Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Ladies and Gentlemen. Another episode of Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 1: Is upon us.
Speaker 2: Very happy day today here with my family, my Team Supremist.
Speaker 1: How you guys doing? What up? What up? The way
Speaker 1: that we're progressing? Uh in the world.
Speaker 2: It's only a matter of time before we can actually
Speaker 2: take our themes on back.
Speaker 3: Oh something, I I think tonight would have been a
Speaker 3: good night for tales from the Latin Quarter and uh,
Speaker 3: all kinds of things tonight. See our guests, you'll she
Speaker 3: just had some.
Speaker 1: Some or we just might have to insert those things.
Speaker 2: I'm here with Team Supreme. Uh, here with almighty Unpaid Bill.
Speaker 2: Oh hey, I'm pivot. Wait Unpaid Bill? Are you part
Speaker 2: of in conto at all?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Is that any of your music? No? No, I'm friends
Speaker 1: that's hitting Bruno.
Speaker 3: No, I wish I was, honestly, my my my bank
Speaker 3: wishes that I was know something about Bruno. But I
Speaker 3: don't talk about him or anyone I have. No, I
Speaker 3: have nothing to do with Bruno. I wish I did, though, man,
Speaker 3: like ten weeks at number one or some ship, Like
Speaker 3: I wish it's still number one, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like you know liv Manuel is going to mess
Speaker 2: around and and like beat boys to men. M Mariah Carey,
Speaker 2: is that still the longest number one number one song
Speaker 2: sweet Day? I think it is, Okay, I mean I'm
Speaker 2: from the old school sound scan so you know, or whatever.
Speaker 1: Method they use now to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this new math don't count. Like we come from
Speaker 5: an er when motherfuckers had to lead their house to
Speaker 5: buy ship. Exactly exactly, That's exactly, dude, that was the
Speaker 5: way we did.
Speaker 2: Yes, Okay, I'm sorry because La is you know, she's uh,
Speaker 2: she's how you doing?
Speaker 6: Like, yeah, I am doing amazing except for this man,
Speaker 6: this little gas situation.
Speaker 1: But I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.
Speaker 1: I'm good. I'm good. What's what's gas looking like in
Speaker 1: LA right now?
Speaker 6: Well, it's funny you asked that my rich friend. Uh,
Speaker 6: currently gas in Los Angeles is six dollars. We are
Speaker 6: at about five ninety something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we'd like it was like four dollars out here.
Speaker 5: Y'all got iron legend gas prices out there.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, this is something, fante. Do you drive? Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is the question you never I mean,
Speaker 2: spent five years, but I just don't.
Speaker 1: I can't see kind of like, what car? What kind
Speaker 1: of car do you have? I got a Lexus RX
Speaker 1: three fifty. That sounds swanky.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, hey, it's paid for. I ain't buying
Speaker 5: another car, So you write it out.
Speaker 1: All right?
Speaker 3: I want I want FaceTime Fante while he was in
Speaker 3: his car outside of the chicken shop, I believe is
Speaker 3: what happened?
Speaker 2: Do you have like a cigarette hanging out of his
Speaker 2: mouth with just one hand on the wheel. Nah, I
Speaker 2: just had to do it the way back, like like
Speaker 2: Dame Dash and painting for Yeah, I have my black father,
Speaker 2: you know, just get you get home and you pull
Speaker 2: up in the driveway and you just sit there for
Speaker 2: about an indeterminate amount of time.
Speaker 1: Am I the only I don't know if this is
Speaker 1: a tea in my movement?
Speaker 2: Am I the only one that sometimes just has to
Speaker 2: sit in the car for ten minutes just so you
Speaker 2: can brace yourself for whatever is waiting for you.
Speaker 1: You're not alone? So that's universal talk.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, straight up, Okay, I'm still happy with my relationship.
Speaker 2: I was just asking for a friend. So, Steve, how
Speaker 2: you doing, I'm good man. Any anything interesting happening in
Speaker 2: the network or you know, oh gosh, I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: I didn't anticipate you asking me that question.
Speaker 1: So okay, well let me just start again.
Speaker 2: How you doing, Steve, I didn't anticipate you ask me
Speaker 2: that either, so I don't know what.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen? All right, So and I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: winging this.
Speaker 2: So I'm trying to keep it real sustinct because I
Speaker 2: realized that our guest hasn't spoken a word yet because
Speaker 2: I didn't address her or all.
Speaker 1: Right, I know, I know. So look when when cats,
Speaker 1: when when dudes my.
Speaker 2: Age start reminiscing about you know, quote unquote the good
Speaker 2: old days or real hip hop or true school or
Speaker 2: whatever we say, our guest name should ring familiar. I
Speaker 2: think that the thing about well, the thing is is
Speaker 2: that even though I've never read an interview or seen
Speaker 2: a television interview, heard it at radio interview on the radio,
Speaker 2: or even exchange any sort of casual banter with our
Speaker 2: guests or even DM crept my way into a friendship
Speaker 2: or a relationship, which is I know that may I
Speaker 2: made that sound weird, but you know, DM creeping your
Speaker 2: way into free friendships is kind of real.
Speaker 1: Like I can actually say that.
Speaker 2: I'm genuine friends with like Henry Winkler and Working Fairchild
Speaker 2: just from DM Creeping, which kind of weird.
Speaker 1: I'm also friends with Tasty Cake Steve wait wait wait
Speaker 1: wait wait, I like with.
Speaker 2: Friends with with with non human entities on Twitter. But
Speaker 2: Morgan Fairchild, dude, it's so random. She started liking, like
Speaker 2: she started liking a whole bunch of my tweets, and
Speaker 2: then we're actually BFFs, like, like, hey, when you're in town,
Speaker 2: let's go to dinner. I mean, I haven't done it yet,
Speaker 2: but I think I'm down with Morgan Fairchild.
Speaker 1: Yo. Oh my gosh. I know.
Speaker 2: It's like the the eight year Old News kind of
Speaker 2: like happy right now, right, I'm thrilled, thrilled.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, because like house is going to
Speaker 1: relate to me. All right.
Speaker 2: My whole point is that, you know, I don't exactly
Speaker 2: have a relationship with our guest on the show, having
Speaker 2: grown up in the age of hip hop, where you know,
Speaker 2: a transition from twelve inch and singles to LPs, and
Speaker 2: I'm part of the generation that lived for liner notes
Speaker 2: and seeing who did what. Our next guest name should
Speaker 2: ring familiar to hip hop heads. Because she was literally
Speaker 2: president of one of the most powerful labels of the genre.
Speaker 2: And I don't even want to limit it to hip hop,
Speaker 2: because you know, I mean, Tommy Boy had hits from
Speaker 2: club hits to pop music to freestyle to I.
Speaker 1: Could name them all.
Speaker 2: De La Soul, Coolio, Digital Underground for Some D's House
Speaker 2: of Payne, Club, Nouveau K seven, LFO Information Society, Ardi
Speaker 2: by Nature, the Riza back when he was Prince Raquin
Speaker 2: RuPaul Queen Latifa, the original hip hop band Statso Sonic. Y'all,
Speaker 2: y'all really have to understand that the muscle that this
Speaker 2: label operated with, probably the only other rival label that
Speaker 2: can even say that they held that same space was
Speaker 2: probably def jam So Ladies and gentlemen, the very legendary
Speaker 2: president or former president, Tommy Boy, the one and only
Speaker 2: Monica Lynch won Quest left set mere.
Speaker 4: Thank you. I'm doing great, And I really appreciated the
Speaker 4: conversation about gas prices because now that I'm sixty five,
Speaker 4: gas price means a whole different thing. I've never driven,
Speaker 4: I don't drive. I just got a match. You New
Speaker 4: York say, what's the gas situation. I'm like, let me
Speaker 4: look at my medicine cabinet. That's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2: Wait, you're telling me you never had your license or
Speaker 2: you never owned a car.
Speaker 4: We have my license, but I only use it for ID.
Speaker 4: And the only car I ever drove was a gold
Speaker 4: Cadillac with power windows that my father owned back in
Speaker 4: like the early seventies. So the die was cast at
Speaker 4: a young age.
Speaker 2: So this is definitely going to lead to my first question,
Speaker 2: what part, Well, I don't know, were you a natural
Speaker 2: born in New.
Speaker 1: Yorker or Chicago? You could hear it from Chicago?
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, Chicago. I'm sixty five, I'm from Chicago, grew
Speaker 4: up there. Yeah, well, you know, I grew up there
Speaker 4: and I was, you know, really weaned on Top forty
Speaker 4: radio when it was still a hugely amazing thing in
Speaker 4: the late sixties. Heard all the great great pop songs
Speaker 4: from that era, and back then, you know, blues was
Speaker 4: definitely still a big thing in Chicago, but it was
Speaker 4: mostly I would say a lot of white guys. They
Speaker 4: were checking the blues back in that scene. You know,
Speaker 4: Paul Butterfield Blues.
Speaker 1: Band, the Electric Blues.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, yep, exactly. And then I start of got
Speaker 4: into the disco scene. I was a big disco dancer,
Speaker 4: hustle contest, was a dancer at the big gay bar
Speaker 4: in Chicago, which is sort of like a It was
Speaker 4: the Studio fifty four of Chicago. Then I was in
Speaker 4: a punk band and we'd work at a punk club
Speaker 4: and did all sorts of things before I came to
Speaker 4: New York in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 1: So you got history. What was your first musical memory.
Speaker 4: My first musical memory was listening to my parents' records
Speaker 4: in the basement, and they, of course had the sort
Speaker 4: of records that you would find in the sixties and
Speaker 4: a lot of collections. It was everything from Nicholson May
Speaker 4: to My Fair Lady soundtrack to you know, Herb Albert
Speaker 4: and the Tijuana Brass, that sort of thing. I had
Speaker 4: a big crush on Herb Albert back then. And I
Speaker 4: got my first record player the same year that Rubber
Speaker 4: Saul came out. That was the first record I ever owned.
Speaker 4: Was Rubber Saul.
Speaker 1: That would be sixty five.
Speaker 4: Uh no, I think it was a little earlier. I think, well, yeah,
Speaker 4: maybe sixty four. Sixty five was Rubber Saul.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, okay, wow, that's cool.
Speaker 2: So would you like Did you have any ambitions or
Speaker 2: goals to be in the music industry or did it
Speaker 2: sort of find you as you became an adult.
Speaker 4: I had no ambitions, no goals. I just loved music.
Speaker 4: I was like I used to buy forty fives all
Speaker 4: the time. I don't know if you remember that there
Speaker 4: was something called the Phonologue, this huge like yellow paperback
Speaker 4: compendium that you could go and do special orders of
Speaker 4: forty fives at record stores back then. Do you remember that?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, when I shot at specialty stores. Now they it
Speaker 2: looks like the yellow pages, like it's just a masterless.
Speaker 1: So what was the spot we used to stop at them?
Speaker 1: Philly Steve Val?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so like you go to Val Shively and
Speaker 2: you know, next to Jerry's Rest in peace, to Jerry's
Speaker 2: who just passed away like a month ago or whatever.
Speaker 2: Like those specialty record stores, like record stores that have
Speaker 2: over one hundred thousand records in.
Speaker 1: Stock, they still have those books there.
Speaker 2: So you didn't work at a record store, So how
Speaker 2: would you get access to those records or how would
Speaker 2: you get access to that book?
Speaker 4: Well? I was always listening to the top forty stations
Speaker 4: in Chicago w LS and W CFL and I would
Speaker 4: go down to the Marina City, those two buildings that
Speaker 4: look like corn cobs in Chicago, and that's where WLS was,
Speaker 4: and I was a kid. I would just take the
Speaker 4: l train down there and you could stand in the
Speaker 4: lobby and watch the DJ on the air, and they
Speaker 4: would have these little surveys that they would give you
Speaker 4: a the top forty records for the week. I know
Speaker 4: this is really kind of going back like a rocker,
Speaker 4: but I figure you probably no.
Speaker 2: Literally, the show is based on long winded rabbit hole.
Speaker 2: The whole point is that get me to not talk
Speaker 2: so good.
Speaker 4: Well, so, anyway, so I started, you know, really saying, oh,
Speaker 4: I want to special order these records because I can't
Speaker 4: find them at EJ. Corvette's or Montgomery Wards or something.
Speaker 4: And so back then, as you know, there were always
Speaker 4: like these great independently owned records stores and you could
Speaker 4: go there and if you struck up a good relationship
Speaker 4: with the owner or a clerk, it was a tremendous
Speaker 4: source of knowledge that was passed along and you could
Speaker 4: special order these things and just basically loiter in the
Speaker 4: store and learn a lot and that in fact, you know,
Speaker 4: we could talk about that in the hip hop era
Speaker 4: as being a big thing here in New York and
Speaker 4: other places. But no, I came here, you know, I
Speaker 4: always say, I came here with you know, on a
Speaker 4: dollar and a dream, no plans except to go to
Speaker 4: Studio fifty four. And I landed in New York during
Speaker 4: the time when it was sort of like the uh,
Speaker 4: the perfect nexus of punk and disco and no way
Speaker 4: was happening, and sort of the downtown arts scene and
Speaker 4: all that stuff that people lieon eye so much. But
Speaker 4: it was a great time to be in New York
Speaker 4: because it really was cheap. And I lived on Saint
Speaker 4: Mark's Place between Second and Third, which was basically like
Speaker 4: the main runway for you know, people would get up
Speaker 4: at two three in the afternoon and then sit out
Speaker 4: on the stoop to watch so and so, you know,
Speaker 4: Richard Hell come down the street to cop is Dope
Speaker 4: or whatever you know it was.
Speaker 2: And I wouldn't say except it's ginger right now it's
Speaker 2: expensive property, but back then it was cheap.
Speaker 1: It was something to behold.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and there was this woman named Anya Phillips
Speaker 4: who was sort of the one of the co founders
Speaker 4: of the Mud Club and She was really sort of
Speaker 4: a downtown duyenne. She was a girlfriend of James White
Speaker 4: or James Chance, you know, contortions.
Speaker 7: And she.
Speaker 4: Sat me down one day. She's very stern, serving a
Speaker 4: dominatrix sort of way. He said, you're going to be
Speaker 4: a topless dancer, and I'm going to make g strings
Speaker 4: for you. Because I had no money, and so I said, okay,
Speaker 4: sounds like a plan. And I went to this place
Speaker 4: called the Go Go Agency. And I've recounted this tale
Speaker 4: many times, but there was a guy there named Johnny
Speaker 4: and it was like a scene out of Broadway Danny Rose.
Speaker 4: And you walk up the stairs in this midtown building
Speaker 4: and there's these big boards and it lists all the
Speaker 4: topless bars and all five burrows. And he would assign you,
Speaker 4: you know, he was an agent. Yeah, And so he
Speaker 4: would send me out to places and queens like the Carousel,
Speaker 4: or the place up in the Bronx called the Slice,
Speaker 4: or there was a place over in the meatpacking district
Speaker 4: when it was still a meatpacking district that you do
Speaker 4: these and a lot of stuff in Midtown because you
Speaker 4: got a lot had a lot of customers in Midtown
Speaker 4: back then. But but yeah, it was wait.
Speaker 2: I gotta ask, so I you know my era of
Speaker 2: I say, I'm part of the deaf leopard generation where
Speaker 2: there's no time where I've not entered a strip club
Speaker 2: where they forced you to listen to pour some sugar
Speaker 2: on me, except for Atlanta, except for Atlanta. But back then,
Speaker 2: like would you have to feed the forty five jukebox?
Speaker 2: Or was there or was it like it is now
Speaker 2: like welcome to the stage.
Speaker 4: No, no, no, I wish I had an mc welcoming
Speaker 4: to the stage. It wasn't quite that.
Speaker 2: Grand I was going to ask if you had a
Speaker 2: numb to plume?
Speaker 1: Did you? Did you have a yes? A title? What's
Speaker 1: her name?
Speaker 4: It was mister Smnique. And this was all sort of
Speaker 4: in the late seventies, you know, so the type of
Speaker 4: records that you were hearing, I mean, if I hear
Speaker 4: you know, ring my bell one more time.
Speaker 1: It's that was sort of like that was yours sugar
Speaker 1: on me?
Speaker 4: It was it was the poursome sugar of Me of
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine. Yeah, totally, you know, but
Speaker 4: it was disco, you know, because it was certain it
Speaker 4: was sort of like when disco it kind of peaked,
Speaker 4: and it was much more like, uh, these mechanical type
Speaker 4: of records, which not that I'm mad at that, but
Speaker 4: it was those type of records. Ring my bell seems
Speaker 4: to be the one that always comes back to me
Speaker 4: in my dreams. But I worked at had what I
Speaker 4: call extended residencies at show World, which you might be
Speaker 4: might remember that and peep Land, which was also a
Speaker 4: big player on the on the deuce back then. But yeah,
Speaker 4: it was steady money, good money. I made cleared fifteen
Speaker 4: hundred dollars a week at the peak.
Speaker 1: Okay, I gotta ask the question, so is this all right? You?
Speaker 2: You remember how it wasn't Papa, don't preach like open
Speaker 2: your heart. Was it like you sat in a booth
Speaker 2: and you in started a coin and the thing went up?
Speaker 2: And you does that type of strip club still or
Speaker 2: is that like a thing of the past.
Speaker 1: Now it's called only fans, Yeah, it is it is that. No,
Speaker 1: we need somewhere, oh man, No.
Speaker 4: It was, Hey, these only fans chicks. I think they're
Speaker 4: pretty smart. They're much more entrepreneurial. I mean, back then
Speaker 4: I got hired and well, like to say you, for example,
Speaker 4: the show World, my boss's name was a woman named
Speaker 4: Thunder and she had huge red hair. She was like
Speaker 4: benson Hurst type of gal. And the place was owned
Speaker 4: by a guy who died recently, but it was all
Speaker 4: mob owned. It was oh who is there was one
Speaker 4: of the big mob characters that Frankie the horse Eyanello.
Speaker 4: There was the guy who ran the whole.
Speaker 1: All that he is named after an animal. Then you
Speaker 1: know that's bad.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right. So you know they paid you
Speaker 4: a flat fee, but you made your money. You really
Speaker 4: made your money by getting these guys to keep putting
Speaker 4: the coins in and keep the window going up. So
Speaker 4: I would sit on one side and then there'd be the curtain,
Speaker 4: the metal curtain, and the guys would be on the
Speaker 4: other side, and a lot of we had a lot
Speaker 4: of Hasidic customers.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: Thing is, let's get into it. Let's talk about it a botica.
Speaker 4: But you know it's because it's such a repressed, sexually
Speaker 4: repressed culture. I think you'd get a lot in in
Speaker 4: the peep shows.
Speaker 2: All right, I'm gonna go there, I'm gonna go there,
Speaker 2: go there. What happens on the guy's side of the booth? Though, Like, well,
Speaker 2: is there a clean up afterwards, like.
Speaker 4: Oh, yes, there is mop patrol, isn't isn't this where
Speaker 4: there's like first, that's right. If when you walk into
Speaker 4: the place, you give them cash and they give you
Speaker 4: these tokens, and the tokens are what allows you to
Speaker 4: go to the boost or to watch a Peep movie
Speaker 4: or things like that. There were They also had live
Speaker 4: sex shows at show World. I didn't do that there,
Speaker 4: but they had. But yeah, the idea was to keep
Speaker 4: them putting the money in. So these these were skills
Speaker 4: I was able to apply to the music industry not
Speaker 4: too long afterwards.
Speaker 1: With you said you didn't do the live there? Did
Speaker 1: you do it somewhere else? Leave it alone?
Speaker 4: You have to you'll have to ask me back. As
Speaker 4: I guess to answer the second part of that question, I.
Speaker 2: Hear a long time New York residents like begging for
Speaker 2: the time when Old New York returns.
Speaker 1: Is this what they're talking about?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean there's a lot of romanticizing about dirty
Speaker 4: New York of the seventies. I mean literally, the summer
Speaker 4: I got there is when they let out a lot
Speaker 4: of people with mental health issues onto the street. They
Speaker 4: just dumped them on the street. There was a huge
Speaker 4: garbage strike. There'd been a big blackout in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 4: as the Tramps told us about, and there was you know,
Speaker 4: it was definitely grungy and dirty, and people liked to say, Oh,
Speaker 4: wasn't it great back then because it attracted all these
Speaker 4: you know, creative people and blah blah blah. But I
Speaker 4: don't really get all. I mean, I like to recount
Speaker 4: the stories about that, but I wouldn't want it to
Speaker 4: go back to that necessarily.
Speaker 2: So you liked post ninety four Disney Giuliani era a
Speaker 2: little better?
Speaker 8: No, No, I think I've shared this on the show
Speaker 8: once before, Like the first day that we arrived in
Speaker 8: New York, when the roots like really first came to
Speaker 8: New York to start mixing.
Speaker 1: Do you want more?
Speaker 2: I believe like in December of ninety three was pretty
Speaker 2: much like I think the.
Speaker 1: Day that whatever.
Speaker 2: I Okay, maybe I've been on forty second Street once
Speaker 2: or twice in my life. Like I know we went
Speaker 2: to go see the Whiz, but I don't remember that
Speaker 2: much at the age of seven, but you know, I
Speaker 2: do remember us going on forty second Street near our
Speaker 2: hotel and like Rich, like my manager what not being
Speaker 2: really disappointed that forty second Streets disnified and not the
Speaker 2: CD you know New York that he remembers. And I
Speaker 2: remember like people telling us like that week is when
Speaker 2: the transformation started and everybody was pissed at it.
Speaker 4: So hey, it's nice to be able to be old
Speaker 4: enough to look back at it and to remember it
Speaker 4: as it was back then. But I'm not getting all
Speaker 4: tears in my beer over you know.
Speaker 1: Hey, that's perfect.
Speaker 4: Wish it was back, you know, so.
Speaker 2: Club wise, you know, I've been trying to get another
Speaker 2: downtown New York diva that made a billion dollar career
Speaker 2: for yourself on this show, but that hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: So I guess you are really our first witness to
Speaker 2: that era, can you assuming that by this time you're
Speaker 2: watching hip hop culture creep into downtown? First of all, like,
Speaker 2: did you go north of the Bronx to any of
Speaker 2: the what was known as the classic eras of hip hop,
Speaker 2: like whatever, the Fever or any of those clubs way north?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I've been to the Fever course, I
Speaker 4: know sal from back then. Tea connection. Actually, you know,
Speaker 4: a funny thing was I ended up bringing Martin scores
Speaker 4: as to the Tea Connection one night to hear Bambada play,
Speaker 4: and that was sort of an odd set of circumstances.
Speaker 4: But uh, you know, yeah, he knew got describe that.
Speaker 1: They wait, what era of Raging Bull King of comedy?
Speaker 4: What era do you This would have been circa eighty
Speaker 4: two eighty three, so you tell me comedy. Yeah, And
Speaker 4: he was friends with this guy named Jay Cox, who
Speaker 4: was the film at a film critic at Time Magazine
Speaker 4: who was related to Tom Silverman, and somehow there was
Speaker 4: a conversation, Oh, Marty would really love to go up
Speaker 4: and check out this hip hop thing, and bah blah bah,
Speaker 4: and and you know, I was like, hey, be happy
Speaker 4: to show him, and you know, take him up there.
Speaker 4: And so there's a car service, which back then, you know,
Speaker 4: it was a rare thing for maybe have any car
Speaker 4: service or anything. But he went up to Tea Connection.
Speaker 4: He was pretty quiet, you know, I think he was
Speaker 4: just checking it out, observing. And you know, the Time
Speaker 4: magazine ended up doing a big story about sort of
Speaker 4: the emerging hip hop scene back then. But yeah, I
Speaker 4: used to go to some of the places uptown, but
Speaker 4: more frequently I would go to every Friday night, we
Speaker 4: went to Negrill when that was having when cool Lady
Speaker 4: Blue you know, had started doing her nights at Agrill.
Speaker 4: And then I would always go to the Roxy on
Speaker 4: Friday night, and then following the Roxy, I would head
Speaker 4: up a few blocks and go to the Fun House.
Speaker 4: I was very friendly with Jellybean and would hang out
Speaker 4: with him a lot. Yes, So those and then the
Speaker 4: Dance of course, Dance Aterria was a really great play
Speaker 4: to hang out at. And you know before that it
Speaker 4: was like Studio fifty four in the mud Club were
Speaker 4: staples for me. But you know, but yeah, Union Squares
Speaker 4: was a place I went to a lot and Amazon Hotel.
Speaker 4: That was a big place. Patrick Moxy had Payday I
Speaker 4: don't know, okay, yeah, oh yeah, total that was a
Speaker 4: big one. Dala Soul did a big premiere performance there.
Speaker 4: And I didn't really hang out at Latin Quarters that much.
Speaker 4: I left that to Dante. But but yeah, those were
Speaker 4: the those were the big clubs that were sort of
Speaker 4: happening back then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the lure of the or the yeah, the focalore
Speaker 2: of Studio fifty four, like assuming that it really started
Speaker 2: to rise in seventy seven, When when did it peak,
Speaker 2: even though I've heard Studio fifty four stories like in
Speaker 2: eighty one, eighty two, eighty three, eighty four, like in
Speaker 2: the half first half of the eighties, like when did
Speaker 2: the allure of Studio fifty four died down?
Speaker 1: And when did it become? Was it ever uncol to
Speaker 1: go there?
Speaker 4: Yes, it was uncool to go there after it closed
Speaker 4: and then it reopened. I would say it peaked in
Speaker 4: seventy nine. It burned fast and hard, and it's extinguished
Speaker 4: pretty quickly, I think that. But you know, i'd say
Speaker 4: by eighty you know.
Speaker 1: Were you there?
Speaker 2: Have you ever went there at its peak? When like
Speaker 2: oh yeah, yeah, even she couldn't get in even though
Speaker 2: they had like the number one song on the.
Speaker 4: Charts, Like oh yeah no, I literally, you know, laughed
Speaker 4: that I you know that I landed at Laguardi Airport
Speaker 4: and proceeded straight to Studio fifty four. But it's not
Speaker 4: it's an exaggeration, but literally I was like a homing pigeon.
Speaker 4: I have to go to my spiritual home of Studio
Speaker 4: fifty four. And you know, back then, so this is
Speaker 4: in April of seventy eight, and back then, you know,
Speaker 4: you had all the you know hand von Furstenberg and
Speaker 4: Warhol and Liza and all these people, you know, is
Speaker 4: razzle dazzle. But there was always this. They always let
Speaker 4: in a group of young kids that if you were
Speaker 4: dressed interestingly enough and added youthful flavor to the crowd,
Speaker 4: you'd stand outside for a little while. And Mark Bennecky,
Speaker 4: who was the doorman, who would stand on this perch
Speaker 4: in a huge norma kmali red cocoon coat, would you know,
Speaker 4: sort of look around and act like, you know, he'd
Speaker 4: sauce out the crowd. I always had a strategy, though.
Speaker 4: My strategy was to take the subway up to as
Speaker 4: close as a possible to fifty four at eighth and
Speaker 4: then take a cab from the corner to directly in
Speaker 4: front of Studio fifty four, which could take anywhere from
Speaker 4: thirty to forty five minutes because the street was already
Speaker 4: always packed, right. The trick was that split second when
Speaker 4: the cab door all opens. Mark Benecky is always looking
Speaker 4: to see who's getting out of cars because it could
Speaker 4: be Truman, Capodi, you know, so, but he would at
Speaker 4: least register you, so you know, I spend whatever seventy
Speaker 4: five cents on the subway, another maybe four bucks just
Speaker 4: going half a block and a taxi to make sure
Speaker 4: to get in.
Speaker 1: See, now Rogers should have learned that. Listen. Yes he
Speaker 1: should also been white, but you know, oh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well listen, there is there's no question about that.
Speaker 4: But yeah, no, it was not a democracy. It was
Speaker 4: far from it. So yeah, seventy nine with the peak
Speaker 4: seventy eight.
Speaker 2: Maybe so once that peaks are you would you say
Speaker 2: that Paradise Garage replaced it? Or then what was your
Speaker 2: like what replaced Studio fifty four? As okay, that's not cool,
Speaker 2: no more, let's go to this spot, you know what.
Speaker 4: It wasn't an either or. I mean, there was a
Speaker 4: lot of stuff going on simultaneously. There was a place
Speaker 4: called Hurrahs that was very popular. There was a place
Speaker 4: called the Continental Bath, I mean not the Continental Bands.
Speaker 4: That's another place, the Continental Club. There was dance materia,
Speaker 4: there was a mud club, there's a Cbgbi's was still
Speaker 4: you know, it was very big still back then. And
Speaker 4: then there was a course places like Xenon which was
Speaker 4: sort of like the poor relation to Studio fifty four.
Speaker 4: You know, if you couldn't get into Studio fifty four.
Speaker 4: You would go to Xenon and then there was also
Speaker 4: what's that sex club? Oh, what's a sex club that
Speaker 4: everyone went to? That the Swingers Club. I forget the
Speaker 4: name of it. It was very popular.
Speaker 2: Hey, son, you know it's in my mind right now, Like, yeah, then.
Speaker 1: You eluded him. This is why we have guests on
Speaker 1: the show. I'm trying to you know.
Speaker 2: I was going up there, but at this rate I
Speaker 2: was doing Oldie. It was like, I didn't see this
Speaker 2: part of New York.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, amir, you certainly have Vinceletti's Disco Files book.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think the.
Speaker 4: Disco Files Book is a really great lay of the land. Okay,
Speaker 4: the clubs that were happening and when they were happening,
Speaker 4: because it didn't just like jump from Studio fifty four
Speaker 4: to say, Paradise Grash and Paradise Garage was such a
Speaker 4: different There might have been some overlap, but it was
Speaker 4: a very different vibe, very different crowd. I was not
Speaker 4: a member of Paradise Crash. I did go there on
Speaker 4: many occasions, but you had to it was had to
Speaker 4: reach out to the guy. Was it Richard Brody I
Speaker 4: think was the name of the guy that owned the
Speaker 4: club and get on the guest list for the night
Speaker 4: and all.
Speaker 1: It was too hard to get it.
Speaker 4: Okay, well you had to be a you know, as
Speaker 4: a membership club.
Speaker 2: Question before your record label days, were you seeing any
Speaker 2: bands or artists like forming clubs or were you strictly
Speaker 2: just like a club kid listening to DJs?
Speaker 4: You know, I was actually more interested in the DJs,
Speaker 4: to tell you, and I still am the I mean, yeah,
Speaker 4: I see these shows and everything, but I didn't have
Speaker 4: I never had the same fervor about seeing live concerts
Speaker 4: except for Roxy Music and I'm a rough, total Roxy
Speaker 4: music geek fan. Love Brian Ferry, like going back to
Speaker 4: the mid seventies. But so that was Oh and I
Speaker 4: was also loved to go see Bowie and LaBelle. LaBelle
Speaker 4: was a definitely appointment, you know, that was like a
Speaker 4: big deal to go to Labelle's shows back in the seventies.
Speaker 2: But were you there for their infamous where I think
Speaker 2: they did something at the Lincoln Center where everyone had
Speaker 2: to wear something silver?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, no, no, yes, that was the Chameleon Tour,
Speaker 4: I believe, yes, with all the costumes that were by
Speaker 4: Larry Lagaspi, the Lake Larry Lagaspi, who's being there's a
Speaker 4: big book that Rick Owens is doing a tribute to
Speaker 4: Larry Lagaspy. But this was in I believe seventy six,
Speaker 4: because I think after the Chameleon tour they kind of
Speaker 4: broke up, if I'm yeah, But I was in Chicago
Speaker 4: and me and all my friends, I was hanging out
Speaker 4: with this huge, gay, glamy crowd and we all dressed
Speaker 4: as reptiles to go to the LaBelle concert. And I
Speaker 4: dressed in this green sequined lizard outfit that I put together,
Speaker 4: and actually and all my friends did. I still have
Speaker 4: photos of it, and I was invited to go up
Speaker 4: on stage and dance with Nonah and Sarah, and I
Speaker 4: have the photos of it to I have the receipts.
Speaker 4: But it was it was incredible. I mean this, this
Speaker 4: is when the audience was really at one with the
Speaker 4: LaBelle and you know, people felt that way too about
Speaker 4: going to Bowie and Roxy music. Everyone wanted to dress
Speaker 4: as glamorously as Brian Ferry, you know. So. But but
Speaker 4: I'm not going to be that. I'm not that personally
Speaker 4: to say, oh, yeah, I was at such and such
Speaker 4: you know concert or anything like that.
Speaker 2: Okay, so for you, did you know an immediate sonic
Speaker 2: difference when you were frequenting clubs that were more hip
Speaker 2: hop based and and I mean way before there were
Speaker 2: rap labels or even before your time at your tenure
Speaker 2: at a Tommy Boy. Like if you're seeing like, do
Speaker 2: you remember your first rap club experience pre your record
Speaker 2: label days?
Speaker 4: Hmmm, No, oh I don't, because I think I started.
Speaker 4: I think probably the first club that I recall going
Speaker 4: to was probably Negrill. So it's not like I was,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, I was at Harlem World in seventy nine
Speaker 4: and blah blah. No, it wasn't like that.
Speaker 1: I was is this the Negrill that's on twenty third Street?
Speaker 4: Negrill I think was down on like Second Avenue around
Speaker 4: maybe fourth sixth Street. Lady Blue Freddy was very involved
Speaker 4: in sort of helping, you know, coalesce the uptown downtown
Speaker 4: scenes together. You know, Bam was djaying there and I
Speaker 4: think I think rack Steady performed there. Is it was
Speaker 4: like a small, sort of cramped basement space. It was
Speaker 4: really you know, not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I get it now when people mentioned the Grill.
Speaker 2: Of course, me being an entry in the nineties, I'm
Speaker 2: thinking of the upscale Jamaican restaurant. Yeah, thinking that maybe
Speaker 2: it was once a hip hop club like in the
Speaker 2: eighties or whatever. But I'm realizing that I got fooled.
Speaker 2: So can you tell me how you got pulled into
Speaker 2: the record industry.
Speaker 4: Well, I was waiting take I left my thriving career
Speaker 4: at show World and people in and you know, I
Speaker 4: made this, you know, incredibly brilliant determination that the people
Speaker 4: who I was, you know, the people I was working with,
Speaker 4: the people I was working for and the customers were
Speaker 4: all pretty much a dead end. And I wasn't and
Speaker 4: I wasn't getting any younger. So I started waiting tables,
Speaker 4: ended up working graveyard at a place called the Empire Diner.
Speaker 4: I was living in the Chelsea Hotel. So there's like
Speaker 4: all the bona fides for like, yeah, she checks all
Speaker 4: the boxers late seventies, early eighties. But because I had
Speaker 4: always been such a music fan and I was always like,
Speaker 4: what's that you're playing? What's that you're playing? You know,
Speaker 4: but you know, I loved it, I decided to go
Speaker 4: to this. I heard about something called the New Music Seminar,
Speaker 4: and it was the first conference that Tom Silverman put
Speaker 4: together with his two partners, Mark Josephson and I'm not
Speaker 4: even sure Joel Weber was part of it at that point,
Speaker 4: but it was in a small It was in recording
Speaker 4: studio up in Yorkville. And this was probably nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: or eighty one. So and I, you know, met Tom
Speaker 4: at a pizza place during a break. I said, hey,
Speaker 4: I'm Monica, you know, okay, whatever. And then a guy
Speaker 4: named Bob Pittman was speaking at this conference and he started.
Speaker 4: He announced that there was a new new thing that
Speaker 4: they were about to launch called MTV, and I approached
Speaker 4: him afterwards. I said, oh, man, this sounds great. I
Speaker 4: would love to work for you. He you know, completely
Speaker 4: ignored me. And about a year so I just kept
Speaker 4: waiting tables. And then about a year later I saw
Speaker 4: an ad for a guy, Gal Friday in the Village Voice.
Speaker 4: This is back when people where there were no there
Speaker 4: was no LinkedIn.
Speaker 1: Uh, you had to buy a Village Voice to get
Speaker 1: a job.
Speaker 4: You had to buy the Village Rights or the New
Speaker 4: York Times, you know, and you on the Sunday New
Speaker 4: York Times, you know, and go through all these little,
Speaker 4: you know, mouse type listings, and I saw an ad
Speaker 4: for a guy, Gal Friday for a dance music I
Speaker 4: think it was a dance music publication slash record company.
Speaker 4: I still have the ad. I still have it on
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, a little yellow piece of paper that I
Speaker 4: cut out. I have it in an envelope. And I
Speaker 4: called the number and it was tom and he didn't
Speaker 4: remember me, but I remembered him, and he told me, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know dance music. I have dance music report. I
Speaker 4: just started this label called Tommy Boy. And you know
Speaker 4: this would be to be like my right hand person.
Speaker 4: Blah blah blah, and there were At this point, I
Speaker 4: was actually living in servants quarters up on Upper West Side.
Speaker 4: I was bouncing around a lot of places.
Speaker 2: That's always the top floor of a that's right. I
Speaker 2: was second. I was second. I was seconds away from
Speaker 2: buying a five story house in Harlem in the Heights
Speaker 2: before after Hamilton. Then them prices really jacked up. It
Speaker 2: was like Hamilton's Row and it looked as large as
Speaker 2: like the Huxtables crib in Brooklyn. But you know, the
Speaker 2: basement was tricked out. The first floor, then they had
Speaker 2: the second, fourth, third, fourth, fourth floor, and then on
Speaker 2: the fifth floor that's usually where the maid or the nanny.
Speaker 2: You know, these houses are also hundreds of years old. You
Speaker 2: imagine that's where Yeah, the help, So that kept your legs,
Speaker 2: That at least kept your legs in shafe because you'd
Speaker 2: have to go up five flights of stairs.
Speaker 4: Yes, for these tiny little rooms. It wasn't you know,
Speaker 4: shared bathrooms.
Speaker 6: Whatever.
Speaker 4: It was fine. It was like maybe fifty seventy five
Speaker 4: bucks a week or something. But I had these numerous
Speaker 4: phone calls with Tom trying to convince some way he
Speaker 4: should hire me because I didn't have a college education.
Speaker 4: He did. He's like, well where you know, what have
Speaker 4: you done before? And like, well, you know, I worked
Speaker 4: at peep Land and this was you know, you know,
Speaker 4: And he wasn't thoroughly convinced. But then once he said, well, okay, listen, tomorrow,
Speaker 4: I'm going out to pick up the twelve inches of
Speaker 4: the new Tommy Boy release and you can come. You
Speaker 4: can ride along with me. So I'm like, okay, cool,
Speaker 4: this is my shot. And so I meet up with him.
Speaker 4: He lives in this uh, two bedroom apartment over in Yorkville,
Speaker 4: Let's face it, the heart of exactly the Upper East Side.
Speaker 4: On the fire, he said you know where the mayor's home.
Speaker 1: Is, where York Street starts, Yes.
Speaker 4: York Avenue, right exactly. It's you know. So we drive
Speaker 4: out to Long Island City and his hatchback. I don't
Speaker 4: know if that's a thing, if they even make hatchbacks anymore,
Speaker 4: but it was. We drove out there in his hatchback
Speaker 4: to this uh pressing plant called Apexton, and it was
Speaker 4: owned by these two Polish brothers. And so what they
Speaker 4: do is, when you know, when Tom had ordered a
Speaker 4: pressing if I don't know, a thousand or whatever of
Speaker 4: this record, they wheel them out to the curb in
Speaker 4: fifty count boxes, and you know, Tom opens up the
Speaker 4: back of the hatchback and I started slinging in these
Speaker 4: fifty count boxes. And I'm a girl from Chicago. Man,
Speaker 4: It's like, I'm a big girl from Chicago. I have
Speaker 4: no problem lifting up heavy shit and slinging it. So
Speaker 4: he was like, oh, she got some muscle on her,
Speaker 4: all right, you got the job. So that's how I started.
Speaker 4: But I had to keep waiting on tables when I
Speaker 4: started because I couldn't afford you know, the pay wasn't
Speaker 4: a whole lot. So I was working tables at night
Speaker 4: and working for tom.
Speaker 1: During the day. Was this is this after Planet Rock
Speaker 1: or like what years? No? No?
Speaker 4: Before December of eighty one, I was the first employee.
Speaker 3: Your memory is incredible, Monica inch, I can't even your memories.
Speaker 1: I believed. I love this. This tells me that you
Speaker 1: didn't do much drugs in the eighties, because.
Speaker 4: Oh no, that's not true.
Speaker 1: Do you take me never mind? Usually our guests are like,
Speaker 1: hey man, I don't remember selective member. What you know
Speaker 1: it is?
Speaker 4: You have selective memory about certain things. If you asked
Speaker 4: me other things, I say, I can't remember. But this
Speaker 4: stuff I do remember.
Speaker 2: Was this the jazzy j like funky Sensation era of yes?
Speaker 1: Okay, in fact, it was.
Speaker 4: That's right, That's what it was like exactly. That was
Speaker 4: when I started in December of nineteen eighty one. Tommy
Speaker 4: actually about a week after I started, went away for
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks to Jamaica for an extended vacation
Speaker 4: with his girlfriend, and Jazzy Sensation had just come out, right,
Speaker 4: and so you know, my duties were split between Tommy Boy,
Speaker 4: this fledgling label, Tommy Boy, and Dance Music Report, which
Speaker 4: was which was a disco DJ tip sheet, which I
Speaker 4: don't know if you remember that, but it was an
Speaker 4: important publication in its time. So he went on vacation
Speaker 4: and left me with, you know, my sort of semi
Speaker 4: defined duties, and one of them was, you know, to
Speaker 4: make sure to you know, take the orders for Jesz Sensation,
Speaker 4: and you know, make sure the pressing plant has got
Speaker 4: the records going and all this other stuff. Well, sure enough,
Speaker 4: I took an order from a one stop. I don't
Speaker 4: know if you know what a one stop is. Yes,
Speaker 4: there's a sub category of an independent distributor. And it
Speaker 4: was an account that we didn't weren't open with, and
Speaker 4: so I took an order and then come to find
Speaker 4: out that it was some guy who was a gonif
Speaker 4: and wasn't going to be paying us. And Tom totally
Speaker 4: liked reamed me about that.
Speaker 1: But when you say you mean like some friends of ours.
Speaker 4: Some friends of ours, well, I just bought a hardcover
Speaker 4: copy of The Joys of Yiddish for a friend of
Speaker 4: mine today. Because when you say because I said, I
Speaker 4: said to her, I said, oh, you know this person, bubbah,
Speaker 4: they're great, but they have no rookmonnas. And she said,
Speaker 4: what's rock Munas. I'm like, you've never worked in the
Speaker 4: music industry. You don't know what Ghani or Rochmunnis is
Speaker 4: or you know, oh yeah, so yeah, I mean it
Speaker 4: basically meant the guy wasn't who serve of a thief,
Speaker 4: wasn't planning on paying us.
Speaker 2: In my mind, the difference between Tommy Boy and well,
Speaker 2: I'm saying the hip hop labels that came before it,
Speaker 2: because really we're talking sugar Hill is what I feel
Speaker 2: is notable about those two labels is that you know,
Speaker 2: with enjoy in sugar Hill, I definitely know that, you know,
Speaker 2: Mars Levy had his hands or quote Mars Levy types
Speaker 2: more gangster run era of the music industry.
Speaker 1: How is one able to start.
Speaker 2: A label, an independent label in the early eighties without
Speaker 2: someone trying to muscle you for a piece? Now, even
Speaker 2: though okay, so Jazz's instation wasn't exactly Planet Rock, but
Speaker 2: for our listeners that are are peep in Jesse Sensation
Speaker 2: is a hip hop rendition of gwymccree's sort of timeless
Speaker 2: Can you feel it?
Speaker 1: Can you feel it? Our sensation or jazz sensation?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Right? So, like, are you aware of the strong arm of.
Speaker 2: The connective folks that sugar Hill and Enjoy Records definitely were.
Speaker 4: Uh, you know, that's a good question. Sugar Hill was
Speaker 4: definitely you know, Joe and Sylvia. And there was a
Speaker 4: guy named Maldon who was sort of the other co
Speaker 4: founder of Sugarte Michael No, no, not Michael moll. I
Speaker 4: was like, okay, now this guy was Yugoslavian. He was
Speaker 4: sort of put in thereby Morris Levy to you know,
Speaker 4: make sure the money situation was whatever it was going
Speaker 4: to be. And uh, but but I would say that
Speaker 4: there it was a very much a entrepreneurial cottage industry
Speaker 4: at that point, you know. And I think Enjoy Records
Speaker 4: Bobby Robinson's label is more in that vein. But you
Speaker 4: what you also had. And I just have to give
Speaker 4: a shout out to Corey Robbins because Corey, yes, co
Speaker 4: founder of Profile Records. Corey actually came to the office
Speaker 4: when Tom was away and he just knocked down the
Speaker 4: door and said, hey, I'm Corey. You know I have
Speaker 4: Profile Records. If any if you need anything, if anything
Speaker 4: goes wrong, you have any questions, please feel free to
Speaker 4: get in touch with me. And it's like, wow, thank you,
Speaker 4: I appreciate it because I didn't have a lot of questions.
Speaker 4: But there was this There were labels that were really
Speaker 4: the the you know dance, the post disco dance labels
Speaker 4: like west End and Prelude. Who there. It wasn't so
Speaker 4: much about some sort of cultural bubbling up. It was
Speaker 4: more about what was selling. Okay, cell Cell's over or
Speaker 4: peaked or whatever. So maybe it's you know, Tanya Gardner
Speaker 4: or you know something right exactly things that are bubbling
Speaker 4: up that are more from the street and including hip hop,
Speaker 4: but it was more of a commercial imperative, I think,
Speaker 4: than an artistic decision or a cultural reflection so much.
Speaker 4: And I think the same thing is absolutely true with
Speaker 4: sugar Hill and Enjoy. I mean, you've got you know,
Speaker 4: Bobby Robinson and Joe and Sylvia. I mean look at
Speaker 4: their histories with the labels that they had, so I
Speaker 4: think that they were all these were independent labels owned
Speaker 4: by people who were looking around the landscape and saying
Speaker 4: where can I make money next?
Speaker 2: Okay, so if you're doing jazzy Sensation, assuming that you
Speaker 2: were there for its very first order, how many pieces
Speaker 2: are you ordering and how many like just walk me
Speaker 2: through how does one spread it? So how many go
Speaker 2: to DJs so they can get played? Are you hoping
Speaker 2: that Frankie Crocker plays it so that it might go national?
Speaker 2: And then if it does well? In other words, the
Speaker 2: problem that was presented in Crust Groove, which I forget
Speaker 2: what single it was like they had a single so
Speaker 2: successful that they didn't have enough money to print it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, then yes, yeah, the worst thing that could happen
Speaker 4: to you is a hit like the producers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so let's even though I want you to lead
Speaker 2: up to Planet Rock, I'm certain that that was a
Speaker 2: problem for you guys, because that was a worldwide smash.
Speaker 2: So how do you operate and service the world? And
Speaker 2: how do you know what the world wants? How do
Speaker 2: you know what a local record store in Germany wants?
Speaker 2: How do you know if Doctor Dre or Uncle Jam
Speaker 2: is playing it in la Like?
Speaker 1: How how do you spread the word?
Speaker 2: Like who's the person that you're trying to get this
Speaker 2: record to hoping that it will become a thing.
Speaker 4: Well, listen, back then, it was a very small network.
Speaker 4: And when Jazz Sensation was out, I mean I always
Speaker 4: tell people, you know, Jazz Sensation really was what I
Speaker 4: would call a regional record It was popular in the
Speaker 4: mid Atlantic area. Tommy Boyce certainly didn't have the we
Speaker 4: had not set up sort of a national network, which
Speaker 4: may or may not have even been you know, might
Speaker 4: have made a difference, I don't know. But the thing
Speaker 4: is is that back then there was such a small
Speaker 4: number of people to even go to. You know, we
Speaker 4: were dealing directly with Magic when he was still on
Speaker 4: HBI Wow, you know, Islam Head, Zulu Beats, Supreme Team,
Speaker 4: there was I mean, this is before Red was on Kiss.
Speaker 4: I mean there was you know, a a lot of
Speaker 4: this was through club DJs and to some degree these
Speaker 4: sort of specialty mix shows that were starting to merge,
Speaker 4: some of them on college, college and university stations. But
Speaker 4: at that point, I know you were talking nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 4: it was it's a short window really between Jazzy Sensation
Speaker 4: and Planet Rock. As Planet Rock came out, I think
Speaker 4: it was April of eighty two, so it's a really
Speaker 4: big difference. So you had the independent record stores who
Speaker 4: by the way, you know, I have had a recent
Speaker 4: conversation with someone about this that if there was ever
Speaker 4: a documentary that someone was going to consider doing. I
Speaker 4: think the history of independent record stores, Black independent record
Speaker 4: stores and their role in hip hop and dance music
Speaker 4: as an untold story, But I would say the record
Speaker 4: stores played a big role in spreading the word and
Speaker 4: play the records. The club DJs were more important at
Speaker 4: that point servicing record pools. I mean, I still have.
Speaker 1: About record pools.
Speaker 4: Yes, I still have lists of the record pools and
Speaker 4: the record pool directors and we would keep a running,
Speaker 4: you know, running list of how many members do you
Speaker 4: have and who do you service and blah blah blah,
Speaker 4: So how.
Speaker 2: Many counts do you have to service? How many counts
Speaker 2: do you have to service for a record pool?
Speaker 4: You know, some of these record pools might have like
Speaker 4: the Shore record pool that was run by a guy
Speaker 4: named Bobby Davis up in the Bronx. He'd say, oh,
Speaker 4: you know, one hundred and fifty members, two hundred members,
Speaker 4: or you know, you'd have maybe a Rickets Records out
Speaker 4: in New Jersey and they might have seventy five members,
Speaker 4: or some record pool out on Long Island or you know,
Speaker 4: whatever it was. But you know the thing with the
Speaker 4: record pool directors is that they sort of were had more,
Speaker 4: uh more power than that they did in the in
Speaker 4: the years to come, and then well you have to
Speaker 4: give us full service or nothing, even though.
Speaker 1: I know it's about to happen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of their members would never touch a wrap.
Speaker 1: Record, okay, so they would just sell it.
Speaker 4: So they would sell it or you know, or it
Speaker 4: would just be like, you know, go into the uh
Speaker 4: you know, the vinyl dump or whatever. But it was
Speaker 4: you know, so.
Speaker 2: Is that why sometimes when I get records then they
Speaker 2: have that little uh cut open hole on the top
Speaker 2: left corner. Is that to differentiate a promotional record?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I always wanted to know what that was for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's yeah, they were.
Speaker 1: They were notched a punch hole.
Speaker 4: Okay, like a neutered cat, you know. You know, it's
Speaker 4: a promo, you know, but that didn't necessarily prevent something
Speaker 4: being resold. But you know, it only would resell if
Speaker 4: it was a hit. Who fucking cares if it's not
Speaker 4: a hit record, you know out so you know anyway,
Speaker 4: but it was a small world, you know in New York.
Speaker 4: Uh you know, yeah, you'd want to make sure Chef
Speaker 4: Petty Bone or Sergio Munzubai or the Latin Rascals on
Speaker 4: w k T you or DJ Jose Animal Diaz. You know,
Speaker 4: you had Carlos DeJesus on w K t U Rest
Speaker 4: in Peace. You had Barry Mayo and Tony Humphries over
Speaker 4: Kiss Wow. Barry Mayo still friend, really fantastic guy.
Speaker 2: Very all these guys were DJs first before I got
Speaker 2: to know them as remixers and editors, because you're mentioning
Speaker 2: Tony Humphries and the Latin Rascals and they were actual
Speaker 2: DJs first before.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Tony, Yeah. And Chef Pettybone was very important
Speaker 4: the master mix on Kiss FM, you know so, and yeah,
Speaker 4: of course Frankie. He was always at the top of
Speaker 4: the you know, top of the food chain, you know,
Speaker 4: like if you could get Frankie to play a record,
Speaker 4: you know. And Frankie was someone who I mean I
Speaker 4: knew him and counted him as a friend, as many did.
Speaker 4: But uh, and he was always very interested in what
Speaker 4: was coming up from the street. You see all these
Speaker 4: photos of him hanging in the booth at Paradise Garage
Speaker 4: or whatever. He didn't want to be left behind on
Speaker 4: any of this stuff.
Speaker 2: But it was, uh, you know, one of the original
Speaker 2: human shizan looking over his shoulders trying to copy what
Speaker 2: was he wanted.
Speaker 4: He was very savvy about knowing what was coming up.
Speaker 4: He that was he had to do that, and he
Speaker 4: did it so successfully for so many years. But you know,
Speaker 4: Frankie was Frankie and he was very uh, you know,
Speaker 4: you had to deal with Frankie like, you know, he
Speaker 4: was royalty. He was radio royalty. You know.
Speaker 2: So in order to are you allowed to speak of
Speaker 2: the methods of how you were able to get a
Speaker 2: record played? I would like to think, I mean, I
Speaker 2: would like to think that a song like Planet Rock
Speaker 2: was so futuristic that DJs would naturally be like ya,
Speaker 2: I gotta play this shit. But for an album like that,
Speaker 2: did you have to ensure ways? Like how were rap
Speaker 2: records broken in markets that were unpenatable but you managed
Speaker 2: to get them on anyway?
Speaker 4: Well, that's that's another good question. The answer is, yes,
Speaker 4: we had to take care of business. And I want
Speaker 4: to mention, by the way, since Philly looms so large here,
Speaker 4: that there was a really great remembrance of a guy
Speaker 4: named Snooky Jones in Philadelphia who passed away recently. He
Speaker 4: was a record promoter and there was a there was
Speaker 4: a great remembrance of the scene in the WDAS parking
Speaker 4: lot where Butterball tamp Buro of course reins Supreme, and
Speaker 4: how all the promo guys would pull up on I
Speaker 4: forget what record day was there. I don't know what
Speaker 4: record day was. H let's say it was Monday, doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: They you know, they all be there in the parking lot,
Speaker 4: jammed up waiting for butter to you know, a light
Speaker 4: from his car and get at him about whatever their
Speaker 4: releases were. But the answer, the short answer is yes,
Speaker 4: it doesn't listen. If it was a hit, you definitely
Speaker 4: had to pay, and if it wasn't a hit, you
Speaker 4: could waste a lot of money. But and people were
Speaker 4: happy to take your money. But that doesn't mean you're
Speaker 4: going to get any airplay.
Speaker 1: So what turned out?
Speaker 2: You mean, if it was a hit, as in, if
Speaker 2: it sounded good and you felt it deserved to be
Speaker 2: on the radio, then you determined this is going to
Speaker 2: be a hit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, there's there's there's things that deserve a lot
Speaker 4: of things, but there's but you still had to pay
Speaker 4: to play if you want to. There's one thing to
Speaker 4: get play on a mixed show, or even play or
Speaker 4: as they used to say Daytime, you know, like fact,
Speaker 4: it was like yeah, but you didn't get Daytime, you know,
Speaker 4: But if you wanted that official ad that's getting reported
Speaker 4: to Billboard and R and R and whatever the other
Speaker 4: bibles were at that point, you had to take care
Speaker 4: of business, and we did.
Speaker 1: How Nightmares was the Planet Right experience.
Speaker 4: Well, I would say.
Speaker 1: It was less in terms of demand. In terms of demand, well,
Speaker 1: it was.
Speaker 4: An immediate hit, and it was something that you know,
Speaker 4: of course we weren't necessarily prepared for, but you do
Speaker 4: everything you can. And what we would do is essentially
Speaker 4: get try and get advance payments from distributors in exchange
Speaker 4: for a discounted rate on the units, you know what
Speaker 4: I'm saying. So somebody said, yeah, we'll pay you whatever,
Speaker 4: say twenty five thousand dollars or you know whatever. You know,
Speaker 4: if we pay you up front, can you give us
Speaker 4: this many units at this price as opposed to what
Speaker 4: the regular price was. So those are the type of
Speaker 4: things we had to do to make sure that we
Speaker 4: kept the pressing plant. You know, we were able to
Speaker 4: pay for the pressing and all the other you know, jackets, labels,
Speaker 4: all the other stuff, shipping, you know, all that stuff.
Speaker 2: Well, hopefully by this point, you guys ramped up to
Speaker 2: more than just a two person operation, correct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well that record allowed Tommy Boy to ramp up
Speaker 4: to more than a two person operation. You know, it
Speaker 4: literally exploded. It created opportunities and marketplaces that we didn't
Speaker 4: have at that point because it was because this record
Speaker 4: did go national and it went global, and it was
Speaker 4: the type of record. It's been recounted many times, of course,
Speaker 4: but it was the type of record that really traveled exceptionally. Well, well,
Speaker 4: it was a car record, you know, had that percolating
Speaker 4: melodic sound so automatically you know, California, Florida, Texas, Detroit, Detroit,
Speaker 4: you know, all these places that were not necessarily hip
Speaker 4: hop markets yet that really cracked the code. You know
Speaker 4: in a lot of those places that electro sound. Tommy
Speaker 4: Boys early days, the first wave of success that Tommy
Speaker 4: Boy had was definitely with electro records. It was the
Speaker 4: Arthur Baker John Roby productions with So Soonic Force, Planet Patrol,
Speaker 4: and then of course we got Johnson Crew with Michael
Speaker 4: Johnson and you know, uh, there were that had some
Speaker 4: like Space Pelic was huge, like in Houston, that.
Speaker 1: Was big in LA.
Speaker 2: When I visited family in Pasadena and summer of eighty three,
Speaker 2: they were only playing the Space Cowboy and it was like,
Speaker 2: that's when I realized things were regional because I never
Speaker 2: heard of Space Game.
Speaker 4: It wasn't an East Coast record.
Speaker 2: Well, I knew about Pac Jam, but I definitely didn't
Speaker 2: know about Space Cowboy.
Speaker 4: That's right. That's right, that's right. Because we were like, well,
Speaker 4: why is it big in Houston? And it was like, oh,
Speaker 4: because there's like a big I guess Nasaurs, you know,
Speaker 4: whatever was going on down there. There's a huge space
Speaker 4: thing in Houston. Oh okay, So there was so yeah,
Speaker 4: and some of these things were like that slower sound
Speaker 4: was sort of also, you know, like in the South
Speaker 4: and some places there were just these different vibes and
Speaker 4: cultural geographical differences that you know, you could see with
Speaker 4: some the records. But we had also Globe and whiz
Speaker 4: Kid play that beat, and you know, and with the
Speaker 4: Double Dance Ninsky remix. And I'm probably overlooking some things,
Speaker 4: but there was there was this brief window between say
Speaker 4: late eighty one into maybe eighty four where we had
Speaker 4: this really dominant electro sound and then I think once
Speaker 4: I heard, you know, it's like, oh shit. As soon
Speaker 4: as I heard deaf you know, run DMC, I'm like, okay,
Speaker 4: sea change. And you know Keith LeBlanc, who I'm sure
Speaker 4: you know who he is because it's a fellow drummer.
Speaker 4: You know. He told me a story recently about how
Speaker 4: as part of the sugar Hill Band he remembered traveling
Speaker 4: with sugar Hill Gang and you know, working in the
Speaker 4: studio there on all these records and all this stuff,
Speaker 4: and he said, yeah, you know, I remember one day
Speaker 4: waking up and hearing Planet Rock and saying, I think
Speaker 4: there's a sea change going on here, guys.
Speaker 2: Oh because theyd Scorpio that's right, yup, that's right, you
Speaker 2: grandmassive flats and the few yars five did well?
Speaker 1: Really Keith a plank and.
Speaker 2: Uh uh skip Yeah yeah, Doug, Doug wim bust and
Speaker 2: skip did scorpio?
Speaker 1: I get it?
Speaker 4: Yeah. So from the live thing into like this electro
Speaker 4: thing was a different thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously you maintained the trust of Tom. Did
Speaker 2: you get immediately Helm president or were you head of
Speaker 2: A and R first, or I mean was the position
Speaker 2: real or it was this a title for paper only?
Speaker 4: Look I work my fucking ass off. I did a
Speaker 4: lot of different.
Speaker 2: Things right, And no, no, no, I don't mean in
Speaker 2: a dismissive way, but I mean, like, you guys have
Speaker 2: a real office in a receptionists and oh I.
Speaker 4: Know, well, you know, back then it was like it
Speaker 4: was all these all the labels were just scrappy operations.
Speaker 4: I mean, we didn't have like any fanciness or nothing. Really.
Speaker 4: I tell you, we worked in the second bedroom out
Speaker 4: of Tom's apartment, and then we moved into two different
Speaker 4: basement offices and your and then we moved in above
Speaker 4: the soccer store on First Day Avenue in New Yorkville
Speaker 4: and sort of built it out there, but it was
Speaker 4: never fancy.
Speaker 2: Four some D's made their entry in eighty five, and
Speaker 2: four some D's, I think at the time was way
Speaker 2: different than what you guys were normally associated with. And
Speaker 2: I know Tom's love and history of old school do
Speaker 2: wop music and you know, so basically, you know what boys,
Speaker 2: the men really pulled off successfully in ninety one. I
Speaker 2: mean four some D's was that in terms of the.
Speaker 4: Blueprint for that. You know. The thing is is that
Speaker 4: the four m D's came to us actually through mister Magic.
Speaker 4: The four some D's had been on the scene for
Speaker 4: some time, which I didn't even realize at.
Speaker 1: That as the four Cs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, as a four MCS and Tom loved do wop
Speaker 4: and he starts saw this hip hop do wop group
Speaker 4: in the four MDS. And the woman who was his
Speaker 4: first wife, her name was Robin Halpin and she's very
Speaker 4: very talented jazz musician and she actually uh co wrote
Speaker 4: and produced a lot of those early four MDS records.
Speaker 4: You know, let Me Love Kitchen for a scratch, you know,
Speaker 4: let's not forget they were in that first movie, was
Speaker 4: it Happin? Yeah, they did the record with the Fat Boys. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 4: here I go again, all these really beautiful records. But
Speaker 4: they were the thing with the four m DS. They
Speaker 4: were always pitted against New Edition, and New Edition was
Speaker 4: the group at that point that had the more of
Speaker 4: the female audience that was really sort of going crazy
Speaker 4: for them. But it was always the four m DS
Speaker 4: and New Edition that were sort of going head to
Speaker 4: head in that early sort of boy group uh vocal
Speaker 4: hip hop you know ar you know, R and B thing.
Speaker 4: But the thing, the big turning point for or the
Speaker 4: four MDS and This is a story that I was
Speaker 4: very involved with. Was when Crush Groove was being made.
Speaker 4: One of the producers was my boyfriend at the time.
Speaker 4: His name is Doug McHenry n.
Speaker 1: Yes, Yes, oh word.
Speaker 4: Okay, Yes, and Dog, and I was staying with Dog
Speaker 4: at the Mayflower Hotel while they were doing the film,
Speaker 4: him and his late partner George Jackson.
Speaker 2: George Jackson, George Wait, slight, wait, I can I insert
Speaker 2: one story only mere style.
Speaker 1: You remember the.
Speaker 2: Boom, the internet boom of the early aughts, when everyone
Speaker 2: thought the Internet was going to be like this gold
Speaker 2: mine of a thing, same way that bitcoin is now.
Speaker 2: And we struck a deal to sell Okay player in Yeah,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine, and I believe we broke her to
Speaker 2: deal with George Jackson and the way that I was
Speaker 2: metaphorically burning cigars with one hundred dollar bills like all
Speaker 2: of y'all kiss my ass like I'm about to do
Speaker 2: rich rich rich and Monday. Richard calls me and says,
Speaker 2: deals off. I'm like, what happened? And He's like, George
Speaker 2: Jackson died anyway, I'm sorry Yes with George Jackson.
Speaker 4: Interjection is obviously the art of the of the game here.
Speaker 4: So but anyway, so I was so, I thought, you know,
Speaker 4: here I am, I'm with Doug. I'm dating Doug. It's like,
Speaker 4: you know. And he's like telling me, Yeah, we're doing
Speaker 4: the soundtrack on Warner Brothers for Crush Coove and blah
Speaker 4: blah blah. And I'm like, awesome, let me get a
Speaker 4: slot on there for the four c mgs. You know,
Speaker 4: he says, you know. But New Addition like, ah, sorry,
Speaker 4: you know, you're everything. So I'm like, so, I'm like, really.
Speaker 1: My secret. They did my secret in the movie.
Speaker 4: It was so but here's what happens. So the Crush
Speaker 4: Groove sound track, the movie's getting wrapped up the soundtrack
Speaker 4: because you know, lead times were crazy back then. They
Speaker 4: had to master the soundtrack all this. The deadlines were crazy.
Speaker 4: And then I get this call from Doug and he's like,
Speaker 4: there was supposed to be this big ballad slot on
Speaker 4: the album and it was dedicated to New Edition and
Speaker 4: Jimmy jam and Terry Lewis. When they produced this song
Speaker 4: with New Edition, I'm like, fucking man. And then he
Speaker 4: calls me, he goes, you're not going to believe it.
Speaker 4: New Adition had to pull out because some sort of
Speaker 4: crazy legal issues. They had a lot of problems back
Speaker 4: then New Edition with their management and lawsuits. All this
Speaker 4: shit was going on. So he goes, can you get
Speaker 4: Force mds up to Minneapolis tomorrow? And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 4: what do we gonna do? You know, bla blah blah
Speaker 4: blah blah. Of course it was not exactly the next day,
Speaker 4: but it was within a matter of two or three days,
Speaker 4: and it was like involved calls with Ron Sweeney and
Speaker 4: Jimmy and Terry and all this other stuff, And of
Speaker 4: course the Force mds in there and the father who
Speaker 4: is a manager of Bob Lundi. They get up there,
Speaker 4: they record this record called Tender Love, and it goes
Speaker 4: on the soundtrack at the very last minute, and guess what.
Speaker 4: It's the first top ten pop hit for Jimmy and
Speaker 4: Terry and it was the big lead. It was the
Speaker 4: big smash hit of the album. And it was through
Speaker 4: that that Warner Brothers got interested in doing a deal
Speaker 4: with Tommy Boy.
Speaker 1: At this place.
Speaker 2: Are you shocked that, even though you know, Sylvia Robinson
Speaker 2: was running sugar Able Records or whatnot, were women in
Speaker 2: executive positions.
Speaker 1: Really not a thing?
Speaker 2: And I'm taking it out of hip hop just general
Speaker 2: at labels, Like I know about Sylvia Ron at least her,
Speaker 2: you know, coming up at Atlantic and starting East West,
Speaker 2: and maybe I mean was more.
Speaker 4: At Casablanca before then?
Speaker 2: Well okay, well I knew about Neil Bookgart, but who
Speaker 2: was running who was at Casablanca?
Speaker 4: Well, I believe Sylvia had started that.
Speaker 1: I did not know. Oh wow, all right, we give
Speaker 1: fact check it.
Speaker 4: This is a great, great subject matter, and I'm really
Speaker 4: happy you brought this up because you know, there's a
Speaker 4: lot of women from that early eighties period who didn't
Speaker 4: necessarily get their shine or necessarily get titles. I was.
Speaker 4: I think I was made president in eighty five. I
Speaker 4: still have the press release. And why do I have
Speaker 4: it because I had to write it.
Speaker 1: The It's like writing your own Wikipedia entry.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like, yeah, your president. Now, could you go write
Speaker 4: this up? Yes, okay, fine, so, but yeah, before in
Speaker 4: that early eighties period, I would say that the people
Speaker 4: that really come to my mind is like women who
Speaker 4: were doing a lot in the early hip hop labels
Speaker 4: would be Ann Carly at Jive Records. You know who.
Speaker 4: I actually knew Anne when she was working in the
Speaker 4: New York Office of e G Records. I used to
Speaker 4: harass her for rocks and music tour tickets and that.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 4: There was Jeanine Leclair who was at Next Plateau Records
Speaker 4: that worked with Eddie o'lachlin. There was d D. Joseph
Speaker 4: who worked with at Prism Records, which became you know,
Speaker 4: which began Jill. Of course, there was Sylvia and there
Speaker 4: were others. And I'm really sorry because I should have
Speaker 4: prepared a list for this because it is important and
Speaker 4: there's a lot of people who you know, it was
Speaker 4: a bit later in the eighties when there were more
Speaker 4: women who were getting into the business, but there were
Speaker 4: a lot of women who were in the business then
Speaker 4: and they just didn't necessarily get as much recognition. They
Speaker 4: might have started as eceptionist and became press or promo.
Speaker 4: So there's there's this whole wave of women that were
Speaker 4: part of the even like late seventies and early eighties,
Speaker 4: whose whose names just don't tend to come up as much.
Speaker 4: So much in hip hop has been told and told
Speaker 4: again through books and documentaries and everything, but there's still
Speaker 4: a lot of terrain that hasn't been touched really, So.
Speaker 2: What's the difficulty level of you, like really as far
Speaker 2: as like pounding the desk and demanding that respect, like
Speaker 2: do you have to be tough as nails?
Speaker 1: It was what's old girl from uh who ran book?
Speaker 1: And uh winter? Right?
Speaker 2: And when we have to come do you have to
Speaker 2: run it in a winter style? And you know, no, no,
Speaker 2: well I don't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I know what you're saying. I know what
Speaker 4: you're saying. You know. I get asked a lot over
Speaker 4: the years people said, well, what was it like being
Speaker 4: a woman in the hip hop world? Or what was
Speaker 4: it like being a white woman in the hip hop world?
Speaker 4: And I'm like, my response is usually like, you know what,
Speaker 4: there were so many opportunities for women in the fledgling
Speaker 4: hip hop industry. Again, it was so small back then.
Speaker 4: If I had gone to say, oh, you know Columbia
Speaker 4: Records or Mercury or PolyGram or whatever Warner Brothers, you know,
Speaker 4: and said, hey, you know, I'm looking for a job,
Speaker 4: I would have been lucky to get, you know, be
Speaker 4: the coffee runner for some guy doing mid Atlantic radio promotion. Okay,
Speaker 4: so in hip hop because it was just a small
Speaker 4: little industry and no one was really checking, you know,
Speaker 4: like a lot of women were able to sort of
Speaker 4: get ahead in this business because there wasn't like a precedent.
Speaker 4: It wasn't an old boys network, you know. So it
Speaker 4: was still being It was still being the story was
Speaker 4: being written, and you know, there was a lot of
Speaker 4: of opportunities. Although I will say when I went to
Speaker 4: the first Jack the Rapper Convention, a lot of people
Speaker 4: thought I was hired help for another reason. So, you know,
Speaker 4: the Rapper Convention. That's another documentary.
Speaker 3: Somebody should too, Ah boy tails from the Rap Convention.
Speaker 1: So okay, when when? Okay?
Speaker 2: So in eighty six, when Club Nouveau starts hitting, you know,
Speaker 2: lean on me and jealousy and all that stuff was
Speaker 2: highly it was unescapable. Like by that point, you guys
Speaker 2: are just you know, a force. Was there ever a
Speaker 2: temptation to say leave Tommy Boy? And maybe and I
Speaker 2: don't want to discredit hip hop's you know force or whatnot,
Speaker 2: but in the mind state of eighty seven, did you
Speaker 2: ever have the temptation or did someone from RCA or
Speaker 2: Warner Brothers or quote a legit major label try to
Speaker 2: hold you away and say come work for us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there was a label A and M actually and
Speaker 4: and a and M was a real class operation, you know,
Speaker 4: it was. I mean, there was like and they even
Speaker 4: bought me a plane ticket and put me in a hotel.
Speaker 4: I was like, oh my god, you know, this is
Speaker 4: pretty great, but it didn't happen. I really sort of
Speaker 4: sense that I was better where it was, and it
Speaker 4: turned out to be true, you know, because it was
Speaker 4: towards you know, it was made president I guess eighty five,
Speaker 4: eighty six, I can't remember exactly, but you know, it
Speaker 4: was towards the end, you know, towards the late eighties
Speaker 4: where I really oversaw A and R and the creative
Speaker 4: direction for the label. I was already doing quite a
Speaker 4: bit already in both of those areas. And and also
Speaker 4: you know, in the early days, whether it was collecting
Speaker 4: money from distributors, or putting in pressers with the pressing plant,
Speaker 4: or getting the label copy typed off, or sitting with
Speaker 4: Bambada while he wrote out of special thanks, or creating
Speaker 4: a press list and writing press releases, talking to you
Speaker 4: name it. It's like you got to do a lot of
Speaker 4: different things. But it was, you know, in the late
Speaker 4: eighties where I sort of really I think that was
Speaker 4: a really golden era for Tommy Boy in the late
Speaker 4: eighties and the early nineties.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty eight, you know, for me, at least
Speaker 2: in my life, one of the greatest paradigm shifts that
Speaker 2: really affected. I mean, eighty eight was such a banner year.
Speaker 2: But you sign a group that literally changes the course.
Speaker 1: Of my life.
Speaker 2: And we've had various people involved with day Las Soul projects,
Speaker 2: so we you know, you don't have to go through
Speaker 2: the every day. But what I do want to know
Speaker 2: is who was responsible for the genius marketing of day
Speaker 2: La Soul Because from the from the press photos to
Speaker 2: the fonts to the stickers. You know, for only time
Speaker 2: on life I ever got sent to the principal's office
Speaker 2: was because I put day Lost Soul stickers all over
Speaker 2: my high school.
Speaker 1: Like, so, who was responsible?
Speaker 2: Like what was the brainchild operation of we could make
Speaker 2: these guys bigger than hip hop?
Speaker 1: And I read that hip hop for hippies. Wasn't that
Speaker 1: your ship?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, I was very involved in all of that,
Speaker 4: but it was also there's a lot of people at
Speaker 4: Tommy Boy that I would credit for being a huge
Speaker 4: part of this campaign. I think that it was a
Speaker 4: very critical decision to have the Gray Organization, do the
Speaker 4: all the you know, all of the daisy, the imagery
Speaker 4: for the for the album cover. That was so that
Speaker 4: was I would say such a radical move at that
Speaker 4: point because they basically sort of threw down a gauntlet
Speaker 4: to what the prevailing visual aesthetic was of hip hop.
Speaker 4: And I think it was the type of thing that
Speaker 4: a lot of people were like, what is this? But
Speaker 4: you know, but the thing is before the album, before
Speaker 4: the album, and you saw all those visuals, you know,
Speaker 4: plug TuneIn was a radical record. And I still have
Speaker 4: I still have the demo tape and I still have
Speaker 4: the write up that I did after my meeting with Daddyo,
Speaker 4: And I want to make sure to credit Daddyo because
Speaker 4: it was Daddyo from Stetso Sonic who called me and said, Hey,
Speaker 4: I've got these groups I'm shopping. Can we set up
Speaker 4: a meeting. I'm like, yeah, da, da da, And you
Speaker 4: sat on the phone. There were three groups. Two of
Speaker 4: them were like sort of these more mainstream like Rene
Speaker 4: and angela type of groups or something, and he mentioned, uh,
Speaker 4: Dala Saul. He said, oh, and there's this group that
Speaker 4: Paul's working with called Dela Saul. And I do remember
Speaker 4: thinking that's a really intriguing name. You know what is
Speaker 4: that it didn't sound like a hip hop group, and
Speaker 4: so I met with him and that's in that demo
Speaker 4: tape of Plug Tuning and Freedom, Freedom of Speak. I
Speaker 4: think uh was on the Freedom, yeah, but it was
Speaker 4: the two tracks on the on the one cassette, and
Speaker 4: it was like you immediately knew that it was either
Speaker 4: going to be big or nothing. And that's where I
Speaker 4: think Tommy Boys legacy largely lies with signings that were
Speaker 4: sort of in that category you're gonna love it or
Speaker 4: you're not gonna hate it, but it wasn't in the middle.
Speaker 4: And Dala Soul I think personifies that. And you know,
Speaker 4: the the demo of Plug Tuning sounds pretty much I'm
Speaker 4: pretty sure. I don't think that it was even even mixed,
Speaker 4: you know. I think was an eight track that Paul
Speaker 4: did and I don't think it even went beyond that.
Speaker 4: By the time it was mastered. I think it was
Speaker 4: still like this eight trick demo sounding thing. And we
Speaker 4: had this we did this ad campaign where we got
Speaker 4: all these different people to say, you know, you know
Speaker 4: how it is, you know, like when.
Speaker 1: You know L's mom she was part of it.
Speaker 4: Latifa's mom, the lake Rita Owens. We did we did
Speaker 4: a campaign that I came in for Dala Soul. I
Speaker 4: came in for Patty LaBelle. I came out with Dala Saul.
Speaker 4: We had this one with like some goofy, you know,
Speaker 4: sort of straight looking white guy like you know, I
Speaker 4: came in for I forget it wasn't steely dandy.
Speaker 1: We hung that up in Sam Goodies. I worked at
Speaker 1: Sam Goodies at the time.
Speaker 4: Oh man, well then you know, so this part that
Speaker 4: imaging campaign I think was fantastic. We had a great
Speaker 4: full page ad and billboard that said Dala Gold when
Speaker 4: it went gold. But you know, I think it a
Speaker 4: lot of it sprung from the group itself, because you know,
Speaker 4: I still have and I shared this with Pass actually
Speaker 4: just last week. He sat down in the office and
Speaker 4: with this he has a very distinctive style of cursive
Speaker 4: and he was writing down the history of Dla Soul
Speaker 4: on this notebook paper set, describing who each group member was,
Speaker 4: and he was writing it in day last speak. And
Speaker 4: that was another thing too, because like nobody knew what
Speaker 4: the fuck they were talking about. They had their own language,
Speaker 4: like what are they talk? What what do you mean
Speaker 4: plug tune? And what's that you know? And what is true?
Speaker 4: Guy the dove? You know? What is all this stuff?
Speaker 4: But they but they had a different look, they had
Speaker 4: a different sensibility. So there was a lot there to
Speaker 4: already work with and to sort of get inspired to
Speaker 4: do interesting and creative marketing and motion. Uh, you really
Speaker 4: can't do something unless the something that the project and
Speaker 4: the recordings and the artists that you're working with are
Speaker 4: interesting in and of themselves. You can blow it up
Speaker 4: and magnify it. But if they're not, if it's not
Speaker 4: inherently interesting and great, you can't really do anything. So
Speaker 4: so they really they were like, wow, this group pretty interesting.
Speaker 4: There a lot of people played role. I don't know
Speaker 4: if you know Rod Houston because he's also from from
Speaker 4: from Philadelphia. He's now one of the biggest voice.
Speaker 1: He's huge.
Speaker 4: He's huge, and Rod I still have the copy that
Speaker 4: he wrote up because we did this contest to name
Speaker 4: the sample.
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah, did you.
Speaker 4: Did you enter? I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't know the LIBERACEI or any Yeah I didn't
Speaker 2: know that.
Speaker 4: Yeah we got I still have a lot of the
Speaker 4: entries from the contest that I kept. A lot of
Speaker 4: people thought it was Bobby Bloom and the only person
Speaker 4: who got the who the only person who got it
Speaker 4: right was Joel Weber, as I mentioned to him earlier
Speaker 4: with the Partners in the New Music Seminar, And he's
Speaker 4: the guy who put out He was an A and
Speaker 4: R guy at Fourth and Broadway in Island. He put
Speaker 4: out The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight. And he was the only
Speaker 4: one who identified the invitations right. It's written on the
Speaker 4: wall is the sample right record? So they So there
Speaker 4: was a lot of really great things that sort of
Speaker 4: sprung from the fact that the group themselves were so
Speaker 4: different and so interesting. And I think that that whole
Speaker 4: Daisy age imagery, you know, was certainly a blessing and
Speaker 4: a curse for the group because then they didn't really
Speaker 4: like being named the hippies of hip hop, and you know,
Speaker 4: pushed back against it, you know. But that was that
Speaker 4: album Three Feet High in Rising, you know. And that
Speaker 4: was actually the first project I assigned to Dante. I
Speaker 4: know that the Dante make sure you get to this,
Speaker 4: get the clearances for so and so and so and so,
Speaker 4: But it was the first project that he worked on,
Speaker 4: which was fantastic. He did an amazing job. And Paul,
Speaker 4: of course, you know, yeah from one to ten.
Speaker 2: How much of a headache was the the Flow and
Speaker 2: Eddy situation because of course, uh, Flow and Eddie of
Speaker 2: the Turtles sort of you know, recognizes their sample and
Speaker 2: then you know, we're taught that that was the that
Speaker 2: was the gauntlet moment of rappers clearing samples for you know,
Speaker 2: was it a quick one and done, Oh my bad,
Speaker 2: here's forty thousand bucks, or were they like we wanted
Speaker 2: a billion dollars and you know, this is.
Speaker 4: That's you know, that's another great topic because the Dala
Speaker 4: Saw three feet High and Rising really did become the
Speaker 4: litmus test for a lot of sampling issues, and it
Speaker 4: became the postage for everything that could go wrong is
Speaker 4: all here on one album. And you know, so it
Speaker 4: wasn't just flowin Eddie. You know, I still have the
Speaker 4: letter from MCA Publishing about Steely Dan or by the way,
Speaker 4: they misspelled Donald Faken's name. But it became sort of
Speaker 4: a blessing and a curse. It was, well, I should
Speaker 4: say maybe more of a curse because look at everything
Speaker 4: that the group has had to go through all these years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's problematic now trying to clear these samples again.
Speaker 4: Still yeah. So, but it also became it was certainly
Speaker 4: a news story. I mean, as you Kurt Loder, you know,
Speaker 4: and there was all these like news stories about sampling.
Speaker 4: It became a big thing, you know. And of course,
Speaker 4: you know, uh Danny O Stessisnic addressed this very brilliantly
Speaker 4: and talking all that as one of the best records
Speaker 4: over and but yeah, it was certainly costly. It was
Speaker 4: a distraction. And the thing about it is this, this
Speaker 4: is my takeaway from it, is that at that point
Speaker 4: in nineteen eighty nine, a lot of these rock guys
Speaker 4: were really of the mindset of like they're stealing my
Speaker 4: fucking art, and they weren't down with the hip hop,
Speaker 4: they weren't down with the sampling. They had very closed
Speaker 4: minds about this. There was not a it had not
Speaker 4: been established as a path like oh yeah, okay, we'll
Speaker 4: just get this sample clear like today. I mean, now,
Speaker 4: you know, I think a lot of people maybe avoid
Speaker 4: sampling to a large degree for all the problems and
Speaker 4: costs associated with it.
Speaker 2: But it's ironic to me being as those same guys
Speaker 2: sample old Blues records to create their songs.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, who had these guys who were older rock
Speaker 4: guys with big you know, they had egos and they
Speaker 4: just had they were their mindset was completely divorced from
Speaker 4: hip hop being a cool, interesting thing and oh wow,
Speaker 4: they're taking something I made and doing something cool and
Speaker 4: flipping it. A lot of these guys did not see
Speaker 4: it that way at all.
Speaker 2: Well, now, I know that George Clinton was extremely He
Speaker 2: had gratitude for me, myself and I at least because
Speaker 2: you know, he instantly saw that, okay, this is bringing
Speaker 2: me back clearly to a new audience.
Speaker 4: So well yeah, well yeah, and you also had Westbound
Speaker 4: Records armand Baladian, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Oh jesus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Armond Baladian was was definitely playing ball. I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, he saw that there was money to be
Speaker 4: made in doing sample clearances. So you know what was
Speaker 4: Digital Underground or daylor or whoever it was. He's you know,
Speaker 4: he owned a lot of this stuff, and so he
Speaker 4: wasn't reluctant in the way that a lot of the
Speaker 4: rock guys were about, you know, violating their art. You know,
Speaker 4: it was just it was a different Again, you have
Speaker 4: commerce on the one side, and you've got these guys
Speaker 4: who were like, man, that's you know, don't touch my
Speaker 4: ship man.
Speaker 5: You know, so right, I was gonna ask Monica, what
Speaker 5: is your involvement, if any, with the current Daylight situation
Speaker 5: with trying to get their catalog on to streaming.
Speaker 4: None is my I don't have any involvement in that
Speaker 4: except to be supportive of the group. And you know, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, I occasionally have back and forth with with
Speaker 4: PAS and you know, I have a lot of love
Speaker 4: for those guys, and I hope that you know, they've
Speaker 4: been through a lot. They've been through a lot, so
Speaker 4: but I don't I haven't had any sort of dealings
Speaker 4: with their business.
Speaker 2: I believe our good friend Faith Newman is now at
Speaker 2: the helm of that project and trying to re clear
Speaker 2: the samples and all that stuff.
Speaker 4: I hope for Jail's sake that that comes through.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: I mean, they have it, but you know, now it's
Speaker 2: like they got to do the work and you know,
Speaker 2: find somebody to fund. You know, they're they're doing it,
Speaker 2: but it's just a very slow process, song by song,
Speaker 2: and they want it as they do.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Thank God, I'm so relieved that they're not doing you
Speaker 2: know the sit now where people like redoing their sits
Speaker 2: on iTunes and gagging you with like these kind of
Speaker 2: subpar versions of their so.
Speaker 1: Re records or whatever. I hate that.
Speaker 2: Wait, okay, well I want to give a shout out
Speaker 2: to Dart Adams, who a surefire way to make him
Speaker 2: angry is to acknowledge that Three Feet High and Rising
Speaker 2: came out March third, nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: Dart Adams, I never.
Speaker 2: Met a person more angrier when he's like, it wasn't
Speaker 2: March third, it was February seventh.
Speaker 4: Yes, oh really, see he's thinking of the promo.
Speaker 1: The promoh he.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you just you're about to set Dark
Speaker 2: Eyed using opinions of Monica Lynch are not like.
Speaker 4: No, listen, I say, I have a lot of Tommy
Speaker 4: Boy archival materials. I could probably.
Speaker 2: I'm not saying you can officially tell us when the
Speaker 2: release date was, because I swear to God he makes
Speaker 2: this every March third. He gets mad as shit when
Speaker 2: Pass or any member of Daylight Soul gets the date wrong,
Speaker 2: but he swears to God that like March third. He's like,
Speaker 2: like Wikipedia is wrong, everything's wrong, Like he knows listen.
Speaker 4: I'll just say this. At some point I'll go through
Speaker 4: all go all is if I find anything that might
Speaker 4: have led to his belief photo. The only thing I
Speaker 4: could possibly think is that maybe you know, because again,
Speaker 4: lead times for things like press were significant back then,
Speaker 4: so maybe just maybe there was an advance copy. But
Speaker 4: I don't want to you know, that's not official.
Speaker 2: So I have one quick question about Cessy Sonic now,
Speaker 2: the way that you guys, the way that you guys
Speaker 2: pushed for some ds to be you know, the do
Speaker 2: wop you know hip hop thing in daylight where the
Speaker 2: hippies of hip hop the exception of a brief write
Speaker 2: up and spin like, I felt like not enough was
Speaker 2: done to really drive home, at least of marketing that
Speaker 2: this is a hip hop band.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it wasn't an easy sound.
Speaker 1: And I've never seen them.
Speaker 2: I've never heard stets of Sonic live ever, Like even
Speaker 2: when you re YouTube, no, there's no there's no footage
Speaker 2: of them on YouTube or anything.
Speaker 1: Like I'm taking you guys's word for it.
Speaker 2: That's that's a Sonic live in concert is a band,
Speaker 2: but there's there's no I mean, you know on in
Speaker 2: on Wax, you know besides Bobby Simmons playing drums on stuff,
Speaker 2: and you know, I know they did live stuff on keys,
Speaker 2: but I've just never seen that's a Sonic on stage.
Speaker 2: And there's no footage of them, and they're almost like
Speaker 2: the Harlem Cultural Festival, Like I don't believe it.
Speaker 4: That's that's pretty interesting. I had never really thought about that.
Speaker 4: I didn't go to look, but I mean I'd seen
Speaker 4: them perform live and they were really, you know, fantastic.
Speaker 4: I think the man it was very frustrating because they,
Speaker 4: you know, sets a Sonic as a group, they really
Speaker 4: worked hard and and you know, it was frustrate rating.
Speaker 4: I mean, everyone wants to have big hits, and they
Speaker 4: had some hits, but they weren't on the level that
Speaker 4: is going to push you into a certain territory.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 4: I think talking all that jazz was like a really
Speaker 4: you know, when you look back at the catalog, I
Speaker 4: think that one to me is like and they had,
Speaker 4: you know, Sally was like a record that did really
Speaker 4: well in Florida and other markets. Oh and you know
Speaker 4: Ghostats of Brooklyn, Go Brooklyn. You can't even soon did
Speaker 4: you put Somebody has told me recently said you put
Speaker 4: that record at the Union Square, and that was a
Speaker 4: signal for stick up kids to like get there, get
Speaker 4: the loot, you know, Like that's why I always stood
Speaker 4: near the door at that place. I was like.
Speaker 1: Traumatizing, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 4: So they always got huge respect and they had great records,
Speaker 4: but they they just you know, and it's it's it's
Speaker 4: a frustration even to this day, you know that we
Speaker 4: weren't able to break them out in a Huger way.
Speaker 4: It happens.
Speaker 5: And I was going to ask you, Monica about Shock G.
Speaker 5: I just hate He's someone that we had on our
Speaker 5: list for a long time, but you know, we you know, sadly.
Speaker 1: Didn't get an interview before he passed.
Speaker 5: What was he like just as an artist, as a producer,
Speaker 5: what was it like working with him?
Speaker 4: You know, I've actually just had a long conversation with
Speaker 4: his former manager Atron last night. We stayed lunch. Yeah
Speaker 4: and Shock we used to talk on the phone and
Speaker 4: he Shock was He was incredibly intelligent, so smart, so funny,
Speaker 4: He was very charming. He had an enormous gift as
Speaker 4: a visual artist. You know, I had a lot of
Speaker 4: dealing you know, he was We had a great relationship.
Speaker 4: He would always be very very specific about artwork. I
Speaker 4: have some like layouts that he would send me, these
Speaker 4: rough layouts. You know, this needs to go exactly here.
Speaker 4: This goes exactly here. Because he did all the artwork
Speaker 4: for all the digital Underground releases and even starting with
Speaker 4: the early version of Underwater Rhymes and Life's of Cartoon,
Speaker 4: that the twelve ings that they had before mccola before
Speaker 4: they came to Tommy Boy, but the well T and
Speaker 4: T recordings, the But he was someone who was very deep.
Speaker 4: I spoke with Latifa recently about him too, well, shortly
Speaker 4: after he passed. We spoke about it because she talked
Speaker 4: about how she went on tour with him and they
Speaker 4: would just go to the hotel lobby and he would
Speaker 4: stare just noodling on the piano. He's a great jazz
Speaker 4: musician and she loved jazz and they had a strong
Speaker 4: connection there. He was just he was an artist with
Speaker 4: a capital A, you know, and and you know, obviously
Speaker 4: he brought Tupac. You know, it was largely responsible for
Speaker 4: bringing Tupac into the world as an artist. And yeah,
Speaker 4: really really special guy. I've never met any you know,
Speaker 4: like especially these days where everything marketing beefs seemed to
Speaker 4: be a marketing tool, and there were beefs back then.
Speaker 4: You know, you could look at karras one or you know,
Speaker 4: whatever was going on. There's always some sort of beefs
Speaker 4: going on. But no, with Shock, he was everyone loved him.
Speaker 4: You know, I was tuking to Pete Nice when he
Speaker 4: was traveled with the Third Base with them, and he
Speaker 4: had huge love for him. I don't know, I don't
Speaker 4: know what I can say about shaq g other than
Speaker 4: he was just We'd have late night phone calls with
Speaker 4: him and he could just expound on just about he
Speaker 4: was a guy. He was very cosmic. He was very cosmic.
Speaker 2: So okay, ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you
Speaker 2: guys that we will have a part two with Monica Lynch,
Speaker 2: the legendary Monica Lynch on Quest Loft Supreme.
Speaker 1: This incredible conversation. Uh.
Speaker 2: We will be back in a later episode to talk
Speaker 2: about basically the nineties with Coolio, with k seven LFO,
Speaker 2: with the Rizza.
Speaker 1: Yo.
Speaker 2: There's so much more that that will happen on the
Speaker 2: next episode of Quest lof Supreme.
Speaker 1: Uh. And you will promise to come back with this Monica.
Speaker 4: Correct, absolutely thank you beautiful.
Speaker 2: All right, So in Biabo Sugar Steve and unpaid Bill
Speaker 2: and fon Digelo and layah, this is questo and shout
Speaker 2: out to cousin Jake holding us down on the leads
Speaker 2: and uh you know we will see you on the
Speaker 2: next ground.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much, Happy with Mom.
Speaker 1: What's Love Supreme is a production of iHeart Radio. For
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