Photo: K-Prince.

This one has been cooking up for long time now, but it’s finally out of the oven and ready to throw on your plate with a side of mash – the history of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series told by the people who put them together and some of the DJ’s and producers they went on to influence:

Ultimate Breaks and Beats: An Oral History

Shout out to Shecky Green and the design team at Cuepoint for turning it into a multimedia masterpiece and whatnot.

While I was staying in New Jersey mid 2013, I attempted to shoot some footage of the original Flavor Unit crew. As it happened, I only managed to get Chill Rob G on film, and after watching the video back I’ve decided that this plays better as a written piece. While some of the same stuff from our 2006 conversation is covered, Rob also went into a lot more detail on some topics, making it a worthwhile piece on it’s own. Not to mention that Ride The Rhythm still stands as one of the strongest and most original releases of 1989.

Robbie: You mentioned that you went through a few different names when you were younger?

Chill Rob G: When I first started I had an identity crisis, I had a bunch of different names. It was Jazzy B, it was Bobby G, it was Killer B – cos my name was Robert. I was down with a couple of different crews too. I was down with The World Rap Crew and I was down with the Dignified Almighty Magnificent MC’s – Those D.A.M. MC’s. When all of that fell apart I just kept rapping on my own. I used to practice with my man Michael Ali, be up at his house every single day, making tapes. When I said that on the record it was true!

Were these beats that he’d made?

He tried to make beats but they was [blows raspberry]. I would just rap over popular rap records. He would try to cut the break. He wasn’t really that good a DJ either – but that was my man back then. [laughs] We would make tapes and try to get it out to the drug dealers, cos they’d be out all night. They would play that music and people would get a chance to hear me rap.

Were you selling these tapes?

I would try to sell them but they wasn’t really buying them, man. I wasn’t getting no money for them, I was just happy they were taking them and riding around.

Were you trying to get them to any record labels?

It was in the back of both of our minds but we wasn’t really acting on it, and thoughts without actions? That’s not going anywhere. I did keep on rapping, and I ran into my man Latee – who I knew from high school – in Irvington, and he was telling me about The 45 King and I should come through and check out some of the beats. Maybe Mark will hook me up with something. He knew I used to rap in high school. In the cafeteria everyone’s banging on tables, everybody’s rapping.

What was The 45 King doing at the time?

Mark had a few people he was working with, he had been a DJ for a while already. Obviously he was plugged in with Red Alert, and Red Alert used to play his beats with nobody rapping on it. It was a little special segment he did during his radio show. When I got a chance to rap for this dude, I didn’t really realise that’s who he was, at that moment. I was just down there with Latee and we were all rapping. While we were down there somebody said, ‘Yo Mark, you should record this and give it to Red Alert!’ I was like, ‘Oh, it’s THAT dude!’ I was down there chilling with him for two hours before I knew who he was. The next day he called me up. ‘Yo, that shit you was kickin’ was dope, man. We should make a record.’

So you went back over there and chose some beats to use?

He didn’t play me no beats. It ain’t like I’m gonna choose no beat – he’s gonna give the beat. I’m just some kid. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’mma bring a beat.’

What was the first beat he gave you?

The first beat he gave me was the ‘Dope Rhymes’ track. That’s the first thing we recorded. It wasn’t even like he gave me a beat to listen to. He said, ‘Come to the studio, bring your $30 for the hour,’ Cos I’m paying for an hour, he’s paying for an hour. ‘Have your rhymes ready.’ I showed up at the studio with some lyrics I hoped that would fit whatever track he played. It all worked out. Back then I had notebooks of rhymes, and I emptied all that out. I said all that stuff. I didn’t really understand song structure, I just knew it had to be sixteen bars because I listened to other rap records and I counted it. Otherwise I had no idea what I was doing when I got to the studio. But it was cool, it all worked out.

How long did it take to get that first single released?

We recorded ‘Dope Rhymes’ and ‘Chillin” the same night at Vaughn Mason‘s studio and got the deal with Stu Fine maybe three weeks later. I knew it was a little rinky-dink label nobody had ever heard of, so I did the song ‘Wild Pitch.’

This was back when they only had LeMonier on there?

I was laying in my bed one night listening to Special K and Teddy Ted on radio. Was it them? It might’ve been the Hank Love Half Pint radio show, and they played this record from this kid LeMonier [‘The Hardest Beat Around’] and the shit sucked! That kid was wack! I was laying there thinking, ‘Wow, he made a record? There’s no way I’m not making a record now!’ Interestingly enough I ended up on that kid’s label and he’s off the label after I got there. I hated him so much I got him booted off his label. Y’all are welcome!

How did you connect with Stu Fine?

I didn’t send Stu Fine anything, we gave our stuff to Red Alert cos 45 King had that plug in. He handed that to Red and he played it, that was really cool. The whole Flavor Unit was together before – I was one of the last people to come. Me and Lakim were the last few members to fit in because my man [The Ruler Lord] Ramsey had the little Ramm Enterprises thing jumping off. Ramsey’s African, and I don’t mean no disrespect at all – but he was real enterprising like that. You see these African dudes out here with blankets on the street? Ramsey had that kinda mind set. He wanted to work to make something pop-off some kinda way, so he had Ramm Enterprises. He didn’t have a lot of talent, but he had talented people around him. ‘We’re gonna do fashion shows and you’re gonna do deejaying!’ That’s what they were doing before I came along, and when I got here they were really focusing on music and I got in that wave.

What are your best memories of those basement sessions?

We made a lot of tapes, a lot of video tapes, just rhyming. A lot of people came through, Biz Markie, a bunch of different people. I knew Biz from way back when he first started, he used to be Jersey City all the time, beatboxing.

Do you like you got dragged into the radio wars between Red Alert and Mr. Magic?

Mark would try to gas you up when you were in the booth. ‘You know Kool G Rap gonna hear this shit. Don’t be no sucker in there!’ He’d walk off and you’d be like, ‘Yeah, Kane and them might listen.’ And you’d try to bring it to make sure you don’t sound wack when they hear it.

Who were some of the other Flavor Unit members who didn’t release anything like Taheed?

Taheed used to rap, me and him were gonna be in a crew together but that never materialized. Taheed liked to have fun, he was just floatin’. Whatever we were doing, If he could come he would come. Markey Fresh took a long time to get his deal, but it did pop off.

Did you consider Markey a core member?

That seemed to be a choice he was making. Markey Fresh used to hang out with Mark, he was one of the guys that was first there when I met Mark. He was cool with me, I never had no beef with Markey Fresh.

Why weren’t you on that ‘Flavor Unit Assassination Squad’ record?

When we was in the studio they were like, ‘We might have to clear this with Stu Fine, we don’t wanna deal with Stu Fine!’ So me and Latee was off that record. We was both there. Before they recorded that record we were just whylin’ in the booth, we didn’t record it. We should have recorded that, that woulda been a hot record!

You also toured overseas with Dave Funkenklein at one point?

We went to Japan with David Klein and it was 45 King, Chill Rob G, Queen Latifah and Latee. We were out there for like a week. It was surprising that they were packing all these shows and really rocking with us. ‘Y’all really don’t speak English.’ They couldn’t understand us. But they was into it, man! Music is universal, plus that energy that we had. We went to Tokyo Disneyland while we were out there, I went to Magic Mountain. It was crazy!

How many tracks did you record before you completed the Ride The Rhythm album?

There was no throw-away records. Whatever we were gonna go in and did, that’s what we were gonna do. The Flavor Unit was a lotta MC’s, so the competition was really healthy and it was always present, so you don’t want to waste no time or appear like you don’t know what you doing! Other rappers is watching you, man! You got Latee and Apache standing right there! And they nice! So don’t be going in there acting like you a sucker!

What’s your favorite song from that album?

I really like ‘Court Is In Session,’ because I was sick when I was doing that. My voice was all raspy, I was late coming to the studio, I was feverish, I did not feel good. But the record came out good!

The accapella on that single also became part of an international dancefloor smash hit, right?

We had a 12″ we put out, ‘Court Is In Session’ / ‘Let The Words Flow’ – I had a dark side and a bright side on everything – and the vocal on that with the accapella got chopped up by these kids in Germany calling themselves Snap. They threw in a bunch of different elements from different records; it’s a remix, that’s what you do. It’s basically ‘Let The Words Flow’ lyrics with a Jocelyn Brown singing riff in it. They handed it out to club DJ’s, started playing it on the radio, they was loving it, so they got this dude to come out and start performing the record, which didn’t make no sense to me. Why wouldn’t you contact the artist, man? You could have contacted me, you would have had the genuine article. It boggles the mind. Then theses dudes did a video! I was shocked.

Did Wild Pitch try to sue them?

They didn’t really step to the plate. In order for me to get the lawsuit off I had to go through Wild Pitch, cos that’s where my deal was at. I got caught in the mud.

And then you did ‘Power Jam’?

Wild Pitch went in and did a remix to the remix and put out the song called ‘Power Jam’ and had this other female come in and try to sing the Jocelyn Brown part.

Was that the straw that broke the camel’s back between you and Wild Pitch?

The real end was when we went it to negotiate the second album. I wasn’t happy the way things were going with Wild Pitch anyway. I couldn’t get no tour support from them, I wanted to get out on the road and do my thing and I was getting booked shows left and right. I need a tour bus, I gotta get on the bus with Kane! I’m spending my own bread! I was doing all of the hustling, they wasn’t really doing nothing. We were negotiating the second record, Stu Fine offered me this mad low number. I was insulted, I was like, ‘Nah, you crazy? I ain’t doing it.’ I walked off on him, that was it. When I left that restaurant? It was done.

You had a meeting in a restaurant?

They always had meetings in restaurants. Try to give you a cheeseburger to think he’s gonna get you to sign. ‘I ain’t signing for a cheesebuger this time, Stu! I was hungry that day, but today? I ain’t hungry!’ I’m just playing.

Where were the rest of the Flavor Unit at by this stage?

At that point the Flavor Unit was getting kinda small. Latifah was making her own moves, she was doing really well. Apache had his record coming out, Treach was making some moves. Lakim was doing his thing over at Tuff City, I think he was on his way to Egypt at this time, to shoot that video. I was talking to Kid ‘N Play about it and they were like, ‘Yo man, you should go and do the next record.’ I was like, ‘Ehhh…’ I didn’t wanna do the record, cos I’m gettin’ beat! I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Did you talk to any other labels?

The low-ball deal came around the same time as my brother dying, my cousin had died just a couple of years earlier, and my best friend had died also. Those two guys died in the same week. I’m having problems with the girl I was living with, so I’m moving. Wild Pitch were not acting right, I was trying to get out of the contract – I was just getting fed up.

Were you there when Latifah trademarked the Flavor Unit name?

I was on the road somewhere at the time, and when I came back, Latee and Mark and Apache were in the basement and they were talking about how Latifah and Shakim came and told them that they incorporated the name Flavor Unit. I said, ‘Word? So what did y’all say?’ They said, ‘We’re gonna rock with it, cos it’s gonna end up to everybody’s benefit. They gonna have the company name but we’re all gonna share the profits.’ I was like, ‘So where do we sign? Did everybody sign deals that said that?’ They like, ‘Nah, we didn’t get to that part yet.’ I guess they signed some agreement – I never signed that agreement.

Do you have any thoughts on the later incarnations of the crew?

The Flavor Unit was a beautiful thing when it happened, but it’s over. The Juice Crew was great when it was jumping off, that’s done. We were all trapped in that little bubble right there and blew-up out of it. Great memories and good friends left over.

Back in 2013, I got to chat to Black Rob for ten minutes as he was on his way to the studio. This time around I tried not to repeat the same questions, but unfortunately I caught him as he was trying to catch some food. Guess some things just aren’t meant to work out, huh? Regardless, you can catch Black Rob’s new LP, Genuine Article, is out 21 April.

Robbie: Were Spoonie Gee and Doug E. Fresh a big influence on you when you were a kid?

Black Rob: Hell yeah! Parties, break-outs – the whole shit! Doug E. Fresh was definitely slamming, man. I already wanted to my thing, but it gave me some inspiration to tbe best that I could be.

What was it like growing in Harlem?

It was different, man. A lotta kids was doing what they had to do, playing around and not doing music, so I came in there doing music. I used to have the parties jumping, little freestyles and all that stuff. Hear that shit out the window. I used to be the number one guy, but I was too young to really comprehend what I was going through, cos I was just stretching out. But I was nice though! [laughs]

Did you have a crew back then?

Nah, you had to do that shit on your own. Nobody else wanted to look around for talent, everybody hated. Here I go, I found out a way to get the girls! That was my only thing, to get the girls. I went to the Bronx and my mans and them, we put together a little rhyme group. It was me, O and a kid named Godzilla. We was going at it and we got an invitation to do Sweetwaters. Sweetwaters was the little club, after work thing where people went and let it down. I got to do Sweetwaters, and I was the only one in Sweetwaters that got to really doing hip-hop. The crowd was like, ‘Yo, where’d you find this kid?’ I did my thing and stepped off the stage and everybody looking at me like, ‘Damn! That shit was nice, kid!’ I made a difference to the right people.

Was the next step to start recording demos?

Me and my crew made one demo tape. It was really a wash-up. From there I got with this kid named RP, and from there I was with Puff, so it was all over!

From there you started doing features for all the Bad Boy groups, right?

That came next, cos I was really getting good. That was when I started vibing with 112 and Faith Evans, once I got down with Bad Boy I made my mark. As I moved up the ranks i was making up shit that he couldn’t even fathom. If there was a way to be after BIG? I was after BIG.

What was your first impression of Puffy?

He was a ‘get money’ nigga, I knew that from day one. I had a problem with RP, he took my money. He wasn’t gonna tell me! I told Puff, and Puff got my money back.

How did you know Cru?

One guy grew-up with me, I didn’t know the rest of ’em. I just knew Yogi. Yogi had good beats and I used to always come to his house and make joints, so he messed around and put me on ‘Recognize’ and the other joint and the labels loved it, man.

What was the process of putting together the Life Story album?

It really wasn’t no problem, I made that album out of sheer love for the sport. I swear to god, I just came in and I spit it out. Whatever came out my mouth was on the album! That’s why there’s so many joints on there.

You’ve got a strong story-telling style. Where did that come from?

Slick Rick. He was definitely hittin’ them with the songs, man. I took hold of that, I grabbed the tapes and I was listening to it and i was like, ‘Oh shit! Where this shit came from?’ I started putting that shit on cap – cappin’ that. From there? It was no holes barred, man. [laughs]

How were you picking the beats for that album?

As long as my beats are hot and when I play it, the crowd gets turned up to it? That’s what I label. That’s what I go with.

Were you surprised how big ‘Whoa’ got?

In a way it was a sure shot but in a way it was a bang boogie. I didn’t think it was gonna sell that many records. Eventually, when they started asking me to perform it all the time? I got it. Come to find out Buckwild – he ain’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know he had that fire with him! But he took that record and me and him balled it up and we just killed it! That record is number one, classic, throughout the years. It’s still getting me money! I don’t got no complaints.

The Black Rob Report was a strong album, do you feel it got the shine it deserved?

I wasn’t there to promote it, I was in jail.

Jamal [Rob’s manager]: Black Rob introduced the world to G-Dep. Black Rob introduced the world to Petey Pablo. He has a ear for music, a lotta people don’t know that. He’s also bringing Quas Amil to the game, which is his artist. He’s going to shock the world as well.

Black Rob: The industry don’t realise that! C’mon man, I could be the biggest A&R!

Editor’s note: The following interview was conducted by Bill Zimmerman in 2007 for the now defunct print edition of Modern Fix magazine prior to the release of Guru’s Jazzmatazz, Vol. 4: The Hip Hop Jazz Messenger. This Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of Guru’s passing.

On April 19, 2010, the rapper born Keith Elam died of complications from cancer at 48. Hip-hop lost one of its Golden Era notables. What remained were questions about Guru’s association with Solar, his late-career producer and business partner in the label 7 Grand, whose motives were questioned by the rapper’s family and former collaborators. Shortly after Guru’s death, Solar released a letter purportedly written by Guru and critical of Premier. Guru’s family labeled it a fake; Solar defended the letter as “what Guru wanted.”

The self-proclaimed “king of monotone,” Guru possessed one of the most unmistakable voices in hip-hop. Honest and authoritative, he delivered music over three decades, most notably in Gang Starr with DJ Premier as well as through genre-bending Jazzmatazz solo efforts. What follows are excerpts from an unpublished interview with Guru and Solar in 2007. It’s a snapshot of Guru’s late 2000s, post-Gang Starr career. It shows two men focused on making their own lane and taking creative chances in the leadup to what would be Guru’s final Jazzmatazz project. Despite all the drama and confusion that would ensue, Guru made a mark on hip-hop. That’s indisputable.

Bill: Guru, one the previous Jazzmatazz projects you were working with multiple producers. What was it like just sticking with Solar on this one?

Guru: Actually, the only one with multiple producers was the third one (Street Soul). The first one (Vol. 1) I produced, the second one (Vol. 2: The New Reality) I produced and then the third one multiple (producers). Actually, after the third one I said I wanted to go back to working with just one producer because I left like the third one – even though I had like a lot of big name producers – it came out more like a compilation than it did an organic work. It’s still one of my favorites joints, but it was something about the cohesiveness of one producer bringing everything together. After teaming up with Solar – first of all when I first started hearing his music that was after we were friends already for two years. Then we decided to do the label. We were introduced six years ago – he took me to his lab so I could hear some tracks, and it was crazy because it was almost like he read my mind because I was looking for a future sound, a new sound for myself. All my favorite artists are able to do that – to recreate and renew and then reinvent. So, when I heard his tracks, I was like, “Oh, man.” I was blown away and actually took some stuff home right then. Our first release came out in 2005 on 7 Grand. That was called Guru Version 7.0 The Street Scriptures, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. That was just the introduction to this new chemistry. Now, at this point, the chemistry is just more intense, so this album is definitely proof of that.

So you guys were just friends and never got into the music stuff for a few years?

Guru: That was cool because most people around me would have been the opposite. Me and Solar were just on some cool shit.

Solar: To be honest, to give readers a little bit of insight, what it was was that I wasn’t a professional producer when Guru met me. … (For others), the friendship wasn’t really friendship. They were really hanging out with Guru looking for Guru to help their careers.

Guru: I’ve been experiencing that the last couple of years. It’s very strange. Fame is a strange animal. Trust me.

Solar: That’s really when the friendship kicked in. He didn’t really need a producer as much as he needed a friend at that time. It was a good time in my life to kind of get back to socializing because I really was immersed in other things. So, it was cool. He was just like me. I’m Guru. And at that point he became very dissatisfied with the situation at the label and his production situation. It had really got unbearable.

Guru: Everything. Management. Legal. I was disgusted with everything.

Solar: We were just two people hanging out at a party, and I’m trying to enjoy the festivities and he’s complaining and I was kind of just like “Well, listen if it’s that bad, man start your own label, dog. Puff did it. Jay did it. They ain’t got nothing on you dog. Just start your own label.” And I went to the other side of the party and got back to business, dog. And he called me a couple days later and was like “You know, I’m gonna to do that.” I was like “Do What?” “Start a label.” And I was like “Good luck with it. I wish you the best.” He’s like “No, no, no. I want us to start a label.” I was like “Alright, let me think about that.” Quite honest, born and raised in New York and seeing how New York really turned into this whole bling era of over-the-top, excessive nonsense. I really felt like hip-hop needed a change. … The business stance of 7 Grand records is to have balance, to bring a perspective from somebody who’s a veteran in the game, Guru, and me as a new jack to some degree, and some fresh ideas, fresh music and a fresh approach to the situation.

The previous Jazzmatazz albums were experimental when you with a major label, but you really feel that this is your thing.

Guru: The difference is that they evolved. It evolved into it’s own musical genre. In the beginning, we didn’t know whether to take it to hip-hop radio or R&B radio or jazz radio. Now, it’s just like, we can take it anywhere. That was before internet, so now there’s internet radio. There’s so many different outlets, so I think it’s actually a better time. And then also, it evolved so that people that gone with it and became fans of it, those people are grooving with it. Those people are checking in. They’re out there. They’re coming to the concerts. That’s one of the reason that we made this album because in our travels touring with The Street Scriptures everybody was asking “When are you going to do another Jazzmatazz?”

Were you surprised?

Guru: Not really because I made that – the original concept was for it to be a timeless project. It’s something that I could always come back to. Something that would always evolve. The constant is, there’s always going to be jazz greats, there’s always going to be up and coming vocalists or musicians, and then there’s always going to be the contemporary ones.

When I think back on Jazzmatazz, I think of some of these great collaborations on songs such as “Loungin’” and “Watch What You Say.” When you look back, what are some of your best memories?

Guru: The one you mentioned, “Loungin’” with Dr. Donald Byrd. I have to mention that because Dr. Byrd was like a mentor to me throughout the project and still is, actually. He was the first one I talked to directly and he was just with it from the gate. He was like, this is history, this is literature. Let’s make it happen, which is very important. And he put word out in the jazz community and that was at a time that the jazz community was not really open to hip-hop. They didn’t understand the sampling thing. They didn’t didn’t think it was lyrics. Basically, what happen was he put such a positive word out there for me. Everybody else I talked to after that was with it.

A lot of rappers don’t make contact with these older artists and get advice from them.

Guru: I would say it benefited me in all areas. In the areas of knowledge of music, in the areas of life itself because those guys are so cool. They experienced so much that to talk with them, they’re just a wealth of knowledge. Guys like Herbie Hancock are sitting there in the crowd giving me all kinds of jewels. There really wasn’t a monetary value you could put on stuff like that. It was just really cool, a really cool experience. I definitely learned a lot about music and the music biz.

What’s next for your guys both individually and collectively?

Guru: After the album and touring extensively with the album, we’ll be touring all the way into the new year with this album, all over the world. So that’s one thing, and then the other thing is that we got the mix CD (The Timebomb: Back To The Future Mixtape) coming out next. Usually the mix CD comes out before the album, but we flipped it around. The mix CD’s an official mix CD, so it will be coming out on 7 Grand Records as our next release. And then after that will be Solar’s album, and he can tell you about that.

Solar: The album is titled Solar 5,000 Degrees and Burning, and right now I just finished doing a remix for (Gym Class Heroes’) “Cupid’s Chokehold,” which was the No. 2 song in the country for four weeks and the No. 1 rated MTV video. So I was very honored and blessed to be tapped for the remix. Besides doing the remix, I put Guru on there to put down 16 bars. These are the type of things you’re going to see on my album. You’re going to see some real top-level spitters, and, like I said, 7 Grand prides itself on bringing a new look to hip-hop without saying “Don’t do this or don’t say that.” We’d rather just show what it looks like to work with different artists and expose them to different markets. … When they see the diversity of the artists on the album and where I’m going with the production, it’s going to be a surprise. It’s not going to be Jazzmatazz-esque. It’s a whole ’nother look and people are going to hear me spitting.

Guru, you’ve been pretty insistent that Gang Starr is through. Have you changed your mind at all?

Guru: That situation was dead. This is now. That ain’t going to happen. It’s all about the fact that then I wasn’t CEO of a label with a visionary like Solar. This is a whole new level for me. For me, it was that thing – that experience was great. It reached its peak, it was historical and that’s that. And now I’m moving on to newer and bigger things, and that’s just the way it is. For me, as the founder of that, there were principles that that was built on like street knowledge, intellect, spirituality that we took with us to build 7 Grand. So Guru and Solar are those principles of Gang Starr on the next level as executives, and as producer and artist.

Solar: You have to remember that Virgin owns the rights to Gang Starr. So to answer the question you just asked Guru – Virgin Records just put out a Gang Starr (Mass Appeal: Best of Gang Starr) album.

Guru: That’s a very important factor, and that’s why we started our own label.

Solar: It’s not his. Virgin owns Gang Starr. Guru has no rights to Gang Starr whatsoever. No rights at all. He wasn’t even allowed to use his name on different projects, that’s how weird the contract was. He couldn’t go on a record and say Guru or call it Gang Starr. It had to be approved by Virgin records.

You didn’t see a dime from this greatest hits?

Guru: Maybe $5. [laughing]

Toney Rome and Large Professor go way back, and share a lot more history than simply a production credit on the b-side of ‘Mad Scientist.’ Toney talks about growing up in Flushing, Queens, facing music industry hurdles and memories of having the hottest tape in school.

Robbie: How did you first get involved in hip-hop?

I grew-up in New York in the 70s and the 80s, when hip-hop was just getting started. I can remember before there were records, used to be chasing tapes, trying to find the hottest tapes and also trying to get to the Bronx to hear the music.

You were in Flushing at the time?

From Flushing, Queens. It was a really organic thing. I was hearing the music out here on the streets, then they started doing jams out here and eventually I started deejaying.

Where were you getting your records? From the city or locally?

It was the era where DJ’s was really secretive about the breaks that they had. Some of the stuff you would know, but you would have to be a sleuth like Sherlock Holmes to figure out what breaks. First you raided your father’s record collection, and you found the old funk and soul records from there. Of course I didn’t have a lotta money back then, so I used to go to stores in Jamaica, Queens and places that I knew out there that had record shops.

How were you getting your hands on the live tapes?

It wasn’t for sale, your friend or distant acquaintance might have a tape from a jam, and everyone’s carrying around radios, so you would hear it. But obtaining it yourself? That’s another thing, because people held them things close. You had to be really good friends or give them something better to get a copy of that tape. When I first started getting into hip-hop, they didn’t play hip-hop on the radio. They [only] played it on WHBI that Mr. Magic was on. Mr. Magic’s show was on from two am to four am on Saturday nights. That was the only time you could hear hip-hop on the radio. I used to religiously stay up and record his shows. Then you make tapes of it and you play these tapes and then you were the man because you had these songs that nobody ever heard before. You had the most valuable tape but you wouldn’t give them a copy. They would have to stay up and record it themselves. [laughs]

Where were you doing your thing when you started deejaying?

I never did a party. We had DJ’s out here that were known in Flushing that actually used to put on jams. Flushing and Jamaica were as far out as I was going at the time. DJ’s wouldn’t let you get on their turntables – you had to have a rep in order to DJ. I didn’t get on like that, most of the deejaying was in my house, the ultimate story of ‘trying to get on.’

What were some of your favorite breaks to cut up?

‘Mardi Gras’ is one of my favorites of all time. ‘Funky Drummer.’ There used to be a song called ‘Super Sperm,’ ‘Love Is The Message,’ ‘Groove To Get Down,’ those classic breaks. Also I would mix hip-hop records that were out at the time and even music songs. One song I use dot cut-up all the time was ‘I Can’t Wait’ by Nu-Shooz.

What can you tell me about the Bland?

The Bland is a housing project in Flushing, so they used to jams out there. There were also jams on Colden Street where I lived out at junior high school, IS237. They would have jams in the park there. But we were also the adventurous type, so even though we were twelve or thirteen, we would also try to get out to the clubs and see who we’re hearing on these tapes. That’s when The Pavillion, Roxy Roller Skating Rink, the Funhouse – try to sneak into those clubs to see the people with [big] names perform.

Was this around when Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick had ‘The Show’?

It was Divine Force, Whodini, Force MC’s. At that time, you still wanted to see [Grandmaster] Flash spin, if you could.

Did you manage to get in?

I was in junior high, so not Large [with me], but I used to get in with some older people I used to hang with. Breakers used to be there, so you got to see breakdancers. Not just people from your crew that you know, and not necessarily Rock Steady either, but other people from around the boroughs. That’s how we grew up. Paulie rhymes, he does beats, but Paulie is a graffiti artist too. Guys I ran with in the neighborhood were breakers, they were pretty popular out here in Queens.

Were you recording your friends rhyming over beats at that stage?

It was mixing. To get DJ equipment was kind of a feat. Not everybody had the money to be able to afford equipment, so when someone did have equipment, people gravitated towards you. That wasn’t the only way to do music – you had drum machines and other ways to produce music – but that was even more out of reach of people. The average Joe couldn’t afford a drum machine or a keyboard or recording equipment. I used to DJ, have people over – they would DJ – make tapes and then we would rhymes over the tapes in the park. That’s when I started rhyming. We would have tapes of me catching a break and rhyme over that, or make tapes of us rhyming.

What were you calling yourself then?

My name has always been Toney Rome. That’s my real name.

Were you just rhyming with friends from the neighborhood at that stage?

I grew up with Large Professor, Neek The Exotic, my boy Cee Lo and people around the neighborhood, but those guys lived in the same buildings that I lived in. We would get together and rhyme, try to make songs, try to come up with concepts, the whole nine.

Was Large always a studious character growing up?

Large was quiet, I would say studious though. He used to be friends with people that he liked something what they do and he wanted to understand that for himself. He’s always been that type of cat – a thinker type of guy.

Were you ever in a crew?

It was really loose. Me, Large Professor and my man J.Y. – he used to manage the Lost Boyz – we actually started rhyming together and we were trying to come up with a name and songs and all of that stuff. That’s when we would go to Power Play Studios out in Astoria to try to record our ideas together, but nothing really came of that. We never got a deal from it. But we gave it a shot.

Plus studio time wasn’t cheap.

It was dope, around that time I was really trying to do it. At that time a lotta the hip-hop record labels – Tuff City and Sleeping Bag Records and things like that – they were all in my reach, they were all based in Manhattan or Queens somewhere. I used to get the [phone] numbers off the records or just show up there and wanna try and get an audition with ’em. There were many times me, J and Large Professor would just go up there and rhyme and try to get on that way. From going around meeting people that way, I met a man named Tony Arfie. He was the owner of Power Play at that time. I guess he saw the spark that we had and he gave us session time when the studio wasn’t booked, so we were able to get in there and record some things.

Do those tapes still exist?

I wish I had those tapes, but I don’t. I had a song that I did with a label – I don’t even know if I want to bring this up, cos the song was so wack – but it was with a label I was trying to get a commitment with, London Records. It never really got off the ground.

Why were you so unhappy with the song you did for London?

It’s what every artist goes through when they have to deal with a third party when making their music. You have what you were doing in the streets and you know how you want it to sound, you know what your inspiration was, and then the person you’re dealing with has another vision. It came to be known as ‘creative control,’ and nowadays most artists have it, but back then they were really trying to force us to do certain things. At the time Run-DMC was big, so they wanted us to do a Run-DMC sounding song. Even though I loved Run-DMC, it wasn’t what we did. Then there was the whole matter of sampling. We wanted to use the records, and from Tony Arfie’s point of view you couldn’t even do that, you had to replay everything. Of course when you replay something it doesn’t have that same feel. It was that kinda struggle going on.

Were London Records not happy with song you submitted?

I don’t know what happened with it, because at the time I left New York, I moved to California. I left a lotta shit behind, but I had to continue on with my life. Large kept pursuing it – he met up with Paul C., he started doing beats, he got really nice and he released the Main Source record and blew up. Large Professor’s my boy, we were tight all our lives, I was like, ‘Wow, my man is blowing up!’ A few years later I moved back to New York. Main Source had moved their separate ways when I came back.

Was Large working on the Geffen LP at this point?

That was a jump. He was looking for his next thing to do – at the time he was just a hot producer out here – so he was producing songs, he was doing remixes, so for a good minute he wasn’t even trying to do a project because he was so in-demand as a producer. At that time it was me, it was Large, it was my man Len X’s 10, it was Cee Lo, it was my brother Yusef Lateef, Vandemator. Paulie had the crib in the same building we grew-up in and we used to always go there and rock beats, rhyme, my man Len used to sing. It was some real live shit. We didn’t say, ‘We have this idea for a song, let’s make the song like this.’ It would hearing the beat that you love, somebody freestyling and then somebody joining in. My man Cee Lo had a knack, he could just freestyle a hook. We would just be hanging out, vibing with each other, and coming up with hot shit. That was what the Queens Lounge was all about. because of who Large was, people started hearing about it and wanted to be involved in some kinda way, so people like Q-Tip and Pete Rock would come through. It was a dope time, man,

Was Queens Lounge the name of the studio?

That was like a movement, man! It was like an affiliation. The way it came about was really organic, it wasn’t like it was forced or nothing. People used to come through and we were doing good things. I’m not sure who came up with the name Queens Lounge – it might have been Large, it might have been Cee Lo – but the name kind of stuck.

What happened next?

Even when I had went to Cali I was still into the music. I had went from deejaying to rhyming to doing beats, I really had stopped rhyming. I’m doing beats, I’m bouncing stuff off Large, and I come up with this one beat and Large is loving the beat. By this point, Large’s production skills were better than mine. He used to always say, ‘You’ve gotta tighten that shit up.’ I went back and reworked the beat and we put it down.

This was ‘Spacey’?

That was the ‘Spacey’ joint. Originally, the last verse was Royal Flush. I don’t know if the labels couldn’t get stuff together or what happened with it, but it eventually changed to Large, Van and Cee Lo.

How did you put that beat together?

The main part of it is Hubert Laws, a song called ‘Modadji.’ When I went to California it was hard to find the record spots out there, so I used to buy cassettes. I found this cassette, it was a live concert of Hubert Laws. It was a real jazz set, in that you can hear the audience in the background, and there was this one song that was eight or nine minutes long. I was listening to it, not like, ‘I’m gonna sample this,’ I was just getting into it because it had that real live feeling. In the middle of the song the musicians just start vamping, so those parts that I sampled are the apex of the song, where they started getting busy – in three separate places. It just had this real action-packed feeling.

That must have been exciting when it came out on the b-side of ‘Mad Scientist’?

It was definitely dope, I still have the vinyl. But it was bittersweet, because the deal with Geffen with Large didn’t go quite the way it shoulda went and the album ended up not being released until much, much later – officially released, anyway.

That must have been frustrating for everyone involved.

That was a creative control thing too. They were trying to push Large to go in a certain direction and Large is Large, man! Conceptually, he has a vision of what hip-hop is, and that’s the type of music he does. He’s not gonna change up and do something just because someone says that’s what he should be doing.

What happened next for you?

After that I was working with a lotta different MC’s out here, trying to get my stuff on. You know how that goes if you don’t really have the name – ‘Spacey’ was out, but it wasn’t really out the way it was supposed to be. I kept with the music and stuff, I actually did a joint a few years ago with my man J-Sands from the Lone Catalysts. That was called ‘Please.’

Did Vandemator record any other stuff?

Van could actually rhyme, but I never saw him actually ‘go for it.’ Doing ‘Spacey’ was typical ‘Queens Lounge’ stuff, ‘Yo, we got this beat,’ they rhymed to the beat, but I never heard another song from Van. Me and Cee Lo used to do a lotta stuff, and Neek. To this day I’m still in the studio, working with artists locally. I’m still doing my thing.

Large Pro really credits you as the guy who ‘put the battery in his back’ when he first started out. Is that fair to say?

I think it is fair to say. We all loved the music, and we were pretty good. I used to go out there and talk to the labels and talk to the studio owners and things like that, so I think where Large is coming from is that I might have helped him to see that we didn’t have to just do this in the park. We could get out there and network with people and do it for real. I used to buy equipment all the time, the newest things. I used to be always trying to push it as far as I could push it. Paul’s a little younger than me, and he mighta saw that and said, ‘I can talk to people like that.’ I don’t wanna take too much [credit], but I think that’s what he could be talking about.

What kind of equipment did you used to work with?

I’ve never went with whatever was popular at the time. At one time, the SP-1200, the Akai S950 and [S]1000 and so on – and even the MPC – were what everybody considered the ‘tools of the trade’ in order to do beats. But I’ve never used none of those. I read up for myself and find things that are gonna work best for me. I had a Yamaha keyboard and I had an Ensoniq 16+. I was doing all the beats on that, matter of fact I did ‘Spacey’ on that.

Any good digging stories?

I remember in the 90s I wanted the movie soundtrack of the Hair soundtrack, just to have it in my collection, but because Pete Rock had used it the record was selling for $500 at Bleaker Bob’s. I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ I was on Northern Boulevard in Queens at a thrift store, I wasn’t even looking for records. I went in and they had a mint copy of Hair for a dollar. [laughs]

Whats sets Queens apart from everyone else?

Queens is a huge borough, first of all. Everybody says, ‘I’m from Brooklyn.’ Even though it’s split up into certain spots, they like to say ‘Brooklyn.’ But Queens is like, ‘I’m from Flushing,’ ‘I’m from Jamaica,’ ‘I’m from The Bridge.’ Even though it’s grouped under that title of Queens, each of those neighborhoods is competitive with each other. It wasn’t necessarily, ‘We’re Queens, it’s a beautiful thing.’ We’re competitive with each other. When you have that kind of competition, that brings the battle. It’s not so much that different neighborhoods are going up and actually battling, but it’s like, ‘Yo, we heard what these dudes in Flushing is doing. We’re gonna make something that’s liver than that.’ It was a competition with Queens people. Incredible MC’s came from that, it never ceases to amaze me.

Any plans to release new music?

I’m working with a couple of people, if I get something that’s really good I’ll look at ways to try to release it and promote it in a way that it can get some traction out there. Me and my brother Yusef Lateef got a studio at College Point in Queens and we got a lotta people coming through. We’re still working with the community out here.

Shout out to The Funkologist for helping this interview happen.

Aaron Fuchs‘ Tuff City label was the David to Def Jam‘s Goliath in the early 80’s. The label would go on to deliver important records from the Cold Crush Brothers, Spoonie Gee, The 45 King and Lakim Shabazz, to name but a few. Aaron talked extensively about how to keep your head above water in the record game and offered some interesting opinions about where hip-hop might have ended up if Harlem hadn’t gotten involved.

Robbie: What’s the longest that you’ve been in one location?

Aaron Fuchs: Five, six years. In New York City, no matter what business you’re in, you also have to be in the real estate business. It’s just chaotic keeping an office address for more than a few years at a time.

What are your proudest achievements as a record label so far?

I was very proud to be on the scene around ’82, when the electronic drum machines came on the scene. I described it as ‘a thousand flowers bloomed.’ You previously had all your DJ’s just looping or sampling beats from the same body of records, and when the electronic drum machines came in, all of a sudden it seemed like the unique sub rhythms of the DJ’s ethnic backgrounds – because hip-hop is a very Pan-Caribbean music-came to the forefront – it was wonderful to be working with Charlie Chase and Master OC, who were Puerto Rican; Pumpkin, who was Costa Rican;and Davey-D who was American black. It was really reflected in their different approaches to rhythms. What a wonderful time to be making music.

How had you met all these guys?

Hip-hop was incredibly small when I got into hip-hop, circa ’78. The communications medium for hip-hop was a 7 x 5 sheet of paper called The Phillip Edwards Report. He was the guy who had the bright idea to list all the stores in the metropolitan area and create a list of records that they were selling and distribute them around the boroughs. When I told Bambaataa, I wanted to sign an MC crew, I didn’t know he’d bring me the greatest of all-time, the Cold Crush Brothers. When I befriended Barry Michael Cooper, because we were both music critics for the Village Voice, I had no idea that he had cultivated a friendship with Spoonie Gee, who was the most influential of hip-hop artist of the old school era.

What can you tell me about your experiences as a music critic?

Criticism started because of Dylan and John Lennon. All of a sudden, lit. majors had something to write about with rock & roll. I always had a niche because I was one of the very few guys writing about black music, so while the review of the new Beatles or Dylan album was always taken, the review of the Wilson Pickett album or the Aretha Franklin album was always available.

And you were more than happy to take that on board.

Yeah. Happy to be able to hang out in Atlantic Records, happy to be able to fill junkies need for music.

Do you feel like it was an obsession for you at that stage?

No. It was an addiction. I interviewed Bob Marley once and he pulled out an ice cream cone of a blunt. I had only been smoking skinny jays at the point and I never pressed the on button of the tape recorder for the interview! But even when I was not stoned I had a need to be listening to music either live or on record every day of the week

How did you make the transformation from critic to label owner?

Beyond merely reviewing albums, I was making predictions in print that were like A&R calls. I reviewed Al Green‘s first album for Rolling Stone and spoke very, very highly about it. ‘Watch this guy, he’s gonna happen.’ Six or seven months later he put out ‘Let’s Stay Together’ and the record company used my quotes as part of their campaign. That really wasn’t happening with critics, and I saw it happening with me a few times. There was also the luck of being early and ahead of the pack. When I decided I wanted to make it my business in 1980 it wasn’t competitive. There were very few, if any, companies that saw it as something that would have long-range potential. Because I was a journalist, and also historically minded, I saw hip-hop as part of the continuum of American black music tradition. I thought it was here to stay,I was betting very long,, so it enabled me to hang in there through mistake after mistake, which might have sunk me had I gotten in later on when it was more competitive or if I was less inclined to stay with it.

It was still regarded as a fad at that time?

If you were a historian as I was, you were hearing the same things you heard about rock & roll. ‘It’s black! It’s jungle music! It’ll never last!’ I had other notions. There’s that Bob Marley expression, ‘Who feels it, knows it.’ It was the reverse for me – I knew it, and then later I felt it! It was strange to me in the beginning, but I knew it was gonna happen and then I grew to love it.

What was the first record you released?

It was a record called ‘Beach Boy’ by Vertical Lines. I had put my trust in Barry Michael Cooper. He’s known for writing the script to New Jack City, but what he was doing earlier around 1980 is still not sufficiently heralded. He was talking to Jamaican born Harlem record label owners to put out his hip-hop productions. These guys started out making Jamaican music in the first place, so to be convinced to get into into hip-hop was a big leap, and then he was into the Kraftwerk-like techno style of it. It was amazing, both for the artistic leap it represented for him but also for the leap of faith he was making these shopkeepers take for him. I’m very proud to have worked with him and having picked up some of his earlier recordings. So I trusted him to make this record. Unfortunately he made this down-tempo electro record with a little doo-wop vocal, and nobody wanted to know. I remember there was this iconic record man in the Bronx named Brad,he had put out ‘Catch The Beat’ by T-Ski Valley, and he kept saying to me, ‘There’s no foot, man! There’s no foot in that record!’ . All these years later It’s gone on to have some kind of cult status but then nobody wanted to really hear a record like Vertical Lines.

You weren’t selling many copies at the time?

That’s right. But it wasn’t sinking me. At that time the economies of scale were smaller. Even if you didn’t make money you weren’t really bleeding money because you weren’t embarking on some sort of national campaign with a $100,000 video and a $100,000 promotion budget. You had a somewhat receptive local radio market and you had a local sales market. It was a good way for a small businessman to sustain. I had my first success with the follow up, ‘Smurf Across The Surf’ we were much more in the groove. That could be deemed to be a classic ‘electro’ record. It was released on the heels of ‘Planet Rock’ so it was uptempo that way, but the beautiful thing was Afrika Bambaataa did the mix. He stripped it down and dubbed it up and then, on the heels of further criticism by Brad, I overdubbed the live kick drum and it was off to the races. We made some noise locally.

What was the record that really put you in business, sales-wise?

I had a CBS deal [now Sony Records] and all the records I did with them sold because there was this incredible sales machine over there. There was an expression in the music business called ‘losing records,’ which meant you could sell a lot of records and not really know how to explain it. They just knew how to put records everywhere so you can get impulse purchases. But even though I had records that got on the radio and sold records for them, it wasn’t til I left them and went indie that I had a record that really secured me, to make me feel, ‘OK, rent’s gonna be paid for a while, ‘The Godfather’ by Spoonie Gee. That was a Marley Marl production. That got into daily rotation. There were two kinds of plays that hip-hop got at that time – a kind of of lesser rotation in the evenings, and hip-hop shows and dance shows on the weekend – and then there were the hits, which were integrated into daily rotation by these stations which were really still R&B stations. They were playing hip-hop to boost ratings. So it was a cross-over in that way. Cross-over has traditionally been from R&B to pop, but in those days with hip-hop you had to cross-over over to R&B! That secured my existence as a company.

‘The Godfather’ album was a comeback of sorts for Spoonie Gee, wasn’t it?

How well I know, because when we put the 12” out we weren’t getting orders for it. I finally went to one of the important retailers – Music Factory – and said, ‘This record is getting all kinds of rotation, why aren’t I getting any orders for it?’ They said, ‘Oh, we thought it was the new Rakim record!’ Spoonie had been quiet for so long, and Rakim had become very popular, having been influenced by Spoonie.

Did you recruit Teddy Riley for that project specifically?

There’s a big story about Teddy Riley in those days, he was almost like the property of a big drug dealer – in a manner of speaking. I don’t even know if he was eighteen. He was a young, brilliant kid. We made those records in his mother’s living room. You didn’t have to be a genius to know how important Teddy Riley was at that time. I think it was an iconic piece on Teddy Riley in the Village Voice that got Barry Michael Cooper his entree to Hollywood. Teddy was tied, if you will, to a ‘gangsta.’ I’m fairly ambivalent about this; but you don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. Gene Griffith, Teddy’s ‘mentor’ and I were peas in a pod. We both had associated label deals at CBS, and there was a uniformity of bad experience to people who had that deal. They were a division of Epic, and at that time Michael Jackson was having his hugest success with Epic with the Thriller album, so that everybody else who was there was secondary, but even at that strata they were able to break Boy George and Cindy Lauper. We were a strata lower beneath them. Fast forward a few years,and word was Gene had been locked up or something, when I stuck my deal for Spoonie with Teddy. Word got out that Gene was set to return, so Teddy put all outstanding deals – including ours – on hold and we feared we the deal wasn’t going to happen. But god bless him, when he returned Gene green lighted the deal.

The Go-Go sound of Spoonie Gee’s ‘Take It Off’ was a big deal at the time. What was your involvement with making that happen?

That Go-Go sound paralleled the rise of Teddy Riley’s swing beat, and my A&R chops for hip-hop were as sharp as they ever were and were ever going to be. I was breathing it. I had this deal with Marley where I would pay him part cash and part vinyl, because I had a deeper command of vintage funk and crate digging stuff. He was a brilliant guy but he wasn’t really a crate digger.

I always saw him as more of technical guy, which is why he called himself ‘The Engineer All-Star.’

But not to the exclusion of having serious ears. I don’t know when the Queensbridge projects were built, but it didn’t have the ‘old bones’ of some of the other black neighborhoods in metro New York – Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem. I was schooling him as far as the deeper crate digging, funk type things. And tho I got some good productions from him for a low price we had a reasonably fair exchange, he was a sponge and quickly integrated what I gave him into his on-air set pieces. If I gave him the Ohio Players‘ ‘Funky Worm’? Boom, Marley had a ‘Granny’ persona like Junie Morrison‘s. I gave him ‘Impeach The President’ and boom! It became MC Shan‘s ‘The Bridge.’ The opening, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got MC Shan in the house!’ It’s a take-off of The Honeydrippers’ ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got the Honeydrippers in the house!’ It was unforgettable hanging with Marley. In those days there were fewer beat makers – guys with studio chops – than there were rappers, and what I saw first with Pumpkin and then with Marly was artist after artist would come around them. starting first with just grabbing who ever he could in Queensbridge, then evolving to people seeking him out from all over metro New York.

The PHD album was a favorite of mine. There was no shortage of heavy artillery on the back cover.

We had a video that was directed by Demian Lichtenstein, who went on to make movies. He made that Kurt Russell movie about the ten guys in Elvis outfits who robbed Vegas [3000 Miles To Graceland]. It was very good, but we had to edit it and edit it and edit it until we met MTV’s standards. But you could never go wrong working out of Queensbridge, it was a real hotbed of talent. The reason I was working in Queensbridge was I was living in Long Island City. Which was just on the other side of the Queensboro bridge. Even though it was the sticks, I was near a studio – Power Play, I was near a pressing plant and I was near the Tri-Borough bridge. You could go into the studio on Tuesday, have your records pressed by Friday and hit the street. Just run around New York on payday, when there were record stores in every borough. It was like being in the baked good business! You’d come into the pressing plant in the morning and the smell of vinyl would just fill your nostrils. Everything about the hiphop business was smaller then and it increased your chances of just making something happen.

How did some of those early Hot Day singles come about? They sounded like they were recorded live.

That ‘Hot Day Mastermix’ record was pretty lo-fi. On the flip he recorded Tragedy over my ‘Take It Off’ track. I was like, ‘Dude, that record is now mine.’ We ended up working together though on a bunch of records.

That record really captured that live park jam feeling. What are some of the more vivid memories from back then?

The instances that rock your world tend to happen to you when you’re younger. When I was taken to the Apollo theatre by the black caretaker of my father’s synagogue in ’64 and saw Jackie Wilson – that just rocked my world. What really surprised me is that the same thing happened so much later in life when Bambaataa invited me to the T-Connection in 1980. The electricity was so palpable, the vibe was so ferocious. Just to see Bambaataa arrive, to see the his procession of posse members coming to the club,carrying crates of records ,and setting up, was very post-gang. When Bambaataa came to the gig, there were four men carrying crates behind him. It had that quality of gang member coming to rumble. Being at a time in life when you’re in your thirties already and you believe you’re past the point of having something so exciting happen to you – to have that still happen was wonderful.

What can you tell me about working with the Cold Crush Brothers?

I had the good fortune to work with Grandmaster Caz, and because his style was so literate it would pass muster with your English professor. But the early records by the Cold Crush, like ‘Fresh,Fly, Wild and Bold’ and ‘Punk Rock Rap’ were styles unto themselves. They say video killed the radio star and film killed vaudeville – I believe that I have precious examples of hip-hop’s vaudevillian phase, something that was forged thru live performance, even though it was still in the studio. Something whose form had yet to be codified. The Bronx and Harlem were worlds apart culturally by the time the 70’s happened, because Harlem’s a long-standing community and the Bronx was burnt-out, but they were geographically very close to each other. You had hip-hop evolve like a weed, like topsy, like Marlboro country, and bang! The Harlem record guys take over because its spatially a short trip.

You had Spoonie Gee, who was really an R&B guy who was rapping instead of singing. You had this formalizing of what hip-hop was into the constraints of the Harlem record business. These couple of [Cold Crush Brother] records actually reflect what hip-hop was before it was a record business. This crazy, formless, sprawling kind of music. You wonder sometimes would would have happened to hip-hop had the Bronx had not been so close to Harlem and was so quickly engulfed by the vastly deeper traditions of Harlem. In the Bronx It was something that was being invented as it was going along, and that’s what opened the door to that younger generation. Sugar Hill had its reign ended because it reflected the imposition of an older sensibility, it was run by record people of an earlier generation.

Did that give you an edge?

What was specific to me was that I had nothing to lose. Around the turn of the 70’s into the 80’s New York was tanking, it was in its nadir. I had lost a series of jobs as a journalist, first with Cashbox – they were close to folding – I caught on with Soho News, they folded. Did some freelance for The Daily News, even they were rumoured to be folding. Hip-hop was exciting to me, it was an absolute leap into a cosmic moshpit for me. I completely invested in it. When I was able to work with the tremendous, iconic early beat maker Pumpkin he was extremely frustrated by the A&R demands that Corey Robins of Profile had put on him. So for me it was, ‘Great! Do whatever you want for me.’ Later I developed very firm notions, and sometime in the mid 80’s I went through my auteurist phase for about a year, in which I believe that I reflected a certain noir sensibility that dovetailed what was going on in hip-hop. Making these real dark records that had almost no commercial [appeal]. ‘Street Girl’ by Spoonie Gee and ‘You Need Stitches’ by Grandmaster Caz. But in the beginning there was almost an anti-A&R sensibility that helped me through.

How did you meet Ced-Gee?

I was keeping myself open to possibility. I had heard that Ced-Gee was the uncredited producer of the Boogie Down Productions album and his work with Ultramagnetic spoke for itself. While there were some artists and producers that I discovered from scratch, you didn’t have to be prescient to know that you wanted to get Teddy Riley or Ced-Gee for a gig, or Marley or Pumpkin or Master OC. It was the mix of respecting existing reputations with be able to make A&R calls on unknowns that I hope is how Ill be judged. Hip-hop has not developed the best possible A&R-driven biographers or historians. I believe that I’m one Truffaut away from being deemed an auteur and it just hasn’t happened yet. [laughs]

There have already been a hundred books written about Def Jam.

You make a very good point, because back then you couldn’t describe what you were doing as competing with them – you were left in the dust by them! You survived the assault of everything that surrounded them. You hope that once 25 years have passed, as with the French deeming something to be ‘noir,’ the British deeming certain types of soul to be ‘Northern,’ you say, ‘OK, I didn’t get my propers the first time around cos I didn’t want to pay Mr. Magic payola.’ I could have tripled my chances of getting records played. I did what I could. And I left a top notch, distinctive body of work.

Part Two

Note: This is part of the full transcription of a video interview previously seen here.

Concluding my discussion with Tuff City Records founder Aaron Fuchs, he talks about working with The 45 King, Lakim Shabazz and the Flavor Unit, the ‘Crack It Up’ single, the Ultramagnetic compilations and the highlights of his discography.

Robbie: The 45 King had a big impact on the Tuff City discography. How did that relationship begin?

Aaron Fuchs: He was R&B driven, which I loved. Red Alert was a DJ of rare honesty, he played a record if he liked it. You didn’t have to pay him. He was partial to The 45 King so making records with The 45 King wasn’t rocket science. Where I made my contribution was my role in the creation of the Lakim Shabazz persona. Listening to hip-hop shows, so many dedications came from prison – people with Islamic names – so it was like, ‘Let’s get a rapper like this.’ So MC La Kim became Lakim Shabazz, with all due respect to his legitimate involvement with his Islamic faith. But we played it up.

How successful was Lakim Shabazz’s Pure Righteousness album?

I think that that was the first hip-hop album that ever came out without a hit single. At that time, the wall of a record store called Music Factory in Times Square was an international communications medium. I had first seen that wall’s responsibility for the transition of west coast hip-hop, from being years behind the east coast, to catching up. In ’84 they came to the New Music Seminar and they were just ripping records off that wall, and it caught them up with the east stylistically. I knew that was happening and that European tourists shopped there too, so I made the Lakim Shabazz album just so I could put him in a picture with a kufi and a dashiki. It broke the album internationally.

How did those early 45 King compilation albums together?

I’m a bottom feeder, I just love the idea of making DJ records. When I say ‘bottom feeder,’ I mean nobody was making DJ records with the intention of only having modest success. Having been marginalised by that time, with a number of major-driven hip-hop labels dominating the play, some of the hip-hop labels themselves had become very huge, I was just making DJ records out of humility. When I made ‘One For The Treble’ by Davy DMX that record was meant to celebrate the ‘DJ record’. The concept of scratch deejaying was new and exciting, that record is an exciting, dark terrain of music. When I made the 45 King records it was with the intention of staking out – like in baseball, everyone around you is hitting home runs and you believe that you can endure as a professional by hitting singles – that’s what I was doing.

Was ‘The 900 Number’ your home run?

It’s had a long, successful life. Even though I gave Mark the sample for it, I didn’t see truly it coming. It started out as something called ‘Beat Suite,’ the fourth movement of a four beat concerto, and slowly but surely a couple of versions later it became ‘The 900 Number.’ Less became more. It was used for the Ed Lover Dance on Yo! MTV Raps, it became part of DJ Kool‘s ‘Let Me Clear My Throat.’ I went to New Orleans in 1988 to get away from it all and I heard a brass band playing it. I said, ‘Has this thing risen to the level of “When The Saints Go Marching In”?’ There’s sports expression called ‘instant offence,’ or in clubs when you’ll use a popper to get the crowd high. That’s what this was, something that really grooves a crowd, gets them excited.

The whole Flavor Unit thing was something that grew hugely because of the politics of radio in New York City. Mr. Magic was a silent partner in Cold Chillin’, he had a share of the records that he played, Marley was his DJ. They were able to make the record that they had a share in and promote it on the airwaves that they had a share of. So they were killing! Combine that with Marley’s excellence – you could see this evolution from MC Shan to Rakim, coming around him from whatever greater swath of territory. Red Alert had to fight back! So Red Alert developed his ‘golden children’ that he could get exclusives with. The 45 King was one such artist, Boogie Down Productions was another, The Violators were another. If you made a record with The 45 King I couldn’t be happier! The Flavor Unit was a petri dish of creativity, these guys stood on each other’s necks to make sure their rhymes were as good as could be. You knew you had a good record, you knew you had a chance of it being played, you didn’t have to pay the DJ to play it if that was distasteful to you.

Tuff City released the only Flavor Unit album of that original line-up. Was that a planned project or a collection of spare songs?

First of all, I planned the fruit salad cover because I wanted The Source magazine to call it, ‘One of the worst covers in hip-hop history.’ So that was intentional! [laughs] Nah, I had a great artist named Skipper Stockman, and this guy was giving me paintings! I couldn’t be happier. Hip-hop was artistry to me. The Joey Vega covers, the DJ records. ‘Flavor Unit Assassination Squad’ was an opportunity to make a record with Queen Latifah, who was the best selling of the artists in that posse.

Were Chill Rob G and Latee not involved because they were signed to Wild Pitch?

I don’t remember. I didn’t quite work something out with Stu [Fine] for Chill Rob G.

Why was there such a gap between the first and second Lakim Shabazz albums?

The period between the first Lakim album and the second Lakim album was marked by contractual dispute. If you talk to Mark you’ll see that after the success of Queen Latifah there’s a pattern of every Flavor Unit member on every label – they went on strike – it was like a work stoppage until they got better deals. That’s what was happening. We never recovered from the loss of momentum.

What happened with Lord Ali Ba-Ski? Was he meant to do an album with you?

He was pretty good but he didn’t want to give up his day job! When you’re running an indy label and you’re in New York – you always heard expressions related to New York, ‘the rat race,’ ‘what makes Sammy run’ – the notion of this pace. In hip-hop, when you ran any indy label, all it was about was getting the next record out. You had to have a product flow.

‘Whoever’s ready? Let’s go!’

Nature abhors a vacuum – and so did distributors. There’s this classic notion with distributors that you don’t get paid on your first record until you make your third, so you were always in this condition of mildly indentured servitude. You had to keep making records if you wanted to pay your old bills.

How did Ron Delite and Louie vega fit into everything, since they weren’t actually part of the Flavor Unit?

He called himself alternatively Louie Vega, Louie ‘Bud’ Vega and Louie ‘Phat Kat’ Vega, all to distinguish himself from the popular dance music producer ‘Little’ Louie Vega. They were a few enough degrees of separation to make it all worthwhile, and there was that sound that Mark had developed that Louie had picked-up on,albeit with some Latin flavor so there was a sense of you were in the ballpark with a record like that.

Did you realise how influential The 45 King’s style was at the time, particularly his use of horns which laid the foundation for people like Pete Rock?

Even though hip-hop was the most radical departure from what preceded it – certainly in the last hundred years of American music – there was still continuity. The guys that used r&b samples on their tracks spoke my language. I could have never seen a J-Dilla coming. Or the guys doing electro tracks – at that time the Linn Drum was kinda giving me a headache. There was continuity that I was able to hear, to the point that when I was actually getting involved in some production, and I was finding my own samples and loops, I simply recorded Spoonie over the entire rhythm track to ‘Impeach The President.’ I made a track with him called, ‘You Ain’t Just A Fool (You’s An Old Fool).’ It took Red Alert three seconds to tell me, ‘Man, I can’t play that – that’s not a hip-hop record,that’s a funk record!’ But we loved making it and I love listening to it. If you look at the value of ‘Impeach’ as a breakbeat, you could almost call it the first hip-hop breakbeat. Listen to that next to ‘Funky Drummer’ by James Brown, which was the most popular drum beat prior to that, and you’ll almost hear the difference between a funk drum beat and a hip-hop drum beat.

Why do you think that the original Flavor Unit fell apart?

As Luther Vandross would say, [sings] ‘Everything must change…’ The LA ‘gangsta’ thing was happening, the Hammer dance thing was happening, and the momentum we built up with the first Lakim album? We lost it in the time that it took to work things out with him for the next album. People’s memory are short. Mark told me every artist in the Flavor Unit contributed to this collective work stoppage when Latifah became successful and wanted their contracts renegotiated.

Apparently the whole crew was involved in making that first Latifah album work as well as it did.

The seeds of Latifah’s success was her ability to negotiate both a woman’s world and a man’s world. The Flavor Unit members applied rigorous standards that they relaxed for her because she was kinda the queen bee. Everybody had to work on their rhymes as if they were homework and come prepared, and she came with the sketchiest of ideas and Apache and the rest snapped to attention and wrote her rhymes for her, or certainly helped. She was less self-contained than the rest of them.

How was your time working with CBS?

I had to start everything from scratch, I had a bad experience with a major [label]. I had the misfortune of being with Epic at the time they had the Michael Jackson Thriller album. There were substantial periods of time – that overlapped with when I was there – that they worked on no artist but Michael Jackson, so I got out of there. I didn’t want to gamble that maybe they’d fund me. What the world must know is that Tuff City was with the Epic Records half of CBS and Def Jam was with the Columbia Records half, and Def Jam had a $750,000 budget for that first year and I had a $20,000 budget for that first year. When you’re growing up and you’re a sports fan, before there was a salary cap,you don’t realise why the teams in the major markets are doing so much better than the teams in the minor markets. You had no idea that your team was doing better because your team was better funded and had better players and stuff.

When you’re running a record company – you’re from New York and being ethnic – it’s easy to fit you into a negative stereotype, you do business this way or way that way. What I am very proud to point out is that 90% of Tuff City’s records in the 80’s, the ten year period it was putting out contemporary music, were records that I generated from scratch. Nobody was bringing me finished albums. People were bringing finished albums to Def Jam because of the bigger budgets, or even after that maybe Cold Chillin’. I couldn’t compete that way. Every record that I made – with the exception of some, I picked up some masters and did a little bit of bidding here and there – but for the most part necessity breeded invention. I would love any kind of retrospective to show that I did it with A&R and not because I could buy the best talent.

Another interesting character you signed was Funkmaster Wizard Wiz. That whole ‘Crack It Up’ record was pretty crazy.

The problem is I’m not a dictator and can’t decree that all copies of the altered version be destroyed. The only chance you had of getting your record played without payola was Red Alert – that said, even then, you didn’t have a good chance! He’s playing this record, and it’s so early. I am on the street! I’m drinking side-by-side with [Mr.] Ness of the Furious Five in Disco Fever, and he’s telling me, ‘Check out this new drug called crack.’ You know how Chuck D called hip-hop ‘the black CNN’? I was the National Enquirer! I used to sit at the McDonalds at Broadway and 125th with my hood over my head and I used to just listen for phrases that I’d never heard before. That’s how you have records like ‘Get Off My Tip’ and ‘Put That Head Out.’ A record about crack? What could be the big deal? It’s just another drug.

Red Alert plays it. I’m thrilled. And I get savaged! [Kiss-FM General Manager] Barry Mayo is getting calls, ‘How could you play this? This is a scourge! How could you be glorifying this?’ That said, ‘Crack It Up’ is brilliant! If you’ve listened to it carefully, this was somebody doing the idiot’s dance in the throes of death. I’m not going to sit with Barry Mayo and say, ‘No, no, no! This is Shakespearian! This is magnificent! This is a jester doing a dance of death!’ Wasn’t gonna happen. So I took it back into the studio, we overdubbed ‘You better not crack it up’ and nobody gave a damn. I sold out for nothing. The two sides of that record – that and ‘Bellevue Patient’ – are the collaboration of two brilliant artists, Wizard Wiz and Pumpkin. Pumpkin was at his zenith, using both live music and synthesizers, and he was going, ‘OK, I hear Dexter Wansel here, I hear Isaac Hayes.’ They just put the record together like that! [clicks fingers]

What was the story with Freddy B and the Mighty Mic Masters?

Red Alert was playing them! [laughs] I bought the master. They had some success with this record ‘It’s the Hip-Hop,’ which was a production by Spyder-D, a stand up guy. We made the follow-up record ‘The Main Event’ which featured Pumpkin on killer live drums and it was even bigger. What you’re reminding me of of is how different life was – how much bigger the world was. On the strength of that record’s success, that group – which was the first ever MC posse from Brooklyn, they’re from Bed-Stuy – and they’re playing the legendary Rooftop in Harlem. These guys were like fish out of water, these guys that were all about Brooklyn to be in Harlem.

You could see they were in strange territory for them. They were a very talented crew but the modest success of that record broke them up. By that time you were already getting groups who were forming to be hip-hop groups. Like that Malcolm Gladwell theory of what happens at the beginning of something when it takes people years and years to get to the point where you hear them at, ’til much later in the evolution of things when there’s much less veteranship and experience.

Wynton Marsalis talks about ‘the dance we do,’ when referring to how black and white culture bounce off each other. Hip-hop had gone through it’s first infatuation by white culture in the ‘Roxy’ era – that whole Basquiat/Blondie thing. I caught that wave with ‘One For The Treble’ by Davy [DMX] and what have you, and like everything else, it ended. One of the closing weeks of the Roxy scene, the Cold Crush did a gig and – I’m saying this positively – nobody gave a damn. There was no pressure, and these guys gave a show like you were watching Booker T and the MG’s. I have never before or since seen a DJ and four MC’s in such perfect sync that it was like four musicians in a funk band. The coming together of the MC’s and the DJ to form a groove and a pocket, the likes of which you just don’t hear, because people aren’t even looking for that anymore. The infatuation with the live dynamics of music in an era where recordings dominate is something that puts you on the right track, cos you will get something that you wouldn’t get any other way.

What were some of the most memorable live hip-hop shows you’ve experienced?

Afrika Bambaataa at T-Connection – you were able to see how post-gang hip-hop was. The Cold Crush Brothers at Crotona Park in junior high, productions by Mike & Dave. They were self-contained entities. Debbie Dee, when Wanda Dee was the DJ. Ultramagnetic MC’s live, to see what would Kool Keith do. I’ve touted that there would be a live album, From Brooklyn To Brixton, and there’s a live performance in The Bronx – the traditional thing with rappers was, ‘Is Harlem here? Is The Bronx here?’ Ced-Gee’s doing that and Kool Keith goes, ‘Is Alpha Centauri here?’

There were a lot of rumors surrounding the Ultramagnetic albums that you released through Tuff City, from Kool Keith claiming they were bootlegs to stories that Ced-Gee sold the tapes for crack.

Isn’t that an unfair thing to say about him? [Ced-Gee] The guy’s a basketball player. He’s the most upright guy, he’s practically middle-class. When you have a big posse you don’t have to have every one in the group’s consent to use the name. I did the deal’s I could make, I was happy to do them. There’s no question that you have your ups and downs in business, you have your conflicts, but you can look at being with Spoonie Gee for thirty years. If I was a little tackier I would have a celebration for his fiftieth straight positive royalty payment. But you can’t please all the people all the time.

Will that live Ultramagnetic album ever be released?

We’ll have to see. There were a number of samples that were hard to clear, and you just put stuff out like that without consequence any more.

What are the three Tuff City releases that you’re the most proud of?

‘Fresh, Fly, Wild and Bold’ by the Cold Crush Brothers, because it captures what was so unformed and untamed about them, and there’s no other record that is put together that way. Which reminds me – finishing a record with the Cold Crush was an achievement in itself. They were really – and I say this in the best possible way – wild and undisciplined people. You look at why did Run-DMC happen? Because they were young, easy to discipline, middle class kids who could just do what they were told ‘Fresh, Fly, Wild and Bold’ captures all the wildness of what hip-hop was before it was formalised. ‘One For The Trouble’ by Davy-DMX, the Bitches Brew of scratch records.

‘Street Girl’ by Spoonie Gee – this was my noir period. It was the most crime-ridden era in New York. Everybody was paranoid, everybody was looking over their shoulder. There was this crack epidemic, there was just this vibe of fear, and that record captures that. If there was a Cahiers du Cinéma I would want to be considered the Billy Wilder of the crack era for making that record. And Wizard Wiz’s awesome ‘Crack it Up.’

The most overlooked record in my catalog is this record called ‘Joe Blow’ by Puffy Dee. She was really difficult to work with and she had a real mousy voice – but until somebody tells me that record isn’t good? I’ll think it’s brilliant. That record has great storytelling, Pumpkin on drum machine – a real beats and rhymes record.

What’s the story behind Jerk-Off Records?

When the whole scene was more underground, there was an Antexx record with a Bugs Bunny sample that I didn’t have a prayer of clearing. I went to my pressing plant and it’s like, ‘You got any jackets by accounts that don’t work with you anymore?’ ‘Yeah! We’ve got Hot Mix 5 jackets!’ So I put it out on Jerk-Off City and put it in a Hot Mix 5 jacket, and sure enough, twenty five years later somebody from England came to me asking for a Hot Mx Five license! You can run but you can’t hide!

Part One

Following on from last year’s interview with former Beatnut Al’ Tariq, I finally got a chance to speak with Psycho Les about the ups and downs of one of rap’s greatest groups. Turns out that Les’ history foes back even further than I thought, as he revealed he worked at Music Factory during high school and produced his first record in 1988…

Robbie: Do you feel like Al’ Tariq’s comments about his time with the Beatnuts were accurate?

Psycho Les: It was pretty much right. Me and Al’ Tariq never had a problem. The problem was between Juju and him, they didn’t really get along. When people don’t get along shit ain’t gonna happen.

He mentioned some subliminal stuff between him and Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul?

There was subliminal shit going on but it was more on Juju and Fashion’s part. That had nothing to do with me, I always stay away from any negative shit. I ain’t out to diss nobody.

What made you want to get involved in hip-hop?

Just being a kid from the streets. When I was coming up in mid ’80s the streets was the only place you could find hip-hop. You would go to the parks and we would have the cardboards, people breakdancing and the guy with his boom box playing tapes of Cold Crush and Spoonie Gee and Kool Moe Dee and all that shit. I was into everything of the culture, man – from breaking to graffiti, I did it all. I just fell in love with the music, just watching the DJ and all the power he had. I started messing with all the DJ’s that lived in my building. I would go to their apartments and watch them DJ. From there I developed the whole dream to have turntables and mixers and collecting records.

Where about in Queens did you grow up?

I grew up in Jackson Heights, it’s the borderline of Corona. The only thing that separates us is one street. That’s how I met Juju, ‘cos one of my friends across the hallway from me was also a DJ – DJ Loco Moe. He introduced me to Juju. We was all DJ’s, digging for beats and the same shit we was all into. That’s how we linked up and clicked together.

What was your DJ name?

I was DJ Incredible Hands, and before that I had another little name – I was DJ Ready To Jam.

Did you have a crew back then?

We had little neighborhood crews, nothing big. It was mostly breakdancing crews. We would go to other hoods and battle other guys and we would go to clubs and battle other crews.

What was the next step?

From the breakdancing on the streets I ended up going to junior high school with DJ Rob Swift. His father was a DJ – we was like thirteen, fourteen years old – so everyday after school we would come home to his house and jump on his father’s turntables and start playing and scratching and doing all kind of shit. That was really the beginning of getting with the turntables. We had a friend in Philadelphia in ’88, he was a big drug dealer and his name was Fats, he had an artist. We all knew each other, Rob Swift and his older brother and everything. He actually put us in the studio and we cut a record. That was my first production, in ’88. It was called 2.2.4. [2 Bad 2 Be 4 Real ‘Ill Tempo’/’I Don’t Play’]

Was it a good record?

Shit, it was my first record ever being in a studio. Just a lucky shot, just to throw it out there. From there, just being in the neighborhood I ran into Juju, we started hanging out. I already had my record out, I had a little bit of experience in the studio. He had met Afrika [Baby Bam] from Jungle Brothers. I ended up going to another school with Juju, and after that school we would go to hang out in the studio with Jungle Brothers.

Were you working with them yet or just hanging out?

Just hanging out. We were going to a G.E.D. school in Flushing, both making beats and bringing cassettes everyday to school and play each other the beats. The kids in school used to call us ‘The Beat Kings,’ like, ‘Oh, here comes The Beat Kings!’ There were some other cats that MC’d in there. Everyday we would go straight to see Jungle Brothers and just hang out. They were recording their albums at that time. I had a medallion, like a Africa medallion, but it said ‘The Beat Kings.’ Afrika asked me one day, ‘Who are The Beat Kings?’ I’m like, ‘That’s me and Juju.’ He started laughing. ‘You motherfuckers ain’t no Beat Kings! You’re the Beat Nuts!’ ‘Cos me and Juju was like clowns all the time – getting drunk, fucking around – and they was like straight, serious all the time. Drinking orange juice, eating healthy. They was on that shit. We was always like the crazy guys. That’s why he was like, ‘You guys aren’t no fuckin’ Kings. You guys are Nuts!’ After that we would be on the radio station with Red Alert and they started shouting us out, ‘Shout out to the Beatnuts!’ So that shit just stuck.

Did you do some promos for Red Alert? That must have a good look.

He was the main guy. If Red Alert was playing your record? Chances are you was gonna blow up. He was playing our promos before our records. He was the first one to play ‘No Escapin’ This.’ I went up the radio station, I put two white labels in his hand, I got in my car and drove three blocks and I turned on my radio. ‘”No Escapin’ This”! The Beatnuts!’ Shit is crazy.

You did ‘Pups Lickin’ Bone’ for Monie Love first up, right?

Yeah, I had something to do with that and I think Juju had something to do with another song. That was our first Beatnuts project, and then Afrika had the Chi-Ali project but he was kinda tied-up at the time. He told Violators, ‘Yo, let’s give that project to The Beatnuts. They have a lotta beats.’ We produced and wrote that whole shit. After we did the Chi-Ali album, Relativity [Records] was like, ‘Who are the Beatnuts? These guys are incredible! We wanna give Beatnuts a deal.’ The Chi-Ali project was like a demo for us. We was young, coming up, learning the game.

What was it like working with Chris Lighty?

He was a quiet guy, but he was funny too. He was a serious guy, not too much joking around. He was really into the music, he had big visions for everybody. If it wasn’t for Chris Lighty, we wouldn’t have no Jungle Brothers, wouldn’t be no Tribe Called Quest, no De La Soul, no Beatnuts. We would still be around, but it would be a whole different picture.

At what stage did you meet the other members of Native Tongues?

Every day with Jungle Brothers we would run into De La Soul, ‘cos they was working in the same studio, so we became close. Tribe Called Quest, we would go to their sessions and hang out with them while they’re making records. Sometimes they’d even ask us to do some crowd shit in the back. We was a part of all those records, but we was just the background guys. Everybody knew we had beats, they call us the Beatnuts for a reason. We was always around all those cats, even Queen Latifah, Special Ed – all the younger cats.

Were those guys hitting you up for Spanish record they didn’t know about?

I got a lotta Spanish records from my moms and my grandma that they just had floating around. Once I started digging for records there was no more rules – I listened to every record. I seen my mom’s records and I just start listening to some of them shits and sure enough there was fire on there. A lot of that shit we used on Stone Crazy. ‘Supa Supreme’? That’s an ill Spanish record. I got that from my mom’s collection and I’ve never seen that record – anywhere! That’s how crazy it is. [chuckles]

Was the first Beatnuts project meant to be more focused on Fashion as the main rapper?

That was really the plan, where all we do is produce. We used to rap just for fun, that’s why we wanted an official rapper. Fashion was supposed to be the lead rapper and you would hear me and Ju on some joints. In the middle of the project he got arrested with some shit he was doing, he went to jail. That’s why we had to drop the EP, because we only had six songs done and then this guy goes to jail. When he came back home, that’s when we did the full Street Level album. Us dropping the EP was just us testing the waters, and boom! The first week it sold like a hundred and fifty thousand. That shit was incredible for those days – no digital, that was just wax and CD’s or cassettes.

‘Reign of the Tec’ had a big impact.

It was crazy, and the video was even crazier. In New York you would see that shit every five minutes on the video channel.

When did V.I.C. get involved?

V.I.C. definitely was a part of the whole beginning. The EP and the Street Level [album]. After the Street Level is when Al’ Tariq and Juju didn’t get along no more, they broke up and the next album after that is Stone Crazy. That’s when it started just being me and Juju. No V.I.C., no nobody.

Why did V.I.C. leave?

There’s nothing wrong with V.I.C., we’re still friends. He had other plans. He had a daughter, he had a wife, he sold all his records, he started working, doing some other shit. It wasn’t nobody’s fault, that’s the choice that everybody made.

Was Street Level a difficult album to make?

Nah, it was actually easy to make. It was a fun time. We would just go to the studio and party, and while we’re partying we’re making records. Anything went, man. We had girls hanging out in there, we would throw the girls in the booth and we would use ’em to do skits. It was just a good time.

Fashion mentioned there was some tension behind the scenes. Were you drawn into that?

More on his part. I’m just into having fun, just drinking and smoking. My job was just to make sure the beats was right and everything was EQ’d right.

Were you happy for ‘Props Over Here’ to be the lead single?

It bothered us a little bit in those days, but now that it’s done I appreciate that record a lot, because people like that record. Coming from where The Beatnuts come from, we was more a hardcore group. We wanna do the hard, headbanging shit. That was real happy, got the jazz bassline and all that. We wasn’t trying to go that route but we still made those sorta records.

Was making Stone Crazy the same kind of vibe?

Stone Crazy was a different deal. Street Level we recorded in a real studio and right across the room from us Puff Daddy and all these other cats would be working over there. For Stone Crazy, when we got our recording budget – instead of going and trapping it in a studio, me and Juju bought a whole bunch of equipment. We got an engineer to come and show us how to fuck with all the equipment and we got a one-inch machine [reel to reel tape recorder]. Every day I would wake up and drive over to Juju’s house and we’ll just record two or three songs. That’s how Stone Crazy got done.

Did that offer more creative freedom?

Yeah, exactly. We was more laid back, we’re not worried about the time. We could rock until we got tired and continue the next day. When we did the record with [Big] Pun [‘Off The Books’] we brought Pun to Brooklyn and recorded there, ‘cos that’s where we did the whole album.

How did you know the Screwball guys?

They’re from Queensbridge, and that’s our neighborhood. We were always messing about in the studio called Power Play that’s in Queens and they was always around there. We just know everybody. I’m a big fan of Blaq Poet, he’s one of the illest rappers to me, so first opportunity we had to make a record with him we had to jump on it.

That was weird how Fresh Prince used that same Patrice Rushen loop on the Men In Black song.

Exactly. Everyone’s always asking us, ‘Were you the first ones to do it?’ I’m like, ‘Hell yeah!’ We the kinda group where if somebody had a beat [already] we would never put out the same beat. Beatnuts always wanna be original. Do you remember ‘DWYCK’ from Gang Starr? That same bassline – we used that shit before ‘DWYCK’! We made a record, it was me, Juju and Fashion rhyming on the beat. We had the whole record done, and then ‘DWYCK’ dropped on the radio. So what did we do? We scratched that record off. Nobody ever heard it. We never use the same beats as nobody. That was our mentality.

How did you find that Wonder Woman sample you used for ‘Watch Out Now?’

I sit at home and I just listen to records from beginning to end and find little words that could be hooks. That’s what I do. My beats always got little talkin’ on them.

How was the process for Musical Massacre?

Musical Massacre was a whole ‘nother story, ‘cos we had a new manager and he knew a lotta people. So we was like, ‘Fuck it! Let’s use all these connects!’ That’s why on that album we have a million fuckin’ guests – dead prez, Cheryl ‘Pepsi’ Riley, we was able to get Method Man – we got everybody on that album. That was the only big difference with that album is we got to work with a lotta big artists – Biz Markie and all that shit.

Had you been wanting to work with Biz for a while?

I know Biz Mark from ’87. I used to work in a record store in Manhattan. He used to come there all the time and we’d be talking about records.

You worked with Stanley Platzer?

Yeah, exactly – Music Factory. I used to work there when I was in high school. That’s how I know Biz Mark since I wa seventeen years old.

Did you meet a lot of people coming through to cop those Ultimate Breaks and Beats albums?

That’s my first time seeing De La Soul come into my store and they were just looking at the rap section on the wall. I still didn’t know ’em yet.

What was Stanley like?

Just a cool dude into his music, like an old school guy. He just loved these breaks and all that. He had this big notebook and everytime he would have a new name he would just write it down, so we had this big-ass breakbeat notebook.

Did that help you dig for records?

I ran through that whole book already, I had a lot of that shit already. He was an older cat so he knew his records.

How long did you work there?

I was there a couple of years and then they sold the building so they closed down that shit.

You had Large Professor and Cormega on the Originators album. Did you already know them?

On that album, me and Juju are alone again – no manager or no nothing. Everybody we had on there was our good friends or people we knew from studio. Large Professor? We know him for years. That was an independent album. After that we had the Penalty [Records] deal with Milk Me. That was our last project that we put out as Beatnuts. I have my own label now, I’m putting out my own shit – fuck it.

That ‘Thunder Bells’ song you did was crazy.

That’s my compilation. I’m doing Psycho Les Presents: THC. That album is done already, I’m tweaking it up and mixing it. Should be dropping by June. I got crazy people on that album, that’s gonna feel like a Beatnuts album anyway. It’s all my production.

What makes Queens stand out from Brooklyn and the Bronx?

Queens are just more into that real dark shit. Dark, evil loops – real dirty. At least the people we roll with. Nowadays everyone likes the clean sound and the keyboard – I like the dirty shit. I was just in the studio with Large Professor and Lord Finesse two days ago and we were just playing each other a lotta shit. It’s good to hear that we’re all on the same page, we still haven’t lost it.

Still keeping it gritty.

That’s our job though! To keep it gritty. That’s what I tell these niggas. I tell my engineer all the time, ‘I love to hear the record static. Don’t try to clean that up and hide that sound.’ That’s the sound that we know!

You also did some stuff with Hydra Records with Jerry Famolari?

Yeah man, Jerry Famolari was a ’round the way, neighborhood guy. His brother, Johnny Famolari, was the engineer for the first EP. He helped us produce, mix, all that shit.

Is that how you met all those groups like Triflects?

Exactly. He [Jerry] had that studio in Manhattan and he was good friends with V.I.C. Me and Juju and Fashion would just go up to the studio and just be up there all night – tweaking and chopping and sampling and doing all kind of shit. That was so important to us, man – mixing. Mixing is everything. You could have a good song but if it isn’t mixed right you’re gonna have a wack record. Mixing is important, that’s what we was masters of, everybody – V.I.C., Johnny Famolari – we was all into that shit. Making everything sound big and tight. That’s why all that old shit sounds crazy. You know DJ Camillo? That was one of our first DJ’s that we put on, he’s from Queens. Now he’s playing radio all over New York and he’s like the biggest DJ put here.

There was a period where you guys were doing a lot of remixes.

It was a time you couldn’t have a record without a Beatnuts remix or something on it. It was that time! We were remixing everybody – MC Lyte, Jomanda, R&B shit. Kid ‘N Play joints, we did [the] Pete Nice album, Naughty By Nature remixes.

Were the Hydrabeats albums just left over stuff?

That just extra shit lying around. I don’t know if you saw that UFO Files that I put out? That just goes to show so much shit we made and we never put out.

Is there much left in the vaults?

I’ve got some stuff, but I’m holding onto that. Everything’s out there, pretty much. All the good stuff. I got a couple of songs that we did with Chi-Ali and we’re actually rhyming – me and Juju rhyming with Chi-Ali and Fashion. I didn’t throw that one out, I know somebody’s gonna give me some money for that. [laughs]

Here’s the full version of my Breakbeat Lou interview, some of which was used in my Ultimate Breaks and Beats: An Oral History feature.

Robbie: How did you meet Lenny Roberts?

Breakbeat Lou: Lenny I’d met at Saul’s Record Pool, back in the early 80’s. There was a feedback committee meeting that we had and everyone was talking about regular rap records and regular music. That wasn’t what he was really into, he was more or a less a ‘in the house’ kinda DJ. There was a comment about a particular record and I said, ‘Yeah, I know that record.’ He said, ‘How do you know that record? You don’t seem like you’re into that particular thing.’ I was already DJing regular stuff. I’ve been in the game a long time – a DJ since ’74, hardcore digger since ’78, producer since ’80. That’s where the connection with breakbeats came in between him and I. He was already involved in going to the jams, ‘cos Lenny used to hang out at Bronx River. First it was bootleg 12’s that were being released – we released ‘Big Beat’, before that was ‘Funky President’ and ‘Long Red’ on Sure Shot Records. We also released the guava ‘Apache’ copies, ‘Chinese Chicken,’ ‘Impeach The President,’ the [Magic Disco Machine’s] ‘Scratchin” one sided 12′, the ‘Rocket In The Pocket.’

The biggest factor in starting UBB was when we did ‘Fusion Beats’ – the Bozo Meko records, Lenny did that. ‘Fusion Beats’ is a pause tape done by [Afrika] Islam and the recording of ‘Flash To The Beat’ was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five‘s infamous beat-box routine. The 12’s did alright, but when we out the ‘Champ,’ the ‘Get Up and Get Involved’ and the Dyke and the Blazers it seemed like people really wanted that. The Super Disco Brakes had already been released, but because Disco Brakes were inferior to everything else it was less appealing. So we decided to release the Octopus Breakbeats, which were the bootlegs we created. We released what we called the ‘foundation beats.’ – ‘Funky Penguin,’ the ‘Mary, Mary,’ the ‘Black Grass,’ the ‘Gibe It Up Or Turn It Loose,’ the ‘Apache,’ the ‘Got To Be Real’, the ‘Pussyfooters,’ then later on with volume 9 we used ‘Big Beat’ and ‘The Mexican,’ the ‘Midnight Scene.’ These were the Foundation Beats for the new generation that were coming out in the early 80s. There’s two tiers to the way hip-hop evolved, from the early 70’s to what I call the ‘Rap Record Era,’ when the ‘Rapper’s Delight’ came out. What started to happen was a lotta people started cutting up rap records instead of regular breakbeats, so we had to facilitate the original foundation breakbeats.

Were the bootlegs a reaction to all the drum machine rap records at the time?

Yeah. I started seeing early Cold Crush routines and all the guys – they were using ‘Love Rap’ as a breakbeat. ‘Feel The Heartbeat’ is another one they used to use. It seemed to be the norm for people rapping over other people’s records when there were a whole plethora of breaks from the original inception. If it was good enough for those guys, why can’t it be good enough for you guys? I felt if you really wanted to know about the culture you should know where the foundation really comes from, and the foundation is these breaks! If you notice from volumes 1 through 9 of the Octopus Breakbeats – which was the 1 through 9 also of the original UBB compilations – all those records were not no craziness of records that became the records afterwards, but 90% of the people growing-up within that timeframe knew about those records. They may not know the name, but they would know the beat. They would know ‘Apache’ and ‘Got To Be Real.’ ‘Dance To The Drummer’s Beat’? Everybody used to call it the ‘Let’s Dance’ record.

You also included some foundation breaks in the later volumes though.

It was two-fold. With the ‘Funky Drummer’ and stuff being in the later years, we tried to facilitate the records that could not be found through the original 1 through 9. You couldn’t find too many of the ‘Apaches’ because of the limited situation what it was. The ‘Got To Be Real’ version that you heard? To beef-up the album, to give it some more attractive, we put that there but it was available otherwise. It was records that were not available or were rarely available that we had to put out on the original 9 volumes. ‘Funky Drummer’ was still available because at that time you also had the Polydor Jungle Groove album that had ‘Funky Drummer’ on it. What we tried to put out was something that was rarely available or people didn’t really know the name of it, even though we heard it many times in the parks and in the jams. In the later volumes, we were trying to push the envelope in the sense to do your homework the same way we used to do our homework. We tried to give you the tools to let you know there’s more you can search for than just what’s here. You can do your homework and go to a store and find out what else can be on Stax records, what else can be on People records. We were the instruments for keeping hip-hop ‘hip-hop,’ and we were the college for diggers. The digging craze started with us. Mantronik would want to get a test-pressing as soon as we got them. He would say, ‘Whatever you want, I’ll give you for the test pressing.

In the beginning we didn’t care what kind of vinyl it was because we didn’t know any better, but the UBB stuff we made sure was pressed-up on virgin vinyl. Volume 1 through 9 we used to go through a commercial jingle studio in New York, and most early engineers do not like to push the envelope – are so technical that they will keep stuff a certain way. When I started getting involved with the actual recording and doing the editing myself, I decided to push the envelope on the levels. Dance music started coming into play, and there was a mastering guy named Herb Powers in New York that was responsible for having the ‘Omph’ in music – the way hip-hop was being interpreted, the way House music was being interpreted, freestyle music, soul or even R&B in that era – if you notice, it had a little more of a kick to it. Herb being a DJ himself, he decided to push the envelope, so that’s what I did. I didn’t mind going into the red when I was peaking into my recordings.

We went from recording at 7 ½ IPS when we did the first Octopus to going from to 15 all the way to 30 IPS on the UBB’s. Volumes 10/11 we did on 15 IPS, from 12 all the way to 25 we did all 30 IPS. I’d make sure the kind of machine I was using I’d record the tones from there and pass it on to the masters so they know what to calibrate their systems to. Then we started having our stuff mastered at Frankford Wayne, which was the best thing at that time to use, and the second-best engineer that they had was Carlton Batts, and he was the one that was mastering our stuff at the end. We took to it the extra level. If I had to run it through a board to beef it up a little bit i would do so, because I knew the levels I was meant to keep to maintain the integrity of the records. Plus when we were patterning the way the records we would go, we made sure we didn’t go past the seventeen minute limit per side so we had full sounding grooves. We really did our homework in getting the best sound that we can get. We didn’t worry about it being so ‘clean’ per say, we just made sure it was a powerful sound.

Everybody in the city had the Octopus Breakbeats. Around 1983, 1984, they died down, nobody wants them anymore. Marley Marl samples ‘Impeach The President’ – the sampling craze starts. Lenny and I were talking, he says, ‘I wanna create a label to do records.’ Chep Nunez and I were in the same record pool with Lenny, and Chep Nunez and I made a production company called The Original Beat Junkie Productions. Lenny said, ‘I’ll make a label and you guys can do my first record.’ The first record was gonna be called Classic Beat Junkies and the record was gonna be called ‘Get Up.’ We sampled ‘Give It Up Or Turn It Loose,’ we sampled the ‘Joshua Tree’ and Depeche Mode or something. It was one of those party records like Kenny Dope or ‘Shake Whatcha Mama Gave Ya.’ So Lenny goes to Downstairs Records, goes to Rock ‘N Soul, then he goes to Stanley [at Music Factory], telling him, ‘I run this label.’ He goes, ‘By the way, do you have anymore of those Octopus Breakbeats?’ Lenny says, ‘No, not really.’ He goes, ‘Do me a favor? If you could press up a few, cos I’m starting to get calls because everyone’s looking for some of these breaks again.’ He was the store where everyone knew to go and get them, but he wasn’t officially part of the Octopus Breakbeats or UBB. Anything else that was being done was Downstairs Records and a store in the Bronx called L.B.M. Lenny used to keep some records at the store in the Bronx cos he also lived in the Bronx. The main store in the late 70’s, early 80’s was Downstairs Records. That’s where Theodore got his name from as the Grand Wizard, because he also used to play pinball and he was a pinball wizard.

Can you tell when someone samples from a UBB record?

There’s a certain way that I edited ‘Impeach The President’ – there’s a slight pop on one of the edits that you can hear – and people tend to sample that and they have no idea that I can tell. It’s a little crackle. ?ustlove has pointed that out to me, ‘I know when somebody samples from you and when they use the original, because i hear the crackle and pop that they use.’ They’re identifiable sounds. Like with ‘Think’ – there’s a slight little swing to the way I looped the record, because I didn’t record it at the locked-in 45 RPM. the way I locked it in is maybe 46 or 47 RPM. All tape, straight editing.

‘UFO’ was always played that way [slowed down]. Bambaataa was the catalyst for all of this. He was the one who catapult us to using a lot of these obscure records. A lot of those records like ‘UFO’ and that sort of stuff, we heard first at Bronx River. We had the mentality where a record had to have a certain bounce to it, or a certain groove or a bop your head sound to it. Those records that had a dope beat but it was too fast, then we’d experiment and put it at 33 [RPM]. It took that extra ingenuity that Bam would put in, how he used to play ‘Rocket In The Pocket’ or how he used to play ‘Theme Of The Planets.’ Knowing how to experiment if the record’s technically a ballad so you put it on 45 to make it sound better. Like with the ‘Amen Brother’ – the song itself is played at 45 – but when the break comes in we edited it, slowed it down to 33, recorded it and put it back to 45.

What are your best memories of Lenny?

Lenny was a lover of music, a very caring man. Always very enquiring, subdued, always to himself. Very smart guy, knowing what can envoke certain things in people. The kind of person that was very organized. There was a time in my life that he was almost like a father to me cos I was always around him. It was a great loss when he passed on. He was a lover of music cos everything that came out after that he gravitated towards. He was true lover of music – when he followed the hip-hop he connected to it, when House music came on the scene he connected to it, when Freestyle music came on the scene he connected to it. His intuitiveness in finding digging spots – he would go to certain stores and look for certain records – and the whole looking at labels and that stuff I picked up from him.

We went digging out of town, and we used to set-up skids when we went in back streets to buy large allotments. We happened to see a real dusty pile of stuff, and we would always look to see what was laying there. It was the import version of the ‘Little Less Conversation’ yellow album [Almost In Love] of Elvis Presley, about 75 copies of it, dusty box and everything. So we put the skid next to that one and slightly put one of the boxes of our stuff to touch that skid, just to see what it would evoke. We finish our thing and were lining everything up, he says, ‘These boxes?’ We go, ‘No, we don’t know what it it.’ We knew what it was. The guy says, ‘Yeah, they’ve been here for a long time. Give me $1.50 for it.’ The Elvis Presley album was easily worth $7, $8 at the time – now it’s worth even more than that. We got it for 75 cents each for 75 copies. He was doing record shows after that and he ended up selling for at least $15, $20, $30 at a time, depending on what it was. He was the ultimate digger – he knew where to go, when to go – he would always come back with everything, and sometimes more, than he was even expecting to get. I remember I went to this jukebox place and I saw eight copies of ‘Just Begun’ 45, Italian copy. I bought all of them! They’re not leaving there without me. It’s that mentality that you tend to get cos you want to maintain that upper hand in having everything you have to know what to get.

Did Lenny have his own record store at any point?

Lenny had a storefront for Street Beat Records, which also he would keep the records that he would sell at the record shows, but he never had a real store himself. A selected few people were able to go – Diamond D, Biz Markie, Lord Finesse – guys that were diggers were able to go there. L.B.M Records is the store in the Bronx that myself and Trevor [TR Love] both used to work at. Lenny was like his uncle, but he wasn’t his uncle by blood. That’s how it was back in those days, we were all in the same tune with each other, I worked with Trevor in the Ultramagentic stuff early, with the Tim Dog album, so we all in the same kind of family situation.

What was the story with the cover artwork?

Kev Harris came to us via Danny Dan The Beatman, who does Dusty Fingers. We had another guy who did the first three volumes – 1, 3 and 9. It wasn’t really ‘hip-hop’ covers, they were more futuristic with the spaceman and all that good stuff. The reason why was cos he was looking at Bam at Bronx River, and Bam in the early days was very Parliament/Funkadelic, mothership, Sly and the Family Stone kind look. When I told Lenny we need to get better covers to reflect more what it was, we had one other guy that tried to do something – it wasn’t that good – and we had put the word out and Danny came back with Kevin. Kevin was the perfect fit, because one of the original artworks that he had was a skull, and we ended up modifying that, reflecting that hip-hop was dying – as we knew it. The symbolic gold chain of the skull with the kangol, then you had the MC on the tombstone and the b-boy on the other tombstone. I’ve been looking for him for a couple of years now, we have to find him.

How did you go about licensing the songs for UBB?

It was easier in those days to get mechanical licensing, cos there is a scale that you follow. You can go to Harry Fox Publishing and get all that stuff put into motion. Now, you’ve gotta get pre-approval, but in those days you didn’t have to. There’s a scale for certain records – it’d be like 5 cents for this, or 7 cents for that – and you say, ‘I’m pressing up 2,000 records of this, eight songs at five cents – that’s 40 cents – you’ve got 40 cents times 2,000.’ You give that cheque out and that’s it. It’s the same thing that K-Tel used to do, or the Time-Life records or the CD that you see that do the year’s best. You’re not using the artist, all you’re using is a song and taking advantage of the mechanical licensing. You’re not changing anything. After that more stringent laws came into place because of the sampling craze people were walking that fine line of mechanical licensing without paying for copyright infringement, so now you’ve gotta get the master’s rights plus the publishing rights.

Why did you stop releasing the UBB series?

We had already decided to do 25 and see what happens after that. We didn’t want to get out like we did with the infamous [Octopus Breakbeats] Volume 8. He penciled in 2,000 copies and it took years to sell those. Now everybody wish they had ’em, but it took years for them to sell – years. If you find a Street Beat version number 8, it’s a bootleg, because we never put number 8 out on Street Beat. Some of the records that were big on Street Beat [8] were released on other volumes – ‘The Mexican,’ ‘It’s My Thing,’ ‘Keep Your Distance.’ We decided to keep it 25, then it became more significant when Chep passed away in 1990. He’d been one of the pivotal parts for the company itself, that’s why you saw 25 was a grey cover – it was no artwork – as we were still mourning his death when we did that volume. That’s the reason we stopped. People thought we stopped because we didn’t have no more records, we didn’t have no more beats, so a couple of years ago I put out a CD called ‘The Diggin’ Expedition’ that had over 150 beats that were not used on the Ultimate Breaks and Beats. There’s records that I can play that people have never heard of to this day. That’s how serious it gets. Don’t get it twisted – we stopped because we wanted to stop.

When I came back, I found out that the records were extremely instrumental in shaping the music industry as a whole. In 1997, 32 of the weeks on Billboard‘s singles chart, the number one’s had some kind of element from the UBB compilation. That year you had Mariah Carey sampled ‘Blind Alley,’ Janet Jackson sampled ‘The Big Payback’ and [Hanson‘s] ‘MMMBop’ sampled ‘Substitution.’ To also see how my edit became a whole genre of music with Baltimore House and our introducing ‘Amen Brother’ enabled Mantronix to do ‘King of the Beats’ and then it became the whole Jungle craze in Europe. It’s very humbling for something that I did as a labor of love. To have Bambaataa and Red Alert saying, ‘If it wasn’t for you guys putting that out – it kept the culture going.’

I kicked it with Devin The Dude about how he came up in the rap game while somehow neglecting any direct questions about getting high.

Devin The Dude – The Unkut Interview

According to his MySpace caption, those are not Street Life’s boots.

Method Man‘s loyal right-hand man and road dawg Street Life talked about growing up in Staten Island, makes it clear that he wasn’t feeling the last Wu-Tang album and hints that this might be the second last solo album from Tical. The Meth Lab is out 21 August.

Robbie: Did you grow up in Staten Island?

Street Life: Yeah I grew up in Staten Island, Park Hill and Stapleton.

How would you describe Stapleton when you were a kid?

There wasn’t that many guns out, it was just more fights and maybe a couple of stabbings. That was better than gunshots though. I was around twelve years old when I was in Stapleton, it was cool. Stapleton was my introduction into Staten Island, then I moved to Park Hill. I got most of my experience by growing-up in Park Hill versus Stapleton – Park Hill’s where all the drama unfolded at. That’s where the legend was born!

Were there many DJ’s out there then?

There were a couple of dudes that used to DJ down on Staten Island, but most of my stuff came from the radio. More than anyone, KRS-One influenced me to rhyme. I heard that, I heard Doug E. Fresh, Slick Rick. Those were more of my people I was looking up to.

Back in that ‘South Bronx’ and ‘Bridge Is Over’ era?

Yeah, that brings back a lotta good memories when you hear those songs. Those were the rec room days. Those were the crew days, when everybody had crews with the jean suits. On the back of your jean jacket you used to have a big graffiti mural, with the name belt. You had all of that shit going on back then. That was the fat shit back there! That’s when everything was fun, before the guns. You might have a little fight, a little scuffle, that was about it. If somebody did have a gun? Out of ten people, maybe one person had a little .22 or something. Now I could tell you eight of ten [people] with a fuckin’ gun!

Why did you want to start rapping?

It was just a hobby that we used to do when we was younger and kinda escalated into other things. It’s always been a passion. I started getting paid for it, then it got a little more serious.

Was Method Man’s ‘Mr. Sandman’ the first record you appeared on?

Yeah, ‘Mr. Sandman’ was the first track that was on wax, that I got paid for, off the Tical album. It was all uphill after that.

But you’d been making stuff before that?

We used to make tapes in the hood, demos and thing like that. Me and my little partners, just bugging out, making little songs. That’s how everyone around the way knew I could rhyme when I was a shorty. Then the streets came and RZA came and everything else came after that.

What was the story behind the original version of ‘Box In Hand’ you were on?

I shoulda been on that Ghost one too [the LP version] but I didn’t make it to the studio that night. There’s a verse where Ghost said everyone’s government name that’s supposed to be on that track, but I don’t know what the hell happened.

You’ve released a few compilation CD’s already. Are you planning on doing an official album at some point?

Those albums were just little samples of songs and things like that, nothing too serious. I didn’t put nothing major out yet. Right after this Meth Lab drop I’m thinking about putting that album out – official album, official release, official everything! It’s gonna be a big melting pot, a big bowl of jumbo [gumbo?]. I got names on there as far as producers that tear shit up but there’s no one producer I’m focusing on – maybe Mathematics. I got some hard shit.

How much time do you spend touring?

My whole life is touring, that’s all I do. At least nine months out the year I’m on the road.

It must be tough to be away from home for so long.

Yeah sometimes, but I don’t complain. It keeps the lights on.

Any stories from the road that you can share?

It’s so much things. Some of the shit you had to be there [for].

What are some of your favorite songs you’ve done?

I think all my shit’s been good, actually. Overlooked and underrated. I did more guest appearing than anything.

You were recently on the A Better Tomorrow album, right?

Umm…do I have to claim that? I guess so. Yeah, I’m a track on there. [laughs] I’m not claiming that one!

What’s The Meth Lab album all about?

It’s just me, Meth, a couple of our homies, going back and forth, just brainstorming. It’s just a lotta good hip-hop songs when you listen to it. The way the game’s going now, you’ll definitely be pleased and digging these songs. All beats, rhymes and lyrics. True fans of hip-hop will love it. It’s a good sound. It’s actually a set-up to the Method Man Crystal Meth album, to get you warmed up. That’ll be out next year. Trying to finish up the game strong and then ride off into the sunset.

You’re both planning to retire?

I feel like there’s another one after this for me and it’ll be a wrap after that. Time to go fishing. It’s been a long time, I wanna do other things at this point in my life. I’m sure Meth wanna do other things in his life. Meth wanna do more acting, he’s been real successful in that.

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:

Here’s the complete transcript of my talk with Tom Silverman, who created the Dance Music Report and Tommy Boy Records in addition to co-founding the New Music Seminar, home of the MC and DJ Battle for World Supremacy. There’s a lot that I couldn’t fit into the NMS oral history piece from last month, so I thought it was worth printing in full seeing as though it paints an interesting picture of the

Robbie: What was your first exposure to hip-hop?

Tom Silverman: I went to the T-Connection to hear Bambaataa thing after learning about breakbeats in 1980, healing about this whole breakbeat phenomenon/b-boy concept in 1980 and wanted to find out about it. I called up Bambaataa and went to see him at T-Connection in the Bronx, and that’s how I first heard him and Red Alert and Jazzy Jay spinning the most amazing variety of music in a way that I’d never heard before. I just asked him if he wanted to make a record and that was kind of the beginning of Tommy Boy, when he said yes. To hear Kraftwerk and Billy Squier and Bob James and Cerone and The Monkees mixed in with normal James Brown and Sly Stone and all of this funk music was the thing that was the real revelation. And then to see how they cut it up and extended beats and found breaks and turned them into something more was just crazy at the time. Imagine seeing that in 1980 when no one had ever experienced it before? It’s like fire! ‘We’ve never seen fire before. What is that?’

When did the NMS begin?

The commencement was 1980, it was a one day event that year. In 1981 we did it in a club venue and it became a two-day event. The place was called Privates, and for the first time we did an event, it was called ‘a DJ spinning exhibition’ where we showed people what was happening in 1981 with spinning. We had a guy called Jeff Broitman, who was a disco DJ, showing how DJ’s mix records in a normal club situation. Then we had a guy called Whiz Kid – who later made records for us at Tommy Boy – who was a quick-cut DJ from the Afrika Bambaataa school of the Zulu Nation. He was from the Bronx and he was one of the greatest masters of fast spinning. It was a DJ’s exhibition to show how they did it, and people were just blown away. Nobody had seen people cutting two bars back and forth between records before. Everybody started talking about it, the room was packed to the gills and people were so excited about seeing it.

That next year was ’82 and we moved to the Sheridan Hotel, and I’m pretty sure we did Jazzy Joyce – a female DJ who was left handed and put the turntable sideways instead of the normal direction – and we dropped the disco DJ style thing. The battle might have started in ’83, which was the fourth seminar which was at The Hilton Hotel. There was all kind of spontaneous hip-hop things that were happening at the conference that year. People were breakdancing to a boombox on the second floor of the New York Hilton Hotel and I remember seeing picture of these kids lying around in a circle watching the breakdancing in the center and one of them was Mike D from the Beastie Boys, before they were the Beastie Boys. [laughs]

How did the Battle for World Supremacy develop?

It was my idea to do this [battle], I came up with the idea of the counting clocks. It was just DJ’s for the first two years and then we introduced MC’s, which created the MC battle, which is still popular today. We had a pro wrestling belt that I designed that was the award, so it became a big thing. We had celebrity judges and a whole team of people that just worked on this event because it became so popular that everybody wanted to show up for it. We’d have like a thousand people in the audience. One year we did it at the Webster Hall and it was totally packed. I think that was the year that Melle Mel stole the belt, he went and took the belt away from the winner. Classic. He got down and did one-arm push ups with the belt over his shoulder, then he ran out with the belt and everyone in the audience was chanting, ‘Give back the belt! Give back the belt!’ He was like the bad guy in wrestling. Every time I see him I say, ‘Melle Mel! When are you gonna give back the belt?’ [laughs]

Do you have much footage from the battles?

There might be a little bit – we don’t have anything unfortunately. I separated from my partner in the Seminar in 1992 and he ran the Seminar for two more years before it stopped. I brought it back in 2009, but all of the [recorded] archives of the Seminar were misplaced or lost by him. We had taped every panel from the second one, so we had recordings – albeit on cassette – of everything. All that stuff would have been amazing to have today it it exists anymore.

It seems to have been an important focal point for the ‘who’s who’ in hip-hop at one stage.

We wanted to try to represent different areas like Miami and LA and the Bay and Philly, early on. Freshco and Miz won one year and Tommy Boy signed them and put them together as an act that didn’t work. Ice-T used to come with his wife Darlene at the time, and then he performed with Bodycount right there in the ‘Cop Killer’ era when tempers were at the highest level, post ‘Fuck The Police’ when that whole Time-Warner thing was happening. We were on the cutting edge. There was a lot of interesting issues with homophobia in black music at the time that would come out at the Seminar, and there were all kinds of accusations of racism that would happen at the Seminar as well, and dirty laundry that would be aired. ore of that would be happening at the Seminar, ‘cos there was no space for that in the Battle for World Supremacy.

There were two different venues. We did hip-hop panels at the Seminar, and those were pretty contentious. There were screaming matches and accusations during the panels themselves, and you never know what was gonna happen. Then it would go into the battles, where all hell would break loose. We created the rule set for the competitions and then Tony Prince kinda took our model and did the DMC battles. He used to take a [DMC] booth at the Seminar and sell their record bags and all that stuff.

Was Busy Bee the winner of the first MC battle?

85 was the year we moved in the Marriott Marquis. Busy Bee did his famous ‘Squirrel and the Nut’ rap that day. King Sun D Moet, who was signed to Profile as an artist, won one year too. Jazzy Jeff won, and when you talk to Will Smith today he considers the New Music Seminar the place where he got his start.

Were you ever involved in the judging panel yourself?

Never. I was busy running the New Music Seminar, ‘cos it was a three day event with five thousand or more people and hundreds of speakers and artists performing. We had a whole committee who would come and meet at our office and plan who we would invite to participate in the battle each year, and they were the ones who did the invitations [for] who would be in the competition. We set the round robin competition rules and it moved through that way, so we could figure out how long it would take. We had to get the bugs out over a period of time. We did exhibitions for years before we actually started the battle, I remember we did spinning exhibitions with a group from LA and from Chicago that had three or more DJ’s all playing at the same time, so we had six turntables and three DJ’s all mixing simultaneously together. We had all kinds of exhibits of where turntablism was going throughout the whole thing. The New Music Seminar was unique in that it was conference that was built around DJing. My publication was Dance Music Report and Marc Josephson was my original partner who had a thing called Rockpool, which was a DJ pool and newsletter for rock DJ’s.

How long did the elimination process take?

We tried to make sure it would be a few hours, which wasn’t always easy. [laughs] That’s why we had the countdown clock, so that we knew that each battle would only be sixty seconds and then they had to move on to the next one. It went eight to four to two. I don’t know if we started at sixteen or we started at eight. I’m pretty sure we started at eight, at least in the beginning. So we had to have twelve battles, and then there was time in between for the voting and the announcing and people booing and all that stuff! [laughs] I couldn’t go to all of them ‘cos I was running the conference at the same time. I went to a lot of the early ones. We used to do it in the hotel and then we moved it into The Ritz, which is Webster Hall, and we started doing it at night.

How were the results decided?

The audience influenced the judges sometimes, but the judging panel was supposed to be judging things based on creativity, uniqueness, skill, and then they held a number up just like the Olympics. Between the Olympics judging, the belt and the pro wrestling thing and basketball countdown clock, all this stuff made it really exciting. These were all the ideas that I had put together to create the format for the battle.

Do you have a particular memory that stands out?

I think Melle Mel stealing the belt was the most memorable. Not neccassarily the best, but the most memorable. When the lead artist from Stetsasonic went on the stage and started throwing turntables and screaming – that wasn’t a great memory, but it was a memory! [laughs]

Was that Daddy-O?

Daddy-O, exactly. I’m sure he was upset at Tommy Boy for something. We signed them in 1983 and by 1985 they were kinda done. That must have been later on, I’m not even sure if they were still signed to us at that point. A lot of anger would come out at the Seminar, different crews would get into a ruckus with other crews. Luke Skyywalker‘s crew got into a fight with the guys from LA, people were saying it was gang violence. They were throwing tables at each other. Luckily it didn’t get into anything worse. This is the era of rap when there was the east coast/west coast battle, we’re lucky we never had any sort of violence that was serious with guns or anything. We emerged unscathed from that era.

This list of winners, particularly in the DJ battles, features some of the most significant names of the day.

Some of the more established ones didn’t want to battle, ‘cos just like boxers they didn’t want to fight someone where they could possibly lose and it would affect their reputation. There were many people who turned it down.

Apparently Treach lost to one of the Cleveland guys in a battle. That must have been embarrassing for him in front of his home crowd.

And yet Treach has had many platinum records and is still making a living today. The guys from Cleveland have other jobs, they’re not in the music business anymore. Treach was the big winner in the long-term. The message was that battle rapping has nothing to do with the sort of rapping that can sell records or make a musical contribution. It’s a different skill altogether, and why can’t they both work together is something I’ve never really understood. I guess being creative and musical doesn’t win you a battle – talking about your momma wins you a battle. That’s entertainment. It got down to the lowest common denominator. This started with the DJ’s first, before the MC’s became a part of it. I think ’84 might have been the first year for the DJ battle, I’m not sure.

What about the beatbox battles?

We had a beatbox competition, ‘cos it looked like that was gonna emerge as a new area. Fruikwan [Note: May have him mixed up with Wise] from Stetsasonic and there were a number of beatboxers who were evolving at that time and it looked like that was gonna turn into an art form that was significant, but it never did.

What do you think the legacy of the Seminar was?

We were right at the epicenter of hip-hop and the evolution of hip-hop and the New Music Seminar was the only place where everyone got together in the 80’s and the early 90’s to really talk about it and how it was evolving – even DJing. We had a DJ’s and Remixes panel every year, we had panels on hip-hop, we had panels on dance music and all of the new trends were always discussed. We gave DJ’s a voice, and producer’s panels and songwriter’s panels and other places where DJ’s never were represented as full citizens in the music industry.

It was honouring those who rejected the old model of what music had to be for a new model. Whether it’s beatboxing or DJing using turntables as an instrument, or rapping rather that singing. The idea of throwing the rulebook out and being able to create music in an entirely new way with an entirely different sound is something to be honoured. No one knows this, but the early pioneers used to have to go out and fight rejection every day, because people hated rap music. They felt it was a threat to everything. They hated DJing and hey hated drum machines because it was a threat to drummers. Everybody was afraid from the past of being disrupted.

Hip-hop really disrupted the music industry. Now it’s really ripe for disruption itself, it’s unfortunately forgetting it’s most important lesson, which we learned here by elevating hip-hop to the world stage – which the Seminar and Tommy Boy both focused on for more than a decade. Hip-hop now is taking it for granted now they’ve been around for thirty five years they need to reinvent themselves into something new, because they’re gonna become just as luddite as the people who fought them in 1980 to ’85. It’s either gonna reinvent itself or it’s gonna be disrupted by something new and left behind. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, just like old rock & roll is still happening.

Pretty Tone Capone in the studio with Real Live, 2004. Photo: richdirection

The infamous Pretty Tone Capone from Harlem’s Mob Style is about to return to the rap game. While I haven’t heard his new material yet, his work with the group and as a soloist has given us some of the most authentic street rap possible, as well as some amusing N.W.A. diss records. Tone discussed how he was born into the hustling lifestyle in Harlem, why Tim Dog almost got scalped and explains how drug dealers are the trend-setters that rappers want to be.

Robbie: What can you tell me about growing up in Harlem?

Pretty Tone Capone: Harlem was all about money. Hustlers and stick-up kids – everybody else was workers and people in the way. Young kids getting a lotta money – doing whatever we wanted to do, where ever we wanted to do it at – at whoevers expense. It was wild like that back then. Rapping was something we did for fun, after it took off, ‘cos the public liked it. We were the only – the only – cats that were in the studio having fun rapping. There were many real cats out here, but they wasn’t rapping.

How old were you when you got involved with the street life?

I was born into this here, man. I’m from a long line of gangsters. I’m from the hustling tree of Harlem, which is from the hustling tree of the world. Family members and all that, I was raised among them. I didn’t have to go that route, but I chose that route. I’m also very intelligent – I coulda been [a] top Goldman Sachs official or one of them [top] 500 company running guys. More or less I chose this life and I love every minute of it, regardless of the down pits and downfalls.

Why did you chose that life? For the rewards it can bring?

I was lavished with these gifts, my whole upbringing is bosses – legends. I go back to Small Pauls, Nicky Barnes, Guy Fisher – they’re all just family! This is no salt eatin’ nigga buyin’ DVD’s talking about, ‘Yo! Look at these…’ – family! When I was young, ten years old, I’d cross the street for ‘Preme [Kenneth ‘Supreme’ McGriff], they’d stop at the lights, give everybody with me twenty, fifty dollars. Everybody! ‘Let’s go to the movies!’ Whatever I wanted. I was small, but also incredible at school, so I coulda went either way. But I chose this route.

What was the next step once you decided to commit to hustling?

I was established at a very young age – thirteen, fourteen. Taking trips off the brick, get rid of it off the side. Takin’ about a hundred and twenty grams, putting cut back into the kilo. Re-rocking in the vice grip, after watching them when I was young. I was making a couple of stacks when I was young. And that was my side money! I was raised around this. A hundred thousand in the drawer, used to be a running house when I was young, so I never stole no money ‘cos I got what I wanted to get. I was raised around this and became real enamored with that lifestyle and the riches and the bitches that it brung and accumulated.

When was your peak in regards to that lifestyle?

Always on top of the game, always eating. That was my downfall for not rapping – I was getting too much street money, so I didn’t think rap was equally refreshing at the time. I always kept that dirty money on me.

So you were just rapping to justify all the money you had coming in?

Exactly, I was life parole, so when I came home I sold music to camouflage my dealings.

What charge had you served time for?

That was controlled substance, of heavy, heavy, heavy amounts. ‘A’ felony, that’s the top felony in the world. That, kidnapping and a couple of other choice crimes. When they hit me with that and wanted to take the house away from my family, I copped out. I didn’t wanna get them involved with none of that.

So once you started doing music while keeping one foot in the streets, how long did it take for you to be able to get out of that life?

Over ten years they had me on life parole. I was still doing my thing, but I was kinda respected on the parole board so when I came in I never had to wait, I got a little leniency. I mighta had a ‘dirty dick’ once in a time – which is dirty urine – and it was nothing, they brushed that off. Then I’d straighten-up and I’d be good for another year or two. I might violate, catch two years – I was catching cases here and there after that too – but I was good. I feed over a hundred people, CEO of what I do.

How did you first connect with the rest of the crew?

I ran into Azie – the original, not the rapper from Queens, get that straight – through street manoeuvres. I met him through Rich Porter, god bless the dead. I met the crew that he was with, we settled in, became accustomed to each other. Did a little business, got to like each other hanging out and I joined that team. I was out amongst many teams – from Queens, Brooklyn – but this was my main team, my Harlem family. Mob Style – they wasn’t rappers at first.

How long were you running with them before the music?

I was on the run – I had a case out in Queens. An ‘A’ felony. So I packed up and came back to Harlem. I was out in that Far Rockaway, Redfern area – Nassau county, the border of Far Rockaway. Caught a case out there, so I came back to Harlem. When I came back to Harlem, I laid down tracks on 8th Ave. I had a couple of spots – they’re called trap houses now – to myself. I was doing some business with Rich. In between all that, I met Azie.

Is that when you recorded The Good The Bad and The Ugly?

No. I was a fugitive, so I set-up shop in Harlem. We established out here, grabbed a couple of spots and I met A through the Harlem vibe. They had their shit poppin’, I had my shit poppin’. We met up, we became family. In between a couple of years with the Mob, doing what we do out here in Harlem, I did eventually get caught, I got snatched up. I was going back and forth from Baltimore to Washington and sneaking back into Long Island, Far Rockaway area. Two years later, after doing what we do out here heavily, I got caught. I ended up having to do some jail time. The music didn’t start until after I came home from jail. I was shocked they was in the studio! When I went in the studio with ’em, that’s when the Mob Style era really began. They had two songs already. ‘Mob Style’ and ‘Blowin’ Up.’

Why did you want to rap?

That was something we did for fun. We were in the street, getting money hustling. Mob Style was a family on the street in Harlem, New York. We were kinda running the streets out here and in our free time we played around in the studio. This is how we felt. After hearing N.W.A. we just said, ‘Fuck it, let’s have some fun.’ We just started having fun with the music, we were basically street hustlers.

So you wanted to expose N.W.A. as phonies? Was that your inspiration?

Not really. I was in jail – when I came home they had two songs already done. That’s when I got introduced to N.W.A., ‘cos I didn’t know nothing about them until I came home. I seen a picture and I was like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys?’ So we had a little fun and went in the studio and gave ’em a piece of what we was. We was basically street guys getting money to go to the studio and have fun, so that’s the part that we came up with.

Had you been rapping previously?

No. I was on the humble, just having fun, counting money, making moves in the street. Everybody in the studio – Azie, fellow Mob Style guys – we laid it down, streets was loving it. I was just being me, talking that talk. That’s just who I am. I stumbled upon rapping – rapping was never my forte.

I’d always assumed that you were more serious about rapping than the rest of the guys, since you had a better flow.

Not necessarily. We was all having fun, and I was just a little more wild. So when you heard me, you felt me. That was me, that was my inner person – what a real soldier was doing out here in the street. Nobody was inspiring to be rappers. When Rick Rubin heard me, he wanted to sign me. That’s how that thing all started with me. I did one album, the Mob Style joint, we did that just having fun. The streets ate it up and started loving it, but we were getting more money in the streets. You see us as friends of whatever, but we were the guys to see at that time.

When I came home I was on life parole, I had a life sentence. I was facing twenty five to life, so I copped out to a lesser bid. Three to life – I copped on that. ‘Gimme two of those!’ I couldn’t wait to get that. So that’s when I came home. We started the Mob Style music vehicle, after Azie got shot and all that. He was in jail when he went through that shooting in the Bronx and all that. You saw the movie Paid In Full, right? That was Azie that got shot! I was upstate in jail when that happened. They sent me newspaper clippings. I was fucked-up when that happened.

How did Rick Rubin reach out to you?

We met at The Marriott, the [New] Music Seminar back then, through a friend from the Far Rockaway area – Casual-T. He was working with Hollywood Basics [sic], Tupac and them. He set up a meeting with me and Rick. I just got home on life parole, I seen a real good opportunity for me to have no excuses of why I got all of the jewelry and the cars I had – a music contract! I wouldn’t have to get a job, so I was thinking from a criminal mindset. So I hopped on that and took that deal.

Were you still operating out of New York when you signed that deal?

Yes. They flew in once or twice, we met face-to-face and then everything else the lawyers took care of.

What was the story with the ‘Case Dismissed’ video?

That was something I just threw together, I did the treatment for that. I was disappointed at the quality of the cameras they was bringing me, so I lost all enthusiasm for that video. But I still went through with it and we just made it what it was. We were having fun, that’s all that was.

Did you record an entire album for Def American?

I recorded about twenty five, thirty joints – all crazy – but Rick didn’t know the impact we had on the streets. [Tone’s producer Fred Flak discusses these vaulted tracks in this Martorialist interview from 2011]. Streets wasn’t a real heavy scene in the music industry at that time – everybody was rappers with gold chains. We were the hustlin’, real dudes, but he didn’t know this was the wave of the future that we started. He was sitting on my shit and I was out here making more money in the streets. He didn’t know what to do it with it, I made him release me ‘cos he ain’t put it out the way I wanted it put out. That marriage dissolved.

Do you have any of that unreleased material?

I’m quite sure Rick has all that in the library. My publishing’s intact, so if he wants to use it I’ll let him put it out, down the line or whatever. I just washed my hands of the industry at the time. Puffy was hollering at me at the time too, right when Big just started. I remember I was in his office, he threw on ‘Party and Bullshit’ and asked me what I think about his new artist. He was getting his hair cut in the chair, up at the label. I was caught up in the streets, so…

What did you tell him when he played you the Biggie song?

That was the only song he played for me. It was okay at that minute, that one joint that I heard, but I was on some other, real street shit – which they eventually capitalised on also. I didn’t have no time for the rap game, ‘cos money wasn’t poppin’! I was getting more money in the street – ten, twenty thousand a week – doin’ nothing.

You mentioned you weren’t happy about N.W.A. when they came out? Did you feel that they were frauds?

Nah, we’re not gonna say they was fraudulent or nothin’ like that, ‘cos we didn’t know these guys! But when I first looked at ’em, I was like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys? C’mon, these can’t be the top niggas in the streets!’ They was talking about beating bitches up, 8-balls, ‘Fuck The Police’ – which is one of my favorite, top joints, I love that joint – so we hit ’em with that drug shit, who the fuck we be! We was doin’ this out here! I don’t know what they do around the world at that time, I was kinda young and dumb. Tim Dog took that idea and ran with it, made a song – ‘Fuck Compton’ – his punk ass. We shoulda stomped him out, ‘cos he wasn’t representing New York at that time at all, he shouldn’t be talking like that.

You felt like Tim Dog didn’t do a good job with that song?

Tim Dog hopped off my idea and tried to run with it! But he wasn’t built for that kinda talk with these fellas at that time. I’m surprised they ain’t scalp him, ‘cos we was about to do him real bodily harm up here! We knew he took that, but I was in the game so we ain’t give a fuck about the music at the time. I just wanna let motherfuckers know that Dr. Dre shoulda called me, ‘cos motherfuckers know god damn well we turned their motherfucking career around. I respect Ice Cube – Ice Cube came to one of our shows way back when he was in New York. I respect they movement.

What other rappers did you used to like? Were you a fan of guys like Spoonie Gee?

Eh, Harlem ain’t never really had no top rappers. Them rappers from Harlem wasn’t really in the streets like that. They probably was doin’ they thing on they level, but the level we was on? Was nobody really on the level we was living and loving life on. To this day they still love us, but no one ever gave us the correct respect and due. Of course they won’t, ‘cos that takes away they shine, but many artists took a Kibble and Bit of styles here and there, used peoples names – all type of foul shit they shoulda been chastised for but we let slide, cos it’s life! But I’m back now, and everything will be straightened out. They thought I was dead, or locked-up for life. They ain’t hear from Pretty Tone in a minute.

Is there anyone in particular that’s pissing you off in rap right now?

No, its just the state of the game in general. I learned how to separate entertainment from reality as far as this music is concerned, ‘cos if everybody was ‘sposed to be official of what they talkin’ we wouldn’t have no music! It’d be like three albums out a year! Ninety seven percent of these guys is frauds, but some of them have good music. Some is lyrically inclined, even though they’re lying about the life they was living or what they was doin’, but we know they was bitches. They kinda tickles me a little bit too. These same faggots that be thinking they live what they rhyming about, but don’t know, but then learn the difference when you see some real motherfuckers around you. As far as the rap game is concerned, everything’s fucked-up right now. It’s terrible!

I agree. Are there any rappers who you respect?

Very few. I like Rakim, that was a friend of mine. Eric B. was my motherfucking man, he used to come visit me in jail. Kool G Rap had the slick lisp, so I fuck with him. He seems on my level, as far as spittin’. There’s only a couple of spitters – ever – in the history of music. I liked N.W.A., especially when they flipped that joint on us [‘Real Niggaz‘], got a real chuckle outta that, I liked that. I met Biggie, god bless him, I loved Biggie. I was around Pac when he was dancing with Digital Underground. We crossed paths many times, solid dude, about that black culture at the time. A lotta people get lost in this game and nobody know where they are. The game is just fucked-up. A lotta old school motherfuckers rapping, they washed-up, they finished. I don’t even know why they tryin’ to come back. That one year you had that glow – give it up, you’re finished! Get a job. I’ma show you how to do it from an old school gangster nigga! [laughs]

How did you feel about Cam’Ron and the Diplomats? Did they do a good job of repping Harlem?

I loved their production! Their production was out this world. I fucks with Cam on the Harlem vibe – a cool, good brother. I know Juelz Santana, I like him. Got some good friends I fuck with. The rest of the team’s aiht. They was holdin’ it down for they era. All this shit is watered down, to a real nigga. I bring that concentrate, straight from the tree! All they got is ‘add to,’ add this and that to get the flavor. My shit is straight flavor. I’m rough when I’m judging music, ‘cos I know what’s supposed to be and what’s not supposed to be, but them boys is alright out here. But it’s not just about Harlem, I was fucking with rappers all over!

Did you like the Geto Boys?

The Houston scene? Eh, I’m ain’t too indebted in that. I ain’t know too much about that scene, I’m a real city slicker, top ten nigga. Whatever section you from, I respect your element in what you at, and I hope you the best at it. I respect bosses from all four parts of the world – east, west, north and south. I respect the workers who try to be bosses. I respect the good guy that’s got a job, that knows his lane. I just like originality and realness, one hundred percent. I’m no judge on who’s doing what, but you cross me? You’re done. That’s all I can tell the world.

Are you still living in New York?

I’m in Virginia Beach and New York City, back and forth. Most of the time in New York City, takin’ care of a couple things.

How has Harlem changed since you were a kid?

Oh, Harlem’s finished. There’s no inspiration out here, I’m disappointed when I’m out here. That’s why I’m coming to bring new life to the neighborhood, put new Jay’s on these kids feet who can’t afford it. Put a glimmer of hope in they eyes. Let ’em see what a real boss sound like and how they move. How they manoeuvre. I’ma guide you straight. I’ma let ’em know what the game is about. When you sign up for this game? This street game, this hustling game, is anything goes! Everyone gets crossed, no love. So whatever happens while you’re in the game? You asked for it! ‘Cos if you had a job or went to school you wouldn’t be a part of it, you’d be able to walk by it. But when you step in the game? It all goes. Mother died, brother set you up, sister set you up, you kill a couple of niggas you love – anything goes in this game. That’s what I want the kids to know.

Why are you so disappointed in Harlem these days?

I travel on a different plane out here on the streets. I don’t really know what they doin’ amongst the average motherfuckers ‘cos I don’t be around average motherfuckers. I’m a trendsetter, so when I drop some fly shit it sprinkles in and hits the average motherfucker around the world – not just New York – and it wake ’em up. So I’m really just putting in an appearance for my people and dropping some flavor for these street niggas to really bounce to. Future shit is alright, but I don’t understand none of that shit he sayin’! It’s time to drop some real street shit.

Did you used to hang at spots like the Latin Quarter back in the eighties?

I did all that. I did shows with Busta [Rhymes] and all of ’em, the Palladium. We did mad shows and we weren’t even no rap niggas. Puffy used to just book us, put us on his flyer. We show up, shut it down. Joedeci, all them niggas opened up for us! The Rink, Palladium, the Apollo, we did all that shit. When we did that shit we came straight off the streets. ‘Yo, it’s time to go!’ We all just follow them down there, eight or nine whips – zoom zoom, zoom. Bronx, Queens, thorough niggas – Supreme Team, my family. The roughest and realest niggas from every borough used to come out when we came out. More or less, it was a convention for real niggas. Our name rang, brought in the tickets, filled the seats.

What was your favorite club from that era?

Wasn’t really a club person. My people, we had ‘First Million’ parties, we used to rent clubs and celebrate a motherfucker we fucking with get his first million. Big black tie affair, nothing but minks, sequins, gators. It was mostly a street affair, street niggas. We had our own section, we didn’t follow nothin’. Rooftop and the Skating Rink, those is fixtures from all over the world, back then. We was regulars up in there. But everything is everything, wherever we went is a party! Tupac used to go to Nells, used to be at Nells with him and shit.

Were you heavy in the car game?

Aww man! My team is known for nothing but the meanest cars! We started half Formula One type motherfucking car dealers right now! My man Azie and them, they was known for dressing the cars up! First big scale BVS’. We started that game! We started the car game, the jewelry game, We started all this shit. Every car from A to Z. We had three, four garages, full of cars.

Did you have a favorite model?

Nah! I liked to whip on the Benz. Azie liked the BM, when he got the 745 that time. I was a Benz man at the time. Rich and Po had the Porsches, those niggas had four, five, six cars each, switchin’ up. I had like one or two.

What about the jewelry? Did you sport the dookie ropes?

We started all that, that’s being redundant. We ain’t have dookie ropes, we had diamonds! We had gangster, mobster diamonds. Our shit was exclusive! Instead of that gaudy shit the rappers was wearing? We had that exclusive, exquisite, fly shit. That tailor-made custom shit! Pinky ring – thirty thousand. We didn’t have that gaudy bullshit. We had the four finger rings though! We started that. LL started getting the four-finger diamond rings after we came out with ’em. Po had one, I had a little baby three-finger joint. My man Chuck Barnes had one, there was a couple of niggas that had them joints. Dapper Dan with the Gucci and the MCM – we started all that shit, man. But that’s back then.

So you guys were the first to get those Dapper Dan outfits?

Yeah, we started him. We branded, opened him up. Then the rappers started going after they seen us with the fly shit. Eric B., Rakim, Mike Tyson used to come through – that’s my man too, at the time. Jesus, a lotta good dudes used to go to Dapper Dan back then. You had to have cake to come through, we used to shut the whole store down until we left – eight or nine minks, all type of shit. That was just the flavor of the day, at that time when the money was coming in.

So the rappers were just trying to imitate what you guys were doing, since you were setting the trends.

There ya go! That’s history, you couldn’t have said it no better yourself. That’s the story of this motherfucking game. Hustlers first, then the rappers wanted to be hustlers. Everybody lying like they been hustlers. Rich spinners and whipping shit up – these faggots couldn’t whip nothin’ up! They wouldn’t be safe to have a spot around no real niggas.

Are you planning on releasing new music?

Yeah. I’m the best who ever did it! I’m about to release some new shit in a minute, ‘cos I’m kinda upset at the state of the game now. A lotta faggotry goin’ on. I don’t want my sons growing up listening to this, there’s no real man music. No one condones guns, violence and drugs, but hey! This is what some people have to do in order to live! Everything don’t have to be targeted towards one thing. If you’re versatile and you’re nice, you’re gonna drop and be hot regardless. Everybody’s got a gimmick, so I’m not really impressed with the state of the game. I’m comin’ to kidnap it!

This is for the documentary/EP. I’m about to smash ’em with three classic Mob Style joints – ‘Gangster Shit,’ ‘I Play Rough’ and like five or six new joints. I’m about to smash these clown back to normal and show ’em let ’em know how real men do out here. There’s a lotta frontin’ out here, a lotta acting. You don’t wanna lead the kids down the wrong path, you wanna hear from someone who’s been on that path. These guys are sweeter than tea!

What are some of the songs we can expect to hear?

I got a joint called ‘Point Blank’ which is a gumbo of what I’ve been hearing the last couple of years from these clowns. I chewed their shit up and spit it back at ’em in the fashion it shoulda been spit. It’s mean, they love it out here. I got a joint ‘It Was You,’ that’s a joint with Jadakiss. An up and comer from the Bronx, Main Scrap…Mike Boogie. So when I drop this new music, bop your head, have fun, pop bottles. I only came here to have fun with y’all, ‘cos I wasn’t approachable for many years. Now I’ma let my hair down and have some fun with y’all motherfuckers out here.

Do rappers like Rick Ross piss you off? Or do you not really care?

I’m a little mature now, so I separate reality from entertainment and all the gimmicks that these brothers bringing. Lyrically, that fat boy can spit, he put his shit together. I’m a spitter, one of the best ever! I don’t know if Puffy opened up the Biggie vault and let him get the formula and he ran with it, ‘cos he’s not a dumb nigga, he sound intelligent. He think he that nigga, so sometimes when he spit it he sometimes sounds like he might really think he’s that nigga! He’s spittin’ heavy, he’s probably one of the top spitters from a lyrically standpoint, regardless of if he was police or not – it’s entertainment, and I gotta tell myself that. ‘Cos if I don’t? I don’t like nobody!

Just watch, I’ma re-establish the game, show these fags how to spit realness – I’m just gonna tear it up. These are cartoon, cornball, paper gangsters. I want my kid to know what realness sound like and feel like, and the other kids aren’t sacrificing they lives, listening to these faggots who aren’t doin’ nothing but living in a condo, selling poison to my peoples who’s out here doin’ that shit, losing their life and freedom. I’ma show ’em the realness of this game and give ’em the combination of how to get outta here!

So you want to let people know the good and bad sides of the game?

The pros and cons. The only pro is if you’re getting money and are successful. Anything else is bad news. If you ain’t getting no money, it ain’t worth it. There’s nothing for you but death and jail if you a stupid hustler. Now, if you’re hustling to get out your predicament, you know how to make the moves and business transactions and make something good outta that? You get away from that before it gets too hot. There’s nothing but snitches out here, that’s why the game’s fucked up – snitches! I speak from the heart! We don’t gotta bite my lip for nothing! Whatever I said, I stand by it.

Special thanks to Stan Ipcus and Tone’s nephew Bobby for making this happen.

Pretty Tone Capone – ‘Kidnapped‘

Pretty Tone Capone – ‘Marked 4 Death‘

Pretty Tone Capone – ‘Across 110th Street‘

Pretty Tone Capone – ‘Can’t Talk Too Long On The Telephone‘

Microphone King Donald D has had a long and varied career, spanning back to the park jam era, onto the downtown club scene, radio and then records, both as a member of The B-Boys and as a soloist with the Rhyme Syndicate. Now residing in Italy, Donald took some time out to detail some of his experiences during the formative days of the culture.

Robbie: How were you first introduced to hip-hop?

Donald D: Going to the parties, watching Kool Herc in the parks and Afrika Bambaataa in the parks. That was my first experience seeing these DJs out in the park.

You were living in the Bronx at the time?

Kool Herc used to play at a park called 129, which is not far from where I lived. Then I would go to Bronx River Center and watch Afrika Bambaataa throw down outside. All of this took place in the South Bronx, where it all started.

How old were you at that time?

You’re talking about junior high school when I was seeing these guys play. At the time we was going to a local place all the kids would call The Boy’s Club. We would go there basically to play basketball, swim. I had other friends who would become hip-hop legends and superstars, so you’re talking about at that time Easy AD, who became a member of the Cold Crush Brothers; you had Lil’ Rodney Cee and Jazzy Jeff who were part of the Funky Four; you had Master Rob and Waterbed Kev who became part of the Fantastic Five. There were a lot of these guys who were at the time unknown who became legends in hip-hop. We all would be playing basketball together as kids [chuckles].

Did you realise how important this new style of music was at the time?

It was basically the same music that my mom was playing in the house, whether it was James Brown records or The Temptations. But the way they played it at these jams was different, where they would find the best part of the record – which was the break – and it made everybody groove, where everyone was dancin’, then you had some b-boy’s spinning. I even tried my part at trying to be a b-boy in the beginning, but it was not my passion. It all changed for me when I went to a jam and watched a DJ by the name of Disco King Mario, and he had an MC on the microphone named Busy Bee Starski, and that kinda changed my whole outlook on what I wanted to do within hip-hop – to be an MC!

What was the next step?

At this Boy’s Club you had to have a membership card. At the front door you had to present your card and there was a guy who would check-off your member [number]. It was a way of checking that you were there. We didn’t know his name in the beginning, but he used to have this giant boom box and he would have all of these breakbeats playing. At the time we didn’t know that he was cutting it up. He told us one day, ‘Do y’all guys know how to MC?’ We messed around, but we didn’t take it serious. We told him, ‘Yeah!’ He said, ‘Why don’t y’all come to my house and let’s make a tape?’ So we went up to his house, me and Easy AD, and we started rhyming. At the time we didn’t even really have names for ourselves. He went under the name of DJ Rasheed and we just came up with these names. I called myself Donald D and he called hisself Easy AD, then this guy was like, ‘Alright, we’ll call ourselves the Ocelon Brothers.’ We became a crew that did parties around in the Bronx. [laughs] It’s funny how it all evolved.

I didn’t really know how to write raps, ‘cos when I saw Busy Bee rhyme I went to the local bodega store and I got a paper bag and a pencil and I was writing down everything that Busy Bee was saying. Our first jam that we did with Rasheed I did Busy Bee rhymes, reading it off the paper. The first party we ever did – if you saw the movie Beat Street, they did that party inside an abandoned building, where in one room you had the DJ set-up and then another room where people were dancing, so they didn’t me actually rhyming these words off of a paper bag. [laughs] They just heard my voice. Then there was somewhere with us there doing it and they were like, ‘You know what? You have to make up your own words.’ Because someone said they heard Busy Bee doing these same rhymes. That’s when I decided I had to go home and write my own rhymes, and the start of my journey in hip-hop I guess. [laughs]

How long did the crew last?

We was trying to make a name for ourselves, and at that time it was kinda hard ‘cos you had the Grandmaster Flash group, you [Grand Wizard] Theodore with the L Brothers, you had Breakout and them with the Funky Four, you had Bambaataa, you had Herc, so all over the Bronx you had all of these groups which we looked at as big time. I remember we got the owner of a place called The Black Door – in the movie Wild Style it became The Dixie Club – the guy said we could do a party there. At the time you had to make up flyers and present them to all the people in the neighborhood. We thought we was gonna be doing this party, and all of a sudden the guy was like, ‘You cannot do a party tonight, we got Grandmaster Flash and the Furious doing the party.’

You got bumped?

Yeah, we got bounced out of the place. We ended up still going to the party and stood at the front and just watched them and I was begging Melle Mel – and at the time Scorpio was going under the name of Mr. Ness – ‘Can we get on the mic and say rhymes?’ They was looking at us like, ‘Who are you guys? Get outta here!’ For some reason we felt all those people that was there were actually coming to see us, because we gave out all the flyers way before they decided to do the party. Even though we didn’t get to do the party, it was a very good learning experience for us to see how they interact with the crowd. Cowboy – just me getting to witness him rock the crowd, the crowd reaction to him. ‘Say ho! Clap your hands everybody!’ Seeing Kid Creole on the art of working the echo chamber, saying rhymes with the echo delay behind it, and just hearing some incredible rhymes coming out if Melle Mel’s mouth! It gave me the education of it all, right there, with those five MC’s. Also Raheim and Mr. Ness, telling the stories. And also seeing Flash, how he interact with them during routines. It have me a lot of information that would be very good for me as I grew in hip-hop.

We still was a group, trying to make our name, and then one day me and Easy AD was walking down the street in the area called the Grand Concourse, and who did we see walking out in the street? Kool Herc himself. It was crazy, all the other times I just saw Kool Herc behind the turntables. We told him we had a group and if we can do a party with him. He was willing to let us come do a party at a club called The Sparkle, but before this party could take place this club wind up burning down. The party never happened, but I’ll always thank Kool Herc because he was the first that was willing to give us, as unknowns, a chance to be able to do a jam with him.

After a while, being that we were going nowhere, the group broke up. I found out the DJ moved back to Jamaica. Where I lived there was girl who was a neighbor and she told me that she had a boyfriend who had a DJ crew. It turned out to be DJ Afrika Islam. I had seen him do a few parties with Bambaataa or with is crew, the Mayberry Crew. She had heard me rhyming in the local center so she decided to introduce me to Afrika Islam. He told me was I willing to try out for his group? So we went to try out for his group. We were in the basement of this DJ named DJ Superman, and all I remember is he had these gigantic speakers that I only saw at Kool Herc parties or at Bambaataa parties. They put on the disco version of ‘Seven Minutes of Funk,’ which is a very long record, and then they asked me to rhyme and they asked Easy AD to rhyme, and after they told us to go wait outside. They called us back in and they said they liked me, they didn’t like Easy AD. They already had two MC’s in the group – one went by the name of LJ, and the other one was Kid Vicious. Before I decided anything I asked Easy AD, I said, ‘We can both leave.’ He said, ‘Nah, this is your big chance. You can be part of the big league.’ It hurted that they didn’t want four MC’s at the time, but it turned out great for Easy AD because he became a member of the Cold Crush Brothers.

They changed the name from Mayberry Crew and we became The Funk Machine – Afrika Islam, DJ Jazzy Jay, Superman and Three The Hard Way MC’s – me, Kid Vicious and LJ. I went from being behind the ropes at Bambaataa parties to now being on stage with guys like Pow Wow, Mr. Biggs, MC G.L.O.B.E., Luv Kid Hutch, Lisa Lee. It was like a dream to be on the same stage, saying rhymes with the Zulu Nation, so I became a member.

So this is the late seventies we’re talking about?

Exactly, so that’s before anybody was making records. We were all superstars in the neighborhood with our voices on cassette tapes. We were doing jams with groups like Grandmixer DST and Infinity Rappers, the L Brothers, Theodore. DJ Cool Clyde, you still had Kool Herc, you had DJ Kenny Ken, you had DJ Charlie Chase. So many DJ’s – Breakout and Baron with the Funky Four. In my projects you had Reheem from the Furious Five, Sha-Rock from the Funky Four, you had Tony Tone and Grandmaster Caz from the Cold Crush – a lot of MCs and DJs who became superstars and legends later on.

Through all that it was making it’s way out of the local school and park jams to where it was now making it’s way into the midtown Manhattan scene, which was more known for the disco scene. Bambaataa [Zulu Nation] – they were the first to start taking it from the ghetto part of the hood to midtown. A lot of us didn’t even know that was going on, that they were down there. It all started with Cool Lady Blue, who was from England. She had the clubs down there in midtown – along with Fab Five Freddy – they were bringing the breakdancers and Bam and the Zulu into a lot of these clubs. Whether it was Negril, it was Danceteria, and then The Roxys scene became huge. That’s when I first started making my way down there when Afrika Islam became one of the resident DJs, along with Grandmixer DST, Jazzy Jay and Bambaataa. He would ask me [to] come down there and get on the microphone and say some rhymes, so I saw a whole new scene that was way different than the parties we were doing.

In the Bronx it was mostly the blacks and the Puerto Ricans and the Spanish kids at all our parties, but now we had a white audience. They were dressed different, it was more of leather with chains and whips, then he [Islam] was telling me, ‘This is more like the punk scene.’ You would see people like Billy Idol and David Bowie there; The Clash, Malcolm McLaren mixed in with the hip-hop scene. Even Madonna, before she was famous, in The Roxys with us. It opened us up that hip-hop can travel beyond the five boroughs. Then I start seeing some of the graffiti artists work in different galleries in Manhattan, whether it was Phase Two or Dondi or Futura 2000, Doze. Then the b-boys were at these upscale places, breakdancing. It was a whole new scene opening up. By this time the group The Funk Machine was basically over. Afrika Islam came to me and said, ‘I’m gonna be doing this radio show, I’m gonna call it the Zulu Beats. It all evolved from The Roxys, from us being in that downtown scene.

That scene inspired him to start the radio show?

Yeah. His idea was: ‘I’m gonna take what I’m doing at the parties and do it on the radio. What you do at the parties with me? We do it on the radio. You MC on the radio, I play the breakbeats, I play the beatbox and we gonna just do it live on the radio so that people who can’t be at the parties will be able to hear what we do, all over New York.’

Was Mr. Magic on the air at this point?

Mr. Magic was on already, he showed us all the way. But Mr. Magic was more of a DJ who talked on the radio and played whatever was the hit record. We took what they did at the parties and brought it to the radio. Islam cutting up the beats right there in the station, DJ Red Alert was also part of the team. We would have live guests come down and we would do interviews – Rock Steady Crew, Fab Five Freddy when he was did the first promotion for the movie Wild Style. We basically had our friends come to the station and we would interview them. A lotta unknown artists at the time were sending promo tapes [songs] to promote the radio station. We had Daddy-O from the Stetsasonic do promos for us; Craig G – who became part of the Juice Crew – was sending tapes and [would] call in. We had people that weren’t famous at the time [become] part of the station’s history. At WHBI it was not just us – you had Mr. Magic there at one time, but it was also the World Famous Supreme Team that was on the station, the Awesome Two was there.

People were telling me how the tapes made it’s way into the UK scene and that’s how they knew about Afrika Islam and Donald D, from cassette tapes making it’s way into Europe! We’re not knowing that what we’re doing is influencing people in other parts of the world. Now Peanut Butter Wolf wants to take all of when I was rhyming on the Zulu Beats show over Afrika Islam’s beatbox and put it on vinyl. [laughs]

Where were you getting your records from?

At that time there were no record pools so we bought the records ourselves. We supported the culture. Zulu Beat is ’83, so there weren’t that many rap records out, a handful of groups. It wasn’t like 1985 when there were so many rap records all over the place.

Have you got a favorite moment from the show?

Wow. The first time I ever rhymed on the radio, that was an incredible moment, because that’s the first time my voice ever was on a radio show. All my friends calling down to the station, congratulating me, and just getting [acknowledgement] from all my peers – whether it was Melle Mel or Rodney C or Sha-Rock, any of them – just saying they heard me on the radio. That was a surreal moment. Or just having our friends come hang out at the station. Frosty Freeze from the Rock Steady Crew was a real good friend of mine, and I always said he was the hip-hop almanac. He knew everything about hip-hop. Not just the b-boying part but the records, the rhymes, the breakbeats, the DJs. He was a hip-hop historian, I always loved that dude. He would come down to the station just to be around it and just love it.

And just learning so much music from Afrika Islam. All the breaks he played helped me, as an MC, to not just rhyme over one style of music. It taught many of us from that era. Whether it was Latin music, whether it was Calypso, whether it was rock, James Brown, it showed us we could rhyme over many styles of music.

Did you have people helping out on the phones at the station?

Nah, we did it ourselves. I was the phone guy. When I wasn’t on the microphone rhyming I was answering the calls. I would relay people’s shout outs, I’d write ’em down and then I’d give them to Afrika Islam and he would say ’em on the radio show, or sometimes I said ’em or maybe sometimes Red Alert may have said it. It was a team effort there.

That was before I made records, but how I got my first record deal was through the Zulu Beat radio show. Vincent Davis came down to the station ‘cos he wanted us to play his songs, and he asked was I willing to make a record? I wanted to make a record so bad, and I wanted to always be part of the Celluloid family – Phase II had that song ‘The Roxy,’ and I love that record; DST had his records; and then there was Fab Five Freddy with ‘Change The Beat’ – I would always ask DST and he was like, ‘Yo, don’t worry. I’ll check with Bernard,’ who at the time was the owner of the record company. But then Vintertainment beat ’em to the punch.

I had never been in a recording studio in my life. My whole thing was, ‘I want Afrika Islam to be part of this, we’re the group.’ But when I went to the studio Chuck Chillout was there. Vincent was like, ‘I have this idea of a group called The B-Boys – you and Chuck Chillout.’ Afrika Islam said, ‘Go make a hit record, make me proud!’ He gave me his blessing so I went in the studio and recorded those first records with Chuck Chillout. At that time period in hip-hop we said rhymes that were so long, so when Vincent said, ‘Can you make a rhyme in eight bars?’ I was like, ‘What is that?’ [laughs] He said, ‘Make your lyrics about everyday life in hip-hop.’ Up until then, I never had anyone tell me how to make raps, so I wrote ‘Rock The House’ about everything I see.

In the beginning I didn’t really like the music of it, because i was listening to all the beats coming out of Celluloid. The song that K-Rob and Rammellzee had [‘Beat Bop’] was one of the main instrumentals that I rhymed over on the Zulu Beat show, so I was hoping to hear music like that with a bassline in it and some kinda instruments. The Vintertainment stuff didn’t have none of it, it was just a beat! We kinda went with it, not knowing that years later it would become one of the most sampled phrases in music history. Within the b-boy culture, it was a big breakdance record.

Why did you the Zulu Beat show finish?

WHBI started changing their format. I guess they felt it wasn’t bringing in enough to their station. All the shows ended – the World Famous Supreme Team, Awesome Two show – everyone started looking for something else to do.

When did Brother B get involved?

After we did ‘Rock The House’ Vince asked me, ‘Do you have any other friends that MC?’ I had another guy named Original Mark that lived right across the street from me, in the same building as Raheim from the Furious Five. I brought him down to the studio and we did another version of ‘Rock The House’ where we went back and forth, kinda like how Run-DMC rapped, and then we did a rap on ‘Cuttin’ Herbie.’ Those songs were never released by the label, Original Mark didn’t last. By this time, Chuck Chillout had left the group and decided to do his solo thing.

I always liked interacting with other MCs on stage, going back and forth. Brother B came to mind, we used to always rap at a lot of the jams. We called Brother B, he was at work and he auditioned right over the phone for Vincent Davis. We recorded ‘Stick Up Kid’ and during the session I was in the recording booth, waiting for the engineer to start the music, I started rhyming some of the ‘Girls’ lyrics. Vincent Davis was like, ‘What is that? You need to go home and write a whole song in that style!’ I gave Brother B some parts to say and the b-side became the big song of that twelve inch.

‘Girls – Part 2’ had all those different coloured vinyls too.

He made all these different coloured vinyls, which at that time was unseen. Everyone was trippin’ over, ‘Yo, do you have the blue? Do you have the yellow? The clear?’ What’s funny is I hated the beat. We were just rhyming over a kick drum and a hi-hat, and I was telling Vince, ‘Why don’t we rhyme off the part of the chorus?’ ‘Cos that was the full beat. But he was like, ‘Nah, those lyrics are so crazy I want people to concentrate on the lyrics!’ We still wasn’t satisfied with the beat, so when it came time to do ‘Girls – Part 2’ and he had the same beat we was really heated. We didn’t know the music business so we didn’t have much say about it. Being that we didn’t have a DJ, that’s when we brought in Master T. I mention his name on ‘Girls – Part 2’ but that’s Chuck Chillout scratching. Master T became our live show DJ.

How long did the group last?

‘Girls’ blew up big, and Afrika Islam invited me to go to Los Angeles with him in 1985. He had an extra ticket and that’s the first time I met Ice-T. That’s the first time I get to see how LA’s gettin’ down. I’m at the parties, I’m seeing Shabba Doo and all these guys I saw in the movie [Breakin’] and the b-boys are dancing off ‘Rock The House’! I’m hearing the DJ’s play ‘Cuttin’ Herbie’ and I’m buggin’ out! ‘This is music is over here in LA?’ I’m playing a cassette tape of ‘Girls’ and ‘Stick Up Kid’ and everybody’s buggin’ out. The songs ain’t even out yet, and Ice-T and everyone are like, ‘This is some crazy, next-level music! Your lyrics are crazy!’

I get a call from my mom and she’s like, ‘The record label is looking for you.’ I didn’t tell nobody I was going to LA. Back then you could go buy a ticket at the airport and get on a plane – there was no book in advance – so I didn’t tell the company anything, I just went to LA. They were like, ‘You have to get back to New York, this record is taking off! We’ve got all of these shows lined up, we need to have y’all rehearsing.’ So I get back on the plane real quick and head back to New York.

He [Vincent] was like, ‘We’re gonna do shows with The Boogie Boys, Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick, Sparky-D.’ So now we’re out doing shows with all these other groups, and I’m like, ‘Wow!’ Even when we did ‘Rock The House,’ me and Chuck did a few shows with New Edition and LL Cool J in ’83, but when ‘Girls’ came out it took us to different cities where we were performing the song.

That show money must have been nice.

At that time no one knew the business, all those artists from the early eighties didn’t make no money off their records, it was all from the shows, ‘cos nobody knew about publishing. If I knew about publishing I’d be rich just off them sampling ‘Rock The House.’ It was still, ‘We havin’ fun!’ Until people started saying, ‘You need to get a lawyer!’ I think Russell Simmons was the first one to approach us for management. We didn’t realize Vincent Davis was like our manager, our road manager, our lawyer – he controlled everything – so when he saw Russell Simmons was trying to get at us he shut it down. He didn’t want us interacting with none of them, like after a show stay inside the dressing room. He didn’t want nobody getting into our ears, talking to us. I think it would have made Vintertainment even bigger if we were affiliated with RUSH Management.

The big thing was to be on those tours with Fresh Fest, and it never happened because Vincent Davis kept us in this closed area where we couldn’t branch out. We didn’t even know our music was big in the UK! The first time I found out about was 1989 when I toured with Rhyme Syndicate in Europe and people are asking me, ‘How come you didn’t perform none of your b-boy songs?’

At what point did you decide to break away from Vintertainment?

We did ‘Girls – Part 2’ and then we were supposed to record a full album. Joeski Love came to the label and he recorded the ‘Pee Wee Dance’ and the song became big. Vincent Davis kinda forgot about us, he went to California and he made the video of the ‘Pee Wee Dance’ and Ice-T and all of those guys are in the video. Doug E.Fresh was on the label at the same time, when he did ‘The Original Human Beat Box’ and then he was having problems. We were having problems, Brother B started stressing out and did his own thing. None of the artists were truly supported.

I was looking for something else to do, and then a label called Rockin’ Hard Records approached me and I did one record for them called ‘Outlaw,’ the b-side ‘Dope Jam’ in ’87. I recorded a song with Bronx Style Bob and the members of Bon Jovi called ‘Are You Ready For Freddy,’ which was supposed to be on the soundtrack for Nightmare On Elm Street. The movie [people] loved the song, ‘The song is incredible!’ But they wanted a bigger name to do the song so they took me and Bronx Style Bob off and put the Fat Boys in our place. We thought the Fat Boys would go in and do their own version – they ended up doing the version that me and Bronx Style Bob wrote.

’87 was the year that I got the call that Scott La Rock was killed, and I things was getting kinda crazy now. I was looking for a change. Islam had moved out to Los Angeles, was doing things with Ice-T. They called to find out the situation with Scott and through this conversation Ice mentioned to me planing Rhyme Syndicate.

Was it a big culture shock moving to LA?

It was much different than the Bronx! It was sunshine, palm trees, no train – and the beaches! I loved it, it was relaxing to me. They had rappers there, but it wasn’t as advanced as we we had in New York, so I thought maybe I can help build the culture. I had a history of making music, being part of the Zulu Nation, so I fitted in well. We recorded the Rhyme Syndicate Comin’ Through compilation album. Def Jef was originally meant to be on that album.

Did you bring in Lord Finesse or was that through the New Music Seminar?

My DJ at the time, DJ Chilly D, was one of the founding members of D.I.T.C. So through him I met Finesse, Diamond, A.G., Showbiz. Then when we was at the New Music Seminar we were just hanging out. That was an event that you had to be at at that time period in hip-hop. That’s also how we met Bango, ‘cos Bango was battling [Grandmaster] Caz. Ice-T was like, ‘He’s crazy! We’re gonna put him down with the Syndicate.’ Not even knowing that Bango was originally in a group with DJ Lord Jazz from Lords of the Underground.

My favorite song of yours from that period was ‘Hell Raiser.’

That was a non-album b-side. When it was time to release the next single, which was ‘Notorious,’ the management was asking me what I wanted to put as the b-side. That’s one of my favorite songs, with the Steve Miller [sample] and the ‘Funky Drummer.’ I was like, ‘”Fly Like An Eagle”? let’s go!’ Afrika Islam had all those beats and I was writing those lyrics while we were travelling on the tour bus. After that tour, Ice-T approached me and he said, ‘You can come out on the tour with me to Europe or you can stay in LA and record the album.’ I wind up staying in LA so I think he took King Tee and Bango to Europe. So we recorded the album Notorious.

What inspired you to write ‘F.B.I.’?

At that time, especially in New York, the crack epidemic was really outta control. It was destroying so many lives and communities throughout America. You had a few groups making songs about it – Public Enemy ‘Night of the Living Baseheads,’ Brand Nubian had ‘Slow Down’ – so I had my tale on it. I was inspired because unfortunately Brother B had started using drugs, that also played a part of the B-Boys not being a group anymore. When I sat down and started writing the song, the first verse was about him. It wasn’t to bring him down, I was trying to show the effects of what this drug can do to you and help him get his life back. He thanked me for reaching out to him like that. The second verse was about an ex-girlfriend of mine who got caught-up into smoking crack, and from there the song evolved around people in sport, the rich people, that were all smoking crack. I didn’t think the song was gonna be big, but ‘F.B.I.’ was the first song that KDAY started playing.

You also did ‘I’m Gonna Smoke Him’ for the Trespass soundtrack.

That’s when I was recording the Let The Horns Blow album. That song was written around Ice Cube‘s character in that movie, he was always angry. The guys that were on the soundtrack watched the film before it came out to get pointers on the movie. The movie was originally called Looters but the name was changed because of the Rodney King uprising.

The Let The Horns Blow album was released in Europe, and the European version was different than the American version because I had to go back and remove samples off the album. I was in the studio at the time the Rodney King thing happened, so there was a curfew in LA. Here we are at night, going to the studio, and the national guard are thinking that we’re looting.

I added ‘I’m Gonna Smoke Him’ to the American version, ‘cos the European version doesn’t have that song on it, but it has the interludes and everything that I had on it. I’ve got a video for ‘I’m Gonna Smoke Him’ but it was never released. Ice Cube and Ice-T released the video from that movie and then the second video was Gang Starr. My video was supposed to be the third video but then Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killa’ thing happened and Warner Bros got rid of their whole rap department. The Let The Horns Blow album in America, they just put it out. There was never no promotion on it, the video was never completed. I still have it on VHS tape [laughs]. At that point I decided I just wanted to produce music for film and television. QDIII was telling me he did the theme song for The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air so I started doing music for films, FOX Sports and stuff.

How long have you lived in Europe?

At first I was going to stay in Japan and then I came to Italy in 2001 and I started hanging out with some of the Italian guys that were doing hip-hop and I put out an EP that was called B.R.O.N.X. I ended up just staying.

Rising up through the ranks from the ‘Son of Bambattaa’ to the DJ at The Roxy and launching the Zulu Beat radio show on WHBI, Afrika Islam went on to release the very fist cut and paste record, help found the Rhyme Syndicate and produce the majority of Ice-T’s first four albums after moving to LA in what has certainly been an action-packed career. He took a little time out to reminisce before he headed over to Ice’s house to watch the latest episode of SVU.

Robbie: How did you first get exposed to the culture?

Afrika Islam: I was a member of the Zulu King b-boys, under Afrika Bambaataa. That’s how I came into the culture, from the floor up. Being a member of the Zulu Kings I went out to battle other b-boy crews across the city, representing the Zulu Nation. From there, my second step was becoming a Zulu Nation DJ – the first line – which would have been myself and Jazzy Jay and Red Alert and DXT. I was under Afrika Bambaataa – we all were – but I was very close to Afrika Bambaataa. Then I got named ‘The Son of Bambaataa’ because I was always under him and his teachings and what was going on in the Zulu Nation at the same time in hip-hop. That’s my roots of hip-hop – I was there as a DJ.

There must have been a lot of competition to make it into that first line of Zulu DJs?

My technique I took from those that were creating the techniques – Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore. That’s primarily where the technique we used came from, but being that I was with Afrika Bambaataa the main thing was learning all those records, because he was definitely the ‘Master of Records.’ Learning all those records was honestly what everything was about. Having all those records, the repertoire, most of these other DJs only had the ability to….even though they were technically incredible and the pioneers of what modern-day DJing is – Flash and Theodore – the repertoire of the records was the soundtrack to New York City. That was the soundtrack to hip-hop.

Were you working with MCs at this stage?

There was the Soulsonic Force, there was the Cosmic Force. Each [Zulu] DJ eventually had his own group – Jazzy Jay had the The Jazzy Five MCs, Bambaataa had the Soulsonic Force. I was lucky enough to have Three The Hardway MCs, that was Donald’s group. Then it became a group called The Funk Machine, which was the bigger group. All the DJs eventually broke-out from under ‘Bam and eventually had their own group. DST had the Infinity Rappers.

How did you get the gig at The Roxy?

The spot at The Roxys happened for me when Bambaataa took the first hip-hop tour to ever leave America to Europe, and they needed someone to replace him. Somebody told me, ‘the only other person that can play like Bambaataa is his son.’ I was considerably younger than what Bam was. When I first came down to play, the club was maybe two, three hundred people. By they time they came back two weeks later there was around two thousand people. The place got more and more famous, so when they got back it was completely the New York underground club.

Plus there were all the punk kids starting to check out hip-hop as well.

That’s exactly right, because of the location of where the club was.

How did you first meet Ice-T?

I’m about to go to his house right now to watch the new episode of Law & Order! [laughs] How I met Ice is when I went out to the west coast on a tour. Bambaataa had said, ‘There’s a guy on the west coast named Ice-T, you need to get with him when you get there.’ I went out with the Rock Steady Crew to do shows in California, and we met up with the b-boys and the poppers that were in Los Angeles. Ice was the MC at a club called Radio, which would have kinda been the equivalent of what The Roxys was in New York. They were a younger hip-hop culture, but the one thing they didn’t have in Los Angeles was the music and the DJs – but it was starting. So when I got to the club the DJs who I met were Chris ‘The Glove’ Taylor and Egyptian Lover. I also met [Dr.] Dre and Eazy-E, but they were even younger, This is when Dre was doing The World Class Wreckin Kru. I was already a veteran in hip-hop, but at the same time we had ‘Planet Rock,’ and most of the records on the west coast came from the ‘Planet Rock’ style of music. Most of the dancers on the west coast, being that they were elite poppers and electric boogie artists, they danced to records like ‘Planet Rock,’ all up-tempo. There was a symbiotic connection between the music and the dance. Ice-T was the MC, but he was also a b-boy when we met. We got together and we became friends.

Was Ice the first artist that you’d made beats for?

Nah, the first artists I dealt with were the Zulu Nation in New York – ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Jazzy Sensation.’ As far as producing records that come out, I’ll take you back to one famous, famous mash-up – it’s called ‘Fusion Beats’! On one side was Grandmaster Flash live at Bronx River, where Grandmaster Flash plays the beatbox live. The other side I did on a pause button in my bedroom! I paused that on a cassette tape.

The Bozo Meko record? Was that the first cut and paste record?

The first that came out, ‘cos we were doing these mash-ups throughout hip-hop history. This is one that just happened to have made it to becoming vinyl. All the rest were done on acetates or they were being played directly from cassette. We were always using a beatbox in the club, we were always splicing together beats so people could rap off of it. That whole thing of being ‘the Master of Records’ was we got together and we started putting together these mash-ups which nobody else could do, ‘cos we actually had the records. That’s production as well! As far as production coming out on a major label? Tommy Boy Records and Enjoy Records were major labels inside of New York City. Sire Records was inside New York City as well. They were more of an indie record label ‘cos they had Madonna, they had The Ramones, they had Tom Tom Club, they had Talking Heads and they had Ice-T!

Making ‘6 In The Morning’ must have been amazing.

When Ice performed ‘6 In The Morning’ in New York City it was really the first time a gangster dude was on a record, where the major line that was being said was, ‘I beat the bitch down in the goddamn street.’ I know that was the reaction that Melle Mel and Grandmaster Caz took from that. Up until then, you were listening to the socially conscious records coming out like ‘Self Destruction’ by KRS-One. At the same time that ‘6 In The Morning’ came out, you also had a criminal named Larry Davis that shot two police that raided his house at six in the morning. So most people thought that rhyme was the backstory of Larry Davis. At this same time in New York, Larry Davis was front page news, ‘cos he was working for the police and the police came to kill him! Ice’s record became official when people associated both of these two together. A real crime rhyme.

When did you guys begin to put together the Rhyme Syndicate?

We assembled the Rhyme Syndicate after Ice got signed in ’88, to Sire Records. Rhyme Syndicate was the next project after his first two records because I had so many Zulu’s from New York – like Donald D, Kid Jazz and Everlast – and he had his friends from the west coast, so Rhyme Syndicate really was a putting together of his friends and my friends together in one record company, pushing the agenda of Rhyme Syndicate/Zulu Nation. A lot of people came out of it – W.C., Coolio, Everlast, Donald D, Ice-T.

How long did you continue working with Ice-T?

I was part of OG: Original Gangster and I was part of Bodycount. At that point I stopped production because I had to go on tour to start playing in Japan and opening up clubs. At the same time, Ice got the ability to start doing movies.

What was the concept behind the Zulu Beat radio show?

There wasn’t even a main thesis to the show, it was to get on and just present hip-hop for what it really is. Plus the show was in New York City, hip-hop was very, very young. I’d been in hip-hop since day one, so the people I had on the show were really, truly from hip-hop – meaning they could have been a promoter or a rapper – Fab Five Freddy; they could have been a b-boy like Crazy Legs and the Rock Steady Crew. So when they came on the show they were talking about experiences that were going on inside the field of hip-hop – not just necessarily [promoting] a new record. People were coming on the show, just telling it like it is, like getting off the first Wild Style tour for the movie, going to Japan or going to Europe. That was the guests, but the music that was played on the show was the music that was being played in the streets. That’s why everybody could identify with it. We played b-boy music, we played music that was being rocked to by the DJs that set the trends in that time.

So you were playing foundation breaks instead of just rap records?

We were playing exactly the same thing we were playing in the parties. All the mixes were all pre-made anyway, but a lot of times the actual cassette tapes that people would buy a copy – that were being put into the boomboxes – that’s exactly what we would play. If you were listening to a tape of the Cold Crush Brothers live or you were listening to a tape of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, live at a special club, unless you were at the club you had a cassette that somebody actually recorded and sold you. We were putting that directly on the air.

How did you get the spot on WHBI to begin with?

WHBI was a language station where you could go in and buy time on the air and sponsor yourself. I was able to buy time on the air because I was the DJ at The Roxy. Cool Lady Blue, that runs The Roxy club, gave me the money to buy time on the air. That’s how the Zulu Beat was established.

So it began as a way to promote your nights at The Roxy?

That was part of it. All the music I was talking about was being played at The Roxy. The night I played at The Roxy, hip-hop lived in New York. The Roxy was the melting pot. Whatever stuff was being played at The Roxy was being debuted on Zulu Beat as well.

What night was the show on?

It was on every Tuesday night. Friday night I was at The Roxys. It could have been a tape from The Roxys, it could have been whatever we jammed on the streets on Saturday and Sunday, or it could have been whatever tape I had – and I had a lot of tapes, from the beginning of hip-hop, starting in 1977. It could have been whatever battle was currently being played around town on cassette, like the famous battle between Busy Bee Starski and Kool Moe Dee. They had a real famous battle at a club in Harlem. Unless you actually had the tape you probably heard it through someone else, but not as far as the entire city hearing it all at one time.

Was the first episode on 1983?

I believe so. I think we went from one to three in the morning.

Was Mr. Magic already on air?

Magic was ‘HBI as well, but Magic wasn’t playing hip-hop. Mr. Magic might’ve been playing R&B and rap records because that’s the genre that Mr. Magic came from. There were other shows that were playing completely reggae on WHBI, but as far as true, real hip-hop? It was Zulu Beat. We played more straight hip-hop.

Donald D said he used to rhyme over you beatboxing and cutting up breaks.

That’s what hip-hop was. Donald was really one of my MCs, but Red Alert was my assistant. Red Alert had hundreds of tapes that he had got copies of from all the battles that he had was able to be at. These were battles that we both were at, but actually having the cassette was the most important thing. If you really look at Zulu Beat, just imagine that you were someone that just had access to hip-hop history and current hip-hop at that time, and the boombox was really the radio station.

Do you have any favorite memories from that period?

Whether it was Rock Steady Crew or Keith Haring or Dondi or Futura or Fab Five Freddy, that’s just what was going on. That was the main thing.

How long did the show run for?

It ran for about two or three years. I had left the show to do the movie with Ice-T – Breakin’ 2 – and then when I came back I was offered to go on main radio in New York City, KISS-FM – which is now Hot 97. I went up there to be the DJ, but once they presented me with a program of what I had to play I gave it to Red Alert. I quit, I didn’t even show up. I didn’t want to be confined in by having to play a program. The reason why they had hired me was they wanted me to play the music which had gotten me where I was, since The Roxy was the main club in New York. They wanted me to play Michael Jackson and a lot of other R&B songs. They were prominent, but they really weren’t the gist of what was going on for us in the hip-hop scene. So I gave the keys to Red Alert and he stayed on twenty years!

Excerpts of this piece were originally published in this piece for Red Bull Music Academy Daily.

Queens-born producer Ayatollah has laced tracks for everyone from Tragedy to Screwball to Mos Def to Cormega. We caught-up last week to discuss his early days on the come-up, auditioning beat tapes at Rawkus Records and a random Happy Days connection. His latest project, Box Cutter Brothers 3, is out now with Drasar Monumental.

Robbie: What was your inspiration to make music?

Ayatollah: My older brother. When I was younger he used to take care of me, and he was a b-boy. He was like my super hero. He listened to a lot of hip-hop, breakdancing and things like that. I admired him, he had a major influence on me – the way he dressed, the music he listened to – I just thought he was really cool. He would wear the sheepskins and the suede Pumas and Kangols. At school I was always into art, so after going to junior high school I got into the whole graffiti thing. Graffiti had a big influence on me making music.

After the graffiti I got into the DJing. I started DJing from ’89. I bought turntables, I started collecting records [and] I started doing parties. I started battling other DJ’s, competition-wise. When I met Jam-Master Jay, rest in peace, was quite a major point in my life. Getting to ask him questions about DJing and Run-DMC – he actually took the time out to answer my questions. I met him at random in Queens, on 165th Street and Jamaica Avenue. It’s a huge shopping area for a lotta people on Queens. There came a point in my DJing career where I was like, ‘I don’t just want to play the records anymore, I wanna actually produce the records.’

Did you start looping on pause tapes or did you have a sampler?

I had a little rack-mount sampler. It sampled for like six to seven seconds and it didn’t have any drum pads. It was just something that looped, but each time you over-looped it, it lost quality. You could only over-loop it four times before the quality got not too good. It worked for a couple of years for starters – some of the beats weren’t bad, believe it or not. It was a brand called Digitech.

What was your first big break as far as getting into the business?

A DJ friend of mine had introduced me to Tragedy – at the time he was Intelligent Hoodlum. Tragedy was looking for a DJ to go on the road with him and tour with him and I kinda auditioned for him at my house in Queens. He liked it, so we did shows and we traveled. It was quite an experience for me.

When was this?

This was Saga of A Hoodlum [era]. I was in the studio with him when he was recording that album. He let me sit in on the studio sessions and see how the process of making records actually worked. That’s what pushed me into wanting to produce tracks as well, I liked the creative process of making music.

What was the first record you produced?

I had produced for this artist by the name of Bee Why. He was an indy artist, we put out a couple of records. My producer name wasn’t Ayatollah at that time, it was DJ Kool G [credited as Gee The Nutty Professor on the singles mentioned]. I changed the producer name, I thought it was a little cheesy. [laughs]

Was ‘Ms. Fat Booty’ your first big hit?

That definitely was the first big record – if not the biggest – that made an impact on everybody, as far as radio and video airplay.

How did that come about?

I would go up to Rawkus Records with beat tapes that I made in my house. I lived in Queens and Rawkus Records was in Manhattan so I would take my beat tapes and beat CDs over to the label. At first they were a little hesitant, ‘cos they were doing a lotta records at that time. After a while they saw that I was persistent, so the A&R’s were like, ‘Even when we’re busy and we tell him to come back, he comes back with more music! Let’s give him a listen.’ So we were in the conference room – all the A&R’s were there, I was nervous – the owners of the record label was there and they played the music. Everybody was bopping their head, they were all kinda surprised. Talib was there and he came in the office and said, ‘What is that?’ One of the beats on the tape were ‘Ms. Fat Booty.’ They let Mos Def hear it, he liked it and we made the song!

Which machine were you using for that?

The Akai MPC-60 II. I still use that machine to this day.

Did everything change once that song blew up?

I got a lotta calls from different MCs – Talib Kweli for example, Pharoahe Monch, Styles P – various artists were reaching out to me like, ‘We like your music, we wanna work with you.’ Kool G Rap, Rakim, Slick Rick, Canibus, Shyne. Some of the Wu-Tang Clan members, Screwball, Cormega. It was really cool.

I loved that Screwball record you did, ‘When The Sun Goes Down.’

You remember that? That’s old, that’s like 2003. I’m gonna listen to that after the interview, I haven’t heard the Loyalty album in years.

Were you in the studio for that?

Yeah, I was in the studio with all of ’em. They were dope. Even Blaq Poet on his own is still doing it.

What are three favorite beats for other artists?

I would have to say hands down ‘Ms. Fat Booty;’ second would be Masta Ace ‘Hold U’ with him and Jean Grae on his Disposable Arts album; the third one would be Rakim ‘A Cold Feeling.’

What was the Rakim song recorded for?

It was meant to be for the movie soundtrack The Wash, but they didn’t put it on the soundtrack so I think it got bootlegged and put out as a record.

What was the motivation behind your instrumental albums?

I had a lotta music that nobody heard. I like doing instrumental projects because you can be more creative with the music.

Who do you have the best chemistry with in the studio?

Mos Def is cool, he’s super easy to work with. Cormega is one of the easier ones to work with. Tragedy, Royce Da 5’9″, Masta Ace.

If you could remake ‘The Symphony,’ which four MCs would you have on there?

One of them would be Nas, second one would be Roc Marciano. Third one would be MF Doom and fourth would be Common.

You worked with the late Sean Price. What are your best memories of him?

Sean P was just a cool cat. I was in the studio when he and I recorded. We actually recorded a lot of songs, people just haven’t heard them. He was just a cool dude.

You also worked with Killa Sha on ‘A Thing Called Love.’

He was a little guy, but he was so, so dope as an MC. I worked with him as a musician, but at the same time he was my friend. He’d come by my house and hang out, we’d watch TV and movies and we’d eat food together and tell jokes. It was more than just music.

He told me he liked really big women.

Sha was a funny guy! [laughs] I don’t know why, but he liked big women! That was his thing.

Hey, whatever works! Do you have a lot of unreleased music that you’ve been holding onto?

Yeah. I’ve got a couple of songs with B-1 that nobody’s ever heard before. We’re going to try to put together an album. That guy’s an amazing MC. He’s rhymed with Kool G Rap and Nas, Large Professor produced him. Xtra-P is one of my idols.

How did you meet Drasar for the Box Cutter Brothers series?

MF Grimm connected us together, he introduced me to Drasar. He’s the man behind the Box Cutter Brothers! I spoke with Drasar tonight and I was like, ‘When do we start Box Cutter 4?’ And he was like, ‘Now! Start sending music for the next one tonight!’

Have you got any funny digging stories?

One time I was in the Village – Soho, Manhattan – I had a couple of record spots I used to go to. One day Henry Wrinkler came into the record store where I was digging for records, and he was buying records! I turned around like, ‘You’re The Fonz!’ I shook his hand, I showed him the records I was buying, he showed me his. [laughs]

What was The Fonz copping?

He bought some Simon and Garfunkle records, he bought some Beatles albums. He told me he liked folk music.

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 five.’ 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…

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.

I did some work with DJ Pizzo this year over at Cuepoint, but previous to that I’d been a loyal customer of the main mail-order hip-hop stores, one of which was HipHopSite, which was founded by Pizzo and Warren Peace in 1996. He explained how the wild west that was the early internet allowed their new business to thrive and help introduce the world to a range of underground groups, as well as their involvement with classic remix projects such as The Grey Album and God’s Stepson. Ironically, the very same lawlessness that had helped the independent rap scene flourish during this period would ultimately become it’s very undoing.

Robbie: How did you get started as a rap fan?

DJ Pizzo: I got into hip-hop watching Yo! MTV Raps when I was a sixth grader. Then I found this college show, when I was in eighth grade, called Word Up. It was on KUNV at UNLV and this guy Warren Peace was the host. He was a freshman in college at the time and I was a kid in junior high, and he would be playing the b-side of the remix of the new Big Daddy Kane single that wasn’t out yet. It opened up a whole new [world] – because of the show, I was hearing all this music that was promo-only. Warren was judging some local talent show, so I went down there and met him. He told me I could come hang out at the show. I was the youngest person there, everybody else was in college, and I was always digging through his records and recording stuff to tape.

Around ’94/’95 I was posting on rec.music.hip-hop. I started trading tapes with kids over the internet, which was sending cassettes of unreleased music to each other through the mail before there was file sharing. There was a kid who had an advance of De La Soul‘s Stakes Is High album, and another kid who had the Wu-Tang Clan demo tape, and another kid who had the Gravediggaz demo tape. All of a sudden I had all this unreleased music that Warren didn’t have, so I started playing those tracks on his show. Then he had the idea, ‘What if we started a website where we can post this unreleased music?’

There were no [proper] hip-hop websites. There was Support Online Hip-Hop and 88HipHop and platform.net but none of it was really updated. We were like, ‘Let’s do daily updates.’ We were doing the Real Audio streams – because that was the only way to do it. Getting industry news through Warren’s connections as a radio DJ, and he was also getting advance music, so we were debuting Biggie‘s ‘Hypnotize’ to the entire internet. People who had access to this stuff weren’t connected to the internet. We were the only people connected in the industry and savvy enough to have an internet website, so we built an audience really quickly.

The indie hip-hop movement of the late-90s, early 2000’s was basically spearheaded by us and a couple of other people. We were introducing the world to all these unknown artists who were outside of the Bay Area, LA or New York, who couldn’t find an audience elsewhere. We were breaking all these new artists like Little Brother, RJD2, Eminem – a ton of people were making their online debuts through HipHopSite and building their audience that way. If you ask Jedi Mind Tricks or 7L & Esoteric or Anticon, those guys will be like, ‘The first people who supported us were HipHopSite.’ That’s why a lot of it was considered ‘Nerd Rap,’ because it was being birthed on the internet. Prior to that, it was being birthed on the street or in the club.

At what point did you begin to do retail?

In the early days we were able to get a few ads out of record labels. Interscope gave us like five grand to promote their artists at the time. They didn’t even know what they were doing, they were just like, ‘Promote our stuff.’ We were like, ‘Cool, we were gonna do that anyway!’ At that point, the budgets in the record industry were insane – the parties, the video budgets – the industry was a completely different animal, because the piracy wasn’t like it was today.

Within the first year we were like, ‘We want to do this as a business, but we’re not making any money.’ At the same time, the indie hip-hop scene was springing up, so we were like, ‘We should sell merchandise for these new groups.’ Some of the first twelve-inches we carried were Jedi Mind Tricks, 7L & Esoteric [and] J-Live. It really took us until the third iteration of the site to figure out how to do the mail-order side correctly. It was like, ‘Send a check or money order to this address and we’ll send it to you.’ This was such new territory at the time. The we discovered that we need to make a shopping cart and take credit card payments. All this stuff seems fairly obvious for an online retailer at this point, but in ’96/’97 it was blazing a new trail.

What kind of quantities were you selling once you got up and running on that side?

We were delivering a huge amount of sales for some of these individual records, especially during the later years when we got into the CDs and the pre-order packages. In the pre-digital music era, you’d move a couple of thousand of something.

Did you introduce the pre-order packages as a response to competition from Sandbox Automatic?

Competition with Sandbox was super-tight. It got ugly at times – on both sides. [laughs] They started it with the autographed posters and we were like, ‘We can do something cooler than that.’ I had a guy who worked for me named S-Boogie, and he was close with Egon at Stones Throw. They had a relationship that was built on trading records, like 45s and that sort of thing, so he went to LA and somehow came the idea to do a Yesterday’s New Quintet 7″ for ‘Rocket Love.’ We knew we were stomping on sacred ground a little bit, because Sandbox was hosting Stones Throw’s website and we had gotten this exclusive deal with Stones Throw. [laughs] Looking back, it was definitely a conflict of interest. That was when we upped the ante of what a free promo item could be, and that changed everything. We realised it was really cheap to press 45s, so we could factor the cost into the price of the promo package. The 7″s were really the premium promo items. We did CDs, mixtapes, t-shirts, but the 7″ was really the cutting edge one, because those things are still valuable today. A lot of them had runs of only five hundred copies.

It must have been crazy to have the opportunity to put stuff like the Pete Rock ‘Meccalicious’ 7″ out.

There’s a crazy story to the Pete Rock one, which I’ll tell for the first time ever. We did the 45 for Soul Survivor II and BBE gave us the tracks and we pressed five hundred copies and did the giveaway. Somehow the label gave us clearance to do it but Pete didn’t sign off on it, so we had to end up destroying these 45s! About a hundred of them got shipped before Pete shut it down, so there’s a hundred lucky people of earth that have the ‘War’ 45. Pete was cool about it, so he was like, ‘I’ll give you this other track.’ So we pressed another 45 and everybody got that one.

What was the story with God’s Stepson and Nastradoomus?

That began with The Grey Album, that also started at HipHopSite. Prior to The Grey Album, Danger Mouse was producing these mixtapes, they were basically mash-ups, and we were carrying them on the site. Danger Mouse called us up one day and Warren was like, ‘We got the Jay-Z acapellas.’ He was like, ‘Can you send those?’ Later he told us, ‘I’ve got this thing called The Grey Album where I’m taking music from The Beatles’ White Album and the Jay-Z Black Album acapellas and I want you guys to carry it.’ We hear it and we’re like, ‘This is dope’ – but we’re not thinking it’s gonna be what it was.

Was it just another remix album to you guys at the time?

Remix albums weren’t even common back then, this really started that trend. We had it up for twenty-four hours and we went through five hundred or a thousand copies. We were like, ‘Damn!’ Then we find out MTV is talking about The Grey Album – that’s what was driving all these sales. He got a cease and desist, so he called us up and said, ‘You can’t ship anymore out.’ Prior to the cease and desist he had pressed a thousand copies of the vinyl, before he even knew it was going to blow up. So what he ended up doing was giving them to his friends and he numbered them. He kept track of who had what number, so if it ended up on Ebay he would know who sold their copy. [laughs] A year or two later he did the Gorillaz album and Gnarls Barkley and I’ve never talked to him again. He’s just become untouchable. [laughs]

God’s Stepson came out of that. ABB was trying to get us to carry the Little Brother album, so they gave us a 45 of this track ‘Atari 2600’ and that took off. Then they were like, ‘We’ve got this Justus League mixtape thing, we’ve got this God’s Stepson thing.’ And then those things went crazy. We were running Doom‘s website at the time and he had an album that was about to drop. I was like, ‘I did a remix album blending Nas accapellas and your beats. I’ll pay you ‘x’ amount of dollars if we can just give this away on CD with the purchase of the album.’ I didn’t even credit myself on it, we just called it Nastradoomus. We just pressed up the CD-R and then that it blew-up. We were selling all this product because of this one little free CD-R that was coming with it. We did a part two a few months later and it took on a life of its own. It blew up and it got bootlegged to death – vinyl, professional CDs – that thing was everywhere. That was not our intention.

How about the CD giveaway of Large Professor’s The LP that you bundled with 1st Class?

We reached out to Matador and somehow we got on the phone [with him] and we were like, ‘We want to put out the shelved album you never put out on Geffen.’ He was like, ‘Cool.’ We had to commit to ordering a thousand copies of his [new] album.

What about the infamous World Domination CD by The UN?

Someone – it might have one of the guys from the group, their DJ or at their label – said, ‘Let’s throw this out there.’ And they wanted to charge for it, I don’t think it was supposed to be a freebie. So we pressed-up the CDs, we did the artwork and then two days after posting it they were like, ‘Yo! Take it down!’ I don’t know what happened but the tune changed really fast.

You also designed and hosted Eminem’s first website, right?

There’s a closing expo that happens every year called Magic, this is ’97, and he was opening up for Gang Starr – but this was a half-assed Gang Starr show because only Guru showed up and Tony Touch was spinning for him. I met up with him [Eminem] at a Motel 6 to buy the Slim Shady EP in bulk. There was a crazy buzz off The Wake-Up Show freestyles and we sold out of it straight away. A few months later, I got on the phone with Sheck [Jon Shecter]. I’d given him a call with the idea of doing a website for Game Recordings. He was like, ‘I’m recording some stuff with Eminem, maybe I can help you do eminem.com? I can introduce you to his manager, Paul Rosenberg.’

I somehow got Paul to give me unreleased Em stuff that was unfinished and songs that never came out to preview on the site [eminem.com]. Paul would always give me little bits of information, like ‘We just did a song with Limp Bizkit.’ I’m like, ‘Dude! Send it to me! Please!’ I’m begging him, begging him and he’s like, ‘No, I’m not gonna send it.’ Then one day I get an envelope in the mail and there’s a letter in there that says: ‘If you give this to anyone, I will kill you.’ I took that super seriously. It was on cassette, I probably listened to it once. It wasn’t that good. Through eminem.com we’re selling ‘Hi, my name is Slim Shady’ t-shirts, during the first year of his Interscope career. That is a big part of what helped HipHopSite really go crazy in sales. Once we started carrying Eminem stuff it blew the doors open, we were doing hundreds of orders a day.

Are there any rare songs that you’re still chasing after all these years?

Do you remember the Fat Tape section in The Source around ’92, ’93? In one of those issues they listed Cypress Hill featuring Brand Nubian ‘Spark Another Owl.’ For years I was just going crazy like, ‘Where is this song?’

How long did it take you to get a proper store?

When I started this thing I was doing it in my parents’ house, and it was going so well that I just bought my own house. I might have been twenty. Half my mortgage was going to be paid by the company because I was going to use the garage as the office. But I was getting weird looks from the neighbors, because they were like, ‘What kind of operation is running there?’ [laughs] All these dudes in my garage, clearly working on something – it probably looked like a drug lab. My neighbour was giving me a real cocked eyebrow, so I invited him over. ‘I want to show you what we’re doing.’ He was like, ‘Ohhh! I work at the post office! I see HipHopSite packages all the time!’

Then I was getting kids from Japan that came to Vegas and were wanting to come to HipHopSite, or local people, and I was like, ‘This is my house, you can’t come here.’ I actually have this kid from Japan come over once, when I was still at my parents house, and I bring him into the garage and there’s two shelves of CDs and vinyl. He says, in very broken English, ‘This HipHopSite?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘This?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘This HipHopSite?’ ‘These two shelves of records are HipHopSite!’ He was bewildered. We had a warehouse for three months, and then we opened up a physical store next to UNLV. That became the base of operations, and we needed eight to ten employees. I had to have someone out front, working the register; I had to have five guys filling orders; another guy doing customer service – that was a complete nightmare; and Warren and I running operations.

Did you start doing in-stores at that point?

Yeah. As we started moving a lot of product, it got to the point where people would do whatever we asked, industry-wise – not where we were abusing our powers or anything. The biggest in-store we had was Pharrell, that was crazy. There was people wrapped around the shop and he was signing autographs. The best story was when we did Talib [Kweli] and DOOM. I’ve got a store filled with kids, there are four hundred kids waiting. One of my employees is like, ‘I’ll go get Talib.’ Nothing from DOOM, so now I’m sweating. We promoted the heck out of this, Madvillain just came out. So I’m talking to his tour manager on the phone and he’s like, ‘We’re at Imperial Palace, just come and get us.’ I’m like, ‘Where?’ He’s like, ‘We’re just walking around the casino. Come and find us.’ So I’m looking around Imperial Palace – which is a run-down Vegas casino that only old people gamble at – looking at customers, trying to find Zev Love X‘s face on a portly MF Doom’s body, because I haven’t seen what he looks like without his mask. My only frame of reference is the ‘Peachfuzz’ video.

Suddenly I saw him and I’m like, ‘Doom!’ He’s like, ‘Huh?’ ‘Yo, Pizzo from HipHopSite.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, what’s up man?’ ‘Yeah, cool. So, anyway – we got that in-store!’ He’s like, ‘In-store? Aww man, I don’t wanna do an in-store.’ I was like, ‘Please! There’s all these kids that are waiting for you. Everybody will be so disappointed if you don’t show up.’ He’s like, ‘Alright…’ So I have this little two-door Ford Mustang filled with very large rappers and entourage. I pull up to the store and we’re in the back room and he’s like, ‘I don’t really wanna do it, man.’ I’m thinking, ‘We’re here! You can’t do this to me!’ So then he’s like, ‘Gimme a beer.’ He takes this Heineken, pounds it – one beer, just like the song – and he’s like, ‘Alright, let’s go,’ and he signs autographs for an hour. It was a very proud moment, because I did the impossible and everybody was happy.

Did you upset anyone with your ‘Best and Worst’ lists at the end of the year?

The year-end thing was kind of like a roast. HipHopSite made its money because of the retail store, so we never had to worry about pissing off advertisers. That was the big problem with The Source after Shecky left – you weren’t getting unbiased album reviews anymore because they didn’t want to piss off their advertisers. That was a big part of what inspired HipHopSite, because we were so upset at seeing our favorite records get panned in The Source. We had a review of The Cenobites album and I think I gave it four out of five, and that same year I rated the Player’s Club soundtrack a two and a half. We were in the office [of A&M’s Kevin Black] and this guy was like, ‘You can’t give the Centipedes [sic] a four out of five and then give Player’s Club two!’ I’m like, ‘If you don’t want your record to get panned then don’t put out a wack record.’ [laughs]

So this was your peak period?

2004 to 2005 was the peak period for HipHopSite, and I’m sure Sandbox and UndergroundHipHop.com too. Then there was the end of the indie hip-hop era, which found all these things stopping within a year – you had Def Jux folding, you had Fat Beats ending their vinyl distribution, Caroline Distribution folded and you had HipHopSite closing. All these things happened at once, and it was very obvious to see why – it was because of the piracy. The flaw in the business model was you might pre-order something, but because we are like a Mom and Pop operation, you might not get it until a week after the street date. On top of that, if there are complications where we get short-changed because the distributor doesn’t have enough copies or we sold-out because we under-ordered, you might end up waiting two weeks to get an album that’s leaked on the internet a week previous to it’s release. This was the beginning of the end, when we started seeing [stuff like] Mobb Deep‘s Murda Muzik leak. Eventually this started happening left and right and we could see the writing on the wall that the music’s going digital. And Serato…

People didn’t need records anymore.

Yeah. The cornerstone of the business, even before the CDs came into play, was the DJs. Vegas has a huge club scene, so we were serving the DJs locally too. We were selling tons of Biggie and Ja Rule and DMX and all that, that was a big part of the business. Then Serato comes out, albums started leaking, the iPod comes out, all these things changed the landscape incredibly. Plus we were at the end of our five year lease at the store. We had been in business for ten years at that point and it was clear that the physical goods era – and more directly, the independent hip-hop era – had come to an end. The underground scene had run its course, all these true blue Brooklyn/L.A., Dilated People type artists, and I didn’t see a lot of new talent coming out of that side of things. That’s also part of why the scene folded.

We attempted to launch a digital music store but it was impossible to compete with iTunes. Then I relaunched HipHopSite as a blog, and that was fun but there’s so many blogs out there that unless you’re delivering original content it’s hard to compete in that space. I loved delivering the album reviews every week, and I feel like we had some of the best, unbiased reviews in the industry, but I actually didn’t like a lot of the music that was coming out. It’s almost like when indie hip-hop died, the blog era started, like a generational thing. The blog scene was different than the mail-order hip-hop scene. The Stones Throw, Def Jux, Eastern Conference stuff marks the end of one era and then a new era begins.