important records ever made in hip-hop but I find them important for different reasons. Too $hort’s Life Is… album was important for me to cover. His path to making records, how important he is to the west coast and the Bay, the fact that he’s an indy artist – and I’ve always liked his flow. These are albums that I find to be interesting to listen to, and I find them even more interesting the more I find out about them. Range is good. It’s good to have Ultramagnetic, who sold less than 100,000 copies, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, who sold multi-millions. Both of them are equally important in a lot of ways, and they both came out in 1988. No artist produces music the same way. Some MC’s only write once they hear music, others have their rhyme books. That’s a huge difference, that changes a lot. That doesn’t make you better or worse but I find it kind of interesting.

What was your experience like when your second book was released through Random House?

They gave me a really good opportunity to put my book out and put it in front of a lot of people, but I really hated giving away 93% of my royalty. There are tonnes of parallels to putting out books and putting out records. There are always trade-offs, but I knew what they were when I went into it. They didn’t promote the book that much, but I didn’t expect them to, they had a lot of other books on their plate so I didn’t get upset about it. I was promoting it the whole time. At the same time, how many chances am I going to get where Random House calls me up and wants to put my book out? I didn’t find it a bad experience, but after doing it I wouldn’t put out another book with a major house unless they were gonna give me a shitload of money, and that’s not something that was ever going to happen. Nothing against Random House, but my new one looks better than theirs, and I did it myself with my designer James Blackwell. I kicked their ass, and that makes me feel good. I don’t think anyone would even notice that it’s self-published.

Who has been your most elusive subject?

Kurtis Mantronik, because I still couldn’t get him for this time around. People don’t even know where he lives! I heard that he was either in South Africa or Israel. He’s continued to elude me, but I’ve done a massively updated version of that chapter anyways, because I felt it was important enough that I needed to do that. I had talked to him in an email interview but he didn’t answer half the shit. Maybe he just doesn’t like journalists. That’s every artist’s right, they don’t have to talk to me, but it’s a shame because Mantronix as a whole is generally forgotten and they were so important in so many ways. You know who else is elusive? Herby Luv Bug. Last I heard, he’s in Brazil. I got in contact with the woman who does his publishing and she was like, ‘No, he’s not going to be able to do the interview.’ The only chapter that was tough for me to decide if I wanted to do it early on, because of not having access, was the Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince one, because he’s Will Smith. I kept having the hope that maybe he would come through and I kept trying to reach him as I went along but I realised that wasn’t going to happen. As with the Mantronix [chapter] I over-compensated by talking to all these other people.

It must help that you have a couple of books under your belt when you’re trying to convince people to do an interview with you.

That certainly helped. It at least lets them know what they’re in for and what kind of approach I’m going to take. There are artists that I wish were in here but I couldn’t get enough time. If I was only going to be given a twenty minute interview then it wasn’t worth it. The chapters that are meant to be in there are in there, I take a very zen approach to it. When I finished the last book for Random House, they were like, ‘This is too long, you need to cut a lot of these chapters in half.’ I was like, ‘Fuck that, I’ll chop chapters out but I won’t cut any of them them in half.’ But this time I’m the boss, so I’ll do whatever the hell I want. Some of these chapters are fuckin’ long, but I always say, ‘The more, the merrier!’

Do you prefer to interview people over the phone or in person?

There’s one thing that distracts people more than anything else while you’re talking to them face-to-face is their fuckin’ phone, so if you’ve got them on their phone they’re not going to be distracted by it as much. I interviewed Biz Markie in New York, and he was very entertaining, but he had two cell phones in front of him and he was checking them both constantly.

What were some of your inspirations as far as music writing?

There are people that self-published before me that I took inspiration from, like Freddy Fresh. That book does not look good at all, but it is fuckin’ incredible. If your content is unique enough and compelling enough then it doesn’t matter what it looks like. I’m very thankful that people before me did books. I’m very thankful that David Toop didn’t just write a bunch of articles and then stop. I’m glad he did Rap Attack, because that book changed my life.

Check The Technique 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies is out this week. Buy it.

It’s taken me ten years to interview a female rapper on these pages, which either means this marks the onset of ‘progressive’ thinking in my old age or I’m a natural born rap misogynist. Either way, during the limited window of time I had to talk with Angie we kicked it about her days in The Sequence and she shared an eye-opening story about her involvement with The Roxy.

Angie Stone – The Unkut Interview

Video of The Sequence performing ‘Simon Says’ on the Job Man Caravan show:

Once again I found myself subjected to indignities of a press day, where you have ten or fifteen minutes allotted to talk to a rapper who has already bored themselves to death speaking to the twenty other jerks before you and some herb always messes up the schedule and as a result that fifteen minutes turns into less than ten. Just for laughs, I decided to stay on the line and laugh at the other shitty questions from the amateur journalists who followed me, while witnessing Buckshot get progressively more confusing the more he drank and/or smoked to make the whole process slightly less tedious for himself. Nevertheless, I still managed to get a couple of interesting jewels from the former Black Moon front man.

Robbie: What inspired you start making music?

Buckshot: My uncle David was a dancer, he was an entertainer and he made dancing a big influence on my life when I was a youngster. He was a dancer for a group called Mtume, they made a record called ‘Juicy.’ I saw him on TV and I felt like he achieved the ultimate impossible and one day I was going to do that and I would achieve the same impossible. I kept going and kept going and I kept dancing. I stopped dancing in 1990 and I became an MC at that point. I always wanted to be an MC but never thought that that was my path. I always thought that dancing was gonna be the way for me. When my MC got locked-up I felt like I had no choice but to continue what we started. When he got locked-up he was like, ‘Yo, keep it going!’ I was like, ‘How am I gonna keep it going? You know what? I’mma just start emceeing myself.’ That’s how I became an MC.

Was that the original Black Moon or was that a different crew?

That was a different group. That was Reese Smooth, KB-1 and KB-2. It was a group we had called…umm…that wasn’t Critical Movements, that was another group that we had. Like you had Big Daddy Kane, Scoob and Scrap? That was my man Reese Smooth and 5 FT was KB-1 and I was KB-2. When Reese got locked-up, 5 said, ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my boy who’s a DJ, but he also produced these beats that me and you are dancing to and practicing.’ That DJ and producer was Evil Dee. From there we became Black Moon because Evil Dee said, ‘Why don’t y’all join my group? We’re called Black Moon, me and my DJ.’ Me and 5 FT said, ‘Let’s do it.’

How did you know Reese Smooth?

Reese Smooth was my man from around the way. Reese Smooth is actually my brother-in-law now, his brother is married to my sister. I was really cool with him and we used to hustle together and he got locked-up for hustling. They gave him a long time, man! He was hustling what us New Yorkers would call ‘outta town.’ From that point on we were Black Moon and we would do local shows and just try to get our name out there. I started interning at MCA Records after we shopped our demos around [there] I hustled my way in to get a job. [chuckles] While I was interning at MCA I was blessed to have this lady named Maria Davis, who was one of the biggest promoters back in the days and helped so many artists get a record deal. She allowed me to do a show for a club night she was having. Because I was an intern I had access to stuff like that. One day I was doing a show – me, 5 FT and Evil Dee – but Maria Davis said, ‘Listen, I’m about to club this shut down.’ I said,’Please don’t shut it down, can we just go on real quick?’ She said, ‘Y’all got five minutes!’ So I ran to Evil Dee and said, ‘Yo, we got five minutes! Don’t take off your coat, don’t take off your book bag, don’t take off nuttin’! Let’s hurry up!’ We actually ran on stage with our book bags and that’s why people started knowing us for wearing our book bags. We thought we had to be professional and take our stuff off, but meanwhile it was like, ‘Go as you are right now. Just go!’ We went as we are everyday, cos we wore out book bags everyday. We wasn’t coming from school, that was our style. When we got off stage, we heard somebody going, ‘Yo! Knapsacks!’ It was Chuck Chillout. He said, ‘Y’all want a record deal? Meet me Monday.’ And that was it, we was outta there!

Was Chuck Chillout working as an A&R at that point?

Yeah, he was working at Nervous Records at the time. I was smart enough to know that wasn’t the Chuck Chillout that was back in the days, but hey, he could still get into something. I entertained it for a bit and thank god I did because it got us…we got jerked, we got done real bad, but I ain’t mad at none of it. The first album, Enta The Stage, I had Havoc as opposed to Havoc and Prodigy. Even though I was cool with both of them, I was more cool with Havoc for some reason, I just had more of an attachment. When we both came out at the same time I was so happy, it was incredible! You know how happy I was when Mobb Deep dropped? It was like, ‘Wow, one of my cool friends came out just like me!’

Can you talk a little bit about working with KRS-One when you recorded an album together?

Why is it certain rappers are not connecting with other rappers? Why is it you’ve gotta have a record company to make ‘em do that? You don’t need a record label to make me connect with one of the most respected lyricists in the hip-hop game, period! If you heard him rap today and saw him today, how energetic, lively, how clean and brute and crisp – he’s so sharp you would think the nigga 30! I’m a student of KRS-One, proudly. I used to wake-up everyday, on my way to some new job, and I used to grab my radio and play, ‘What Can They Do, What Can They Say’ [‘Jah Rulez’] by KRS-One. I used to grab that Blueprint album, the first Blueprint, and I used to play that everyday, all day, on my cassette. So yes, I’m a student of that brother. Yes, I learned a lot of my skills and tactics and techniques as far as emceeing from that brother. Anybody that doesn’t give props to the people they learnt from is just a sucker! You didn’t just wake up one day out your bed and all of sudden you’re just start rhyming this way! You was listening to artists before you and decided to start rhyming yourself. Whether you believe it or not, there’s a subconscious influence on you. If you look at my style, if you look at my career, you can now see all the rappers that was – Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, KRS-One, Public Enemy – if you said, ‘Which MC would I match Buckshot up to?’ It would be KRS-One! An underground artist who was big, influenced everybody, sold gold records but never went platinum, never was a sell-out, never decided to cross-over! I’m that nigga! I’m not the Slick Rick or Big Daddy Kane – not that they sold out, none of them did – but I was never that flashy about it. Flashy was never a part of my priorities.

Great Black Moon B-Sides:

At long last, I got around to interviewing the great Lord Finesse officially. I’m also deep into completing the first proper book of Unkut interviews, so I’m saving the second half of this piece for print, along with a whole bunch of recent follow-up interviews that I’ve been doing. That being said, I didn’t want to hold back everything, so I had to drop a chunk this discussion with the Funkyman to keep your ears ringing until the print edition is released in early 2015. Lord Finesse needs no introduction, as he’s the man who built on the punchline foundations laid down by Big Daddy Kane and paved the way for the next generation of MC’s. We kicked it about his experiences with record labels, his love of the SP-1200, plans for the future and the and the infamously misunderstood Mac Miller lawsuit.

Robbie: Did you feel like you were prepared when you started making Funky Technician?

Lord Finesse: C’mon man, you can listen to that first album and it was dope, there was structure, but nobody was telling me, ‘You should do sixteen bars here, you should do sixteen bars there!’ I was rhyming forever on some of those records.

Nothing wrong with that!

[laughs] Most of that album was written while I was going to the studio or the day before. Some of it was freestyle stuff, but connecting it and doing it all together I had to write rhymes around some of the stuff and make ‘em songs. If you listen to the battle with me and Perc you’re hearing a nice amount of Funky Technician in that ‘89 battle.

So they were your stock battle rhymes?

When it’s time to make records you take ‘em and you re-craft them for the record.

Did any labels try to make you compromise your sound or image?

I didn’t even get that far. I went from Wild Pitch, which was a label with really no money and no promotion to take artists to the next level at the time, to being at a label with a lotta money. They got everything to take me to the next level, but they don’t understand who Finesse is as an artist! It’s like the popular gun that everybody’s talking about, you’ve gotta have the gun, not because you’re a shooter or you go to the gun range. You just want the gun because everybody else got the gun. Then when you get the gun, you don’t know nothing about the gun, you don’t know how to shoot it! You don’t know the mechanism’s of the gun so you kinda toss the gun to the side cos you don’t what you purchased! That’s how I feel when it comes to Giant. I’m there, but they don’t really know what they got! ‘This is the dude everybody was talking about! OK, we got him! Now what do we do with him?’

I ain’t have no A&R overseeing me so I had the freedom of control to do whatever I want, which is a good thing but can be a bad thing. To be a successful artists you’ve gotta give the label what they want and you have to be on the same page and have the same destination in mind. Otherwise they’re gonna go one way and they’re gonna go another! They’re the ones with the power and the money, so they’ll go, ‘We don’t know what to do with him, so we’re just gonna drop him.’ Majors will just drop you. Independents will hold you as a chip, like trading a player from one team to another.

Return of the Funkyman is my favorite Lord Finesse album. How do you feel about it, looking back?

I think it was a good album. I don’t think it was my best effort, but to put it as a package? The Awakening is probably my favorite album, because I was in the zone when I was doing that album. I knew what I wanted as an artist. If you look at all those videos from that album, I wrote the scripts for all the videos so I was more comfortable. When I did ‘Return of the Funkyman’ and we shot that video? I wasn’t comfortable. What he depicted in that video wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It’s a cool video, but it wasn’t like ‘Hip To The Game’ or ‘Actual Facts.’ I was having fun in those videos! I was more being me. I’m a private person, the only time people can really get to see me perform is on stage, so I was always awkward shooting videos because they was always somebody else artistic creativity, it wasn’t my thoughts what I wanted the video to be. ‘Return of the Funkyman’ and ‘Strictly For The Ladies’? It was aight, but ‘Hip To The Game’? This is what I wrote. When you watch Cold Chillin’ videos back in the day with Kane and Biz and Kool G Rap, those videos felt alive, they felt real! I wanted a real touch, and that’s where The Awakening came in. Because the director say, ‘In this scene, I want you to act hard!’ It’s hard for me to do that, because I don’t act. Lord Finesse is not an actor so I have to do videos that make me comfortable and keep things in my element. ‘Hip To The Game’ and ‘Actual Facts’ are closed-off videos, they’re not streetwise videos where I’m performing and people are stopping and walking by. I’m kinda shy in that aspect. But if it’s closed-in and the focus is on my and there’s not no outsiders looking in? I can be me. When you’re a person that’s not out in the public like that – most rapper’s carry a certain persona, but it’s mainly entertainment and acting. You acting hard, you rolling with thirty dudes but you’re really soft! You’re a cornball! That was never me. I was around some of the craziest people you could ever imagine, and they always told me, ‘Yo Finesse, just be yourself. Don’t act tough, don’t act gangster, just be a cool dude. Demand and command respect, but you don’t have to do it by making people fear you or acting this tough role.’ I always took that and tried to be real cool and make people gravitate to who I am as a person.

With The Awakening, I was in my zone with that, everything about that was me. Neil Levine, the president of Penalty, personally signed me. ‘Finesse is available? We can get him? OK!’ He said to me, ‘Finesse, I don’t want you to worry about this and that. I just want you to do the records you wanna do, and we’re gonna build around that.’ That’s what I did, I had fun! That’s why I like that album better than Return of the Funkyman, because I was still learning a lot, especially production. I wasn’t whole yet as a producer, I was just hollow. With The Awakening I knew what I wanted as a producer, as an artist, the image about it. I wanted it to be melodic, but at the same time I could make it dark. I could take jazz basslines and horns and dictate the picture I’m painting, musically. So some of the stuff sounds soulful, some of the stuff sounds melodic, some of the stuff sounds dark, but I’m doing it with jazz! A genre creating other genre’s within that album.

You really found yourself as a producer on that album, but I feel like Return of the Funkyman showcased your rhyming talents even better.

Lyrically, as an MC, I don’t lose the hunger. Anytime I’m in public or I dropped a verse on something, it had to be dope. I ain’t never really cruise-control on nobody’s song or on my songs, because I know I’m being judged, I’m being rated lyrically on my performance. Every time I’m trying to top my performance, and if I can’t top my performance I don’t really want to half-step and give my fans and followers a shitty performance. That’s not who I am. That’s why when people say, ‘Do an album!’ It’s not that simple to me. A lot goes into that, I’ve gotta see what I’ve done before, I’ve gotta see where I’mma go with now. I don’t wanna do club and radio records, so I’ve gotta do music that can compete against those records or destroy those records! But don’t do, ‘OK, these strip club records are hot so I gotta do a strip club record.’ I don’t operate like that, I’m just into good music. I’m into what I do, so when you hear it, it might not be what everybody else is doing but you’re gonna say, ‘Damn, that shit is dope! I can’t shit on this. What was this dude thinking when he made this?’ Because that’s what I always thought! When I heard Kane’s ‘Raw’ – the lyrics and the music – I was like, ‘What the fuck was they thinking of when they did this?’ When I heard Tribe Called Quest Midnight Marauders album, I’m sitting there stuck, like, ‘How did they put all this together?’ That’s how I look at art. You can always tell true artists from people who just throw it together.

Rapper’s today look at our era and say, ‘Y’all too lyrical! It’s about having fun. Hip-hop shouldn’t be so technical, y’all shouldn’t take it so serious.’ Now the fuckin’ lyrical bar for hip-hop is on the fuckin’ floor! Everybody look at the precedents that these simple rappers are making and everybody feel they can do it and now we’re being over-saturated and overrun with bullshit that’s simple! The more simple it is, the more people think they can do it. They trying to dumb it down! Like I said on my new album, ‘Lyrically, they tryin’ to put the planet to rest/What y’all niggas say is extraordinary? Shit, I say that’s standard, at best. Y’all ain’t all that smart/Lyrically you finger painting. Shit, you call that art?’ The stuff I’m saying now is gonna be very profound and prolific, cos I’m coming from a grown man state of mind now. I don’t have time to joke and play no more, I just got facts and jewels right now.

There was a period where you were killing it with your guest appearances, like the records with Trendz of Culture and Ground Floor. Did you feel like you were really in the zone?

That was during the time of The Awakening and I was definitely in the zone because for once it was like being a producer and being a rapper. I’m buying records, I kinda know what I’m gonna rhyme to. As a producer, I can sit in the studio by myself to create something, nobody’s there, and do these songs. Then leave the studio and play ‘em for my peoples and ask what they think. Go back into the studio myself, or one or two of my friends would go with me. I just felt better because I didn’t need nobody to oversee me. A lot of the stuff I would be up in the house, messing with it for a week, and then when it’s time to go into the studio I’m ready to lay this beat, I know the beat is tight and I’m excited because once the engineer EQ’s it, this is gonna be dope! If it sounds good in the house the shit sounds phenomenal in the studio. That was always my theory. If it sounds great here? It’s gonna sound extraordinary in the studio. I’m listening to it in here on small speakers – I might turn it up in the big speakers to tune certain things – but once it’s time to lay the stuff? Oh man, y’all will see. I started working on this new Lord Finesse project and y’all will hear the difference, musically. It’s still gonna be hip-hop, still gonna be Boom Bap, but sonically? Musically? Nah! I can’t wait, man! Let these dudes be doing their simple beats, I’ll show ‘em what it is.

Was working with Dr. Dre part of the reason you moved on from the SP-1200 to get that fuller sound?

People always get it misconstrued. When I used the SP-1200, it was never for the sound. It just happened to be that was the best sound available in the 1200, and it gave us a distinct sound like a 1200. But we never looked into it like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get the 1200 for that sound!’ No, we wanted the shit to sound better! We would spend six to eight hours trying to get that shit to sound right, because the hiss and you gotta add more bottom – shit, you gotta do more work in the studio! The 1200 is the brain. It was always the brain, it controlled the 950. It sequenced all the sounds together, it was the mastermind of the whole track. That’s why it’s called The SP-1200 Project because it was made with the brain of the SP. When I put discs into the SP-1200 and the 950 – yes, I’m using the 950, but without that 1200 the magic can’t be created. From a sequence aspect, from a programming aspect, from how you’re hearing the songs echo – the 950 don’t do that! You using the SP-1200 as the mastermind. We never looked at the 1200 for the sound, I looked at it for the swing and the style, because it was very simplistic to work and the funk that you got from the drums? How you could make them drums bounce? You couldn’t do that with no machine. Even now, you could try to do it with the Renaissance and the 3000, but you have to make this go later and you have to shift the swing, it’s not a natural thing. You gotta know the algorithms and the swing of the 1200 to reduplicate that sound and style.

You did that ‘Soulplan’ song with Roy Ayers, that must have been a big moment for you.

I just seen Roy last December when we was in Paris and he brought me up on stage. He’s one of my favorite artists, who don’t love Roy Ayers? By far one of my favorite artists – him and Stevie. To work with him was a dream come true, like, ‘Fuck the record, I’m working with Roy! This is crazy!’ We had fun, man. That’s one moment that I wish I coulda captured on video tape, but I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. That vibe was so smooth, the shit me and Dink and Roy was doing, with Dink rocking the Fender live and then you got Roy on the vibes? Shit, I thought I was back in the 70’s! It felt beautiful, man. That vibe was dope that all you needed was have somebody have a motherfucker bring a table in there with a table cloth, set-up a candle and order some food and you and your girl could’ve just sat there and y’all have felt like it was a motherfuckin’ romantic dinner! That’s how that vibe was. I plan to work with Roy on this next project. I got a lotta surprises on this new shit, trust me. I’m just tryin’ to make it the best shit I can make it.

‘Kickin’ Flavor With My Man’ might be my favorite Percee-P verse.

That verse is crazy, that was towards the end of Return of the Funkyman. I liked how ‘Yes, You May’ came out so much that I called him in to do another song with me, and just recently gave it new life on Slice of Spice. I wish that was the beat back in the day! [laughs]

T-Ray told me that he wanted to put a hook on the ‘Yes, You May’ remix. Is that true?

I wouldn’t say all that. He originally want to submit the beat to Biz and I’m like, ‘I need that right there, man. Please, let me get that. I need that!’ It was what it was. He ain’t have nothing else in mind, he ain’t never bring it to my attention, like, ‘Look man, I think we should do this.’ We did both of those songs in one day, we did the ‘Party Over Here’ remix and we did ‘Yes, You May’ in one shot in D&D.

Where did you get the Grandpa Finesse character from?

I got inspired by Marley Marl.

He got that from Ohio Player’s Granny character, didn’t he?

Oh wow, I never knew that. I just thought it was a good way to start off songs and have a character bug out. I’m good with characters, just how I opened up The Awakening with the sermon and i act like I’m a pastor or a preacher. I like doing things like that, that’s what gives your album or your project character. If you’re just rhyming you’re not letting people know you have a sense of humor or you’re a jokester or something different about you. You need skits to glue it all together.

Have you got a release date for the next album or are you still working on it?

I’m working hard on it right now, so tell people to stop asking me when I’m doing a new album. It’s not a microwave thing for me, I can’t just do something and throw it out cos you want it. It doesn’t work like that, cos if it’s trash it’s gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna help me. I see so many artists prolific artists throw out albums and that shit be gone in two months. They don’t work it, they don’t go do a promo tour for it, they don’t really up their sleeves. They don’t even care about their own movement, and that shit is disturbing to me. To know you’re prolific artist and you aren’t even supporting your own shit, so how can you expect people to support you? You aren’t doing interviews, you ain’t describing what made you do this project, ‘I wanted to do this and I wanted to do that and I hooked-up with this producer.’ You’re not even describing the direction of your shit, you’re just throwing it out there. That’s corny to me. It hurts the music, because you’re looking at the music as so disposable. I don’t look at my craft and my music and my lyrics as disposable, man. Everything has a purpose, it has a meaning. Certain things I like to tell my fans, I know how bad you want it but it has to be dope! People say The Awakening, ‘That’s a classic, man! That’s one of the best albums in the world!’ A lot of people didn’t appreciate it until now! I always tell ‘em, ‘I’m doing my new shit. I hope it don’t tell you ten to twelve years to appreciate my new shit.’ Some people don’t appreciate things until they’re not here. Then you talk about what was, ‘You should make another album like The Awakening!’ or ‘You should do another Return of the Funkyman!’ I was at different places in my life when I made those, you’ve just got trust that I’mma be at another place in my life to make a classic.

I remember with that whole Mac Miller situation, I was visiting you when that first became an issue and they had promised to pay you for some beats on his album, which never happened. I assume that whole lawsuit worked out OK for you?

I’m glad it’s over. The only thing that disappointed me with people was that one side of the story was told and everybody was just dumb enough to just listen to that side without doing research for theyself to find out what the true story was. To this day I still get people that try to relive it and keep it alive, and my whole thing is if you don’t know the true story? Just shut the fuck up. You coming at me with this out of pocket tone and you tell, ‘That was messed up what you did!’ And you really don’t have a clue what went down and now it went down, and you judging me and you convicting me based on that. Then when you hear the facts all you wanna say is, ‘Oh, I ain’t know.’ But when you’re coming at me outta pocket it don’t make me want to respond and talk to you, it makes me want to punch you in your face. ‘That’s fucked up! You did this and you did that!’ I’m looking at you like, ‘Who told you that? Do you know this for a fact or this is what you heard? So you run up on somebody on some shit you heard?’ You don’t do that in the hood, cos that gets you fucked up. I don’t see it no different being in the industry. You’re coming at me and you don’t know what you’re talking about and the tone you’re taking with me? I find it very offensive. When you slap somebody and you pop ‘em in the mouth then it looks like you’re the villain once again! You ain’t gonna run-up on somebody and be like, ‘Yo, I heard you murdered so and so.’ We in the world of cut and paste, nobody does research. Everybody repeats what they’re told. Most people don’t have a mind of their own. Like, ‘That doesn’t sound like Ness. Let me do some research.’ I don’t feel like a lotta people did that, I just felt like a lotta people said, ‘He’s mad, he’s bitter, he’s old! Old bastard!’ They called me all types of names and shit.

That was disgraceful, everyone was talking shit and they didn’t even know the situation.

They still don’t know the situation. I’m a person that grinds for everything that I got in the industry and I just wouldn’t let anybody take my music and exploit it. I didn’t let AT&T do it, I didn’t let nobody do it, so why am I gonna start now? I t was exploitation of the music, it wasn’t what everybody put out there. ‘He’s suing for a mixtape!’ People didn’t know the whole story.

You mentioned that Stevie Wonder is one of your favorite artists. Can you speak a little bit about him?

For him to start off at some a young age? I’m inspired by his duration during the decades. From the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80’s, the 90’s, the 2000’s. Artists like him and Quincy Jones and Roy Ayers and James Brown – these dudes were going through different generations and different times and they tweaked their music. Like Michael Jackson, they all tweaked their music to go with that generation and that time without really doing something they ain’t wanna do. That’s very important with music – to do things that are naturally new and be able to adapt to the time without going overboard or going off the deep end and doing something real silly. You get to Stevie Wonder and you look at all his albums – all of them joints got classics on there. Watching Quincy Jones do all the the soundtracks and work with Michael Jackson on Thriller, and ‘Razzamatazz.’ Me and Dre had a talk about that, cos he said it in an interview one time. People try to equate your age with the music, and he was basically, ‘That’s bullshit, Ness. Quincy Jones didn’t do Thriller until he was fifty!’ When you look at it from that aspect, how can people tell you, ‘You too old to do something!’ Or ‘You should quit! This is a young person’s game.’ Fuck outta here!

Do you feel like you get pigeonholed into making music like you did in the 90’s?

I just want people to appreciate my music and appreciate what I’m doing as an artist, and trust and believe that I’m gonna give me best effort. I don’t have to repeat a certain time of my life to come up on music. Trust and believe like how I did Funky Technician and how I did Return of the Funkyman and The Awakening. Trust and believe that it’s gonna go up another notch. I don’t have to recreate those efforts to do so. I can look at certain elements and ingredients in those efforts, but I don’t have to reduplicate those efforts to be great.

What three Lord Finesse songs would you play someone who hadn’t heard you before?

I would give them a taste of everything, from ‘Funky Technician,’ ‘You Know What I’m About,’ ‘Brainstorm,’ ‘Hip 2 The Game.’ I even like my verse on the Bas Blasta joint, I be performing that some times.

Photo: Alexander Richter

Not sure how my extended interview with The Mighty V.I.C. from 2008 slipped through the cracks, but after using a couple of parts of it I never got around to transcribing the entire three hours that we spoke over a couple of days while Vic ran errands. As before, the full version will be in the Unkut book, but here’s an edited version which covers the major points in his career. V.I.C. discusses how he began interning as a recording engineer at Power Play in the late 80’s, before joining The Beatnuts and working with Godfather Don under the Groove Merchantz banner and later recruiting Mike Heron to create the Ghetto Pros.

Robbie: How did you get started in music?

V.I.C: I started deejaying when I was fifteen years old. I was at the local bagel shop and one of the local kids who worked at the bagel shop showed me a mixer. I was in the tenth grade and I remember being home, sick at the time, and the guy came over after school – and after he was done at the bagel shop – and showed me how to DJ. From there, I found out you can actually go to school for engineering. I was like, ‘You can go to school to edit?’ So I did that a short time after. I went to an engineering school in the city, which I learned zero from, and I started interning at Power Play. That’s where I met Ivan ‘Doc’ Rodriguez, I met Norty Cotto, Patrick Adams – the guy that used to play on all those Eric B. & Rakim albums. At that time there were guys like Just-Ice recording there, you had KRS-One, you had EPMD. Hurby Luvbug used to record there too, Salt ‘N Pepa, Dana Dane, Kid ‘N Play.

G Rap used to live around my block, and just before I started producing I had an RZ-1 Casio. I gave G Rap the loop for ‘Truly Yours.’ My set-up was an RZ-1 Casio drum machine. I had a turntable so I would play a loop and put a beat underneath of it and hit the drum machine at the same time and record it like that onto a boom box. I remember playing the actual 45 to G Rap – he came to my basement, he heard it and he was like, ‘Yeah! Let me get it!’ That’s how ‘Truly Yours’ came about. Marley did it of course, but I gave them the loop. It’s funny ‘cos Polo went around telling everybody he gave the record to Marley. You remember Large Professor’s people, Vandamater? Vandamater used to bring records to my house and that’s how I started getting put on to samples and stuff. Vandamater saw Polo and he knew the story already, so he set Polo up, ‘Where’d y’all get that loop from? ‘Truly Yours’? That thing was crazy!’ And Polo’s like, ‘Yo, that was my record! I gave that to Marley.’ Vandamater’s like, ‘You lying…’ in his mind. [laughs]

Did you engineer anything before you started producing?

I did something with Norty Cotto, which was a dance album on Tuff City. I did a beat and he liked it and he just wanted to add his flavor and put it onto his record. My experiences there were first interning, then assistant engineering and then producing there. After I stopped interning I got a job at Chemical Bank, and then a woman asked me what did I go for school for? I told her I went to school for audio engineering. So she’s like, ‘You went to school for music and you’re working at a bank? Why would you do that?’ It just hit me that day, I was like, ‘You’re absolutely right! I’ve been working here a couple of years, I’m gonna get myself fired!’ So I would walk in late, when they’re opening up the bank, and they’re looking at me like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ I would be short a few dollars every time – maybe $30 $10 here and there – finally, two weeks later they called me in the back and were like, ‘Hey, we have to let you go, we don’t know what’s going on with you.’ I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ Wow, it worked! I got myself fired so I could collect unemployment, so this way I can collect my money and still try to work with the music. That’s when I started doing ‘Ladies Can I have Your Attention’ and started working at Hit Factory.

How did you meet C$ Money?

I met C$ Money through a mutual friend. Somebody told me, ‘I got this guy who rhymes.’ Somebody always knows somebody. He rhymed for me over the phone and I was like, ‘Wow, this guy is truly incredible.’ Then he hooked up with Chase. Red Alert was all over it, he used to play that every weekend, Chuck Chillout, all those guys were spinning it on their mix shows. They guy who put it out had a good relationship with those guys, but they loved that record, they used to play it a lot. Stones Throw re-issued it a couple of years ago. We had a whole album on them through Crazy Noise, but it never came out. I worked on that record for about a year.

What was next?

I did those records with Renaissance and then I did those records with Smooth Movement, which was Big Meal. That was on Krazie Noise, ‘The Adventure.’ That’s a classic in more than one way, cos I started making all my connections when I put that out. I dropped it off for Bobbito, I gave it Funkmaster Flex, he was playing it. He worked at Profile Records, he wanted to put that record on Profile, he was trying to get it up there. You had guys like Kid Capri playing it on BLS.

How did you get down with The Beatnuts?

I knew Juju from The Beatnuts for a very long time – not through music but through mutual friends. I knew he did music but he thought I did just dance stuff, and I used to invite him over to my house and tell him, ‘You should come on through and stop by, I’ve got a little studio.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.’ He never paid much mind to it. But then he heard the Smooth Movement record on the radio – he had no idea it was me. He went to a local record store and he said, ‘There’s a record, the guy sounds kinda like Grand Puba but I don’t think it’s Grand Puba.’ He’s describing it to the guy and the guy pulls out the Krazie Noise record. He says, ‘Nah, it’s not that, man. That’s a House label.’ The guy plays it for him and he went and bought two of them. Then he shows-up at my place later on, ‘Hey! I didn’t know you did this record!’ I said, ‘I told you a long time ago, come to my house.’ He came over and I knew a little bit about records but that’s when I really started getting into full-force digging and just listening to different music. It was kind of a trade-off. He had a little sampler that he can get his ideas at in his home. It was something he had to trigger – nothing MIDI, nothing with a sequencer – he just used to do it by hand. Finally he’s like, ‘I wanna get me a drum machine!’ I had an MPC-60 so he got an MPC-60. He was showing me how to chop beats and I was teaching him how to use the machine.

When was this?

Around 91, 92. He wanted to make me part of the crew, that was probably a case of, ‘I have these records, you loop them.’ Chi-Ali’s father was their manager.

Fashion wrote most of Chi-Ali’s rhymes on that album didn’t he?

Right, he was doing some writing for him. They used to be in love with Fashion – it was his lyrical skills I guess. I got to do the ‘Lemonade’ remix, help out Ju and stuff like that. I met Kurious Jorge at a party that Gang Starr were performing at, through Powerule. Kurious Jorge came over and was waiting for Juju to play him some beats. He was like, ‘Do you think he’s gonna come? What’s going on?’ He was waiting there for about an hour, and Juju never showed up. So I ended-up playing some beats for him and that’s how ‘Walk Like A Duck’ came along.

So at that time you would all produce under The Beatnuts umbrella?

That’s right, you might not know that I did that song. That’s when I became a member, they were like, ‘Are you gonna be part of this?’ We never really separated the name with a member by saying, ‘This member produced this’. I also did ‘Uptown Shit’ and ‘Mansion and a Yacht.’

You also rhymed on the Intoxicated Demons EP?

I rhymed on the EP and the album after that, but Juju wrote those rhymes and it took me about two hours to spit ‘World Famous.’ When I first started rhyming it was like, ‘Man! Oh my gosh! Your voice is good!’ He was excited, but all the excitement left about an hour later. [laughs] At one point, instead of saying ‘Philadelphia’ I was saying ‘Philly-A-Delphia!’ I must have said it at least fifteen times.

Why did you have so much trouble?

It was a new rhyme to me, I had no time to practice it. It was a little difficult for me – the beat wasn’t the slowest beat and I had never really been in the booth. Jorge wrote the rhyme for me first, then Juju was like, ‘It’s cool, but it’s not fitting the topic. I want it to be more about beat-digging.’ And who not to do a beat-digging rhyme more than Juju? It had to come from a person who experiences it more, and Jorge obviously didn’t look for beats. So he rewrote it right there.

Why is it called The Beatnuts on the spine instead of Street Level?

That was probably Relativity, another Peter Kang special. A lot of things went wrong with that label! [laughs] The album is definitely Street Level. It was just a screw-up on their part.

Why did you move on?

I kinda stopped going to the sessions. Fashion came back – I don’t know if he felt I was trying to take his spot in the group? Obviously I wasn’t. I don’t think it was the best relationship. Someone had told me, ‘Just watch it, he talks a little bit behind your back.’ Talking about my relationship with them like I was just trying to use them, trying to get my name out there. You can see if someone is trying to make a name for themselves or whether they’re trying to really be down and take a group of people as his family and just having a great time doing music. Their road manager, Ric Man, he used to tell me, ‘You need to start coming back to the sessions. There’s really no direction – they’re just drinking, smoking a lot – a lot of work doesn’t get done. It’s becoming more hanging out’. I’m telling you now – I did the A&R job that the A&R was supposed to be doing in the Intoxicated Demons.

You mean keeping the ship on course?

I felt at one point, when we were first recording in the city, I felt like there was too much joking with the engineer. Great guy, I actually know him from years back. It’s Jerry Famolari’s brother. Great sense of humor, but I felt it was too much joking going on and I said, ‘We need to go somewhere else.’

Studio time isn’t cheap, right?

Yeah! It may not physically be coming out of your pocket, but it’s coming out of your budget! They’re gonna recoup their money. At that time they weren’t grasping that concept, and it became a little problem. That’s when we went to Jersey. We were working with Pete Nice at the time, we did some music on Dust To Dust and there was engineer by the name of Rich Keller, and we started working with him, out of his house. He had one family that used to rent, he used to live upstairs and then on the basement he had his studio. He used to have Onyx recording there, a few people. Before the basement he rented out a house and he used to have his studio in the front porch and we used to record vocals in his bedroom. It was great.

So the EP finally got done at Rich Keller’s place. Fashion was locked-up and he came out towards the end of the EP. I was run out of there twice, out of that little crew. The first time by their A&R at the time. He saw that I was doing his job – which I was doing! I got that record done with them, then when it came time for mixing, he says, ‘I heard from Peter Kang that he doesn’t want you coming in to any more of the mixes. He said that the work doesn’t get done with you there, that you joke around. It’d be better if we just went in and concentrate, there’s not enough money in the budget.’ Dude, I did your job for over a year! Then with Fashion there’s all this stuff, acting like I’m not supposed to be part of ‘em? That’s when I started parted ways. When I did the Nas remix? That’s basically the time, when I started doing Groove Merchantz. But I was still doing some Beatnuts records – Fat Joe ‘Misery Loves Company,’ from the Don Cartagena album – that’s me. By the time of Stone Crazy they were kinda doing their own thing. I still would go to sessions a little bit, then they asked me to mix the rest of the songs that were left because they were going to master the next morning.

You worked on Al’ Tariq’s album despite having a strained working relationship initially?

Because now he’s not threatened anymore, he’s not part of The Beatnuts, so it’s like, ‘Hey, let’s work!’ I think everyone deserves a clean slate, let’s see what you’re about now.

Tell me about the Groove Merchantz.

Starting of the Groove Merchantz era I was working on Bas Blasta with Steve Stoute and Kid ‘N Play, they had the label from RCA. It was a completed album but RCA decided not to put it out. Even in that era I was getting work like Mi Phi Mi. [laughs] Me and Juju went out to Memphis, to Tennessee and did some work with him. It was strange, one time he opened up for Sade! It was very different to what I was doing at the time, that was also through Steve Stoute. Then I had the Kid ‘N Play, Houseparty 3, where I did ‘Bounce’ with The Beatnuts. It’s cool to work with people like that, especially if you’ve seen them come up, even if they’re not at their peak. That’s when I first started working with Kid, and that led into the Bas Blasta stuff.

The Groove Merchantz wasn’t like a production team where we had to do everything together, it was just a fun thing, like, ‘Let’s just do some beats together’. We got to do some remixes for House of Pain, for Nas. It’s funny ‘cos I get these cheques that say ‘Groove Merchantz’ on them from BMI and stuff like that, and it’s like, ‘OK, I can’t cash these – I don’t have a bank account called Groove Merchantz!’ [laughs] I’m tryin’ to get in touch with ‘em, ‘Listen, it doesn’t exist! It was just a name that I was using, doing business as.’ I’m getting these checks and it’s like, ‘OK, that’s nice, but I can’t do anything with ‘em!’ It was just a fun thing, like when MC’s get together and they collab on records. Not too many people were doing it at the time, like back in the days when jazz musicians used to get together. That was the whole thing with Groove Merchantz, and even Ghetto Pros in the beginning.

Godfather Don is quite a character. I’ve been trying to track him down for a while.

Godfather Don is quite a character, man. And a bit eccentric! He’s funny, he’s a good guy to be around. Very talented, the guy is kind of bizarre. The way he does beats and the way he uses an MP[C] is like no one I’ve ever seen. I know people use their MP just like a musician uses their bass, but this guy is like a complete band on the MP. It’s ridiculous! He’ll have the littlest piece, this little sample. You’re playing the pad and he orchestrates this incredible groove and you’re wondering how and you try to imitate it and you’re just like, ‘How’d you do it, dude?’ It’s like you can’t even explain it to yourself. One time I wanted him to lay down this song and he gives me this disc. I told him, ‘Hey, I don’t think the sequence is working, it’s not right.’ He was going to come down to the studio and I’m just hitting the button like, ‘I don’t understand! All the pieces are here? What did you do?’ I still couldn’t comprehend it. He truly is a master with that MP, and I’m talking about the old MP, the 60.

You mean instead of having his kick, snare and bass line separated he just had little sounds?

Yeah! He won’t even have a bassline! He’ll have a little bass tone that sounds like crap and then he’ll put it through something, filter it. He’ll have a couple of little sounds and all of a sudden you hear this groove! ‘OK, where are the other sounds coming from?’ It’s bizarre. You’re almost looking around for another sampler. ‘OK, you’ve got something hidden until the table or something, cos I don’t know how you’re doing it?’

How did the connection with Hydra Entertainment come about?

I’ve known Jerry and Mike for a while, twenty plus years. Jerry was actually rapping at one point [laughs] I bet you nobody in the world knows. I’ve done demos for Jerry which he probably has stored away in a safe deposit box somewhere and doesn’t want anyone to hear it. I’ve known Jerry since he was in high school, I’m a little older than him. I was consistently doing a lot of work with Hydra.

Before that he was releasing dance music on Sneak Tip, right?

Right, I knew Jerry when he was doing the dance music stuff. The guy I met Jerry through [Jose Segura], I was doing dance records with him on Dope Slap. Jose worked with Jerry doing more of the computer stuff like working with the graphic designers with the logos and stuff like that. This is before he was putting out dance records.

What was the first thing you did with him?

First I started doing breakbeats with them. First, original stuff where it was just drum beats, loops. Jerry wanted to put those things out. Then I remember doing instrumental tracks, Sack of Soul and stuff like that. Before that, I think Screwball may have been the first thing I recorded. We were recording in Power Play – I recording that record before Hydra had a studio.

The ‘Screwed Up’ single?

Yeah, all that stuff. ‘Take It There’ was a Quincy Jones sample and there was one before that.

What was the story with the Big Meal single? Juju did one side and you did the other.

We both collaborated on that. He helped me out with my side and I helped him out with his side. We recorded that stuff at Juju’s house. That was actually supposed to be for Rawkus. The ‘Put ‘Em On’ was for Rawkus through Ghetto Gold and then they didn’t want to put it out. Bobbito also wanted to put it out on Fondle ‘Em, but we ended up doing it with Jerry.

Who was Big Meal?

He’s actually the original Dr. Butcher from ‘Men At Work,’ he’s the first Dr. Butcher. I guess that ended-up falling into character with G Rap, cos the next G Rap album, the Dr. Butcher as you know him – Drew – he ended up being the last Dr. Butcher. But the one that’s on those ‘Men At Work’ records and all that? That’s Big Meal. That was a name G Rap came up with. This is him telling me, he helped out with some of those productions a little bit but he never got any credit. It’s a Marley thing.

You also got to work with Rakim?

I was working with Ron Lawrence from the Bad Boy camp, he was one of the original Hitmen. He was up at Universal visiting Hurby Luvbug and he heard that they were working on a project. Next day he called me and said, ‘Rakim wants one of the beats,’ and the next day he called and said he wants one more. I laid down the beats, then Rakim would lay down the vocals and then he would send the two inch and we would add whatever we’re gonna add. It wasn’t like we got to sit in the session with him. I’m telling Ron Lawrence, ‘This hook is not good! You’ve gotta tell him!’ He’s like, ‘How are you gonna tell Rakim to change the hook?’ He changed one of the hooks, the other hook he was just sold on. On one of the versions they put Canibus, but they took him off cos it sounds like he’s just killing him. It sounds like he was going at Rakim. You can’t have ‘The Master’ and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘This guy just destroyed The Master!’ [laughs]

You worked with all the Terror Squad after that. Did you have a good relationship with them?

I met Joe first and then it was Pun. Cuban and Triple Seis were from Pun’s crew, so I met them after. Pun was a fun guy to work with, really humorous. He would keep you laughing. Very talented, he was so creative, and sometimes with creative people it’s almost a fine line between bizarre – at some things. He’s a really nice guy but pretty bizarre on the other hand. Just the way he rhymes, the way he did things. ‘You’re rhyming off beat.’ ‘No, no, no. That’s the way I wanna rhyme!’ True artist’s are gonna be an artist. Big Pun’s ‘Brave In The Heart’ came out after the fact when he did Endangered Species, but that was supposed to be a Hydra record. When I met Terror Squad was around the time I was doing the Ghetto Gold. I was doing the Black Attack records with Correct, ‘My Crown,’ Rawkotiks, and then I started doing records with Cuban and with Seis so they could come out on Ghetto Gold as 12”s, but they never came out. Those were Ghetto Professionals records that came out through Rawkus. The Ghetto Gold label was almost like the Black Jazz logo, the guy called up Mike and said, ‘Cut that out! Stop using my logo!’ [laughs]

At the later part of all of that, when I was doing the Terror Squad album, that’s when I started doing the Ghetto Pros thing. I recorded another record with Tariq and them [Missin’ Linx], ‘M.I.A.’ The same sample that Dr. Dre used for ‘Next Episode’ a couple of years after. It did so well for Fat Beats, I wanted to do a little EP compilation album and they were willing to do it. Richie was running Fat Beats at the time and he was working on the Big L stuff with Mike at Rawkus. I started recording, I showed him a few songs that I had and he was like, ‘I’ll advance you some money.’ So I got some of the guys from Terror Squad to start recording my Ghetto Pros album. Then T-Ray heard the songs and was like, ‘Hey, I can do something bigger!’ In reality, I could have been into volume 10 or 15 by now! Who knows.

The Mighty V.I.C has in recent years provided musical scores for various MTV and E! Network programs such as ‘Pimp My Ride,’ ‘Punk’d’ and ‘My Super Sweet Sixteen,’ and is developing his own music library company.

Some early V.I.C. productions:

Check last week’s A Salute To V.I.C. compilation for more of his later work.

The artist formerly known as Fashion aka Kool-Ass Fash took some time out to discuss the ups and downs of his career as both a soloist and as a member of The Beatnuts. This first part focuses on his early days, revealing that the Intoxicated Demons EP could have been completely different had fate not intervened, his thorny relationship with Juju, subliminal rhyme jabs between the Native Tongues and how recording the Street Level album was absolute hell.

Robbie: What made you want to rap?

Al’ Tariq: I wanted to rap at an early age, growing up in The Bronx. The first time I heard Spoonie Gee [starts reciting ‘Spoonin’ Rap’] I wanted to do it bad. I always sang and act and wrote plays and movies at a young age, but what made me think it could be real was I went to school with a young gentleman named James Todd Smith. We attended this school called Christopher Robbins Academy, we were both in ninth grade together. I had gone down to North Carolina to live for two years with my family and sister. I was down there in the fall, my brother came to see me, he was like, ‘Look at this record that Jay made.’ I couldn’t believe it. That was the moment. ‘He did it? I could do it!’ When I heard ‘I Need A Beat’ it was the fall of 1984. At them times, I was rhyming but I wasn’t out there rhyming with everybody. It was something I did on the low. Basketball and girls was all I thought about. I wanted to be an entertainer anyway, but rhyming was probably the fourth or fifth thing on that list. I had other pictures for what I thought I was gonna be at the end of the day.

So you decided to make a record as well?

Both of us are Capricorns and have that singular focus. That was the time for me. Seeing that he did it, this dude I went to school with, I used to rhyme with. I was in his grandmother’s house, in the basement, being around him. Being around the original Cut Creator, we were all in the school together. I was in ninth grade but I was dating a junior who was probably the hottest chick in the school. It was like a battle. I played on the basketball team so it was like, ‘Nah, Jay can’t be better than me.’ Not no hate or no jealousy, but ‘I know I’m that good too.’ That drives me still to this day.

What was the next step?

In North Carolina I was in a singing/rapping group for a year and a half. We went around winning a bunch of talent shows and all types of shit. That’s how I stayed with the music. Then when I came back to New York, I was sixteen and I was still rapping but I wanted to model, I wanted to act, I wanted to sing. But the universe has a way of pushing you towards what you’re meant to be doing. When I was about seventeen, eighteen I got hooked up with some people that were like, ‘You’re talented, you should do this music.’ This kid named De’Anthony, who knew people in the Flavor Unit, was loosely connected to them, he wanted to get my stuff and show it to ‘em, so I started working with him and going to the studio. He brought me to Big Beat Records and they were talking about giving up a little bit of money for the songs that I had done, but I went and told Juju and them. We were at some club and I was like, ‘Yo, Ju. These dudes wanna give me $50 – $60,000 to do an album.’ He was like, ‘That’s nothing. I can get you 250 [thousand dollars].’ Because he was around the whole Native Tongue thing. He knew Tip, he knew the Jungle Brothers, he knew De La and he knew Chris Lighty, and things were happening with them. ‘You don’t have to take that deal, I’ll get you a deal. Let’s start going to my house and doing some songs.’ So we start going to his crib, demo’ing songs. We did a bunch of song together, hanging together, partying every day at my cousins crib – girls and weed and beer and music – just breaking night. We would stay up all night and then sleep all day.

How had you met Juju and Les?

I went to school with Ju at the school called Newtown, he left and went to this other school, and that’s where he met Psycho Les. He and Les met at an alternative school for kids who had a poor attendance record or whatever it was. Both of them went to school with a guy who I used to call my family and we used to say we were cousins. His name was Ronnie Walters. He used to see them in school everyday, battling. They would bring their tapes of beats they made the night before and play them at school. At first they were adversaries, then they got to the point where they respected each other and they started to work together. So he told Ju, ‘Yo, you know my cousin? He’s an MC, he’s better than anybody around the neighborhood.’ So he brought Juju to the house where we stayed at, my aunt’s house, and they listened to me rhyme and we started hanging at the house everyday after that. This is like ‘89.

They told me that Chris Lighty had called them and wanted them to do music for this kid that he was about to put out – Chi-Ali. They started working with him, so they would come and tell me about what they were doing in the studio. One day they came and it was like a funny vibe, and Les finally says to me, ‘We gave Chi ‘In My Room.’ ‘In My Room’ was one of my favorite joints on my demo at that time. What I thought was they gave him the beat, so I was like, ‘Damn, I love that beat. You know what? Fuck it, we’ll find another beat for the song. Y’all use the song and that’s gonna help the whole situation.’ So Les says to me, ‘Nah, we didn’t just use the beat. Juju gave him your rhymes too.’ We were in the front of my cousin’s house, it was a sunny day and I turned around to Juju, I was like, ‘Yo, how are you gonna give him my song, man?’ He was like, ‘Yo, you didn’t copyright that shit!’ That was the beginning of a crazy relationship that we’ve had for years. I always look at that as the beginning.

How did you react?

I wanted to do something physical, but I have always been a thinker, especially when it comes to fighting and beefing and all that stuff. It’s gonna be the last resort for me. I’ve had times where I’ve lost control and done some things that I’ve regretted, but for the most part I think first. Les saw the look on my face, so Les said to me, ‘Don’t even worry about it. I’mma take you to meet the nigga Chris tomorrow.’ So the day after Les took me to meet Chris Lighty. He was like, ‘Yo Chris, this is the dude that wrote ‘In My Room’ and all that shit Ju been letting you hear.’ Chris was like, ‘Yo, I didn’t know those were your songs and that niggas didn’t have permission. Why don’t you come and write some joints for him, I’ll give you some money.’ I was like, ‘Yo, bet!’ That was my way in. It makes me proud, Les and Chris are the reason that I have my career right now. If Les hadn’t have brought me to Chris and been on some fuckwit shit and moving like Juju was doing, you may have never heard of me. Chris giving me the chance that he gave me? I owe everything to him.

So he gave you a writing credit?

I’m on the album for writing credits, my publishing I didn’t get though. I didn’t know no better at the time. I got maybe $7,500, which at that time was crazy to me. I was a nineteen year old kid, plus the fact that I was on the album on a big song with Dove from De La Soul, Phife, Dres, me and Chi-Ali. All of those dudes were huge.

What happened to Ju and Les shopping your demo at this stage?

This is a story I got from Chi-Ali’s dad, his name was Stan, and he was our manager at the time. He told us Relativity heard ‘Let The Horns Blow’ and they knew who everybody else was except me. They were like, ‘Who’s this dude rhyming?’ They were like, ‘That’s Fashion, he’s been been writing Chi’s songs and he’s the rapper that runs with The Beatnuts.’ So they were like, ‘Holy shit! So they’re not just a production team? They’ve got a rapper? Let’s get them too.’ That’s what got us our deal. Chris was gonna have The Beatnuts as his in-house production team, but Relativity were like, ‘These dudes can be a group themselves.’ The Intoxicated Demons EP started out as my solo album. It was supposed to be me rhyming and them producing it and them on a couple of songs with me. So if maybe there were gong to be ten songs on the album, just to give it a number? Six would be solo songs and four would be me with me and Ju and Les. When I went away to jail for eleven months, we hadn’t finished it. The Beatnuts kept making songs and they did joints without me. The label was like, ‘Before he even gets out, let’s put this stuff out.’ ‘Reign of the Tech’ was getting a good response and people liked it, so they put that shit out and it blew up and that started the whole ball rolling. It was on from there.

Were you glad they kept going or were you frustrated that you were missing out?

I wasn’t frustrated at all, back then I didn’t take the shit so seriously. I was such a happy-go-lucky person, I loved doing music, I loved girls – I really wasn’t focused on my career. I was just living in the moment at that time. So when I went away to jail, just the fact that they kept everything going and the fact that my crew had this big song and shit? It was good to me. Things started going sour when I came home, cos it turned into this whole Spanish thing and this whole Corona thing and all these people were hanging around now that weren’t around before. It used to just be the three of us and now it was all these dudes from Corona and it just turned into this other shit. People had their opinion about if I should be in the group or not, it was racial shit, it was just crazy after that, man.

Was V.I.C. one of the new guys on the scene?

V.I.C. came in while I was in jail, I never knew Vic like that. He was another producer from around. He was a little older than all of us, but I didn’t really know him. When I came home he was around and he was on one song, ‘World’s Famous,’ and I was like, ‘Wow. This is crazy!’ But it was all meant to be, when I look back at it now. But at that time? It was madness. I hated it. I hated the whole Spanish and black shit. They were like, ‘We made this song and you weren’t on it.’ But they knew I was looked at by the label as one of the main parts of the group, but as far as Ju? Ju never liked that. Ju always wanted to be the mouthpiece, to be the guy that did every interview. It was a real tough thing, this dude would put his foot in his mouth. One time we had a crazy beef with Warren G and them because Juju had said in some interview that he don’t think Warren G is hip-hop, with that ‘Regulators’ song he had. So Chris Lighty had to squash that whole beef so we could even go to Cali. He said the shit on BET, on Prince Dajour on Rap City, and it turned into this whole thing. Then it was beef when we went to Chicago, cos Juju said, ‘All that tiggedy tiggedy tongue twisting shit don’t impress me!’ So Tongue Twista thought he was coming at him and they wanted to jump us at a show. It was crazy.

I had done this song, before we even started doing the album, called ‘Nikki The Sensational.’ Les had did the beat for it. I really liked Tribe Called Quest, I was really a fan of theirs, so the song was my way of doing ‘Bonita Applebum.’ It didn’t sound like ‘Bonita,’ but if you were gonna say, ‘We’re gonna take these elements, we’re gonna do this type of beat, talk about a girl, make it a catchy hook.’ So I did my version of it. So Juju came to this club one night and he was telling me that he let Tip hear it and Tip was shitting on me, like, ‘Yo, the beat is good but that nigga y’all got rappin’ is wack.’ So he was egging me on to diss him! It was so many subliminal disses about people. We had went to De La Soul’s video for ‘Saturday’ and there was this whole feeling like they shitted on us, like they wasn’t acting cool with us. It was mad corny, man. Ju was always egging me on, cos one of the first things he told me when he first heard me rhyme, he was like, ‘You’re gonna murder everybody! When I tell you to get on somebody? You gonna get on ‘em!’ That was always the mode that we was in from day one. So I’m like, ‘Wow? These niggas are shittin’ on me? Fuck all of them! Busta – everybody!’ So when you hear ‘Third of the Trio,’ when I say, ‘I’m so smooth on the horns, I was the real b-b-butter, baby!’ That’s about Tip and them. Then they said shit about me on famous songs, like when Phife says, ‘Believe that if you wanna but I tell you this much/Riding on the train with no dough, sucks!’ [‘Buggin’ Out’] He’s talking about us. One night we were in front of Calliope Studios, we had just done a session and we were talking about how we had sharks in our stomachs cos we were hungry. Nobody had no money to get nothing to eat while we were working all these hours in the studio. I remember me and Les telling Phife that we were about to hop the train to get home cos we didn’t have no money and shit, so he put that in a rhyme. It was all subliminal shit. Like when Tip says that shit in ‘Scenario’: ‘I can give a damn about an ill subliminal/stay away from clowns so I ain’t no criminal.’ He’s talking about me.

Tip and them had an editing session for the ‘Check The Rime’ video, so we went to the shit. It was me, Les and Ju, Tip is in there with some chick, the dude’s editing the shit. So we’re sitting down by him and the girl and Juju says to me, ‘Yo, tell that nigga Tip all that shit you were saying about him now.’ So I’m like, ‘Wait a minute – this is the nigga that’s been telling me that Tip was saying ill shit about me, that I suck, so I’m saying shit on them in records, and now you’re saying it in front of him?’ Me and Les looked at each other like, ‘What the fuck? This nigga is crazy!’ I remember Tip’s face, man, and how he looked at me. I felt so bad, because I always wanted to be cool with the nigga and make a record with the nigga. I was star-struck actually sitting in the room with the dude. It’s one of the hottest crews out and I’m in here with them, looking at a video before anybody is seeing it. And this nigga just said that shit. The way Tip looked at me, and I didn’t even say nothing. We left about ten minutes after that, and I never talked to Tip again. I seen him one time face to face again. Me and Les were walking in Soho and he was in a car with Lyor Cohen, they stopped and we exchanged pleasantries for a second, we shook hands but it was a real fake handshake. It just sucked, man.

Do you think Juju was trying to start trouble that wasn’t there or was it legitimate?

I won’t even pretend to understand Juju. I’ve dealt with the dude for years, I thought we were like brothers. We used to break bread together, eat, smoke, girls – all types of stuff. We went through the tough shit together of having no money. I could never put my finger on it. I think it was some racial shit that a part of it – comments he’s made to me over the years – plus at our high school there used to be wars between the Hispanics and the black people, and he was definitely always on the side of the Hispanic dudes. I was in the middle, because my mother’s father’s Cuban, and I’ve always had an affinity with my Latin people, that’s my blood.

The Street Level album was amazing. How were things when you were all recording that?

It’s amazing to me that the album came out like that, cos there was so much bullshit going on all the fucking time the studio. It wasn’t comfortable for any of us, Les and Juju used to have at it over beats and saying little dumb subliminal shit on records. The best shit that we did to date is the shit that we did together as a whole, is that Street Level album. We kinda took air out of the sails for that album, because we didn’t like the first single, ‘Props Over Here.’ We just did ‘Reign Of The Tech, ‘No Equal,’ ‘Psycho Dwarf’ all of this crazy wild EP, we’ve got this crazy album and ‘Props’ is the only song of it’s kind on the album, B. Nothing else is super jazzy like that, we started making a whole different song to it. But the label was on this over-thinking shit that we needed a radio single. It was like, ‘Dog, listen. ‘Reign Of The Tech’ wouldn’t have been a radio single, it’s just that it caught people.’ We coulda came out with ‘Hit Me’ or ‘Get Funky’ but that made us come out with that song and it was contrived. If you hear the hook, ‘Yeah, you get props over here!’ We’re using the slang term of the day and all of that shit, it was wack. The day it was picked for us, we were on a conference call with Chris Lighty and he got Tip on the phone and he was like, ‘Yo, Tip said that the first single should be ‘Props Over Here. The album is crazy, ‘Props’ is gonna blow up for y’all.’ It was us in the room with Alan Glumbrad and all these people from Relativity/Sony, Peter Kang. We did the good video but we didn’t put the energy behind it, that wasn’t the joint we wanted. I was associating mad songs with the experience I went through to create them, so a lotta of them songs I didn’t like until years later. I didn’t know that people liked it though. We used to hate going to perform that shit.

Why was that album so difficult to make?

It was bad times. If you put on earphones you can hear the underlying story of that album, cos you hear so many little ad-libs and people saying, ‘Suck my dick!’ We were doing subliminal disses to each other on our own album! Even the rhymes! ‘Yeah, and you can keep it subliminal/I don’t play, some people say my style is type criminal’ on ‘Hellraiser’? Ju thinks Les is talking shit about him! It was nuts, B.

How much did your lack of enthusiasm for the first single damage the album?

That definitely damaged it. Our energy, our vibe. Les and I – cos Ju didn’t even go out on the road with us to tour – we went on the Best of the Underground tour with Organzied Konfusion, Artifacts and Common. It was just me, Les, Ric Man and Mista Sinista from the X-Ecutioners. That album should have went platinum. If our energy would have been with it, and we would have been working it and feeling good about it? I think it went gold over a period of time, but it should have been a smash hit at the time period. We should have stood fast and not agreed with ‘Props Over’ as the single, regardless of what Chris and Tip were saying. Puba kept telling me every time he saw me, ‘Yo, tell the label to make that shit a single! We got a hit with that shit!’

‘Are You Ready’?

Exactly! We had some many joints that could’ve been singles.

What were ‘Fluid’ and ‘40 Oz’ from?

That was during the album. There’s a bunch of songs that we did that no one ever heard. There was a few joints we were supposed to do shit with and it never happened. Then a couple of joints like ‘Fluid’ got released, but it was on some low stuff and only for Japan it was supposed to be to give the something different. I have no idea where all of those fuckin’ joints went. Even joints that we did when we were recording my album. Do you know that joint ‘DWYCK’? We did a joint to that beat, called ‘You Got It Going On’ and it was a crazy joint. But as we were recording it, ‘DWYCK’ came out and Ju and them were like, ‘Fuck!’ They didn’t want to do the song no more because these dudes had used the beat first.

Part Two covers the God Connections solo album and the Missin’ Linx project.

Continuing my interview with Kool-Ass Fash, we discuss him leaving The Beatnuts, meeting Kanye West, forming Missin’ Linx, getting beat-jacked by Dr. Dre and his ill-fated experience signing with Dante Ross.

Robbie: At what stage did you decide to do a solo album?

Al’ Tariq: While we were out on tour doing The Beatnuts joint, we were doing a show close to home at a school, maybe in Long Island or some shit, being on stage and then somebody started heckling us. Talking shit, ‘Yo, you fuckin’ aargh!’ I finally look and it’s Juju. Then he comes and hops on stage and joins in on one of our songs and shit. I was so mad, and I could never understand why Les and Peter Kang didn’t get mad with this dude. I had a few serious run-ins with him.

We met Amanda Shears, who was down with Happy Waters and Ted Demme, that’s how I met my ex wife, that day we went to go meet them. Steve Stoute hooked up a meeting with us with Amanda Shears, Steve Stoute wasn’t even as big as he is, this is back in the day with Steve Stoute. We go, we met Amanda Shears and she was about to be our manager and I get a call from her one day and she’s like, ‘I’m having a problem with Juju, can you talk to him?’ She was saying, ‘I’ll get 20% of what y’all do. I’m about to bring y’all deals to do songs with people, to do beats for people.’ She was crazy connected. So Ju was like, ‘Alright, but if I talk to somebody and I get an agreement to do a song for them, you don’t get no money outta that.’ She was like, ‘You’re doing beats for $5,000, $7,500. $10,000 at the most. I’mma get you $40-$50,000 for beats to big people.’

He refused to share his money on the job. Instead of just giving the 20 on everything, he was like, ‘Fuck that. If I hook something up, why should you get any money?’ I’m like, ‘Yo Ju, she’s not just managing us as producers. She’s about the manage the group The Beatnuts. We’re gonna be on tour with Cypress Hill, Funkdoobiest, rock groups – everything, my nigga! Fuck that little bit of money you’re talking about!’ And like the dickhead he always liked to be…and nobody would say nothin’. Les wouldn’t beef with him, that was always my gripe with Les. ‘How do you see this dude ruining us, putting his foot in his mouth at every turn, fucking up shit, burning bridges with people, nobody wants to deal with him.

He doesn’t come out on tours! You think when we did those tours that everybody didn’t want to see all three of us? They didn’t want to just see me and Les. People, to this day, ask them about me. ‘Yo, what’s up with Fashion?’ So you know at that time they wanted to see all three of us. He was burning so much shit for us that I was like, ‘I can’t be in this group.’ I’m a soloist anyway, so I did like three or four songs. Relativity had a new president, dude didn’t know us from Adam and he said, ‘Because of what this last Beatnut album did, we’re not gonna do two Beatnut albums, and that’s all this Fashion album is gonna be if it’s only The Beatnuts producing.’ So they declined to do a deal with me. As soon as that happened I was out on the market and Correct was the first label that jumped on it. ‘We’re crazy fans, we’re building a young label, we’re gonna blow you up!’ They were based in California. Don Schneider, who’s father was an importer/exporter of computer parts – he was an Israeli dude, new money – back then he was worth maybe $50 or $100 million. Ian Hunt was a descendant of the Hunt family, which is one of the huge, old money families in America. He was a trust-fund kid and they had all of this money to do this label. They had an umbrella company, and then Correct came under it. They had the group Mannish, they had me, they had Gravity, they were trying to sign Kanye. They had done a single with Black Attack and were about to sign him too. As you can see, Les did most of my album anyway.

Had you become righteous around that time?

I already had been educated in Islam already, something just happened and I took my Shahada. I could have still called myself Fashion, but I wanted to make a break because I felt like the energy of The Beatnut thing, the album not reaching the heights that we felt it should have reached. We didn’t even know how well-received it was from the fans, we were so caught-up in, ‘We didn’t get five mics!’ The Source had given us three and a half mics, then they came back and made a correction in the next issue. They were like, ‘We really wanted to give The Beatnuts’ album four mics, it was a mistake.’ But the damage was already done. All the hype and the Yo! MTV Raps and the BET and magazine covers and all the other bullshit? It didn’t mean shit. Rap was becoming big business, so labels were already at that time, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ If the album wasn’t the biggest thing? They were moving on to the next thing. Common, Fat Joe, ‘If you guys didn’t sell 300,000 the first week then we’re off to this.’ It was wack.

Was the ‘Nikki’ song on God Connections the same song from the old demo days?

Nah, it wasn’t exactly the same thing, cos the first one that Tip heard didn’t have Miss Jones on it. The one with Miss Jones was done later on in the studio when we were doing the Street Level abum.

How did you connect with the Chicago guys like No I.D.?

Because of Common we already knew about No I.D., so he was already part of the family. Correct had Gravity, so I went to Chicago to do a track with him and Ye produced it. That was the first time I met him, and he was a fan of mine. I was looking at him like a talented young kid. It felt good, cos he know all my rhymes and was asking what made me put the King of New York shit in the hook for ‘Crime Pays,’ and ‘What made you put all them black exploitation films in your rhymes for ‘Foxxy Brown’?’ I’m like, ‘Yo, you’re the only nigga that peeped that, man.’ I’ve had people interview me and ask about that song and ain’t nobody understand why I did that.

‘Peace Akhi’ with Ju and Les was great too.

‘Peace Akhi’ was a joint, man! If Correct didn’t fold, because of some crazy shit that happened – some sexual harassment lawsuit – and I had the chance to do more videos that that album would have been way more successful. At the time too, I was going back and forth to court, facing twelve and a half to twenty five years in jail, so it was a crazy time, B.

Where had you met Problemz and Black Attack?

I met Probz and Black when I was still with The Beatnuts. Because of that dude Ronnie, he knew Sterling Kagel from Roosevelt Island. Sterling was messing with this crew called S.O.P. – Smoked Out Productions. They were starting to make some noise, but they had two stand-out rappers and the rest were mediocre, at least that’s what the fans felt. That was Black and Probz. Sterl asked me if I would do a song with them as their first release away from S.O.P. The song came out crazy and I was like, ‘Yo, I want y’all to be on my album!’ They were with it. It caused a little confusion with Sterl, but they weren’t signed to him.

Then you went on to form Missin’ Linx with them and recorded a single, which has an interesting story behind it.

Dre heard our song, and that’s how he even wanted to go get that beat. The dude’s who sold him that beat weren’t supposed to sell it to him because they had sold it to V.I.C., who’s the dude that produced ‘Missin’ In Action’ for us. He heard that shit on the Baka Boyz, ‘Who is that? What is that?’ Found out what it was, what the loop was – took it. Ours was an underground classic, his was a top ten hit. But it’s all good.

So you cleared things up with Vic after your initial reservations?

I was cool with Vic, Vic used to go through the same shit with Juju. The back-stabbing and the back-talking and all the dumb shit. He witnessed it, he knew what time it was. Plus he wasn’t really a racial dude, so he could see all the shit that was going on. He wasn’t gonna shit on Juju, cos that’s why he was in the spot he was in. Even though he had his other connections with Deric Angeletti and people, Vic’s fame is that he was down with The Beatnuts, somewhat.

Why did you only release a Missin’ Linx EP instead of a full album?

We were making a lotta noise with the ‘Missin’ In Action’ song, we had just got an offer from Fat Beats for a nice sum of money to do an album and to do an imprint [label]. Fat Beats is a small, boutique thing, it’s not a major, and they were like, ‘We’re gonna push y’all over here.’ At the same time, I had a boy by the name of Dagen Ryan who always fucked with Dante Ross, and he was down in the business, doing things with DV Alias Khrist and all those dudes. Dagen was making his bones, I known him since we were youngsters, running around in clubs in the 80’s. He was like, ‘Dante just got a deal with Loud – Stimulated – he wants y’all to be his next three man group. It’ll be in the same line as Brand Nubian, Leaders of the New School, and y’all. That’s how he’s gonna bill it.’ So I went with the emotional shit. It was a dummy move, I should’ve never did that. All he wanted to do was give us an EP. ‘Oh, it’s Dante Ross! We’re gonna be on Loud!’ I should have just did the right thing and been loyal to Fat Beats and took the almost $100,000 they wanted to give us to launch our own shit. It would have been a totally different outcome, because they were a force and they really wanted to push everything. I put that on me, making that decision.

Then we had a terrible relationship with Dante. Dante shitted on us, didn’t really give a fuck about that Stimulated shit. He was riding high on the hog because he had done the Santana album and he had the fuckin’ Whitey Ford album out. He was so huge that he never was at the office. He didn’t give a fuck about our shit, we never even did a video for our shit. Then me and him got into a beef because we needed to get money. We did the whole EP already, and you want to be extra critical and talk shit and cause dissention in the group? I’m like, ‘What type moves are you making, man?’ All of us were fucked up. I was like, ‘Yo Dante, we need to do something to get some bread. Can we do a record with Fat Beats while we waitin’ for this EP to drop? Black ain’t got no electricity in his house, Probz ain’t paid no rent, he’s about to get kicked-out. We need bread!’ He’s like, ‘No.’ He didn’t care, man. So me and him got into a crazy phone altercation, which I hate. Beefing over the phone of my pet peeves. I was so heated I wanted to do something to him, and the whole shit just fell apart man. He just shelved our shit, he never put out nothing. It never got no pub, it never got nothing. It was a waste of time.

You still went on to work with Juju and Les a few times again. How are things between you all now?

We havn’t done nothin’ since ‘07. Me, Les and Problemz did an album, Big City, on Nature Sounds. That was another one where we had a falling out. Les wanted Devin to pay him money over to go promote his own album. Devin had booked shows for us to do, Les wanted to do Beatnut shows over those so we never did one show together. We did a video and the video never got shown anywhere because Devin wouldn’t put no more money into it, because Les refused to promote it unless Devin gave him money upfront. The reason that album came about is me and Probz were doing an album together, our first single was gonna have Ol’ Dirty on the hook. Ol’ Dirty passed away, so we were a little set back. I get back up with Les, and Les is not in a good situation in life. He was going through a messy divorce with his wife and shit just wasn’t good for him. I brought him to Devin so that Devin could hear the album he put together. Dev wasn’t impressed with the album, but he suggested, ‘Why don’t y’all just be a group and do an album? I’ll put it out.’ It took us two years to do the shit, cos Probz and I were both gainfully employed. Then Les went and talked shit about me and Probz on AllHipHop.com or some shit, saying he only did the Big City album to help us out cos we wasn’t doing shit. Yo, that was some of the best shit you did in years and you’re talking about, ‘You needed to help us out?’ You were fucked up! Sleeping in your car and then living with this dude Chris, this singer from Chicago.

Before that, we had done a tour together where I found out at the last minute that them even doing the tour was contingent on having me as a part of it. It was a European tour with an American leg on it. ‘One of the main reasons that we got this tour is because the promoters in Europe said you had to be on it.’ No wonder these fuckin’ dudes just call me out the blue to do this shit. And then they were giving me peanuts! This is the last fuckin’ straw. Then they did the Take It Or Squeeze It album, we did two or three songs together. I remember Chris Lighty coming up to Chung King studios, talking about the first single and shit. They wanted ‘No Escapin’ This’ and I was like, ‘My nigga, ‘No Escapin’ This’ does not sound like ‘Off The Books’ or ‘Watch Out Now.’ The reason they’re big is because you can dance to them, you can play them in clubs. What y’all should put out is the Greg Nice joint.’ So Juju said, ‘Who made you Power of Attorney? How you get to run shit?’ So again I bit my tongue and let them go ahead.

Were you proud for them when they had those two hit singles?

I’m in the ‘No Escapin’ This’ video, on line in the club, so I was around those niggas. I remember people coming to me saying, ‘Yo, they’re talking about you in their song, ‘Do You Believe’.’ They were talking about me, saying slick shit, but I didn’t really care. I was like, ‘I’mma start this label.’ I wanted to have my own artists and I wanted to be sit back and be that dude on top. There’s other stuff I wanted to – movies, I wanted to do this singing album with a band – all types of other shit. Regardless of whatever you do, that’s just gonna make me go harder, cos I’m gonna feel like I’ve gotta be bigger than whatever you did. Envy? Yeah, you can say that. Never jealously, never hate, never mad. I’ve been on stage with them and performed them songs like it was mine, and I’m proud of it because that’s a part of my family tree in this music game. Their success? I revel in it. I know I’m a part of the history of this group, before them songs and after those songs. But there was something else meant for me.

Are you still living in New York?

I’m at Westchester, about 35 minutes outside of the city, which is beautiful for me. I’m close enough to the city that I can enjoy it, but I’m far enough away that I don’t have to deal with the concrete jungle.

What’s next for you as far as music?

I wanna do one album for me, I wanna have closure. I wanna end my career as a rapper my way, I want it to end the way I want it to end. I have thirteen kids, and part of the reason I came back to Westchester was to be a dad for my kids. It started being more and important to me. Then I went through this crazy situation up here in 2004 where I was involved in this crazy federal case. My first cousin, who’s like my brother, was murdered by these dudes that I knew from up here. They killed him in a crazy drug deal, it was all over the news. I was in a raid, it was 60-something people arrested. It was one of the biggest drug arrests in New York State history. Kidnapping, murder, all types of shit. When that shit happened in 04 and I lost my cousin, it made me really evaluate everything and take stock of what my life was and what the fuck had I been doing, how I wasn’t taking shit serious. I was just living. That made me feel like what was important was family and having a legacy with my kids and being something for them. Not just hopping all over the pace and living my life on my terms, I had to live it being responsible for other lives, and I never was living like that until that time. That changed everything for me.

Will there be another Al’ Tariq album?

Of course. I have a name for the album, it’s called B.I.G – Before I Go.

CJ Moore has been at ground zero for more classic hip-hop records that most of us can either count, through his work as an engineer at 1212 during the Paul C. era, with his group Black By Demand and with his work for Akinyele and Kool G Rap to name a few. After chopping it with CJ for three hours, there’s a lot of material to get through and a lot of behind the scenes stories to drop, so let’s begin with how it all got started.

Robbie: When did you first get involved with music?

CJ Moore: About 83, 84. My brothers had a DJ group, and I was just a guy around the group. They were into the deejaying aspect of it and I was into the rapping aspect of it. I started getting into the technical side of it around 84, 85. My mom had bought me a little portable piano and I started making my little compositions from that point. That stemmed into me being the guy who understood a lot of the technical ins and outs as far as equipment was concerned, and I took it from there.

You didn’t study engineering formally?

I just picked it up as I went along. It was a studio called 1212 that I worked at, I was 14, going on 15. I had made a record called ‘We’re Gettin’ Paid.’ My aunt had bought me a drum machine, called a Casio RZ-1. One of the first sampling drum machines, it had like a 2.5 seconds of sample time on it, so I started making my beats from that and using my little piano. I took it into 1212, and the guy who owned the studio – his name is Mick Corey – he took a liking to the fact that I had never been in the studio before, how I kinda knew my way around to where I recognised what I was looking at. I knew how to get in and out.I used to go over to Sam Ash and Manny’s on 48th Street after school and play around with the equipment until they kicked me out. I would watch people and at some point I would overhear conversations about studios. I was trying to get in these places, but I didn’t have the money nor the backing, as far as you get into the buildings and they see this little kid trying to come into a music building. They looking at me like I’m crazy, with no supervision. 1212, I saved up my little money and went and did the sessions. I asked him, ‘I would love to work in a place like this!’ And he said, ‘Why not?’ I liked at him like he was crazy. He was asking me what did I know about this and what did I know about that and I was answering all of the questions right. He was talking about ratio and threshold and attack and things of that nature. I understood that because I used to read a lot and picked it up from that point until I really got my hands on it. I had some sort of a tutorial head-start due to literature.

A lot of sessions that were coming in and out of there, he asked me did I want to sit in on some of the sessions. Naturally I had to ask my mother to see if she would allow me to be out, cos a lot of the sessions were at night. At first they were weekends, and I started sitting in on sessions like Black, Rock and Ron and Son of Bazerk. It had been two weeks and one of the engineers called out and couldn’t make it, so I filled in. It was Ultramagnetic’s session. We started playing around, cos they were originally doing most of their stuff with Paul C. Then wound up I ended up taking the Black, Rock and Ron session and I did all the songs for their album. Then Son of Bazerk, did their songs. Organized Konfusion were some guys that came in and I did their stuff.

Were they Simply II Positive back then?

Yeah, they were Simply II Positive then. During that time, I had already been spoken for over at Tommy Boy Records. I was originally signed to Warner Bros. but then they bumped me down to Tommy Boy, that was the rap label that Warner Bros. owned. I had cut a record called ‘All Rappers Give Up’ back with ‘Can’t Get Enough.’ With Organized Konfusion, I was trying to get them to go over to Tommy Boy. We had this record, ‘Bra,’ that we had sampled, and one of the acts on Tommy Boy, I think it was De La Soul, had simultaneously used the same sample, and Prince Po accused me of giving the track to one of those guys. I’m like, ‘Hey, it’s a record! People sample, I don’t own the exclusive rights.’ So they started working with Paul C.

Guys like Large Professor came in the studio, I tracked and mixed ‘Watch Roger Do His Thing,’ his first record for Main Source. You had Stezo. Between Paul C and myself, we were splitting a lot of sessions. The big ta-do was me being this young, black kid from the inner city, from the projects. A lot of people wanted to see that. ‘Yo, you’ve gotta check out this little kid in the studio!’ People were fascinated with just the idea of that, so I was starting to get called into different studios like Power Play, Electric Lady and Chung King. I started combing being an artist and being an engineer by trade. The Tommy Boy thing kicked in and then we were going into album mode. ‘Can’t Get Enough’ did real well, ‘All Rappers Give Up’ did real well, it was an A and B side, but then it flipped because ‘All Rappers Give Up’ became the number one record in LA for an extremely long time. They had a radio station called KDAY, the furst 24-7 rap station. I had never been in California a day in my life, and I couldn’t believe the impact that the record had. We’re talking about 88, 89.

Ice Cube would later sample the same loop, wouldn’t he?

Right, on ‘How To Survive In South Central.’ In hindsight, it was almost like he was paying homage to the record. I was one of their favorite artists and I was on tour with them. I didn’t know who they were. You’ve got this hot young rap act from New York and you’ve got this underground rap act from California, which was Eazy-E and NWA. When I got off the plane our acting manager at the time, Ed Strickland, he said, ‘You’ve got a show with these guys.’ It was Ice-T, Eazy-E, NWA, us and Spice 1. We played at a place called the Artemus Ham Hall out in Las Vegas. We saw these dudes coming down the escalators and it was like, ‘Who are these dudes with the big silly curls?’ It was a totally different transition how Californians dress and how New Yorkers dress. We kinda bumped heads in the beginning. They didn’t know we were a rap group and I didn’t know we were a rap group because none of us had videos at the time, so they looked at us and we looked at them with crazy looks. We got introduced and we did the soundcheck, and Eazy-E had the assumption that Black By Demand were Run-DMC status because the record was so huge out there. Between three stations we were getting twenty spins a day, and because we had pictures out there for the concert we could barely even get out of the airport!

We were one of the first guys to ever use Roger Troutman on any type of record and do it in the manner that we did it. That sorta set a trend, so the field started opening up. ‘You Got’s To Chill’ and those other records kinda hit at the same time, but we were playing that record in the streets before it got to radio. People were getting a glimpse of it in the clubs, in the streets, which was real mixtapes back then. Then we did ‘Dearly Beloved’ which did extremely well for us – we travelled the country and lots of parts of the world.

Why did you decide to flip Yes’ ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’?

I didn’t want to do that record. Tommy Boy came to me and they said, ‘I need you to do this.’ Which was something like Tone Loc. ‘Funky Cold Medina’ was out, and I’m like, ‘Go get him to do that record!’ We got into it, I walked out and I said, ‘You know what? I’mma give ‘em what they want.’ I happened to be be going through my brother’s records and I came across ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart.’ So just for kicks I sampled it, I played some instruments over the sample and then I went and got ‘Apache’ and some other things and put the drums together. We brought it onto Tommy Boy and collapsed the entire staff, everybody just lost their mind. We were looking at each other like, ‘What the fuck? Are they serious?’ It was so left-field what we were doing. We had another record called ‘In The Midst of Funk’ which was the flipside, and we wanted the video to that record. They forced us, we did the video for ‘Dearly Beloved’ and it did well. ‘In The Midst of Funk’ wound up getting more radio play, commercially, but ‘Dearly Beloved’ had that television airplay. That’s when Yo! MTV Raps was hitting, with Doctor Dre and Ed Lover. They were good friends of mine, so they found a way with Ted Demme – who was their producer – to rotate the record. I started getting really heavy into production. Tommy Boy wouldn’t take the records that I was doing, so I started taking those same records and taking my voice off and letting other people rap over it.

Was this for the Black By Demand album?

Right. We would give ‘em a bunch of songs and they would tell us, ‘That’s not you.’ How are you going to tell us ‘that’s not you’? You’re not me! That was a similar beef everyone at Tommy Boy was having. Dante Ross, who kind of discovered us, he fought for us as much as he could, cos he was a heavy hip-hop head and he was into the raw guts of hip-hop. They were into the commercialism, they wanted to cross that road, but the artists that they signed weren’t really the artists for that. Even with De La Soul, they created that whole ‘DAISY Age’ thing. I remember going to all these meetings with Uptown and De La Soul and Stetsasonic, Latifah. It was just a constant bicker and fight on creative control. They wouldn’t let me get off the label. Delicious Vinyl wanted to sign me, Motown wanted to sign me, Uptown wanted to sign me, so I had a bidding war going on. All these execs were coming to the table and every time I it turned around, the number was getting higher, so I said, ‘I’m young, I’ll wait this contract out. I’ma get heavy into production.’

I was already engineering for other people, and Dr. Butcher and myself started going head-over-heels doing tracks. I was the more technical person, cos I understood how to deal with a lotta the electronics in the studio. Father MC was a friend of mine and he was trying to get a record deal, so he was coming into 1212 but he just wasn’t hitting. I had this record called ‘I’ll Do 4 U’ and I said, ‘I’ma take me off and put you on it.’ Took it over to Uptown and they wanted to mess with it, but they didn’t want to mess with a young kid like myself. I wanted a production deal. I was handling my own business, I had a powerful lawyer, his name was Bill Krasilovsky – he wrote This Business of Music. People followed this book like the bible, and he was also lawyer for so many of the presidents of these major companies, so I had the advantage of having a lawyer of that stature, that knew how to get to anybody, anyway he could. They wanted to do a ‘deal for hire,’ so I told Father MC, ‘There’s an opportunity on the table, I don’t want to hold you back.’ I made a couple of dollars from the situation and then Father MC went on to have his career.

Then I find myself with Joe Public, which Lionel Joe managed. Ed Strickland took me under his wing and I started getting around the George Clinton’s and the Bootsy Collin’s and the Mtume’s and the Jazzy Jeff’s. I got an opportunity to be around these people and I was learning, things were rubbing off, so I found myself getting involved in a lot of projects, just like the older guys did, where you might find Bootsy Collins played bass on a Stevie Wonder but you don’t see the credit. That was sorta like me to a degree, cos I was so good at arranging stuff and seeing vision of how a chorus should be put together, how the breakdown should lay in there and different little integral parts of a record, so I found myself getting involved with those guys a lot. On the R&B side, I wound up getting in the studio with Joe Public and we did ‘Live and Learn,’ ‘I Like’ and ‘I’ve Been Watching You.’ But Lionel took credit away from us and put us down as writers, as opposed to us being put down as the production that you contributed. I didn’t really understand how potent that was on a platinum record, where you have executives looking at the credit and saying, ‘These guys are the writers – I wanna get in touch with the producer!’ [laughs]

After the Joe Public ordeal, it’s ’92, ’93 and I finally get off Tommy Boy. I’m looking for another deal and I wind up getting signed to Chrysilis Records. Ed Strickland worked over at Chrysillis, he had jusy did Gang Starr. Then there was so sort of racism case that happened over there, where Ed Strickland was accusing someone of racism, so he wound up having to resign. So now I don’t have any kind of representative at the label and they’re looking at me like I’m Japanese! So they gave me a release and I kept it moving and me and Dr. Butcher had a strong conversation, we’re approaching ’95. He said, ‘You remember Akinyele, who did that record with Large Professor?’ So we got involved. I had a relationship over at Power Play Studio in Queens, so I went to the guy who owned it and I said, ‘I want to rent your Studio C building for two months. I don’t want nobody up in here.’ We cut the deal. Akinyele was signed to Loud Records, and we started doing his album. Akinyele had beats from a lot of people, so this guy named C4 came in, it was Butcher’s friend. I was the engineer, the producer, mixer. He had these samples, the elements of ‘Put It In Your Mouth.’ Akinyele had gotten comfortable with me, so our motto was, ‘Let’s just get down what we need to get down, CJ – you take it from there and turn it into something.’ That’s what happened to ‘Put It In Your Mouth.’ It was super sloppy, the sounds weren’t crispy, so I was like, ‘I’ma take this home, re-sample it. A new kick, coming from the same source but sampled the right way, the snare, etc’ C4 stormed out, he was so pissed. ‘What the fuck are y’all doin’ to my record?’ Akinyele was like, ‘Shut the fuck up. I paid you for it so it’s mine. Get outta here!’ The A&R guys from Loud Records were on my ass, so I’m telling Ak, ‘Get everybody out of the studio. Just you, me and Dr. Butcher.’ We shut it down, we finished that record. Kia Jefferies, who sang the vocals, she had a good idea, she went in there and we polished it up and that became the intro of the record. All of a sudden, the entire thing is starting to come together.

I did a rough mix on it, we brought it into the label and the label was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ So Ak turned around and said, ‘Fuck you, I want out. We’re gonna buy ourselves out of the contract if you won’t get behind it.’ Jessica Rosenblum was his manager at the time, she also ran all of the major clubs that were popping at that time – the Tunnel, the Palladium, the Ritz. She had the DJ’s under wing, so she made the DJ’s play ‘Put It In Your Mouth’ in the club, the record started getting up. Now all those same people that were on our neck – including C4, who didn’t agree with nothing. Now C4 is bragging about him being a person on the record, when he was totally against it. [laughs] We knew what we had, because the goal was to go somewhere where everybody wasn’t. If everybody’s going right, we’re trying to go left, but we’re gonna stay there so hard that we’re gonna carry that whole committee onto our side of the street and we’re gonna walk ‘em down a lane. That’s exactly what we did.

Butcher and myself proceeded onto the rest of the album, we must’ve did 40 songs on there. I started recording Kool G Rap at the same time, synced him with Butcher again and brought him in there on the downtime of Ak. By us controlling the building, we had 24-7 reign of anything we wanted to do. The money we spent to rent the studio out? We made it back on sessions, because I had such a catalogue of people that I was recording. The Mic Geronimo’s, the Royal Flush’s and the Sauce Money’s and all those guys. Then Ak made a move and it turned into an EP, because the record got so hot the direction of where Akinyele’s career was going took a u-turn, and no everything was sex, sex, sex. We had this hip-hop album and it was so ahead of it’s time and so different and so left-field that he would have gotten so many accolades from it, but he went the EP route. It was successful on that side, but it took from what he could have been as a well-rounded artist. Nobody wanted to hear anything but that from him, it becomes typecast. This guy is Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, so that’s the only thing he can play for the rest of his life.

Part Two covers CJ’s involvement with what could have been the greatest rap supergroup of all-time, working with Kool G Rap, his sessions with Ultramagnetic and the mystery surrounding Paul C’s untimely demise.

Engineer all-star CJ Moore delves into the behind the scenes events of Kool G Rap‘s Roots of Evil and the infamous Rawkus album, heading out west, working with the Live Squad and much more in the second part of this interview trilogy.

Robbie: What happened after the Akinyele sessions finished?

CJ Moore: When money started coming into play between Dr. Butcher and myself, things started getting funny. I went out to California and I teamed-up with Ed Strickland again and we was with a guy doing a project called The Reality Check – a guy named Michael Harris – Harry O. He’s the guy who funded Death Row Records. Ice Cube, Ice-T, Dub C, all those guys were involved. I produced a couple of records with Ice-T with me and him rapping back and forth. I was doing the east coast stuff, Battlecat was doing the west coast stuff. I went to Big Daddy Kane, talked to him on the phone, I said, ‘I need you to be out in California. I’m doing this project, it’s kinda merging the east coast with the west coast. Let’s talk about what it’s gonna take to get you on the project.’ He asked me who was on the project, and I explained to him. There was guy named Black Ceasar on the project, he was from Pittsburgh, real talented guy, but Kane had a problem because his name was Black Ceasar. I said, ‘But your name is Big Daddy Kane!’ ‘Yeah, aka Black Ceasar.’ I said, ‘What kind of bullshit is that?’ He couldn’t do the project because of that. I stepped to Method Man and I was trying to get to Redman and everyone was kinda busy, so the east coast/west coast thing never did the proper merge. There was so much money on the table, more than these guys have ever made. For some reason it just backed-out. I guess the whole Harry O thing might have scared people to a degree, if you know the homework on the whole Death Row situation. But we can’t get into that.

I came back, the Akinyele project is out, we’re working on Kool G Rap. Kool G Rap went around to everybody – from the Large Professor’s, the Lord Finesse’s, Easy Mo Bee’s, Premier’s – all of the producers who were hot at the time. They wouldn’t mess with him, so he comes to Dr. Butcher and Butcher comes to me. ‘I don’t work without CJ.’ ‘I don’t work without Butcher.’ He was over in Arizona for something that happened personal in his life, and we teamed up to bring Kool G Rap out of the water. Went down to Arizona for two months off and on, we only left once. We started coming up with ideas, putting choruses together. When I say blood, sweat and tears? We bled that whole Roots of Evil album out. He was down with an independent guy who invested in the project and all the parties were happy.

They bring the project back to New York and they wound up getting to Rawkus Records. He gets this number thrown at him and he’s looking at about $2.5 million. Mind you, Dr. Butcher and myself put this project together – not G Rap. G Rap was the rapper. We connected on ideas, he had his choruses, we worked on the choruses, we altered some things. Me and him kinda fought, rapper to rapper. It was more competitive. ‘I ain’t listening to that dude! He don’t have no super hits on the charts right this minute!’ Not understanding that me coming from a rap base, I’m a more integral part of that equation than anybody can be, because I was an intricate rapper, very wordy. G Rap is an intricate raper, so as we flowed through the records and you’ve got the process punching-in and punching-out – this was two inch tape machine – so when he makes a mistake I gotta be able to chop him, in-out, in-out, and make it sound like he did it from beginning to end, flawlessly, with one take. That’s not an easy thing to do with a Big Pun and a Kool G Rap and guys like that. I pulled it off and made him sound better than he has ever sounded in his life.

He gets the deal and he sits down with Butcher and says, ‘We wanna try to put you in the Igloo Entertainment system.’ Drew backed-up, like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Who the hell is Igloo Entertainment? Something you just made-up on the go with your boys, the last two, three months? CJ’s got credits going back to 1985, gold and platinum, so what are you saying? Jump on a new bandwagon when we don’t have to?’ He basically shitted on us, in street terms. He was pissed, I was pissed. The project finally came to a head and Butcher and I are submitting tracks to him like some outsider, and he turned down every track! These were hot tracks! Some of these tracks ended up being on Akinyele’s album and different artists.

I continued to engineer, I continued to live the obligation I had to finish the album and we fought every which way. I’m the type of cat, you cannot smoke around me. You can drink, you can bang your head against the wall but do not smoke around me cos you’re disrespecting my lungs. G Rap and myself fought like cat and dog about that, because if you want me to work for you, I can’t have a headache and I can’t be bombed out. I’ve never done that in my whole career and I’m not gonna start. One day, a rapper by the name of Nature was in there and I just told G, ‘Yo G, can you put the cigarette out?’ This was his session, we were in Unique Studio, and Nature lit-up a cigarette right after I said that. I took the cigarette out of Nature’s mouth and I smashed it up and I stood in his face and egged him on. He knew better, so he stayed in his place. Then me and G Rap got into it. I took all the fader levels and I pulled them down and I said, ‘Fuck you! I’m through!’ I got in his face, he got in my face, we’re about to fight. Everybody got in between us, I walked out.

Small Change [Kool G Rap’s manager at the time] kinda mediated us, we got back in together and we started finishing out the album. Now we had a brand new rule – ‘I don’t give a fuck who your people are. They in there? We don’t work. We don’t do that hang-out shit.’ The ideology behind the industry, unfortunately, is a lot of nerdy-ish guys who may have done a lot of different things educationally. I had that, but I didn’t have musical schooling, and I was heavily from the streets. You kinda still lump a person in that category, so I was the kinda guy that always got tried, but when I backed the people down it kinda backed-off. That’s what was happening with Kool G Rap. I think that stemmed from having credits written incorrectly – either no credit, or barely Butcher got credit and then I got some credit – as opposed to us getting all the credit.

This was for the Rawkus album?

Yeah, The Giancara Story.

Did you feel like Rawkus were pushing G Rap to be more commercial?

Absolutely. Black Shawn and Mike Heron? They were groupies to me. ‘I’m working with the legendary Kool G Rap! I’m so fanciful! I’m gonna bring somebody up to meet him!’ They were trying to commercialize him, and we were 100% with him on that fight. It was like a double-edged sword, because he would come to us, ‘Buckwild just said he’d do a track! He only wants $25,000!’ I looked at this dude like he was E.T. ‘Are you serious? You’re happy paying this man 25 grand who you don’t know from a can of paint, but we blood, sweat and teared you to this million dollar contract?’ I didn’t want to shit on that guy’s money, so I said, ‘Yo, it’s cool.’ But to me the track was garbage. We do the track, and Butcher was telling him, ‘G, why are you going so hard? You’re going across the grain.’ I was telling him, ‘Just have a conversation with me, just talk to me.’ The record was called ‘The Streets.’ He went in there and he really nailed that record, it had a different aura for G Rap but it flowed. He was like, ‘Yo, I can’t front. That’s it!’ It dawned on him at that time, ‘I’ve been screwing these cats over.’ I knew it had to be beating him in the back of his mind, cos he knew what he was doing. The album came out, the credits were all wrong and I knew it was intentionally done.

When Butcher and I were getting together and doing our production and putting these things together it was just unstoppable. We did a song called ‘Thug Love Story’ for G Rap and we bust our ass on putting that together. The scenes with the helicopters and the news teams and the shoot-outs and all that stuff. All that stuff stems back, rewinding the clock. Remember a group called Live Squad? Big Stretch from Queens, who was running with Tupac. We got him a deal on Tommy Boy after I left. Ed Lover came to me, cos they had a group named No Face. I did every one of those records on that album. Ed Lover was managing Live Squad, got the the deal and they came to me with this little drug/street theory. They said, ‘We’ve gotta make this thing stick!’ So I went home and got a duffle bag and brought it back with all of the things that we needed, and we made real sound effects. We had actual shoot-outs and situations for the skits of these records. Put it together and then that turned into The Movie.

It was so crazy and bold and daring. It was that whole street mantra, where Stretch was like, ‘If we’re gonna go hard and not get no radio play, let’s really get no radio play. Let’s do it for real!’ He said, ‘What about the baby? Throw it out the window!’ He physically threw-it out the window for real! The rape scene with the girl and then her riding him and then shoot him in his head and the blood spills out of his head! That was as graphic as it gets! If you remind it back, that’s the very first of it’s kind. No other group ever did anything of that stature, ever. It set a tone off, and everybody was so hype. People like Mobb Deep used to walk in the studios with that VHS tape. ‘You’ve gotta see this shit!’ That was their bible to their street raps, because we’d painted such a vivid, raw picture of that. We had a good time doing it.

At the same time, Ice-T had ‘Cop Killa.’ Paris, his album cover was he was on the White House lawn behind a tree, with an AK-47 pointed at the White House. It was all Tommy Boy and Warner Bros. stuff, they blew the whistle. ‘All right, enough is enough! Get this Live Squad outta here, this Ice-T shit outta here, and definitely get Paris outta here!’ Everything happened within a month’s difference of each other, so everybody got banned. Ice-T went on a vigilante, and he had a lot more fortitude and a lot more intelligence to go ahead and get his career uplifted from that particular point. Paris just disappeared, and unfortunately Stretch was killed.

We were sitting on a gold mine, it was more putting the pieces together on the east coast side of hip-hop, where we had control of Large Professor, Dr. Butcher, DJ Rob Swift, Roc Raida, Lord Finesse, Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane. We’re a circle, we’re friends, we’re in and out of projects. Akinyele got on the phone one day, and I came up with an idea. I said, ‘We need to form a group, a committee – one company where we all produce and write and do records through this one company.’ I was trying to do Motown. I told them, ‘This idea is gonna bring all of us to the top, so if Large Professor does a record and Lord Finesse does five records and I do two records, then that’s eight records. So I get credit for eight records, Lord Finesse gets credit for eight records, Large Professor gets credit for eight records. The difference is, I get money for the two records, Large Professor gets money for one record and Lord Finesse gets money for the eight.’ Akinyele told everybody we’re gonna get on a conference call, and he’s telling them, ‘It’s CJ’s idea.’ G Rap starts off. He says, ‘Yo, I’m with it, but we’ve gotta have some money at the table. That dude C, he’s getting engineering money, he’s getting mixing money, he’s getting rap money, he’s getting production money – he’s getting all the money!’ Lord Finesse jumped in and agreed with him. So they were all jealous. Ak said, ‘Can you engineer? Can you produce? So what the fuck are you talking about?’

Who were the other members of Black By Demand?

You’ve got Cut Professor, who is the DJ, who was also my cousin. Then we had two dancers, they had speaking parts on the records as well, which was Curt Flirt and Jeff Love. We did well over a thousand show together – the NWA tour, Salt ‘N Pepa tour, the Kool Moe Dee tour, some sport dates with MC Lyte, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Cash Money and Marvelous, MC Breed, Fat Joe – we were all over the country and the world. Those Black By Demand records did a whole lot for us, nation-wide. We weren’t as big as the rest of the guys who had signature records, but we had the love of the DJ’s because of the sound of the records. We records were super-heavy. If you put on some of the records that I was involved in, my marquee is that I make super-heavy records, so when it’s playing in the a club, it sounds much bigger than the records that it played after, so it kind of blows those records away.

Can you tell me more about your first record from 1986?

The record called ‘We’re Gettin’ Paid’ was a guy named DJ Smalls. There’s a group mogul that kinda burst the industry in New York City. They’re called the Disco Twins. The Disco Twins had a group called the Body Rockers. The Disco Twins grew-up in my projects, they lived in the back building, I lived in the front building. They would come out and have these systems, Smalls was their rapper. Smalls was tired of them, everybody was telling him, ‘Yo, there’s this young boy who lives in 2-10. You’ve gotta get with him, he’s off the chain!’ He came and sought me out, and I’m looking at him because to me he was a legend. He was that dude in the streets. He had a partner named Kid Flash, but we called him Innovator, because Innovator would never write rhymes, he would come off the top with everything. He would pick-up objects and he’d just go. We formed a crew called The Chosen Few, and we got down with a guy named Reggie Powell. He formed a label called HBO Records. Greg Nice was the other act, and this guy named Larry Davis.

Larry Davis from the news?

The vigilante guy who was on the run from the cops! He was the beat-maker for Greg Nice, the group they had was called The Comedians. That’s when I first met Greg. Greg Nice and DJ Smalls were friends, they grew-up in the same area. When Small’s introduced me to all this stuff I was in wild city, because I’m 14, 15 years old and I’m getting ready to this. I’m in high school, I’m doing talent shows but I’m already known cos I was winning every contest at Skate USA on Roosevelt Ave in Elmhurst, Queens. We formed this crew named Chosen Few and we started coming up with routines, we went in the studio and there it happened. Smalls, because he’s so well known in the streets, there’s nobody that would not play his record – cos that’s DJ Smalls! Red Alert was on 98.7 KISS, Marley Marl was on WBLS with Mr. Magic, they were called The Rap Attack. I remember going to Marley Marl’s house, he lived not too far from where I lived. Smalls handed him the vinyl and said, ‘This is the record I need you play tonight.’ He said, ‘Let me hear it to see if it fits.’ He said, ‘Nah, it already fits.’ In other words, ‘You’re playing this record!’ Then he goes to Red Alert, we actually go the station that same night. We’re downstairs, and by the time he gets to the car the record was playing. Cats couldn’t do that back in the days. You couldn’t get next to these people, but Smalls could. So he wound-up turning the group to Small’s Chosen Few. It was kind of a slap in the face, because I wrote everything, I produced everything, I did everything. I understood the politics behind it, Profile Records wanted to sign us from Reggie Powell, a lot of record labels wanted to take us. Innovator was kinda upset, cos he wasn’t as young as I was. ‘How can you do that? CJ wrote everything!’ I didn’t care. ‘I’m on a record! I don’t give a shit about none of that. Let’s just go.’

There was an era where guys were making neighborhood records, MC Shan came out with a record that was geared around Queensbridge, specifically. KRS-One came out with the ‘South Bronx.’ Then here comes MC Poet, he does ‘Beat You Down.’ By that time I was on a new record label, called Nu Sounds Records. It was some guys outta Corona, Queens – independent again – and I put out ‘Astoria’s In The House.’ So now this is the battle of these records. Then you had [Cutmaster] DC with ‘Brooklyn’s In The House.’ That era was just so fun. I was able to go to these shows – Latin Quarters – and we would have the battle of these neighborhoods. We wouldn’t play at the same time, we would play at different times and the promoters looking at who could attract the biggest crowd. He’s having a ball, cos he’s making Latin Quarters, Union Square, The Skate Key, The Q Club and Crystals – all these different clubs that were jumping off in these different boroughs – we were able to be the king of, to a degree.

Part One

Part Three covers his time at 1212 with Paul C, Ultramagnetic and Super Lover Cee in more detail…

I got 20 minutes with Prince Rakeem the other week. This was the result.

The RZA – The Unkut Interview

Concluding the three part interview with Black By Demand front man CJ Moore, he covers working with Paul C, Ultramagnetic MC’s and Super Lover Cee, the importance of engineering and chopping, getting ripped off on the ‘Rump Shaker’ single and his deep crates of unreleased material.

Robbie: What was your involvement with Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd?

Super Lover Cee lived in the building behind mine. He has a group called Future Four MC’s, which was Super Lover Cee, myself, DJ Rudd and there was another DJ named Tiny Tim. We did shows around the neighbourhoods and then we disbanded. I was the guy doing the beats and the choruses and putting the track together. When I did ‘All Rapper’s Give Up,’ I had not gotten a deal just yet. He was hanging out of his window, cos he lived on the first floor, he was playing some stuff and he said, ‘Yo C, listen to this!’ I’m standing by his window and I said, ‘Let’s put it together.’ He wound up putting it together and I wound up tightening it up. When I brought him to the studio to do the session and introduced him to Paul and Mick, Paul C. didn’t want to do the session. He couldn’t hear it, he didn’t see anything pleasurable about it. He wound up doing it. As far as the entirety of the project, when he did their album Girls I Got ‘Em Locked, I did not do any of those records. But a lotta those routines we had in the Future Four? He wound up using them.

What are your best memories of Paul C.?

People thought he was black guy! [laughs] Because of the style and influence that he would put on records. We would go to each other’s house and we would just play stuff. Paul also played bass, so sometimes I would get Paul to play bass over my stuff, and I was real great at drum rolls and different types of kick/snare patterns, and I would do a lot of that. Me and Drew became what me and Paul was. Paul was determined. He was the kind of guy that would sit there for two hours on a kick drum and try different things. Even though he was older than me, he didn’t have that much more experience, because Paul was in a band as a musician. He transcended into hip-hop as he got into the studio. Before that he was playing funk grooves in a band, but he always had these guys in his neighborhood, in Laurelton, like Rahzel and Black, Rock and Ron and Mikey D. They knew Paul was into the music. ‘We can go through Paul and get some music done.’ Paul would have these ideas and he would put them together so fly – he had a different approach, he had his sound.

When he did the Stezo record – I did the a-side, he did the b-side – Paul wound up putting the record together and the approach that he had was a little eclectic. He started with the snare, then the hi-hats and then put the kick drum in. Then went around and got the hi-hats and resampled them and did all kinds of little things to it. It was kinda cool the way his approach was on it, because it made sense to him. When it was all put down and together, a person like, ‘What is he doing? I don’t get it, I don’t understand.’ Just wait a minute, let him finish! If you would pick up some of these records that he used, you would say to yourself, ‘Where is this part in this record that he sampled?’ It doesn’t exist, because we would recreate the grooves. That’s one thing that he got from me, as far as recreating the grooves. What I got from him was the diligence of, ‘Just sit there ‘till it’s right.’ For some reason I have a gift of frequency, I can understand almost by the number, close and the proximity, because I have super-sensitive ears. That was gift to that equation. We just had such a great blend and a great mesh.

Ultramagnetic was the most ultimate, freaky, crazy, weird-ass sessions that you would ever be in. Ced-Gee used to do his tracks on an Akai 12-track hard disc recorder, he was one of the only ones that ever used that shit. I was sitting in the control room [at 1212] and he told me, ‘Yo C! There’s something about the static, I’m telling you. You don’t hear that? Listen! Listen! Shhh!’ I’m like, ‘This motherfucker’s crazy!’ He said, ‘Listen! It’s the static! It’s the fidelity! Owww! It does something to you!’ He bugged out. It was crazy! And Ced-Gee don’t drink! [laughs] In general it was just so weird. One time I set-up Kool Keith in the mic booth, and Kool Keith – to me – never made sense. He’s like, ‘Wikkety wack, wack, wack, wikky!’ The freakiest lyrics you would ever hear and it was so comical and just so dope at the same time, because the rhythm was sick! And Ced-Gee with, ‘You’re a roach, known pesticide/Filthy, very dirty to me!’ To be in that studio room at that time, I had so many bite marks in my jaws cos I used to go under the board and laugh my ass off. You couldn’t see me from the mic booth! When it was over and we got into really listening back? I developed, ‘I hear where you’re coming from!’ We wanted to clean the records up. We wanted to take the static out – he wanted to put it in! That’s what became unique about Ced-Gee.

Do you and Paul C. help with the programming?

He did most of it. Paul would clean some of it up, I would clean some of it up. A lot of what you heard was phenomenal editing. Pulling out the things that were necessary and putting necessary things in. I was heavy on dropping the beat, because I came from the parks where when you’re rhyming and the DJ is spinning the records back and forth on two turntables, the minute he pulls the needle off or moves the fader and it’s silence, you get to say your punchline and the crowd goes, ‘Ohhhh!’ That was the highpoint of you being an MC! I translated that into the records. For example, ‘Calente is my name but then I seldom tell it.’ That was a drop. Nobody did that on record at that time. By me doing that and highlighting the points, engineers and rappers were like, ‘I gotta do that!’ So they started doing that from that point. Another thing I used to do was drop the beat and then come back. Usually, people come back on the kick, but what I would do is I’d drop the beat and I’d have this big, gas, garage snare splash-down, so when it would hit, instead of being ‘Pop!’ it was ‘Poppppppp!’ Sounded like you were in the Grand Canyon. That’s what you’d hear during the drop while the person was rhyming, and then the beat would come back on the one. I did that on a Black, Rock and Ron record, and you can look back at the years and so how long ago that was, and then I kept repeating it.

Then edits came into play, where people had to do clean versions of records. I said, ‘Let me do a bunch of sound effects – reverses, huge scratches.’ Stretch Armstrong was good friend of mine – I had built his studio – and he played on the radio, so he needed clean versions of all the records that nobody else would play. So I started throwing these sound effects in there, ‘Zzzzuut! Dut-dut-dut!’ Then you start seeing all these different producers starting to do that. But I never in my life started claiming, ‘This is where this started.’ But I was around when Marley Marl wasn’t Marley Marl. Being a 13, 14 year-old. The Dick Charles’ and the Patrick Adams’. Dealing with Luther and Janet Jackson and those guys. I was seeing the suit and tie straightforward approach, and I had the straightforward approach with some jeans and a t-shirt.on, and it was interesting to people.

I remember when he was working with Rakim, he would come to me. ‘What do you think about this one? I’m getting ready to sample this. I’ma put some of these on the tape, just take it home and listen to it and tell me what you would do with it.’ That’s what we would do. ‘Yo Paul, you should do this…’ And then he’ll come back and he’ll do something else. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s kinda crazy!’ With the Let The Rhythm Hit ‘Em tracks and stuff. When he passed, the whole situation was in limbo. ‘Paul died – he had these discs. He had the whole, entire what was going to happen of the album. What are we going to do?’ I didn’t want to touch it, I’m like, ‘Don’t mention nothing to me.’ Large Professor was sitting on the side, that’s how he got his opportunity right then and there. Where I backed out? He came in.

Why did you back out? Were you too upset at the time?

Yeah, I was just too close to him. It was just too much at the time. I’ll never forget – I was late for a night session, coming in. You had to ring the buzzer downstairs, I’m ringing the buzzer, ringing the buzzer. I’m like, ‘What the hell is Mick doing? I know he’s up there, I see the light!’ He comes down stairs and he just leans on the wall, opens the door and he ran and just hugged me. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Tears all through his face, and he says, ‘Paul is dead.’ He just fell apart. Me and him were sitting there for half an hour – fuck the session – we’re just losing it, together. He explained to me what he heard had happened. We went upstairs, we cancelled the session and we went through emotionally what we had to go through and proceeded on. That was the straw that got ripped right out of the camel’s back. Like, ‘I can’t do this, man. I’ma step away from music for a little bit and get my head right and keep it moving.’

There was a point where he was dealing with Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd when me and Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd fell-out. At the same time, they had a problem in the neighborhood and they had to leave the neighborhood and they went over and stayed with Paul C. This is kinda when the thing went down, and Paul C. trying to play the middle guy – semi listening to these guys – kinda fell-out with me a little bit, but it was like a month prior. I’m talking to his wife, I’m like, ‘Why won’t Paul pick up the phone?’ He finally picks up the phone, he was real short with me, and I’m trying to figure out, ‘What the hell? We was just buddy buddy?’ I guess these guys got in his head, so I wound up looking for those guys – Supe and Caliente – having a problem with them. ‘What are you getting in front of me and my friend for?’ I put one and two together and it had to be that. So when he passed, everyone was thinking it was because of their problem – somebody came to look for ‘em, mistaken identity, and wind up getting Paul. No one saw Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd. They disappeared! Finally they surfaced, it got cleared-up. Supposedly they had nothing to do with it.

It was hard, I didn’t want to touch anything that he touched. I still have discs that he had involvement. He had 20 or 30 of my discs – I didn’t want ‘em back. I was working on a group called Phaze ‘N Rhythm, they were on Tommy Boy too, ‘Swollen Pockets.’ I was so heavily in demand at that time, and I didn’t want it. I was turning down four or five groups a week. Aaron Fuchs, who owns Tuff City Records, he was calling me off the hook to work with his acts. Will Sokolov over at Sleepings Bags [sic] he was calling me to work work with his acts. He wanted to sign me and I didn’t want any parts of it.

Can you explain the importance of the engineer on producing records?

Some people would take a drum loop as it is on the record and put a good combination of another record, which is the musical loop part of it. Some of the EQ’ing would come into play where you filter out the bass or you filter out the highs. You may find two or three loops and then you would find a kick, a snare, a hi-hat and maybe a crash and a drum fill and some scratching – a lotta people would produce that way. Large Professor wasn’t the guy who was really chopping stuff up. He wasn’t taking the beginning part of the record and the ending part of a record and squeezing it together to make it sound like a different side of the record. The Easy Mo Bee’s would do, that Pete Rock’s would do that, to a degree. He was probably a tad more advanced than Large Professor was. I was a consummate chopper. If you wanted to control ‘Impeach The President,’ you would take each kick, each snare, and then the hi hat. You would put ‘em back together, but you would control the quantization of that beat and loosen it up a little to give it that live feel. Now you’re at an advantage – if you want the beat to change at some point of the record, or you want to pull the snare out in certain areas? You could do that. A loop? You can’t do that.

Looping was a craft, to a degree, and sampling was an art. My approach was, one two-bar loop might consist of eight different places from that same record, but you would listen to it as if the musicians played it just like that. Some of us would take a real live bass player, and whatever the bass was doing, we would do that and then some. This is tricks, a lot of that we created in 1212. I don’t know if anyone was doing this at the time, but I discovered – I pulled the jack out of the SP-1200 one day, but it didn’t come all the way out, it came half-way out. When you pull a jack partially out, it creates a filter. You’ve got outputs 1 through 8 in the drum machine, and each of those jacks had a different frequency filtration on it, so if you would pull a jack halfway out it would cut the highs off, with 8 being the most wide-open. They did that purposely for whatever reason, but it was never in the instructions, so people didn’t know about it. We would take an 808 kick and put it on Output 1 with the jack halfway out. That 808 kick was so monsterous, because it was an 8-bit sampler. That’s how the records that had 808’s in ‘em were so incredible back in the days, but they weren’t obtrusive.

Today, 808’s resonate, and it sounds disgusting. You can’t even get a kick and a snare, because they want it loud. We had ‘em low and heavy, and a lot of that came from the filtration part of that. We would add an 808 kick to the loop, and then repeat that real low with a 909 underneath the loops to re-enforce the kick drums, to give it the bottom, to give it the bass and the body. You’re hearing the loops, ‘That’s Impeach The President, that’s Funky Drummer.’ But we added these integral parts so it took it away from the era it came from in the 60’s and 70’s and brought it to the 90’s where it was heavy. They used to pan records real hard back then. They used to take the drums and pan it hard left, and take the music and pan it hard right. Sampling stereo, we realized you could actually pan right and get the music out and just get the drums by itself. Some of those things that we don’t get credit for, for understanding the technology and manipulating it the way that we did.

People got exposed, where people were asked to add more elements to their production. The people that disappeared where the the people that could not go beyond sampling. That’s when the musicianship or the creativity came in, where you had to be forced to be creative, so guys like the Large Professor’s and the Lord Finesse’s started disappearing to a degree. Nothing against them – people can say the same exact thing about me – but I jumped into other worlds because i can play. So I was able to do Joe Public, I was able to do Meshell Ndegeocello and R&B acts, as well as a lot of hip-hop acts that had a lot of gut and beat to ‘em. On the west side you had a guy named Battlecat was who really similar. The process of sampling was definitely an art. People always looked at it as stealing. ‘That’s not no talent!’ But we really re-birthed a lot of those artists. James Brown, who had not had a record in years, he wound up coming back because of that.

It made him relevant again.

Absolutely. The Isley Brothers, The Gap Band, Kool and the Gang – I kinda made Kool and the Gang with ‘Can’t Get Enough’ – and Earth, Wind and Fire. A lot of people were looking at you as these young, urban guys, and there’s a way to kinda denigrate or snatch a lotta that credit, where those same R&B guys and those executives found themselves reaching out to us for credibility, because hip-hop was taking over. ‘OK, we need to be validated. Let’s go and grab these guys.’ The closest they could get was Teddy Riley, they didn’t get the right guy. They got an R&B guy who’s trying to do rap.

‘Rumpshaker’ was originally done by my hands. The Disco Twins had a studio in Jamaica, Queens, and Ty Fyfe came to me and I did his session. He didn’t know shit about any kind of instrument, he just had these records and I took ‘em and sampled ‘em, put it together and put it on a disk. He disappeared and went to Virginia and we hear ‘Rumpshaker.’ So I was at him for a really long time.

Were you ever compensated for that?

Never did. When I got to the bottom of it, he had business partners that were dealing with my business partners, so we wound up doing something different on another end where i was heavily compensated for something else. That felt like my payback.

Do you have a lot of stuff in the vaults that’s never been heard?

I got so much unheard stuff. I have Stretch, Tupac, Biz, some Organized Konfusion stuff. I got some Stezo, Black, Rock and Ron, Son of Bazerk, Flavor Flav – I’ve got some stuff! [laughs] Of course G Rap and Akinyele, Free who used to be on BET – she’s super-duper talented, man. She was supposed to be the replacement for Lauren Hill, cos Wyclef had signed her. Didn’t work out. I have two briefcases of DAT’s – nothing but mixes. I had the liberty of being by myself and doing my own mixes as well. I would do a mix, then I would do a dub edit, extended versions, TV versions and things of that nature. I was good at splicing tapes, so I would physically cut the tape apart and make reverses and all kinds of little crazy edits.

So you have a lot more Akinyele material apart from the stuff he released on the ‘Lost Tapes’ album?

That man got about three albums that people haven’t heard. G Rap got about an album worth of stuff. We just recorded at the liberty of recording – the budget was there – let’s just go, let’s just bang out as much as we can. Fortunately, a lot of that stuff I was at the helm of. Some of it I produced and some of it I had creative control as far as the engineering and mixing part of it. A lot of the executives would come to me and say, ‘This is your baby, this is your project. Bring me something.’

You also worked on the Uptown record? It sounded like he caught a tough break over there.

Tommy Boy’s notorious for killing people, they would just kill your career. When Dante Ross came to me, I didn’t know who Uptown was. All I heard was that, ‘He was at some battle – he went against Kane, or he was rhyming the same time as Kane – and he did better than Kane. I think you should mess with this dude.’ That’s how Dante sold him to me. I was busy at the time, I said, ‘I don’t have time to get into production right now, I’m getting ready to go on this road-trip. I’ll get it when I come back.’ He said, ‘Nah, we need to get it now.’ Dante came to my house, I took out my drum machine. I think I took a hi-hat and some snare rolls from the records he had, then I grabbed some records outta the crate and I started putting it together. We went to 1212, I laid the record down and I did some extra stuff when Uptown got there. Dude was sharp – he’s another underrated rapper. He nailed it. I think he’s one of the dopest MC’s I’ve ever worked with. I was always intricate as far as putting patterns together – Uptown was another guy who did that as well. He kinda impressed me. When I got home, I was telling radio DJ’s – ‘Yo, Red Alert. There’s this dude Uptown, you need to get on it.’ I got at Funkmaster Flex, Chuck Chillout – I was prepping these dudes.

Unfortunately, when I read the article [Uptown – The Unkut Interview] he was under the assumption that myself and Dante had took his portions of the money. We probably made a couple of hundred dollars upfront off that. You get a production contract, there’s an artist portion of the contract and there’s a production portion of the contract. All of that stuff in the chorus? That’s my voice. I came up with the chorus and he wrote all of the lyrics. In that interview he said he didn’t get any money afterwards, I believe that record did well. I wound up splitting the royalties with Dante, and I didn’t think that was fair. But he brought me the project, and I’m working on all these other big things so it really doesn’t matter. He [Uptown] was supposed to get 50%, but this is what Tommy Boy were notorious of – Tommy Boy would either take 100% of your publishing and pay you for it for your first record, or they would take 50% of it. On a single, you’re supposed to get 7 points. Points are, in layman’s terms, spoken to on the dollar. So if the record sold for $7, you’re supposed to get 49 cents – hypothetically. The 49 cents is what the participants get. You might have a producer that might say, ‘I want 2 points.’ That leaves the artist with 5 points. He might have a writer that wants 1 point – that leaves him with 4 points. I’m pretty sure Uptown’s contract looked like that. That’s from not having a lawyer to look into it, unfortunately. Uptown, I thought that he was gonna be the next cat. I was proud of that record.

I thought it was an MC Shan song when I first heard it, but I said, ‘Damn! Shan got nice all of a sudden!’

[laughs] That’s so funny, everybody thought that. When people figured out that it wasn’t Shan was when they heard that the kid was nasty. His voice sounded exactly like MC Shan, and I think that’s why Marley Marl wouldn’t play it at the time. I went to school with [Brother] J. Actually, J beatboxed for me in the talent show in Murray Bircham [laughs] I was rhyming and J was my beatbox. I was in the tenth grade. I didn’t know that J rapped until I heard him on a record, and I went to school with him from 10th grade to 12th grade. I went to a meeting – they had this thing called The Vanglorious Movement – Lumumba Carson, which was Sonny Carson’s son, Professor X. We were in the Latin Quarters, and it was MC Serch – that’s how MC Serch got his name, he was searching for knowledge – KRS-One, Just-Ice, Daddy-O and Lumumba Carson. That’s when I met Lumumba, and they were creating a crew, almost like Zulu Nation. ‘The red, the black, the green’ – when I heard that on the record I was like, ‘Oh shit! He used to say that shit at the meetings!’ Then J came out and did his thing, I was so proud of that dude.

Me and Ice Cube on the road was inseperable, because we were the two young guys. I wrote everything and did everything in my group, and he damn near did everything in his situation, and he never did get that credit. I’ll never forget, he told me, ‘Man, they’re riding around in Mercedes – I’m getting around in a Suzuki Sidekick!’

Was this just before he left NWA?

Absolutely, which at the time was the best move for him. When we would do sound check, Eazy-E and all of them would be somewhere else, and Ice Cube would do the sound check for everybody’s parts. We were too young to get into clubs and stuff, because we were underage, so when we were in Vegas and gambling towns, they would chase us out all the time, cos we looked like little kids. It was crazy.

What record would you play to someone to let them understand the CJ Moore sound?

I would say ‘All Rapper’s Give Up.’ Engineering-wise, I would say Akinyele’s ‘Put It In Your Mouth,’ because it was a rebel song. It wasn’t supposed to happen.

Photo: richdirection

My second piece for Cuepoint tells the story of DJ Too Tuff‘s life after Tuff Crew as he turned to the drug trade to survive, and barely made it out alive.

DJ Too Tuff – Part Time Rap Star, Full Time Drug Dealer

Working through my list of D.I.T.C. members to interview (only Fat Joe, Buckwild and O.Gee remaining), I got to talk shop with O.C. recently to ask the question that’s been burning my soul slow since 1994 – why didn’t he use that Rakim sample on ‘Time’s Up’!?

O.C. – The Unkut Interview

Rocksteady member DJ JS-1 has been putting it down in the DJ, mixtape and production game for years, as well as getting busy with the paint as JERMS since his school days. We caught up last November to discuss the sorry state of modern rap, the trials of making compilation albums and tips copping vinyl on the sly.

Robbie: How did it start for you?

DJ JS-1: Growing up in Queens, New York – I was born in the mid 70’s – so by the time I was old enough to look around and know what’s going on, you’re six, seven, eight years old. It’s early 80’s and hip-hop culture was everywhere. My grandmother lived near Lefrak and I first remember them doing a mural on the side of pizzaria there when I was really young. I always loved to draw, and I got into graff from watching these guys do that. By third or fourth grade I was trying to draw my name and do stuff, and in sixth grade we stole some spray paint and went to the schoolyard to try and write our names. That was 1986. I was always listening to hip-hop and started buying vinyl as soon as I was old enough to get on the bus or the train by myself to get to the record stores. Then I saved up to get turntables.

What were some of your favorite record stores growing up?

Locally in Flushing, where I lived, there was a little flea market and there was a small record store in there. That was the closest one to my house that I could get to off one bus, and we used to see Large Professor, cos he lived near there. Large Professor was always walking around up in there. He was someone I always looked up to, so that was kinda cool. Later on it was Beat Street Records in Brooklyn, Rock & Soul Records and Downstairs Records in Manhattan, then eventually A-1 Records and Sound Library in downtown Manhattan. Slowly but surely most of them got phased out, there’s a handful left now. We used to make whole weekends for that! Make the rounds to all the stores and run into people we knew. I met DJ Rectangle in 1993 when he was in New York or the first time I met Roc Raida and all these different favorite DJ’s were all at record stores. It’s sad that we don’t really have that anymore, I really miss that.

Even the memory of where you found a particular record can be great.

Of course. There’s times when we would go to the record store and I would have $15 on me and I would find so many records that I couldn’t buy. I would take the records and hide them and hope that when I came back nobody’s checked in this section cos there’s horrible records here. Those records meant to so much to me, cos when you went back and they were still there it was like, ‘Yes!’

Did you rack much stuff?

We used to do the 99 cent sticker trick. We went into Beat Street one time and they took the roll of 99 cent stickers when the girl turned around and they were just taking $20 albums and putting the 99 cents sticker on it! The girl at the counter had no idea. They’d just drop a stack of records and she just rang them up. That was a nice trick.

When did you decide to start making beats?

Around the mid 90’s I did something on the second Return of The DJ record on Bomb Records, and when I started seeing people around the world saying, ‘This thing that this guy and Spinbad did is really good!’ Then me and Spinbad did a couple of mixtapes and they sold a lot. We started meeting people like Jazzy Jeff and DJ Scratch and they were saying, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing, this is really good.’ Once you start getting feedback from the people that you look up to it’s like, ‘OK, maybe there’s something to this!’ I still didn’t look at it as a career but I was plotting away to keep putting out more mixes and getting my stuff out there. Eventually in the late 90’s when had I met up with Rahzel and he said, ‘I need someone to tour around the world.’ Touring is pretty direct way to put money in your pocket, so I was like, ‘OK, I can walk away from what I went to college for.’

Aren’t their two DJ Spinbad’s?

The other Spinbad is a guy from Philly who’s really old school, before Cash Money. Some people argue that he was the guy who was doing the transform scratch before Jeff and Cash Money. The Rock The Casbah Spinbad is the one I know. In the 90’s we were doing the 4-track mixes and really trying to go crazy producing mixtapes. We scratched hooks from songs, added songs from movies and all stuff like that. On the cover with him on the original Rock The Casbah mixtape, it’s me, him and A.Vee. I’m wearing my Jungle Brothers camouflage hat. [laughs] We took The Breakfast Club cover. Me and Spinbad had made a tape called Cold Cuts Remixes and we sold a lot of that. Then he put the 80’s tape together, I did a few scratches on that I think, I was at his house. We were always cutting up 80’s stuff but nobody was making a mixtape with it, and he was like, ‘I’m just gonna go for it and put all the movie stuff on it like we do for hip-hop mixes.’ I don’t even know what the numbers would be on that, sales-wise, but that tape did excellent. It really got around.

Is it intimidating to work with a rapper on the level of Kool G Rap or KRS-One?

It is, because I’m thinking how can I say anything to these guys about, ‘You should make a song about this’ or ‘Say it like this, this is the direction I want to go in with this song.’ It was awkward for me at first but KRS was kinda the guy that helped me out a lot because he told me to give him direction. He would ask me, ‘Is this how you want it? How does this sound?’ Once I saw that he was receptive to my criticism or me taking control of the session because it’s my song, I kinda let that roll over to the other guys. Most people were pretty cool. I was just happy that they agreed to work with me in the first place, but if you want it to come out the way you want it you do at a certain point have to speak up. Now I’m comfortable with everybody and I have no problem.

You also managed to get Ced-Gee and Kool Keith on the same track.

I got Ced and Keith to turn up to the studio at the same time, at 9am on a Sunday morning! [laughs] That alone is a feat! I didn’t expect it to happen. They told me they were gonna be there and they showed up! To this day it’s one of my greatest moments. Not an easy thing to pull off.

What’s the longest you’ve ever tried to get somebody on a track?

There’s been times I ‘ve waited ten months for a verse. I don’t have a timeline when I do these projects, cos I know what it’s gonna be like with all these different MC’s on it. I know it’s gonna be a long time so I’m always constantly working – some songs were meant to be on an album that came out last time, some songs don’t get finished until the next project – I just do it as I go. It’s definitely not easy, but I love it though, so I can’t complain.

How do you feel about the way New York has changed since when you were growing up?

It’s totally different to how it was back then. In Brooklyn now, all the weed spots that you used to go to and the crack areas and the gun areas, now Madonna’s trying to open restaurants there, the rent is so expensive, you see people riding around on expensive bicycles. Vegan shakes and coffee shops that used to be weed spots. You can’t knock that the neighborhoods are getting better. but at the same time a lot of the stuff that we grew up with music-wise, where the feeling came from of that music? That stuff is taken away so the stuff that’s made now is just not gonna have that same vibe because it’s not coming from the same place. When we were coming up it was a lot more rugged, everyone had their camouflage and their Timberland boots and it was ‘rough, rugged and hardcore.’ Now if I go to the park and I look at the style of these kids and what they’re wearing and what they’re talking about in the songs, it makes sense. The kids are all wearing these super-expensive outfits, their sneakers are $300 and they don’t wanna play basketball because they don’t want to get their sneakers dirty. They’re wearing these pretty jeans and everybody looks like a little R&B celebrity and the music reflects that. It’s much softer.

Everyone wants to talk about their feelings.

[laughs] Right! Everyone’s all emotional. It reflects that also in the neighborhoods – where people were getting beat up in Bushwick is now all art galleries and you get a kale shake. People got priced out, unfortunately. The stuff we felt made New York cool and the reason that everyone wanted to come here, it’s like the people that did eventually come here took that away. They talked about, ‘There’s graffiti in Brooklyn, it’s really cool.’ But now they took away graff and they put in street artists. Guys stenciling Marilyn Monroe and an owl. It’s like, ‘What’s up with the real graff?’ ‘Oh, we don’t want that!’ It’s strange. Also, we don’t really have any hip-hop clubs. When we were growing up there were tonnes of hip-hop clubs – there was Homebase and The Tunnel and Marrs and The Arena and The Roxy and The Palladium and Latin Quarter. There places were huge, and people would be in there, dressed hip-hop and they would be playing raw hip-hop all night long. The promoters weren’t like, ‘You have to play something for the girls!’ People forget, they would put stuff off the Criminal Minded album in the club and the whole club would go crazy, girls would be dancing.

It was all these massive hip-hop clubs and they did away with all of ‘em! A lot of times the neighborhood would complain and say it was drawing people they didn’t want there, and in certain parts of Manhattan they would say, ‘There’s people smoking weed outside! We can’t have this!’ They would find ways to shut the clubs down. It was a lotta political nonsense and the vibe of the music started changing. Puffy and these guys were promoting the fanciness aspect of it and in their videos they’d be in these plush clubs with the champagne dance and the suits, and the promoters would be like, ‘We want our place to look like this!’ Now if you want to hear some hip-hop you might like it’s a lounge or a very small club where it’s like a hallway, it’s like 150 people all in.

Aspirational lifestyles.

Right. It’s like, ‘No, that’s just him in a video, he’s rich. We don’t do that.’ It just got out of control. Now the bigger radio DJ’s basically DJ in strip clubs and hip-hop DJ’s who play breakbeats are playing for a couple of hundred bucks in these small lounges. There’s just no other hip-hop clubs, so that kills the vibe. A lot of these kids might feel that for them to get their stuff played by the big radio guys they’ve gotta make a strip club kinda record.

You’re involved in the annual Rocksteady Anniversaries, right?

Yes. That’s the one thing I look forward to every year because everybody there is all on the same page. For a while we were doing in in New Jersey but for the last few years it’s back in Central Park. We had about 6,000 people out there for it, it was great. This year I got to DJ for Special Ed and we did all his hits, that was awesome.

Were you there when Lord Finesse decimated Lords of the Underground accapella?

Yes, I’ve been there for a lotta great moments at the Zulu Anniversaries as well. I’ve been at one where George Clinton from Parliament/Funkadelic was there and Organized Konfusion performed. That was ’93/’94. You’re not gonna see that at pretty much anything else ever. When Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy performed together in ’94/’95 in the middle of a ballroom with Bambaataa and KRS and all these people in there together. It’s just incredible to be at. I’ve been blessed to see a few things like that. I was at the New Music Seminar when Supernat and Craig G battled, it had began at this club called Wetlands and I happened to be at that, there were probably 200 people at that one. I was also with Supernat and Rahzel when he battled JUICE at the Wake-Up Show anniversary in California. It’s about being at the right place at the right time, I used to try to go to everything that I thought something would happen at.

You’ve been putting out albums for almost fifteen years now. How have things changed?

When I first started, vinyl sales were tremendous. I would sell a KRS single – over 15,000 copies of a vinyl single. That’s not gonna happen now. The money aspect on the vinyl part was pretty nice, and then CD’s gradually went down. That kinda stinks cos I was always more of a physical product guy, the artwork and the liner notes. Everyone can just make a song a put it out on the internet, because people are using Serato now. Back then, the fact that you’d either have to get a distribution deal or front the money to press vinyl eliminated a lot of people from the game from the simple fact that if you didn’t think it was well worth it or would do well for you? You wouldn’t bother doing it. But now you can make nine albums a year, just throw ‘em out there and it if it works it works. If it doesn’t, you don’t really lose much cos you just sent the email out there. It’s very saturated, you’ve gotta fight through the noise to get to the good stuff.

The process of paying dues before putting music out isn’t as harsh.

We used to complain about what we’ve gotta go through to put music out and wish that it was as easy as it is now, but now that it’s so easy everyone puts music out and it devalues the good music that’s coming out. Even for myself, who loves this stuff, I just get so many songs sent to me that sometimes it’s hard to even go through them. You just get discouraged. ‘Really? In this past month there’s 300 songs?’

It’s a pretty low ratio of those 300 that are any good, right?

I went through 272 songs and I pulled aside 18 of them to play, so there ya go.

DJ JS-1 & DJ Spinbad - ‘Itchy Vinyl Session Part II‘

DJ JS-1 feat. Kool G Rap - ‘Take A Loss‘

DJ JS-1 feat. Kurious, Craig G & Smooth B - ‘Love Me Not‘

DJ JS-1 Feat. Canibus, Ced-Gee, Kool Keith, Prince Po and Rahzel - ‘Brainbender‘

Phill Most Chill came up drawing flyers for local crews before dropping his own independent record in 1988, moving into some production work and eventually landing a regular spot at Rap Sheet. From there he became a record dealer and collector, released over 100 mixtapes and eventually returned to the microphone in 2005, and has since released a number of new projects. I caught up with Soulman to talk records, journalism and more records…

Robbie: How did you first get exposed to hip-hop?

Phill Most Chill: I go back as a little kid, cos I grew up right outside of New York, like a half an hour away from the Bronx in Connecticut. I go back to before when hip-hop was even on record yet, it was just parties. I’d see all the classic crews from back in the days – the Furious Five, Cold Crush Brothers – all of ‘em, they would rock at the community center or roller skating rink or high schools in my neighborhood. I started out as a fan but also I used to do flyers for some of the hip-hop pioneers back in those days. From there I went to making records myself – little, small indy records – and that led to the thing with Rap Sheet. During that time I also got into production and I went all out with collecting breaks and digging for records to the point where I would consider myself one of the leading people as far as digging in the crates. I used to also sell breaks and records to all the top producers in New York City. They used to have the Roosevelt Hotel record conventions. That came from me doing the ‘World of Beats’ column – at that point I felt I needed to really up my game and go all-out with the records. That led to me becoming a dealer as well, because a lot of the breaks people were looking for? I had ‘em and I knew how to get ‘em. Pretty much every great producer in the New York area back then? I sold records to. The only dude I didn’t see at the shows was Preemo.

Prince Be from PM Dawn upset a few people at those conventions by reserving a lot of stuff if I recall, but he wasn’t even making records with any of it.

He was one of the biggest collectors, I’ve got nothing but good things to say about Prince Be. But a lot of the other producers? They could not stand him! They did not like him at all, cos he would come and he would buy records. He wouldn’t play around, he would spend money! He wouldn’t say, ‘Hold this for me and I’ll get you back later’ like a lot of the other dudes would do a lot of the time, he was always straight up. He would come with the money and buy the records, so they would cater to him and a lotta other dudes did not like that one bit. Like what you were saying, ‘He’s not even using these records for his production, so he’s taking all the good shit and we could actually be utilizing it!’ That, combined with his persona from the kind of records that he’s making and the incident with KRS-One – a lotta people didn’t like him. But he was real cool to me, he knew his music and he would buy his records, he wouldn’t bullshit around.

Was he just a collector or was he using these records to DJ?

He was just a collector, he had done pretty well in the music world so he had money to spend. From what I understand he also did some production under a different name, so he did actually use them for certain joints but people would never know.

Any good stories from those convention days?

I was digging and a well-known producer starts just digging in my crate – over me! Like I’m not even there, because he was so-and-so and he feels like he can just do that. I don’t give a fuck who you are, you’re not gonna just dig in the crate that I’m in! I very calmly stopped what I was doing, looked at him and the look said, ‘You better get your hand out of my crate.’ And he did, he backed up. Some of the stuff that used to happen at those record shows is a whole other thing, there was some crazy shit going on, I don’t want to put people’s names out there. Famous producers stealing records, another time a dude pulled out on somebody, I don’t know if it was a gun or a knife, over a record.

How did you get started as an artist?

That was something I did from the time I was a small child. I was well known in my high school for doing art, doing pieces and everything and a dude I went to school with knew a couple of the dudes from The Collins Brothers. They were one of the pioneer groups of hip-hop, they came from Mount Vernon and they set it off for a lot of rappers that you heard about later, like Heavy D, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, Brand Nubian. They paved the way for all the rappers that came from the Mount Vernon and New Rochelle part of New York. I was real young, I might have been thirteen years old but I looked like I was ten years old! I would do flyers for ‘em and they would be like, ‘This kid is ill! These flyers are as nice as some that we see in the city!’ It was the first thing I ever did that was hip-hop related, other than being a fan. They’d let me into shows and I’d go behind the rope and see the DJ’s – that was a big deal for me back then.

What are some of your best memories from that park jam era?

They would have these things called ‘plates’ – basically they were just acetates – but it would be stuff like live tapes of stuff they recorded in the house. You’d listen to it, you’re hearing a guy rhyming and then you hear scratching but you look at the turntables and there’s just a record playing. ‘What the fuck is that?’ DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist got to go through Afrika Bambaataa‘s collection, I think they might have found some of those acetates, those plates To me, that’s the most valuable shit as far as hip-hop goes. It was a one-off they’d press up and play at the parties. The first time I heard ‘Flash To The Beat’ record with Flash on the beat box was at a party with Bambaataa playing the record. This is before it was in the stores, I was like, ‘What the hell is that?!’ Unbelievable.

What was the next step from there?

I always tried to write rhymes, then my man Scratchmaster Rob from the Bronx taught me how to DJ, how to cut on two turntables. It grew from there – we started rhyming, started making tapes and we did a live show. Me and my cousin had a group called the Devastating Two, and Hashim – he had a classic song back in the 80’s, ‘Al Naafiysh’ – he was doing a show too, and from that one show we did we got signed to Cutting Records. We were supposed to put out a record on their subsidy label NV, and it never happened because of contract situations and managerial problems. It was still a great experience to be in the studio with dudes who had done big records, and at that time Cutting Records was one of the most well respected hip-hop labels, so that was a big deal for us. From there we put out the ‘On Tempo Jack’ record on our own label, which became a cult classic, years later. From there went on to the Baritone Tiplove records and then to Rap Sheet.

How was ‘On Tempo Jack’ received at the time?

This is a record that we put out ourselves. My brother was a hustler, he had a drug operation going from Uptown New York to D.C. His man was down with Alpo and those dudes from Uptown. I’m not real proud to say it, I’m not down with any of that, but the record was gonna be a front for their business that they were doing. We put the record out, people liked it, but I didn’t like it myself. I didn’t think the sound was good enough, I wanted it to be able to compete with all the other dope records that was out.

Back then, every week there would be an incredible record that would come out! You turn on the radio, it’s a new song by Kane, you’re like, ‘Oh my god!’ It’s a new one by Biz! It’s a new one by Ultramagnetic! I thought my record was good but then I’d hear a new Public Enemy record and I’d be like, ‘I’ve gotta go back to the drawing board, this is not good enough!’ So I didn’t really push the record back then. I took it to the radio stations in Philly and they fronted on me, they wanted payola. I was like, ‘Fuck that!’ I could have taken it to Red Alert or anyone in New York but I just didn’t. As soon as people discovered it in the 2000’s it just exploded! Traffic Entertainment got with me to do a re-issue on it and then all the originals sold out for anywhere from $200 to $750. It was a nice little payday!

How did your Rap Sheet column come about?

I did ‘True Urban Funnies’, that’s how I got into Rap Sheet at first, doing the comic strip. From there I told them I could do interviews as well, so I started interviewing people like Pete Rock, ?uestlove, Treacherous Three, Grandmaster Flash, people like that. They let me do the ‘World of Beats’ column, I started interviewing people like Diamond D, Buckwild from D.I.T.C., DJ Cash Money and a whole lot of other people. I always will credit Darryl James for giving me the opportunity to do something on the magazine side of things, he gave me a lot of leeway to do what I wanted to do.

What were some of the highlights of your time there?

I was in the Greene Street Studios with Pete Rock when he was doing a session! This is when Pete Rock was at his peak, and to hear him playing all these unreleased songs was crazy. That and flying me out to LA and meeting a whole lot of people out there at the convention. They had me on a panel talking about music production with my man E-Swift from Tha Alkaholiks, Pete Rock and a few other people. Cool shit was going on all weekend – I saw Brand Nubian beat up the soundman at a show they did, saw Ol’ Dirty Bastard spazzing out, totally drunk on stage, going insane.

Did you upset anybody through your articles?

One of the little controversies I had when I was doing magazine articles was people thought I dissed Brainfreeze. When Brainfreeze came out people went real crazy over it, like god came down out of the sky and made a mixtape! My reaction was, ‘It’s dope, but y’all are going a little too far with this.’ What I said is because a lot of the fans now are white, and these dudes are white and they made a dope tape, they’re taking it to a whole other level of adoration. [laughs] You’re kinda dissing a lot of other people when you take it to that level. But I never meant it as a diss to them at all, I thought Brainfreeze was dope and I think they’re very talented.

At what point did you get heavy into record collecting?

I’ve been collecting records since I was a kid, but I went to a higher level in the late 80’s when the James Brown sampling craze came out, started to get all those type records, trying to find things. It didn’t explode until after I started doing Rap Sheet. I meet people like Beni B, who did ABB Records, he hipped me to a lot of things as far as understanding how to dig for records. Him and Mr. Supreme from Seattle, both of those guys showed me some things. From there I was like, ‘I’m doing a column on digging in the crates, I need to be on that level.’ I just went all out and my collection went from 3,000 records to 6,000 records to 10,000 records. Before you know it, I’ve got over 20,000 records and a lot of real rare beats and breaks.

From there, doing the record shows took it to another level where I’m looking for certain sounds for certain producers. ‘I know Pete Rock likes this, let me find a record that sounds like this type of shit. I know the Beatminerz like this, let me find something that they would like. Lord Finesse likes this…’ You go from digging for beats and breaks and samples and before you know it, you just love music and you’re just collecting records. So I would just end up buying whatever hit my ear and now, years later, a lot of these records are worth hundreds of dollars. You go from being a crate digger to a record collector.

What’s your best find on a digging mission?

I went to this music instrument store and they had some records there, I guess some DJ had sold their collection. I started looking and I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’m seeing all these rare, rare disco records. I don’t even know that much disco but I could just tell these were some big items. I pretty much bought them out, I bought tonnes of records. I didn’t even know for sure what exactly they were worth, but it’s record after record that’s worth $200, $300, $400! I went back to the guy in the morning, ‘Yeah, we got some more back in.’ They put more out and again I’m seeing all this crazy shit. Then one of the kids in the store saw me buying all the records and he said, ‘OK, there must be some shit in here.’ So he took the rest of the records and kept them for himself. I’m like, ‘C’mon man, you don’t even know what you’ve got!’ That was probably the best come-up I ever had. Tonnes of really rare records – stuff on the Queen Constance label and some of the other Peter Brown labels that I’d never heard of before.

Was there one that always got away?

The one record I always wanted to get, I wanted to find in the field, was a copy of Skull Snaps. I can go to Ebay right now and get a copy of Skull Snaps for around $100 – I didn’t want to do that. You have to do that with certain records, because they’re regional records on smaller labels you’re not going to find them at your local record shop.

How did you used to work out what to charge for records?

Now you have Ebay and Popsike and have a bit of a gauge as to what the prices should be, back then you really didn’t. There would be certain lists where you would see certain records going for an amount of money but a lot of those lists didn’t know what people were into, especially if you were buying beats and breaks. They might say that Power of Zeus record is a $20, $30 record, but at the record shows it might be $100! A lot of it was trial and error, you try to see what other dealers are selling certain records for, just to get an idea, and sometimes you’re just making up prices. You’re saying, ‘This is a dope record. If I find it out in Ohio someplace it might be a $5, but if I play this for producers at the show they’re gonna spend $50 for it. They’re gonna want that!’ That led to some of the producers thinking, ‘These dealers are trying to take advantage of us.’ But really, dealers are sitting up in stores, listening to hundreds of records. Trying to find beats, trying to find grooves, trying to find samples. We were providing a service as well as just selling records. We’re putting a lot of time and effort into this. Sometimes the prices would get a little heavy, but if you’re a producer and you buy a record for $50 and you make a beat and you sell it – and you’re getting a thousand, five thousand dollars, or way more – that $50 is nothing! It’s all just part of the game.