Speaker 1: Questlove Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic episode
Speaker 1: was produced by the team at Pandora.
Speaker 2: What's Up, Everybody, It's Sugar Steed from Team Supreme. June
Speaker 2: marks Black Music Month.
Speaker 3: We often speak.
Speaker 2: About it on Questlove Supreme and we've had some of
Speaker 2: the legends responsible.
Speaker 3: For the recognition on the show.
Speaker 2: Every day this June, we are running a different episode
Speaker 2: from the QLs archives to honor the tradition and intent
Speaker 2: of Black Music Month. This week we are focusing on
Speaker 2: some of the great hip hop conversations in the ULS catalog.
Speaker 2: Our leader Questlove has a new book out called hip
Speaker 2: Hop Is History. Check it out at questlove dot com.
Speaker 2: This is a conversation with just Blade, who has been
Speaker 2: a leading hip hop producer in DJA for over twenty
Speaker 2: five years.
Speaker 4: Suprema sub Suck Supremo, roll call Suprema sub sub Suprema,
Speaker 4: roll Suprema Supremo, roll call Suprema So Supremo.
Speaker 1: Roll Quest Love heard stories, Yeah, legends getting busted, Yeah,
Speaker 1: hashtag ass.
Speaker 3: Vaughn Yeah or ass dusted.
Speaker 4: Supremo, roll call Suprema something Supremo, roll.
Speaker 1: Call Fonte's in the building. Yeah, funky rhymes.
Speaker 3: I bust.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you see my friend Just Blaze, Yeah, don't give
Speaker 1: him any dusts.
Speaker 3: Supremo. Roll to hear that.
Speaker 5: Sorry, sure, roll call.
Speaker 2: My name is Sugar, Yeah, Sugar Steve, Yeah, Just Blaze.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no problem, roll call no um on pay bill. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna break it down up. Yeah to Just Blaze.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the NPC four Housing.
Speaker 4: Ro Supremo, Supremo roll call, Supremo Son Something Supremo roll call.
Speaker 3: Boss Bills in the house. Yeah, still broke as a mofo.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but I'm still going to ask just yeah for
Speaker 7: a hookup at Polo.
Speaker 4: Supremo, Supremo roll call, Suprema Suck Sun Supremo roll Call.
Speaker 8: It's like, yeah, oh boy, I'm ready, Yeah for Just Blaze.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's baby roa call Suprema No, Yes, Supremo.
Speaker 4: Roll No years online, Suprema son som roll call.
Speaker 5: My name is just Blaze. Yeah, I'm great, No years,
Speaker 5: no one that I still brock from state to state.
Speaker 9: Wait, roll call, roll call Suprema Son.
Speaker 7: Suprema Ladies and gentlemen, no problem, yeah, Steve.
Speaker 1: Yes, Steve actually came up, like why you said rhythm No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that was your best That was your best rhythm.
Speaker 3: We're all high right now. Thanks, it was amazing.
Speaker 2: I feel bad, he said, no, yeah, and then we
Speaker 2: didn't me to death.
Speaker 5: I didn't. I had a sixteen ready son.
Speaker 3: I didn't realize. Yes, take over the production, but of
Speaker 3: course you have the producer.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Quest Love Supreme only on Pandora.
Speaker 1: Please welcome our guest Justin Blaze. What's your middle name, Gregory?
Speaker 1: Justin Blakey Blakery.
Speaker 5: It's the Weed.
Speaker 1: It's it's Steve, you know, gentlemen, uh one, one of
Speaker 1: my favorite producers, one of the loudest producers, I mean,
Speaker 1: the era of the loudest drums ever. I felt ended
Speaker 1: with just place for real, like bring the drums back, bro.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome just Plaze to the show. Indeed,
Speaker 1: just since you, I feel are like the difference between
Speaker 1: your era production and the era of some guests that
Speaker 1: I've been on the show is I feel like your
Speaker 1: your second generation Renaissance. Okay, So, thus you were a
Speaker 1: fan of the original Renaissance crew, the tips of the
Speaker 1: large professors of the Pete Roxy. You grew up you
Speaker 1: know on their music before you. So thus I feel
Speaker 1: as though that makes you probably a student like a fan.
Speaker 3: You're you're, you're, you're a suit of.
Speaker 1: Renaissance rap, and you know, I feel as though it's
Speaker 1: time for you to let us know what time is.
Speaker 3: Do you guys know what time it is? What it is?
Speaker 6: This time? You do?
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, It's time for another round of.
Speaker 7: Justin Blaze, Sir, tell him what the game?
Speaker 5: You name this?
Speaker 3: Snare? Oh?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: Special edition, special edition. This is scrutinizing, all right, fifteen snares?
Speaker 1: What's this snare? Oh, I'll do it again to name it.
Speaker 3: I can never remember the name of this one either. Yes,
Speaker 3: there you go. What's this.
Speaker 5: Meters again? Oh? I used it on game? Yes, I
Speaker 5: can remember the name of it. But I know the break.
Speaker 5: I've used it the zillion times. No, no, no, I'm tripping.
Speaker 5: I know I've used it. I have the break.
Speaker 3: I just.
Speaker 1: South Side movement say the world. Yes, yes, Joe, yes,
Speaker 1: Joe text Popois to.
Speaker 3: M M. I know that sport, Yes, that was sport
Speaker 3: lightning rod cool mean gang.
Speaker 5: Oh, I know that Hey fellows some people sally so
Speaker 5: that woman man be a man. I didn't I didn't
Speaker 5: even that happened. Just just keep going.
Speaker 3: Now you're gonna get cocky, motherfucker.
Speaker 5: Heads. Yes, God made me.
Speaker 3: The last one. H Actually that's not fair. It is you,
Speaker 3: isn't it.
Speaker 5: I was about to.
Speaker 3: Say this is the one that.
Speaker 5: I say. I just had the song.
Speaker 1: Yes, I inserted myself, as I do with everything in life.
Speaker 1: But I thought, but the thing is it sounds I thought,
Speaker 1: motherfucking no, they wanted to loose me. One of the
Speaker 1: biggest almost near like roots melt down fist fight things
Speaker 1: was that they.
Speaker 5: Meaning not me.
Speaker 1: They wanted to keep the Clyde stubble Field h soul bride.
Speaker 1: But I was like, no, I wrapped uphold and so
Speaker 1: I thought me and Russell Elevado worked on that ship
Speaker 1: for like now.
Speaker 5: You fool me.
Speaker 1: I was always thought that was what that's what that was,
Speaker 1: No man, and I kept doing the roles at the end.
Speaker 1: Let people know it's not I mean gus me. Anyway,
Speaker 1: There's going to be four other rounds of this.
Speaker 5: There's no problem breaking. So I used to win this game.
Speaker 3: I know you, you and I are like this right.
Speaker 5: So, like on the radio, Z one hundred used to
Speaker 5: have a morning show where they used to do exactly this,
Speaker 5: and this was mymas used to drive me the schools
Speaker 5: every morning. We listened to Z one hundred and the
Speaker 5: would play a half of a second of a song
Speaker 5: and we would, you know, in the car amongst ourselves.
Speaker 5: We would play the game every morning. So fast forward
Speaker 5: a little bit later. There was a point where it
Speaker 5: wasn't Hank eleven and Halfpipe, but it was another one
Speaker 5: of the underground radio shows at the time. I was twelve.
Speaker 5: I was eleven, eleven or twelve, and they used to
Speaker 5: do exactly this, and I won six weeks in a
Speaker 5: row because.
Speaker 3: When you guessed the one second.
Speaker 5: Yeah, one second, and it wasn't a stare. It's just
Speaker 5: like they play a second of a song. But I
Speaker 5: was too young to actually win, so my mother used
Speaker 5: to have to accept the prizes for me. So it
Speaker 5: got to the point and then and then mister Magic
Speaker 5: and I was doing it on in show for a while.
Speaker 5: I won that four weeks in a row. It got
Speaker 5: to the point where they were like, justin all right,
Speaker 5: you put your mom on the phone. I want I
Speaker 5: want to set a cold chilling glasses. I want tickets
Speaker 5: to see that R and B group of boys. Wow,
Speaker 5: remember that you might remembered had a song called Rabbit
Speaker 5: stew Yeah, I won that CD just every week for
Speaker 5: like two month straight. I was winning off of doing this.
Speaker 1: I've heard you sell the story before, and that is
Speaker 1: partially the reason why I started bit you guessed, because
Speaker 1: based on you.
Speaker 3: Know, hearing him. Yeah, here is snippets. We'll do more later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm kind of going off off of off script
Speaker 1: more than I normally do. I kind of want to
Speaker 1: continue you and I just came from uh about south
Speaker 1: By Southwest, uh months ago, and I more like weeks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we my fault. You know, time doesn't exist with me,
Speaker 3: that's true. But you.
Speaker 1: So when we were eating you you declared something that
Speaker 1: totally blew my mind.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: There's two teams. There's Team Bizarre Ride to the Far
Speaker 1: Side and Team Lab Cabin. No, no, well team even
Speaker 1: then even then there's a battle, but there's there's Team
Speaker 1: Bizarre Ride to the Far Side versus Team ninety three
Speaker 1: to Infinity.
Speaker 3: Guess what team just plays plays for?
Speaker 5: Hell? Yeah, thank you? Thank you?
Speaker 3: Wait you too? Yeah? Yes, wait you too?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean listen, Bizarre Ride was wait anyone on
Speaker 1: my side?
Speaker 5: I am?
Speaker 8: I mean it doesn't matter because it's me, but I
Speaker 8: am she has to.
Speaker 5: Be on your side. No, no, no, no, I'm never
Speaker 5: on his side.
Speaker 7: I didn't hear Bizarre Right to the Fire Side until
Speaker 7: twenty ten, to be wait, honest, that's seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I know.
Speaker 5: I heard it later than that.
Speaker 1: Really really, you're wait, y'all got something commented you listen
Speaker 1: to it fully as an album for the first Yeah,
Speaker 1: for the first time.
Speaker 5: I heard it for the first time as an album
Speaker 5: when the box set came out.
Speaker 3: When You Get Out, that's when I got it.
Speaker 5: So like for me, I heard, are you motherfucker like.
Speaker 3: The record? Yeah, it wasn't.
Speaker 7: It wasn't that I didn't like this thing I used
Speaker 7: to Well, at the time it came out, I didn't
Speaker 7: have money to buy up everything, and I didn't have
Speaker 7: time to steal everything like I wanted to.
Speaker 3: So, like it was pick and choosing. Far Side just
Speaker 3: wasn't catch up you. You purchased records before you were born.
Speaker 7: Right right, But like Far Side just never. I mean
Speaker 7: I had I had passed me by twelve minutes. That
Speaker 7: was all I really felt like I needed exactly.
Speaker 5: So for me, what it was was I've been jaking
Speaker 5: since I could walk little, whatever money I had went
Speaker 5: to records. I got to pass me by twelve and
Speaker 5: you had to get that as a DJ. Aside from that,
Speaker 5: what was the other single? There was the remix Other
Speaker 5: Fish and I got on the Fish, which and I
Speaker 5: love both of those records. There classic records to me.
Speaker 5: I'll tell you it was two things. A something didn't
Speaker 5: compel me to go halfway with that album. And secondly,
Speaker 5: but neither one of my local record stores had it
Speaker 5: on WAX. I didn't buy some of these and tapes
Speaker 5: Infinity came on had then it was only on one
Speaker 5: as most albums were back then as opposed to double
Speaker 5: a triple vine. So for me that time, by the
Speaker 5: time I got to listen to it, I didn't hear
Speaker 5: it in the era that it mattered. Now. On the
Speaker 5: other hand, it was a whole different animal for me.
Speaker 5: It was dudes that definitely rhyme different, but they still
Speaker 5: had an East Coast sensibility about them, so the beats
Speaker 5: still kind of rock like, even though they're rhyme patterns
Speaker 5: and I did we're different. I'm not saying they didn't.
Speaker 5: I just I didn't have I didn't have access to
Speaker 5: it back then. Right, But now that said Lab Cab
Speaker 5: in California, it's one of the best albums ever, and
Speaker 5: I will argue to death for Lab Cab versus.
Speaker 3: All Right, yeah, Early are born in seventy eight, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: eighty four? Like yeah, Margaret, I'm born in eighty four, Margaret,
Speaker 3: you know that?
Speaker 5: To me, that doesn't really I don't know if that
Speaker 5: plays a factor for me, at least personally, because so
Speaker 5: this morning, I'm talking about records that came out when
Speaker 5: I was four years old and known verbatim. But I
Speaker 5: know him from back then, so it wasn't like I
Speaker 5: missed the just completely missed that error. I just missed
Speaker 5: that album Were.
Speaker 8: You in the Club? Because I think the reason maybe
Speaker 8: it got to me was because I was in the
Speaker 8: club and they were playing in the club in DC,
Speaker 8: Like at ther.
Speaker 3: Were you going to be in the club at ten
Speaker 3: years old?
Speaker 5: It was I was fifteen.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, exclusive, everybody knows that.
Speaker 5: Put on.
Speaker 3: It's weird. I don't like.
Speaker 1: The thing was is that when the Your Mama video
Speaker 1: came out and they played a lot on video music jukebox,
Speaker 1: I kind.
Speaker 3: Of dismissed him. I was like it was slow.
Speaker 1: It was nothing new about substitution that I haven't heard before,
Speaker 1: substitution to break.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 3: But when I heard for Better for Worse, that was
Speaker 3: the one that was.
Speaker 1: That was just a goddamn revelation to me, and I
Speaker 1: told him for Better for Worse was the reason why
Speaker 1: we put Scott Storche in the roots because Richard Nichols's partner,
Speaker 1: aj Sons Simmons, he was our stretch Armstrong and Babeto
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia. So Drexel Radio was where we got our
Speaker 1: real hip hop because by then, like Poara ninety nine
Speaker 1: was just like anti you know, less rap, you know
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. So you know, when he got
Speaker 1: the record, he was like a state of Emergency's like, yo,
Speaker 1: I think we slept on the forest side. You got
Speaker 1: to hear this record, so we like it was dead
Speaker 1: of winter. We got in that car and listened to
Speaker 1: the ship and when for Better for Worse came on,
Speaker 1: like I can only describe it as if you ever
Speaker 1: seen like the Parliament Motor Booty Affair commercial or just
Speaker 1: the color, like the shit sounded like water, and I
Speaker 1: can't explain that. Maybe it's the first time I actually
Speaker 1: heard offender Rhodes up in the mix of it. But
Speaker 1: when I heard that ship, I was like, Yo, this
Speaker 1: ship sounds like water, like we need That's what we needed.
Speaker 3: Our ship.
Speaker 1: And so Richard's like, yo, a white kid living on
Speaker 1: my floor at my house him and then he came
Speaker 1: in next day.
Speaker 3: I was like, can you sound like this?
Speaker 1: And Scott just started playing the Roads and it's like
Speaker 1: you're in the group. Well, yeah, that's where you say that,
Speaker 1: and I'm La Cabin either because I.
Speaker 5: Seem from me, Lab Cabin was more of a revelation
Speaker 5: for me just production wise as well, like, uh, the song,
Speaker 5: the songs were great, but for me, the production on
Speaker 5: that album.
Speaker 1: I'll say when I when I first heard Bullshit was
Speaker 1: that the first time I really heard Dyla. We we
Speaker 1: were doing a show with the Far Side and this
Speaker 1: is when the album just got done, and like when
Speaker 1: Lab Cabin had just got done. Yeah, okay, so like
Speaker 1: we just started. Actually, do you guys have a Cat's
Speaker 1: Cradle the North Carolina and it's in car Bro Okay,
Speaker 1: so the Far Side and Roots are doing a show
Speaker 1: at the Cat's Cradle and whoever was doing like the
Speaker 1: local college nighttime hip hop joint. We opened for the
Speaker 1: Far Side, so they came to scoop me to take
Speaker 1: me to the College station, and I wanted to stay
Speaker 1: just to see Far Sides intro because you know, they
Speaker 1: had one of the best stage shows ever, like the energy.
Speaker 3: There's this four men.
Speaker 1: It was like watching bad brains on stage, Like they
Speaker 1: were just like all over the place crazy.
Speaker 3: And you know, I saw the intro.
Speaker 1: They came out to uh do do uh Ronnie Laws,
Speaker 1: Uh uh yeah, pressure pressure Sensitive is the album, yeah,
Speaker 1: title title wave tight Wave. So they came out to that,
Speaker 1: and I thought, oh, okay, that's that's that's a good intro.
Speaker 1: And then I got in the car, but because the
Speaker 1: door of the club was open, you can hear the vibration,
Speaker 1: you know, you hear the vibration of eight to eight
Speaker 1: outside the club, and dog, all I heard was we
Speaker 1: were literally outside the about to go on the highway.
Speaker 1: But I kept hearing the vibration of Dyla's kick patterns
Speaker 1: and it sounded off and I made them stop the
Speaker 1: car and I ran back to the car the club
Speaker 1: so I can open the door and listen.
Speaker 3: And I was like, yo, it's like a drunk three
Speaker 3: year old.
Speaker 1: Did this shit, and I'm trying to describe to the roots,
Speaker 1: like yo, that new Forest sid song has a kick
Speaker 1: pattern that's like it sounds real messed up. And the
Speaker 1: next night I was like, who did that shit? And
Speaker 1: they explained like this kid named JD and that sound
Speaker 1: like you know.
Speaker 5: They worked on but I was interning. I might have
Speaker 5: been assistant and journalist at that point. They spent some
Speaker 5: time at the Student I used to work at Where
Speaker 5: did You First? At the cutting room and eighty eight
Speaker 5: Keys was working with them at the time. I don't
Speaker 5: know if any of the records actually made that album,
Speaker 5: and he was working on them during that time, so
Speaker 5: a lot of those songs they were bringing up while
Speaker 5: they were in there working. So I would say that
Speaker 5: was probably my first time hero between that and Well,
Speaker 5: I guess no because The Busters the Coming came out
Speaker 5: before that bron But yeah.
Speaker 3: The Coming was ninety six. The Coming was ninety five.
Speaker 3: Ninety five, damn it was ninety five.
Speaker 5: So I want to say the Coman is the first
Speaker 5: time I had heard, but I didn't really know who
Speaker 5: he was or you know.
Speaker 1: I was on Mass he was on Skills first album too.
Speaker 1: What was that ninety six. That was That's the first
Speaker 1: time I can remember hearing him on that album. He
Speaker 1: was on He's on Skills, first album, going down the
Speaker 1: Jam and Skills and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's the third.
Speaker 5: I go back and listening to the album.
Speaker 1: There's actually a song on the coming. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that he did that. The l and that song did. Yes,
Speaker 1: he did. That was back Spin, which one which one
Speaker 1: would keep it moving, Keep moving.
Speaker 5: That was on ram Page's cousin.
Speaker 3: Credits. Yeah, it's credited to the Uma. Really, yes, and
Speaker 3: when you listen to that snare, it's you.
Speaker 5: I'm thinking, I'm thinking of the other posse he cut,
Speaker 5: the Deaf Squad meets Flipbow Squad. That's what I'm thinking of. Okay,
Speaker 5: that was back Spinea.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's it's like I didn't even thought about that.
Speaker 5: I don't even thought about who. For some reason, I
Speaker 5: always assumed that Backspin did that because of the drums. Now,
Speaker 5: but now that you mentioned it, it makes it makes sense.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know that that was he did it,
Speaker 1: Like I overlooked that.
Speaker 3: In my you know what, I hear it all that.
Speaker 1: Right, that there was a Yes, I'm looking for it
Speaker 1: as we speak.
Speaker 3: It's not I'm not just keep it, keep it moving along.
Speaker 3: So you said you were DJing since you were four
Speaker 3: like around that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what was your household like that you had
Speaker 1: access to those records?
Speaker 3: Like, how did you?
Speaker 5: So in my house it was it wasn't just my house,
Speaker 5: but it was my family unit in general, my family
Speaker 5: at the time pretty much all lived in the same city,
Speaker 5: and me being the first baby in the family. Uh,
Speaker 5: you ended spend a lot of time, you know, with
Speaker 5: your relatives, spending the nature big cousins, household weekends and
Speaker 5: things like that. So in my immediate household, my pops,
Speaker 5: uh was a jazz organist, taught himself how to he
Speaker 5: reverse engineered reading music. He knew how to play, but
Speaker 5: didn't know how to read. So he would get the
Speaker 5: sheet music to songs that he knew how to play
Speaker 5: and see what was happening on the paper and then say, oh,
Speaker 5: so when it says this, this is the nope that
Speaker 5: I'm supposed to be playing. So he kind of reverse
Speaker 5: engineered reading music.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: So he always had Casio keyboards and Yamaha keyboards aside
Speaker 5: from his Thomas organ, and you know, he would let
Speaker 5: me play with him and that's kind of where the
Speaker 5: making music bug really first came about, because we had
Speaker 5: like then Casios had uh the drum pattern loops drum, yeah,
Speaker 5: the loops, and you can actually you could you could
Speaker 5: have on the base side you could hit a bass
Speaker 5: note play. So there was that. And then his Thomas
Speaker 5: organ was one of the ones that had the drum
Speaker 5: pads in it, or drum pads on it. They weren't
Speaker 5: there were more like chick lick computer keys and there
Speaker 5: was no sequence there, but you could tap a kick
Speaker 5: a snare how I had and all that, So that
Speaker 5: there was that. And then my aunt was an avid
Speaker 5: collector of like late seventies and early eighties fulk in
Speaker 5: R and B. Spent a lot of the standards, sheryln Earth,
Speaker 5: putting fire and stuff like that. But I used to
Speaker 5: spend a lot of time at her house on the
Speaker 5: weekends as well, and I would just sit there and
Speaker 5: take all her records up the sleeves and have them
Speaker 5: all out on the wood floor. And she was walking
Speaker 5: into the room and be like, what are you doing
Speaker 5: with my records? Like they were out the sleeves just
Speaker 5: and I'm just sliding them across the wood look at yeah,
Speaker 5: look at the LA fascinated bout labels and the covers.
Speaker 5: And then so around that same time, I had an
Speaker 5: older cousin. He's seven or eight years older than me.
Speaker 5: This was right when New York Mixed show became a thing.
Speaker 5: So you had Red Alert and Chuck Chill Out on
Speaker 5: Friday and Saturdays on Kiss and then you have Mister
Speaker 5: Magic and Mollie Maw on UH one on seven on
Speaker 5: Fridays and Saturdays. So he had I might have been
Speaker 5: six ish at the time. He's maybe the twelve ish,
Speaker 5: so he had he had a boombox and his sister
Speaker 5: had a boombox. So on weekends I would stay by
Speaker 5: his house and we would uh listen to both shows
Speaker 5: at the same time and record them and then just
Speaker 5: wear that tape, both of those tapes out for the
Speaker 5: next week. We had no money at the time for
Speaker 5: more cassettes, so we would just record over last weeks show. Eventually,
Speaker 5: you know, I got a little bit older, we started
Speaker 5: archiving things, right, But so I remember like when when
Speaker 5: they premiered Salt and Pepper the Showstop, or when when
Speaker 5: when Red played U Disco three Fat Boys for the
Speaker 5: first time, Like so That's what I'm saying. Like, I
Speaker 5: didn't really miss a lot in terms of their early things.
Speaker 5: I was there for all of that. And what my
Speaker 5: cousin would do. He lived run a corner from a
Speaker 5: record store, So what he would do is he would
Speaker 5: buy all the twelve inches. As they got old and
Speaker 5: the albums would drop, he would give me the twelve inches.
Speaker 5: So like Suckers comes out, and it's like that comes out,
Speaker 5: and then the self titled album comes out, so he
Speaker 5: gives me that single. Who didn't he horn a House
Speaker 5: of Rock comes out? Then their album comes out, he
Speaker 5: gives me that.
Speaker 3: So he would give you the twelve inches because he
Speaker 3: had he had the album, so he's like, I don't
Speaker 3: need the single. He didn't think about it, like it
Speaker 3: plays better as a twelve.
Speaker 5: Inch, you know what I mean. So then and then
Speaker 5: in terms of the actual DJ anything, I'm listening to
Speaker 5: these guys scratch records on the radio and I'm but
Speaker 5: I'm not really sure what it is that they're doing.
Speaker 5: I'm thinking they're taking the needle and rubbering across the
Speaker 5: actual wax. So then we actually we had this conversation
Speaker 5: on our group chat the disco I'm sorry. The Crash
Speaker 5: Crew in Fantasy three both had the same melody as
Speaker 5: first year rocking on the radio, so right, well, Fantasy
Speaker 5: three was first Sylvia heard the melody. Jack didn't ye so,
Speaker 5: but but they came out pretty much back to back.
Speaker 3: So he.
Speaker 5: He had a one time table in his room. He
Speaker 5: plays the trick coman. He's like, you want to see
Speaker 5: me make a record, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: do it. So he plays Fantasy three and then he
Speaker 5: stops it and puts he had the Crash Crew record
Speaker 5: right underneath it, so he took the Fantasy three record
Speaker 5: off and just put the little down the Crash Crew
Speaker 5: and I'm like, oh my god, this was the same mellot.
Speaker 5: I'm thinking he's doing something, not realizing he's just playing
Speaker 5: two songs. But then his older sister had a one
Speaker 5: of those eighty star rack systems, and at the time
Speaker 5: it was a push button operated like the selector input
Speaker 5: selected was a was a Each one had its own
Speaker 5: push button, so you would push a button for cassette,
Speaker 5: push a button for turntable, push a button for radio whatever.
Speaker 5: Long story short, she had two. I want to say
Speaker 5: there were Fisher turntables in there and if you pushed
Speaker 5: a phone on one in PHONEO two they could both
Speaker 5: play together. So he takes he had a copy of Thriller.
Speaker 5: She had a copy of Thriller, so he takes beat It.
Speaker 5: It takes both copies of Beat It and starts one
Speaker 5: right after the other. So it's going boom boom cat
Speaker 5: Gat boom boom got gat boom boom cat Cat boom
Speaker 5: cat cat making the drum stutter. So it was pretty
Speaker 5: much all downhill from there, Like I became obsessed with
Speaker 5: with records and yeah, exactly, and then I would I
Speaker 5: would say, you know, I'm Cassio comes out with the
Speaker 5: s K five, which was liked my no my one
Speaker 5: of my best friends growing up down in Virginia. When
Speaker 5: I used to steal my aunt down there, he had
Speaker 5: a SK one and it was cool, but it was
Speaker 5: still just you put one sound in it, and it
Speaker 5: was that. That was that s K five. You had
Speaker 5: drum pads and four seconds of sampling time. So right
Speaker 5: around that same time, that same summer, actually, I think
Speaker 5: is when my aunt bought me Nations Are Millions, one
Speaker 5: of the only cassettes I've bought because Sam Goodey didn't
Speaker 5: have the vinyl so that Christmas, my best friend's sister
Speaker 5: gets to SK five. We jacked her for it.
Speaker 1: Christmas, I was gonna say, did you steal like records
Speaker 1: or you stole her keyboard?
Speaker 5: NOI stole her s K five, damn. But then I'm
Speaker 5: the reason I bring up Nations Nation the Millions is
Speaker 5: because I'm realizing that these records I'm finding in my
Speaker 5: mother's addict are on this public enemy record, and I'll
Speaker 5: never forget the day I realized that what funky drummer was?
Speaker 5: I found a forty found of a drummer, a funky
Speaker 5: drumber forty five, and.
Speaker 1: You grew up in a funky drummer forty five household?
Speaker 1: Yes yeah, your mom's official.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah yeah, like like all of that, like Isaac
Speaker 5: all pretty much all the breaks, all the commercial but
Speaker 5: not like the stuff that they used to play in
Speaker 5: the park and the stuff he had to date for
Speaker 5: but anything like that was on stacks. James Brown involved,
Speaker 5: Isaac Hayes whatever, all those breaks and she it was
Speaker 5: like three boxes off that I found in the addict
Speaker 5: was when I was When I was young, Attict was
Speaker 5: a forbidden zone. You didn't go up there. Unless you
Speaker 5: had permission from my moms, because it was it wasn't
Speaker 5: a finished attic. It was like stuff everywhere. So I
Speaker 5: but I went up there anyway one day and found
Speaker 5: a box of records. I started bringing the records down
Speaker 5: and I'm realizing, I can make these beats that from
Speaker 5: here on this public Enemy records have the SK five
Speaker 5: and I have these records. And we had a thing
Speaker 5: called the Star Studio, which was it was it was
Speaker 5: a scam. It was basically a double cossette recorder. And
Speaker 5: what it did was it allows you to record to
Speaker 5: the left side of the tape and the right side
Speaker 5: of the tape signal wise independently. Right but true, that's
Speaker 5: two tracks, right, so you can have a song playing
Speaker 5: on one side and then record a vocal to the other.
Speaker 5: I used to make these things on SK five and
Speaker 5: then on the other side, me and my brother would
Speaker 5: rap right. And as you know, I don't know how
Speaker 5: far that to the story you want to go, but
Speaker 5: that was the beginning of me even realizing what making
Speaker 5: music or making beats. You would see that that verage
Speaker 5: you had to do it all. You had to wrap,
Speaker 5: you had to write, you had to break, you had
Speaker 5: to do everything. So it was really all of us
Speaker 5: in our little crew kind of all kind of attempted
Speaker 5: to do all of it, and eventually some of us
Speaker 5: just got better at one specific thing.
Speaker 3: Incidentally, where were you born, Hackensack, New Jersey?
Speaker 5: Okay, but I grew up in Patterson Cool but yeah,
Speaker 5: So it was like for me, I was pretty good
Speaker 5: with the hands of graffiti. I was decent with the
Speaker 5: breakdancing as well. I used to get busy and then
Speaker 5: it was DJing and rapping and making beats, so the
Speaker 5: djang and production things. But I excelled out, excelled at
Speaker 5: the quickest, and my rhyms were decent. But I'll never
Speaker 5: forget the day my brother turned eleven. My cousin has
Speaker 5: taken me to one hundred and twenty Fish Street for
Speaker 5: the first time, so I must have been well, not
Speaker 5: just turned ten, so I think I was twelve. He's
Speaker 5: taken me to go to record shoping one hundred twenty
Speaker 5: fifth for the first time, and I'm playing one of
Speaker 5: our beats on a cassette and we were having a
Speaker 5: rap battle in the back seat with my cousin's driver
Speaker 5: and I rhy and then he rhymed. He sent this
Speaker 5: front that blew me out of the water, blew mine
Speaker 5: out the water, and I hung up the rhymes. After that,
Speaker 5: I just said, right, so what we're gonna do is
Speaker 5: I'm ana beat Pete Rock and you're gonna bcl Smooth.
Speaker 5: And I actually found a demo that we probably made
Speaker 5: when I was like fifteen and he was eleven or
Speaker 5: or about twelve. I posted it on SoundCloud. If you
Speaker 5: look at the picture on it, we think we're Pete
Speaker 5: Rock and seals move when you listen to the beat,
Speaker 5: I'm actually cutting up, just rhyming with BIZ and I'm
Speaker 5: using a I'm using a cannibal alete. I looped up
Speaker 5: a capricorn Capricorn because yeah, you couldn't tell us people
Speaker 5: was in Pete Rock and cel Smooth.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, because you were fourteen by the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, exactly right around like fifteen and shit.
Speaker 3: So weird, man, that's some crazy shit.
Speaker 5: But that was my life period, Like I didn't know
Speaker 5: anything else.
Speaker 1: So when did you get your first drum machine? Like, okay,
Speaker 1: I want to do this right, So I had was
Speaker 1: your machine a choice?
Speaker 5: I had the Roland. Remember they used to make the
Speaker 5: Doctor rhythms, So I had a do R six sixty
Speaker 5: and then Lexicon, you know, Lexicon makes the we verbs
Speaker 5: and the delay unions. They scammed everybody and made it
Speaker 5: called the jam Man, and they marketed it as a
Speaker 5: sampler to make beats on. But what it really was
Speaker 5: was just a delay that you could sink to MIDI.
Speaker 5: So you would put a loop in there to sink
Speaker 5: to middy and you could start and stop it with
Speaker 5: your computer or whatever you were sequencing with, but you
Speaker 5: couldn't say anything with it.
Speaker 3: You can what year does this mean the jam Man?
Speaker 5: Oh maybe ninety two ninety three Bob said something about this.
Speaker 3: It's Bob Power. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I also believe that Marley A. Y the earlier version
Speaker 1: of this, like one of the like even I think
Speaker 1: that nobody beats the bis break.
Speaker 5: He did it through I can sink right. So that
Speaker 5: Christmas that year, whatever year it was, Roland comes up
Speaker 5: with this thing called the JS thirty and it was
Speaker 5: kind of like looking back, it was called the Sampling Workstation.
Speaker 5: Looking back, it was kind of like a very very
Speaker 5: low budget answer to like an npcin kind of thing,
Speaker 5: so relatively relatively little budgets. It was twelve hundred dollars.
Speaker 5: So all I wanted for Christmas was that didn't think
Speaker 5: I would actually get it because it was twelve hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: How much were MPC or like yeah, I was like, yeah, twelve.
Speaker 5: Hundred and twenty four ninety five back then. So I
Speaker 5: skipped the one thing seeing the Soul to Soul video
Speaker 5: and Nelly what's his name, Nell Hooper Hooper is on
Speaker 5: stage and back to life and he's got the Mac
Speaker 5: that's for a keyboard.
Speaker 3: I remember that.
Speaker 5: So that was like and I got we had gotten
Speaker 5: a computer. I used. I used to computer computer program
Speaker 5: as well. My dad was a computer program for a
Speaker 5: living and he was a keyboard just as I. So
Speaker 5: I see Nelly playing the Mac or playing the keyboard
Speaker 5: connected to the Mac, and I'm like, you can make
Speaker 5: music with computers. So beg mom to take me to
Speaker 5: software et cetera. And I walked in and I'm like,
Speaker 5: I need the program to that you make music on
Speaker 5: a computer.
Speaker 1: Wait, I'm like, I'm laughing because of how influential videos are, uh,
Speaker 1: in the life of a kid watching it and then
Speaker 1: you see something that could just be for show because
Speaker 1: you that's it. I watched Prince like do you remember
Speaker 1: the Bad Dance video where he had like the laser
Speaker 1: dis and.
Speaker 3: I Prince got scratching.
Speaker 5: When cdj's came out, that was the first thing I
Speaker 5: thought of, was Prince in the Batdance video. And it
Speaker 5: was in Speaking of which also the very first thing
Speaker 5: that my mom has ever got me. I skipped this
Speaker 5: as well, was the Radio Shack Realistic mixer, the PA mixer.
Speaker 5: It was a four channel with a no fader and
Speaker 5: only had up and down switches. Right, So I see
Speaker 5: Terminator X in the Bring the Noise video and he
Speaker 5: turns out he wasn't even really the guy doing the
Speaker 5: scratches on the records anyway, but he was their show DJ.
Speaker 5: But he's doing in the Bringing Noise video there's appointment
Speaker 5: there on State somewhere and he's back spinning two records
Speaker 5: and he's only using the up and down faders, not
Speaker 5: using the cross fader at all. So I'm thinking at
Speaker 5: the time, as is this impressionable kid Tornadox one of
Speaker 5: the best DJ's ever, These public enemies DJ. He doesn't
Speaker 5: use a cross fader, so the mixed writing is the
Speaker 5: one without the cross fader.
Speaker 3: Oh no.
Speaker 5: Mixer.
Speaker 1: They later added across had cross Face. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Course Love, Supreme and just Plaze. Here is sharing, uh,
Speaker 1: the origin of his story with us and New cross Faders. Hey, actually,
Speaker 1: since we're at it, let's go around to.
Speaker 3: Drum Fields. Are you ready?
Speaker 5: I might not be as good drum now.
Speaker 3: This is easy, okay, come on, Hey.
Speaker 5: What is it? Parliament is the problem to?
Speaker 3: All right, I'll do it right.
Speaker 7: I don't know, Yeah, I've never actually never heard I've
Speaker 7: heard it you Oh well listen. Yeah, I know it's
Speaker 7: from Shake Your but I.
Speaker 5: Never knew what another album I didn't.
Speaker 3: I was lated to that one to actually the producer's dream.
Speaker 5: I know, and I still don't like you play baby.
Speaker 1: I'm all, you're just straight mean potatoes. Be you like
Speaker 1: to mean potatoes? I like the not the gardens on
Speaker 1: the side.
Speaker 5: It's the same, but it's the same story. We'll go
Speaker 5: back to the roll to the second in a nutshell.
Speaker 5: I didn't buy a Poles boutique when it came out
Speaker 5: because I didn't find but.
Speaker 1: I didn't like what's the first thing that lad? I
Speaker 1: thought that ship was kind of corny. I wouldn't.
Speaker 7: I didn't even know that album existed until like maybe
Speaker 7: five years after it came out.
Speaker 3: Really yeah, I feel like it's.
Speaker 5: For me personally. I can listen to it now and
Speaker 5: I understand why it was revolutionary and production. It's not
Speaker 5: in my go to Four of the Beast, these catalogs.
Speaker 3: Ah, I feel that's their being to me artistic. I
Speaker 3: can't even listen to licenses l anymore. This is kind
Speaker 3: of grading.
Speaker 5: Oh, I love I listened to that well.
Speaker 1: I mean, I respect its history, but I mean as
Speaker 1: a guy who lives for record reviews and a guy
Speaker 1: who like wakes up at five am to see what
Speaker 1: Pitchfork gave something some ship like Rolling Stone was my
Speaker 1: Pitchfork as a teenager, and to see those out of
Speaker 1: touch dudes give him a lead review and a four star,
Speaker 1: Like what's the chances of some freddy white boy uh uh,
Speaker 1: mockery hip hop group getting an artistic.
Speaker 3: Come lottery like this, this, this, these accolades.
Speaker 5: So you feel like it was undeserved, many and manufactured.
Speaker 1: I mean I feel, you know, in the in the
Speaker 1: and yeah and the pantheon of of of artistic statements.
Speaker 1: I feel like the Father's nation a million, the sun
Speaker 1: is three fet hot and rising, and the Holy Ghost
Speaker 1: is Paul's boutique for the late eighties. Like those three
Speaker 1: records opened and also subsequently shut shut the door right on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you had to be my age at the time, like
Speaker 1: we weren't expecting an artistic statement from the beastie boys.
Speaker 3: Like I was ready for more, just like you know girls.
Speaker 3: Yeah they're they're brandy mockery hip hop, and I got
Speaker 3: an artistic statement. You know, he slept on it for me.
Speaker 3: It was ill communication. That was the one where I
Speaker 3: was like, I fucked like, that's the one I come
Speaker 3: back to.
Speaker 5: That's when I got back on the train, you know
Speaker 5: your head.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't really on that one. Yeah, they were finding
Speaker 3: themselves on check yea.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I think I thought that there was they
Speaker 5: were discovering something about themselves that wasn't there before. Here's next, LTG.
Speaker 3: Cut cutting it up. I'm actually bad at this. What
Speaker 3: the hell.
Speaker 5: Do you want to play?
Speaker 3: Even like he knows this ship? You better know this ship.
Speaker 3: Oh bust and Loose, Yes, of course I made.
Speaker 5: I never cut that one up. As a kid, you
Speaker 5: ain't into the go go blaze.
Speaker 3: You DJ for old black people, like.
Speaker 5: Busting Loose is still not in my list at all.
Speaker 5: I don't I don't play it.
Speaker 1: You ain't doing barbecue late of course, come on man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 3: But now what is it? Oh shafton Africa, Oh saff Africa.
Speaker 3: Wait one more time? Oh I know what this is?
Speaker 3: Justin blaze? What does this feel?
Speaker 5: It's not the shylight it is okay, I'm not trip
Speaker 5: from the woman.
Speaker 3: Last one cars back guaran Yes, yes, so all right,
Speaker 3: so your.
Speaker 5: First official so the drug you tout the drum machine
Speaker 5: things too, Yes, a s R two.
Speaker 3: What year was this?
Speaker 5: Right after the Wan? Yes, because I want to say
Speaker 5: it was rap Pages did an article on him. There
Speaker 5: was uh, it wasn't a production based article, but they
Speaker 5: didn't get into that. The ten was the keyboard, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: that was no, No, the ten, The ten was a
Speaker 5: keyboard interrat should you either got the keyboard or the
Speaker 5: rat And then the n s R X was the
Speaker 5: npc ST.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So yeah, the a s R ten read an article
Speaker 5: that's what I used, that said, that's what we gotta get.
Speaker 1: The s R ten, I shall say to this day,
Speaker 1: Michael D'Angelo Archer still uses in a s R ten,
Speaker 1: still walks around Steve can verify this.
Speaker 3: I've got some of the floppy disks in my pocket
Speaker 3: right here. He doesn't know, Yeah, Steve uh, Like he
Speaker 3: refuses to move.
Speaker 1: He feels like it will cripple him if he updates machine,
Speaker 1: like if you want something modern, which fontaneasy combusted, have
Speaker 1: any new equipment or it's just that he has some
Speaker 1: updated equipment, Like there's there was one particular there's one
Speaker 1: particular Japanese keyboard company that sends him like some new
Speaker 1: stuff that like he used it on Charade, this keyboard
Speaker 1: that I wish we had. It's like some it's a
Speaker 1: very vintaged Japanese sounding machine that really has some cool
Speaker 1: patches on it. Like his true gift is making patches.
Speaker 1: Like he will sit there like all all all this
Speaker 1: pat sounds like that drippy, wet Klimbu thing.
Speaker 3: Like he takes the clember passed from.
Speaker 1: The a s R and knows exactly how to filter,
Speaker 1: how yeah, how much reverb to put on it, how
Speaker 1: much to.
Speaker 5: Decay And people realize that a SR had one of
Speaker 5: the most advanced effects processors at the time. If you
Speaker 5: ever familiar with the and Sonic DP four that was
Speaker 5: and that was a standard in studios at that time.
Speaker 5: That was the effects section of the a s R
Speaker 5: ten put into an effect shooting.
Speaker 3: Really yep, so the same but just more advanced.
Speaker 5: It was the same exact thing.
Speaker 1: With company that scam and sell you the same ship,
Speaker 1: but you're like cast now busting apple like I mean,
Speaker 1: all they did was add one element and.
Speaker 5: They took it. They made it a rack mount. Actually
Speaker 5: the SR the SR version was the DP two like that.
Speaker 5: That was when they went out of the s R
Speaker 5: made the DP too. Then they doubled it and made
Speaker 5: a version called the DP four. It just gave you
Speaker 5: more effects.
Speaker 1: So as as with most beat makers that I know
Speaker 1: or that are at least from the second generation, like
Speaker 1: some of their favorite things are remaking, like practicing what
Speaker 1: if I made this beat or whatever? Like what was
Speaker 1: the first beat you prat?
Speaker 3: Like, okay, how I don't think.
Speaker 5: I ever did that. The closest I ever got to
Speaker 5: it was using the capricorn loop that Pete used for
Speaker 5: in the house. I didn't but I didn't try to
Speaker 5: remake his beat. I may be using it not for sale,
Speaker 5: but just for what you mean, for I just never
Speaker 5: I never really did that. I don't think I can't remember.
Speaker 5: I can't recall having ever done that once.
Speaker 3: Wow, sockers, because normally that's like the go to practice.
Speaker 5: When I see videos of people remaking my beats like
Speaker 5: on YouTube, and it kind of trips me out, Like,
Speaker 5: but I get it. If you want to get better,
Speaker 5: you want to learn how somebody did something, figure how
Speaker 5: somebody did something.
Speaker 3: You're gonna it's it's like a guitar player learn how
Speaker 3: to play play.
Speaker 5: Standard, yeah, or just a ballplayer who watches, you know, video.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of chefs.
Speaker 1: I know that, like, you know, we'll try to figure
Speaker 1: out like how McDonald's made, you know, the Big Man.
Speaker 5: What I was more concerned about was for me, I think,
Speaker 5: especially in that formative era, it was more so I
Speaker 5: was listening to how the records were engineered and trying
Speaker 5: to because I was working with the ASR ten and
Speaker 5: a four track, or even before that that roll in
Speaker 5: Jams thirty and a four track, and I was just
Speaker 5: trying to figure out, right, I have a drum machine,
Speaker 5: I have the same samples I see equalizes on this
Speaker 5: four track. Why don't my records sound as good as
Speaker 5: the records on the radio. And I'm not understanding the
Speaker 5: concepts of studios and mastering and mastering. I don't understand
Speaker 5: any of that. I'm just like I got I got,
Speaker 5: I got beats, and I got eqs and I got
Speaker 5: a mic. So for me, it was about squeezing whatever
Speaker 5: sound quality I could out of the little bit that
Speaker 5: I had.
Speaker 1: I will say, and a test that probably next to
Speaker 1: doctor Dre who's the cleanest producer that I know, producer
Speaker 1: slash engineer, and maybe the combination of a particular era
Speaker 1: of Tip and Bob and Tim Laith laughing or whatever,
Speaker 1: you have one of the loudest mixes I know, which
Speaker 1: is weird because I know that both you and Kanye
Speaker 1: kind of came up in the Blueprint Battle generation of
Speaker 1: you know, of the jay z era, whereas like twice
Speaker 1: in my DJ career that I've been charged with breaking
Speaker 1: the speaker, it was just Blazo.
Speaker 3: No over Kanye Records.
Speaker 1: Kanye is the only dude like when his product comes out,
Speaker 1: I have to re eat, reconfigure, re eq it like
Speaker 1: almost remastered myself, or turn the mids and the bass
Speaker 1: all the way down.
Speaker 3: Because you know that.
Speaker 5: Study famous changed over the years, because I remember when
Speaker 5: his his focus used to not really be about the
Speaker 5: If you remember a lot of times this drums would
Speaker 5: be really small, and that was one of the things
Speaker 5: that like, he's he's actually to call me about, like
Speaker 5: how do you get your drums to sound like that?
Speaker 5: With the wares were with the bass like, that was
Speaker 5: the thing I remember. I would not get into the specifics,
Speaker 5: but there were times where sometimes that would become an
Speaker 5: issue in the studio where it was like, Yo, the
Speaker 5: track is dope, but the drums seem so small. How
Speaker 5: we get to the sound sound bigger?
Speaker 1: But if you look at the history of hip has
Speaker 1: changed the millions, drums are small as shit, right, And
Speaker 1: then I realized, oh they sacrificed. They have small drums,
Speaker 1: but the noise surrounds it exactly. And so but a
Speaker 1: lot of your production is like your your your accessory
Speaker 1: noises whatever, like uh sirens you use and your snares
Speaker 1: and your loops and the voice like everything is at
Speaker 1: top level lout, but it never it never peaks, like
Speaker 1: how do you well.
Speaker 5: One thing that uh like that I would always try
Speaker 5: to do is fun make sure that each each element
Speaker 5: of the song has its own space, and sometimes you
Speaker 5: have you can't just do that with pushing the faders
Speaker 5: of any killing, there's dynamics that come into play too,
Speaker 5: because I still like to leave headroom at least so
Speaker 5: that even if you're blasting it, it still doesn't feel
Speaker 5: like it's overpowered still much. Right, So I'll give you
Speaker 5: a perfect example. You don't know, those horns are so
Speaker 5: shrill and loud, and Jay has that kind of nasally
Speaker 5: tone to his voice, so those those horns and those
Speaker 5: and his vocals kind of sit in the same frequency range.
Speaker 5: So we did on that record was we used his
Speaker 5: vocal as a side chain to trigger a compressor on
Speaker 5: a certain frequency of the horns, so that whenever he
Speaker 5: runs it would it would duck that just that part
Speaker 5: of the frequency on the horns. And then when he
Speaker 5: wasn't rhyming, the horns were coming coming full.
Speaker 3: A certain compression, right, And that's where compression works for you, right.
Speaker 5: And it's it's not like it wasn't a matter of
Speaker 5: making the horns louder or lower. It was a matter
Speaker 5: of when that frequent his voice is hitting, make sure
Speaker 5: that frequency itself is ducked on the horns.
Speaker 1: So when you when you create a track like that,
Speaker 1: it was all right, when I first heard it, that
Speaker 1: was a hard song for me to digest. I almost
Speaker 1: think it's a good thing when like you're uncomfortable with
Speaker 1: something because it's so new to you. Like first time
Speaker 1: I Rebel without pause is like, Yo, what the hell
Speaker 1: is this? And especially in light of hearing that record
Speaker 1: during nine to eleven and all that stuff, when I
Speaker 1: heard it, I just thought, you remember the scene in
Speaker 1: Casino where Joe Pesci is like, don't make me do
Speaker 1: this though, and he's like squeezing the dude's uh.
Speaker 3: The vice. I always imagine that you don't know by
Speaker 3: jay Z was.
Speaker 1: That was the soundtrack to the Ship, Like it sounded
Speaker 1: like someone's being squeezed, and like, was that your intention?
Speaker 5: Nah? For me, it was just like at that time,
Speaker 5: it was just energy. That is what I was trying
Speaker 5: to get across really more so than anything else. It's
Speaker 5: funny sometimes if you remember, he used to performance sometimes
Speaker 5: and he would have the flames in the background, Like
Speaker 5: that's when I was inventioning that moment. A lot of
Speaker 5: those records, especially during that era and it's still even
Speaker 5: to this day, but especially that era, I was thinking
Speaker 5: in terms of performance.
Speaker 3: You're seeing the final product in the stadium.
Speaker 5: And exactly so I'm seeing like that moment, or I'm
Speaker 5: seeing when he's doing song Crid and it's just the
Speaker 5: whole stage is black and it's just the spotlight on
Speaker 5: him and he's telling that story and a little by
Speaker 5: little the maybe some imagery in the background on the screens.
Speaker 5: I would always think in terms of performance, that's why
Speaker 5: I showed me what you got is the way it is,
Speaker 5: and why climax is at the end, because that was
Speaker 5: supposed to be the record. After he does corn walks
Speaker 5: off the stage, then he comes back with just and
Speaker 5: it's not a beat, it's just And by the end,
Speaker 5: everybody's soloing. The drummer's doing his thing, the basis is
Speaker 5: doing his thing, the guitar players with the key up
Speaker 5: that that's why that record is like that.
Speaker 3: So did it frustrate you that that song came so
Speaker 3: early and not later in the sequence.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a little bit, but it should have been something
Speaker 5: towards the end of the album more so than at
Speaker 5: the top. But the way it starts is also good.
Speaker 5: But us to have at the top of a project.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, in in the case of I
Speaker 1: mean illmatic kind of ruined the the idea of one
Speaker 1: person watching everything so on on an album like The Blueprint,
Speaker 1: which is essentially an illmatic on its own.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean it's you, Kanye, Timberland, Scott, uh, who else? Bink?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: So who really gets final say on? Like, well, it's
Speaker 1: just start here, like who has his ear as in
Speaker 1: let me sequence this?
Speaker 5: At that time, I would say a lot of that
Speaker 5: would probably have been because Gool wasn't around, was cool around,
Speaker 5: you know, Chauncy was done after the Dynasty album?
Speaker 7: Or who was engineering? I remember the Chauncy story. Well,
Speaker 7: there's many of those, the one with the up a
Speaker 7: tape or something.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of things. And then he tried to
Speaker 5: sue Yes, yes, a couple of years ago for seventy
Speaker 5: five million for a whole I don't know what the
Speaker 5: number was. Chauncey was the engineer on the Dynasty, the
Speaker 5: Dynasty album, maybe some of Volume three. Okay, that's a
Speaker 5: whole other set of stories. I figure what it was.
Speaker 5: But basically he had a bunch of copies of the
Speaker 5: Masters and had been storing them at a storage space
Speaker 5: in la I think it was Key in California. For
Speaker 5: since he got fired, which was after the Dynasty album,
Speaker 5: and then came back and tried to sue j for
Speaker 5: a bunch of Oh no, he tried to claim ownership
Speaker 5: partial ownership of publishing and masters.
Speaker 3: Why did he get fired?
Speaker 5: He just kept messing up badly.
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, how do you know this?
Speaker 10: I think he told the story, told stories on Twitter,
Speaker 10: because when it came out that he was trying to
Speaker 10: take action, I was like, oh no, no, no, let
Speaker 10: me set a few things straight here, like he was
Speaker 10: not writing anything.
Speaker 5: He was not. He wasn't He doesn't own the masters.
Speaker 5: I actually have a lot of the Masters myself. He
Speaker 5: might have had copies or clones because that was right
Speaker 5: when we were we were doing the hybrid of two
Speaker 5: inch to in digital, so a lot of stuff was
Speaker 5: getting bounced back and forth. It was just a mess,
Speaker 5: and he was really trying to portray it like he
Speaker 5: was the driving force behind the sound of Rockefeller for
Speaker 5: some years, and he was not. He's actually the reason
Speaker 5: why a lot of records have mistakes on him. Do
Speaker 5: this go back to the Dynasty album. Listen to get
Speaker 5: your mind right.
Speaker 3: Right, that's the one that because of him.
Speaker 5: No, no, that's no, it is that your chick is
Speaker 5: in a mono because of it.
Speaker 3: Whoa to the beat?
Speaker 5: Listen to the beat? Hold up, no, but is uh
Speaker 5: what was I saying? Oh yeah, listen to get your
Speaker 5: mind right. You'll notice the chorus is performed differently every time.
Speaker 5: Sometimes it starts, yeah, you're not a fly. Fly the hooks.
Speaker 5: So really there's three hooks. Each one falls in a
Speaker 5: different place. Same thing with can't be life. Listen it
Speaker 5: can't be life. Go back and listen to that record
Speaker 5: with that in mind, you'll see that the hooks don't
Speaker 5: fall in the same place every time. So it was
Speaker 5: things like that, and then he you know, back then
Speaker 5: he used to have the slave two inch wheels together,
Speaker 5: so if you have forty eight tractionally slave two machines together.
Speaker 5: We were doing stuff from pro tools and the dumping
Speaker 5: into real to mix from real. Duros getting the tapes
Speaker 5: because he was mixing that soundtrack where we were finishing
Speaker 5: at baseline, and every set of reels that got that
Speaker 5: Durro got, the sink was off, so like none of
Speaker 5: the reels were coming back SYNCD up. So he put
Speaker 5: the two tapes up and he used to be playing
Speaker 5: a lot of sink.
Speaker 11: And and.
Speaker 5: And eventually it came to eventually it almost came their
Speaker 5: hands at one point because Daryl told about himself and
Speaker 5: uh dar wants to tell so I'll let him do it.
Speaker 5: But yes, Droyl told about himself on the phone, very
Speaker 5: matter of fact. He didn't you didn't. He didn't flip
Speaker 5: on him. He just told him about himself and hung
Speaker 5: up the phone. Charles, you come to deliver and delivers
Speaker 5: the tapes and it is ready to scrap and it
Speaker 5: didn't happen. And I'm just sitting there in the room
Speaker 5: like whoa. That escalated very quickly. It got shut down
Speaker 5: as quickly as it happened.
Speaker 3: But but and how does that translate to a guy
Speaker 3: like Jay.
Speaker 1: Jay's like one of those guys that, to me, like
Speaker 1: doesn't care how something happened.
Speaker 3: So of course he's gonna look at you like, well,
Speaker 3: you're fucking up right.
Speaker 1: And because he's looking at how do you explain to
Speaker 1: him that, like, look, he didn't line it right and
Speaker 1: this is not my fault.
Speaker 3: And I'm trying to maguyver.
Speaker 5: I think we kept j out of it a lot.
Speaker 5: He was aware that things weren't right, but he wasn't
Speaker 5: really getting to the specific because we were getting handled
Speaker 5: between me Guru and Duro. You know, we were making
Speaker 5: sure that he got handled regardless. So he might have
Speaker 5: known that there were problems, but it didn't get to
Speaker 5: the point I didn't get back to him to the
Speaker 5: point where he felt like he had to address or intervene.
Speaker 3: Well, it was the person that had to lay this
Speaker 3: the SmackDown, say oh, you're fired.
Speaker 5: That might have been hip hop. Maybe Okay, it might
Speaker 5: have been a hip hop because the thing is, Chelsey
Speaker 5: liked that all that stuff aside. I liked him as
Speaker 5: a person, and he and I got along, and he
Speaker 5: and hip hop got along very well as well. So
Speaker 5: I want to say it was hip hop. I probably
Speaker 5: had to have that conversation with him. But how do
Speaker 5: we get here?
Speaker 3: I'm kind of fault, We're kind of we're kind of
Speaker 3: asked backwards? Isn't this? So? I noticed that every major
Speaker 3: producer that gets put on has.
Speaker 1: To go through the initiation of getting ganked first, like
Speaker 1: going under the tutelage of someone never happened.
Speaker 3: You didn't apprentice under any.
Speaker 5: Never by o g's by teachers. But people who put
Speaker 5: me on were the DJs and producers that I group
Speaker 5: listening to you like that was school for me. I didn't,
Speaker 5: I can't.
Speaker 3: I moved first, but you want so I moved you up.
Speaker 5: With forty hours in my pocket, literally at forty dollars.
Speaker 1: When you said that, I heard the introduction of welcome
Speaker 1: to the jungle in my no no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no no, him walking on like forty second street
Speaker 1: like looking up.
Speaker 6: So my uh.
Speaker 5: You know my old manager, Nesa, she was We know
Speaker 5: each other since high school. She went to n y
Speaker 5: U uh got got She got an internship with the
Speaker 5: cutting room, ended up becoming like the studio manager. Gave
Speaker 5: me a shot at the internship for a week, but
Speaker 5: she was kind of close to managing the studio with Dave,
Speaker 5: the dude that owned it. I always wanted to intern,
Speaker 5: but I was in school. She didn't want to just
Speaker 5: bring me in like that out of nowhere. You remember
Speaker 5: that girl Jane Doe tip short blond here. Jane was
Speaker 5: an intern. She gets the stomach flu. This is during
Speaker 5: my winter break from Rutgers. So NASA calls me and
Speaker 5: she's like, yo, so what if our interns is sick?
Speaker 5: Do you want to come intern for a week? Because
Speaker 5: she's to be able to stomach flu. So I'm like, sure,
Speaker 5: the opportunity of a lifetime for me, I come do
Speaker 5: that week. Jane calls the following Monday. I just I
Speaker 5: just got signed to em I I'm not coming back,
Speaker 5: So they are you want to stick around for a while.
Speaker 5: I'm like all right, cool. So it was kind of
Speaker 5: supposed to be a temporary winner break kind of thing,
Speaker 5: and then the night manager ended up getting fired for
Speaker 5: some just some mother some nonsense, so they needed somebody
Speaker 5: to take that position. They needed a night manager.
Speaker 3: They need, like right away, where is the cutting room located?
Speaker 3: I feel like it was right.
Speaker 5: Next door to Platinum Island and Rockers, So six seventy
Speaker 5: eight Broadway.
Speaker 3: Okay, we did cut there.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm trying to figure out, like where that's my
Speaker 1: Ladelph half life location.
Speaker 3: That's where do well?
Speaker 5: No door was that Platinum Island next door? You guys
Speaker 5: worked at Platinum Mountain, all right, okay, and so Dory,
Speaker 5: your door was that Platinum Oultin. I was next door
Speaker 5: at the cutting room. So night manager gets fired. They
Speaker 5: come to me ask me if I want the job.
Speaker 5: I'm like all right, that means I gotta leave school. Basically,
Speaker 5: you know, I want to say I was two and
Speaker 5: a half years and I was studying computer programming. I
Speaker 5: wasn't really happy though at the same I wasn't happy
Speaker 5: in school. At the same time, I'm I'm at Rutgers,
Speaker 5: so I'm in Newark a lot. So I'm like finding
Speaker 5: my way into DJing at open mics and baby play
Speaker 5: my beats at open mics, and dudes like the artifacts
Speaker 5: are showing up. Bradman came through once or twice outside
Speaker 5: as well, there or a lot. It was a spot
Speaker 5: called the Pipeline, was the open mic that did on Wednesdays.
Speaker 5: So that era where it was like, I'm not really
Speaker 5: happy with school. Rutgers had just hired a bunch of
Speaker 5: foreign professors and no disrespect to them by any means,
Speaker 5: but their accents were so heavy none of us could
Speaker 5: understand what they were saying in the classes. So you're
Speaker 5: sitting there like and you're studying complex things like Calculus
Speaker 5: three and you know, in computer programming, and the dude,
Speaker 5: this one dude African guy, we will all just sit
Speaker 5: there and look at each other in the class like
Speaker 5: what he's saying at all? And then it was an
Speaker 5: Irish dude whose accent was also so heavy, Like so
Speaker 5: I'm getting discouraged by school. I'm starting to do these
Speaker 5: open mics because I'm meeting people locally in NewYork, and
Speaker 5: it started to become more human to me. Up until
Speaker 5: that point, everything that I had done was kind of
Speaker 5: in my own world, you know, with my friends, my
Speaker 5: local friends, DJing. I'm DJing little things here and there,
Speaker 5: you know, in my city, of becoming the man in
Speaker 5: my city, but nothing outside of that DJ just you know,
Speaker 5: so I'm selling local mixtapes. They're starting to make a
Speaker 5: little bit of noise. I'm kind of known as the
Speaker 5: dude on my side of town. But you know, in
Speaker 5: that era especially, you have a lot of dudes that
Speaker 5: sell dreams, you know, especially the young kids. Like I
Speaker 5: remember going to this one dude's house who was actually
Speaker 5: an old friend of ours. I didn't know that anybody
Speaker 5: could just call the record and get a press kid, right,
Speaker 5: So he's walking around talking about how I can't hang
Speaker 5: with Puffy, that he drink too much baileies, like that
Speaker 5: was just his thing. I'm hanging with this drink and
Speaker 5: I'll go to his house and he would have all
Speaker 5: these what I found out brivalized years later were press kids.
Speaker 5: But he would have all these folders sitting out across
Speaker 5: the table with the logos and our artist pictures and bios.
Speaker 5: But it's all just press kids, like anybody can get them.
Speaker 5: But he was making it seem like he was working
Speaker 5: with all of these artists. And you see the logos,
Speaker 5: you're like bad Boy or Arista Uptown whatever. Right, so,
Speaker 5: and there was another dude name Peter Pan. Yeah so,
Speaker 5: but so anyway, just point is this, It wasn't really real, right,
Speaker 5: you know, at that point. And then I'm just trying
Speaker 5: to catch all the important parts being in Rutgers and
Speaker 5: then being in subsequently being in Newark, and I'm seeing
Speaker 5: dudes like the Outsiders, dudes like like the Artifacts. This
Speaker 5: is when Jersey Raps popping the first wave of it,
Speaker 5: you know, like kind of like righte like post Flavor, Yeah,
Speaker 5: exactly like them used to show up. And I remember
Speaker 5: being there one day and one of the dudes, young
Speaker 5: Z and Rod Digger are on stage raym and none
Speaker 5: of them know who I am. I'm playing beats in
Speaker 5: between the intermissions.
Speaker 3: How are you playing beats without the technology of the
Speaker 3: being invented?
Speaker 5: Yeah, we just had tapes, had the beats on tapes.
Speaker 5: So I'm DJing, but I'm also just playing tapes, and
Speaker 5: that was I was playing tapes during intermissions. So I'm
Speaker 5: playing a beat and I remember Z was like, I
Speaker 5: went to put a record on Framing Roan two and
Speaker 5: he was like, no, put that on the beat, put
Speaker 5: that beat back over. Whatever that beat was that was
Speaker 5: just playing, And I was like, it became real in
Speaker 5: that moment, Like somebody who has a record deal, whose
Speaker 5: records I have bought, an established artist, wants to rhyme
Speaker 5: on something that I made. It's not my homie from
Speaker 5: down the block. It's not a dude I go to
Speaker 5: school with. And on top of that, it became a
Speaker 5: human because up until this point, all these guys were
Speaker 5: guys you see on TV, you hear them on the radio,
Speaker 5: you buy the records, you study their album covers. You know,
Speaker 5: I'm an album art geague. So that's where these guys
Speaker 5: lived in those boxes. All of a sudden, he's a
Speaker 5: human being and he's you know, it's a real thing.
Speaker 5: It became tangible in that moment. So around that same time,
Speaker 5: another guy that I went to college with had a
Speaker 5: local crew called a BHA and they were making a
Speaker 5: little indie records here right there, and I started hanging
Speaker 5: with you know, running with them a bit, and from
Speaker 5: that point on it just became more human. So this
Speaker 5: is right at that same time when Jane Doe uh
Speaker 5: leaves leaves, I get the internship. I then become the Nightmare.
Speaker 5: And another thing I actually ended up right when Steaks
Speaker 5: Is High. Chemist Steaks Is High was MOS's premiere, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: big Brother Bik, it was right. So I'm doing an
Speaker 5: open mic I think in East Orange. Rod Digga had
Speaker 5: signed to at one point to violate it through Q
Speaker 5: tip and a kid called Roots was doing her demo
Speaker 5: and and oh I just caught that. So yeah, kid
Speaker 5: called Roots is doing her demo and it just and
Speaker 5: this was maybe like my second week, you no, maybe
Speaker 5: I've been there for about a month or so. I'm
Speaker 5: dj ning an open mic in East Orange. Digger shows
Speaker 5: up and I never spoke to her during that time,
Speaker 5: and I just slip the open mics right previously when
Speaker 5: I was in college. So she comes, she's like, I
Speaker 5: recognized you. Wrestling was somewhere. I didn't even gonna get
Speaker 5: it at the studio when you were working with Q
Speaker 5: Tip whatever whatever. So we have a little conversation and
Speaker 5: then most just walks in and does big Brother beat,
Speaker 5: and then I play a beat. He's like anybody out
Speaker 5: of beats. I played cassette. He rhymes on that. So
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, it was like just it wasn't
Speaker 5: happening on records, but was just happening organically.
Speaker 3: So just it was kind of like, so, when was
Speaker 3: your first beat that you landed?
Speaker 5: No mace, like my first real beat for that that
Speaker 5: anybody ever bought. I gotta check what song I really
Speaker 5: like it, the one when they get shot out of
Speaker 5: the cannons, Blinky blink, blinky blink.
Speaker 3: It was only.
Speaker 5: So what happens is at this point, I'm working studio
Speaker 5: for maybe about a year and a half, two years,
Speaker 5: and I'm starting to thinking, all right, things are happening,
Speaker 5: but they're not I'm not making any money. I should
Speaker 5: probably maybe start considering going back and just finishing my
Speaker 5: last couple of specials at school. Whatever. So one of
Speaker 5: the things that I used to do, because I'm not
Speaker 5: a good salesman, I like to sell myself. So what
Speaker 5: I would do is when I would get off work.
Speaker 5: I would just go to whatever room was available, make beats,
Speaker 5: work on records, and leave the door crack so people
Speaker 5: would just walk past and hopefully be like what is that?
Speaker 5: So whatever, it would have happened here and there. You know,
Speaker 5: nothing ever, really uh came about from it. I developed
Speaker 5: a few friendships with some A and rs and a
Speaker 5: couple of artists that way, but nothing ever came out
Speaker 5: of it. But then one day, Mace is working in
Speaker 5: the next room. They're sequencing a sampler. I forget what
Speaker 5: it was, a bad Boy sampler or something, and he
Speaker 5: had to fix something on it. So I'm making sure
Speaker 5: to play my music extra loud because they were floating
Speaker 5: right in the hallways. So this dude comes to pokes
Speaker 5: his head the room and he's like, what's that And
Speaker 5: I'm saying, that's just something I'm working on. He's like,
Speaker 5: who are you? My name is just just what just just?
Speaker 5: Your name is just just And I was like, no,
Speaker 5: it's just just My name is Justin. So he's like,
Speaker 5: all right, blame me some more beats. So I blamed
Speaker 5: some beats. I don't know who he is. I just
Speaker 5: knew he's connected to them somehow. So you know how
Speaker 5: Mace used to always reference to a kudahudah love.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So this was coolest partner, the cool tot silent
Speaker 5: partner in the company. So he was like, Yo, where
Speaker 5: you at on Thursday? And I'm like here working, So
Speaker 5: you're working. I'm like, yeah, this is my day job.
Speaker 5: He's like, come in the hit Factory on Thursday. So
Speaker 5: I go to the Hit Factory. He's like, matter of fact,
Speaker 5: we give you an idea, you know, an audition popcorn Love.
Speaker 5: I'm like yeah. He's like, take that loop it up,
Speaker 5: put the scratches and whatnot on it. Put He's like,
Speaker 5: do all that, trust me make So I probably end
Speaker 5: up picking it as his first single. And I'm like
Speaker 5: what He handed me the key, like the golden ticket,
Speaker 5: like you see, like a nice guy do this.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: So I did it that night, went to Hit Factory
Speaker 5: that Thursday and playing it for him and as soon
Speaker 5: as he heard it, he just started jumping around the room.
Speaker 5: This is the Yeah, this is the single. This is
Speaker 5: the single. And my man was Sam. He looked over
Speaker 5: at me like I told you. I didn't preface it
Speaker 5: with him, Like he didn't say I had somebody making
Speaker 5: this beat. He was just like he gave me the
Speaker 5: Allue and Joe when the record came out, I was like, yo,
Speaker 5: putting pluced by just blazing. Super said like because it
Speaker 5: was it was his idea. He literally strew me the value.
Speaker 5: Didn't ask for no money or anything.
Speaker 1: All right, So I gotta figure out how you wound
Speaker 1: up at Baseline Studios and so fast forward.
Speaker 5: I'm the maze thing happens.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: Matt Fingers MM short redhead kid, one of my best.
Speaker 5: He used to have an indie label called Guests Wild
Speaker 5: back in the days. Mike Zoo had most a couple
Speaker 5: of records early stuff like that. Anyway, he had a
Speaker 5: relationship with Penalty Records with Mayhem and UH Martin Morton.
Speaker 3: Okay, so he.
Speaker 5: I'm talking about one day because he was a clan
Speaker 5: at the studio as well. He's song from Mace and
Speaker 5: I'm like yeah, He's like for real. I'm like yeah,
Speaker 5: He's like, you'll give me some beats, So again, not
Speaker 5: trying to get anything out of it. He takes a
Speaker 5: cassette gives it to a man at Penalty. This is
Speaker 5: right when they were finishing Norway's album and that led
Speaker 5: to UH me working with they had just signed half
Speaker 5: a Milk.
Speaker 3: Okay, so.
Speaker 5: Now I'm in the story with half a milk. So
Speaker 5: that was kind of like the main thing wasn't a fluke.
Speaker 5: We just did it again. And then from there I
Speaker 5: met Killer Priest, did a couple, which is how I
Speaker 5: ended up here in this building. You know, back then
Speaker 5: met Killer Priest, Tragedy Kadafi. So I'm working with a
Speaker 5: lot of dudes that I respect, that I like, but
Speaker 5: it's not dudes that are selling to the records. And
Speaker 5: then Matt pun I thought it was a print call.
Speaker 5: It wasn't.
Speaker 1: First I'm notice is Pawn and I'm like he never
Speaker 1: never sounded like a regularly and being on the phone.
Speaker 5: Like cal on my crib and the brox what So
Speaker 5: I'm like, so I'm like, all right, So I go
Speaker 5: to his crib, played him some beats sam Ash, I
Speaker 5: want to say it with sam Ash at the time,
Speaker 5: I just wipped them off and sold him a bunch
Speaker 5: of studio get he didn't need. He was modeling his house.
Speaker 5: He was trying to build a studio in it. So
Speaker 5: I'm looking around the house and I'm like, well, you
Speaker 5: got a D eighty you got D eighty eights, so
Speaker 5: you don't need a that's and you got a O
Speaker 5: two R so you don't need a Maxi Digital eight
Speaker 5: bus like they double. So whatever, right, So I'm just
Speaker 5: I'm just on the strength, just telling him, you know,
Speaker 5: like he's like, if you don't you want to stand
Speaker 5: this stuff? I said, yeah, I engineer. He said, all right,
Speaker 5: So when I want to build my studio, would you
Speaker 5: come and help me put things together? I said, here,
Speaker 5: no problem. He said, all take whatever you want.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: So he ended up building like my first studio, like
Speaker 5: inadvertently gave me everything I needed to get started in
Speaker 5: the crib. So now I can crank out beats twenty
Speaker 5: four to seven. I got everything at the crib, I
Speaker 5: can record, I'm doing everything in the house, but I'm
Speaker 5: still working at the cutting room. Bruce Hornsby was a
Speaker 5: big client of ours, and he used to print call
Speaker 5: me all the time.
Speaker 3: Used to figure out, man, that's crazy.
Speaker 5: So me and h Bruce was working I think with
Speaker 5: David Byrne I think at the time. So they're working
Speaker 5: on something and they were. They were working at at
Speaker 5: the studio for quite some time. So being that I
Speaker 5: was a dude, who helped him with a lot of things.
Speaker 5: Being helped me and us, Me and him developed the report.
Speaker 5: So sometimes he would hold studio. He'd be like, Hey,
Speaker 5: this is uh, you know Joe Blow from Galaxy Records.
Speaker 5: You want to offer you offer justin a record deal.
Speaker 5: Just be like, God, whatever, Like what do you want?
Speaker 5: Bruce like in that kind of relationship, So.
Speaker 3: I can tell her this story is about to go.
Speaker 5: So I'm at I've told a story of bits and
Speaker 5: pieces of it. I'm trying to speed to it. I
Speaker 5: told total bit of it before. So fast forward a
Speaker 5: little bit later. Bruce is still pranked calling me. I
Speaker 5: meet Dino from Universal right when Rock was finishing up
Speaker 5: the eighteenth let and Cannabis had they had just signed Cannabis.
Speaker 5: I forget how I met him, was a chance of meeting,
Speaker 5: but he gives me the sales pitch.
Speaker 9: Yo.
Speaker 5: Uh, I played in like forty beats and I walked
Speaker 5: in with a beat CD. Nobody had a CD recorder
Speaker 5: at the time. We're not common. I literally probably was
Speaker 5: just me and a hit factory, meaning in a hit
Speaker 5: factory the only people who had them, and I walked
Speaker 5: away a CD, which automatically He's like who brings beats
Speaker 5: on a CD. So that quarter is on. So we
Speaker 5: go through the music. He loves it. He gives me
Speaker 5: the sales pitch. He gives me the Gilbert Godfrey and
Speaker 5: gas face. We're gonna make you a big, big, big,
Speaker 5: big big one big Reacher.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: He's like, I got Cannabis, I got rock Kim, I
Speaker 5: got this, I got that. I never hear from Dino
Speaker 5: again after the whole sales pitch. So I get a
Speaker 5: phone call about to two three beats later, uh at
Speaker 5: the studio. So I went to the phone studio. Can
Speaker 5: I speak to Just And I'm like, yeah, this is him. So,
Speaker 5: my name is g Roberson. I work for Rockefeller Records.
Speaker 5: I'd like to talk to you about a couple of things.
Speaker 5: And I'm like, Y're all right, Bruce, what do you want?
Speaker 5: I'm like, how does Bruce know what Rockefeller Records is?
Speaker 5: This is whatever? And I'm like, so I'm playing, I'm
Speaker 5: going back and forth with it, and eventually I just
Speaker 5: hang up the phone. So then the phone rings again, like, hey,
Speaker 5: I got disconnected. I was trying to speak to us.
Speaker 5: My name is G from Rockefeller Records, and I'm like, oh, okay.
Speaker 5: So he's like, yeah, so you know, I was at Universal.
Speaker 5: I had a meeting with Dino two weeks ago, and
Speaker 5: I have this artist that I'm trying to sign named
Speaker 5: Billy Bathgate and he doesn't have a demo. He's like.
Speaker 5: So he's like, you know, my artist doesn't have a demo,
Speaker 5: but I've been doing it, just taking him around to
Speaker 5: different labels and having him roy I'm Live and Youno
Speaker 5: played your CD and we want like we love, I love,
Speaker 5: like for what I heard out of the twenties, it's
Speaker 5: like ten no I love. And I'm like okay. So
Speaker 5: he's like, so what's up and he's like, well, I'm
Speaker 5: working on a deal for Bathgate. On top of that,
Speaker 5: I just started as an A and R Rockefeller Records,
Speaker 5: and we're trying to build a production team. So I'm like, okay,
Speaker 5: so how does this relate to me. It's like, we want,
Speaker 5: we would like to talk about being part of the team.
Speaker 5: Can you come down to the office. This is when
Speaker 5: their office is. I think we're on fifteenth Street, like
Speaker 5: you're Union Square somewhere. So I go to Dave. Dave
Speaker 5: was the owner of the studio and he's like oh, Dave,
Speaker 5: I gotta go. Jay Z's label just call. They wouldn't
Speaker 5: have a meeting, he said, But you just came back
Speaker 5: from lunch break, and I'm like, I just got a
Speaker 5: call from jay Z's record label. You talking about lunch breaks.
Speaker 5: So he's like, just go go, So I leave, go
Speaker 5: to the meeting. They're like, so basically want to do
Speaker 5: a production crew. You this kid we just found called
Speaker 5: Kanye West Rock Wilder and but rock wider o their buck.
Speaker 3: Wild and Rock was supposed to be part of the
Speaker 3: sign production and.
Speaker 5: K Rob from k Robin Ramel. Wow, they were we
Speaker 5: were gonna be rock the world, that is what they
Speaker 5: were gonna call it. And and yeah, imagine how crazy
Speaker 5: that would have been. So it never happened. The you'll
Speaker 5: never happen. Uh. But we ended up just having a
Speaker 5: good working relationship. I never signed a Rockefeller. I just
Speaker 5: we we worked well. They paid me a lot of money.
Speaker 5: I stuck around. You know they would do They would
Speaker 5: pay me in advance for like like down the line. Well,
Speaker 5: I'm getting a little bit ahead of it. So the
Speaker 5: first thing they give me is to work on a
Speaker 5: Mills album. Yeah, so I engineered that album. I co
Speaker 5: produced the few of the songs uncredited, but just you know,
Speaker 5: and UH recorded in track the whole thing. That was
Speaker 5: also the first time anybody rockefed I ever even heard
Speaker 5: of a recorded on pro tools. They didn't know what
Speaker 5: that was. So Bill ran out of She ran out
Speaker 5: a budget, she couldn't buy no more to tapes. Something.
Speaker 5: We got this thing called pro tools. We'll try it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So so I do her whole album and UH did one,
Speaker 5: one or two things with Bleak and beans. Jay wasn't
Speaker 5: paying me any attention. We get to the end of
Speaker 5: the Bill's album. Here's a song that I did with her.
Speaker 5: He says, who's on that? Who's that dude on the song?
Speaker 5: Or that was Bathket We put bath Gate on the record.
Speaker 5: He's like, taking did the classic goal? Take him off?
Speaker 5: I'm getting on this? And who did the beat? Oh?
Speaker 5: Just oh yeah? He got better? All right? Cool?
Speaker 3: Telling come down.
Speaker 5: Like the tell him come down the baseline.
Speaker 3: So he got better.
Speaker 5: So I gave him. I had given him a cassette
Speaker 5: of what the Becoming Streets is talking like by chance
Speaker 5: two days before. I didn't give it to him. I
Speaker 5: gave it to g or Hip, who gave it to him.
Speaker 5: Get a call from Lenny. Yo, he's he's cut. He
Speaker 5: just cut streets watch or Streets is talking likelast night,
Speaker 5: and you want you to come to Baseline bring some
Speaker 5: more beats. And then the story that I told a
Speaker 5: million times, I made stick to the script while he
Speaker 5: was in the booth recording, parking lot pimping. He comes
Speaker 5: out the room and I play him stick to the
Speaker 5: script and he's like, yo, when did you make this?
Speaker 5: I'm like, just now in the headphones. He's like, but
Speaker 5: I was in the booth. I said, yeah, I just
Speaker 5: made it real quick, you know, chopped up loop, played
Speaker 5: the keys, whatever. And that's when he was like, alright,
Speaker 5: stick around And that was pretty much it. And then
Speaker 5: I guess a year and a half later or two yearsly,
Speaker 5: I ended up owning Baseline.
Speaker 3: At its height. What was the typical day at Baseline,
Speaker 3: Like chaos.
Speaker 5: Was depending on whatever you're talking about. By the time,
Speaker 5: like dip sent had come around and everything, Yes, it
Speaker 5: was pretty chaotic for a lot of reasons. But I
Speaker 5: mean just even schedule wise, because like you have all
Speaker 5: these guys and these various crews in there, and there
Speaker 5: were the cruise cruise.
Speaker 3: You have your room. Does Kanye have his room, No,
Speaker 3: it's it's just it's two rooms.
Speaker 5: So it's the room, the main room in my room.
Speaker 3: He makes ministress on baseline. And so we was in
Speaker 3: the big broom.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, So they were in the A room and
Speaker 5: I was in the B room. So Bleak was an
Speaker 5: early bird, So Bleek might get there by eleven, a
Speaker 5: M Jay might show up around two, dip set might
Speaker 5: show up around eight. Beans would show up in at
Speaker 5: four in the morning. Not to be in troublesomewhere. So
Speaker 5: literally like a twenty four hour factory. And you're all, yes,
Speaker 5: that's exactly what it was.
Speaker 3: Answer this for me.
Speaker 1: How did none of them? How did none of them
Speaker 1: stop you from giving uh? Uh cool mean gang.
Speaker 5: To Joe button?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Joe, But how did they not stop you?
Speaker 5: So I'll never forget that day. I'm at what studio
Speaker 5: was in La the same studio Ya was leaving when
Speaker 5: he had the accident sound something, and I forget the
Speaker 5: name of it, but I'm in there. Uh it say
Speaker 5: it was a two room facility. We had both rooms.
Speaker 5: Water room is me making beats. The other room is
Speaker 5: a state propping a bunch of dudes, uh working on
Speaker 5: an album or working on different projects. So I come
Speaker 5: up with the pumping Up idea that night. I came
Speaker 5: up with it as a follow up to rock the
Speaker 5: Mic for Freeway and Beings. So that was my vision,
Speaker 5: like Rocked the Mic had kind of just had its
Speaker 5: run and starting to wane. I think Flip Side had
Speaker 5: maybe just all no, Flip Side hadn't I don't know
Speaker 5: flip Side had come out yet. It was rock the
Speaker 5: Mic was on Stay Property, so yeah, Flip Side I
Speaker 5: hadn't come out yet, So Pumping Up was supposed to
Speaker 5: be to follow up to Rock the Mic. Now in
Speaker 5: Freeze case free will pretty much wrap to anything that
Speaker 5: I give him. At that point in his life, Freeway
Speaker 5: would have wrapped to anything anybody gave him. Literally, I
Speaker 5: had him rapping on Casey and Jojo all my life.
Speaker 5: Still is It sounded like a good idea at the time.
Speaker 5: You know, it didn't come out for a reason. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's called my piano. I'll find it in sentences, so
Speaker 5: my piano. So I'm in there, I make the beat.
Speaker 5: Freeways was ready to like tell me when to wrap,
Speaker 5: and but Beans was kind of like, uh, I think
Speaker 5: he might have been heavy on the lean length this time,
Speaker 5: so he kind of was just like, so he leaves,
Speaker 5: and then a bunch of random rappers just started coming in,
Speaker 5: like local La dudes who are like fans and just
Speaker 5: you know those dudes that somehow ended up in your
Speaker 5: session and trying to you know, get on your records.
Speaker 5: So I won't name names, but there was just one
Speaker 5: who was just like, I had to turn the beat
Speaker 5: off now, like, but he came in and started writing verses.
Speaker 5: I was like, oh, yeah, the beat has to just stop.
Speaker 5: So I stopped the beat and I started making as
Speaker 5: One from Blueprint too, and I was, this is gonna
Speaker 5: be the Rockefella song that everybody gets on. It's a
Speaker 5: Rockefella song. There's nobody else. The other artists just kind
Speaker 5: of sending that. So I started making as One and
Speaker 5: then we ended up recording that I gave the Young
Speaker 5: Guns there, I think because young Guns started with the
Speaker 5: Sneath book out the cut out, the cut I figured
Speaker 5: whose routine I jacked? It was somebody's part routine that
Speaker 5: I had jack. Yeah, so that's what that's came up with.
Speaker 5: That idea. Gave that to young Guns. They start, so
Speaker 5: you're coming up with the hooks to hooks, sometimes rhymes,
Speaker 5: sometimes I'm rewriting rhymes, you know, it's it's always something.
Speaker 5: So that pumping up beat goes away. So now we're
Speaker 5: Blueprint Too era and this is like the first time
Speaker 5: that Farrell and Ja really really locked in, like for
Speaker 5: just coming up with the record after record after record.
Speaker 5: So I'm in the beat room doing what I can
Speaker 5: really do, just in there working. I remember the pump
Speaker 5: It Up beat mm hm. So I go, I go
Speaker 5: to jail. I'm like, yo, did hear a song? He's
Speaker 5: like all right, So he comes in like five minutes later,
Speaker 5: he's like, yeah, that's mean. But I'm finishing this for
Speaker 5: our record right now.
Speaker 3: So if he finished, excuse me, miss over now, I want.
Speaker 5: To say, it was all tonight. Yeah, I'm talking about please.
Speaker 5: I love that. That's that's I love that song. I
Speaker 5: mean in general, the Forrail records and they were all dope.
Speaker 3: It was like if pump It Up was on Blueprint two,
Speaker 3: that could have made a world.
Speaker 5: So actually the record that he was working on ended
Speaker 5: up not being used. It was where he first did
Speaker 5: to come get someone. He took the wrath came around.
Speaker 5: He did that another on another frail beat, which I
Speaker 5: just found recently.
Speaker 3: M M.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because I have all the tapes, you know, so
Speaker 5: sometimes I justkim through the server and see what I find.
Speaker 5: But anyway, so so he goes back to do the
Speaker 5: Peril record and he kind of was just like, yeah,
Speaker 5: that's nice, you know. Like now, Jay's like that sometimes
Speaker 5: if he's focused on I've seen him do that to
Speaker 5: other people in regards to me, like I'm finishing this
Speaker 5: dress record right now, I gotta i gotta go back
Speaker 5: in the room. So I didn't. I didn't take offense
Speaker 5: to it. But it's funny in retrospect. So moving on
Speaker 5: from that, pumping up comes out ends up becoming you
Speaker 5: know what it does. It's a huge record. Jay walks
Speaker 5: in the room one day, he's like, Yo, that pumping
Speaker 5: up is crazy. But next time you come up with
Speaker 5: something like that, like playing motherfucker, you do let me
Speaker 5: know about that. Like you know the things that I
Speaker 5: never We never had a structure where it was like
Speaker 5: I owe them first, write a refusal. But you're not
Speaker 5: an idiot. You know where certain records are supposed to go,
Speaker 5: and they knew that. I knew that, So it was
Speaker 5: never really a thing who.
Speaker 1: A skater because when he does it on that organe Scan.
Speaker 5: Don't worry Scan, No, I'll give it back soon.
Speaker 3: Sc was your nickname or something, Scan Dollar.
Speaker 5: It was a clues manager. It was close. It was cluesman.
Speaker 5: Scan was basically, uh, clues manager, but that's a desert
Speaker 5: storm was clue dur escape.
Speaker 3: I see.
Speaker 5: So, and Joe had his affiliation with Uh. You know,
Speaker 5: Skane was the one who bought Joe to death chair.
Speaker 5: So it's kind of that connection. So give me that beat.
Speaker 5: Don worry Scane, I'll give it back, right.
Speaker 3: So that's what.
Speaker 5: So when I told Jay that, he was like, you did,
Speaker 5: I'm like yeah. He's like, nah, I remember you said
Speaker 5: I'm gonna go do this for real record. He was like,
Speaker 5: I can't remember that now. Then he went and recorded
Speaker 5: his verse that was that.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I feel like we're jumping all over the place,
Speaker 1: which is we're very unmarrrored to dude.
Speaker 3: Back to the beginning. So when you were a kid, yes,
Speaker 3: we can do it. No, well okay, well what about
Speaker 3: your work with mad Lyon?
Speaker 5: Wow?
Speaker 3: Wow?
Speaker 1: Actually well no, no, no, no, no, no back up,
Speaker 1: because I think this is something that this this room
Speaker 1: doesn't know you're responsible for the club classic?
Speaker 3: Uh shake that ask girl, how are you? Yes? How
Speaker 3: are you responsible for that?
Speaker 5: So I didn't do the original original version that was
Speaker 5: tap rest in Peace Dude from Baltimore. But the interesting
Speaker 5: thing about what was happening at that time in Jersey
Speaker 5: what later on ended up becoming known as Baltimore club music,
Speaker 5: which then became, uh, you know, over time a Jersey club.
Speaker 5: We had that influx happening, but then we also had
Speaker 5: a lot of stuff from Chicago that was coming in.
Speaker 5: So like the casual stuff shout out to Curtis h
Speaker 5: a lot of that stuff was starting to infiltrate, and
Speaker 5: it was basically the beginnings of the primordial soup of
Speaker 5: what became Jersey Club.
Speaker 1: So, okay, so is Jersey club? Of course you're gonna
Speaker 1: say yes, most of you all beat me down for it.
Speaker 1: Is Jersey club an actual, legitimate, recognized genre genre.
Speaker 3: That's a question because I didn't know a subject.
Speaker 1: What's the difference between Jersey Jersey Baltimore House. Well, I
Speaker 1: know the difference, I know House, but I.
Speaker 5: Feel like there you can't mention Jersey club without mentioning
Speaker 5: Baltimore House. But I feel like the Jersey Jersey Club
Speaker 5: has become its own thing, the way they programmed the
Speaker 5: when they chot the samples, when they do certain studies,
Speaker 5: it's become its own thing, like it's becomes its own thing.
Speaker 1: So whereas the think the James Brown Marvel with Link
Speaker 1: Collins think Loop is.
Speaker 5: Not as prominent in Jersey Club anymore, so that breaks
Speaker 5: it's all right. So like obviously all the Jersey Club
Speaker 5: records you have to think loop or at least the tambourine,
Speaker 5: the shakers or the tambourines in there. I feel like
Speaker 5: there was a certain point where it got away from
Speaker 5: that and it was more about the bottom the base
Speaker 5: pause and that pattern that boom boom boom, boom boom boom.
Speaker 5: Both of those records are still based on that. But
Speaker 5: what I'm noticing with the younger generations that are doing
Speaker 5: it now, It's not something that I can necessarily put
Speaker 5: in the words because I never really analyzed it from
Speaker 5: that standpoint, but the way they are truncating and stuttering
Speaker 5: and flipping out of their samples, there's definitely a distinctly
Speaker 5: different way that they do it in Jersey versus how
Speaker 5: they do it in Baltimore versus how like some of
Speaker 5: the dudes that are doing it in Philly, like a
Speaker 5: like a Sega for example. Are they all do it
Speaker 5: a little bit differently? And that's not something that I
Speaker 5: could really quantify or put in the words how it's different.
Speaker 1: So I mean, but is this still pulse wise typically
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty eight bpms?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, the foundation, The foundation is still the same.
Speaker 5: The foundation is still the same. Se Man.
Speaker 3: I feel like I was on to some where you
Speaker 3: got Me and didn't complete the miss if you'd work,
Speaker 3: I feel like the world.
Speaker 1: I feel like America, like with you Got Me and
Speaker 1: with Bombs over bag Dad. I think America is ready
Speaker 1: for German bass.
Speaker 5: But it's like it's the gatekeepers on what it happened.
Speaker 3: You think you're talking about it now. I just feel like,
Speaker 3: I mean, I just I just feel like the breaking out.
Speaker 1: I'm praying with this dreat record that the bpms get
Speaker 1: sped up more and it really start starts a paradigm shift.
Speaker 5: I don't hope that this is so hope they gets
Speaker 5: sped up more. I just hope there's more variants in
Speaker 5: the bpms.
Speaker 1: Well, it's due time, because it's twenty seventeen, and true
Speaker 1: to my five year theory, with things changing on the
Speaker 1: sevens and the twos, something new is going to happen
Speaker 1: to hip hop. According I meant the last thirty plus
Speaker 1: years that it's happened.
Speaker 3: I'm praying that this is it.
Speaker 1: I mean nothing against you know, seventy three bpms and
Speaker 1: I mean now people getting super slower.
Speaker 5: No, now it's it's the lean effect. So now it's
Speaker 5: like a half Yeah, it's like literally one fifty to
Speaker 5: fifty one bpm.
Speaker 3: Do you resent that? I mean not resent that, I
Speaker 3: mean I know I don't.
Speaker 5: Resent it because it actually allows me in DJ sets
Speaker 5: to have a little bit more fun because not for
Speaker 5: one reason, but for one of the main reasons being
Speaker 5: you can go from the super high energy to this
Speaker 5: total shift but still keep people doing the same bounce,
Speaker 5: you see what I'm saying, like, and then that allows
Speaker 5: you as a DJ to get creative with it and say, Okay,
Speaker 5: I can go from one hundred to fifty and it
Speaker 5: feels the same, but now the mood has changed, so
Speaker 5: now I can say, way out of that, it hit
Speaker 5: the seventy five bpms, and then after that some way
Speaker 5: fun way you get to one to forty. A lot
Speaker 5: of the halftime and double time stuff that's happening at
Speaker 5: least in my DJ sets has allowed me to navigate
Speaker 5: more courses quickly.
Speaker 1: You I, We're just saying, but it's just like, as
Speaker 1: a person like I can't stand bad segues and DJ sets,
Speaker 1: so everything has to make sense to me.
Speaker 5: I'm the same way. That's why I like, I watched
Speaker 5: some I watched some dudes, and sometimes I immedtedly get
Speaker 5: jealous of dudes that aren't that don't mind, just care right,
Speaker 5: just stopping the music and totally just shifting tempos and moves,
Speaker 5: and you know what, But the more I watch dudes
Speaker 5: do that, whether it's somebody that's opening for me, whether
Speaker 5: it's somebody that I'm playing before and opening for, whether
Speaker 5: it's a co headline or whatever it is, I watched
Speaker 5: those from the side sometimes and I'm like, I wish
Speaker 5: I did not care the way you don't care, because,
Speaker 5: to be honest, today's audience doesn't care.
Speaker 1: I don't care as long as I just want to
Speaker 1: hear a playlist loud right club.
Speaker 5: And when I see that, I'm like, I literally have
Speaker 5: said to myself countless times. I wish I did not
Speaker 5: care because that terrible, ugly segue that that dude just
Speaker 5: did just had put this party on full tilt. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We I don't know which year the Roots Picnic it was,
Speaker 1: but we hired a DJ that was going back from
Speaker 1: his iPhone to his CDJs.
Speaker 3: What was that doing that then? But he but he
Speaker 3: had them going crazy?
Speaker 1: I crazy, right, he had Well, it was like, yo,
Speaker 1: there's some new shit I just made and he goes
Speaker 1: to his iPhone and he puts it on the whole
Speaker 1: place is going crazy right now.
Speaker 5: It's it's it's really Uh. Today's audiences have a very
Speaker 5: different ear and a very different set of standards.
Speaker 3: They care more about the end result in the process.
Speaker 5: I guess that.
Speaker 3: I guess they care more about the end results than.
Speaker 5: The process, more so than like there you know, I
Speaker 5: will say this and this is something that This is
Speaker 5: an argument that I I had years ago in Australia.
Speaker 5: I feel like there's this uh divide in terms of
Speaker 5: what people want from a DJ across general. Like I
Speaker 5: was at a record spot down Under and I was
Speaker 5: talking to Homie and UH through that random spot and
Speaker 5: his wife and we were talking about DJs Uh, this
Speaker 5: was I guess six, Yeah, it was two thousand and six.
Speaker 5: So we were talking about DJs that play reissues versus
Speaker 5: original pressings and bootlegs and edits and just having that conversation.
Speaker 5: But she said one key thing that made me realize,
Speaker 5: that made me realize where are actual divide laid? Because
Speaker 5: she said, when I go to see a DJ play,
Speaker 5: and I said, that's the problem. You're going to see
Speaker 5: him like, I personally do not care where do the
Speaker 5: sourcing it from? Like there's some some sometimes certain peerists,
Speaker 5: certain types of peers would be like the Serado kids. Uh,
Speaker 5: when they have when they go into their Serado argument
Speaker 5: and they start talking about the fact that, like a
Speaker 5: kid now can just go download all thirty volumes or
Speaker 5: whatever it is of ultimately beats and breaks and play them.
Speaker 5: They didn't know what it was like to have to
Speaker 5: go track those volumes down. And I'm like, all right,
Speaker 5: I knew what that was like, but I didn't have
Speaker 5: the struggle of having to discover those break beats and
Speaker 5: find all the original pressings with right when Bamana was
Speaker 5: playing in the park, whoever was playing in the park,
Speaker 5: you know, they used to have to they used to.
Speaker 5: They cover the records, they're black, the labels out, and
Speaker 5: then you would hope that somebody from Downstairs Records or
Speaker 5: Downtown Records, whatever would right, you can sing it to
Speaker 5: them and say such and such, just play this record
Speaker 5: that sounds like this and hopefully, hey, hopefully they have it.
Speaker 5: B hopefully they deem you cool enough to give it
Speaker 5: to you. There was a lot of gatekeeping, this gatekeeping
Speaker 5: at every level. So for me, I'm like, wait, why
Speaker 5: are you worried about seeing him play? I'm worried about
Speaker 5: hearing him play because ultimately, if he doesn't impress me
Speaker 5: with what I hear, or if he or she doesn't
Speaker 5: impress me what I hear, then it's game over. So
Speaker 5: that's what I feel like. Every generation, the qualifications and
Speaker 5: ramifications change in terms of what people are looking for.
Speaker 1: And even still when you can, like while it's true
Speaker 1: to the Sorato generation can just download volumes to play them,
Speaker 1: and you said exactly, you ain't lived with them, like
Speaker 1: you still got to live with those records. You gotta
Speaker 1: know why eight bars, why they work, and the record
Speaker 1: is hot and right, because you can't just play the
Speaker 1: whole Frisco Disco right, because people will look at you like,
Speaker 1: what you can.
Speaker 5: Get to that pump pumpum, it's it's it's a change.
Speaker 5: There's very few of those records that you can actually
Speaker 5: play front Tobacco. You can play UFO front to back.
Speaker 5: You could play Cavern front to back. You can't really
Speaker 5: play Big Beat past the break right. You can play
Speaker 5: a little bit of it, but he sings, But after that,
Speaker 5: that's pretty much it. You're done.
Speaker 3: You know you still got the music.
Speaker 1: I used to be that way in the beginning, and
Speaker 1: then we had a bus accident, yeah, and destroyed Myless Heroes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my Headless Heroes was like the first thing in the Yes,
Speaker 1: two hundred bucks done. And then I was like, nah,
Speaker 1: I'm spending boot legs from now on.
Speaker 5: I have friends, like some of my friends are like
Speaker 5: some of the bulls either purist or OCD types or
Speaker 5: purest o CD types that you ever meet, and like
Speaker 5: they won't make beats from a reissue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know cats like that too, And I'm like, really,
Speaker 1: I'm like, why that's weird because I only like in
Speaker 1: Peace to President, on the boot on the on the
Speaker 1: Ultimate Beasts Breaks versions, what Kenny Do got the Master
Speaker 1: to it re isssued it and it's too damn clean.
Speaker 5: It's clean. It's too clean.
Speaker 3: It too it's not good to me.
Speaker 5: I like his I like to play his reissue when
Speaker 5: I just want to give people a make them do
Speaker 5: you get that? Like? Or when they just stay here
Speaker 5: and they're like, yo, this is the same, but it's different.
Speaker 3: What did you do? You know?
Speaker 5: But like other than that, I don't care where you
Speaker 5: get it from as long as it's going back to you.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, what since we're down the rabbit hole already?
Speaker 1: Since you said that, do you ever find yourself whenever
Speaker 1: your peers are over your shoulder? Do you ignore the
Speaker 1: audience and then suddenly you're doing it for them? And
Speaker 1: does that ruin your set?
Speaker 5: I try to not do that.
Speaker 3: In another way, if Natasha is over your shoulder right
Speaker 3: and you know you got some shit, it's going to
Speaker 3: fuck her up right.
Speaker 5: Now, you know what? I only I only so a
Speaker 5: something like that. We're saying, it's like me, Natasha, my
Speaker 5: other record NERD friends. I will only do that at
Speaker 5: our party. So at our party and we all know
Speaker 5: that anything goes, and that's when we really get to
Speaker 5: go in on each other. Like you don't have this boom.
Speaker 5: You don't have this boom, or I'll do something crazy
Speaker 5: like you don't have this boom and I'll play it then.
Speaker 5: And I have copies for everybody. You get a copy,
Speaker 5: a copy I do. I do the open things sometimes,
Speaker 5: you know, like I come out to the moment Monday
Speaker 5: more often so like, but when it comes to like
Speaker 5: where I'm working, and sometimes a lot of times, like
Speaker 5: I do certain types of events that they don't really frequent,
Speaker 5: but they're curious about them, you know, like if it's
Speaker 5: like a big d M thing or something like that.
Speaker 5: A lot of them, like I'm not just talking about
Speaker 5: Natasha then, but just in general, a lot of my
Speaker 5: friends don't necessarily frequent those places, but they're curious about
Speaker 5: what goes on. I'm not gonna go and play like
Speaker 5: the Ill super Duper Rare, you know, a funk funk
Speaker 5: boogie record. You know, when I'm in the middle of
Speaker 5: playing a bunch of turn up music for some kids
Speaker 5: and doing doing what I gotta do for them.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's not it's so you have more
Speaker 3: nuanced control.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you guys.
Speaker 3: I can't resist sometimes I can't.
Speaker 5: I can't do it now. Now Here's the thing. If
Speaker 5: I'm in a venue or playing a party or an
Speaker 5: event or a festival where it's kind of more of that,
Speaker 5: anything goes kind of thing right, and you can throw
Speaker 5: the curveball and the audience is. There's some places that
Speaker 5: you will play and people know, people know who you are,
Speaker 5: they know your taste. If they're coming to see you play,
Speaker 5: they know that they might get a curve ball. People
Speaker 5: going to see Rich Pardina because they know he's gonna
Speaker 5: throw curve balls, you know.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, your status definitely determines how much you can
Speaker 1: get away from your right.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So like if I'm playing a certain place and
Speaker 5: I'm like establishing myself, Like for example, there are certain
Speaker 5: festivals that I play where it's like just Blazers playing.
Speaker 5: We are at that stage and as soon as I
Speaker 5: you know, my stage could be forty percent of thirty
Speaker 5: percent full. By the time I get twenty minutes in,
Speaker 5: i'mout one hundred percent capacity. There are other festivals that
Speaker 5: I play where it's like I'm establishing myself in this market.
Speaker 5: So my curveball ability is very low because I'm trying
Speaker 5: to establish myself here. I'm not gonna be the guy
Speaker 5: that's gonna all of a sudden be like he was
Speaker 5: doing great and then he just started playing the theme
Speaker 5: from the Jeffersons. I'm choosing as an.
Speaker 1: Example, like, Yeah, Kate Turna, I don't know you ever
Speaker 1: seen Yeah, he's kind like that, like he did.
Speaker 3: I went and saw him.
Speaker 1: He was here a couple it was like last month
Speaker 1: and his opening set This is a room for the
Speaker 1: like twenty year old. You know, his opening song was
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Club by Blue Magic Wow. And I
Speaker 1: texted that but that was, like, you just that was revolutionary,
Speaker 1: and they he had him jamming too.
Speaker 5: But that's the thing. There are certain people that that
Speaker 5: certain generations will look to for that. He's somebody that
Speaker 5: can do that, not because he has the status of
Speaker 5: being able to get away with curveballs, because he's one
Speaker 5: of the certain people looked at certain DJs for certain things.
Speaker 5: Some people look just like, I know he's gonna play
Speaker 5: a good time, play all the songs. I know he's
Speaker 5: gonna know when to drop the vocal out so I
Speaker 5: can sing along, and it's just pretty much a standard
Speaker 5: good time. Then you have other guys who are known
Speaker 5: as like the Diggers and I feel like Kate Trnado
Speaker 5: in a lot of ways is the digger sample.
Speaker 3: I he was dropping whispers. I was like, what the fuck?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 3: It was so people.
Speaker 5: That doesn't surprise me at all because I know him,
Speaker 5: but because I've seen him play and I've watched the
Speaker 5: fact that the crowd respects him when he does that. Now,
Speaker 5: it depends on what mark, depending where market we're in.
Speaker 5: I remember when I was playing, we played a festival together.
Speaker 5: I want to say it was in New Zealand. His
Speaker 5: stage was a much smaller stage, but he was able
Speaker 5: to do that on the stage that music Me and
Speaker 5: zay Low on the stage that I was playing at
Speaker 5: that would not have worked because just by the way
Speaker 5: I'm positioned, I'm positioned on the stage. That's the stage.
Speaker 5: So it's not gonna work for me.
Speaker 3: Wait, since we're talking about DJ tricks and stuff and.
Speaker 1: You know, surprises and obscure songs, I think maybe now
Speaker 1: it's a good time to try part three.
Speaker 3: It's part three. I'm going it's a little more advanced.
Speaker 5: Oh come on, did that drum roll thing? Was like torture?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, you did well, you did well?
Speaker 3: All right, So can you guess these jawns.
Speaker 5: Okay, I can already tell you.
Speaker 3: I know that one.
Speaker 5: DC LaRue vernon.
Speaker 3: What just happened?
Speaker 5: Hold up very white brothers?
Speaker 3: So again? Oh wait? What am I I'll do? Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm going to play trying to play.
Speaker 5: That's all.
Speaker 3: Play, y'all host this show. Y'all should know this ship.
Speaker 3: I don't want to hear it.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 5: Now here's the thing. There's something I don't I don't
Speaker 5: know the original bridge, I know who was used by
Speaker 5: I better know that I have the record. I don't
Speaker 5: know what by name?
Speaker 3: Okay, we'll try again. I don't know that I have diabetes.
Speaker 3: I'm I'm out.
Speaker 7: A couple of let the Sunshine and by who? How
Speaker 7: do you know it's let the Sunshine? Because when you
Speaker 7: played it, you let it go little and I can
Speaker 7: hear the let this.
Speaker 5: I just don't know whose version that is.
Speaker 3: It's the three Block singers? Who is this? All? Right?
Speaker 5: Then he played that?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 5: What is the name?
Speaker 3: Is breaks? This version of.
Speaker 1: Brace's version of what's the what's the version of Mango
Speaker 1: Mango meet by by Mandro?
Speaker 3: Okay, do you guys know the mango meat story?
Speaker 5: Oh am?
Speaker 3: I allowed to reveal it.
Speaker 5: I feel like since I've done it, I heard that
Speaker 5: Jeff has been redoing that.
Speaker 3: Motherfucker I do it?
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, what you thought you.
Speaker 3: Thought we were going?
Speaker 5: All right? Fine, mango meat?
Speaker 3: Can I do it first?
Speaker 5: Okay, go ahead?
Speaker 3: Can I do it first?
Speaker 8: Please?
Speaker 3: Go go? What's about to happen here? All right?
Speaker 10: Oh?
Speaker 3: Wow?
Speaker 5: Then I got and I got it.
Speaker 3: That might that might traveling?
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: Man, the night he revealed that ship, it was confusion.
Speaker 11: What is that?
Speaker 3: Realizing the freeways? What is the what is the uh?
Speaker 3: Oh you still don't know? No, I know, I know,
Speaker 3: but I just look.
Speaker 8: I wanted to ask a dumb question. I guess in
Speaker 8: the room, but I was somebody listening, mister Blaize, But
Speaker 8: what did you replace whatever that instrument was for rock?
Speaker 5: The mic?
Speaker 8: Like, I mean, it just sounds it sounds different, like
Speaker 8: it's still I can hear the Caden sounds the same,
Speaker 8: but whatever the it's production.
Speaker 3: He tuned it higher and.
Speaker 5: There's a lot there's a lot more to it, but
Speaker 5: that's basically right there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: That was done on the ASRX pro really yeah, randomly,
Speaker 5: like I had one. The thing I loved about the
Speaker 5: a SRX Pro was or that the SRX in general
Speaker 5: was that it was the engine of the sr ten.
Speaker 5: But it also had built in a built in sound
Speaker 5: module where you can access patches through RAM as opposed
Speaker 5: to having to load stuff and through uh A drive
Speaker 5: or not having to use like a JV ten eighty
Speaker 5: or twenty eighty or whatever to get your sound. So
Speaker 5: it's basically right. It was basically all in one machine.
Speaker 5: Like you had the sampling section, you had your samples,
Speaker 5: and you also had built in piano patches, basses and
Speaker 5: things like that, and no drum machine to my knowledge
Speaker 5: up until that point, had had that all built into
Speaker 5: the RAM.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I started I started trying to I championed
Speaker 5: it for a while. It was no NPC, but I
Speaker 5: it was. There was a certain element of portableness.
Speaker 3: Of course, right, I mean on that equipment.
Speaker 5: So we're not dying.
Speaker 3: I know that.
Speaker 5: That's the get it together said, that's one.
Speaker 3: I never was one of those like switched on back
Speaker 3: or hooked on box records. Another let the sunshine and
Speaker 3: by the move machine.
Speaker 5: Okay, looked that was I do have that. No, I
Speaker 5: don't know that one.
Speaker 3: Oh congo byte afric.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, no, here Yeah, that's d C LaRue.
Speaker 3: Was a squeak? Yeah, that is that a kick pedal
Speaker 3: or or chair. Yeah, it's things like the squeak of
Speaker 3: the pedal. Pay whole thing. Oh, play a little bit
Speaker 3: of it anyway.
Speaker 5: That is who is d C LaRue.
Speaker 1: Dclu in discreet Industrlet's vernon, vernon, vernon, birch, birch, Get
Speaker 1: up like that last night?
Speaker 5: Actually that was Sylvester. That Selvester sounds like boon. I
Speaker 5: don't think it is what it sounds like. It sounds
Speaker 5: like me and the gang, but I know it's not.
Speaker 5: You're close.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's get it by Mandrel. Can you get it?
Speaker 6: Get it?
Speaker 5: Get it?
Speaker 3: Get it? Oh yeah, okay, last.
Speaker 5: Together brothers. I used to us to trol people and
Speaker 5: I would like even I still do, yeah instead of
Speaker 5: the train. Yeah yeah, but like it wasn't you know,
Speaker 5: It wasn't until I really like, it wasn't until maybe
Speaker 5: at some point in the two early two thousands that
Speaker 5: I realized that's what that was. And now the Train
Speaker 5: is my favorite bass record because that that that The
Speaker 5: together brothers, it's so.
Speaker 3: Hard, So I never going together brothers better. I don't
Speaker 3: like the way they programmed that the the no no.
Speaker 5: Not that I don't like Together Brothers butt, I mean
Speaker 5: that's the source. My point is I never listened to
Speaker 5: Ride the Train from the context of production. I only
Speaker 5: ever listened to it as that song that drove you
Speaker 5: nuts when it came on the radio or when the
Speaker 5: video came over. So once I found the sample, I
Speaker 5: went back and listened to it, and I was like,
Speaker 5: for them to take this and making Miami based record
Speaker 5: out of it, that was like some old like when
Speaker 5: uh what was a mister Mixer's crew, the ghetto style
Speaker 5: DJs when they would do things like on mega mixes
Speaker 5: when they would have no matter how you try, you
Speaker 5: can't stop. But making Miami bass flip out of that.
Speaker 5: I appreciated that, like because it's typically Miami based. They
Speaker 5: were sampling craft work, planet rock, uh, stuff that was
Speaker 5: already electro. Right when you take something like that together
Speaker 5: Brothers Record Together Brothers Records, which is when you listen
Speaker 5: to Alontowa, it's completely different styles doesn't lend itself to
Speaker 5: bass music. That was kind of like the reason why,
Speaker 5: like people ask me, like about the sample flips I'm
Speaker 5: the most proud of, or that I had the most
Speaker 5: fun doing whatever. Obviously, the Rick James one that you
Speaker 5: and I, you know, have a history with like that
Speaker 5: was one where it was like I took some nothing.
Speaker 5: I hadn't been sampled before. It had never been sampled
Speaker 5: for that.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 5: It wasn't supposed to be, hey, look here's you can't
Speaker 5: touch this. You know it was, but when you listen to,
Speaker 5: you like, there's something about this that sounds familiar, and
Speaker 5: then you realize that there's nothing but me chopping it
Speaker 5: up on the past.
Speaker 3: You did it with ignorant shit with the with the.
Speaker 5: Nobody ever listened to, but nobody ever listens to people.
Speaker 3: Want to quiet did it was well they kind of
Speaker 3: used vicious on the.
Speaker 1: He took like a little bit of it. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but I mean listening I remember the record. I remember
Speaker 1: it was the main part, but like the little hook right.
Speaker 5: There as well, or even like the uh, the t
Speaker 5: I Rihanna live your life where it was like everybody
Speaker 5: knows that record from the fact kid on YouTube doing this.
Speaker 5: And the funny thing is now it came about in
Speaker 5: almost the same exact way. You know, I did the
Speaker 5: Rick James things from my MySpace page, like trying to
Speaker 5: figure out a way to just branded, like, hey, this
Speaker 5: is my actual page. So I forget what I was
Speaker 5: trying to brand, but it was the same thing. We
Speaker 5: make a track out of something ultimately ridiculous, but trying
Speaker 5: to make something incredible and cool out of it. And
Speaker 5: I don't know if it was for like, it wasn't
Speaker 5: Friends her or something, but it was something else from
Speaker 5: that early Internet era, and it just so happened and
Speaker 5: Tip called me right after I made it. Well, as
Speaker 5: we were making I'm yo, this could actually be a song.
Speaker 5: So I started writing a hook to it, and it
Speaker 5: just so happened that Tip called me like right after
Speaker 5: I laid the references, and I was like, yoh, I
Speaker 5: had the opportunity to get a Justin Timberlake on a record,
Speaker 5: because I guess Justin Oda he owed Justin o him
Speaker 5: a favor forgetting on something. So originally it was that's
Speaker 5: why it's all false sett of a demo if you
Speaker 5: ever hear the demo's all false sett of because I
Speaker 5: was referencing as Justin Timberlake. But then Rihanna came into
Speaker 5: the picture and we ended up going with that because
Speaker 5: it made more sense for her to be on that record.
Speaker 1: Okay, now I gotta jump all over the place. Since
Speaker 1: you mentioned Kingdom Come, I wish someone was there to
Speaker 1: work on the hook writing process of those three songs,
Speaker 1: which the show me what you Got.
Speaker 3: I'm not mad aged show me what you got, but
Speaker 3: just for it was the way got killed it. It
Speaker 3: was the wave. I didn't mind the way people don't wave.
Speaker 5: But here's the thing. Black people don't wave, right. But
Speaker 5: I'll tell you what. I don't play that, but I
Speaker 5: play festival I don't, or parties or bigger parties. I
Speaker 5: don't play the whole record, but I play it up
Speaker 5: until the wave and every but everybody wait, okay, anyway,
Speaker 5: it was like, so I think I actually stole something
Speaker 5: from mster c When when when the record first came out,
Speaker 5: and how someone was running back to back to back
Speaker 5: to back and missus got hype and started doing the
Speaker 5: hands up and wave to the left, wave to the
Speaker 5: right way. So for me, that's the perfect way to
Speaker 5: get out of that record, because everybody does it. They
Speaker 5: all in white people, black people, whatever. Now now that
Speaker 5: it's an older record. At the time, it might not
Speaker 5: have worked.
Speaker 3: It works now.
Speaker 1: I think the resistance to show me what you got
Speaker 1: was more about at that point, it was just too
Speaker 1: much God damn Hove. At that point it was like,
Speaker 1: I think anything would have been overkilled.
Speaker 5: Which is funny because that was his come back out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he came. Yeah, he was silent for yeah.
Speaker 1: But I mean it was still I mean it was
Speaker 1: still the bad Yeah, the back I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: don't I think anything.
Speaker 3: Would. I mean, it was too much of it. And
Speaker 3: this is the thing.
Speaker 1: Whenever he snickers on his record, I hate that snicker
Speaker 1: because it's like that, that is the all right, you
Speaker 1: ever watched you ever watched.
Speaker 5: You?
Speaker 3: Ever watched you?
Speaker 1: Ever watch uh the Chappelle extras where Charlie Murphy's describing
Speaker 1: the guy that says you fucking wore on Yeah, and
Speaker 1: now that this gets Yeah, he has a friend. He
Speaker 1: has a black in that insults you to the point
Speaker 1: where you just want to beat the ship out of him.
Speaker 1: He has a way of saying, you fucking moron, and
Speaker 1: he turns into a white person saying it makes you
Speaker 1: want to fuck him up. That's what does that j snicker.
Speaker 1: It's not even like the two like the Tupac snicker.
Speaker 1: What was the Tupac I mean no, I don't.
Speaker 5: Like, I don't know about the Tupac snicker being a thing.
Speaker 3: I mean no, Tupac always.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be smart, but it's never as menacing
Speaker 1: as Tupac think it is in his head, Like I
Speaker 1: think his mind Tupac thinks would be like the super Villains.
Speaker 3: And I never even noticed. I never even know the
Speaker 3: snicker is a thing. Get I know the Jada, that's
Speaker 3: the Jada.
Speaker 5: I love this.
Speaker 3: All right, here's the super Rappit. We're never going to
Speaker 3: get to your career. Sorry, that's fine.
Speaker 1: So one of the one of the most amazing things
Speaker 1: I've found out that Bill and I found out teaching
Speaker 1: at NYU.
Speaker 3: Does the world even know that you teach at n
Speaker 3: YU with me? Or do I teach it n YU?
Speaker 1: Or do I just hand out papers if you weren't
Speaker 1: there would class be as smooth as possible?
Speaker 3: Hell no, Yeah, this is the black laugh? Is this
Speaker 3: is this the theory? Okay? So it was the whole
Speaker 3: class about the black laugh? No, this is actually really interesting.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: So what I didn't know was that in general, emotions
Speaker 1: were illegal during slavery period. I mean, even with your
Speaker 1: parents you're like, you better not cry for I give
Speaker 1: you something to cry out, or you know, you can't
Speaker 1: get angry at someone or whatever.
Speaker 3: But you also couldn't laugh. Laughing was illegal slave time.
Speaker 1: You were Sassin, so it was just keep your head down,
Speaker 1: do you work, No crying, no laughing, no whatever. So
Speaker 1: the slaves had to invent uh some sort of device
Speaker 1: so that they can express emotions if they want to
Speaker 1: cry or scream or some then. So the idea of
Speaker 1: a barrel laughs comes from a place. They built a barrel,
Speaker 1: filled it with water, so if you felt yourself wanted
Speaker 1: to curse out your master or laugh at a joke
Speaker 1: or something, and then one get fifty lashes, you would
Speaker 1: duck your head in the water and laugh to suppress
Speaker 1: the sounds.
Speaker 5: And that's when a term barrel laughs comes from.
Speaker 1: That's where it comes from now where it's relevant into
Speaker 1: terms of entertainment. The very first spoken word, or I
Speaker 1: guess the first recorded material for black people was a
Speaker 1: song called the Laughing Song, and I guess it was
Speaker 1: the fuck the police of its day, because it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm recording a song, so you can't give.
Speaker 3: Me lashes or put me in jail. For laughing. So
Speaker 3: ha ha, it's the ha ha ha song or whatever.
Speaker 1: And so one of our teaching assistants, Amalia Amalia, she
Speaker 1: did a study and in her study she noticed that.
Speaker 3: Laughing on any black records is never laughing. It's an
Speaker 3: expression of pain. So when Stevie like the.
Speaker 1: Invention of Michael's he he is from Stevie wonders maybe
Speaker 1: your baby, which is about betrayal, so he just most
Speaker 1: of James Brown's grunts hot or either laughing is uh
Speaker 1: an exclamation term or it's a villain term, like I
Speaker 1: got you, motherfucker, what you gonna do?
Speaker 5: It's it's never just a genuine, genuine, hearty laugh of joy.
Speaker 1: Or her laughter on any and she has. She's done
Speaker 1: a study of like one hundred years of recorded music
Speaker 1: in documentary.
Speaker 3: Now is that class.
Speaker 5: Turned me out of find a laugh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jenny, Literally every laugh she has is either villainous
Speaker 1: or an exclamation.
Speaker 3: Or an ironic Yeah, not one, all right, So I
Speaker 3: can't even backsell it. So this is the Laughing song
Speaker 3: by George W. Johnson from eighteen ninety.
Speaker 6: Eight Robert Song by George W. As I am, I
Speaker 6: was coming around the corner, I had some people sad,
Speaker 6: it comes down the dog here, it comes this by
Speaker 6: you know, he is like a snowflower. His thousand is
Speaker 6: like a strap at open rules here for gaps. Then
Speaker 6: I laugh.
Speaker 3: How was that recorded in the very first.
Speaker 5: You know, how was recorded or what it was recorded on?
Speaker 1: I mean, whatever it's I mean, I wouldn't say that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's on acetate. I wouldn't even say it's during
Speaker 1: the time period that what's his name was? Yeah, that
Speaker 1: low Max was going around recording people. But I don't
Speaker 1: know the history. I can yeah to another, but anyway
Speaker 1: leading back, leading back to JA yeah, yeah, but I
Speaker 1: just never.
Speaker 3: Yeah his laugh. It's like being called a moron.
Speaker 5: What I'm gonna do?
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, Yeah, it's just it irks me. But my
Speaker 3: whole point was that I felt.
Speaker 1: It got short one. I think people were just ready
Speaker 1: for the j backlash to go down. It was time
Speaker 1: for it, and to Oh my God and and Kingdom
Speaker 1: Come could have used way better hooks, and but I
Speaker 1: still felt the thing was I sold him. I told
Speaker 1: him to start that record with those three songs because
Speaker 1: in my head I wanted his comeback to be like
Speaker 1: the updated two thousand and six version of America's Most Wanted.
Speaker 3: I described, like yo, these three records.
Speaker 5: And but see you know the things that he had
Speaker 5: his own other other vision, like he wanted it. He'd
Speaker 5: always wanted to do a project with Dre.
Speaker 1: And if you look like every all their collaborations are
Speaker 1: fail Like Dre the first watch It Too was dope.
Speaker 3: That song wasn't really, but he came up on that verse.
Speaker 5: Dre tried to mix those records. He didn't know, he
Speaker 5: didn't bother trying to make sure me what you got.
Speaker 5: He tried to mix Kingdom Come and not You. They
Speaker 5: had this thing where they were like they had done
Speaker 5: deal with Dre, where Dre was kind of supposed to
Speaker 5: help oversee the album and also do the mixing. They
Speaker 5: knew they know how hands on I am with my stuff.
Speaker 5: Dre knows that. But I said, you know what, it's Dre.
Speaker 5: I can't argue with that, you know, like if he
Speaker 5: says is he wants to do cool. I knew it
Speaker 5: was gonna happen. I know I was gonna get a
Speaker 5: call m H. And that's exactly what happened. I got
Speaker 5: a call like yo, because because Dre has already me
Speaker 5: and Dred already tried this with when we were working
Speaker 5: on games first album, you know Dre oversaw right, No, No,
Speaker 5: the first album we had like Church for Thugs, Yeah
Speaker 5: one a second album. So like Drey had already tried
Speaker 5: to mix my records. And because it's Dre, I'm never
Speaker 5: gonna say no. You can't attempt that, you know, like
Speaker 5: that's it's tray. And Dre has probably one of the
Speaker 5: the best ears in the hip hop as it relates
Speaker 5: to his sound. He knows how to make his sound
Speaker 5: sound amazing. But he called me and say, I don't
Speaker 5: know how you do what you do with these crazy
Speaker 5: bass frequencies and these super high in horns like part
Speaker 5: I tried to make it. It's not happening. Uh, come
Speaker 5: get on the plane. And I went out to LA
Speaker 5: and fixed the game record and it wasn't even a
Speaker 5: long process. It was just I know how I EQ
Speaker 5: what IQ exactly. And then with with Kingdom cod was
Speaker 5: kind of the same thing, like I never I never
Speaker 5: at this point I was you were doing files and
Speaker 5: I never was the type to send files out. Again,
Speaker 5: it's Dre, I'm not gonna say no. And I remember
Speaker 5: Jay Brown being like doing this solid. You know, I
Speaker 5: know that you're you know, you do your own stuff
Speaker 5: and you're your own factory. But we're trying to do
Speaker 5: this deal with Dre where he mixes everything. I said,
Speaker 5: all right, fine, sending the files, get the same call, Yo,
Speaker 5: it's it's not coming back right like I heard just rough,
Speaker 5: you might as well just.
Speaker 3: Have just do it.
Speaker 5: Because all he was he what he was trying to
Speaker 5: do was retreat my It's like, what just I already
Speaker 5: have the demo here, so let me just fix that up.
Speaker 5: So the day that they sent me the files back
Speaker 5: and j was coming to approve or listening to the
Speaker 5: mix and see if he was cool with it, was
Speaker 5: the dad played him, show me what you got m
Speaker 5: and he, because I had to mix up for Kingdom,
Speaker 5: come in the b room and then I like, I
Speaker 5: have something else you need to listen to it.
Speaker 3: I play time. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I want to say this was maybe the last thing
Speaker 5: that he did recording wise. At Baseline. We mixed. We
Speaker 5: mixed Blueprint three at Baseline, but he didn't record it
Speaker 5: the other there. We just bought the files back and.
Speaker 3: Mixed it Baseline. Still no.
Speaker 5: Baseline. I had the Grand Closing two thousand or eleven,
Speaker 5: Waito eleven, twenty eleven. So I did the great clothes
Speaker 5: on What was the last thing worked on there? That
Speaker 5: is a good question. I'm gonna have to get back
Speaker 5: to you on that. I want to say Blueprint three
Speaker 5: was the last thing. I want to say I actually
Speaker 5: worked on there, Like there might have been a few
Speaker 5: other random things that came up here and there before
Speaker 5: I finally closed the doors, but the last full project
Speaker 5: that was worked on there, like the entire Blueprint three
Speaker 5: was mixed there.
Speaker 3: Okay, now I'm gonna get back in the DeLorean and
Speaker 3: go back to.
Speaker 5: Let's go back to the shake that ass thing.
Speaker 3: Actually, that's why I was saying it because I got it.
Speaker 5: So I didn't make the record, but I was in
Speaker 5: my in my neighborhood or in my local market. I
Speaker 5: would say I was one of the guys that, like
Speaker 5: can I guess, helped break it. So I had routines
Speaker 5: that I would do. Back then, you didn't have twenty
Speaker 5: Jersey House records to play because it worked twenty of
Speaker 5: them or twenty Baltimore House records at that time. So
Speaker 5: I used to have a whole team that I used
Speaker 5: to do. So one night I used to do. I
Speaker 5: used to do a roll skating rink and from nine
Speaker 5: to twelve was roll skating and then from twelve o'clock
Speaker 5: on we would shut down the skating rink and it
Speaker 5: would just be people dancing on the skating rink. It
Speaker 5: was all ages. I was maybe like sixteen when I
Speaker 5: was doing at the time. So one night we got
Speaker 5: little bit of money together and we had Wendy Williams
Speaker 5: host Wow and uh, mister c was gonna be the DJ.
Speaker 5: Because the party started doing pretty well, so we were
Speaker 5: able to, you know, get a little bit of money
Speaker 5: together and start booking people. So Whenny Williams comes down
Speaker 5: to the host, Carhart Dad like she could have been
Speaker 5: an extra in a Youngster's video or what she was,
Speaker 5: car Heart down from top to bottom like Scully or
Speaker 5: shut out Stretch. So she comes down and she's doing
Speaker 5: her whole thing. I'm still DJing, and I know that
Speaker 5: missus he's about to do his thing. So I'm like,
Speaker 5: you know, I've always been a type to kind of
Speaker 5: respect the headlining DJ, but at the same time, like,
Speaker 5: this is my party, so I'm gonna throw out so
Speaker 5: my things. I knew that he was gonna do the
Speaker 5: hip hop thing. He had never really been exposed to
Speaker 5: Jersey just house culture in general up until that point,
Speaker 5: because it's very different from what's happening in house in
Speaker 5: house clubs in New York.
Speaker 3: Gotcha.
Speaker 5: So I do my usual Jersey house thing, which is
Speaker 5: really just the mix of the Chicago stuff, the Baltimore stuff,
Speaker 5: some of our local Jersey stuff, some of the Detroit
Speaker 5: tech noow, and I ended with this routine that I
Speaker 5: used to do, where I used to do a mix,
Speaker 5: a blend of shake shake, shake that ass. And the
Speaker 5: whole time, he's just kind of in a corner, like
Speaker 5: you know, being the celebrity DJ, just watching me, waiting
Speaker 5: to get on. He's just coming whatever. I play that
Speaker 5: and he immediately is just like, wait, what's this? As
Speaker 5: soon as he heard to opening dum dump done done done,
Speaker 5: like the Bounce called him. Then he looks at the
Speaker 5: crowd and he sees with the crowds when we had
Speaker 5: just moved the crowd onto the skating ring, so now
Speaker 5: everybody's dancing. He just watched what's happening, like, Yo, this
Speaker 5: is amazing. So I get a phone call from stage
Speaker 5: information that night we uh he hits me the next day,
Speaker 5: he said, I need that record or that song that
Speaker 5: you have. I need to do something with this.
Speaker 3: So who is the original artist on that red.
Speaker 5: He passed away a few years ago, so I bring him.
Speaker 5: I bring him a copy to the Cold He's like, oh,
Speaker 5: we meet the Cold Chilling offices. This is when Cold
Speaker 5: Chilling still add offices. So I go to Cold Chilling. Now,
Speaker 5: me as a kid who grew up on people in
Speaker 5: my age, grew up on like, you want me to
Speaker 5: come to Cold Chilling. So I called my older cousin,
Speaker 5: You'd be right over to Cold Chilling the next day
Speaker 5: or I actually a couple of days later, and I
Speaker 5: give him the record and he literally gives me a
Speaker 5: copy of every single record that came out on Cold Chilling,
Speaker 5: from the inception like the Prism day to then sealed, yeah, sealed,
Speaker 5: brand new, unopened. So it's like literally like three boxes
Speaker 5: worth and doubles of everything a man.
Speaker 3: So I'm including like the looks like a job for
Speaker 3: Big Daddy Kane and everything where I want to interview.
Speaker 5: That was that was? That was, That was post co chill,
Speaker 5: because that was that was.
Speaker 3: But Chilling was like was it was? It Prince of Darkness,
Speaker 3: I think was.
Speaker 5: But but then like because I'm new when I'm young,
Speaker 5: or because I'm so young, they like, wait a minute,
Speaker 5: we should play start playing them some of our new records.
Speaker 5: They're trying to kind of guinea pig me to be
Speaker 5: like the kid A and R. So now I'm going
Speaker 5: to cold Chilling and like they they had signed a
Speaker 5: group called the Brooklyn Zoo. Had nothing to do with
Speaker 5: Dirty but they were called the Brooklyn Zoo. And he
Speaker 5: plays they play me the video and they play me
Speaker 5: this song, or they play me the video and I'm
Speaker 5: waiting for the Wu Tang symbol to pop up, and
Speaker 5: it doesn't pop up, and then the video's over and
Speaker 5: I'm like, well, where's the Wu Tang symbol? I don't
Speaker 5: know even I'm a kid, like you play it. And
Speaker 5: this was right when UH returned to the thirty six
Speaker 5: shames that come out, So I'm like, where's the Wu
Speaker 5: Tang symbol? There wasn't one. I'm like, but they're called
Speaker 5: the Brooklyn Zoo, you know, Like it was just so
Speaker 5: that I walked up with the Brooklyn Zoo twelve inch too.
Speaker 5: It was just you know, like but it was just
Speaker 5: that surreal experience of I'm at the CoA chilling offices
Speaker 5: and I've just been giving this entire catalog on wax.
Speaker 5: So that's actually the first time my name ever appeared
Speaker 5: on a record was when mister C did his version
Speaker 5: of shape that ass. If you look at the bottom
Speaker 5: of the twelve inch it's his big being up to
Speaker 5: my man DJ just from Jersey. So like, to me,
Speaker 5: I had made it. You couldn't something my name was
Speaker 5: on a record, period, Like it doesn't matter that it
Speaker 5: was a tape kings pressing, it was a record, but
Speaker 5: I'm like, I'm like, Mom, look, She's like, who's DJ
Speaker 5: Judge from Jersey. I'm like, that's me. But like I
Speaker 5: still ask you today. I have a framed copy of
Speaker 5: that record, like just because it's one of those reminders,
Speaker 5: like my first time ever my name was ever on
Speaker 5: a record was It wasn't even a record that I produced,
Speaker 5: but I knew I had a big hand in it,
Speaker 5: and that record ran New York radio in clubs for
Speaker 5: god knows how that's I heard.
Speaker 3: So all right now I'm skipping the Matt Lion.
Speaker 5: That was a really random thing. I don't remember how
Speaker 5: it came up. I don't remember how it came up.
Speaker 5: Chris had just gotten a job at Reprise.
Speaker 3: He was like the right he was forgot Chris.
Speaker 5: Office this dude named thorough maybe a through something like that,
Speaker 5: and then he gave a line a deal. I don't
Speaker 5: remember how the initial like how it happened, but I
Speaker 5: end up like my first time ever in l A,
Speaker 5: like being flown out to l A birecty. My first
Speaker 5: time I set foot in California was being flown out
Speaker 5: to do this mad Line album. And a lot of
Speaker 5: stuff that I was doing was very orchestral at the times.
Speaker 5: A lot of string arrangements, uh, a lot of horn arrangements,
Speaker 5: timpane stuff like that. And his idea was he was
Speaker 5: trying to do like a Conan inspired album like Yes,
Speaker 5: looked up Mad Lion Predator or Prey Predator p r
Speaker 5: e D. Like instead of Predator is Predators.
Speaker 3: A Predators the nineties?
Speaker 5: Right, we wore Prey album?
Speaker 3: God Yeah wow?
Speaker 5: Like his talking voices very it's close to close to
Speaker 5: his rap bush. I did like eight records for him.
Speaker 5: It was my first time ever seeing like a lump
Speaker 5: sum of money like maybe like something like almost one
Speaker 5: hundred grand check or is that in cash sign of
Speaker 5: I got a check from Warner Brothers. But then I
Speaker 5: forget what. I forget what the situation was. But I
Speaker 5: want to say, maybe there was a white label of
Speaker 5: one of the records that we did that I ended
Speaker 5: up getting because I was still in a record pool
Speaker 5: at the time. So I get like by a copy
Speaker 5: of my own a record at the record pool and
Speaker 5: it just has produced by mad Line.
Speaker 3: Mm hm, and I'm like, sure, yes, you did this record.
Speaker 5: So we were on you know, we we We're on
Speaker 5: the phone.
Speaker 3: He manned.
Speaker 5: We talked about it. It wasn't he didn't give me
Speaker 5: the industry run around. He didn't do it. You know,
Speaker 5: we talked about it. He was like, listen, you know,
Speaker 5: gave me his opinion on it. I gave him my
Speaker 5: opinion on it. He said, well, how about this, how
Speaker 5: about we just make it the Madline and just play
Speaker 5: his album. I said, no, it doesn't doesn't need to
Speaker 5: even be that. I just want to be properly try
Speaker 5: for what I did. And from there on that we
Speaker 5: had no problem at all. Funny enough, that was actually
Speaker 5: all That album is the first time auto tunes have
Speaker 5: actually used on an R and b record, Wow, what
Speaker 5: year is that? I don't know it was before because
Speaker 5: Sheriff did it. Obviously that was the first one. And
Speaker 5: then I want to say, and then Jennifer Lopez had
Speaker 5: it on. I think maybe if you Want My Love
Speaker 5: or something like that. We did a record with Total,
Speaker 5: did he explode?
Speaker 3: Am I the only one that really likes Total? I
Speaker 3: appreciate Total for what they were, what know theirs? The
Speaker 3: first album was JAC Sitting Home. I tried. Look they
Speaker 3: had on there called rock track.
Speaker 1: I remember it was like having having good songs and
Speaker 1: giving good performances are two different, right, And what I
Speaker 1: appreciated about Total is that I felt they worked within it.
Speaker 1: I felt that they were accessible. They were the girls
Speaker 1: next door. They sound right your cousin Tanisia's singing.
Speaker 5: And I don't think I ever tried to be anything
Speaker 5: more than you know, like So we did the Remember
Speaker 5: we did the record. It was it called I don't
Speaker 5: remember what it was called, but you look up mad
Speaker 5: line Total, it'll it'll come up. But we did the record,
Speaker 5: and I'm gonna try something right after. I already I
Speaker 5: was using pro tools, you know, early on, so I
Speaker 5: knew about the auto tune effect, so I put auto
Speaker 5: tune I think on pay the Dark Pan was the
Speaker 5: dark Skian girl put Auto two on her. She was like,
Speaker 5: what's that? So I'm like, oh, I'm just gonna put
Speaker 5: all on all their vocals, all her background.
Speaker 3: The first of the second album.
Speaker 5: This is One Mad Lines was featuring featuring Total, so
Speaker 5: we did I did the bag speaking. That's another funny
Speaker 5: story that that doing that record is how I met
Speaker 5: Joey Longo, Pal Joey this but this was when Thong
Speaker 5: song was out and okay, so wait they used drums
Speaker 5: from Earth People. So I walk into Unique, Wow the
Speaker 5: dam I'm doing this session and I look at my
Speaker 5: uh track sheet and it says assistant engineer or by session,
Speaker 5: assistant Engineer's gonna be Pal Joey. And actually it might
Speaker 5: have just said Joey Longo because that was just real near.
Speaker 5: So I'm in the room and it's just, you know,
Speaker 5: this white dude a little bit older than me, you know,
Speaker 5: you know what he was talking about. And I started
Speaker 5: putting on are you Pal Joey, like the Pal Joey
Speaker 5: and he's like, you know who I am. I'm like,
Speaker 5: you know Earth People? Soho krs like I was just
Speaker 5: I was so wide I did so I was like,
Speaker 5: why are you working here?
Speaker 3: Wait?
Speaker 1: Can you stop the story? Yeah, I know pal Joey
Speaker 1: from all the Kras credits. Pal Joey did motherfucking so
Speaker 1: host hop music.
Speaker 5: Yes, that's what I'm saying, Yes.
Speaker 8: In a conversation.
Speaker 3: Now, yeah, I think you should have got it.
Speaker 1: You think he probably got a pretty good check because
Speaker 1: Mark Ronson sampled him well, credited him on the uh
Speaker 1: the last record that the the.
Speaker 3: One that sounds like hot music.
Speaker 5: So so so I'm like, I'm I you know, looking back,
Speaker 5: that was a crazy thing to ask. By the time,
Speaker 5: I was just like, he's a hero to me. And
Speaker 5: when I hear thongs so he has aside from Hot Music,
Speaker 5: his other classic house record is Earth People Dance, So
Speaker 5: he had a bonus beats version on the flip that
Speaker 5: the DJ's used to rints crazy. So yeah, So at
Speaker 5: the end of Thong song, I remember it changes and
Speaker 5: it gets a little bit more foreign to Flourish. They're
Speaker 5: using pal Joey's drums. So not only has this done
Speaker 5: done amazing classic records, and at the time, I'm thinking
Speaker 5: that all of my heroes are living, rich and lavish
Speaker 5: and are doing are well to do whatever. So I
Speaker 5: asked him, why are you working here? He's like, well,
Speaker 5: I wanted to learn about engineering and I needed a job.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, but you realized that, like your drums
Speaker 5: are sampled in the number one record in the world
Speaker 5: right now, you don't need like why are you working here?
Speaker 5: And I was just so that was my first time
Speaker 5: meeting somebody that was a hero mine, but meeting them
Speaker 5: is just in their regular life. And he was like,
Speaker 5: you think I can get some money for that, and
Speaker 5: I'm like, dude, yeah, those are clearly your drums, your
Speaker 5: program drums, not a loop you found and no, this
Speaker 5: is your program drums are on the biggest record.
Speaker 3: Wow, I'm mind blowing this. Pal Joey Yes, ah damn
Speaker 3: that's Earth People.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sorry, it's Earth People.
Speaker 5: So dude, I'm just the random Sorry. I met Pal
Speaker 5: Joey and kind of like was like, yo, dude, talk
Speaker 5: to this lawyer. You can go get some money next time.
Speaker 5: I don't know the exactly outcomeing, but like next time
Speaker 5: I saw him look a lot happier and it was
Speaker 5: like yo, yeah, so you know, I'll stop the story
Speaker 5: there but I think he was doing he did okay,
Speaker 5: uh made out okay over that. But anyway, Yeah, so
Speaker 5: that Lion situation was the first time that I'd ever
Speaker 5: made a little, a nice little trunk of money up
Speaker 5: front at once. My first time in LA. Uh was that?
Speaker 5: My first experience in Boystown in LA. I have a
Speaker 5: great Boystown story. I was talking about Westwood. I don't
Speaker 5: know it's like the actual Boystown area of LA. Okay,
Speaker 5: I didn't know what Boystown was.
Speaker 3: You're the roots in nineteen ninety four when oh wow,
Speaker 3: I have a I got a better one though. This
Speaker 3: is we're about to get off the air now.
Speaker 5: It was this was my second my second time in
Speaker 5: l A. I ended up in anybody who's familiar with
Speaker 5: La over next time you're in l A, you know
Speaker 5: that I hop on Sunset.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Halloway Drive.
Speaker 5: Right next to that is the Halloway Motel. So the
Speaker 5: night of the Grammys, I ended up having to stay
Speaker 5: in that hotel. Why, not knowing what it was.
Speaker 3: I'll give you the short It's the cheapest hotel on
Speaker 3: the not just.
Speaker 5: It's not even a hotel. Bro It's a place where wait.
Speaker 3: A minute, wait by the air.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is what they rhyme about, like thing of
Speaker 1: the Bristol Hotel by cool. So it's wait, it's crazy
Speaker 1: because it's like, Okay, I see the Roscoes, I know
Speaker 1: where the I HOPI.
Speaker 5: It's literally right next to the eye. How I'll give
Speaker 5: you the shortest version possible. So this is my second time.
Speaker 5: This is my first time in LA on my own,
Speaker 5: just being there. Me and and hip Hop went to La.
Speaker 5: I think we set up some meetings or whatever.
Speaker 3: Hip Hop Kanye's manager, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Okay, so we're out there. We're both dumb, young we
Speaker 5: do you know, We're just out there. So this was
Speaker 5: we were out there while the Grammys were happening, so
Speaker 5: we kept We're only supposed to be there three days.
Speaker 5: We kept extending the stay, and the hotel's found with
Speaker 5: that they're getting money. So the day of the grammysh price,
Speaker 5: the price just the rooms aren't even available. So there
Speaker 5: the Grammys comes and I called out to the front
Speaker 5: desk like, hey, so we're just gonna extend our stay.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to the Gramies. I'm They're like, oh, sorry,
Speaker 5: well that room has been sold out since last year
Speaker 5: for this day, Like and I'm like, all right, so
Speaker 5: can you help us out? Like we need to stay here.
Speaker 5: We don't have a plane to get back home. So
Speaker 5: they called all their other hotels like you know in
Speaker 5: LA trying to find rooms. They couldn't find a room,
Speaker 5: they had their rooms available. They start calling other hotels
Speaker 5: just to try to help us out because we've been
Speaker 5: staying there for like two weeks, so they were trying
Speaker 5: to look out for us. Long story short, there are
Speaker 5: literally no hotel rooms in l A at all period.
Speaker 5: It's the day of the Grammys. There's nothing. You're also
Speaker 5: talking like maybe like two thousand. So a lot of
Speaker 5: those you know a lot of those newer hotels that
Speaker 5: are in l A now, like those they don't exist
Speaker 5: back then.
Speaker 3: This is when records were actually said pre R and B.
Speaker 5: They just none of it available. So so me and uh,
Speaker 5: uh that's see, I forget dude's name. What was the
Speaker 5: what were the what was the crew behind Sunshine Anderson's uh.
Speaker 3: Who was City and uh Mike City producer before I.
Speaker 5: Forget dude's name, but he was like the guy that
Speaker 5: kind of ran their crew or was like, oh they
Speaker 5: had him maybe start with a jay he he he
Speaker 5: was the industry dud at the time he was popping.
Speaker 5: I remember what his name was, kind of irrelevant. He
Speaker 5: was having So I'm skipping around. First of all, my
Speaker 5: homie mo Betta comes and picks me up mh one
Speaker 5: of my old homes from the bed. So we're literally
Speaker 5: driving around La trying to find our hotel. That's the
Speaker 5: reason why I bought dude up to some chinadis, and
Speaker 5: dude was because he would start a Grammy party that night.
Speaker 5: Hip Hop was gonna help him with the party. So
Speaker 5: a hip left like, ya gotta go help homeboy. Can
Speaker 5: you try to sort out the rooms? I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: we'll figure it out. At the time, I don't know
Speaker 5: how difficult it's gonna be.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: We check out of the room. Hip goes and does
Speaker 5: what he has to do. The party is on at
Speaker 5: I think the House of Blues on some like that
Speaker 5: was right off Sunset or whatever. So I get uh,
Speaker 5: we go around at every hotel, nobody has anything. We
Speaker 5: plastic place, the Holloway Motel and the Science that's vacancy, right.
Speaker 5: So we get there and it wasn't even like a
Speaker 5: front desk. They had like a or the window. They
Speaker 5: had a window so sign number.
Speaker 3: Two bulletproof class all you need so hard keys.
Speaker 5: You have any rooms. He's like, well, unfortunately, guys, we
Speaker 5: only have doubles. I'm like, well that's great because there's
Speaker 5: two of us. So he doesn't know that hip, but
Speaker 5: he sees me and mo bet he's in my homie.
Speaker 5: He's like when you know, He's like, unfortunately. I'm like, wait,
Speaker 5: but no, doubles are fine. There's two people. We need
Speaker 5: two beds. So there's a jar sitting right next to him.
Speaker 5: I don't look at the joh I'm thinking it's like lollipops, candy.
Speaker 5: I don't know. But I'm looking around just the neighborhood
Speaker 5: and there's a lot of prostitutes out here, right whatever.
Speaker 5: I'm just kind of this is my second time in La,
Speaker 5: my first time really on my own, so I'm just
Speaker 5: getting the laying the land. Wow, this is I guess
Speaker 5: this is the hooker area.
Speaker 3: I don't know. So they're like pancakes. I get to
Speaker 3: the whole time.
Speaker 5: I get it in and it's it's a The room
Speaker 5: is clean. It's you know, bare bones, but it's clean.
Speaker 5: So I'm in there for a while and I'm like,
Speaker 5: I said I'm nobody. So I'm just like, the Grammy
Speaker 5: Red Carpet is happening. We're watching it on T I'm
Speaker 5: watching it on TV. Hip Hop is doing his thing,
Speaker 5: you know, gallivanting with Homeboy at the setting up for
Speaker 5: the hard rock calf or the not the House of
Speaker 5: Blues drunk.
Speaker 3: What album is out that you're is this blueprint or
Speaker 3: this is pre pre all of that, like two thousand.
Speaker 5: Maybe maybe a mill Maybe that's probably it. Maybe a mill.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, well, hip hop is having that party,
Speaker 5: but back and get into that or always having a party.
Speaker 5: Hip Hop is back and get into that. So I
Speaker 5: go to get in the shower.
Speaker 3: So I.
Speaker 5: Start showering. It's like, yeah, I think this is something.
Speaker 3: Do you still have what you caught that night? I
Speaker 3: don't need to switch seat.
Speaker 5: Actually, I think this is the fear that we can
Speaker 5: all relate to. And the shower and middle middle lather
Speaker 5: mid the water shuts off, there's no water. Yeah, what
Speaker 5: do you you do? So? And I had like I
Speaker 5: literally just stepped in waters on me, soap up, water stops.
Speaker 3: And I'm like the timer on the shower, what do
Speaker 3: I do?
Speaker 5: So I kind of I'm covered in soap like it's
Speaker 5: you can't really just tabl it off because then it's
Speaker 5: just I had no choice. So that right after that,
Speaker 5: the rings got the front desk or the front window
Speaker 5: letting me know that there's been a water main break
Speaker 5: in the area. There's no water anywhere in the area.
Speaker 5: So I wipe. I'm still sticky with the soap filleb
Speaker 5: all over me. I get dressed, I'm like, what do
Speaker 5: I do? Uh Like, I'll just go to the iehop.
Speaker 5: Can't go to hop. There's no water, so I hop
Speaker 5: was closed, so I was just gonna go back to
Speaker 5: the room. So I'm sitting on the in the room,
Speaker 5: sitting on the bed watching the Grammy red carpet, still
Speaker 5: covered in soap, you know, but like sticky and whatnot.
Speaker 5: And then all of a sudden, I hear coming from
Speaker 5: the next door. So I'm like, oh, I guess, so
Speaker 5: somebody somebody's getting it in, so I need somebody is
Speaker 5: lucky that I notice. I hear many voices. It wasn't
Speaker 5: just like a male and a female moan, or a
Speaker 5: male and a male moan, or a female and a
Speaker 5: female moan. It was just some all types. I'm like,
Speaker 5: so That's when it really hits me, like, yo, I'm
Speaker 5: in like a hotel motel, like the hotel motel, and
Speaker 5: I run back out to I run back out to
Speaker 5: the front desk and it's closed, but the jar is
Speaker 5: still there, or the front window, but the jar is
Speaker 5: still there. And I realized the jars are actually it's
Speaker 5: what's where the jar, what's in it is. It's not
Speaker 5: lolly pops, it's not bubble gum. It's packets of ky
Speaker 5: and kind of so I'm like, right, So I'm like, well,
Speaker 5: so now I'm just I'm walking around. Remember I said,
Speaker 5: I noticed there were a lot of hookers out, So
Speaker 5: that's what I'm realizing. That's when I'm starting to realize
Speaker 5: what area that I'm in, Like, and I'm staying at
Speaker 5: a motel that they're all coming to through their business in.
Speaker 5: So then I try to I'm like, you know what,
Speaker 5: I'm sticky, I'm covered in soap. I had dreads at
Speaker 5: the time, so my dreads is all soap and watered
Speaker 5: up everything. So I'm like, you, I know where the
Speaker 5: House of Blues is, So I was just gonna try
Speaker 5: to walk towards there. Maybe I can just get into
Speaker 5: the party somehow. But then I realize how I look,
Speaker 5: And then I look at the line and I see
Speaker 5: the line is down on the block because it's a
Speaker 5: House of Blues Grammy party in LA And I realize
Speaker 5: I'm not getting into that, but I'm gonna try anyway.
Speaker 5: But this is really before cell phone was even really
Speaker 5: like where I had a cell phone. I want to say,
Speaker 5: a hit baby did it. I'm like, I don't know
Speaker 5: what to like. I don't know what to do with
Speaker 5: this point. So I roamed Boystown for the next couple
Speaker 5: of hours. Oh wow, and just not you know, what
Speaker 5: do I do with that situation? So eventually I go
Speaker 5: back to the hotel. I realize what it is now,
Speaker 5: water comes back on I you know, finish the shower,
Speaker 5: so I lay my jacket on top of the bed.
Speaker 5: I don't get in the bed and I just lay there.
Speaker 5: So hip hop finally comes in like six thirty in
Speaker 5: the morning, and he's tired. He's been at this party
Speaker 5: or like they probably went for food after him, god
Speaker 5: knows what else. So I come like half asleep, but
Speaker 5: I see him going to pull the sheets back and
Speaker 5: get in the bed. I'm like, no, I don't get
Speaker 5: in the bed whenever you do not get in the bed.
Speaker 5: He's so confused, like he gets in the bed anyway.
Speaker 5: I'm like, dude, stop, like to sleep on. Do you
Speaker 5: see what I'm doing? Do you guise where we're at?
Speaker 5: You see to drive condoms in ky you know at
Speaker 5: the front, there was no wow shout out to search.
Speaker 5: So uh, next morning, uh mo, better finds uh you know,
Speaker 5: now the grand people are leaving. So the next morning
Speaker 5: we find a hotel. Oh but then I don't really
Speaker 5: know that this is traditionally supposed to be an hourly
Speaker 5: thing and if you stay over there, like check out time,
Speaker 5: it's still like nine a m. Because nobody goes through
Speaker 5: those places in stays. So I'm getting the phone calls
Speaker 5: and dude is a very effeminate and his medisms on
Speaker 5: the phone, So I'm kind of like just kind of like, yo, whatever, dude,
Speaker 5: because he's like it was checkout time. I'm like, yeah, whatever,
Speaker 5: click because I'm I'm activating. I'm tired. If I've had
Speaker 5: the worst of the night from hell, I just want
Speaker 5: to sleep inside. Know that I have another hotel room.
Speaker 5: So dude calls again a little bit later, still, you know,
Speaker 5: being effeminine, and I'm just like, you gotta get up.
Speaker 5: I gotta get up, I gotta get up. Hip hop
Speaker 5: had left righty because he was going to try to
Speaker 5: find another hotel room. So dude calls one more time
Speaker 5: and I'm like, hey, yo, we're we're about to be
Speaker 5: out in fact to be found a hotel room at
Speaker 5: this point. Next thing, I know, about five minutes later,
Speaker 5: the banging I'm not doing baby, and it's I hear
Speaker 5: that same with feminine voice. So I opened the door
Speaker 5: like ready to like make it the thing. And the
Speaker 5: dude is like six foot nine diesel my white beaters,
Speaker 5: his muscles, got muscles, and I'm like, sir, we'll be
Speaker 5: right out.
Speaker 3: That episode.
Speaker 5: I bet you.
Speaker 1: Man, Let's let's go somewhere. So okay, so sigon, yes man,
Speaker 1: what happened with that record? Like I'm now that it's
Speaker 1: like over and what endless delays? So wait did it
Speaker 1: come out?
Speaker 5: It did come out, came out twenty eleven.
Speaker 3: I got that mistake with Jay Electronic means.
Speaker 5: Lord of Mercy Side was brought to me by like
Speaker 5: when Sycamore was first trying to figure out what the
Speaker 5: an R game was. Whenever he wanted to work with me, Like,
Speaker 5: and I used to just see Sycamore around and be like,
Speaker 5: who is this dude? Like I'll be in Chicago, and
Speaker 5: the next I'll be in Cleveland, and I'll be in Chicago,
Speaker 5: Sycamore is there. I'll be in Cleveland the next day
Speaker 5: he's there, and I'm like, you know, he was just
Speaker 5: trying to I was on a road with Jay and
Speaker 5: Fifty at the time, so Sick was kind of just
Speaker 5: like finding out where we were playing at and popping
Speaker 5: up in every market, just trying to make a name
Speaker 5: for him. So so took a lot of control him.
Speaker 5: He wanted to do the an R thing. So he
Speaker 5: brings me a bunch of artists. One of the artists
Speaker 5: he brings me aside off, So I'm like, yo, kid's
Speaker 5: kind of nice have him coming down to the studio.
Speaker 5: Gave SI about four records or four beats. I'm gonna
Speaker 5: take these home and let me know, you know, bring
Speaker 5: me back what you come up with in the meantime,
Speaker 5: Like you know, he'd had his Warning Shots mixtape out.
Speaker 5: He had literally like a a a crazy binder full
Speaker 5: of press and whatnot already. So I'm like, all right,
Speaker 5: I think, you know, the kid has some stuff popping. Uh,
Speaker 5: letsten to me. He comes back with. You know, in
Speaker 5: terms of the music music he brings back is not
Speaker 5: mind blowing, but it's good considering he just went home
Speaker 5: and one night wrote four songs and brought him right
Speaker 5: back to me. So I'm I'm still debating, like what
Speaker 5: we can do with this, If we can make it
Speaker 5: into something, he's coming around baseline more. I'll giving him
Speaker 5: more music. Within a week of that, word starts to
Speaker 5: spread that we are, you know, hanging out before we
Speaker 5: could even do the bidding war thing or anything like that.
Speaker 5: Atlantic comes right to the table, like, so we heard
Speaker 5: just plays working with a notice name Sagon and Ge
Speaker 5: is involved, and hip hop is involved. So we wanted
Speaker 5: didn't hear, didn't hear a song, didn't hear a demo,
Speaker 5: heard nothing. They just saw the names on paper, just plays, Sagon,
Speaker 5: Gem Robinson, hip Hop, Rockefeller. Go like, why why would
Speaker 5: we not a part of this? And because of the
Speaker 5: way his buzz was at the time, at least in
Speaker 5: the underground and throughout New York, I think they thought
Speaker 5: they were getting like the next fifty cent right, and
Speaker 5: it wasn't that His music wasn't that and so me,
Speaker 5: you know, being young in experience in that field, just
Speaker 5: was like, oh they hey, we don't even have to
Speaker 5: make a demo. They just wanna sign up because it
Speaker 5: was involved great looking back to my the worst things
Speaker 5: you could ever do. You already know that. And on
Speaker 5: top of that, G and hip hop are gonna be
Speaker 5: in the building at Atlantic. Now I kind of want
Speaker 5: to say that this might have been their entry point
Speaker 5: into Atlantic or this was like happened right after they
Speaker 5: made their way into Atlantic. So you have, you know,
Speaker 5: two of your very good friends now being the heads
Speaker 5: of A and R at the labels. Like it's a
Speaker 5: no brainer. You know, it's a win win for everybody.
Speaker 5: And as soon as we sent them the like so
Speaker 5: things are bubbling and I knew something was up, and
Speaker 5: like we gave them the first record was it Pain
Speaker 5: in My Life with Trey songs on it, which they
Speaker 5: didn't lift the finger to make it happen. We did it,
Speaker 5: got the record played or it's playing out seven, it's
Speaker 5: playing on a few other markets. Videos being played on
Speaker 5: b et. He uh was hosting rap City for a
Speaker 5: week or what. I don't know if he was on it,
Speaker 5: he had a regular series of like rotation like PSAs
Speaker 5: that he was doing on MTV, and I want to
Speaker 5: say he holds in Rahap City for like three days
Speaker 5: or something. All this is happening when Painting My Life drops.
Speaker 5: None of this is from Atlantic. This is either from
Speaker 5: pds or music directors whatever. Being a fan of him,
Speaker 5: a fan of the music. It wasn't me calling in favors.
Speaker 5: It wasn't us calling in favors. It was all happening
Speaker 5: very organically. So we're looking at the label like, hey,
Speaker 5: this is happening on his own without you guys lifting
Speaker 5: a finger. How about you lift a finger?
Speaker 3: Do you know? How about it?
Speaker 5: Like they were like, well, how do we do this?
Speaker 5: How do we sell this? And this is right when
Speaker 5: they're starting to This was that same year that they
Speaker 5: made all that money selling ring tones for the first time,
Speaker 5: So they're looking at this like how do we sell
Speaker 5: ring tones of this music? This is socially conscious, actual
Speaker 5: like real hip hop, how do we sell this? And
Speaker 5: I'm like, well, you know, you guys are a label.
Speaker 5: You've been selling records for you know, one hundred years now,
Speaker 5: and that's no slight to them. That's just really what
Speaker 5: my attitude was, like we've if I can't, if the
Speaker 5: music can organically find its way to MTV b et
Speaker 5: ninety seven, most of the other with the exception of it,
Speaker 5: like we were get was getting played in Boston, was
Speaker 5: getting played in Miami, it was getting played in Chicago.
Speaker 5: All this is happening without any of us calling it
Speaker 5: any heavy favors. And with that, you guys, they were
Speaker 5: not lifting your finger. Imagine what can happen if you
Speaker 5: guys did. And they just never did. And then they
Speaker 5: it started eventually became a parent. They just didn't know
Speaker 5: what to do with it. So at that point, I'm
Speaker 5: looking at it, all right, let's figure out to get
Speaker 5: out of this contract. But to Craig Coleman's credit, Craig
Speaker 5: was Craig admitted that and was still trying to find
Speaker 5: ways to make it work. He still, like it came
Speaker 5: time to be forecast budget, he was still, you know,
Speaker 5: going letting it happen. We needed a Jay Giles band
Speaker 5: sample cleared, which nobody had never really sampled Jay Giles.
Speaker 5: You know, he personally made the phone call to like
Speaker 5: the manager. Then you go to sample clearance house. They
Speaker 5: he personally called a manager made it happen, you know,
Speaker 5: and while he's trying to put his best foot forward,
Speaker 5: size getting frustrated at the delays and things. So he
Speaker 5: started to speak out against the label and then he
Speaker 5: was like doing things like five page my MySpace posts
Speaker 5: rentingas Atlantic. I'm like, dude, I'm trying to get these
Speaker 5: guys to either put up more money speaking finishes, to
Speaker 5: feel way to do it, or let us go. You
Speaker 5: keep doing this, You're pissing them off, Like it's gonna
Speaker 5: make my job harder. Would you either get the album
Speaker 5: finished or get out of there? And at that time,
Speaker 5: there was so much transitional stuff happening at Atlantic, which
Speaker 5: are you already know all about that? Just the process
Speaker 5: of getting out, even after they agreed to do it,
Speaker 5: just took god knows how long.
Speaker 1: I mean, we were able to get out of our
Speaker 1: stuff like quick, but like Apathy was that at the
Speaker 1: same time.
Speaker 3: It shit took like three years.
Speaker 5: I remember trying to Apathy. He was over there too,
Speaker 5: And you know, I think with us they had it.
Speaker 5: They had they hadn't They invested a good amount of money.
Speaker 5: Like what I did. The first thing, one of the
Speaker 5: first things that I did was all the producers that
Speaker 5: had been helping him and supporting him, like guys like
Speaker 5: Scram and Alchemists and stuff like that. I went back
Speaker 5: right to those dudes and was like, I can't pay
Speaker 5: you for your old beats, but I'm gonna give you
Speaker 5: all you guys song deals. So I'm paying Scram Jones
Speaker 5: for three beats up front before he's even made them.
Speaker 5: I'm coming to Alchemists and said, I'm paying you for
Speaker 5: two beats, like the same guys that helped develop that sound.
Speaker 5: I want you guys to be the bulk of this album.
Speaker 5: Buck while same thing. So I'm giving dudes checks before
Speaker 5: I'm even hearing beats. And for the most part, all
Speaker 5: that worked out. But that said Atlantic had put out
Speaker 5: so much put up so much money, they weren't about
Speaker 5: to just relinquish it without having their right exactly. So
Speaker 5: by the time they worked out to return and everything else,
Speaker 5: now we had a position where his buzzes died. So
Speaker 5: it's like, all right, now we're freedom. We have freedom.
Speaker 5: We can put the record out how to who wants
Speaker 5: to buy it now? So we kind of had to
Speaker 5: get him back in the habit of putting on material.
Speaker 5: Mace tam s getting him on the road, finding any
Speaker 5: distributed for the project, for the project, making sure that
Speaker 5: all those sample clearances, the things that Atlantic had set
Speaker 5: up in good faith, were being transferred over to the
Speaker 5: new situation. I have to, like Jay had given me
Speaker 5: a feature for the album, and now I have to
Speaker 5: you know, hit Jay and be like, hey, it's still
Speaker 5: coming out. I want to make sure we're still good,
Speaker 5: you know, and all the guys, like all the talent
Speaker 5: that was on the album, like just like Fat minus
Speaker 5: Scoop doing the intro misinfo, doing skids, screen learning and
Speaker 5: doing skits like because it was kind of set up
Speaker 5: like a radio broadcast, getting on touched with all these
Speaker 5: people are making sure that like hey it's been five
Speaker 5: years or four years, but you know, I make sure
Speaker 5: that we're still good on our clearances. So a lot
Speaker 5: of that was really the lay of doing it, and
Speaker 5: at the same time him, you know, getting his buzz
Speaker 5: back up. It was definitely a learning experience, I think,
Speaker 5: one that you know, you kind of have to go
Speaker 5: through to know what mistakes not to do or to
Speaker 5: make over things that I go for the next time around.
Speaker 11: So it was five years later, like we started that out,
Speaker 11: I met SI, I took over, like officially officially took
Speaker 11: over baseline and O three, I want to say, side
Speaker 11: came around, uh by and I mess.
Speaker 5: Sicamore n O three the same year that I bought.
Speaker 5: But so I want to say, ci I had to
Speaker 5: start coming around in oh four, middle four, and we
Speaker 5: were working and like the deal probably happened by late
Speaker 5: O four early oh five came out in two thousand eleven,
Speaker 5: So that's six years later.
Speaker 3: So let's talk about another frustrating project. JA Electrolysis elects.
Speaker 5: His train is running on schedule?
Speaker 3: What what schedule?
Speaker 5: That's his favorite saying my train is running on schedule.
Speaker 3: Was the last time you had a conversation.
Speaker 5: With him, a real, real, real conversation, or like that,
Speaker 5: we had contact, a real conversation. It's been a while,
Speaker 5: Like when when Carrie Fisher died, we had a conversation.
Speaker 5: It wasn't about music. It was about carry Fisher.
Speaker 3: You cite you too are Star Wars.
Speaker 5: We was just like sci fi guys in general, you know,
Speaker 5: so so uh that was a conversation. It wasn't a
Speaker 5: lengthy conversation, but it was a real conversation about so
Speaker 5: real stuff. Just about life in general and things like that.
Speaker 5: I want to say after after being Swiss, did did
Speaker 5: the back and forth thing he d m me super
Speaker 5: hyped wanting to work.
Speaker 3: Where is he in the world right now?
Speaker 5: I don't know he's I want to say, if I
Speaker 5: remember correctly, though, one of the last times we did
Speaker 5: have a real lengthy conversation, he had told me that
Speaker 5: he had bought a house. It was either in New
Speaker 5: Orleans or in Texas. It might have been in Texas,
Speaker 5: maybe so he'd be closer to his daughter. Maybe it
Speaker 5: wasn't like New York and it wasn't in LA. I
Speaker 5: want to say that. If it wasn't in New Orleans,
Speaker 5: it was I think maybe in Texas. You know, Jay's
Speaker 5: always been a nomad. Like it's funny enough, you know,
Speaker 5: actually how I know James through Shot. It's funny how
Speaker 5: many things Shot is randomly behind. But yeah, so het
Speaker 5: y'all got this kid. He's amazing lyricist, great artist, doesn't
Speaker 5: know a thing about the business, doesn't know how any
Speaker 5: of this works. You need somebody to take him under
Speaker 5: his wing. I'm not that guy, you know. I wanted
Speaker 5: to bring him to you. In the meantime, something and
Speaker 5: me and this has been in the game days when
Speaker 5: you ahould talk on a Yeah, somehow Jay ended up
Speaker 5: stealing my am screen name from Shad Yo Okay.
Speaker 1: I was thinking as you were talking about this, I
Speaker 1: was like, I wonder if I should share this story
Speaker 1: about the time when Jay okay, So he's legendary for
Speaker 1: this ship. Yeah, you tell you his first so no,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's to.
Speaker 5: Be honest, It wasn't that much of a story, like
Speaker 5: because I was already aware of him from the shot,
Speaker 5: because we shot had already prefaced the conversation, and me
Speaker 5: and Mashad had spoken about him a few times. I
Speaker 5: wasn't necessarily surprised when I heard from him, But then
Speaker 5: I realized he didn't like he was just looking Overhad's
Speaker 5: shoulder or at his computer when when was didn stole
Speaker 5: my screen And I always figured if he stole probably
Speaker 5: I doubt that Whi's for shot? Are we talking about?
Speaker 3: He's done Biggie's woman chance? Uh. He was kind of
Speaker 3: the he was the gutter of of the of Puff's
Speaker 3: hip men. He did all I mean, I mean he
Speaker 3: did do one try. Yeah, I mean he did it like.
Speaker 5: He's one of those guys that could bounce around like.
Speaker 3: He'll do Ladies Night for Little Kim, but then he'll
Speaker 3: do dreams for Biggie, you know what I mean. So,
Speaker 3: but wait real quick.
Speaker 1: So during the eight uh campaign and period for Obama,
Speaker 1: like when all of us were going heavy doing all
Speaker 1: that stuff, one of the greatest pranks I was ever
Speaker 1: part of because Jay and I got cool one day
Speaker 1: he just aimed me two got my aim and we
Speaker 1: became fast friends that way. And he convinced me two
Speaker 1: kind of go to my celebrity room to play pranks.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if I should reveal this, you
Speaker 1: should absolutely he he uh somehow managed to get Obama's
Speaker 1: aim name before Obama thought to you know, like back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight, you weren't thinking of okay,
Speaker 1: let me get my Gmail name, my AOL name.
Speaker 5: My son Obama on a name he got.
Speaker 3: He got it on Aim and uh brilliant.
Speaker 1: First he pranked a Dallas Maverick person to thinking that
Speaker 1: he was Barack Obama.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Then it sounds like then we got Jonah Hill, which
Speaker 1: to this day I'm not sure Jonah Hills forgiven me for.
Speaker 3: But the best one of all.
Speaker 5: Was not wet. You're reminded me of hold on, hold
Speaker 5: on finished.
Speaker 1: I can only imagine with oh my god, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, to this, to this, to his credit, that's
Speaker 1: when I knew. Actually, I think that's also what subsequently
Speaker 1: ended my days of being on AIM.
Speaker 5: I used to always be on AIM.
Speaker 3: I remember they kind of punk me out of it,
Speaker 3: like I stay inside the solitary confinement, I don't go
Speaker 3: out to the general.
Speaker 5: I remember he tried that with me one time, proposing
Speaker 5: as Scarlett Johanson.
Speaker 3: Genius. I got about this his genius level finess.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you, he had nods, nods, engaged so convincingly.
Speaker 3: It was the most vulnerable I've seen him.
Speaker 8: He said something prolific, didn't he said, like.
Speaker 3: I mean he was just like he was so touched
Speaker 3: and for that the and it was and it was
Speaker 3: and the way the way that he did it.
Speaker 1: I was also like, oh, j might be a sociopath,
Speaker 1: like like this is some this is some uh what's
Speaker 1: the will Smith six degrees? Since it was the level
Speaker 1: I've seen him in situations, just switched characters where he
Speaker 1: can talk the whitest of the rothschild white and the
Speaker 1: g of the gutter and.
Speaker 5: Then all of a sudden that so very quickly. Now
Speaker 5: one thing I say about Jakes, He's a social engineer.
Speaker 1: It was it was at that moment where I realized
Speaker 1: that the way that his brain works is just on
Speaker 1: some next level.
Speaker 3: So what's going on with him? Man?
Speaker 5: Like? What the exhibit any fun fact exhibit DE was
Speaker 5: sponsored by Guitar Center. We have a Guitar Center thing.
Speaker 1: He all, I went to Guitar Center, I see Apple Store,
Speaker 1: make it the music Like, that's just real.
Speaker 5: What happened was, uh, you know, they do their catalog
Speaker 5: of their circulars whatever, like once every season. Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: So it was a twofold thing. They wanted to have
Speaker 5: myself and an engineer and an artist on the cover
Speaker 5: of that particular season's catalog. My homie, Mike, Mike Chev
Speaker 5: who was uh yeah, he was so Chev had some
Speaker 5: kind of insights the Guitar Center, so he hooks up,
Speaker 5: where's going to be me and him on the cover.
Speaker 5: And then obviously Jay's are connection. I know Shave through
Speaker 5: jaz No, I know Shat through ja Electronica. Yeah. Like
Speaker 5: so when I said I'm saying, I'm tking about electronica,
Speaker 5: I'm talking about Hope, I'm talking about so long story short.
Speaker 5: Guitar Center, UH does this thing once a year where
Speaker 5: obviously most of their employees are aspiring musicians or whatever,
Speaker 5: DJ's producers, whatever, they are songwriters. So they do a
Speaker 5: compilation every year of their employee's best music to contest.
Speaker 5: Whoever makes the best fifteen songs makes the compilation. And
Speaker 5: this year they wanted to feature something from an established artist,
Speaker 5: that artist being me. So the idea was, Okay, we'll
Speaker 5: make a song that'll be you mean Jelec trying to
Speaker 5: call make a record that will we featured on the
Speaker 5: Guitar Center compilation. So they bring Rolling into the mix,
Speaker 5: and Rolling basically says we want to sponsor the making
Speaker 5: of this record. So they basically just opened the vault
Speaker 5: and said pick whenever you want. There's no limit to
Speaker 5: what you want. So I got about the yead of
Speaker 5: the things. There was not much that I really needed
Speaker 5: it from Rolling, but like the new June that, like
Speaker 5: every keyboard they had that was coming out that year,
Speaker 5: like the guitar synth that they made, like anything they
Speaker 5: had that was hot. At that point, I was just like,
Speaker 5: I want one of everything, and within a week we
Speaker 5: had an all to the studio. None of it was
Speaker 5: really needed, but it was just all right, cool, appreciate
Speaker 5: it rolling. So I'm gonna say what it was all
Speaker 5: sudden done was probably about thirty five forty grand worth
Speaker 5: a year that they sent over. So we do the
Speaker 5: cover of the guitar set of Circular. It's already been shot,
Speaker 5: it's about to come out. I'm trying to find Jason.
Speaker 5: We could do Exibit A. I can't find him. I
Speaker 5: filed to Detroit because I knew he was gonna be
Speaker 5: in Detroit, went to shaves Crib, tracked him down, and
Speaker 5: we ended up doing Exhibit say in chavs Attic Wow.
Speaker 5: And a week later you could walk into this is
Speaker 5: before anybody really knew who he was yet, you could
Speaker 5: walk into the Guitar Center and get a physical copy
Speaker 5: of Exhibit A for free, just for walking into Guitar
Speaker 5: Center with like artbreak and everything.
Speaker 3: So we do that.
Speaker 5: With you know, there were a lot of different conversations
Speaker 5: about what we could do, you know, whether we like
Speaker 5: at one point that the idea was for me and
Speaker 5: him to kind of like be a group. You know,
Speaker 5: I'm I'm primo he's guru, you know that kind of thing,
Speaker 5: like an actual duo. I went through a lot of
Speaker 5: different phases and then uh, he would come in baseline
Speaker 5: just hang out. It was funny, actually, Sagon actually kind
Speaker 5: of felt a little bit of a way when Jay
Speaker 5: first came around, right like and his thing was kind
Speaker 5: of like, yo, who is this guy? Like all of
Speaker 5: a sudden, you know you you know, like we're trying
Speaker 5: to get my project right and and this guy just
Speaker 5: comes down of nowhere and now the intentions on it,
Speaker 5: it wasn't like the tension was ever away from side.
Speaker 5: I just think he kind of looked at it like,
Speaker 5: can we get my thing?
Speaker 3: You're no longer the bill of the bar or he ring,
Speaker 3: and and it wasn't And.
Speaker 5: That wasn't the case that oh Jay was just coming
Speaker 5: by like all some hanging out and eventually they ended
Speaker 5: up becoming friends and you know, they're good. You know
Speaker 5: that That was just kind of the first couple of
Speaker 5: days of just like yo, who right, just trying to
Speaker 5: figure out who to dude is. So that was also
Speaker 5: just kind of the process of me and Ja yetting
Speaker 5: to know each other as or you can know each
Speaker 5: other as people in general cause up unt to this point,
Speaker 5: a lot of our community, you know, keeping we would
Speaker 5: speak a lot for a week or two, then he
Speaker 5: would disappear, or I'd get busy or whatever. So this
Speaker 5: is the first time that we were in each other's
Speaker 5: company on a regular basis, NonStop for quite a while.
Speaker 5: So out of that comes Exhibit See, which has many
Speaker 5: people who were listening to this probably or another story
Speaker 5: like that was actually we were trying to take it
Speaker 5: back to the days of when dudes would do promos
Speaker 5: for DJs. So exam was supposed to be a promo
Speaker 5: for Angela.
Speaker 3: Ye, oh my god, what's up with all these women classics?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that's actually that the exact same kind of things.
Speaker 5: So that's why if you listen, Angelae used to have
Speaker 5: a show call of the Morning After. That's why the
Speaker 5: end of Exhibit See, I say the Morning After World premiere.
Speaker 3: I thought that was gonna even title that out right,
Speaker 3: So now.
Speaker 5: So we did the record of the idea was do
Speaker 5: the record take it to the Morning after the next
Speaker 5: morning and just premiering on there. Jay fell asleep. He
Speaker 5: fell asleep in the studio. I wasn't one hundred percent
Speaker 5: in love with the mixed yet and it ended up
Speaker 5: going from being like I think it was supposed to
Speaker 5: be a minute long to a now a five minute song.
Speaker 5: So we just decided to let go of the uh
Speaker 5: that idea of it being a promo for Angelo, and
Speaker 5: the record just kind of sat around for a while,
Speaker 5: you know, my hard drove. So I was going to
Speaker 5: Tony Touch I Shaved forty five and I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 5: I can play, like all right, my usual you know
Speaker 5: everybody you know, it was like I did this record,
Speaker 5: did that record? I don't want to do that again
Speaker 5: instead of play a bunch of records I've never played before.
Speaker 5: It was one of those records. And as soon as
Speaker 5: I played it, like the phone lines lit up. PD's
Speaker 5: calling into the room like what is this song? People
Speaker 5: from other stations in the building are walking into Shave
Speaker 5: forty five, like yo, what is this? And it just
Speaker 5: became kind of became a thing. Had I never played
Speaker 5: Tony Touched the show that night that record, but I might.
Speaker 3: Guitar Center.
Speaker 5: We're talking about, I might have never even played any Worlds,
Speaker 5: you know. So I play it, you know, it does
Speaker 5: what it does, and it becomes like the first time
Speaker 5: in years that you're carrying real hip hop at three
Speaker 5: o'clock in the afternoon on New York Radio. It was
Speaker 5: anything that hadn't happened in a while.
Speaker 3: So I mean, it's.
Speaker 5: What is.
Speaker 3: What do you think it's gonna take or at this
Speaker 3: point it's just too far.
Speaker 5: I don't know. Like here's like Jay, like he's an
Speaker 5: ideas guy, like I will point him a most proably
Speaker 5: gonna be a group. So I had I had, so
Speaker 5: I have three jen trying to come most death records.
Speaker 5: They did three records. I had them. But it's like
Speaker 5: then that was then it was another another idea that
Speaker 5: it was a different idea. There was a different idea.
Speaker 5: Then j comes a law or Hope comes along. Was
Speaker 5: to do the deal and was kind of like I
Speaker 5: guess his thought process initially was if I bring Jay
Speaker 5: and then just place comes with that mm hmmm, because
Speaker 5: people were looking at us, you know, as being affiliated,
Speaker 5: which I can't understand why he would think that. But
Speaker 5: that wasn't necessarily you know, it's like it doesn't kind
Speaker 5: of work like that. That's that's like somebody assuming that
Speaker 5: they signed you, they bring you into work on a movie,
Speaker 5: and you know, like and I come along with them,
Speaker 5: you know what I mean, Like it's we're still to right.
Speaker 5: So Jay's at this point now in London a lot
Speaker 5: he's working on the album, and you know, I get
Speaker 5: to court like from you know, from like come by
Speaker 5: the house. So go by the house. We square every away,
Speaker 5: everything that we need to square away in terms of
Speaker 5: my involvement with the album. So I fly out to London,
Speaker 5: We get a I'm speaking to a lot of stuff,
Speaker 5: but you know, we get a good amount of the
Speaker 5: Corley album. He had demo ideas already, so I took
Speaker 5: those touchdows up, worked on a few new records, didn't
Speaker 5: exhibit g I think, and h maybe like two more
Speaker 5: and kind of just got the album to a certain
Speaker 5: point and that was it. I don't know what happened.
Speaker 3: And ago.
Speaker 5: In twenty seventeen. Now this was maybe twenty twelve.
Speaker 3: Yeah, damn, get me wrong.
Speaker 5: I could be wrong. Way Yeah it might. It might
Speaker 5: have been thirteen.
Speaker 3: There was a large professor record the Angelo by the album.
Speaker 5: From Let me think about this. I'm trying to see,
Speaker 5: like I'm trying to figure out what else was happening.
Speaker 3: You still feel like you're waiting for a doctor. Dre record,
Speaker 3: even though it came out.
Speaker 5: That record is not doing but that record is not
Speaker 5: that's not that's not the one that happened. I remember
Speaker 5: when I started getting calls like for them for me
Speaker 5: to come out and work on that record, and I'm like,
Speaker 5: but they're like, this is a whole different thing. Like
Speaker 5: I've heard. I would to say probably the first a
Speaker 5: little bit of the very first Detox because that was
Speaker 5: one of the first people he called and he was
Speaker 5: doing it, so I heard a little bit of that.
Speaker 5: Then he went and wiped all the.
Speaker 3: Tapes, like literally literally literally, word has it.
Speaker 5: There is one debt that is in a location, yeah.
Speaker 3: Just in case, like he passes one.
Speaker 5: No, he doesn't even he doesn't even want that. I
Speaker 5: think there's another person who has this. Dad. I could
Speaker 5: be wrong, I could. I know there is there is
Speaker 5: a remnant of something. I don't know who has it.
Speaker 5: He put it that way, it's an engineer.
Speaker 3: But I do.
Speaker 5: But the word is. I remember hearing those songs early on,
Speaker 5: like Usher's Throwback was supposed to be a Detox record.
Speaker 5: It was supposed to be about him leaving the game.
Speaker 5: Oh you're gonna want me man? That was the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, what.
Speaker 5: That was a detox?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Look, we can get just lost in these stories forever.
Speaker 1: We got to stop the show. We're going over her
Speaker 1: a lot of time. Thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Just players give it.
Speaker 1: I won't be having fon take at Lah myself lost
Speaker 1: and unpaid Bill and Sugar Steve paid Bill.
Speaker 3: Yes, but he's the richest of all of us. Just
Speaker 3: look at him us his question signing off, what Love Supreme?
Speaker 3: See all in the next go Rep West.
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Speaker 1: was produced by the team at Bendora. For more podcasts
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