Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to another episode of Quest Love Supreme.
Speaker 3: Whatever I'm being built.
Speaker 4: Man, it's a good day.
Speaker 3: It's Philly day. I'm excited.
Speaker 2: Whenever you're quiet, I feel like you're working on something monstrous.
Speaker 3: What are you working on?
Speaker 4: I feel like you think that, because I have all
Speaker 4: this gear behind me, that I do a lot of
Speaker 4: cool shit. But I don't. None of it works.
Speaker 3: It's just for looks, just looks good. It's just for show. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, there's no potential movie or or Broadway project coming up.
Speaker 3: Not the moment.
Speaker 4: I'm too busy watching boy band scam documentaries about lou
Speaker 4: what's his name?
Speaker 5: That guy?
Speaker 3: Anyway, That's what I've been doing today. There's a new documentary. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's on Netflix. It's called Dirty Pop. That's pretty nice.
Speaker 3: I recommend it. I'm in it. Say no more, Steve, whatever, bro,
Speaker 3: Good morning. How's it going? It's am so I don't
Speaker 3: know what's going. Steve doesn't do morning. You know that?
Speaker 3: That sounds about right? All right?
Speaker 2: That sounds about right? What can I say? As a
Speaker 2: podcast host? As a writer of several books, Liner Note
Speaker 2: obsessive author of many a nineteen twenty paragraph Instagram post.
Speaker 3: That's understating it.
Speaker 2: Even as the world record holder for podcasts show intros
Speaker 2: lengthy intros, it's an understatement to say that I have
Speaker 2: an obsession with journalism, And of course the answer to
Speaker 2: that is duh.
Speaker 3: Of course.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm probably one of the few casts to
Speaker 2: sees the journalists of the person that brings the story
Speaker 2: as just as important as the artist making the story.
Speaker 3: In my childhood, they were.
Speaker 2: Equally influential music periodicals that took up space just like
Speaker 2: the records did. So I just didn't grow up with records,
Speaker 2: but you know, I grew up in a house with
Speaker 2: a goad jillion serious music periodicals. And then I think
Speaker 2: in my senior year of high school something clicked in
Speaker 2: kind of in the summer of eighty eight, I ran
Speaker 2: across a magazine with Llo cool J on the front cover,
Speaker 2: and not knowing what it was, sort of like a
Speaker 2: last minute purchase. I purchased a bunch of records and
Speaker 2: there's magazines at the at the register.
Speaker 3: On my way home.
Speaker 2: Reading that periodical, I got admit that the writing style
Speaker 2: was a little bit different than when I was used
Speaker 2: to because there was no Internet in eighty eight, so
Speaker 2: pretty much I had to rely on the words of
Speaker 2: anyone working at those magazines like Ride On or Black
Speaker 2: Beat or Word Up, you know, and there'd be an
Speaker 2: occasional blurb in mainstream media, but it was always just
Speaker 2: one degree of you know, either run DMC's cover story
Speaker 2: for Rolling Stone, like see not all Rapid is Violent,
Speaker 2: you know, that sort of thing. But for me, I
Speaker 2: always saw that the hip hop coverage in the late
Speaker 2: eighties in very early nineties almost the equivalent of letting
Speaker 2: a vegan judge a Texas barbecue contest. And the aforementioned
Speaker 2: periodical comes along and starts treating the music that I
Speaker 2: love and that we all love is high art, and
Speaker 2: I went from casual reader to obsessive in about twenty minutes.
Speaker 2: And so the friendships I've cultivated, and the name of
Speaker 2: that magazine, the business partners I've chosen because of that magazine,
Speaker 2: my art direction in life, the art I've created, even
Speaker 2: though those actual participants of that magazine become lifelong friends
Speaker 2: of mine. For me, the story of the Source magazine,
Speaker 2: which you know, I still refer to as hip Hop's bible.
Speaker 3: You know, our guest today was.
Speaker 2: Very, very instrumental in bringing that periodical, that religion, that culture,
Speaker 2: that way of life, and all those writers and all
Speaker 2: those artists and all those photographers in our world. And
Speaker 2: you know, it's rare to read any in depth interviews.
Speaker 2: I've yet to hear his side of the story of
Speaker 2: his stint there between eighty seven and eighty eight there
Speaker 2: until nineteen ninety four, not to mention his other ventures
Speaker 2: as well. And he's given us the honor to pick
Speaker 2: his brain for this episode. John Check, finally you come
Speaker 2: to Cout's Love Supreme.
Speaker 5: It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Thank you, Mair.
Speaker 5: I really appreciate that.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I hope I embarrass.
Speaker 5: You, not at all. I'm a big fan of the podcast.
Speaker 5: I was getting my rap ready. I guess we're not
Speaker 5: going to do that today. He got a wrap ready.
Speaker 5: But I can let it. I can hold it till
Speaker 5: the future. It's all good.
Speaker 2: Got you, got you okay, I see you're NS ten's
Speaker 2: behind you. Where are you broadcasting from?
Speaker 5: I am in my office in Las Vegas, where we
Speaker 5: work with a lot of DJs, because one of my
Speaker 5: partners is a guy named Eddie Mack, who has a
Speaker 5: DJ agency here, So we have this is kind of
Speaker 5: our office headquarters here in Las Vegas. It's very close
Speaker 5: to the Las Vegas Strip. And yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 5: of DJs here, a lot of hip hop here, a
Speaker 5: lot of vinyl here, all that good stuff it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're the first person to tell me.
Speaker 2: I think maybe in I went to what was the
Speaker 2: convention that used to come out there, the fashion convention,
Speaker 2: like Magic. Yeah, I went to the Magic Convention once
Speaker 2: and you told me like, yeah, I'm living in Vegas,
Speaker 2: and I'm like Vegas.
Speaker 3: Who lives in Vegas?
Speaker 2: You know, like where we only see Vegas as a
Speaker 2: five cent slot machine and nothing else.
Speaker 5: Yeah, most people come and go in like three days
Speaker 5: is the That's like kind of the typical experience, like
Speaker 5: seventy two hours or like get me the hell out
Speaker 5: of here. I ended up staying for like twenty five years.
Speaker 2: But you were the one that told me that not
Speaker 2: only Vegas is the future, but you you predicted even then.
Speaker 2: I think this was maybe ninety eight, ninety nine, definitely
Speaker 2: wasn't in two thousand and yet you told me, like yo,
Speaker 2: like I predict that Vegas is going to be the
Speaker 2: epicenter taken away from Los Angeles.
Speaker 3: Like I guarantee you in the first something. I don't
Speaker 3: know about all that, but you actually turned out to
Speaker 3: be right man.
Speaker 2: Like, practically my entire community of friends that I'm used
Speaker 2: to running into in Los Angeles have moved to Vegas
Speaker 2: and made Vegas their home.
Speaker 3: Like what was it about?
Speaker 2: Because you were like one of the earliest people saw
Speaker 2: the potential in it. Like I'll say, for a lot
Speaker 2: of us, Vegas just got cool. You know, even in
Speaker 2: music terms, when I tell the band like Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: it's always like a cheesy term, like you know, like
Speaker 2: New York Studies jazz version of shaving a haircut. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, that's sort of But like, what was it
Speaker 2: about Vegas that told you, especially twenty years before the fact,
Speaker 2: that you know this, this will be the new spot?
Speaker 5: You know, I found a lot of things about Vegas appealing.
Speaker 5: What we do best out here is music, food, the
Speaker 5: weather for those who can take the heat, and it's
Speaker 5: actually a pretty good, easy lifestyle if you can, you know,
Speaker 5: find your niche out here. But when it comes to music,
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously that was sort of my you know,
Speaker 5: one of my main reasons for being here. I saw
Speaker 5: a lot of opportunity. I saw I got here right
Speaker 5: as the sort of nightlife wave was beginning with a
Speaker 5: lot of DJs, and I kind of jumped right in
Speaker 5: and started like bringing a bunch of my friends out here,
Speaker 5: like djam Mark, Ronson Stretch, Armstrong, DJ Premiere, people like that.
Speaker 5: But yeah, yeah, Vegas is you know, has come a
Speaker 5: long way in the time I've been here, and now
Speaker 5: I think it really is one of the best music
Speaker 5: cities in the world for sure. I mean, there's so
Speaker 5: much here whatever you're into, whatever genre you're into, if
Speaker 5: you want to see live acts, if you want to
Speaker 5: see DJs, if you want to just have a nice
Speaker 5: meal and listen to some good music, we got it
Speaker 5: all covered.
Speaker 2: The idea of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?
Speaker 3: Is that truly a myth?
Speaker 2: Or is the idea of that whole what happens in
Speaker 2: Vegas stays in Vegas thing?
Speaker 3: Is that real or not?
Speaker 5: Everyone finds their own Vegas. That's a phrase I like
Speaker 5: to say, meaning pretty much early on when you first visit,
Speaker 5: you have that all out wild experience where you you
Speaker 5: know someone they go to extreme in one direction or another,
Speaker 5: and then over time, whether you're a visitor or whether
Speaker 5: you're a resident here, you begin to assimilate into a
Speaker 5: newer kind of environment and in the sense that nothing
Speaker 5: really shocks you anymore, nothing really surprises you, and you
Speaker 5: can kind of just take it all in stride. And
Speaker 5: I think I hit that a while back, you know,
Speaker 5: like and for people who are frequent visitors, the same
Speaker 5: thing happens. You stop having those extreme moments and you
Speaker 5: kind of just settle into like a good experience and
Speaker 5: you kind of find your niche. You know, you find
Speaker 5: the places you like to go, or you're here for
Speaker 5: particular music events or something like that. So yeah, I
Speaker 5: mean there's some truth to that, but I think that
Speaker 5: usually refers to people who are more beginners in Las
Speaker 5: Vegas and on you once you become more experience, you
Speaker 5: take it all in stride.
Speaker 2: Basically for your taste, Like what's your restaurant of choice.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm pescatarian leaning vegan vegetarian, so you know, I
Speaker 5: look for those kind of spots. There's so much you know,
Speaker 5: what I will say is that if I'm going to
Speaker 5: give one restaurant recommendation, I'm just going to recommend a
Speaker 5: whole block which is Spring Mountain Road, which which is
Speaker 5: very close to the Strip. It's Vegas is Asia Town,
Speaker 5: and there's literally hundreds of amazing restaurants there, and most
Speaker 5: tourists never see it because it's not in a casino.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: The typical experience is most people will come to Vegas
Speaker 5: and they'll check into one of the casinos. They'll literally
Speaker 5: never leave that one building because every casino has like
Speaker 5: fifteen restaurants and three nightclubs and the pool and the
Speaker 5: gym and everything else. So but what I recommend to
Speaker 5: people is you go, like literally five minutes away from
Speaker 5: the wind is a street called Spring Mountain Road, and
Speaker 5: on that street is literally hundreds of amazing restaurants. And
Speaker 5: among those hundreds, there's about a couple dots in that
Speaker 5: are world class Japanese, Thie, Vietnamese, Korean, et cetera. So
Speaker 5: that's my recommendation.
Speaker 2: So you're saying that, you know, for us to stay
Speaker 2: on the Strip is the equivalent of people visiting New
Speaker 2: York and just staying in Times Square and really not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like kind of like staying in Times Square,
Speaker 5: but to some extent, I mean listen, I'm not going
Speaker 5: to say that I work with a lot of casinos.
Speaker 5: I work with a lot of restaurants. I go to
Speaker 5: a lot of restaurants. So you know, I'm not going
Speaker 5: to say that there's there's nothing to be found there,
Speaker 5: because there's a ton of amazing places. But you know,
Speaker 5: over time, most locals tend to avoid the Strip unless
Speaker 5: absolutely necessary. That's kind of the process that every local
Speaker 5: goes through, is eventually weaning yourself away from the Strip
Speaker 5: and towards like the regular Las Vegas city, which is,
Speaker 5: you know, pretty significant city. But yeah, I mean, obviously
Speaker 5: I get why most people come here and they just
Speaker 5: kind of check into one of these places and stay
Speaker 5: there because it's that's what you're you know, that's what
Speaker 5: they expect you to do. And it's nothing wrong with that, right,
Speaker 5: But as time goes on, you start to see sort
Speaker 5: of a wider a wider frame.
Speaker 3: All right, next time, I'm you're my tour guide.
Speaker 5: So let me take you off the strip. I'd be
Speaker 5: happy to do it, man, happy to do it.
Speaker 2: Okay, awesome, all right, So I want to get into
Speaker 2: your story because you know, I've heard practically anyone that
Speaker 2: is cross paths of that institution known as The Source magazine.
Speaker 2: I've spoken to in great detail, but I've never ever
Speaker 2: really picked your brain just about the whole modus operandi
Speaker 2: of the place and whatnot.
Speaker 5: So let it be known that we've known each other
Speaker 5: for quite a long time, but we've actually, yeah, we've
Speaker 5: never really had like a deep talk about it, which
Speaker 5: is great. Exactly do it here, this is a time
Speaker 5: to do. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well for starters, you and I have something in common.
Speaker 2: We're both from the city of Philadelphia, so oh yeah,
Speaker 2: absolutely talk to me about your beginnings before you start
Speaker 2: the magazine, Like what was your life basically before in
Speaker 2: the first half of the eighties.
Speaker 5: Okay, So I grew up in Center City Philadelphia, which
Speaker 5: is you know, literally like where the downtown part of
Speaker 5: Philia is for those who don't know. And I went
Speaker 5: to school a place called Friends Select, which is a
Speaker 5: Quaker school on seventeenth in the Parkway. I was there
Speaker 5: in my whole childhood, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. So
Speaker 5: every single day in my life, yes, I would, I would.
Speaker 5: I would walk you know, through the city past Chestnut
Speaker 5: Market JFK and then to the school, you know. Being
Speaker 5: a young kid who was drawn to music at a
Speaker 5: very young age. You know, I used to listen to
Speaker 5: the radio all the stations, from the pop stations, to
Speaker 5: the rock stations, to the to the urban slash black
Speaker 5: music stations, and I would walk through the city and
Speaker 5: you just, you know, you can't help, especially in the
Speaker 5: eighties in Philly, you can't help but soak up culture,
Speaker 5: you know, just walking around. I'm talking about fashion, music,
Speaker 5: you know, just just sort of energy. I mean, we
Speaker 5: talk about music. I mean there I was in the
Speaker 5: city that was creating all this music. I didn't even
Speaker 5: realize what was happening around me. In other words, like
Speaker 5: some of my earliest memories about music are like hearing
Speaker 5: like wake Up Everybody in like a pizza place in
Speaker 5: like nineteen seventies, Evan, I guess, And you know, I
Speaker 5: didn't realize it was made in Philly. I had no idea,
Speaker 5: but I just knew that it was something. You know,
Speaker 5: when you hear a song like that with that much
Speaker 5: you know, emotional depth, it kind of rewires your brain
Speaker 5: a little bit. I think, you know, not just that song,
Speaker 5: all the Philly soul that was that was around us.
Speaker 5: So basically I was drawn to music at a young age.
Speaker 5: But it wasn't until I was about in eleventh grade
Speaker 5: at friend Select that I decided to do something about it.
Speaker 5: I had been spending a lot of time prior to
Speaker 5: that listening to records. I was really into disco, you know,
Speaker 5: Disco was kind of my first love of music. First
Speaker 5: record I ever bought was a chic Yaoza Yasa Yasa
Speaker 5: dance Dance Dance fun fact.
Speaker 2: Yes, according to Nile Rogers, Yes, the voice of ya
Speaker 2: ya Yaza is Luther Vandros Wow.
Speaker 5: I did not know that. That's awesome fun fact.
Speaker 3: Yes, I love it.
Speaker 5: I remember I bought the forty five on Atlantic Records.
Speaker 5: It was like a red label and I would listen
Speaker 5: to it constantly. I will confess that I loved all disco,
Speaker 5: including the Beg's, the Village People, everything else. You know,
Speaker 5: we all did, We all did. Yeah, I mean, it
Speaker 5: was just great music. And the thing is for me though,
Speaker 5: I also loved rock, so like you know, back when
Speaker 5: they used to be disco versus rock, there was a
Speaker 5: huge conflict in like the late seventies where you had
Speaker 5: to pick a side and I could never pick a side.
Speaker 5: It was weird, like there was like half the kids
Speaker 5: were like, you know, Pink, Floyd, led Zeppelin, Queen. You know,
Speaker 5: some of those groups ended up doing disco records too.
Speaker 5: But you know, but basically there was this big conflict.
Speaker 5: I could never pick aside. I always liked both, and
Speaker 5: I just like wrote it out that way. But then
Speaker 5: when I got to eleventh grade, I was so into
Speaker 5: hip hop. At that point, it's like nineteen eighty four
Speaker 5: and you know, Run, DMC, the Fat Boys, Houdini, LLL
Speaker 5: cool J, Curtis Blow. You know. I was loved all
Speaker 5: those groups, and I decided that I wanted to work
Speaker 5: in radio, so I forced my way into the building
Speaker 5: at Power ninety nine FM WUSL.
Speaker 3: He used to work for Dave what's his name? At
Speaker 3: Power ninety.
Speaker 5: Nine, there was a yeah, that was the I think
Speaker 5: he was the PD yeah when when I was. But
Speaker 5: but when I walked in, it was a there was
Speaker 5: a newly hired MD and his name was Tony Gray,
Speaker 5: and he called his on air name, and this is
Speaker 5: kind of silly now, his on air name was Mike Jackson.
Speaker 5: Mike Jackson, remember Mike Jackson, the man.
Speaker 3: Who invented the Power nine at nine.
Speaker 5: That's correct, That is correct, Mike Jackson. So Mike Jackson,
Speaker 5: he had a hold like that's an alias. Yeah, Like
Speaker 5: can you imagine picking that as your alias? I mean,
Speaker 5: it kind of doesn't make sense, but that's what he did.
Speaker 3: Smart, Okay.
Speaker 5: So I walked in. It was kind of like one
Speaker 5: of those remember in Wayne's World, when what's the guy's name,
Speaker 5: like handsome George or something like that, a gorgeous George
Speaker 5: and they walk in and there it's he has this
Speaker 5: huge voice and they walk in. There's like a very
Speaker 5: kind of little guy and he doesn't like it looks
Speaker 5: kind of nerdy. It was very similar to that. It
Speaker 5: was very similar. He had this looked like yo, yeah,
Speaker 5: he had this like very powerful like voice. He was
Speaker 5: doing the Evening Drive, so he was on from I
Speaker 5: think like six to ten.
Speaker 3: Mike on the Power nine at nine, Oh my.
Speaker 5: God, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: So wow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And so he was like, you know, he was
Speaker 5: kind of like a hero of mine. But he had
Speaker 5: just started, like I think a few months before I
Speaker 5: got there, and it just so happened when I walked
Speaker 5: in and I wanted to be an intern and he was.
Speaker 5: He saw me, and he was kind of like a
Speaker 5: slim kind of you know, smaller dude. He had hair
Speaker 5: almost like a a perm, but it was like a
Speaker 5: gumby perm if you can imagine those two things going together.
Speaker 5: And anyway, he was very friendly to me at a
Speaker 5: very I was. I was totally nervous and and like
Speaker 5: he took me in and he started talking to me,
Speaker 5: and you know, basically we hit it off like that
Speaker 5: first night and I started working for him like literally immediately.
Speaker 5: And back then it was like the radio station was, uh,
Speaker 5: you know they use carts which looked like eight track tapes. Yes, yes,
Speaker 5: and you would like put that. So the first job
Speaker 5: was there was like a pile of carts like on
Speaker 5: the floor with like two hundred of them, and I
Speaker 5: had to like sort through them and organize them and
Speaker 5: stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Can you explain something to me, because okay, so I
Speaker 2: am from the era. I mean I've seen every era
Speaker 2: of radio, but first doing the radio I do remember
Speaker 2: those a track carts like one. What was the purpose
Speaker 2: of it to like who would do those edits?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: Was the purpose to store as much music as you
Speaker 2: can on that particular cart?
Speaker 3: Or like the purpose?
Speaker 5: There was a combination when I was there they were
Speaker 5: still playing records for the most part, but some songs
Speaker 5: when they made into heavy rotation would be on a cart.
Speaker 5: I think the main purpose of it. Also, all ads
Speaker 5: and all drops, all announcements, all bumpers, all that kind
Speaker 5: of stuff was on the cart. But I believe the
Speaker 5: reason they used them was because when it finished, it
Speaker 5: would end up right on cue, so it automatically, like
Speaker 5: you hit play, it would play whatever was on there,
Speaker 5: and then it would stop and it would be immediately
Speaker 5: cued up again. So I think it was just the
Speaker 5: convenience of having you pop it in and you know
Speaker 5: it's going to be right on cue, I believe.
Speaker 3: So you don't need to look for the spot where right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so they're like, we have to play a song,
Speaker 5: so you just hit play and you know, it's like
Speaker 5: it's immediately it's always on cue. So I'm pretty sure
Speaker 5: that was the reason that they used them, or that
Speaker 5: was the purpose of the invention. But that was also
Speaker 5: a time and then we can talk about this maybe
Speaker 5: as we get into it, but that was when DJs
Speaker 5: were doing edits on reel to reel, so I actually
Speaker 5: witnessed some of the most amazing artistry you've ever imagined
Speaker 5: with a razor blade and like a real to real tape.
Speaker 3: With those days, You're gonna ask you something.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, yes, Do you know who Yaman super mixes?
Speaker 5: Oh man, I'm so glad you said that name. He
Speaker 5: was the king of the tape edit. He was our
Speaker 5: Latin rascals, Latin rascals, he was Latin rascals.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: And I witnessed him making edits. I saw him in
Speaker 5: person making edits and I saw exactly and he's totally forgotten.
Speaker 5: Nobody remembers he was and where is he? As I recall,
Speaker 5: he was like an Arabic gentleman, kind of coming up
Speaker 5: in the same exact style as Latin rascals in New
Speaker 5: York City, and he would make these phenomenal I mean
Speaker 5: like I would walk into that room and there would
Speaker 5: be like all the segments of tape would be hanging
Speaker 5: on the wall because he would be he would remember like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is the chorus over here, this is the bridge,
Speaker 5: this is the whatever, you know, and you know, he
Speaker 5: would go in with that blade and there would be
Speaker 5: like that little piece of metal that you would put
Speaker 5: the tape in and you'd slice and then you'd like
Speaker 5: put like a white piece of like masking tape like together, right,
Speaker 5: uh huh and uh, And the tape would go all
Speaker 5: the way through the tape machine and then all the
Speaker 5: way back around the pole and back again so that
Speaker 5: you could get the right length for the tape, you know.
Speaker 5: So yeah, and then as you watch it go by,
Speaker 5: you'd see all the little white strips, like all the edits,
Speaker 5: you know, and it was amazing. Yeah, that was like
Speaker 5: a crazy artistry that I totally forgotten art form.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm in supermix. Was was like pro tools before
Speaker 2: pro tools. Like he would do a mix, then I'd
Speaker 2: get on, like we would have like three h JBC
Speaker 2: ghetto blasters at the crib, and I would try to
Speaker 2: emulate whatever I heard him doing because that's how I
Speaker 2: thought people made remixes and shit.
Speaker 5: So I mean with the set you would use, you'd
Speaker 5: make a pause tape to try to make it like
Speaker 5: like an edit.
Speaker 3: Yes, we all did that, do anything to hear any
Speaker 3: of that stuff again, Man.
Speaker 5: He was absolutely brilliant. There was also a Philly DJ
Speaker 5: named Jeff Mills. Yeah, just saying Jeff Mill, Jeff Mills
Speaker 5: moves moves, Yes, exactly so that's the world I walked
Speaker 5: into when I was just like, you know, a high
Speaker 5: school kid, and it was sort of the aftermath of
Speaker 5: when Howard ninety nine had become a black station already,
Speaker 5: but they still had a lot of remnants of sort
Speaker 5: of their r yeah, like kind of like dance music,
Speaker 5: you know those people exactly exactly, Yes, Jeff Jeff Wyatt
Speaker 5: is another name that was back then. But anyway, so
Speaker 5: Tony Gray aka Mike Jackson and we hit it off
Speaker 5: and and I started working for him. And I was
Speaker 5: also very close friends with Jojo Davis, who was the
Speaker 5: nighttime night Flight ninety nine. It was the overnight kind
Speaker 5: of the Philly version of the quiet Well there was
Speaker 5: a quiet storm. The way you would work is Mike
Speaker 5: Jackson would play from six to ten, then there was
Speaker 5: a quiet storm and then night Flight ninety nine will
Speaker 5: come on, and that was like the overnight shift.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And Jojo was actually a relative of Miles Davis. I
Speaker 5: think it was his nephew. I never knew that he
Speaker 5: was the one that, you know, it was like when
Speaker 5: I was with Tony Gray, he was he was a
Speaker 5: very serious dude. He was a hard working, kind of
Speaker 5: not partying type guy. You know, he would show up
Speaker 5: for work, he carried about the business. He was straight laced.
Speaker 5: Then I would leave for the Quiet Storm because that
Speaker 5: was actually no DJ. It was just like they were
Speaker 5: just playing like records and that would be you'd hear
Speaker 5: like you know, like Shirley Murdoch and stuff like that,
Speaker 5: and then.
Speaker 3: Well there's like pre taped or like done live.
Speaker 5: I think there was someone in the studio playing records,
Speaker 5: but they had a list. I think they had like
Speaker 5: a playlist they had to follow, and they had the
Speaker 5: great sound effects with like the rainstorm if you remember it,
Speaker 5: and it was it would put you in the mood.
Speaker 5: But then I would come back. So I would leave
Speaker 5: with Tony Gray and he would leave and I would
Speaker 5: leave and go to a friend's house. And then midnight
Speaker 5: I would come back to the station and it was
Speaker 5: Jojo Davis and that was when the party was on.
Speaker 5: So we would like hang out and that was where
Speaker 5: we could get loose. And you know, that was where
Speaker 5: I met all its people and talked about music and
Speaker 5: the whole nine yards.
Speaker 2: Wow man, So how influential as the intern, like even
Speaker 2: where I work now at thirty or Rock, It's the
Speaker 2: interns here that keep me hip to what's next, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean.
Speaker 3: Like, I'm in my.
Speaker 2: Fifties, but my interns here in the twenties. They're the
Speaker 2: first ones to yo question you up on this, yup
Speaker 2: on this, yump on this. So there's always the intern
Speaker 2: that knows what tomorrow is. Were you that voice for them.
Speaker 5: To some extent? I think I was because I was
Speaker 5: very into hip hop. So at that moment in time,
Speaker 5: hip hop not really become the main programming. It was
Speaker 5: still the programming was great. I mean, listen, it was
Speaker 5: the eighties. It was the best era of music I
Speaker 5: think of all time. But what was great about the
Speaker 5: programming was that it was very diverse and very funky
Speaker 5: and very you know, and I loved it. But there
Speaker 5: wasn't enough hip hop for my taste. So I was
Speaker 5: in there pushing. I was in there pushing low key
Speaker 5: on the hip hop side.
Speaker 3: This is what happened.
Speaker 2: So the Spring of eighty five, my mother's side of
Speaker 2: the family is from California. Spring of eighty five, we
Speaker 2: do our pilgrimage to Los Angeles and we'll stay out
Speaker 2: there for like three to four weeks, so say like
Speaker 2: a month or so, and.
Speaker 3: You know, it's very different.
Speaker 2: Eighty five Los Angeles was night and Day from eighty
Speaker 2: five Philadelphia and Greg Mack and Katie A.
Speaker 3: Why was you know?
Speaker 2: AM was the first twenty four hour hip hop radio stage.
Speaker 2: They're playing a lot of their Malaco records, like a
Speaker 2: lot of the West Coast stuff like Rodney what's his name?
Speaker 2: California and those out of Party like basically like post
Speaker 2: Electro that sort of stuff, and.
Speaker 5: La Dream Team stuff like yeah, all that.
Speaker 3: Stuff, Doctor Dre shit.
Speaker 2: And so that's the summer of Toddy T's batter Ram, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: And they're playing it constantly, constantly, playing it constant, constantly.
Speaker 2: So in August when we get back to Philadelphia and
Speaker 2: I get on the block where all my friends are
Speaker 2: and we're sort of just trade and comparing notes. You know,
Speaker 2: something happened in the summer of eighty five and which
Speaker 2: suddenly hip hop was allowed in the evening And I
Speaker 2: don't know what a lot of do you know, how
Speaker 2: how stupid you one has to feel when everyone's like,
Speaker 2: what do you mean you don't know Lotty Dotty in
Speaker 2: the show, and I'm like, no, yo, it's about batter Ram.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The way that La people were acting to Totty T's
Speaker 2: batter ram I put it on for them and they
Speaker 2: looked at me like like this was the first time
Speaker 2: I witnessed like a cultural region.
Speaker 5: Regional difference is regional difference.
Speaker 2: And I played my song first and they weren't impressed
Speaker 2: at all, and then they played me Lotty Dotty and
Speaker 2: you know they're taping off the radio. So this is
Speaker 2: how I know what a Power nine at nine is.
Speaker 2: You know, Mike Jackson is number one song is Lottie Dotty.
Speaker 2: But you remember when the show and Lottie Dotty were
Speaker 2: like number one for like alls nine months.
Speaker 3: So how does a record like that crack.
Speaker 2: The mainstream in a way that pre Spring of eighty five,
Speaker 2: I'm only used to, you know, Lady b Show on
Speaker 2: Sunday for three hours and nothing else. Maybe Drexel will
Speaker 2: have like an hour of it. But talk to me
Speaker 2: about like the inside of the machine, like how are
Speaker 2: they penetrate that unpenetrable system.
Speaker 5: So you know you're right on the time, because that
Speaker 5: was literally when I was getting involved there eighty five,
Speaker 5: and I as time went on, I actually took over
Speaker 5: that Power nine and nine. I was the person that
Speaker 5: was compiling that that was supposed to be based on requests,
Speaker 5: so there was kind of like a there was a
Speaker 5: there's a balance there, so that I ask.
Speaker 3: You the discobobblated, boobulated question.
Speaker 5: Next we'll talk about mc breeze. No problem, that's my buddy, okay.
Speaker 5: But yeah, so I would make I would make a charge,
Speaker 5: and you know, in the beginning, they didn't really trust
Speaker 5: me to do it, but after I'd been there for
Speaker 5: you know, a number of months, they saw that I
Speaker 5: kind of knew what I was doing, so they would
Speaker 5: let me literally make the whole top nine. And it
Speaker 5: was always it was kind of like a little bit
Speaker 5: of science, a little bit of creativity kind of mixed together,
Speaker 5: you know, like it would be. The science part is
Speaker 5: they did have requests, and they did have a system
Speaker 5: for logging these requests, so you did see what was
Speaker 5: like actually the most requested. But as you know, those
Speaker 5: kind of move, it's kind of a backwards looking stat
Speaker 5: you know, like requests kind of can be almost like
Speaker 5: what's already a hit usually, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5: And so I had to also kind of bring in
Speaker 5: a little bit of the newness. And I'm not saying
Speaker 5: it was all me. There was a lot of forces
Speaker 5: in play. The biggest force is just the you know,
Speaker 5: it was a combination of run DMC breaking down those
Speaker 5: big barriers. You know, I think they were the biggest
Speaker 5: reason why hip hop broke through. But there was a
Speaker 5: lot of other records, you know, force M d's, I mean,
Speaker 5: like you know, Dougie Fresh, and so it was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it was just kind of you know, it just slowly happened,
Speaker 5: and so they would at some point along the line.
Speaker 5: But you're dead on correct in that the regular station
Speaker 5: rotation would not include these records. But during the Power
Speaker 5: nine at nine, we were allowed to put in what
Speaker 5: the streets really wanted to hear. And then of course
Speaker 5: on Sundays with Lady B that was an all out
Speaker 5: you know, that was like the center of hip hop
Speaker 5: and Philly basically, you know, that was most important show.
Speaker 5: But the big songs would break through and they would
Speaker 5: end up hanging around on the chart, on that Power
Speaker 5: nine chart for a long time. And you know, one
Speaker 5: of the biggest gotta be deaf for me. What I
Speaker 5: think is you could argue one of the greatest twelve
Speaker 5: and singles of all time is the show in Loddie Dottie.
Speaker 5: I mean that's like, you know, you can't beat that.
Speaker 5: You know, it became a religion, and it did. It
Speaker 5: was huge in Philly, huge as big as can be.
Speaker 5: But you know what else was huge in Philly, And
Speaker 5: I'm curious to hear if you see, if you remember
Speaker 5: shout by Tears for Fears was massive in like like,
Speaker 5: oh the Craig g I was that came up the
Speaker 5: other day. I was actually there the day that one
Speaker 5: of the good men showed up from Pop Art Records
Speaker 5: and dropped off that Craigg shout record. I remember, actually
Speaker 5: I was in the studios. Yeah it was.
Speaker 3: You got pop art stories.
Speaker 5: I got pop Art stories stories, yo. Yeah, I forget
Speaker 5: the source.
Speaker 2: We can just talk about the first two years at
Speaker 2: ninety nine.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm sorry, I mean interrupt, but I was just
Speaker 5: going to say. The point I do want to make
Speaker 5: though about those days was that and this is something
Speaker 5: that has followed me in my whole life. When the
Speaker 5: station brass was deciding like what to program, there was
Speaker 5: this very open attitude. Anything funky was okay. So that
Speaker 5: was a time when you could turn on a black
Speaker 5: radio station. Here Tears for Fears. You could hear the
Speaker 5: Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads. You could hear Holland
Speaker 5: Oates and many other examples of stuff like that, which
Speaker 5: that has always been my kind of like DNA guiding
Speaker 5: philosophy is like, if it's funky, it doesn't matter who's
Speaker 5: making it. And somewhere along the lines it got more segregated,
Speaker 5: I think, like music, you know, but back then the eighties,
Speaker 5: you know, those records were as big as like you know,
Speaker 5: Alexander O'Neill or Shorell or something like that. You know,
Speaker 5: they were just side by side.
Speaker 2: Fun fact, the first time I heard is weird trivia moment,
Speaker 2: the first time I heard shout on Power ninety nine.
Speaker 2: I lived on Osage Avenue. Wow, I lived on fifty
Speaker 2: second in Osage Avenue. Okay, And every Philadelphia my age
Speaker 2: knows what happens or May thirteenth, nineteen eighty five on.
Speaker 3: Osage Avenue of course the bombings.
Speaker 2: So the thing was because this drama has been brewing
Speaker 2: all week, you know. Jack Jones was like, it's almost
Speaker 2: like being live at Vietnam, like you'd be behind the
Speaker 2: cars like reporting, and it seemed contained. I mean, back
Speaker 2: then it was just about like, okay, there's gun exchange
Speaker 2: between the move organization and the police, so we may.
Speaker 3: Drop the bomb on top of the house. You know.
Speaker 2: For like three hours, it seemed like it was contained,
Speaker 2: but then when it spread to another block, then we
Speaker 2: started getting concerned, like, okay, well we live here and
Speaker 2: this scene seems to be spreading, Like how late will
Speaker 2: it be until it comes to our block? And there
Speaker 2: was a moment where our block captain around like eleven
Speaker 2: PM kind of just gave the warning like, look, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm in contact with the other block captains and whatnot.
Speaker 3: If they don't contain that.
Speaker 2: Fire, maybe at three four in the morning, we might
Speaker 2: have to vacate our cribs. So it was almost like
Speaker 2: a pack a pack, what's important that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: And I remember having the.
Speaker 2: Radio on while we were packing, like in case we
Speaker 2: had to go to my Grandmam's house or whatever, and I.
Speaker 3: Looked at the radio.
Speaker 2: I was like, wait, what the hell's Tears Fears doing
Speaker 2: on Power ninety nine, Like it.
Speaker 5: Was just you remember hearing that song during the move crisis,
Speaker 5: you're saying, right, yeah, yeah, I remember. Of course that
Speaker 5: was a major moment for Philly. We were all like
Speaker 5: you know, it was on the it was live, it
Speaker 5: was covered live. You know there's like live shots. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that was crazy. That was a moment.
Speaker 3: So what was your Philly nightlife experience?
Speaker 2: Like, like, like, were you ever an attendee of about
Speaker 2: to call it the spaghetti Warehouse?
Speaker 3: After Midnight?
Speaker 5: The mid They used to call it the mid h. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the mid was like the abbreviation. I was too young
Speaker 5: to get into after Midnight, but I would. I'm now
Speaker 5: I'm too old for almost everything, but back then I
Speaker 5: was too young to get into after Midnight. But I
Speaker 5: remember hanging outside and I met all the people involved,
Speaker 5: and there was actually a white guy that was like
Speaker 5: I think running after Midnight. I can't remember his name.
Speaker 5: And if you remember, there was this the most incredible
Speaker 5: ll cool J freestyle came out of After Midnight and
Speaker 5: it's like he's rhyming over Tee La Rocket's yours, It's
Speaker 5: yours yeah, and it's it's like magic. That shit was
Speaker 5: so powerful and so amazing.
Speaker 2: Last year when we tour with LLL the amount of
Speaker 2: begging we had to do to get him, he only
Speaker 2: did it once, like that was going to be his
Speaker 2: on core before we did Rock the bells together. Wow,
Speaker 2: like he has zero clue or how much of a
Speaker 2: spiritual experience that was for most of the Tri state
Speaker 2: area and the amount of tape trading and that sort
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 5: Oh, forget it, listen. And I figured this is going
Speaker 5: to come up later. But I saw the Force Tour
Speaker 5: when you guys came to Vegas, and oh, man, you guys.
Speaker 5: I mean I've seen so I've seen literally probably you know,
Speaker 5: hundreds of rap shows in my life, but I'm serious,
Speaker 5: that was the greatest rap concert I've ever seen in
Speaker 5: my life. And that includes the Fresh Fest one, Fresh
Speaker 5: Fest two, all the classic Public Enemy concerts, all that.
Speaker 5: The reason is it's you deserve it because it was
Speaker 5: so well choreographed, so well run. There was no downtime.
Speaker 5: It was like constant action on the stage and with
Speaker 5: those three Frilly guys in the middle, it was flawless.
Speaker 5: And I think like you really raised the bar for
Speaker 5: what around conser it can be.
Speaker 2: You know what, yo, dude, it's hitting me right now
Speaker 2: as we speak. One of the key pivotal moments in
Speaker 2: Roots history. You came to the Tracadero and witnessed your
Speaker 2: first Roots performance, and you gave me real constructive criticism.
Speaker 2: I took it to heart and applied it. He's like, hey,
Speaker 2: it was dope, but listen, you got to figure out
Speaker 2: a way to engage your audience and grab them in.
Speaker 3: And you taught me about formatting.
Speaker 2: You said, you guys are going to heavy on the
Speaker 2: on the dazz, drum solo and all that stuff. But
Speaker 2: you know, I think a dope thing you all should
Speaker 2: consider is occasionally in your song like pepper It like
Speaker 2: condiments with hip hop references that people would know. We
Speaker 2: did that while we were a busking group, but then
Speaker 2: we decided, you know, when you're busting and you're playing
Speaker 2: for like three.
Speaker 3: To four hours on the corner, you're gonna run out
Speaker 3: of shit.
Speaker 2: So you know, it was easy to tell your upright
Speaker 2: bass player, all right, start with discoursions, all right, let's
Speaker 2: go to bugging out. Okay, let's go to wrapping promoter,
Speaker 2: all right, let's go to.
Speaker 3: It like you. We would literally go through the.
Speaker 2: Entire tribe discography because there's this drum and upright bass.
Speaker 2: But once we got like, okay, we're not playing on
Speaker 2: the streets no more.
Speaker 3: Let's just do all original material.
Speaker 2: And you told me it's like yo, man, like y'all
Speaker 2: got to bring back and you said hip hop one
Speaker 2: on one And I had a meeting the next day
Speaker 2: with the dudes and they were like, all right, well
Speaker 2: let's see what happened. And that single handedly, like I
Speaker 2: totally forgot that you kind of were the spark that
Speaker 2: started that moment of me figuring out the show as
Speaker 2: in format terms and how to how.
Speaker 4: To pace things and all that stuff. I totally forgot that.
Speaker 4: I mere, how Coen do you call audibles during the
Speaker 4: during the show? Do you do that ever? Like in
Speaker 4: the middle of a show, like you feel the crowd,
Speaker 4: you feel a thing like if all of a sudden
Speaker 4: LL is like, let's do this. Do you ever audible?
Speaker 4: I've never seen you do that, but I know you
Speaker 4: talk all the time to the band.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's so weird, man, because I come from the Prince
Speaker 2: school of presentation. You know, George Clinton used to always
Speaker 2: joke that prints would rehearse spontaneity like and do I
Speaker 2: ever allow for a moment that requires that. This past weekend,
Speaker 2: in which of this taping, I will call it the
Speaker 2: Microsoft Gate domino effect. There was a Microsoft update effect
Speaker 2: that effected any business that uses Microsoft, including airports and
Speaker 2: hotels and whatnot.
Speaker 3: So as a result, this.
Speaker 2: Past weekend we were doing fragmentute root shows like you know,
Speaker 2: somehow we went from a trio to earth Wind and
Speaker 2: Fire like there's eleven of us now and.
Speaker 3: So we were kind of reduced.
Speaker 2: We were reduced to a seven man group, which you know,
Speaker 2: because I am a somewhat of a former creature of habit.
Speaker 2: If there's a monkey Wrinch store in my way, yes,
Speaker 2: I'm able to adjust. Do I like that? I hate
Speaker 2: it for me. I want the well oiled, well rehearsed
Speaker 2: version of perfection for everyone to see it. But I
Speaker 2: will say that in the last month or so, I'm
Speaker 2: purposely calling shit. While Rica's mid third verse, I'm like, yo,
Speaker 2: do you remember without a doubt from things fall apart?
Speaker 3: And he'll be ron and dad like.
Speaker 2: Treeka has the ability to communicate with me as he's
Speaker 2: still rhyme and shake his said yeah I know. Or
Speaker 2: he'll say like two verses like I know that much,
Speaker 2: and then you know, show download a Saturday night real
Speaker 2: quick by school. We d just take the drum baker
Speaker 2: from the beginning, like literally in the last month and
Speaker 2: a half or so I've been sort of in that
Speaker 2: place to see if I can leave my comfort zone
Speaker 2: because right now we have way too much material, and
Speaker 2: especially with these records that we have coming out in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, like I'm gonna have to literally throw
Speaker 2: this entire perfect show away and start all over again.
Speaker 2: So I'm this time, I'm looking forward to it. Previously
Speaker 2: I had dread like, man, we got to build it
Speaker 2: from the beginning. But you know, I feel as though
Speaker 2: that's that's my life lesson, like pivoting and that sort
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 5: So that was why the Force Tour was so great.
Speaker 5: Was Tarique was the greatest hype man in the history
Speaker 5: of hipp I mean, yeah, there's nobody ever who can
Speaker 5: you know, he's a center MC, he's the star. But
Speaker 5: then when he's time for him to be the hype man,
Speaker 5: he's the greatest hype man of all time. And you know,
Speaker 5: you guys got so much out of like like a
Speaker 5: rock him, who's you know, not necessarily known for being
Speaker 5: a great live performer, but you guys certainly worked so
Speaker 5: you got the max you could get out of a
Speaker 5: lot of these people. And also the stro Elliot aspect
Speaker 5: was another thing because you had, you know, real eight
Speaker 5: oh eight and all that stuff on there, and I
Speaker 5: mean you figured it out. You figured out the formula.
Speaker 5: Whereas you know and other wrap shows of the past,
Speaker 5: it used to be long delays and you know, miscommunication,
Speaker 5: no choreography, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: You know, So when did you leave Power ninety nine?
Speaker 5: When I graduated from high school in nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 5: that was the end of my Power ninety nine time.
Speaker 3: What year was it?
Speaker 5: When the end the story you just told about when
Speaker 5: we when I saw your show and made some comments,
Speaker 5: what year was that?
Speaker 2: Was that?
Speaker 5: Like nineteen ninety That was ninety three, ninety three?
Speaker 2: Okay, us at Master Ace were at the layup was
Speaker 2: kind of like of you from the Undergrounds, you know whatever,
Speaker 2: those cartoons whoever like Sees and Tramp and all those.
Speaker 5: Jazz stations and see yeah yeah, good h yeah.
Speaker 2: Philly guys like they had one of the very first
Speaker 2: examples of what I call like your hip hop shop.
Speaker 2: Now every city has a hip hop shop where there's
Speaker 2: the T shirt in the gear, but you know, if
Speaker 2: you wanted to get fresh jive shirts or your skateboard
Speaker 2: gear or you know, what's supreme is now that's you know.
Speaker 2: So Keith McPhee are our longtime production manager, owned one
Speaker 2: of those hip hop shops and he used to work
Speaker 2: at Sound the Market and he organized the show, and
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, it was us master Ace. I think
Speaker 2: Onyx made their debut in Philly at night, but you guys,
Speaker 2: you guys came and I was like excited, like yo,
Speaker 2: the guys from The Sorcerer were here. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: Like I think it's the first time we had like
Speaker 2: our first rehearsal.
Speaker 3: We never rehearsed. We would just like go off the
Speaker 3: top and whatever.
Speaker 2: And I think the nervousness of preparing something sort of
Speaker 2: took us off our game where we were little too
Speaker 2: serious about it and not And you told us like
Speaker 2: y'all didn't do the things that I heard about you
Speaker 2: guys doing. And I was like, yeah, you're right, Like
Speaker 2: I was over preparing and I learned to bring back
Speaker 2: hip hop one on.
Speaker 5: One so nice.
Speaker 3: Now, do you know?
Speaker 5: Before we leave Philly, I just want to just mention
Speaker 5: one more part of Philly, which is a did you
Speaker 5: ever hear of Rubber Park? Does that name of ring
Speaker 5: a bell at all?
Speaker 3: Rubber Park?
Speaker 5: Rubber Park was a park that, like as the name implies,
Speaker 5: was covered in like a rubber substance. It was down
Speaker 5: on It was down on Delaware Avenue kind of near
Speaker 5: South Street, like Bainbridge around like Bainbridge and Delaware Avenue
Speaker 5: back I'm talking about in like eighty five, nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 5: eighty four, eighty five. That was where I got my
Speaker 5: It was it was past South Street. You'd have to walk.
Speaker 5: It's right along the river, like when you remember how
Speaker 5: they used to be like parks and things right along
Speaker 5: the river there. And that was where I got my
Speaker 5: first dose of real hip hop culture. That was where
Speaker 5: you know, people would break, dance, graffiti, rap, all of it.
Speaker 5: Not DJ because but.
Speaker 3: Is this like Second Street or Delaware Avenue.
Speaker 5: Delaware Avenue like it was like facing the water, like right,
Speaker 5: you know, like close to the water.
Speaker 3: You know what. I'll be honest with you.
Speaker 2: Because of crack Era, like after that limb Bias story
Speaker 2: broke out, my dad and mom were like.
Speaker 3: Super visual, super vigilant, like.
Speaker 2: Before that Oprah theme comes on, Yeah, it's better be
Speaker 2: in this crib and da da da dah dah.
Speaker 5: So like when you're like four or five years younger
Speaker 5: than me, So I think that's probably why. You know,
Speaker 5: I wasn't that old either, but you know, I was
Speaker 5: making my way down there. But that was that The
Speaker 5: reason I mentioned is just because no one ever mentions it,
Speaker 5: and it's like that was one of the first places
Speaker 5: in downtown Philly that real hip hop culture emerged. It
Speaker 5: was because there's a proximity to South Philly. There's you know,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of neighborhoods in that area that where
Speaker 5: there was real hip hop culture and they kind of
Speaker 5: kids would gather in that park, and that was a
Speaker 5: time when I was like just consuming all the records,
Speaker 5: like you know, like it's sort of all the big
Speaker 5: names like Fat Boys, who Don't get who Don't Get
Speaker 5: enough love? By the way, You're right, I love the
Speaker 5: Fat Boys people. I was listening to can You Feel
Speaker 5: It yesterday, which is one of my favorite songs. I'm
Speaker 5: pretty sure Larry Smith produced that. I'm not exactly I think.
Speaker 2: So, but adjacent Curtis and Larry were adjacent who have
Speaker 2: told me that was his first record you ever purchased.
Speaker 5: Can You Feel It?
Speaker 3: The very first Fat Boys record was the first album that.
Speaker 5: Wow, the album Yeah, yeah, okay anyway, So that was it.
Speaker 5: I was just curious if you if you had heard
Speaker 5: of that locale in Philly.
Speaker 2: Nah, Like really, I didn't start. I only hung with adults,
Speaker 2: like if I had free time. I was in the
Speaker 2: family business, traveling with my dad a lot during school time.
Speaker 2: I always came straight home, never allowed to hang out.
Speaker 2: And then kind of when I met Treek, that's when
Speaker 2: the sort of arrange were like lift it a little bit.
Speaker 3: Where maybe I can go to a movie or that
Speaker 3: sort of thing.
Speaker 2: But like my first real act of rebellion was, yo,
Speaker 2: let's go bust on South Street, you know, because even
Speaker 2: then the thing was like wait, take my drums on
Speaker 2: South Street, my dad will kill me.
Speaker 3: Like it was that type of that type of atmosphere.
Speaker 5: So for those who were from back in the eighties,
Speaker 5: South Street was it didn't have a lot of hip hop.
Speaker 5: When I first started hanging out there, it was all
Speaker 5: punk rock. It was a punk rock place, and they
Speaker 5: had that Zipperhead record clothing store and there was a
Speaker 5: record store right by there. I would go to Gym Staks.
Speaker 5: I lived very close to Gym Stakes, so I would
Speaker 5: go there. I would go to Gym Stakes like all
Speaker 5: the time, and and then you know, even just by
Speaker 5: being there on South Street. I wasn't really a punk
Speaker 5: rock guy, but I got into it because it was
Speaker 5: it was all around, and it was yeah, it was
Speaker 5: happening at the same time as hip hop, as we
Speaker 5: all know, so it was there was kind of a
Speaker 5: there was a pairing there, you know, there was some connection.
Speaker 5: So I was, you know, exposed to a lot of
Speaker 5: punk rock at that at that stage. But it wasn't
Speaker 5: until later that it became more of like a hip
Speaker 5: hop street, you know. But in the beginning it was
Speaker 5: it started as a hippie place, you know, back in
Speaker 5: the day, and then it evolved into like, yeah, counterculture.
Speaker 2: My sister was slightly older, so she would hang on
Speaker 2: South Street with their girlfriends and there was like that
Speaker 2: that ice cream spot, once upon a porch or something
Speaker 2: like that, right right, right, yeah, Like I remember South
Speaker 2: Street when it was actual like the village like counterculture.
Speaker 6: And then totally in the gap and Tower Records came
Speaker 6: and then yes, exactly, the Starbucks and then right so,
Speaker 6: if you're friends elect and obviously of course this makes
Speaker 6: you ivy leak material, what were your other college options?
Speaker 3: Like, why did you choose Pin Wait, what did you say? Harvard? No, Harvard?
Speaker 3: Why did you choose Harvard?
Speaker 5: Well, okay, I had what was your essay about?
Speaker 3: Where do you want to be? What were your KAT scores?
Speaker 3: I want to know all the ship checky, let's get it.
Speaker 5: Okay. So what happened was when I got to senior year.
Speaker 5: You know, I was kind of living this dual life
Speaker 5: because I would go and hang out with all the
Speaker 5: Power ninety nine people, and you know, I would still
Speaker 5: go to school every day. I was kind of doing both.
Speaker 5: I was burning the candle at both ends kind of thing,
Speaker 5: and I was able to be. I was a good
Speaker 5: student for the most part, and particularly with English. I
Speaker 5: was like, you know, I was a English major type guy.
Speaker 5: You know. I was reading and writing and focusing on
Speaker 5: books and stuff that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: In addition to working at Power in nine, I also
Speaker 5: started writing about hip hop at a very like early stage,
Speaker 5: like in like eighty five, I was writing articles for
Speaker 5: not only my school newspaper, but also there was a
Speaker 5: newspaper on South Street. It was called the I can't
Speaker 5: even remember what it was called, maybe the South Street
Speaker 5: Star possibly, but.
Speaker 3: It was like a village voices.
Speaker 5: It was like a village voice type exactly. It was
Speaker 5: like a village voice. It didn't last probably that long,
Speaker 5: but so I was starting to write, like you know
Speaker 5: these what ended up being what I do with the source.
Speaker 5: I started at a you know, in Philly, writing about
Speaker 5: rap and I would attend. It's mainly because I was
Speaker 5: going to the concerts and I was, you know, writing
Speaker 5: about that. So like you know, Fresh Best one, Fresh
Speaker 5: Best two. There was a concert called the Philly versus
Speaker 5: New York Battle.
Speaker 3: I remember that.
Speaker 5: You remember that? Okay, I remember.
Speaker 2: Hearing about it, but I was, yeah, okay, wait, I'm
Speaker 2: one of those hip hop stages, elders.
Speaker 3: Whatever you want to call me that you don't say.
Speaker 2: There will be some time is where like I'll revisit
Speaker 2: something from thirty years ago that I swore.
Speaker 3: Basically the Mandela effect. Are you familiar with that term,
Speaker 3: the Mandela effect? No? What is that? But I like
Speaker 3: it when you refer to yourself as Mandela though here
Speaker 3: we go. Wait, wait, you guys don't know what the
Speaker 3: Mandela effect is. I've never heard of this of life.
Speaker 2: Okay, So so the Mandela effect is kind of like
Speaker 2: a good version of an urban legend. Like basically, I
Speaker 2: think Mandel effects started with people thinking that the Mandela
Speaker 2: funeral was televised, Like I could have sworn that happen,
Speaker 2: and it didn't happen. You know, like six degrees of
Speaker 2: Kevin Bacon was like a thing and pop culture. Yea,
Speaker 2: now the term the Mendela effect. Okay, So some common
Speaker 2: examples of the Mendel effect of logical explanations like mister
Speaker 2: Monopoly wearing a monocle because it complements his old fashioned
Speaker 2: satirical Like mister Monopoly doesn't wear a monocle, but we
Speaker 2: think he does.
Speaker 5: I understand. So it's like the mistake in memory that
Speaker 5: everyone shares that that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it says widespread false memories that large number of
Speaker 4: people are groups believe got it right.
Speaker 2: And just like in my version of it is, you know,
Speaker 2: I will return to the storied summer of nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: eight in which everything was changing our lives. But then
Speaker 2: I'll go back and listen to it, and then I'll
Speaker 2: be like, Okay, was this sophomore album as good as
Speaker 2: I thought it was in terms of the folkal or whatnot?
Speaker 2: And let's just say that, like if you were to
Speaker 2: put a gun in my head and basically say, like,
Speaker 2: all right, was this really a classic record?
Speaker 3: Were you just in your moments?
Speaker 2: I talked to this with ll like you couldn't tell
Speaker 2: me shit about Walking with the Panther in eighty nine.
Speaker 2: But when I let five years ago by I went
Speaker 2: back to it, I was like, Okay, I see where
Speaker 2: the ridicule came in. But I still hold that album
Speaker 2: precious to me, even though it's not as classic as
Speaker 2: my seventeen year old mind said it was. So I'm
Speaker 2: just asking you were rap shows back then as you
Speaker 2: remember it as legendary as we.
Speaker 3: Thought it was, or was it? Just like, Okay, shows
Speaker 3: are better now, even though the feeling is better than my.
Speaker 5: Take on it is. If you want to talk about
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty eight, I still believe to this day of
Speaker 5: the eighty eight was the most incredible year for hip hop.
Speaker 5: I will always believe that. I think eighty eight was
Speaker 5: the pinnacle of hip hop. However, when it came to
Speaker 5: the shows, as I said, a lot of them were problematic.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, like, even though I was loving it,
Speaker 5: there was nothing for us to compare it to in
Speaker 5: the early days in Philly, I would witness crazy scenes
Speaker 5: of you know, at the door inside the venue. This
Speaker 5: is mostly out the spectrum. That was most of the
Speaker 5: shows I will go to. We're out the spectrum, you
Speaker 5: would see people being thrown off the balcony. I mean
Speaker 5: it would be crazy shit. Oh yeah, oh, crazy stuff.
Speaker 5: I mean throughout you know, most of those shows, there
Speaker 5: would be some crazy incidents. I mean, for the most part,
Speaker 5: they were fine. There was not a you know, nobody died,
Speaker 5: I don't think, but you know, there was, you know,
Speaker 5: there was. They weren't well put together shows, but I
Speaker 5: think it was we were so starved for you know.
Speaker 5: I mean back then there weren't very even videos really
Speaker 5: for most songs, so you were just kind of seeing
Speaker 5: the artists. All you saw was the record cover and
Speaker 5: then what was in the venue right there with you,
Speaker 5: you know, so there was I think the moment was
Speaker 5: so like, I mean, I saw all those shows, all
Speaker 5: those amazing and especially and you want to talk about
Speaker 5: eighty eight. Chuck de often refers to a certain show
Speaker 5: at the Philly Spectrum in nineteen eighty eight as the
Speaker 5: greatest hip hop concert of all time, And I agree
Speaker 5: it was. I mean, you know of that era anyway,
Speaker 5: It was right when Nation of Millions was red hot,
Speaker 5: and it was like perfect, perfect timing. Also on the
Speaker 5: bill was rock Him and Eric b. Ll Statsosnic I
Speaker 5: think Big Daddy Kane, like a whole bunch of great artists.
Speaker 5: But I just remember a Nation of Millions being at
Speaker 5: the pinnacle of that moment and just like the energy was,
Speaker 5: you know, through the roof. I mean, obviously that record
Speaker 5: had captured the hip hop generation almost like no other
Speaker 5: that album.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so were any of your hip hop contemporaries, those
Speaker 2: of it, of age at least even thinking of traveling
Speaker 2: up north to the Latin Quarter to witness it?
Speaker 5: Or as you all know, if you guys grow up,
Speaker 5: if you grow up in Philly, there's always this sort
Speaker 5: of New York is like this big, imposing, like big brother,
Speaker 5: like next to you, you know what I mean. It's
Speaker 5: like we always admired it, respected it, maybe feared it,
Speaker 5: maybe didn't understand. You know, we wanted we were jealous
Speaker 5: of it, but then we acted like we weren't jealous
Speaker 5: of it. You know, there was this there was this
Speaker 5: whole sort of thing where New York was the big
Speaker 5: city and Philly was like you know, the sixth Borough
Speaker 5: of New York or something like that, you know, and
Speaker 5: we were, you know, always drawn to it. For sure.
Speaker 5: I was probably too young during the prime of the
Speaker 5: Latin Quarter era to go there, but I did end
Speaker 5: up going there later in like eighty eight, I think
Speaker 5: I went there. But there was, you know, there was
Speaker 5: always that sort of love hate relationship. You remember when
Speaker 5: Double D n Steinsky had a record that was the
Speaker 5: you know, that great mashup record.
Speaker 3: Yeah it was.
Speaker 5: That was such a great song, right, it was one
Speaker 5: of the first mashups ever. And you remember at one
Speaker 5: part that used to go New York is red hot,
Speaker 5: New York is read right, and everyone in Philly used
Speaker 5: to go New York ain't shit, New York ain't shit.
Speaker 5: And then around that same time you brought up mc
Speaker 5: breeze Discombobulated Boobulator, right, and then the flip side was
Speaker 5: a song called it Ain't New York because Philly is
Speaker 5: stepping in. You know that song.
Speaker 3: I know I have the twelvens.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the b side to Discombobulate or Boobulater, which was
Speaker 5: a song about you know, pro Philly anti New York
Speaker 5: kind of sentiments. So yeah, it was always there as
Speaker 5: kind of like this big, imposing place, and eventually all
Speaker 5: of us ended up making our way there one way
Speaker 5: or another. You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I could have sworn that you were just
Speaker 2: straight up New Yorker, I didn't realize that you had
Speaker 2: Philly ties, and I was shocked.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh shit, okay, I see. So yeah,
Speaker 3: like your time at Harvard, when you're graduating, what do
Speaker 3: you want to be? What are you aspiring to.
Speaker 5: Be graduating high school? Yeah, when I was graduating high school,
Speaker 5: I wanted to be I think I just wanted to
Speaker 5: be on the radio. I think that was kind of
Speaker 5: my main goal, or my main sort of I wanted.
Speaker 5: I knew I wanted to be around music, somewhere on
Speaker 5: the I guess on the business side of music or
Speaker 5: on the broadcasting side of music. And to answer your question,
Speaker 5: I got into Penn as well. And then they let you.
Speaker 5: Pen allowed you if you lived in Pennsylvania and you
Speaker 5: applied to Penn, you got in early, then you could
Speaker 5: still apply to other schools. So once I got into Penn,
Speaker 5: then all I I just went for the number one place,
Speaker 5: and and and and I got rejected from Yale and Princeton,
Speaker 5: but I got into Harvard. Yeah. But anyway, as I
Speaker 5: went there, I mean I pretty much remember that my
Speaker 5: first real mission upon arriving at Harvard was radio station.
Speaker 5: So I went right down to w HRB, which was
Speaker 5: the school's radio station. It was primarily a classical station.
Speaker 5: It's Harvard. Yes, it was exactly as you would picture it,
Speaker 5: you know, exactly that music was playing exactly and so like.
Speaker 5: They had an urban music department, but it was only
Speaker 5: on the weekends, but I signed up for it. There
Speaker 5: was a time slot allotted on like Friday and Saturday
Speaker 5: night for urban music. It had a very unfortunate name,
Speaker 5: the Darker Side TDS. It had nothing to do with race.
Speaker 5: It was because it was at night, okay, but it
Speaker 5: was still a dumb name. Yes, right, Okay. Anyway, so
Speaker 5: I walk in and I'm like, listen, I came in
Speaker 5: with all and now I got all the power ninety
Speaker 5: nine experience under my belt. I feel like I know
Speaker 5: more than everyone else, you know. I walk in and
Speaker 5: they say, okay, I'm like, I'm filling out the form
Speaker 5: of like any past experience, and I write like, you know,
Speaker 5: extra sentences like about all the stuff I've been doing
Speaker 5: with Power ninety nine and all this other stuff. And
Speaker 5: then they just put me in a room with all
Speaker 5: the other beginners and I have to just pay my
Speaker 5: dues and kind of like, you know, be an intern
Speaker 5: for them. You know, like when you're a freshman, you
Speaker 5: kind of have to just like in any any program
Speaker 5: in kylie Is, you have to like pay your dues
Speaker 5: and you know, show that you really you're really serious
Speaker 5: about working there and all that stuff. So I start
Speaker 5: to go through that process, and you know, they didn't
Speaker 5: have a raps show.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 5: It was really just R and B, a straight R
Speaker 5: and B, straight R and B kind of thing, a
Speaker 5: little bit of dance music, I think, and Baker and
Speaker 5: Luther and yeah, yeah, yeah it was. It was at night,
Speaker 5: so more uptempo stuff, I guess. And but again this
Speaker 5: is now, So I graduated in eighty six, so now
Speaker 5: we're talking about, like, you know, we're entering one of
Speaker 5: the prime times of hip hop, Golden era time I
Speaker 5: consider golden era, and everyone has their own definition. I
Speaker 5: consider Golden era eighty four to ninety four. That's just
Speaker 5: my opinion. Everyone has their own opinion. But that's my
Speaker 5: personal opinion from run DMC too like the yeah to
Speaker 5: non it's basically yeah exactly, but at any rate. So
Speaker 5: I'm in there and I'm starting to, like, you know,
Speaker 5: do all the things I'm supposed to do to get
Speaker 5: involved with this radio station. And I'm in my dorm
Speaker 5: room one day and I'm listening to Go See the
Speaker 5: Doctor by kolm o d. I remember I had that
Speaker 5: twelve inch final and I hear a knock at my door.
Speaker 5: It's in the college dorm room, you know. And I
Speaker 5: opened the door and I see a white guy standing
Speaker 5: there with a red Felas sweatsuit and a mustache, and
Speaker 5: he's like, hey, I heard you playing that music. You're
Speaker 5: into that kind of music. And I was like yeah,
Speaker 5: and he's like, hey, I'm Dave. And it was Dave Mace,
Speaker 5: my future partner in the Source, but that was the
Speaker 5: very beginning. He walks in and we start talking and
Speaker 5: we're two white guys who are there who both love
Speaker 5: black music. He was really into go go music in particular,
Speaker 5: which I knew very little about. I mean I knew
Speaker 5: like very little, like only like Chuck Brown and the
Speaker 5: Soul Searchers and the very basics.
Speaker 3: But what was he from the DNB.
Speaker 5: He's from DC. Yeah, yep, he's from Yeah, he's from DC,
Speaker 5: you know. And so we were kind of like sharing
Speaker 5: with each other, like, you know, showing each other, you know, records,
Speaker 5: and you know, I think my argument's a little bit
Speaker 5: more convincing if you're playing somebody wrap records and they're
Speaker 5: playing new Go Go records. I mean, there's way more
Speaker 5: records so you can play, you know. But we became friends.
Speaker 5: And in the beginning, he was working for the school
Speaker 5: paper selling ads, and he was he had a knack
Speaker 5: for selling ads, as we soon all learned, and he
Speaker 5: was selling ads for like the Harvard Crimson, which is
Speaker 5: like a famous school newspaper. And I was like, hey man,
Speaker 5: you didn't realize that. If you you don't, you might
Speaker 5: not know. But if you come down to the radio
Speaker 5: station you sell ads, they let you keep a commission.
Speaker 5: He's like a commission because when you were selling ads
Speaker 5: over there, they didn't let him keep a commission. He's
Speaker 5: like they really And I was like, yeah, come on down.
Speaker 5: So I brought him down to the station, and you know,
Speaker 5: he started doing the same thing I was doing, which
Speaker 5: is like go through the whole initiation process and so forth.
Speaker 5: But then pretty quickly, you know, to make a long
Speaker 5: story short, we kind of teamed up with a couple
Speaker 5: of other students, not famous people, just other students that
Speaker 5: were there at the time, and then you know, we
Speaker 5: started doing this like rap show. I mean it started
Speaker 5: very small.
Speaker 3: Did you have to get permission to do.
Speaker 5: This or yeah, we had to like go through the
Speaker 5: whole It took about a year. It took about a
Speaker 5: year for us from from from when I first went
Speaker 5: down there to us actually getting a rap show. It
Speaker 5: was it was probably a year later. It took like
Speaker 5: a whole year. It was probably sophomore year that I
Speaker 5: actually got the show. And what I did was I
Speaker 5: went back to Philly and went to Power ninety nine
Speaker 5: and walked in and saw some old friends, walked right
Speaker 5: into the studio the b room, like the the not
Speaker 5: the on air studio, but the production studio, and I
Speaker 5: took every single one of Lady Bees on air IDs
Speaker 5: and drops and recorded them so like you're listening to
Speaker 5: street beat, you know, that kind of stuff. And I
Speaker 5: went back down to I went back up to Cambridge
Speaker 5: and I was like, Dave, I got it, and I
Speaker 5: had a cassette and it was we're gonna call our
Speaker 5: show street Beat, and so I basically got you know,
Speaker 5: there were other rap shows that Boston had, like only
Speaker 5: on college radio, but there was like.
Speaker 2: She's saying, if it's like, yo, this is chuf Dan,
Speaker 2: you're checking out the sounds of street Beat.
Speaker 5: You took all the drops of like not artists, but
Speaker 5: more so like like official like the official radio guys.
Speaker 3: Do that guy? Who is that guy?
Speaker 5: There was some guy do a lot of work? Yeah,
Speaker 5: there was that guy was getting a ton of work.
Speaker 5: Back then. There's always somebody like that. But you know,
Speaker 5: it was like you know, cold Rock in the planet
Speaker 5: with street Beat, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: And so that gave us an edge because you know,
Speaker 5: now we have a more we have a very professional
Speaker 5: sounding like station radio show, you know, because we have
Speaker 5: these drops. So I came back. I remember, just by
Speaker 5: randomly that around the same time I had the twelve
Speaker 5: inch for Mantronics and just Ice it was around that
Speaker 5: same time. Whatever. You know, there's a lot a lot
Speaker 5: of those kind of records. So I was bringing records
Speaker 5: back that no one in Boston had heard yet, you know,
Speaker 5: I was I was basically, like you know, the connection
Speaker 5: to like getting records ahead of everybody just because of
Speaker 5: really just going to like Sounds of Market, funkal Mart,
Speaker 5: those kind of places.
Speaker 3: So you weren't getting service yet you still have to buy.
Speaker 5: The station did get serviced, but but yeah, but most
Speaker 5: of the good ones I had to buy.
Speaker 2: Yes, So what was the general attitude or the atmosphere
Speaker 2: at Harvard for this music, Like were they open or
Speaker 2: was it.
Speaker 3: Just like a small two percent of y'all or really
Speaker 3: hip hop ds?
Speaker 5: That's a great question. I mean, I think it was
Speaker 5: pretty reflective of the general population at that time, whereas
Speaker 5: hip hop was still an underground form of music.
Speaker 2: Because you're in college, did you yourself see the license
Speaker 2: to Ill effect happen at rapid speed?
Speaker 5: License to Ill was an important inflection point. I think
Speaker 5: glad you brought that up, because that happened actually right
Speaker 5: in eighty six, late eighty six, right, so that was
Speaker 5: when I when I it was it was right around
Speaker 5: the time when I met Dave, honestly, and the beginnings
Speaker 5: of what would become the Source was happening. But License
Speaker 5: to Ill was a huge, huge influence on not just me,
Speaker 5: but I mean so many people, you know, were influenced
Speaker 5: by that record. I remember that I was. Actually I
Speaker 5: was so into it that I like even made it
Speaker 5: like a focus of one of my freshman year classes,
Speaker 5: like you got to write a paper about whatever you want,
Speaker 5: and I wrote about License to Ill. And that was
Speaker 5: an important record for me also being a white Jewish
Speaker 5: guy from the city, you know, kind of identifying. But
Speaker 5: the thing is that you know and you later that's
Speaker 5: about this. I was about to say that exact thing.
Speaker 5: Everyone in Philly thought they were Puerto Rican.
Speaker 3: I don't just festing man out of there, because the
Speaker 3: Beastie Groove Mike d sound like he was Puerto Rican.
Speaker 3: You just festing man when you want to hear.
Speaker 5: You right, exactly, And for some reason, everyone that you
Speaker 5: you heard that they were Puerto Rican too, right, because
Speaker 5: everyone in Philly. Everyone in Philly is like, no, nah,
Speaker 5: they Puerto Rican, They perto Rican. And I'm like, uh,
Speaker 5: I guess I didn't know. You know, nobody knew because
Speaker 5: all we had was those Crimson def cham labels with
Speaker 5: no picture on it.
Speaker 3: You know, my science teacher is the one.
Speaker 2: He saw the photo and he's like, hmm, because we
Speaker 2: brought the album to school and we were we were
Speaker 2: obsessed with the whole the backwards eat me thing on
Speaker 2: the airplay wing, Yes, the wing of the album covered.
Speaker 2: And so when he looks at it and he saw
Speaker 2: the name Horowitz, he's like, oh, okay, some of my
Speaker 2: Jewish brothers.
Speaker 3: I was like, Jewish like white. He's like yeah. I
Speaker 3: was like, no, man, white boys, ain't that funky?
Speaker 2: Like literally it took forever, Like when I heard him
Speaker 2: speak on Soul Train, I was like, okay, mister Parrot,
Speaker 2: might be right.
Speaker 3: They what used to get down to mere? What do
Speaker 3: you want to say? I know this now? I know
Speaker 3: this now.
Speaker 2: So how does what we know as the source get created?
Speaker 2: In terms of it's starting out as a newsletter?
Speaker 5: So we we eventually, So we started out with Dave
Speaker 5: and I and two other Harvard students who because they
Speaker 5: were older and we were younger, and they were kind
Speaker 5: of like, you know, still like the sceniority over us.
Speaker 5: But then you know, over time, one of them fell
Speaker 5: off and the other one fell off, and then eventually
Speaker 5: it was just me and Dave. That point, we did
Speaker 5: find that the show was starting to get popular. We
Speaker 5: would get a lot of phone calls like way more
Speaker 5: than any you know, classical music fans aren't known for
Speaker 5: like bringing up the phone lines and make them a blush.
Speaker 5: So we so we were like the people were in
Speaker 5: the station were always like mind blown by the amount
Speaker 5: of calls we were getting. We had competition. There was
Speaker 5: like two or three other college radio rap shows at
Speaker 5: the time, so that was who we saw as our competition.
Speaker 5: Now around this time, I should also mention that I
Speaker 5: also had a desire to be a rapper and heavily
Speaker 5: influenced by the Beastie Boys. Of course, a friend of
Speaker 5: mine from Philly and I started a white rap group
Speaker 5: called b MOC and we were, yeah, we were you know,
Speaker 5: we didn't know what the hell we were doing, but
Speaker 5: we basically somewhere along the line, another friend of ours
Speaker 5: who I think Amir you know Will Be of DJ
Speaker 5: of the Goats, who's one of my childhood lifetime friends. Yes,
Speaker 5: Will Braveman. Yes, I was going to n YU at
Speaker 5: the time, and we were all in college in different colleges,
Speaker 5: and Will met a young man by the name of
Speaker 5: Brett Ratner, and Brett Ratner I wish I never heard
Speaker 5: of him, but anyway, so what happened was whoever that is. Yes,
Speaker 5: so Brett Ratner, who now you know everyone knows as
Speaker 5: a Hollywood guy, me two guy and all that stuff.
Speaker 5: But anyway, he had learned about our existence, heard one
Speaker 5: of our demos, was interested in us. So while the sort,
Speaker 5: while the street beat on w h RB was starting
Speaker 5: to take off, I was also trying to be a rapper.
Speaker 5: So I was trying to write rhymes. I was trying
Speaker 5: to get beats. I was trying to make music.
Speaker 3: How how were your grades?
Speaker 5: Well, you know, as the story goes on, as we
Speaker 5: get deeper into it, you know, like we got through it.
Speaker 5: But I majored in the Source basically, you know, that
Speaker 5: was like what I when I was at Harvard. I
Speaker 5: majored in the Source, no doubt about it. I did.
Speaker 5: I did get good enough grades to get through. But
Speaker 5: I wasn't like the top student or anything because I
Speaker 5: just we were just so focused on the magazine. But
Speaker 5: that was a little bit later. But so leading up
Speaker 5: to You're forgiving, thank you, thank you so so leading
Speaker 5: up to that though, like so I was in This
Speaker 5: is related to your questions how did the Source start?
Speaker 5: So basically I was living in New York City in
Speaker 5: the summer of nineteen eighty eight, I was working for
Speaker 5: Ted Demi and Fab five Freddy at Yo MTV raps
Speaker 5: because I wanted again, I wanted to I was so
Speaker 5: I was just trying to get into the industry no
Speaker 5: matter what, you know. So I had arranged for a
Speaker 5: summer internship to work for you OMTV raps. I'm also
Speaker 5: pursuing my rap career at the same time.
Speaker 3: How did you get in there?
Speaker 4: Like like they like white kid walks through the door,
Speaker 4: They're like, yes youo MTV raps. Like does that that
Speaker 4: seems like a disconnected It was just like or did
Speaker 4: it work? I think if any that was or maybe
Speaker 4: that was the thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know, I just.
Speaker 5: Yo, yeah, I mean you know, look, let's there was
Speaker 5: always the uniqueness of being white, and sometimes I worked
Speaker 5: in my advantage being easy to you know, the only
Speaker 5: white guy in the room. Sometimes Yeah, but that's that
Speaker 5: was Yeah. In this case, I honestly don't remember. I
Speaker 5: think I just wrote a lot of like mail, like
Speaker 5: you know, pre email. I wrote letters to people and
Speaker 5: I was like, you know, I want to come into
Speaker 5: New York, d DA da DA, And they're like, Okay,
Speaker 5: you come work here. I didn't last long there actually
Speaker 5: because they they didn't treat me well. They they didn't
Speaker 5: respect my my knowledge of music. They didn't understand, they
Speaker 5: didn't know they they treated me as you as low
Speaker 5: as you can get. They they famously they were so
Speaker 5: sick of me spotting my opinions about rap because I
Speaker 5: knew more than them. I really did, not not FAB five.
Speaker 5: But the other guys are working there, they didn't know shit, okay,
Speaker 5: and I walked in and I knew way more about
Speaker 5: music than they did. I knew it. I mean I
Speaker 5: recognized it right away, but they didn't want to hear it.
Speaker 5: So they basically opened a door. It was like something
Speaker 5: out of a movie. You open a door and there's
Speaker 5: a tape. There's a room with like the entire history
Speaker 5: of you MTV raps to that point, like all the
Speaker 5: raw footage is sitting on the floor. They say, hey,
Speaker 5: we got a job for you. Go into that room
Speaker 5: and watch every single tape and wipe down what's on it.
Speaker 5: So they shoved me in a closet.
Speaker 3: What a punishment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, with hundreds of tapes of the very earliest year
Speaker 5: of your MTV raps, and uh, I hated it. I
Speaker 5: also remember, just.
Speaker 3: Just as I'm in heaven, I'm sorry.
Speaker 5: I know, I know it sounds it sounds. It sounds
Speaker 5: like it's not that bad, but I mean, you know,
Speaker 5: I wanted to be where the action was, you know.
Speaker 3: Having the peel potatoes in the cartoon, like yes.
Speaker 5: Potatoes, like an endless job that never with no sunlight,
Speaker 5: you know, just like in the room. So I also
Speaker 5: remember I was in the room the day of that
Speaker 5: the Manifest video from Gang Stars showed up words I
Speaker 5: Manifest and if you remember that, I think that was
Speaker 5: their first video. I believe that was Gangstar's first music video.
Speaker 5: I loved the song. I already knew it because I
Speaker 5: loved everything on Wild Pitch. And I walk in and like,
Speaker 5: so if they pop it in and fab five Freddy's
Speaker 5: in the room, Ted Demi rest in Peace, who was
Speaker 5: the executive producer of you know OMTV raps, And they
Speaker 5: play it and I'm like popping my head, going crazy,
Speaker 5: and I think it was almost like a It was
Speaker 5: almost like just because I liked it so much, they
Speaker 5: wanted to not like it, I swear, And so they
Speaker 5: go and they're like they're like yeah, yeah, I don't
Speaker 5: really like it. That guy's voice, it's just weird. They're like,
Speaker 5: I don't even get it, Like why is he dressed
Speaker 5: like Malcolm X? And I don't even get it, you
Speaker 5: know if you remember you had like the Malcolm X
Speaker 5: glasses on?
Speaker 3: Yeah, remember yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah? And so they rejected it. They rejected the video.
Speaker 5: They ended up playing it way later, like six months later.
Speaker 5: But at any rate, after all that, I kind of
Speaker 5: like got turned off and I ended up quitting that job.
Speaker 5: But in the meantime, I was still getting records and
Speaker 5: was super super immersed in the music and also making
Speaker 5: music for whatever it's worth. And then Dave meanwhile, and
Speaker 5: at this point now we're getting up to the summer
Speaker 5: of eighty eight, so we had about one year of
Speaker 5: our rap show under our belt. And Dave stayed in
Speaker 5: Boston that summer while I was in New York. And
Speaker 5: Dave had an idea. He was like, hey, man, let's
Speaker 5: do something to promote the radio show. You know, like,
Speaker 5: I got this idea, tell me what you think. And
Speaker 5: he made a one page newsletter called The Source, and
Speaker 5: it was a yellow sheet front and back, and I
Speaker 5: received it in the mail and I was impressed. I
Speaker 5: mean it was very you know, it was very simple.
Speaker 5: You know, it was just literally like one piece of paper.
Speaker 5: But I got it right away. It should be noted
Speaker 5: also that the first rat magazine I ever saw was
Speaker 5: actually from Philly. It was Mike. When I say rat magazine,
Speaker 5: I mean you mentioned the Black Gully, but Mike Elliott,
Speaker 5: do you remember the name of that magazine, Crush magazine.
Speaker 5: It was called Crush.
Speaker 2: He had a not a pay per view show, a
Speaker 2: public access show, right, yes, yes, yes, I remember him
Speaker 2: always advertising Crush magazine, but I never got it.
Speaker 3: So you got this newsletter.
Speaker 5: I had seen one other rat magazine that wasn't word
Speaker 5: up and write on, which were obviously teeny bopper, and
Speaker 5: no one respected those. We all knew that Crush was.
Speaker 5: I mean, maybe they served a purpose. I'm not trying,
Speaker 5: as you know, they definitely came before me, but you know,
Speaker 5: they weren't treating the music, you know, in a serious way.
Speaker 5: Crush was the first publication I saw that was talking
Speaker 5: about real records. And but again it was very it
Speaker 5: wasn't well put together. It was it was it was,
Speaker 5: and it wasn't. It only came out a few issues.
Speaker 5: I don't think it even really lasted that long. So
Speaker 5: I had some French point as to what it could be.
Speaker 5: But that Crush at that time was like I'm the best,
Speaker 5: the only one. I remember. I had the editor of Crush,
Speaker 5: who actually came in New York at that time to visit.
Speaker 5: I met with her. She came to my home at
Speaker 5: that time because I guess I wanted to write for her,
Speaker 5: maybe at any rate. So I did receive that one issue,
Speaker 5: and I thought it had potential. I went back to
Speaker 5: college in the fall of eighty eight and Dave and
Speaker 5: I connected and right away we became business partners. And
Speaker 5: you know, this is the truth. And anyone you know
Speaker 5: all the rumors about how the Source started and this
Speaker 5: and that. Dave and I took one hundred dollars each
Speaker 5: and put two hundred dollars into a bank account, and
Speaker 5: that was the beginning of the Source. It was Dave
Speaker 5: and I put in one hundred dollars each, and I
Speaker 5: became the editor in chief, in charge of all the content,
Speaker 5: and Dave became the publisher in charge of all the
Speaker 5: BIS magazine, which includes selling ads, which as I mentioned,
Speaker 5: he had a particular skill at. And he turned out
Speaker 5: to be really really good at that. So that was
Speaker 5: the beginning of the Source. Now, the Source was initially
Speaker 5: designed to promote our college rap radio show. Uh so
Speaker 5: we it was all about it was charts, some news,
Speaker 5: and it was very focused on Boston radio, which Boston
Speaker 5: community and the hip hop the fledging, very small hip
Speaker 5: hop community there. The first few issues were kind of
Speaker 5: along those lines, and then we started distributing them in
Speaker 5: local Boston rap record stores like Skippy Whites is the
Speaker 5: most famous one. And that was the very beginning. And
Speaker 5: then you know, pretty quickly as we started publishing, we
Speaker 5: published our second issue, which had I think six pages.
Speaker 5: It was like a four It was like four pages
Speaker 5: with like one sheet in the middle, so it was
Speaker 5: like total of six pages. That one had a picture
Speaker 5: of kras The in the corner.
Speaker 2: At the time when you're forming this, was there a
Speaker 2: mission statement or a mantra like were you guys like
Speaker 2: what was your besides just promoting the radio station. Was
Speaker 2: there a desire to see like critical think pieces written or.
Speaker 5: So in good question? So in the beginning, I think
Speaker 5: we saw ourselves as more of a trade magazine, like
Speaker 5: that was the show. Yeah, Like the initial incarnation of
Speaker 5: the source. The first tagline was the voice of the
Speaker 5: rap music industry. That was how that's how we first
Speaker 5: framed it. So for the first year or two, I
Speaker 5: mean maybe year and a half, the first like even
Speaker 5: ten issues or so or eight issues there was and
Speaker 5: we weren't every month, and we were doing it. We
Speaker 5: were totally just running it on our own. We had
Speaker 5: no education in this. We never took a class on journalism,
Speaker 5: We never took a class on how to run a
Speaker 5: business any of that stuff. We just felt it out
Speaker 5: and did it all, you know, trial and error basically.
Speaker 5: But pretty soon, you know, initially we were positioning ourselves
Speaker 5: as the voice of the rap music industry. Now I
Speaker 5: remember now a year later, the summer of eighty nine,
Speaker 5: I was back in New York City in the same
Speaker 5: apartment which is with will with will Be, and it
Speaker 5: was right by NYU and I got a call and
Speaker 5: it was now, now it's eighty nine, so everyone knows
Speaker 5: who Harry Allen is because I'm going to my media
Speaker 5: assassin that voice. Don't believe the hype, you know that.
Speaker 5: And so I picked up my phone and there's a
Speaker 5: message from a voicemail from Harry Allen and he was
Speaker 5: like calling for Jonathan Scheckter. He's like, I see you
Speaker 5: calling yourself the voice of the rap music industry. He's like,
Speaker 5: don't you know there are many voices of the rap
Speaker 5: music industry. I'm a foioice of the rap music industry.
Speaker 5: Chuck Dee is a voice of the rap music industry.
Speaker 5: And I was It wasn't necessarily a bad call, but
Speaker 5: it was kind of a challenging.
Speaker 3: It was a very Harry Allen phone call.
Speaker 5: A heavy Harry Allen type phone call, but he was calling,
Speaker 5: so it wasn't like necessarily bad. So I called him
Speaker 5: back and I engaged him in conversation and we made
Speaker 5: plans for him to write something pretty early on. But yeah,
Speaker 5: that got me thinking a little bit about who we
Speaker 5: were and what we were doing. And then following that,
Speaker 5: I'm kind of compressing a lot of you know, there's
Speaker 5: a lot of things in between, but basically, at some point,
Speaker 5: I think in eighty nine, we changed our tag to
Speaker 5: the Magazine of Hip Hop Music, Culture and Politics, and
Speaker 5: that was when we made the decision to be a
Speaker 5: consumer facing magazine and not an industry facing magazine. Now, granted,
Speaker 5: we were still very small and were doing it all ourselves.
Speaker 5: I mean when I say ourselves, I mean literally Dave
Speaker 5: and I were like all hours of the night, you know,
Speaker 5: doing every single thing that you see in the magazine.
Speaker 5: I mean we were laying out the magazine on the
Speaker 5: very first version of of an Apple Macintosh, the very
Speaker 5: very first you know, well the rectangle you know, take
Speaker 5: exactly like we were using Quark Express and page Maker,
Speaker 5: which were the very first desktop publishing software, and like
Speaker 5: we would it would be like yes, like you would
Speaker 5: take like, okay, we want to put a picture there.
Speaker 5: Oh wait, no, move it to the right. So you
Speaker 5: move it to the right, and then you have to
Speaker 5: wait for the entire page to rebuild itself. It would
Speaker 5: take like an hour to do one thing. I mean
Speaker 5: it was so slow because it was literally and also
Speaker 5: you had to those it was those hard floppies, so
Speaker 5: you had to keep like insert disc A, inskirt disc B,
Speaker 5: insert disc you know what I mean. It was like
Speaker 5: this incredibly time consuming slow process, but we were doing it.
Speaker 5: You know, we would get on our hands and knees
Speaker 5: and sort the magazine. By the time we were mailing out.
Speaker 5: Now at this point we had a larger mailing list
Speaker 5: and we would get on our hands and knees and
Speaker 5: sort the magazine by zip code, put them in a
Speaker 5: rubber band, and put a sticker with the zip code
Speaker 5: on that pile of magazines. So it was like literally
Speaker 5: every little thing that you had to do, we were
Speaker 5: doing it ourselves.
Speaker 2: I mean, how were you able to in terms of
Speaker 2: getting content, Like, did you know all the publicists at
Speaker 2: def jam or Jive or whoever was hip hop friendly
Speaker 2: at the time, did you like, how are you able
Speaker 2: to get FaceTime with them and sort of convince them that,
Speaker 2: you know, in addition to your black beats and your
Speaker 2: right ones, that we should also be a priority stop.
Speaker 5: Early on, I think we were well received by the
Speaker 5: industry people like publicists and marketing people and stuff like that.
Speaker 5: I think, you know, there was never any I mean,
Speaker 5: you know, once in a while we would have to
Speaker 5: pursue somebody, but for the most part, once we established
Speaker 5: ourselves with the first maybe five or six issues, like,
Speaker 5: people wanted to send us records, so we started receiving
Speaker 5: all the records, all the press kids, and then the
Speaker 5: harder part was getting you know, interviews, getting the artists
Speaker 5: and but yeah, that was just basically doing you know,
Speaker 5: in pre internet days, I was all working the phones,
Speaker 5: getting people, you know, setting up interviews which are also
Speaker 5: frequently conducted over the phone, and yeah, and then starting
Speaker 5: to meet more writers and that kind of thing. And
Speaker 5: then I should mention, you know, very early on, relatively
Speaker 5: early on, around eighty nine ninety, we met two other
Speaker 5: Harvard students. One of them is James Bernard, who was
Speaker 5: actually a Harvard Law student, and the other one was
Speaker 5: Ed Young who was an undergraduate but he was a
Speaker 5: year older than us, and Ed had experience working in
Speaker 5: the magazine industry. He had taken a year off and
Speaker 5: worked for The New Republic, which is a like a
Speaker 5: political sort of magazine. And James was a Harvard law
Speaker 5: student who was actually in Harvard Law at the same
Speaker 5: time as Barack Obama. And James was more on the
Speaker 5: editorial side, so he was, you know, a San Francisco
Speaker 5: kind of black activist type person who had a lot
Speaker 5: of political views. He was into the music too, but
Speaker 5: you know, that was kind of my area of expertise,
Speaker 5: and James kind of took on the socio political side
Speaker 5: of the magazine very early, and we kind of like
Speaker 5: teamed up. So now we got four of US. So
Speaker 5: now instead of two of us, is four of us
Speaker 5: and we're still basically doing everything ourselves throughout junior and
Speaker 5: senior year of college.
Speaker 2: What was the first glossy non newsletter issue? What was
Speaker 2: LLL that first issue?
Speaker 5: I believe there was a picture of LLL with all
Speaker 5: the girls right surrounded by girls, I believe, so, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's like from a video shoot. There's a picture of
Speaker 5: ll It's kind of a shitty, blurry picture, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: that was I think our first color cover. I believe
Speaker 5: that was our first full color, glossy like magazine. Basically, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I think you're right about that.
Speaker 3: At what point did you realize this was lightning in
Speaker 3: a bottle for you?
Speaker 5: You know, I think throughout our college, the second two
Speaker 5: years of college for us, which would have been you know,
Speaker 5: eighty nine to ninety, was when I began it began
Speaker 5: to be clear that we were we had something that
Speaker 5: was legitimately like, you know, a product that people would love.
Speaker 5: And now I should say, like, you know, for me
Speaker 5: my influence. There was a two very famous newsstands in
Speaker 5: Harvard Square, really famous like huge nuda stands. I sold
Speaker 5: like every magazine from the Whole World, and I would
Speaker 5: go there every week and I would read New Music Express,
Speaker 5: an Emmy, Melody Maker, two British magazines. I would look
Speaker 5: at Spin, I would look at Rolling Stone, and I
Speaker 5: would look at The Village Voice. So those are like
Speaker 5: my five anchors, all of them to varying degrees. Not
Speaker 5: Rolling Stone, but Spin, with John Leland was dabbling in
Speaker 5: hip hop. The Village Voice was kind of the main
Speaker 5: voice of hip hop journalism. You had Nelson George who
Speaker 5: started with Billboard obviously, you had Harry Allen, you had
Speaker 5: who am I forgetting? There's so many great writers from
Speaker 5: that era, uh, Greg Tait, Yes, exactly. So those these guys,
Speaker 5: you know, were my who came before me, you know,
Speaker 5: they were my inspiration. But really it was Rolling Stone
Speaker 5: that I was looking at, not because I loved what
Speaker 5: they were covering, although like I said, I did love
Speaker 5: rock music too, but it was more so because they
Speaker 5: were the They were the best put together publication. They
Speaker 5: everyone loves. Everyone knows who's on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Speaker 5: So I would study Rolling Stone more so from a
Speaker 5: structural point of view to try to like pick up
Speaker 5: whatever ideas I could. I would read the other ones
Speaker 5: more for a content point of view, to try to
Speaker 5: get references and records, and Nmy in particular was great
Speaker 5: because Tim Westwood, who later became a good friend of mine,
Speaker 5: would have a chart every week that was so far
Speaker 5: ahead of America it was crazy, Like he would get records,
Speaker 5: put them on a chart, and he would list ten
Speaker 5: records that no one in New York or Affiliate or
Speaker 5: Boston had ever even heard yet. So he was so
Speaker 5: far ahead of the curve. So that was a great
Speaker 5: influence on kind of all those things were influences for me.
Speaker 5: But then once we started, you know, putting some of
Speaker 5: those things into practice with some of these early issues
Speaker 5: of The Source, we'd get a little bit better. We'd
Speaker 5: add more pages, we'd add more color. There was one
Speaker 5: very important issue where we put we put Malcolm X
Speaker 5: on the cover right in the midst of you know,
Speaker 5: when when that when he was like, you know, a
Speaker 5: major figure in hip hop culture, you know, through Public
Speaker 5: Enemy and all the other artists talking about him. So
Speaker 5: we were doing things like that to try to you know,
Speaker 5: we wanted to get attention, but we also felt that
Speaker 5: that was reflecting what was happening in the in the culture.
Speaker 2: So the ice Cube Issue ten, Issue of the Source
Speaker 2: is where I believe the myth of the Source, the
Speaker 2: legend of the Source, the idea of the Source, and
Speaker 2: the Source as we know it, all five of those variations.
Speaker 3: No, I think that's when it came alive with.
Speaker 2: So you have to know that at the rate where
Speaker 2: you're giving the albums ratings, yeah, that that was going
Speaker 2: to spark something in the industry.
Speaker 3: How are you guys like for that summer issue? All right?
Speaker 2: For those who don't know, I think issue ten was
Speaker 2: ice Cube on the cover. This is like late spring
Speaker 2: of nineteen ninety and they're pretty much going to review
Speaker 2: every album that will come out in the summer of
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety. Yes, and the opinions. Again, before the Source,
Speaker 2: you just got blurbs and mentioned you really didn't get
Speaker 2: much on like quality. So it's not like if right
Speaker 2: On magazine is talking about Michael Jackson's Off the Wall record,
Speaker 2: they're going to offer anything really critical to how important
Speaker 2: this is. It'll just be like, hey, as a new
Speaker 2: or a single, don't stop to you done and rock
Speaker 2: with you?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2: He's going to on tour with his brothers, Like you
Speaker 2: just basically got like bullet point facts. You never got opinions,
Speaker 2: and this is the first time that we're seeing opinions.
Speaker 2: First of all, we learned what five mics were. And
Speaker 2: that's the issue where I believe, and I'm going off memory,
Speaker 2: this is how the devoter I was. I know that
Speaker 2: Edutainment by BDP got five. I know that America's most
Speaker 2: wanted ice cube got five.
Speaker 3: Yes, I know that.
Speaker 2: Eric being Rockiem's let the Rhythm hit Him got five
Speaker 2: and Edutate I said, Editainment right, yes, Edutainment Americans. Oh
Speaker 2: oh people, uh, tribe, people's instinctive travels in the past
Speaker 2: of rhythm. It's weird enough because even with those four records,
Speaker 2: I could see rock Kim and BDP like, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: they've released another classic record.
Speaker 3: I see.
Speaker 2: I didn't know much about Tribe, and I was happy
Speaker 2: because I was like anyone under that day La soul umbrella.
Speaker 2: I'm happy to see that there's more zaniness coming from
Speaker 2: that corner of the world. And of course I instantly
Speaker 2: knew that the cute thing was classic, because you know
Speaker 2: that's that was like I had it. However, the most
Speaker 2: shocking review of that whole issue where you guys, I
Speaker 2: think went through maybe twenty records.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: You guys gave Fear of a Black Planet a very
Speaker 2: simple three and a half stars, which by that point
Speaker 2: every critic was just go goa over anything public of
Speaker 2: me did. And I never thought I see the day
Speaker 2: where someone would offer, well, wait a minute, let's reconsider
Speaker 2: that and gave like actual You know, I'm very much
Speaker 2: influenced until maybe last ten years. I was very much
Speaker 2: influenced by what a reputable critic would say about an album.
Speaker 2: When I saw that, I was like, yo're they're trying
Speaker 2: to make a statement here, like it's not burning a bridge,
Speaker 2: Like three and a half is not bad, but it wasn't.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the high praise that America's most warned got
Speaker 2: or that sort of thing, and like, but you guys
Speaker 2: were just fearless.
Speaker 5: Do you think which do you think was a better
Speaker 5: album in retrospect nation, I mean, Fear of a Black
Speaker 5: Planet or America's Most Wanted?
Speaker 2: Oh come on, stop playing the first three songs on
Speaker 2: a mirror. Here's the funny thing. Here's the funny thing.
Speaker 2: So now now that I know, soup the nuts on
Speaker 2: how that album got made. Yes, I do know that
Speaker 2: the true all star lineup of the Bond Squad, meaning
Speaker 2: both both Sockles, Sadler and.
Speaker 3: Chuck. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's almost like I really considered America's most wanted
Speaker 2: the first three songs, even though that entire album is
Speaker 2: mind blowing for me. It's almost like it's I consider
Speaker 2: the first three songs almost its own world, and then
Speaker 2: when you get to once Upon in the projects to
Speaker 2: the rest, I considered that like another album.
Speaker 5: But I could see that, I could see that.
Speaker 3: You're absolutely I mean, you're you're right.
Speaker 2: I think had we not receive Terror Dome and Fight
Speaker 2: the Power previously, then we could see it as, yes, just.
Speaker 3: As equal to nation and millionaires.
Speaker 2: But you guys kind of taught me that, like retrospect
Speaker 2: soundtrack songs making appearances on an album long after the fact,
Speaker 2: that it doesn't count. But I mean it, It wasn't
Speaker 2: snark whatsoever, but that rating let me know how serious
Speaker 2: you guys were about music journalism. Did you guys realize
Speaker 2: at that point that you are about to enter a
Speaker 2: very very slow game of chicken with the industry in
Speaker 2: terms of, like, now there's expectations of what my mic
Speaker 2: should be there' should be.
Speaker 3: You know, like set a standard, yes, set a standard
Speaker 3: that we never had before.
Speaker 5: Right, Okay, So I I first of all, thanks for
Speaker 5: your compliments. I understand and agree with what you're saying
Speaker 5: in that we were the first publication really to be
Speaker 5: critical of rap, but not in a but in a
Speaker 5: meaningful way and coming from a place where we we
Speaker 5: loved wrap, you know, we wanted to it was really
Speaker 5: it wasn't really that complicated.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 5: It was once we came up with the idea for
Speaker 5: the ratings. And I don't remember exactly what issue that was.
Speaker 5: It could have that could have been the first issue
Speaker 5: where that happened. I don't recall.
Speaker 2: I think the l issue was the first issue with
Speaker 2: before mis it was like records or broken it.
Speaker 5: It was like an exploding record. Yeah. And then it
Speaker 5: became Mikes. Yeah. And around that time I also met
Speaker 5: another early Source staffer named Reginald C. Dennis. He was
Speaker 5: a Harlem based hip hop head who showed up in
Speaker 5: a three piece suit when he came for his first interview.
Speaker 5: I was wearing like a like a T shirt and
Speaker 5: jeans and a baseball hat and like you know, in
Speaker 5: walks like this, guy were in a suit, and uh,
Speaker 5: we hit it off, and because you know, we we
Speaker 5: bonded over rap music and we hit it off, and
Speaker 5: Reggie became kind of our first music editor, and that
Speaker 5: most of the ratings happened under his tenure. I mean,
Speaker 5: I was the editor in chief and James Bernard was
Speaker 5: like an important managing editor. Also, I should mention Chris Wilder,
Speaker 5: my lifelong friend, another Philadelphia guy. He's the guy that
Speaker 5: kind of really brought me. He's the guy that brought
Speaker 5: me to Rubber Park. He was the guy that introduced
Speaker 5: me to hip hop culture in a real way. He
Speaker 5: was part of our staff as well, another editor there.
Speaker 5: And during that time, that was when you know, okay,
Speaker 5: so we moved nineteen ninety It's a great turning point
Speaker 5: because that was when we basically graduated from college. We
Speaker 5: moved the business in New York City. I remember literally
Speaker 5: listening to America's Most Wanted on the drive from Boston
Speaker 5: to New York, like that was like the newest album
Speaker 5: at that moment. And we moved into five ninety four Broadway,
Speaker 5: which was right up Broadway in Houston in New York City.
Speaker 5: Before I without even realizing, we were in the perfect
Speaker 5: perfect place for the magazine. I mean, the reason we
Speaker 5: chose that building was because Bill Stephanie and Hank Shockley
Speaker 5: were actually friends of ours. I had met Bill Stephanie
Speaker 5: at some point along the way, and they had Soul Records,
Speaker 5: which was kind of post public Enemy.
Speaker 2: Sounds of urban listens, correct, and they were always good
Speaker 2: for an acronym that's correct.
Speaker 5: Yes, and they were. And Bill, as you know, it
Speaker 5: was one of the greatest guys of all time. And
Speaker 5: so he brought us in and he's like, hey, you know,
Speaker 5: there's His office was in the same building, so he said, hey,
Speaker 5: you know, there's room in this building. I know, though,
Speaker 5: where's the location five ninety four Broadway Broadway in Houston.
Speaker 3: The same place where October ninety four happened.
Speaker 5: All of it happened, Yes, for Broadway yep, So basically yes,
Speaker 5: So that was nineteen ninety so we moved the business there.
Speaker 5: In the beginning, we had one room and it was
Speaker 5: about nine ten people, and we had like literal it
Speaker 5: was like something out of a cartoon. It was like
Speaker 5: there was like one room with like six phones and
Speaker 5: nine people and they're like the cords would be crossed
Speaker 5: in the middle of the room, and there was nowhere
Speaker 5: to hide. It was like you were just everyone was
Speaker 5: hearing everything, and it was just kind of like a chaos.
Speaker 5: And then after a few months of that, we upgraded
Speaker 5: to like a little bit of a bigger space with
Speaker 5: like several rooms, and then at some point we divided
Speaker 5: it intot of like business and editorial.
Speaker 2: I was going to say, uh, one of your one
Speaker 2: of your star players bringing to this show. Dream Hampton,
Speaker 2: of course, has recently created possibly one of the most
Speaker 2: mind blowing, blowing ist documentaries I've seen as of late,
Speaker 2: entitled It Was All a Dream, where I mean essentially
Speaker 2: her years as a n why she used student she
Speaker 2: basically just always kept eight camera and no matter where
Speaker 2: she was, and she has all of these magic moments.
Speaker 2: And there's a moment where she is in the office
Speaker 2: of what I assume the storied Mind Squad or whoever
Speaker 2: you know the source starting ten and literally like just
Speaker 2: to peep in that world for you know, it's all
Speaker 2: of fourteen fifteen seconds.
Speaker 3: But I always wondered, you know, what that environment was like.
Speaker 5: I had the same reaction I saw A dream was
Speaker 5: kind enough to show me a screening of the film,
Speaker 5: and yeah, it was I had never seen that footage.
Speaker 5: That was my first time seeing that footage of it
Speaker 5: was like, I think it was around ninety two ninety
Speaker 5: three ish, and she's in the office with a camera.
Speaker 5: I remember that she was around with a camera, but
Speaker 5: I had never seen the footage until very recently. But
Speaker 5: it is a great film. I definitely highly recommend that
Speaker 5: people watch.
Speaker 3: It once word gets around. How do you guys know who.
Speaker 2: Is reputable in terms of like their their writing skills
Speaker 2: or their their knowledge of the music.
Speaker 5: So some people already had a name because they had
Speaker 5: written for other places, and that would be you know,
Speaker 5: the names I mentioned, like Nelson, George, Harry Allen. Then
Speaker 5: there were people that came up organically because either they
Speaker 5: were friends of a friend or they literally just showed
Speaker 5: up at our office one day. I don't recall Bones Malone.
Speaker 5: Malone is an example of someone who showed up, but
Speaker 5: he had already had some some some bylines in I
Speaker 5: think in Spin or possibly other places. He had a
Speaker 5: very distinctive writing style. Bones wrote, you know, with his
Speaker 5: own language, basically if you remember Dream Dream, I don't
Speaker 5: recall how Dream showed up, but she did show up
Speaker 5: at some point. I don't remember how she entered our world,
Speaker 5: but there she was, this brilliant woman, and we needed
Speaker 5: women voices to be honest, and we were pretty much
Speaker 5: a very male heavy operation, and I knew in my
Speaker 5: heart that we needed more women, and so I immediately
Speaker 5: assigned her her first writing for us, which was to
Speaker 5: review h W A hose with attitude.
Speaker 3: I remember, yeah, and so one and a half mics.
Speaker 5: She gave it like one mic or something. Yes, exactly exactly,
Speaker 5: But that was necessary. That was a necessary step because
Speaker 5: we had to put it in. We put in perspective
Speaker 5: and dream. You know, who could be a better person
Speaker 5: than Dream to do that? You know, we were lucky
Speaker 5: that she came along because she, you know, one of
Speaker 5: a kind voice. Uh. And then along the way, I
Speaker 5: I you know that we're talking about those days. I
Speaker 5: need to mention Mattie c who is you know, was
Speaker 5: my very close friend prior to even the very earliest
Speaker 5: days of the Source. Matt actually coincidentally knew both me
Speaker 5: and Dave May's just by chance. And then when the
Speaker 5: Source was starting, he in a lot of ways, I mean,
Speaker 5: as I think back on, it represented really the core
Speaker 5: of the mind squad taste in music. Maddie C was
Speaker 5: the essence of like our taste in music because him
Speaker 5: and I were very often aligned in our taste, but
Speaker 5: not always. But Maddie C was ahead, so far ahead
Speaker 5: of the curve in understanding hip hop and having good taste.
Speaker 2: And what are the sides of the tug of war
Speaker 2: rope in terms of like who's more esoteric, who's more
Speaker 2: three VHI and rising?
Speaker 3: And who's more Life is too short? And how do
Speaker 3: you know how to be objectionable?
Speaker 5: You know, that's a great question. I mean one of
Speaker 5: the earliest challenges we had was dealing with regionalism. We
Speaker 5: referred to it earlier when you had your experience. You know,
Speaker 5: there were so many examples the only so to.
Speaker 2: Say, the two short reviews are probably a good example
Speaker 2: of albums that are now deemed classic.
Speaker 5: Now, yes, we made a trash yeah through lens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So how how does that?
Speaker 5: We were always accused of being New York centric because
Speaker 5: quite frankly, we were. I mean, you know, I was
Speaker 5: from Philly, but you know, we were East Coast centric
Speaker 5: people in terms of our taste in music. But very
Speaker 5: early on, if you look at when we were still
Speaker 5: the voice of the rap music industry. We actually were
Speaker 5: running columns from Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco.
Speaker 3: Atlanta, San Francisco.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we were Seattle. I mean we were always We
Speaker 5: were one of the first media entities to recognize that
Speaker 5: there was hip hop in other parts of the United
Speaker 5: States besides New York and LA. And another one that
Speaker 5: was doing it was you m TV Raps. So even
Speaker 5: way after I had left you oom TV Raps and
Speaker 5: now I'm doing the source full time, we were kind
Speaker 5: of the only national hip hop media you know, uh
Speaker 5: platforms that existed, but there was there was an ongoing
Speaker 5: tension that existed between East and West coast different tastes,
Speaker 5: you know, too short. It is a great example. Here's
Speaker 5: another example. Nwa who I Love from the first second,
Speaker 5: I mean the first easy E record, you know, everything
Speaker 5: Dre did. I was like the biggest Doctor Dre fan ever,
Speaker 5: but in a weird way, we were playing a lot
Speaker 5: of that on a radio show. We were playing, you know,
Speaker 5: all the Doctor Dre stuff. I went back to Philly,
Speaker 5: I remember in eighty nine. Straight Out Compton came out
Speaker 5: in eighty eight, So sometime late eighty eight, early eighty nine.
Speaker 5: I think it was actually Christmas break of late eighty
Speaker 5: eight early eighty nine. I was back in Philly and
Speaker 5: I walked into either with Sounds of Market or Funkal
Speaker 5: Mart and Todd one remember him, he was like one, yes, yes,
Speaker 5: he was a very famous or not famous, but you know,
Speaker 5: like a well known Philly DJ and record guy. Basically,
Speaker 5: I walk in and I'm like, I was now the source,
Speaker 5: had some momentum, and now I had my own radio show,
Speaker 5: so I was kind of feeling myself a little bit.
Speaker 5: I walk in and I'm like, hey, man, I don't
Speaker 5: see Nwa anywhere. Where's Nwa? And he goes, Nwa, man,
Speaker 5: that shit is garbage. I'm like what, I'm like, yo,
Speaker 5: people love that. He's like, no one here, no one
Speaker 5: in Philly likes that shit, nobody likes that shit. That
Speaker 5: shit is straight garbage. And I'm like, okay, damn. I
Speaker 5: was shocked. Meanwhile, it took like a whole year later
Speaker 5: and every single car is playing straight at Compton, you know.
Speaker 5: But it was like the bubble was so strong still
Speaker 5: around New York and LA and Philly that like it
Speaker 5: took a whole year extra for like that to get
Speaker 5: penetrated by something as great as the NWA album.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, the ads and Dodillboard.
Speaker 2: I used to religiously read Billboard from like eighty six
Speaker 2: to maybe a ninety three. But whenever the any ruthless
Speaker 2: ad would in Billboard magazine, I would just dismissed it
Speaker 2: because I was like, yo, they got eight ball jackets
Speaker 2: and Jerry Crows.
Speaker 3: They looked like my cousins in La. This has to
Speaker 3: be whack.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking that I don't want to get caught up
Speaker 2: in the Toddy t versus Dougie fresh.
Speaker 3: Right that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't until Tik's number one rule was like
Speaker 2: he rejected no hip hop. He was never biased against anything.
Speaker 2: So the fact that Hammer's rhyming over the apache break
Speaker 2: and turned his mother out, Reek was like, I assure you,
Speaker 2: this is like public Enemy level of production, Like you'll
Speaker 2: love this, just give it a chance. And finally during
Speaker 2: lunch break he played the first three songs straight out
Speaker 2: of Compton.
Speaker 3: I was just like, what the hell is this? Like
Speaker 3: literally in lunch rooms, So it was word of mouth
Speaker 3: for a lot of us.
Speaker 5: It took a long time for Philly. For Philly and
Speaker 5: New York. So but we had to be ahead of
Speaker 5: the curve on this. So it kind of to answer
Speaker 5: your question, we were. We had you know, the natural
Speaker 5: tastes of the people in And I also want to
Speaker 5: mention Reef rob Tulou was another important uh figure in
Speaker 5: the source now to Reef Chimo Do rest in Peace.
Speaker 5: An incredible photographer. We can talk about him as well.
Speaker 5: Took so many iconic hip hop photos including Tupac and
Speaker 5: Biggie and Nas and all these incredible legends that we
Speaker 5: all the pictures that we all know to be the
Speaker 5: representative pictures of these artists as Chimo Do. So we were,
Speaker 5: you know, we just organically kind of attracted writers, photographers
Speaker 5: and artists and producers and DJs and executives and you
Speaker 5: know even even Reggio say came into the office and
Speaker 5: at Rest in Peace. He was also an early writer
Speaker 5: for us. He was a very you know, headstrong, like
Speaker 5: you know, uh, smart guy who had a lot to say.
Speaker 5: Chay O Cooker who's gone on to become you know,
Speaker 5: successful screenwriter in Hollywood. A number of people like that
Speaker 5: have gone through us.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we'll say right now, shout out to chay
Speaker 3: Nice nice.
Speaker 5: So yeah, So so anyway, there's there's you know, we
Speaker 5: we as far as like get to your question about
Speaker 5: like inside the magazine, how who liked sort of dela
Speaker 5: versus too short or stuff like that. I mean it's
Speaker 5: hard to say exactly. I mean I think Maddie and
Speaker 5: myself and Reef kind of took on the more New
Speaker 5: York centric stuff and then Reggie and James kind of
Speaker 5: took on the more down South and West Coast stuff.
Speaker 5: That was sort of the general breakdown. But like our
Speaker 5: ground zero for Maddie and myself would be like the
Speaker 5: Brand Nubian album nineteen ninety, you.
Speaker 3: Know, like let's talk about it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was our ground zero.
Speaker 3: Yeah review, Yes, I heard, I heard of Brand Nubian.
Speaker 2: I believe that I saw a feel so good video
Speaker 2: on your TV raps maybe once or twice. But the
Speaker 2: review it's almost to the point where And I also
Speaker 2: said this about Illmatic, I wondered if the review of
Speaker 2: the album winds up being like its own headliner, Like,
Speaker 2: is the reception of the sources perspective of an album.
Speaker 3: Bigger than the album itself?
Speaker 2: Because when I saw those five mics for all for one,
Speaker 2: and I've read the first line it said brand Nubian
Speaker 2: is New York. And the way that I was positioned,
Speaker 2: I accepted it because I was like, oh, okay, so
Speaker 2: this album is a paradigm shift.
Speaker 3: This album is now how the next generation of New
Speaker 3: Yorkers are going to look talk.
Speaker 2: And they broke down the language and the slang and
Speaker 2: the skins and all that stuff. And you know, I
Speaker 2: didn't know too much about you know, the five percent
Speaker 2: nation and.
Speaker 3: None of that's you know what I mean like, And
Speaker 3: because I was told it was a classic, I just
Speaker 3: accepted it that it's a class you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Like, That's that's how impressionable a seventeen year old receiving
Speaker 2: the information. Did you guys know at the time that
Speaker 2: that was going to be I think of all the reviews,
Speaker 2: the Brand Ubian getting five mics was the thing where
Speaker 2: suddenly I started to hear like of the whole regionalism
Speaker 2: thing and they don't respect our music and that sort
Speaker 2: of thing or not they don't respect our music, But like,
Speaker 2: suddenly it matters what you guys think as opposed to
Speaker 2: because I don't know if the lure of brand Nubian
Speaker 2: would have kicked off if it were just a all right,
Speaker 2: they got a you.
Speaker 5: Know what I mean, like, yeah, Brand Nubian. I mean
Speaker 5: if you were around New York City in that year,
Speaker 5: I mean they that album leaked. You know, that was
Speaker 5: one of the things that was an example of bootlegging,
Speaker 5: you know, in those days when cassettes were bootlegged.
Speaker 3: Sow Far in Advance was it?
Speaker 5: We had that cassette so far, I mean the only
Speaker 5: one I think the rivals it ISNAS and we can
Speaker 5: tell that story also. But basically Brand Nubian was red
Speaker 5: hot in New York. I remember literally when Dante walked
Speaker 5: into a new music seminar party and they performed oh
Speaker 5: actually either they yeah, I think they performed wake Up
Speaker 5: or one of their early singles, and I'm like, what
Speaker 5: is this because I had that funky groove on it,
Speaker 5: it had that Parliament I think sample. But anyway, it
Speaker 5: was that record was so big in New York City
Speaker 5: during that nineteen ninety period. Like every nightclub, you know,
Speaker 5: if you go to like especially, I would have out
Speaker 5: a lot in the downtown New York club scene listening
Speaker 5: to people like Stretch, Armstrong and many others, and those songs.
Speaker 5: I mean you would hear like three four album cuts
Speaker 5: a night, you know, in one session from Brand Nubian
Speaker 5: that was so influential.
Speaker 2: So long before its release. Yes, you guys had it
Speaker 2: for release five to six months ahead.
Speaker 5: Something like that, something like that. Yes, I remember, Maddie
Speaker 5: was the it was the keeper of that cassette and
Speaker 5: the only other you know, not the only but we got.
Speaker 5: We frequently got records, you know, because back then, for
Speaker 5: those pre internet days, we would get a cassette and
Speaker 5: you know we would because we had such a long
Speaker 5: lead time. I mean, we might be working it's if
Speaker 5: it's you know, if it's August and now the issue
Speaker 5: we're working might not come out until like October first
Speaker 5: or something. You know. It was like so far ahead
Speaker 5: that we had to be always thinking in that frame.
Speaker 5: So we have to be thinking, like what are people
Speaker 5: going to like? Whoever you put on the cover has
Speaker 5: to be who's hot, like two to three months from now. Basically,
Speaker 5: so because it took because the reason was we had
Speaker 5: to finish all the work, send the issue off to
Speaker 5: get printed. It took it took a couple of weeks
Speaker 5: to get printed, and then it had to get distributed
Speaker 5: to all the distributors, and it was like a two
Speaker 5: month lead time before it actually ended up on the
Speaker 5: newsstand at least. So because of that, we had that
Speaker 5: always that challenge, and the publicist knew that, so they
Speaker 5: would give us the cassettes. But that's when things would leak.
Speaker 5: So there was a big period, you know, in the
Speaker 5: early nineties when a lot of big albums, namely Brand
Speaker 5: Nubian and Illmatic in particular, got leaked real crazy. I
Speaker 5: didn't leak either of them, but I did hear both
Speaker 5: of them very early on. You know, should I tell
Speaker 5: the omatic story or.
Speaker 3: Tell the Ematic story? Yeah, all right, y'all. That was
Speaker 3: part one of Jonathan Schechter's story.
Speaker 2: Of course, we know you wanted the story about how
Speaker 2: NAS got his five mics in the Source. Come back
Speaker 2: next week for that story, and he'll also give you
Speaker 2: some stories about how the Source played a huge role
Speaker 2: in Biggie's career shortly after.
Speaker 3: And also, you know, he's going to talk about how
Speaker 3: he left the publication that he birthed, and he reveals
Speaker 3: what he's been up to now. I'm still celebrating great music.
Speaker 2: This whole interview was damn near four hours, and you know,
Speaker 2: so we try to preserve all of it. So come
Speaker 2: back next week, look into your feed and enjoy part
Speaker 2: two of our conversation with Jonathan Schechter of the source
Speaker 2: magazine all Right.
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