Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic
Speaker 1: episode was produced by the team at Pandora. What Up
Speaker 1: It's Unpaid Bill.
Speaker 2: On this classic episode of Quest Love Supreme, we travel
Speaker 2: back to March eight, twenty seventeen. Tom Zila, the founder
Speaker 2: of Tommy Boy Records, tells Team Supreme about some of
Speaker 2: the legendary music this company put out and creating a
Speaker 2: pathway to make sampling more affordable for producers. Listeners can
Speaker 2: also check out our twenty twenty two two part interview
Speaker 2: with former Tommy Boy president Monica Lynch.
Speaker 1: Enjoyed all here on uls.
Speaker 3: Supremo, Supremo, Suprema So Supremo Ro, Supremo, Sun Sun Supremo
Speaker 3: Roll So Supreme Sun Supremo Ro.
Speaker 1: This is your cult leader. Yes you are my sheep. Yes,
Speaker 1: Tommy's in the place.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Supremo Roll Call, Suprema Son Supremo Ro.
Speaker 1: The name. Yeah, here's an example. Yeah, let me clear
Speaker 1: my throat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but not no samples Supremo Suprema s RO.
Speaker 6: Good morning Tommy from Tommy Boy. Yeah, my name is
Speaker 6: Sugar from Bagel Boys.
Speaker 4: Supremo, Supremo, Son, Son Supremo.
Speaker 2: Roll pay Bill, Yeah, Steve say, oy, Yeah, about to
Speaker 2: throw down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tommy Ro Supremo. So you guys, Supremo Bill is frantic?
Speaker 5: Yeah, looking through my jacket. Yeah, must have misplaced on
Speaker 5: my sex packets.
Speaker 4: Roll Supremo Son Supremo, roll call Suprema Son Supremo.
Speaker 7: Role Yeah girl, Yeah, and I'm too excited.
Speaker 1: Yeah world Ro.
Speaker 4: Supremo Supremo, roll call Supremo some some Supremo role ca.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm Tommy boy. Yeah, I wasn't prepared for this annoying.
Speaker 9: Supreme Supremo Rome Suprema Son Son Supremo, Roll call Supremo
Speaker 9: Son Son Supremo, Roll call Suprema some Supremo ro.
Speaker 1: He said, come on, it's hard to promise things, ladies
Speaker 1: and gentlemen. Uh, and welcome to you another edition of
Speaker 1: course Love Supreme. How are you guys doing, say a
Speaker 1: little Team Supreme? Yes, everybody, mama, okay.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: I have to say that our guest, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: probably on paper, his his label probably spoke to me
Speaker 1: more than because usually when you think of the consummate
Speaker 1: hip hop label or the consumant label, of course, the
Speaker 1: D word is always the first thing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1: But uh, as far as pushing the boundary and innovations
Speaker 1: and one of the greatest logos of all ties, one
Speaker 1: of the most boy logos of all time. I have
Speaker 1: to say that that for me, Tommy Boy Records kind
Speaker 1: of pushes the envelope just a little bit further as
Speaker 1: far as innovation and trying out new ideas. And that's
Speaker 1: what I feel. Our our steam guest today is about
Speaker 1: lady and gentlemen. Please give it up for mister Tommy Silverman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you. How are you today?
Speaker 8: Very good? Very good? Starting my fast Day one might
Speaker 8: as well good day to start it. Wednesday?
Speaker 1: You're right, you're right. How long are you going for?
Speaker 8: How long it's humpty day? You know it's Wednesday. How
Speaker 8: long do you go for? I don't know. I you know,
Speaker 8: I as long as I still feel good. I'm drinking
Speaker 8: water that you know. I'm starting out drinking water. We'll
Speaker 8: see if I go to fancy restaurant, I might have
Speaker 8: to eat. We'll have to see.
Speaker 1: But this is day one.
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is day one. Man.
Speaker 1: The crank is going to start.
Speaker 8: But it gets good. Yeah, you're turning about the detox, right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: that's going to be pretty clean.
Speaker 1: I feel for you make well, okay, I know there's
Speaker 1: a lot that I don't know about you, but I
Speaker 1: mean I know of your your general story, but I
Speaker 1: do know that your love and your appreciation for music
Speaker 1: runs deep.
Speaker 8: So yeah, starting with your dad.
Speaker 1: That's that's how we first met. I have to say
Speaker 1: that I didn't think that anyone in the current music
Speaker 1: world even really knew of the do wop world or
Speaker 1: any of that stuff. And that's the first thing you
Speaker 1: came up to me and said, like, I know your
Speaker 1: dad is I was really so am I to believe
Speaker 1: that your first passion of music was duop.
Speaker 8: No. But you know, I discovered duop just like you
Speaker 8: talk about how you discover things through sampling and that,
Speaker 8: you know, I hear heard new things and I went
Speaker 8: back and discovered roots, and so doop was a route
Speaker 8: that I discovered. I was way way too young to
Speaker 8: know doop, but I discovered it, you know, when it's
Speaker 8: sort of the shinnan nah kind of a thing came
Speaker 8: around and I wanted to know. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 8: I had Lee Andrews and the Heart's album, which, like
Speaker 8: most people only know the singles, right, you know, I
Speaker 8: got really deep into it and it's definitely one of
Speaker 8: the top five or ten do op artists of all time.
Speaker 8: And then to find that you actually played with those
Speaker 8: guys in the garden when you were thirteen made me
Speaker 8: have like a different kind of respect. I already respected,
Speaker 8: of course hip hop and the people in the world,
Speaker 8: you know, more than almost everyone else. But then to
Speaker 8: hear that you also had that was you know, because
Speaker 8: I when I started hip hop and I was working
Speaker 8: with Ben Bada in the Bronx in nineteen eighty, it
Speaker 8: was the same corners that duop started from where hip
Speaker 8: hop started, like literally the same streets in the same neighborhoods,
Speaker 8: you know, the Belmont Avenue. There was the Italian section,
Speaker 8: and there was the Black section, and there were kids
Speaker 8: singing on every street corner, and it was the same
Speaker 8: corners that kids plugged in, you know, their mixers, into
Speaker 8: street polls and started. You know, it wasn't that far apart.
Speaker 8: So I thought there was a relationship, and I you know,
Speaker 8: I always search for that relationship, even to the point
Speaker 8: of signing the Force MDS, which I thought was sort
Speaker 8: of the synthesis of duop and hip hop.
Speaker 1: So were you born into a musical family or a
Speaker 1: musical collective family.
Speaker 8: Creative but not musicough. My mom is an artist and
Speaker 8: my dad is a writer.
Speaker 1: Are you Are you born New York.
Speaker 8: YA, Westchester, White Plains?
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, So like what are your first musical experiences
Speaker 1: at least.
Speaker 8: Out early when I was Yeah, when I was like,
Speaker 8: my dad was really into jazz and so you know,
Speaker 8: he used to like play air saxophone to Coleman Hawkins
Speaker 8: when I was like five years old, and those are
Speaker 8: my earliest memories. And he used to play Miles Davis,
Speaker 8: early Miles Davis records and he had like a big
Speaker 8: high fight. This was way before stereo and built into
Speaker 8: the wall and the house that we lived in, and
Speaker 8: you know, and he was you know, they played Billie
Speaker 8: Holliday and they were really into that kind of music.
Speaker 8: So that was the music that I grew up with
Speaker 8: at the time.
Speaker 1: So you weren't listening to the The Battle, Dave Crockett
Speaker 1: or anything that Middle America was into.
Speaker 8: You guys were except for show tunes because that you know,
Speaker 8: you know, that was the mut that had to be
Speaker 8: in there too. That was a combination of like of
Speaker 8: bebop and show tunes. It's a weird combination. But yeah,
Speaker 8: that's what played in my house before I was had
Speaker 8: my own musical exploration, which probably started in sixty five
Speaker 8: or sixty six when I started buying my first records.
Speaker 1: What was the first record you purchased?
Speaker 8: Tommy James and the Schondell's Hanky Panky on Roulette, Ah
Speaker 8: Roulette turned about forty fives? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, okay, So was it an everyday occurrence like
Speaker 1: buying bubblegum or was you like buying for forty fives
Speaker 1: and records? Like was that like?
Speaker 8: Yeah? But it was expensive. I mean, you know, for
Speaker 8: a little kid with you know, on a tiny allow,
Speaker 8: how much were forty fives back competed? It was either
Speaker 8: baseball cards or records?
Speaker 1: You know, how much were forty fives back?
Speaker 8: Now? Forty five is like sixty nine cents or something
Speaker 8: like that, or maybe even forty nine cents if you
Speaker 8: went to Corvette's, where would you go? I went to
Speaker 8: the local store where I bought comic books, you know,
Speaker 8: and they had records, some records on forty five's.
Speaker 1: Okay, But was there a place in New York that
Speaker 1: was like the Holy Mecha center of.
Speaker 8: Not at that time, not at that time. I'm talking about, like,
Speaker 8: you know, sixty five, sixty six, sixty seven. You know,
Speaker 8: it's an interesting era too, because you know, then there
Speaker 8: was New York radio then you know, it was all
Speaker 8: I AM. There was no effort radio yet, so it
Speaker 8: was ABC, MCA. Those were like the pop stations, and
Speaker 8: then there was l I, B N r L, which
Speaker 8: was the black stations, okay, you know, and I didn't
Speaker 8: even find out about the black stations until I got
Speaker 8: into junior high school.
Speaker 1: So as far as your your foray into music, by
Speaker 1: the time you started collecting, I mean, were you then
Speaker 1: collecting the music of the time as far as your.
Speaker 8: I was into blues and duops. Those were the things
Speaker 8: that were now cast your friends. Totally nobody knew that's
Speaker 8: what I wanted to do. But by the way, that
Speaker 8: wasn't just about music. That was about the way I
Speaker 8: dressed and the things I was into. I mean, I
Speaker 8: used to get kicked out of school for wearing a
Speaker 8: Lenen pin or you know, carrying Mao's Red Book to
Speaker 8: school when I was in ninth grade and stuff. I
Speaker 8: would wore Bush jackets with American flag upside down on
Speaker 8: the back, which was like the signal for distressing. I
Speaker 8: wrote the underground newspaper with another couple of guys in
Speaker 8: my junior high school. You know, I was like, kind
Speaker 8: of whatever it was, I was against it. So you
Speaker 8: know I was a contra against the against the system
Speaker 8: even in high school. Well, you know, I looked look
Speaker 8: at everything that is and say what isn't you know?
Speaker 8: What's missing? What's not you know? And so I try
Speaker 8: I look at I invert everything and say, okay, what
Speaker 8: are the opportunities for change? And kind of that may
Speaker 8: be the reason why Tommy Boy and the D label
Speaker 8: have a different philosophy. I was always looking to do
Speaker 8: something nobody had ever done before. I wasn't looking to
Speaker 8: have the biggest hit today. You know, I was looking
Speaker 8: to do something, you know, where there was no competition.
Speaker 8: I wasn't trying to trash the competition. I wanted to
Speaker 8: be the first.
Speaker 1: What makes a person want to do that? Because it
Speaker 1: would have been so easy for you to just statisfied,
Speaker 1: kind of blend in with the status quo and kind
Speaker 1: of reap the benefits of the time and right off
Speaker 1: into the sunset, Like what makes you?
Speaker 8: I guess when I was a little kid, I wasn't
Speaker 8: the fastest or the strongest. I get picked last in
Speaker 8: the sports team. I wasn't the best looking, so I
Speaker 8: didn't get invited to the party. So I had to say, sorry,
Speaker 8: I guess we have to make my own world, you know.
Speaker 8: And so I kind of had to reject the status
Speaker 8: quot because the status quo rejected me. And by the way,
Speaker 8: if you look at the entire world, everything that moves
Speaker 8: society forward happens because people are rejected.
Speaker 1: How many how many siblings do you?
Speaker 8: I have two younger brothers, Okay, Oh you're the oldest.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, were you the middle child
Speaker 1: or the Okay? I was trying to get super over analytical.
Speaker 8: And my brothers aren't. Aren't this way I see. So
Speaker 8: I don't know if it's karma genetic or if it's
Speaker 8: the results of behavioral rejection when I was younger, but
Speaker 8: I think, you know, like if Gandhi hadn't got kicked
Speaker 8: off of train in South Africa, he wouldn't have gotten
Speaker 8: to India and done what he did. You know, he
Speaker 8: wouldn't even have thought about that, you know. But he
Speaker 8: was seeing as colored in South Africa at the time,
Speaker 8: and and he was going along. He'd gone to Oxford
Speaker 8: or somewhere for law school, and he said, what's this about?
Speaker 8: And when he became a reformer because of rejection, and
Speaker 8: you you know, Jesus Christ, you know, you look at
Speaker 8: everybody in history has been rejected. It's gone and gone
Speaker 8: on to do great things.
Speaker 1: So for me, so for you was music more. You're
Speaker 1: you're calming, your your your your sanctuary.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I was also an exploration, you know, like so
Speaker 8: I was into the Rolling Stones when I was really young,
Speaker 8: and then I got into all the blues artists that
Speaker 8: influenced them. So I started buying you know, old blues
Speaker 8: albums and learning about blues that way.
Speaker 1: You know, it's easy now, especially with the with the
Speaker 1: oncelot of the internet, to get information quick fast. But
Speaker 1: you know, like if you're listening to uh, say, like
Speaker 1: if you're listening to zep too, if you listen a
Speaker 1: Whole Lot of Love or whatever, like who's there to
Speaker 1: let you know about a Willie Dixon or Blind Lemon
Speaker 1: Jefferson or.
Speaker 8: So I'm looking at the liner notes of course, and
Speaker 8: you know when you're watching you listen to the record
Speaker 8: in your room, you're listening to the record on a
Speaker 8: record player in your room. You have plenty of time
Speaker 8: to read liner notes, and the liner notes are big
Speaker 8: because records are big, and you can see that Spoonful
Speaker 8: by Cream was written by Willie Dixon, so I had
Speaker 8: to find out what else Willy Dixon did or whatever,
Speaker 8: you know. And then I got crazy into Muddy Waters
Speaker 8: because you know, his songs were covered by everybody else,
Speaker 8: and so you know, then I you know, and then
Speaker 8: I said, oh, well, he's playing a telecaster, so maybe
Speaker 8: I should try to get a telecaster. So then I
Speaker 8: learned to play guitar, and that was like, I try
Speaker 8: to be like Albert King or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, So you initially wanted to start off as
Speaker 1: a blues musician.
Speaker 8: No, I just wanted to be a musician. And actually
Speaker 8: Albert King played the least notes, so it was easiest
Speaker 8: to do.
Speaker 1: So no high school band experience, so you know, I.
Speaker 8: Wasn't you know, as I said, I wasn't picked first
Speaker 8: for anything. I was picked last for most things, so
Speaker 8: you know, I wasn't getting it. I wasn't the most
Speaker 8: popular kid. So you know, if I could be, you know,
Speaker 8: a guitar player, maybe I could get laid someday, you know,
Speaker 8: there was that possibility.
Speaker 1: So by the time you're playing guitar, like, are we
Speaker 1: talking about the seventies period or the.
Speaker 8: No still sick? Oh well early maybe sixty to sixty
Speaker 8: nine and seventy. Yeah, Okay, this is the advent of
Speaker 8: FM radio and you know, psychedelic rock and stuff.
Speaker 1: So once FM, what was that? Okay, so Zeppelin one
Speaker 1: the entire side. Okay, So I need someone who was
Speaker 1: there in real time to explain to me because I
Speaker 1: always wanted to know. You know, a lot of people
Speaker 1: when they explained to me the power of AM radio
Speaker 1: listen to music, when their transition radios and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: how magical it was, Like was it really that foreign?
Speaker 1: Once FM high fidelity radio came into play, Like the
Speaker 1: clarity of it all, Like, was it a revelation to you?
Speaker 8: No, definitely not.
Speaker 1: I mean, yes, I hear some people actually prefer the
Speaker 1: lo fi AM radio station sound as opposed to which well, at.
Speaker 8: The beginning, you know, AM radios were small. You know,
Speaker 8: they're transistor radio, so you could almost put them in
Speaker 8: your pocket. So that was the first portable music AM
Speaker 8: radio and it was in the cars only AM. So
Speaker 8: when FM came. They it wasn't in cars yet, it
Speaker 8: wasn't in transistor radio. They didn't have AM FM transistor
Speaker 8: radios for the first few years. So you know, it's
Speaker 8: kind of probably like that HD channel now right. You know,
Speaker 8: they exist all over the world, but nobody listens because
Speaker 8: nobody even knows how to tune in, you know, so
Speaker 8: you know, you had to you had to make it easy,
Speaker 8: and it was hard. You know, you had to find
Speaker 8: the stations, and everyone listened to the same station. So
Speaker 8: w ABC was playing at one time Joni mitchell ty
Speaker 8: Yellow Ribbon around the old I mean, the most wackist
Speaker 8: mainstream kitty rock, and then they were playing Monosabongo Solamakosa
Speaker 8: at the same time and a country record like behind
Speaker 8: closed ABC. I think that Radio one in the UK
Speaker 8: is a little bit like that. They play like diverse music,
Speaker 8: you know, they would play like hip hop and rock
Speaker 8: and all kinds of music and still do. So people
Speaker 8: get exposed to more stuff, and as the band got
Speaker 8: split and stations started to specialize, people gravitated toward one
Speaker 8: kind of music as a way of sort of appreciating
Speaker 8: that music but also avoiding every other kind of music.
Speaker 1: So you're saying at Efen radio actually started the idea
Speaker 1: of genres or segregating music.
Speaker 8: Yeah, rock radio happened dead FM only, and you know,
Speaker 8: people who listened to that only got rock, so they
Speaker 8: didn't have to hear you know, Charlie rich anymore. So
Speaker 8: now no more country influence, now, no more black influence.
Speaker 8: Everything was that, you know, you know, Richie Havens was
Speaker 8: as black as it got, or the Chambers Brothers. You know,
Speaker 8: it was the only kind of things that would get
Speaker 8: played on those radio stations. So that began the segregation.
Speaker 8: And that's why at the you know, for years Rolling
Speaker 8: Stone magazine never had black people and never on the
Speaker 8: cover or even writing about them, except for maybe Slide
Speaker 8: because they played at Woodstock. Anyone, if you played on Woodstock,
Speaker 8: you were allowed in the club.
Speaker 1: You know, that was a wow. Okay, I never even
Speaker 1: thought about that. I thought, you know, because the idea
Speaker 1: of Eppen radio men playing like complete sides and playing
Speaker 1: the full version of a particular song and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing would have made it better.
Speaker 8: But you know, well it did. I mean there were
Speaker 8: great things about it, and the quality was better and
Speaker 8: people talk to you more in a different way. They
Speaker 8: weren't shouting at you as much. It was a more
Speaker 8: laid back kind of a thing, you know. And then
Speaker 8: I got when I went to college, I got involved
Speaker 8: in college radio immediately and became the music director of
Speaker 8: the college radio station Where'd you go Colby and Maine.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what was your vision for your college radio years?
Speaker 8: Like? So, you know, I did a So initially I
Speaker 8: start started doing my own radio station, and I did
Speaker 8: a du op show, you know, cruising Tom's College of
Speaker 8: Musical Knowledge every Sunday night. And then I started doing
Speaker 8: a party show, you know, by seventy four and seventy five,
Speaker 8: and I play Party Records, which was you know, mostly
Speaker 8: R and B and funky records. I may have been
Speaker 8: the first person in America to play Lady Marmalade.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, okay, So because DJ culture really wasn't a
Speaker 1: thing in seventy three seventy.
Speaker 8: Four, it was just beginning.
Speaker 1: How do you Okay, So take me to what your
Speaker 1: rider is. In seventy three, DJing for a college like
Speaker 1: are the idea of big speakers?
Speaker 8: I mean, yeah, I mean you do this is radio DJ,
Speaker 8: not live DJ. Oh Okay, live DJing didn't exist yet.
Speaker 8: Like that, except maybe in cool Hair. It was happening,
Speaker 8: you know, on Sedgwick, but there wasn't many other places.
Speaker 8: It was just starting there really at that point in time.
Speaker 1: And so all just bands were still playing the music
Speaker 1: of a day.
Speaker 8: And yeah, and I was in a fraternity house and
Speaker 8: I used to book the bands that would come in,
Speaker 8: and they were blues bands mostly that's what I could get,
Speaker 8: or disco bands. So in seventy five, disco started to
Speaker 8: take off. And then Saturday Night Fever came out, So
Speaker 8: disco started, and then Saturday Night Fever came out. So
Speaker 8: I was doing my a disco radio show. And then
Speaker 8: a club opened, A disco opened in Waterville, Maine, and
Speaker 8: I started djaing there with a mixture I built myself
Speaker 8: from radio shack parts. Didn't have queueing, but just like
Speaker 8: two giant knobs, and I had like two record players.
Speaker 8: They weren't really turntables, you know, like you know whatever.
Speaker 1: I listening to the record before with headphones.
Speaker 8: Well, I knew the record and I knew what it was.
Speaker 8: But the first DJ, arguably the first American DJ in disco,
Speaker 8: was David Mancuso, who just passed last year. At the
Speaker 8: loft and he started playing in seventy two, and he
Speaker 8: played every record to the end, and then he started
Speaker 8: playing in another record, you know, And when disco started
Speaker 8: around the world, that's the way happened. The idea of
Speaker 8: mixing came much later. There weren't really mixers that had
Speaker 8: queuing until probably seventy four.
Speaker 10: Is that when you started the disco news while you
Speaker 10: were in college?
Speaker 8: Okay, so that started. We'll get there anyway. Yeah, so
Speaker 8: I'm playing black music for a totally white college.
Speaker 1: You know, there was one What were they accepting of it?
Speaker 8: There was like eleven black people in the school and
Speaker 8: there are only two black families or four black families
Speaker 8: in the whole state of Maine, and maybe two record
Speaker 8: stores in the whole state of Maine.
Speaker 1: Was what was the outreach? Was it just the college or.
Speaker 8: Like it reached. We had a ten watch signal, which
Speaker 8: is what most colleges had, but we were on the
Speaker 8: top of a hill, so we reached like forty miles.
Speaker 8: It was pretty amaze, and there wasn't a lot of
Speaker 8: other radio stations interfering up there. So we used to
Speaker 8: get We used to do crazy stuff and get away
Speaker 8: with crazy stuff on the radio station. It was pretty radical,
Speaker 8: but you know, playing black music was pretty radical, and
Speaker 8: people would always call up and request me to play
Speaker 8: Derek and the Domino's Leila, and I tell no. In fact,
Speaker 8: I was the music director. I took the record out
Speaker 8: of the stacks and no one could play because you know,
Speaker 8: the idea here is we're supposed to introduce new music,
Speaker 8: and you know, both led Zeppelin and you know and
Speaker 8: Derek and the Dominoes, those were the most played records
Speaker 8: and it was so every show would play them every time,
Speaker 8: so it was like top forty radio, and that wasn't
Speaker 8: the concept. So I pulled them out of the stacks
Speaker 8: so nobody could play.
Speaker 1: Did you feel like it was arm rustling. I mean
Speaker 1: I usually when I hear stories of taste makers, and
Speaker 1: especially like with Tastemaker DJs, it's always a moment where
Speaker 1: it's like I'm the almighty, all knowing expert of music
Speaker 1: and you're going to love anything I play and there's
Speaker 1: no resistance. But you know, today if I go to
Speaker 1: a club and play like an unknown demo or something
Speaker 1: that I think is like really incredible piece of music,
Speaker 1: it's it's a struggle, like, you know, half a dance
Speaker 1: floor might clear. I know we live in a different
Speaker 1: time now, but I mean, but to really get people
Speaker 1: to get into something and yeah that only you're into.
Speaker 8: I have this discussion, by the way, with the founder
Speaker 8: of Pandora on a regular basis, who's a friend of mine.
Speaker 8: And mainly because you need to be able to play
Speaker 8: an unfamiliar record enough times to make it familiar. And
Speaker 8: the greatest records of all time have to clear the
Speaker 8: dance floor. The records that change the world, nobody will
Speaker 8: understand the first time they hear them. It's impossible because
Speaker 8: if it sounds like everything else, it's not moving anything forward.
Speaker 8: So something that's different, no one's going to like, right,
Speaker 8: you know. So you know, it was that way in
Speaker 8: the early days of hip hop. You know, Black radio
Speaker 8: didn't want to play hip hop records, but when they
Speaker 8: did play it, the phones would light up. And then
Speaker 8: they stopped using the phones as a way of identifying stuff,
Speaker 8: and they did call out research to you know, middle
Speaker 8: aged women, housewives at home who hated hip hop. And
Speaker 8: so there was always this negativity about hip hop at
Speaker 8: black radio.
Speaker 7: What about those eleven students that were at school with you,
Speaker 7: like those eleven black students. Did they ever communicate with
Speaker 7: you to or did they add to it? Like, did
Speaker 7: you hear his record?
Speaker 8: There was one guy who was a good friend of
Speaker 8: mine who came from the Bronx who actually turned me
Speaker 8: onto a lot of stuff. He was actually a DJ
Speaker 8: in seventy five in the Bronx and he was a
Speaker 8: year older, I think, and he ran track with me.
Speaker 8: So I was I ran track and so that in
Speaker 8: high school, you know, being on the track team was
Speaker 8: sixty percent black. In White Plains High school. You know,
Speaker 8: we had a silver medalist at the Mexican fist Olympics,
Speaker 8: you know from you know, from our school, and he
Speaker 8: was the slowest guy on the on the relay, the
Speaker 8: quarter mile relay. He was the slowest guy. But he's
Speaker 8: the only one who went to college. The other guys,
Speaker 8: you know, got drunk or did whatever they did. But
Speaker 8: you know, I remember joining the track team in ninth grade,
Speaker 8: you know, and going to indoor tract the first time
Speaker 8: and being like one of you know whatever twenty white
Speaker 8: guys on a team of one hundred people and getting
Speaker 8: to hear the music and getting to know what they
Speaker 8: were into.
Speaker 1: And by the way, this was Black Power time.
Speaker 8: You know, this is when you know, you know, the
Speaker 8: fifth pick was in everybody, at the back of everybody's head,
Speaker 8: just the beginning of that era. And we had race
Speaker 8: riots at White Plains High School and they took the
Speaker 8: word planes off, so it's at White High School. And
Speaker 8: the Italians would come to school with baseball bats, and
Speaker 8: you know, the Blacks picketed, and you know, and I
Speaker 8: was part of the resolution committee trying to you know,
Speaker 8: get people talking to each other. And it was just
Speaker 8: an amazing time to be alive, really because everything was changing,
Speaker 8: and you know, it was the beginning of that revolution
Speaker 8: that made today possible.
Speaker 1: When did you graduate college.
Speaker 8: I graduated high school in seventy two, college seventy six,
Speaker 8: and then I went to graduate school thinking that there
Speaker 8: was no way I could get into the music business.
Speaker 8: So I you know, continued my path, which was environmental science,
Speaker 8: and went to graduate school in environmental geology in Michigan
Speaker 8: and Kalamazoo.
Speaker 1: Was there any music as you do? That was out
Speaker 1: of nowhere? Yeah?
Speaker 8: Right? And then after two years there, just before I
Speaker 8: finished my masters, my old roommate from college called me
Speaker 8: who was working for cash Box, which was the competitor
Speaker 8: or Billboard at the time, he was doing the R
Speaker 8: and B charts, and he said, hey, you're you know,
Speaker 8: you were way ahead of it. You were into disco
Speaker 8: back in seventy five. It's blowing up. It's a giant thing.
Speaker 8: This is after Saturday night fever. Let's start a tip sheet.
Speaker 8: Let's move to New York. And I had sent out
Speaker 8: two hundred resumes to try to get a job in
Speaker 8: water pollution and water quality and got two interviews and
Speaker 8: no job offers. That I was super depressed about it
Speaker 8: in the letters at that time, and I said I'm out,
Speaker 8: and I said, I left school and I went to
Speaker 8: New York. I set up this newsletter for DJs in
Speaker 8: nineteen seventy eight in New York City. And then the
Speaker 8: guy came moved quit cash Box and came and started
Speaker 8: it with me, and we started and we ran it
Speaker 8: out of our apartment, and then we got to know
Speaker 8: all of the DJs who were doing everything. So that
Speaker 8: sort of opened the door forward.
Speaker 10: Case it explain to me exactly you say it was
Speaker 10: a tipsy, exactly what does that mean.
Speaker 8: So it means that we talked. We talked to record
Speaker 8: pools who gave the records to the DJs and found
Speaker 8: out what was happening from them. We talked to record stores,
Speaker 8: we talked to radio stations when radio stations went disco.
Speaker 8: We talked to everybody, and we had like regional representatives
Speaker 8: from around the country in Canada that would tell us
Speaker 8: what was breaking, and we would talk to people about
Speaker 8: imports that were hot that were coming in. We did
Speaker 8: a top eighty chart that we compiled when we took
Speaker 8: everybody's information every week, and it was a checklist and
Speaker 8: it had the beats permitted of every record. And in
Speaker 8: those days beats it was really big because everything was
Speaker 8: records and nobody knew what beats per minute were of
Speaker 8: what was so they needed a mixing tool. So, because
Speaker 8: at this point, you know, mixing was starting to become
Speaker 8: really big, and in order to be great at mixing
Speaker 8: you had to know what the bpms were. There was
Speaker 8: a guy in Albany who had this disco Bible and
Speaker 8: he'd run these computer reports and send them out every
Speaker 8: once a month with all of the records bpms on them,
Speaker 8: and people would pay this guy like one hundred dollars
Speaker 8: a month for a subscription just to know what bus.
Speaker 10: He's still available, So y'all were kind of like a filter,
Speaker 10: I guess, like y'all told people what was that We.
Speaker 8: Did the research because in that point there was no Internet.
Speaker 8: There's no way else to find any information out and
Speaker 8: DJs needed to know what they didn't have, that they
Speaker 8: needed to get, what was coming up, what they needed
Speaker 8: to play, and what was really big beats, per minut
Speaker 8: it and things like that, and you know, records companies
Speaker 8: would advertise and record stores would advertise, and we used
Speaker 8: to sell it in record stores around New York like
Speaker 8: Rock and Soul down the Street here and a few
Speaker 8: of the other record stores here, and we were you know,
Speaker 8: we got to like subscriptions and sales of over three
Speaker 8: thousand or four thousand copies. We were reaching about five
Speaker 8: thousand DJs by you know about you know, nineteen eighty
Speaker 8: or eighty one.
Speaker 7: How much for each addition to a buck.
Speaker 8: Or something like that, it was maybe a dollar fifty
Speaker 8: or something like that.
Speaker 10: They were the original too Dope boys, right, y'all were
Speaker 10: the first blog, right exactly it was.
Speaker 8: And it was like a newsletter. We had to print
Speaker 8: it and you know, and we type set it on
Speaker 8: a typewriter at first, and then we bought a type
Speaker 8: setting machine. We had all this stuff in the apartment
Speaker 8: and we were running it that way.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, so much work was it? Was it completely
Speaker 1: national or just like was international? Oh so you even
Speaker 1: took we took information from you two cample, two people.
Speaker 8: You're calling all these details, three of us and yeah,
Speaker 8: and we were all there were three of us that
Speaker 8: all went to school at Kolbe and we were calling.
Speaker 8: We were selling the ads, we were doing the editorial,
Speaker 8: we were setting the type, we were doing you know,
Speaker 8: we're having it printed and bringing it to the record
Speaker 8: stores and putting the stickers on and you know, the
Speaker 8: name stickers for each one, and you know, and keeping
Speaker 8: the subscription list and all of that we were doing.
Speaker 8: It was unbelievable.
Speaker 1: So at no time did a bigger shark like Billboard,
Speaker 1: you know, any any of these other music industry people
Speaker 1: think like to lease you guys, or to purchase the
Speaker 1: business to work for them wasndented other people.
Speaker 8: Billboard had a disco section that was very significant, and
Speaker 8: they already ran a disco conference called the Billboard Disco Form,
Speaker 8: which all the DJs would come to. And when I
Speaker 8: first moved to New York. I remember August of seventy
Speaker 8: eight going to the Billboard Disco Form, and disco was
Speaker 8: very gay at that point. I mean it was you know,
Speaker 8: the people who controlled disco music and the leaders in it.
Speaker 8: It was a very gay thing. And you know, I
Speaker 8: was one of the few people in the business that
Speaker 8: wasn't so you know, when I would go to the
Speaker 8: disco form, it was hard for me to get into
Speaker 8: the label suites like the Kaza Blanc or the TK
Speaker 8: suites because I wasn't gay. You know, I haven't launched
Speaker 8: a publication yet, but anyway, you know, the publication, you know,
Speaker 8: built up and built up. By nineteen eighty we started
Speaker 8: the New Music Seminar with another publication to compete with
Speaker 8: the Billboard Disco for him.
Speaker 1: Okay, most people and our listeners know about Studio fifty
Speaker 1: four and that, but I know there had to have
Speaker 1: been for every Jordan. There's like twelve guys on the
Speaker 1: playground that are justice talented and ready to whoop possess. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, what were the other clubs in New York
Speaker 1: City besides the Folkal or Studio fifty four or.
Speaker 8: So, there were probably four accesses in dance music during
Speaker 8: the period of time there was that sort of studio.
Speaker 8: Fifty four was the Si Shi Club set the international
Speaker 8: people and you know, the stars, but it wasn't known
Speaker 8: for music. Richie Ksor was the DJ. Didn't really play,
Speaker 8: you know, played good music, but you know, nobody considered
Speaker 8: him the best. Of course, Paradise Garage at the same
Speaker 8: time was Larry Levan and he was playing the most
Speaker 8: amazing music. And the sound system was a Howard Long,
Speaker 8: sick crazy sound system in the place. You know, even to.
Speaker 1: This day year it was Paradise, it was like.
Speaker 8: Seventy eight to eighty one.
Speaker 1: And all the folklore of those speakers and the lights
Speaker 1: and all that stuff.
Speaker 8: I used to do interviews and go to the house
Speaker 8: of the guy who built the sound system, who built it,
Speaker 8: Howard Long, Richard Long, Richard Richard Lungs Sociates RLA. It
Speaker 8: was amazing and you know, the subworfs would you'd walk
Speaker 8: by them, you know, your pants would flap from the
Speaker 8: wind book and they moved so much air. And then
Speaker 8: they had tweeters, those piez of tweeters hanging from the ceiling,
Speaker 8: you know, and he had you know, in the booth.
Speaker 8: He used to play on thor AND's belt drive turntables,
Speaker 8: which is crazy because most DJs only play on direct drive.
Speaker 8: And they had built some kind of a rubber band
Speaker 8: or uh spring suspension for the so that they wouldn't
Speaker 8: keep it from and usually and also from skipping, you know,
Speaker 8: and even though they still would skip sometimes. And he
Speaker 8: was the first guy who had like three turntables. And
Speaker 8: I used to hang out in the booth all the
Speaker 8: time and listen to the stuff he would play, which was,
Speaker 8: you know, more amazing. And then there was another part
Speaker 8: of the business that was Latin. There was clubs that
Speaker 8: were more Latin oriented and they played more salsa oriented
Speaker 8: dance music, which there was a lot of that too.
Speaker 8: People don't know about it because if they were one
Speaker 8: then you know, then there were the gay clubs, which
Speaker 8: was you know, twelve West and you know Roy Thoade
Speaker 8: and DJs like that, and they played much higher beat beat,
Speaker 8: permantent euro disco. They were running, they were tweaking, so
Speaker 8: they were running one hundred and thirty beats per minute,
Speaker 8: you know. The black and then there was the and
Speaker 8: there was and then there was so Pardise Garage was
Speaker 8: black gay so they were playing a little bit more
Speaker 8: down temple. Then there was straight black clubs, you know,
Speaker 8: and they were playing even more down temple. But you know,
Speaker 8: it depends, and then I would go up to nineteen eighty.
Speaker 8: I discovered the Tea Connection in Africa, Benbada, and I
Speaker 8: went up to hear him spin and he was doing
Speaker 8: a whole nother thing that was a mine trip that
Speaker 8: was made everything else that I had ever seen obsolete.
Speaker 1: So the Tea Connection, first of all, always wanted to do,
Speaker 1: is there any connection to the band? Tea Connection?
Speaker 8: And t was the guy's name, I guess that owned
Speaker 8: the space, and it was one floor walk up, just
Speaker 8: a big space with like another like a balcony, and
Speaker 8: then there was located. It was located on White Plains Road,
Speaker 8: right near the l the elevated trains there. You can
Speaker 8: Google it and find it on Google Maps, which I've
Speaker 8: done recently.
Speaker 1: Because I'm not in New York. White Plains is.
Speaker 8: White Plains Road the Bronx. It's it's kind of in
Speaker 8: the Central Bronx. It's definitely not in the South Bronx.
Speaker 8: Everyone talked about the South Bronx and maybe Cedric could
Speaker 8: be considered the South Bronx, but this was you know, Africa.
Speaker 8: Benbada was from Bronx River Center, which was more central
Speaker 8: Bronx off off of the Cross Bronx Expressway. You can
Speaker 8: kind of see it from It's just north of the
Speaker 8: Cross Bronx Expressway and Knightsbridge is just south of it,
Speaker 8: so you know, you could see. And I've learned more
Speaker 8: about this only as I've sort of studied the evolution
Speaker 8: of hip hop over the last five years and how
Speaker 8: you know, the different parts, you know, the different crews
Speaker 8: that came up, came up around them where the projects were.
Speaker 8: So the projects concentrated people and then they made it
Speaker 8: possible actually for gang the gangs to start, and then
Speaker 8: the gangs turned into DJ Cruise also and they all
Speaker 8: came out of That's why the early rap they always
Speaker 8: talk about their their project.
Speaker 1: The one common thread that a lot of the guests
Speaker 1: that are on the show that have experiences with early
Speaker 1: hip hop, I think that the most common theme is
Speaker 1: that no amount of fear will ever surpass their need
Speaker 1: to you hear quality music or quality DJs. So i'man
Speaker 1: in seventy nine eighty, when you're traveling to the Bronx
Speaker 1: White guy traveling to the Bronx, Like to you, there
Speaker 1: was no were you alone? Like was alone any and
Speaker 1: for you the music was too exciting and the scene
Speaker 1: was too exciting for you to even consider like maybe
Speaker 1: I don't belong here.
Speaker 8: So I just never thought about it, you know, it
Speaker 8: never It was a weird thing for me because I
Speaker 8: just because I was rejected always myself. I never really
Speaker 8: thought about us and them and I. You know, when
Speaker 8: I went into these places, the thing I noticed is
Speaker 8: I might have been like twenty twenty five or twenty
Speaker 8: six at the time, and going up the steps to
Speaker 8: the T connection because Ben Boda had put me on
Speaker 8: the list, I was for sure the first white person
Speaker 8: that had ever been there. And you know, so no
Speaker 8: one looked at you where like everybody was You're lost.
Speaker 1: No, everybody was super cool.
Speaker 8: They must have figured that I was from downtown and
Speaker 8: maybe I was a record or something like that. So
Speaker 8: there's there was decent respect. But you know, I wasn't
Speaker 8: thinking about it. I was just going up there. I
Speaker 8: just didn't know where to go. I hadn't been there before.
Speaker 8: I was much more concerned about getting lost and finding
Speaker 8: the place than it was about that, and you know,
Speaker 8: it's never been an issue for me. I never really
Speaker 8: thought about it, you know, even when I'm in you know,
Speaker 8: Harlem World and I hear shots go off, I really
Speaker 8: never really was never thought that I could get hurt
Speaker 8: or something like that. I mean, other people are think
Speaker 8: about that shit a lot. I just don't think about it,
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 1: Now, I have a lot of those tapes from the
Speaker 1: Tea Connection of you know, like Coal Crust Brothers and
Speaker 1: flashing them performing there. How big is the Tea Connection.
Speaker 8: Like the size of it a little bigger than the
Speaker 8: size of the sleep with a balcony up on top
Speaker 8: where when I first walked in, I saw Bembodis in
Speaker 8: front of the turntables and on one side Jazzy Jay
Speaker 8: and the other side read Alert.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 8: When I went up and Avengers and that was the
Speaker 8: day I met them all cast.
Speaker 1: Leave the Avengers over there. So I'm saying the average
Speaker 1: club size is like one hundred and fifty maybe two
Speaker 1: hundred people get get in. Yeah. See, when I'm listening
Speaker 1: to it sounds yeah like And then it's just hitting
Speaker 1: me that a lot of the game changing aspects of
Speaker 1: the culture were slightly under three hundred.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the Grills was small, but the Bronx River Center
Speaker 8: was a lot bigger, you know. And the other thing
Speaker 8: you had to consider is that this is all ages.
Speaker 8: You know. The kids in there were average age, probably
Speaker 8: sixteen or seventeen, so they were making their dollar at
Speaker 8: the door, three dollars or whatever it costs, you know.
Speaker 8: And you know then I met ben Bada that day
Speaker 8: and he gave me his business card that said Africa Bambada,
Speaker 8: Master of Records.
Speaker 1: Where did you first meet him? Was he?
Speaker 8: I was there? You're right there that day. That was
Speaker 8: the day I had found out about him by going
Speaker 8: to Downstairs Records to do an interview about this new
Speaker 8: room that they'd open because they were one of the
Speaker 8: reporters to Dance Music Report, uh, and they were talking
Speaker 8: about they just opened a new room that was like
Speaker 8: the size of a walk in closet that was called
Speaker 8: the break breaks Room or the Breakbeat Room.
Speaker 1: Is this the subway version of Downstairs or the boy.
Speaker 8: Right here on forty third and sixth Avenue down on
Speaker 8: the mezzanine before you go into the subway.
Speaker 1: So am I too assume that I'm not too I'm
Speaker 1: not too knowledgeable in the history of the owners of
Speaker 1: Downstairs Records. But am I believe that they're the ones
Speaker 1: that first started the idea of comping breaks and put
Speaker 1: them on one record like the No, they're not the guys,
Speaker 1: they're not. This was when they first sold it though right.
Speaker 8: They might have sold records, they weren't the ones who
Speaker 8: made it. That was like record Lenny and Paul Winley,
Speaker 8: those were the guys who did that.
Speaker 1: We had something to do with with the guys at
Speaker 1: Downstairs Records.
Speaker 8: Like, no that that store had been there for years.
Speaker 8: It wasn't it. It wasn't a black record store, but
Speaker 8: it was in the subway, so you know, everyone went
Speaker 8: by it anyway. That's where I bought my disco records.
Speaker 8: That's also where I bought my duop records. They had
Speaker 8: a huge do hop collection. They had, you know, all
Speaker 8: of like the indie kinds of things. There was a
Speaker 8: couple of record stores that were in the subways. There
Speaker 8: used to be one that was around the Times Square
Speaker 8: shuttle that was a Latin record store that used to
Speaker 8: walk by all the time because there's a huge amount
Speaker 8: of traffic that goes by, and that was in that
Speaker 8: was in the subway. This one was before you went in.
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna bring that back. It's it's still there.
Speaker 8: That record? Is that one there?
Speaker 11: The one by the the one Latin Times Square?
Speaker 8: I don't know what it's called a Latin name, right,
Speaker 8: I think so.
Speaker 11: I think that's where you get have your jest stuff.
Speaker 11: Now right now, I mean I went in there a
Speaker 11: couple of times. It's weird.
Speaker 1: What's what do they sell in there? Now? They do
Speaker 1: they sell wax? Do they sell a little old stuff?
Speaker 8: But yeah, yeah, they're still sell vinyl? Yeah, other stuff too.
Speaker 11: Where's this It's like in the time, it's right by
Speaker 11: where you're saying, by the by the shuttle, yeah, by
Speaker 11: the at the path shut up the s train in
Speaker 11: Times Square.
Speaker 1: I forget what it's called. Make a pilgrimage there, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I think I'm embarking that. Like I have a
Speaker 1: dream of opening a spot that sells forty fives in
Speaker 1: the subway, like a small boutique, kind of like Jero
Speaker 1: does in Japan. Like oh yeah, right, I mean he
Speaker 1: charges fifteen milso forty five for five.
Speaker 7: Security New York.
Speaker 1: I'll make seers in the village somewhere so exactly.
Speaker 8: So, uh.
Speaker 1: Are you routinely coming to the tea connection.
Speaker 8: I mean I went two or three times to the
Speaker 8: tea connection, but that very night at the tea connection,
Speaker 8: when I watch what he's doing. I watched how he
Speaker 8: played the records. I saw the marks on the records.
Speaker 8: I sort of label steamed off the records. I saw
Speaker 8: the tape on the records. You know, all of the
Speaker 8: things he did. You know, at that point I got
Speaker 8: to know benbody. I asked him, I said, do you
Speaker 8: want do you want to make a record that sounds
Speaker 8: like this? Because he was playing you know, Billy Squire,
Speaker 8: sly Stone, the Monkeys, you know, craft Work, all of
Speaker 8: this stuff together and all of these kids were dancing
Speaker 8: and it was just to me it was a revelation.
Speaker 8: I'd never seen anything like it. I said, this is
Speaker 8: what heaven is supposed to be. You know, everybody, everything together,
Speaker 8: it's all okay. If you could dance to it, come on,
Speaker 8: and you know that inclusiveness has been was Ben Boda's
Speaker 8: theme with the Zulu nation throughout. You know, everybody was
Speaker 8: always welcome to the party. He invited anybody who wanted
Speaker 8: to come, and that would happen at the Bronx River
Speaker 8: Center for all of the Zulu Nation anniversary parties every year,
Speaker 8: people would come from every country the world. And that's
Speaker 8: where all of the film crews came from Japan and
Speaker 8: from France and from Belgium or Holland and brought and
Speaker 8: brought video back and exposed the whole thing that was
Speaker 8: happening with hip hop and the pillage of hip hop,
Speaker 8: and you know, planted the seeds. So you know, if
Speaker 8: anybody is the Johnny apple Seed of hip hop, it's
Speaker 8: Africa Bambada. And I helped.
Speaker 1: So to start a label in in the early eighties.
Speaker 1: What does it take? I mean, now, when people want
Speaker 1: to do stuff, you just put it SoundCloud there it is.
Speaker 1: But if you're seriously now that you you've studied distribution
Speaker 1: and DJs and you have connections, how much does if
Speaker 1: you're you know, starting a label, how much does it
Speaker 1: cost to start a label today? In nineteen No, in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty.
Speaker 8: Well, so I borrowed five thousand dollars from my parents,
Speaker 8: and because I already had my rent covered, you know,
Speaker 8: I was doing the publication. I already had a medium
Speaker 8: I could advertise in for free because I already had
Speaker 8: the publication. So I had a connection to DJs, and
Speaker 8: I could using DJs. I could break the music through
Speaker 8: the DJs too, So I was dependent on that.
Speaker 10: But so by this time it's dance did discos not
Speaker 10: Disco News?
Speaker 1: Is Dance Music Report officially?
Speaker 8: Yeah? I think so, yes. By seventy nine it became
Speaker 8: dance When disco died in seventy nine, we changed the
Speaker 8: name to Dance Music Report. Yeah, yes, definitely. And then
Speaker 8: so yeah, you know this was by this is nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty one. You know, I'm saying, like, let's start. So
Speaker 8: I work with Ben Boda. I cut a demo for
Speaker 8: what would become Planet Rock and eight track demo and uh,
Speaker 8: and I was starting the label up and deciding what
Speaker 8: to do.
Speaker 1: Quick question. The effects of the disco sucks uh period?
Speaker 1: The regulation Yeah, racism m no, but the after effects
Speaker 1: of it, it was actually more homophobic than it was.
Speaker 1: But did it did that effect or deter anyone from starting? Uh?
Speaker 1: Independent labels? Because I assume that the independent labels of
Speaker 1: the seventies were primarily to make disco records them.
Speaker 8: And sees, yeah, Prelude, TK, you know west End that
Speaker 8: you know, Yeah, they were serving that community, the DJ
Speaker 8: community because it was so hard to get records played
Speaker 8: on radio, just as it is today. In fact, it's
Speaker 8: worse today. But as you know, there were less radio
Speaker 8: stations then and it was hard, but there were no chains,
Speaker 8: so each radio station made their own decisions. So you
Speaker 8: can go to one radio station and convince that programmer
Speaker 8: that it would be a good idea for them to
Speaker 8: play that record, if you know what I mean. Wink wink,
Speaker 8: and yeah.
Speaker 1: Hit man. What's his name of Frederick Gan Records Stories.
Speaker 8: Yeah, he was one of my mentors. You know, I
Speaker 8: have plenty of more the shows to share worse right now.
Speaker 8: But so was dominated again and you know Chris Blackwell
Speaker 8: and mal Austin.
Speaker 1: So you've worked with Mars Levy.
Speaker 8: I didn't work with him, but you know I spent
Speaker 8: some time in his office, you know, having meetings.
Speaker 1: Can you can you give us some Marris Levy wisdom
Speaker 1: that you're allowed I saw while I was So does
Speaker 1: everybody know the.
Speaker 8: You know, what's the what's the famous movie where where
Speaker 8: the guy owes him five bucks and he wants to
Speaker 8: chase him across the Bronx tails, you know, in that
Speaker 8: Bronx tail and he is I want to get my
Speaker 8: money back, and he says, forget it for five dollars.
Speaker 8: It's the cheapest way to ever get rid of somebody
Speaker 8: you don't want in your life. So I'm sitting in
Speaker 8: follow that rule. So so I'm sitting in in Morris
Speaker 8: Levy's office and a guy calls and asks him to
Speaker 8: borrow ten thousand dollars or something like that, or five
Speaker 8: thousand dollars. And he says, okay, I want it back
Speaker 8: in a week. If I don't get it back in
Speaker 8: a week, don't ever call me again. I don't know you.
Speaker 8: And he hangs up the phone. He gets he calls
Speaker 8: his assistant or somebody said, have have somebody write up
Speaker 8: a check for five thousand dollars for this guy. He's
Speaker 8: coming to pick it up this afternoon, just like that,
Speaker 8: not a question. And so that was that rule. But
Speaker 8: he tells the guy in advance, which was the honorable
Speaker 8: thing to do. And then he pays the guy, gives
Speaker 8: the guy money that it's not money he owed him,
Speaker 8: it's money the guy needed. And Morris Leeve he's always
Speaker 8: helped people who had gambling debts or other things not
Speaker 8: get killed by paying the debts off, but taking you know,
Speaker 8: George Goldner's catalog and why the Fool's fall in love?
Speaker 8: And that's why it says Lymon Levy, but it used
Speaker 8: to say Limon Goldener, by the way, so he just
Speaker 8: took George Goldner's share of the label. It's why the
Speaker 8: Beatles that were originally signed to their first record came
Speaker 8: each of the black owned label out of Chicago. But
Speaker 8: because they didn't have their business straight, they lost the
Speaker 8: record to Swan and then Capitol picked it up after that.
Speaker 8: You know, history could be different if the Beatles had
Speaker 8: been signed for their entire career to a black.
Speaker 1: Old Left Chair Records, right.
Speaker 8: Or a VJ would have been could you imagine?
Speaker 1: So were you at all worried about what the climate
Speaker 1: was going to bring in the eighties by starting your
Speaker 1: own label, especially with the idea of killing off disco
Speaker 1: culture or the backlash that it was facing, like for
Speaker 1: the independent label.
Speaker 8: At least, What do you mean no, Because I think
Speaker 8: disco never really died. That was a press thing because
Speaker 8: in nineteen seventy nine the music business had a recession.
Speaker 8: It was the first recession the business had been growing,
Speaker 8: I guess off the back of cassettes and then all
Speaker 8: of a sudden, maybe it was I forget what it was,
Speaker 8: but for some reason, catalog peaked and the record sales
Speaker 8: dropped and they needed a escapegoat and they used disco
Speaker 8: as the scapegoat. Ironically, the same year, disco died out
Speaker 8: of the top ten records of that year in nineteen
Speaker 8: seventy nine, like seven of them were club hits, club
Speaker 8: dance records, including Michael Jackson Jackson's and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So I'm always hearing about like this is the worst
Speaker 1: time for music, Like even when Quincy Jones and Michael
Speaker 1: and Bruce Udina starting a thriller, their first mantras We're
Speaker 1: here to save the music industry. So I'm always hearing
Speaker 1: of this time where like sales are down or we
Speaker 1: need to save the industry. I mean, in your mind,
Speaker 1: when was the quote the glory years of the industry.
Speaker 8: Well, there's two ways to answer that question. There's the
Speaker 8: aesthetic way in the financial way. The financial way is
Speaker 8: easy because twenty or nineteen ninety nine two thousand was
Speaker 8: the peak revenue. By twenty ten, the combined revenues of
Speaker 8: the US record business were about the exact same after
Speaker 8: inflation as they were in nineteen sixty six, so we
Speaker 8: lost about sixty percent of all of the employees in
Speaker 8: the music business and all of the value of the
Speaker 8: music business during that period of time. So but now
Speaker 8: this year the business is up between eight nine percent
Speaker 8: for the first time since nineteen ninety seven, and last
Speaker 8: year it was up two percent. So we have two
Speaker 8: years of growth, the first two years of growth since
Speaker 8: two thousand and one. Two thousand, really two thousand, actually yeah,
Speaker 8: two thousand was the last year of growth, any growth
Speaker 8: at all. Okay, So yeah, and then aesthetically, I can't
Speaker 8: really say because you could say nineteen fifty four when
Speaker 8: rock and roll started, you know, you could say nineteen
Speaker 8: forty nine when bebop started, or you know, a certain
Speaker 8: kind of jazz started, you could say, but in your
Speaker 8: heart of hearts, nineteen seventy five when disco started. You
Speaker 8: could say nineteen eighty one or eighty when hip hop started.
Speaker 1: But in your heart of hearts, what's your My passion
Speaker 1: lies with this year, like what's your.
Speaker 8: Well because I'm in the duops that era and I
Speaker 8: was born in fifty four, so that was my ear
Speaker 8: like of shit, you know, that really touched me and
Speaker 8: made me cry. And made me feel like love you know,
Speaker 8: through music and connected to me. But the same thing
Speaker 8: happened to me when that day at tea Connection, when
Speaker 8: I saw what Bam Boda was doing in the Connection,
Speaker 8: I said, this is going to change the whole game,
Speaker 8: you know. And people talk about the four pillars of
Speaker 8: hip hop, you know, because it wasn't it wasn't just music.
Speaker 8: It was obviously it was this introduction of rapping on
Speaker 8: sort of a formalized way, and you know, turntable to them,
Speaker 8: you know. And then clearly, you know, there was a
Speaker 8: dance element and there was an art element to it.
Speaker 8: But there's a fifth element that nobody talks about, and
Speaker 8: Bamboda always talks about knowledge is the fifth pillar. But
Speaker 8: the fifth pillar also is sampling, the idea of taking
Speaker 8: something old and recontextualizing it and making it something new.
Speaker 8: Bamboda did that live, Cool, Heirk did that live. You know,
Speaker 8: the early DJs, you know, Theodore and those guys took
Speaker 8: little bits of things and made them into elements that
Speaker 8: you know, became famous later. And so sampling is clearly
Speaker 8: the fifth I don't know if there could be hip
Speaker 8: hop without sampling. I think I can't even imagine the
Speaker 8: first ten years of hip hop if there wasn't sampling,
Speaker 8: you know, or you know, the sampling equivalency that happened.
Speaker 8: I don't even be derivative.
Speaker 1: I mean, but that's with music, I mean, because that's
Speaker 1: what everything really, that's what's Samplin and Lollen Stones was doing.
Speaker 8: And cover records are that, but you know even more
Speaker 8: interpolations which have happened before. So before I prepared for
Speaker 8: the show by going online because I know we were
Speaker 8: going to talk about sampling here. And I want to
Speaker 8: quote Isaac Newton from sixteen seventy five, Sir Isaac Newton
Speaker 8: who said, we stand on the shoulders of giants. I'm
Speaker 8: only here because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants,
Speaker 8: and every sample is a sample of a giant that
Speaker 8: came before. And even if you go to that song,
Speaker 8: there was an influence. They were on someone else's shoulders.
Speaker 8: So you got the ripples fifty people that go back
Speaker 8: till the first guy was hitting something with a stick,
Speaker 8: you know. So you know, it's a really it's a
Speaker 8: real big issue that we can't find the past and
Speaker 8: give today's creators access to the past to create new futures.
Speaker 8: That's what hip hop is about. And to me, that's
Speaker 8: the revolution of it. To add new context to old
Speaker 8: content is to reinvent the world. That's the ultimate recycling.
Speaker 8: That's you know, it's a divine science and art, and
Speaker 8: I think it needs to be liberated.
Speaker 1: So when was Tommy Boy born? And why did you
Speaker 1: name it.
Speaker 8: Eighty one Tommy Boy?
Speaker 1: Well, no, no, no, I mean what were the other options? Like,
Speaker 1: did you have any other options for label names?
Speaker 8: So I was studying a lot about this and and
Speaker 8: you know, the label that was existing since seven nine
Speaker 8: that was sort of inspirational for me was sugar Hill.
Speaker 8: And you know, in nineteen eighty when we started the
Speaker 8: New Music Seminar, we you know, at that point we
Speaker 8: were sort of looking at what was happening and what
Speaker 8: the changes were happening. And that's when I was, you know,
Speaker 8: sort of discovered Bambada and jumped into what hip hop
Speaker 8: culture was becoming. Because, by the way, in nineteen eighty
Speaker 8: it wasn't called hip hop yet. Nobody talked about hip
Speaker 8: hop till nineteen eighty two. You know, it was break
Speaker 8: music or breaks or bee boy music or something like that.
Speaker 8: Bambadas told me I wrote an article in Dance Music
Speaker 8: Report and interviewed Cool Hurricane in Africa Bambada, and it
Speaker 8: must have been writing in nineteen eighty. I have to
Speaker 8: find that article still when and he was. You know,
Speaker 8: they were telling me the story of the roots of
Speaker 8: this music and how this music evolved, because to me,
Speaker 8: I thought we covered every kind of dance music, and
Speaker 8: you know, we covered reggae, dance oriented rock, every kind
Speaker 8: of music, and you know, this was a new kind
Speaker 8: of dance music, at least to our readers, and you know,
Speaker 8: I wanted to cover the evolution of it. In nineteen
Speaker 8: seventy nine, when Rappers Delight came out, it changed the world.
Speaker 8: It's you know, it was a game changer everywhere. That
Speaker 8: was like lightning in a bottle. That record, you know,
Speaker 8: was a real wake up call. And that's sort of
Speaker 8: when I started building my business plan for Tommy Boy.
Speaker 8: You know, if they can do this, you know, then
Speaker 8: it's possible that others can. You know that I could
Speaker 8: possibly do it too. You know, I didn't think there
Speaker 8: was a special magic between Joe and Sylvia Robinson. You know,
Speaker 8: they might have had more pull with Frankie Crocker or
Speaker 8: something like that, but I didn't really think that, you know.
Speaker 8: I was also influenced by reading books about the drifters
Speaker 8: and how how labels didn't pay artists in the duop era,
Speaker 8: you know. And one of the reasons I wanted to
Speaker 8: start a label was I wanted to try to say
Speaker 8: is that could you start a label and do the
Speaker 8: right thing and pay people and do what you're supposed
Speaker 8: to do and be fair, you know, with artists, And
Speaker 8: so that was like a driving you know issue for me.
Speaker 8: But it was, you know, I knew I wanted to
Speaker 8: do something, but until I saw what Ben Boda was doing,
Speaker 8: I didn't see a path to do it. And then
Speaker 8: Ben Bod actually gave me the first record, you know,
Speaker 8: he was sort of the A and R guy, you know,
Speaker 8: he said, this is a great record. You should put
Speaker 8: this record out. And it was Cotton Candy, which was
Speaker 8: the first record I released that wasn't a hit.
Speaker 1: Who did Cotton Candy?
Speaker 8: Cotton Candy was the group. The name of the song
Speaker 8: was having Fun and it wasn't really a record. That
Speaker 8: was TB eight eleven catalog number, first Tommy Boy release.
Speaker 8: The second one was Jazzy Sensation, was was the first
Speaker 8: Bemboda record, so Bam Boda found like you know, three
Speaker 8: or four and then I'd go to the you know,
Speaker 8: to his things and I'd discover the four c mds
Speaker 8: at the Zulu Nation anniversary party that Bronx River Center
Speaker 8: or you know Cold Crush Brothers, which I didn't get tough.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, Scott, were you there for the Jazzy
Speaker 1: Sensation sessions? Who was that? Do you know the house was?
Speaker 8: I don't remember who the house bend was there was
Speaker 8: it was Pumpkin and All Stars, I don't think, so, okay,
Speaker 8: it was it was Arthur Baker that produced that. And
Speaker 8: after I had given Arthur already the demo that I
Speaker 8: had cut for what would become Planet Rock, which which
Speaker 8: had like replays of samples that were built into it
Speaker 8: more than the ones that were ended up being on
Speaker 8: Planet Rock, and I gave it to him and he, uh,
Speaker 8: he said, can I produce this? And I said, yeah,
Speaker 8: that'd be great. But it came up that we wanted
Speaker 8: to do sort of a take on Funky Sensation, So
Speaker 8: we did that one first.
Speaker 1: Because that's night and Day. If anything I can, like,
Speaker 1: I consider enjoying sugar Hill. It's like Okay, are they
Speaker 1: the first hip hop labels? Are they last?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 1: The last of the disco labels? And like I'd consider
Speaker 1: Tommy Boy really the first hip hop true like modernized
Speaker 1: between you and Profile, like the Real established a modern
Speaker 1: hip hop label, which.
Speaker 8: Is another story. Is I brought Corey Robbins to the
Speaker 8: Tea connection to see Benbo to spin he wasn't a
Speaker 8: hip hop label before he was. He ran a label
Speaker 8: called Panorama before that, and then he started, uh, Profile
Speaker 8: Records and Profile Records. Was it like Tommy Boy was
Speaker 8: supposed to be a dance label because I had a
Speaker 8: dance publication and my DJs were you know, everything in
Speaker 8: hip hop was disco the beginnings of people don't think
Speaker 8: they think hip hop is something else. It's not. It's
Speaker 8: like it's just like Jesus was a Jew, you know,
Speaker 8: hip hop was this? Is this the last supper? Was
Speaker 8: the say come on you know yeah on ash Wednesday?
Speaker 1: Exactly? So so one with Planet Rock and what it's
Speaker 1: done for technology and really just taking hip hop's leaves
Speaker 1: and bounds above, I mean really starting modern electro music.
Speaker 1: How what's what's this? The story behind it? Like how
Speaker 1: it was it just like hey, I have this craft
Speaker 1: work record, and how can we make it sound robotic
Speaker 1: and futuristic like this? And Arthur Baker's like.
Speaker 8: Oh no, because I told you I already had the
Speaker 8: demo that had been done a year and a half.
Speaker 8: A year before that.
Speaker 1: Was an A Rock was done in eighty.
Speaker 8: No, there was an eight track demo that included the
Speaker 8: elements that ended up being in Planet Rock, plus just
Speaker 8: the instrumental part and three other things that we ended
Speaker 8: up not using, you know, besides craft work.
Speaker 1: You're saying the track was done a year, but.
Speaker 8: I originally had envisioned using I like it by BT
Speaker 8: express the beat from that exactly, and Rick James give
Speaker 8: it to me baseline, you know so, and those things
Speaker 8: were worked into the original demo as well. Really yeah, okay,
Speaker 8: and then we decided we didn't need that much. It
Speaker 8: was too confusing. Does that exist? Does that the original
Speaker 8: deal will still exist anywhere? I don't have it. It
Speaker 8: probably does. Arthur Baker might have it as a cassette.
Speaker 8: It must have. It must exist.
Speaker 1: Some last question.
Speaker 8: Search, Let the search begin. We got to find it.
Speaker 8: Everything exists somewhere.
Speaker 1: He still alive. Yeah, he's doing great.
Speaker 8: He just produced the eight oh eight movie, the movie
Speaker 8: on eight o eight, which is getting ready to be
Speaker 8: the story thank you. So what we're talking about here
Speaker 8: is we had no money, so we decided to buy
Speaker 8: one reel of two inch tape and record at fifteen
Speaker 8: ips because thirty would have been too much. And the
Speaker 8: idea here with Arthur was that we're going to make
Speaker 8: a rap record with what we're doing here, and then
Speaker 8: we'll also do a vocal record with the same tracks,
Speaker 8: you know, because there was too yeah you got it, see,
Speaker 8: And so so we go, we go into the studio
Speaker 8: and it's a studio. It's on eighty fifth Street in
Speaker 8: an old school building that has that we have to
Speaker 8: walk up five flights of stairs with all the equipment
Speaker 8: to this recording studio called what was the name of
Speaker 8: the studio, Intergalactic, which was a perfect name to start
Speaker 8: electro musical and and uh, I think with the engineer
Speaker 8: and everything, all of the costs, I think it costs
Speaker 8: eight hundred dollars to make the record, you know up there,
Speaker 8: and the studio had a fairlight synthesizer in it. We
Speaker 8: rented in eight oh eight. I remember with Arthur looking
Speaker 8: to try to because there was this guy record Lenny
Speaker 8: that I saw, you know that used to record all
Speaker 8: of the sessions he recorded, like a famous section at
Speaker 8: Lincoln High School which was Flashed the Beat. It became
Speaker 8: Flashed to set on sugar Hill. But originally it was
Speaker 8: a plate that a plate means yeah, yeah, we have
Speaker 8: to explain to you.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, did you explain? All right? So Flash to
Speaker 1: the Beat is uh okay. You would probably not as
Speaker 1: the drum genesis of gang Stars, you know, my Steez
Speaker 1: the real but it's really grand Master Flash flashes on
Speaker 1: the bead box Plane play on a very primitive drum machine,
Speaker 1: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five doing routines.
Speaker 8: It started out as a plate. We used to call
Speaker 8: them plates, but their acetates and those place you used
Speaker 8: to go to to get an acetate made of a
Speaker 8: tape and so some people but they'd wear out fast,
Speaker 8: but people would play acetates.
Speaker 1: And then a label independent Bonzo Mika which I have
Speaker 1: no idea, eventually released it. And that's that boot leg
Speaker 1: of a boot leg of a boot leg like that
Speaker 1: just made the rounds across the Tri State area. Gotch
Speaker 1: which when even when Mattel invented uh since since sonics yeah,
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty one, Like I got that for
Speaker 1: my tenth birthday so I could do pretend flash and
Speaker 1: the beat. Yeah, so in your mind you was that
Speaker 1: you're I mean, besides the whole idea of slashtone, there's
Speaker 1: a rite going on and what Eure was doing with technology.
Speaker 1: In your mind, you wanted to bring that sound to
Speaker 1: the studio.
Speaker 8: Well, I used to play craft Work on my radio
Speaker 8: station back you know, back in nineteen seventy three, so
Speaker 8: I was already into craft work. That's why it blew
Speaker 8: my mind so much that Ben Boda could play it
Speaker 8: in front of a sixteen year old black audience and
Speaker 8: get away with it work and make it work, and
Speaker 8: so you know, that's what changed the game. So that
Speaker 8: was the one that stood out as the most radical
Speaker 8: departure from what you know, black music or funk music
Speaker 8: would have been considered at that time. So you know,
Speaker 8: that's the one I thought we should go with, you know,
Speaker 8: for that, But it wasn't. It wasn't because this sounded
Speaker 8: like that, because this doesn't really sound like craft work
Speaker 8: at all. Ben Boden's style is very different than flashy style,
Speaker 8: and I really only just recently gotten to meet Flashing,
Speaker 8: you know, through the get down and being on panels
Speaker 8: with him and stuff over the last two years. You know,
Speaker 8: I don't really know him very well at all, but
Speaker 8: I have mad respect for him. You know. There were
Speaker 8: two different universes. There was the Flash universe in the
Speaker 8: Banbodi universe, and I never really entered Flash's universe. You know.
Speaker 1: But even at the time when you're constructing this, like,
Speaker 1: you have no idea that you're metaphorically speaking, getting in
Speaker 1: a delurean and going ninety years into the future because essentially, like,
Speaker 1: all the elements that are in this song will determine
Speaker 1: thirty years later with EDM music, with trap music. I mean,
Speaker 1: all the ingredients are there. And so at no point
Speaker 1: was this like a meeting like, yo, we got to
Speaker 1: go to the future because it would have been easier
Speaker 1: to just get a house band to recreate the next.
Speaker 8: Would have been more expensive though we didn't have enough
Speaker 8: money to pay for a base.
Speaker 1: See, I would have thought it was more because That's
Speaker 1: why I wanted to know how long did it take
Speaker 1: the craft because first of all, it's a seven minute song,
Speaker 1: like Who's essentially like putting the pieces together.
Speaker 8: Okay, so Jaa is the is the engineer.
Speaker 11: Engineer was always the person playing together we have learned anything.
Speaker 8: But but then there's the assistant engineer was Bob Rosa,
Speaker 8: who went on to become super famous himself as a
Speaker 8: as an engineer and a mixer, both of those guys.
Speaker 8: And then you know, we had a synth player that
Speaker 8: we brought in, you know who, who played the lines
Speaker 8: on it, and and Arthur Baker was the you know,
Speaker 8: the producer, you know, and all of us were up
Speaker 8: there just contributing whatever ideas we had using all the technology.
Speaker 8: There was a massive amount of technology. And I started
Speaker 8: playing around with this fairlight synthesizer that was in the
Speaker 8: room and it had like a light pen and a
Speaker 8: green screen you had to touch to change the things.
Speaker 8: And I was I found this orchestra sound and you
Speaker 8: could play polyphonic orchestra hits and create this giant sound.
Speaker 1: That's why I wanted to know where did that?
Speaker 8: Yeah, So I just said, can we figure out a
Speaker 8: way to use this? And then Robie John Roby was
Speaker 8: the you know guy who did all the keyboards and
Speaker 8: stuff on that and played the melodic parts, came over
Speaker 8: and did that. And so you know, we utilized that
Speaker 8: we had rented an eight o eight because we couldn't
Speaker 8: find Flashes drum machine, and we brought that in And.
Speaker 1: Did you guys think for a second, like can we
Speaker 1: ask him if we could borrow it?
Speaker 8: Or But they don't, I mean, because they were different.
Speaker 8: It was the castanover crew. That's the castanover crew. You know,
Speaker 8: it's like gang stuff, you just you don't. I wasn't
Speaker 8: going there, I mean.
Speaker 1: Like Africa. I wasn't afraid to go.
Speaker 8: And I probably wouldn't have been afraid to go to
Speaker 8: see Grandmaster Flash either, because you know, I wasn't thinking
Speaker 8: about that either. But I didn't want to create a con.
Speaker 1: To ask like, oh, I know, Flash, he'll let me
Speaker 1: borrow Yeah.
Speaker 8: I don't know. I mean I don't know that that
Speaker 8: he had. They both had relationships with Kurt with herk
Speaker 8: but I don't know what kind of relationship they had
Speaker 8: with each other. I mean, even watching the get Down,
Speaker 8: I still learned how because because Flash was you know,
Speaker 8: consulting and a producer on the get Down, so to me,
Speaker 8: I learned a little bit about you know these that
Speaker 8: was written from the Flash perspective more than the banbody perspective.
Speaker 8: You know that there are two different you know, there's
Speaker 8: a world according to def Cham where you know, Russell
Speaker 8: has his vision of what hip hop was and where
Speaker 8: it came from, because he used to hang out at
Speaker 8: Sal's place, which was disco Fever, and I never went there.
Speaker 8: I mean that was where the drug dealers went, you know,
Speaker 8: I went where the kids went. And to me, the
Speaker 8: hip hop, the dancers, the creators, they were all young,
Speaker 8: really young. The older guy the guys that were wearing
Speaker 8: suits and drinking drinking splits of moet where all, you know,
Speaker 8: and they had like, you know, velvet pictures of James
Speaker 8: Brown on the walls and stuff.
Speaker 1: By the way, were these afternoon parties or night parties?
Speaker 8: The night parties, but they were.
Speaker 1: They weren't cardon back then, that's hard.
Speaker 8: And they had day stuff two in the park. But
Speaker 8: I didn't go to those because I was working. But
Speaker 8: you know, i'd go after I worked, I'd go out
Speaker 8: at night and and and see him there. The Bronx
Speaker 8: river ones were even earlier because they were in a
Speaker 8: wreck room in in the project.
Speaker 1: All right. I own an eight o eight drum machine
Speaker 1: and it as hard as hell too program it and
Speaker 1: really get it to do what you wanted to do
Speaker 1: execution wise, Who was the eight o eight monster? Was
Speaker 1: that author?
Speaker 8: Uh? I think Roby figured it out. He was the
Speaker 8: more technically savvy guy. But and Arthur Baker both worked
Speaker 8: on it together and and figured out what they wanted
Speaker 8: to do, and they might have actually had done some
Speaker 8: programming in advance. I can't remember a lot of that
Speaker 8: happened all spontaneously there, including the you know, the guys
Speaker 8: had written their rhymes, and a lot of the stuff
Speaker 8: that happened with the rhymes was spontaneous too, like, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 8: I forgot the lyrics. How I forgot the lyrics? And
Speaker 8: you know, Arthur wanted to take it over again. I said, no,
Speaker 8: that's good, let's just leave that. You know that was better.
Speaker 1: So when it's over and said and done and mixed,
Speaker 1: are you too involved in it to really realize that
Speaker 1: you guys might have read Yeah.
Speaker 8: You never know until you play it in front of
Speaker 8: an audience. The first time we had an inkling that
Speaker 8: something was going to be crazy, you know, was when
Speaker 8: you played it in front of an audience. By the way,
Speaker 8: this was the second bout of Tommy Boy record Jazzy
Speaker 8: Sensation had come out already the year before and was
Speaker 8: a hit. It did like forty thousand copies, which for
Speaker 8: me painted by parents back alone right away. And you know,
Speaker 8: I remember, very important thing to remember is bringing that
Speaker 8: record to WHBI to Mister Magic show, because Mister Magic
Speaker 8: was the first person in the world the radio was
Speaker 8: he polite to you, He was cool, he was you know,
Speaker 8: he was he was super cool. And I went up
Speaker 8: there and there was in the fantastic Alems were up
Speaker 8: there at the same time. Wow, Twins, they're bringing their
Speaker 8: record up the same day, Hooked on Your Love or
Speaker 8: whatever on Near Records, which was their label, and you know,
Speaker 8: those guys were from the hood, and I was totally
Speaker 8: not for the hood. So I was going into you know,
Speaker 8: and they already knew Magic and I was just meeting them,
Speaker 8: and they played both records. But Benbada had such an
Speaker 8: audience in the Bronx that the phones went absolutely nuts,
Speaker 8: and I got orders for five thousand records the next Monday.
Speaker 8: That's when I knew I had something one spin ten
Speaker 8: thousand watt or fifty thousand watts station that had you know,
Speaker 8: hasidic jews. Afterwards, doing Talmut time and you know Brooklyn
Speaker 8: Rasta's doing you know whatever deep reggae before and you know,
Speaker 8: he had his little three hour splot. So it wasn't
Speaker 8: like a radio station people tuned into. It was a show,
Speaker 8: the only show, but it was the only place you
Speaker 8: could hear hip hop. So everybody listened into it. And
Speaker 8: who was into it?
Speaker 10: And at this time, like there was simple clearianicses. Even
Speaker 10: the things like with the craft Work sample, it wasn't
Speaker 10: a sample, it was played.
Speaker 1: So did the guys that did the Mexican were they like, hey,
Speaker 1: that's our melody.
Speaker 8: Or so we didn't have an issue with that one
Speaker 8: because they probably stole it from the Good to Bad
Speaker 8: and the Ugly and it was really any of morricone,
Speaker 8: you know. So I don't know what. So that's the
Speaker 8: only reason I can think that after all the years,
Speaker 8: nobody ever came out. But you know, after Planet Rock
Speaker 8: became pretty big, I got a letter from the publishing
Speaker 8: company of uh of kraft work. I didn't know. I
Speaker 8: didn't I didn't really understand copyright law. You know, I
Speaker 8: wasn't that you know, I was pretty young, I was
Speaker 8: just starting my company. I got a shock treatment when
Speaker 8: I got the letter and we had to figure out
Speaker 8: a way to settle, and you know, it was like
Speaker 8: one of the early settlements.
Speaker 1: What is your distribution game?
Speaker 8: Like?
Speaker 1: Is are you in a position now where you're getting
Speaker 1: more orders than you have and you can handle that?
Speaker 1: You can handle? Are you like I need a full
Speaker 1: time staff now to.
Speaker 8: I had two employees I had once I got the
Speaker 8: letter from craft work to hire a lawyer full time.
Speaker 1: Well not even I'm talking about to even get the record. Yeah,
Speaker 1: forty thousand records and that many records.
Speaker 8: Just tell the pressing plant we need more, you know,
Speaker 8: and you know, and we have to pay up front.
Speaker 8: So yeah, we need to get cash. So we had
Speaker 8: to go sell records directly to the record store for
Speaker 8: two dollars instead of two fifty, and we get cash
Speaker 8: so we could pay for the presses, you know, so
Speaker 8: you could turn cash flow around fast. Or we give
Speaker 8: the distributor or a discount and they would pay us
Speaker 8: up front instead of paying or half up front. There
Speaker 8: were ways in those days where you could get money
Speaker 8: if you had a hit and it was a big demand.
Speaker 8: The distributor is happy as hell because it was the
Speaker 8: big record driving it for them, and they needed to
Speaker 8: make sure that we had cash flow to pay the
Speaker 8: pressing plan, so they'd squeeze us for an extra discount
Speaker 8: and give us money upfront so we could pay the
Speaker 8: pressing plant.
Speaker 1: Were you your own distributor?
Speaker 8: Or?
Speaker 1: Who were you using?
Speaker 8: No, I had twelve distributor to cover America in those days,
Speaker 8: you had to have twelve distributors. There's we had a
Speaker 8: New York distributor, Philly distributor Universal in Philly. We had
Speaker 8: a distributor in Washington, Baltimore, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, you know, Cleveland, Boston, Hartford.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you it's crazy.
Speaker 8: San Francisco, La Texas, and New Orleans.
Speaker 1: And then what about a nationally Shreveport is separate one
Speaker 1: in Shreeport in New Orleans? What about internationally?
Speaker 8: How did you do it? And nastually? We didn't know
Speaker 8: what we're doing. We licensed the record internationally to a
Speaker 8: PolyGram subsidiary called twenty one and they gave us whatever
Speaker 8: like a twenty thousand dollars advance for the world.
Speaker 1: As a president of the label. How are Africa, Bimbata
Speaker 1: and the Sonic Force doing this song and concert? Are they?
Speaker 1: Is there demand to bring them like is I mean,
Speaker 1: how are you guys dealing with your statics.
Speaker 8: Of Like we had to make it, we made it.
Speaker 1: How do you make it work on Well, I saw
Speaker 1: the video, but how do you make it work on stage?
Speaker 8: Like?
Speaker 1: Are we getting a band to try and recreate this?
Speaker 1: Is there?
Speaker 8: No? The bembodis DJ it Because the other thing the
Speaker 8: time we boy did was we were innovating in the
Speaker 8: records themselves. First of all, a lot of the twelve
Speaker 8: inches at the time were forty five, so we only
Speaker 8: did thirty threes. We put the beats permitted on the
Speaker 8: record so the DJs would know what the beats permitt
Speaker 8: It was, By the way, what's the beats permitted in
Speaker 8: a plant Rock? Anybody? On twenty nine? Very good? Yeah.
Speaker 8: But we also put bonus beats on that record, the
Speaker 8: first record ever that had bonus beats, because we wanted
Speaker 8: to give DJs tools because we knew who our audience was.
Speaker 8: Sugar Hill didn't think that they thought their audience was
Speaker 8: record bised. We thought our audience DJs, and the DJs
Speaker 8: became record biers, and record biers followed started buying with
Speaker 8: the DJs. But even though they weren't DJs, so you
Speaker 8: know twelve inches, which were just a DJ market until
Speaker 8: like seventy eight or seventy nine started becoming Planet. I
Speaker 8: think the first record that really probably went multi platinum
Speaker 8: off twelve inch was probably Wrap His Delight or Heartbeat
Speaker 8: by Tony Gardner.
Speaker 1: Do you know the Heartbeat story with Larry Levan? I
Speaker 1: wanted to say this earlier when he mentioned down tempo
Speaker 1: how he played So Larry Levan defiantly oh yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, how he played it like twenty times in
Speaker 10: a row.
Speaker 1: Well they said three hours, but I feel like he
Speaker 1: it might have been under twenty times in a row.
Speaker 1: That's how he broke it at Paradise. Yeah, he literally
Speaker 1: was going to force them to dance to down tempo
Speaker 1: as opposed to disco, and their thing was to have
Speaker 1: a sit in. So for the first or five times
Speaker 1: people were sitting under dance. His audience was like, no,
Speaker 1: we're leaving, and Larry Levan was like, no, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: the controller here. You don't you know you're not hold
Speaker 1: me hosted.
Speaker 7: Don't try that.
Speaker 1: Don't try to sell me.
Speaker 8: A few people can get away with that.
Speaker 1: He was like, I will, I will play what you
Speaker 1: want to hear after I see them dance to this,
Speaker 1: and so after the twentieth time, they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: damn it, and then they started and then they have
Speaker 1: been He literally stock him, cindered them into.
Speaker 7: That's good to know though, but that heart that heartbeat
Speaker 7: record was the transition and so that is not it's
Speaker 7: not disco, but it is downbeat.
Speaker 1: And then yeah Tuesday, Yeah, like he literally forced them
Speaker 1: by gunpoint to you know, it was radical at the
Speaker 1: time because it was like ninety one bpms, where the
Speaker 1: average record was disco fied and so yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, but and he already played dow tempo compared to
Speaker 8: the White Gate you know discos where they were playing
Speaker 8: one hundred and twenty ninety thirty so Africa. So the
Speaker 8: other thing we did was we had an instrumental B
Speaker 8: side and a version that had Tina Bee on it,
Speaker 8: which was Arthur's wife, Tina Baker.
Speaker 1: Okay she be yeah, oh crap, I did not know.
Speaker 8: And that allowed us to get play on in clubs
Speaker 8: that were gay clubs because it was the right tempo
Speaker 8: and they weren't going to play a record with a
Speaker 8: rap on it. So that so our record got played
Speaker 8: everywhere everyone could play our record. Also, you know, punk
Speaker 8: rock was fast, so a lot of the you know,
Speaker 8: people who liked to play rock music couldn't play early
Speaker 8: hip hop because it was too slow for what they
Speaker 8: were playing, but they could play Planet Rock. So Planet
Speaker 8: Rock was a breakthrough record on so many levels. Also,
Speaker 8: Latin kids went nuts, Asian kids went nuts because this
Speaker 8: whole you know, this was the Pa pac Man Asteroids
Speaker 8: versus pac Man kind of period where people were hearing
Speaker 8: these electronic sounds in video games and going crazy over
Speaker 8: them and you know, hearing electro music. We also had
Speaker 8: real support in Detroit, which was like the funk capital
Speaker 8: of the world, from the Electrifying Mojo, who was the
Speaker 8: big DJ who broke all the early George Clinton stuff
Speaker 8: on the air and he was god in Michigan and
Speaker 8: so you know, he broke it through the whole funk
Speaker 8: you know scenario. So we got really great support from
Speaker 8: the record because we put elements in it that were
Speaker 8: inclusive that look, this record isn't just for the Bronx.
Speaker 8: This record is for everybody. If you're gay and into
Speaker 8: euro disco, play the B side, you know, if you're
Speaker 8: having trouble getting into it, use the bonus beats to
Speaker 8: get into it. We gave everybody everything they needed, and
Speaker 8: to me, that was a breakthrough part of the record too.
Speaker 8: It made it easier for the record to catch on
Speaker 8: when you only have two employees in the company.
Speaker 1: Jo Top.
Speaker 7: Not to jump the gun, but because you keep talking
Speaker 7: about how well versed you were on the diversity of
Speaker 7: the gay community, is that when you like ran into
Speaker 7: like a young RuPaul, because I mean that's a person
Speaker 7: of a certain age.
Speaker 1: I was just curious.
Speaker 8: Because I was much later.
Speaker 1: Paul was right.
Speaker 7: I didn't know because he's certain.
Speaker 8: He used to intern at the New Music Seminar for us.
Speaker 8: He used to perform perform at a show at the
Speaker 8: Saint at the New Music Seminar once, you know, uh,
Speaker 8: and he was an amazing performer. But you know, Monica really,
Speaker 8: you know, Monica Lynch was the president of Tommy Boy,
Speaker 8: actually not me, and she, you know, she was the
Speaker 8: one that brought that in. And you know, because she
Speaker 8: understood that, you know, she was came from Chicago and
Speaker 8: she came out of that culture, you know, the the
Speaker 8: gay disco, the ball culture and stuff like.
Speaker 1: That, coming out of a Planet Rock.
Speaker 10: A lot of the stuff y'all followed up with I
Speaker 10: guess it fell under like the I guess theyould call
Speaker 10: it freestyle at the time. Was it like the Latin
Speaker 10: hip hops? Yeah, Latin hip hop? Who was first they.
Speaker 1: Called it Latin hip hop? Then they called it freestyle? Okay, okay, gotcha?
Speaker 1: Who was some of those artists?
Speaker 8: T K A. That was the big one. We had
Speaker 8: K seven t K A. So the K K seven
Speaker 8: is the K and t K A Tony K.
Speaker 1: Society, I mean didn't really start with Information Society.
Speaker 8: Was the Information Society which was salabout Yellow who had
Speaker 8: the fever, had a club called it Devil's nest Alnido
Speaker 8: del Diablo in the Bronx also, and Louis Vega used
Speaker 8: to spin there, and Louis Vega discovered this record and
Speaker 8: brought them in from Minnesota. These guys are like Vikings
Speaker 8: from Minnesota, and they came they came in the you know,
Speaker 8: this white group came in and played an all Puerto
Speaker 8: Rican club in the Bronx and.
Speaker 1: They were white. Never saw the video, not only white
Speaker 1: way original white.
Speaker 8: They weans from.
Speaker 1: You know, because Silent Warning like all that stuff just
Speaker 1: sounded and all the Puerto Rican kids in my high school.
Speaker 1: I just thought they were Puerto Rican because I guess
Speaker 1: Puerto Rican.
Speaker 8: So yeah, So that was probably eighty four, like two
Speaker 8: years after playing Rock, or maybe late eighty three because
Speaker 8: Running was the first record which used a eight o
Speaker 8: eight in it. Also, so when you know it was
Speaker 8: discovered and Louis played, these guys thought they were playing
Speaker 8: to a rock odings because they thought they were a
Speaker 8: rock band and when they saw they didn't know who
Speaker 8: their audience was, and we sort of had to do
Speaker 8: an adjustment so they can understand you can try and
Speaker 8: play rock music or you can embrace this this audience here.
Speaker 8: It was really amazing to see.
Speaker 1: Well imagine that a group going against their will, playing,
Speaker 1: playing and surviving off audience. They who would ever have
Speaker 1: thought that would ever happen to a group. Again, I
Speaker 1: feel as though everything that you've brought to the table,
Speaker 1: uh from Tommy Boy Records, especially in the first ten
Speaker 1: years of the label, was a foot forward as far
Speaker 1: as the culture and innovation, and of course you know
Speaker 1: you are established that as the natural contrarian, you were
Speaker 1: trying to go to the places other people weren't going.
Speaker 1: And I guess probably the second most notable signing of
Speaker 1: your label ghost. That's no the ford the MDS tell
Speaker 1: me about. Well, first of all, changing the four sim
Speaker 1: C's from Staten Island to the four m.
Speaker 8: DS was doctor Rock and the four sim C's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so how did you how did you run into
Speaker 1: them and and sort of groomed them and like did
Speaker 1: they already come package as they were swetters? And because
Speaker 1: I feel like that's.
Speaker 8: You, that's me, you know, I already said that, you know,
Speaker 8: but I saw I saw him perform at one of
Speaker 8: Africa Bambadi's Zulu Nation events. They were Zulu. I mean
Speaker 8: there were people that were affiliated with the Zulunation in Olbers.
Speaker 8: They're from Staten Island, so you know, all of the
Speaker 8: Staten Island hip hop that came out of Staten Island
Speaker 8: grew up on four m DS. And you know, they
Speaker 8: had Jesse d who was the singer who used to
Speaker 8: do Michael Jackson invitations on the on the Staten Island
Speaker 8: ferry and raise money that way. And yeah, they were
Speaker 8: but they were super talented and I heard him sing
Speaker 8: a song that blew my mind at this show. It
Speaker 8: was hip hop and hip hop beats, but they did
Speaker 8: this beautiful four part harmony or five part harmony routine
Speaker 8: to the f Troop theme song, which was really amazing for.
Speaker 1: Our listeners out there. Like a lot of early hip
Speaker 1: hop routines were just based on TVs do ron Stone,
Speaker 1: Cowboy and and by yeah exactly. So a lot of
Speaker 1: these early hip hop routines are based on uh u
Speaker 1: h F whatever that is u HF channel uh reruns
Speaker 1: and about the weird out who wants to be on
Speaker 1: Quest Love Supreme way he bring it? Yeo, yeah, I will.
Speaker 1: So back to the Foursome ds. So you saw them
Speaker 1: do this routine and you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I thought that, you know, they were super commercial
Speaker 8: and and I thought that this concept of harmony over
Speaker 8: hip hop beats might be another departure point because you
Speaker 8: have to understand also at this time, the DJ was
Speaker 8: the main person in a rap group, not the rappers,
Speaker 8: and the DJ usually had the musical idea and their
Speaker 8: name always was first it was Africa Bembada and Grandmester
Speaker 8: Flesh and Eric B. And you know it was because
Speaker 8: the person with the records was the master. You know,
Speaker 8: the the DJs were fungible, I mean the MC's were fungible.
Speaker 8: There's everybody wanted to be an MC. Also didn't cost
Speaker 8: money to be a MC. It costs money you had
Speaker 8: to invest to have the equipment, the records and all
Speaker 8: that stuff. So they were the guys, and often they
Speaker 8: came with a musical idea. Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh
Speaker 8: Prince and again, you know, so these are the guys
Speaker 8: and then things. There was a point in the music
Speaker 8: industry where that changed and they went to outside producers
Speaker 8: and that was sort of a to me, a sea
Speaker 8: change in the music business. But timmy boys strength came
Speaker 8: from self contained groups that had a sound of their own.
Speaker 8: That came where the vision came from the DJ slash producer.
Speaker 8: You know, whether they were a great producer or not
Speaker 8: was something else. But they usually had a musical vision
Speaker 8: that we had to interpret. You know, Baan Bada had
Speaker 8: a musical vision. Arthur Baker interpreted it.
Speaker 1: Where they easily sold on the Frankie Lineman approach of.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they were open to whatever. At the point they
Speaker 8: wanted a record deal and they weren't going to get
Speaker 8: a record dealer. It wasn't like there was a lot
Speaker 8: of competition. Maybe they would have thought it, but I,
Speaker 8: you know, I said, look, you know, it's the same
Speaker 8: street corners. There's a great story here. Let's do this thing.
Speaker 8: And also maybe we can you know, get girls really
Speaker 8: into this group, because you know girls, you know, and
Speaker 8: so that would be, you know, a way to expose
Speaker 8: it and break it. And also I was dealing with
Speaker 8: radio because I was the guy actually called Radio two,
Speaker 8: So I was working radio and talking to radio DJs
Speaker 8: trying to get them to play hip hop, which they
Speaker 8: didn't want to play. They hated it. They you know,
Speaker 8: if they played hip hop, they had one slot on
Speaker 8: their playlist or two slots on their playlist. So it
Speaker 8: was very hard to get them to play it. And
Speaker 8: even though I didn't have any major label competition for
Speaker 8: ten years, during this period of time, there's plenty of
Speaker 8: indie label competition. We were all chasing the same guys
Speaker 8: with hip hop records, and you know, the record had
Speaker 8: to be really good. So you know, I thought that
Speaker 8: a record that was allot, you know, a vocal record,
Speaker 8: would would not be considered a hip hop record. But
Speaker 8: because it was on Tommy Boy and we had hip
Speaker 8: hop hits, they didn't even listen to the I can't
Speaker 8: play this hip hop record. It's not a hip hop
Speaker 8: listen to the record you could play.
Speaker 7: At what point did crush groove come into the picture
Speaker 7: for them and did it have like an effect on
Speaker 7: the records?
Speaker 1: Actually they were right.
Speaker 8: I remember O n and I saw the eighty five.
Speaker 1: I saw it in the theater.
Speaker 8: Call it eighty six indo eighty five eighty beginning eighty six.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I think for some d's performance and
Speaker 1: rapping was the that was that was the highlight of
Speaker 1: the movie.
Speaker 5: Of the film, or Griffin Dunn's rap at the end,
Speaker 5: the horrible rap.
Speaker 1: What was the But they weren't, I mean, they weren't
Speaker 1: cush with tender love was. They did It's and force
Speaker 1: scratching and.
Speaker 8: That was earlier. Rapping was first, So that must have
Speaker 8: been eighty four eighty five.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean It's and for scratches, I mean, let
Speaker 1: Me Love You was it was a good introduction. But
Speaker 1: really I know that b boys got to open on
Speaker 1: It's and for scratch and even when they opened for
Speaker 1: a new edition. I've seen three full force new edition
Speaker 1: shows and I always felt like full force or forced
Speaker 1: my god, I said, full force cracker for some ds
Speaker 1: opening for a new edition, I could tell that they
Speaker 1: were out for blood, like they performed harder, and you
Speaker 1: know they were doing all the invitations.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they have dance routines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, way way past. I mean they were rhyming, they
Speaker 1: were singing, they were imitating Michael JACKSONI wack costumes.
Speaker 8: We have to talk about I think that was me
Speaker 8: on the record.
Speaker 1: That was you exclusive. I don't know my sound effects
Speaker 1: this stuff, just that part, Okay, I see so well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I always wanted to know why did they By
Speaker 1: the time Chilling came out and Tender Love had had
Speaker 1: made noise.
Speaker 8: Tender Love was like the first top ten record for
Speaker 8: Jimmy jam and Terry Lewis.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was, so were they because the cover of
Speaker 1: Chilling was like them in Offers and they was chilling.
Speaker 1: I know literally that. But were they telling you, as
Speaker 1: an executive, like, we don't want to go the bubblegum?
Speaker 8: We were over that right away because it didn't work.
Speaker 8: We tried it, We tried to connect to that audience
Speaker 8: and it didn't connect, so we went a new way.
Speaker 1: My dad actually liked that. He liked the Chilling record
Speaker 1: because I had to Let Me Love You twelve inch
Speaker 1: and it looked the way that the photo was positioned,
Speaker 1: it looked just like the Frankie Liman thing. So my
Speaker 1: dad instantly got, oh, that's what they're they're coming from,
Speaker 1: and so damn that did he like the music when
Speaker 1: you listen to it? Forgive me, it was my It
Speaker 1: was my music, not a music. But I definitely know
Speaker 1: that harmonies at least, you know, I know that he
Speaker 1: saw the cover and was like, oh, that's Frankie Lion.
Speaker 8: By the way. He broke with the cover too. His
Speaker 8: first record was the record somebody had done before.
Speaker 1: Really No, no, no, I mean literally the photo.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I know what you're talking the cover, Yeah.
Speaker 1: With climmcfetter, that's what you mean. Who orchestrated them getting
Speaker 1: with jam and Lewis? Like was that a thing for
Speaker 1: the Cruss Grooves soundtrack?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Also, this time you're about to go to One Brothers right, Like,
Speaker 1: at what point are.
Speaker 8: You in the middle of the in the middle of
Speaker 8: making that. We had already made that record. Then I
Speaker 8: was talking to my Austin about about doing a joint
Speaker 8: venture with Warner Brothers where we maintained our independence, but
Speaker 8: we were half owned by Warner.
Speaker 1: M So did you were you executive of the Crush
Speaker 1: Groove soundtrack because it was on Warner Brothers.
Speaker 8: Had we had one record on there and it was
Speaker 8: gonna the album is going to be on Warner Brothers,
Speaker 8: but this was going to be the single that drove
Speaker 8: the album. So this was the single that was going
Speaker 8: to sell their album for them, so that there was
Speaker 8: a natural conversation anyway to talk to him about doing
Speaker 8: something bigger together.
Speaker 10: So was that song ever officially on A four C
Speaker 10: and d's album.
Speaker 8: It was on Chilling.
Speaker 1: It eventually became on Chilling, but after the Fat Got You.
Speaker 1: But I thought because you were had one foot in
Speaker 1: Warner and one foot at Tommy Boy, that.
Speaker 5: Didn't the single come out on both labels though like
Speaker 5: the Warner, it wasn't the twelve inch on time.
Speaker 8: Yeah. The deal that we made with Warner was all
Speaker 8: the twelve inches came through Tommy Boy and they had
Speaker 8: the albums. So actually Warner released the fourth MD's album Chill,
Speaker 8: and I think came through Warner and we had the
Speaker 8: twelve inches. That was the deal. We kept the twelve
Speaker 8: inches and they kept the forty five's in the albums,
Speaker 8: and that was important. That was important for you to
Speaker 8: keep the twelve inches for the branding. And also we
Speaker 8: were independent. We want we also had international We could
Speaker 8: make international deals. We had our own licensing ability to
Speaker 8: make licenses, We did our own promotion. They did promotion too.
Speaker 8: But you know, one of the reasons I did a
Speaker 8: deal with Warner was I wanted access to top forty
Speaker 8: radio and they had access to the Indie network and
Speaker 8: the Indian network. We couldn't. It was so expensive and
Speaker 8: we were so small we didn't have the leverage or
Speaker 8: the scale to access it. So once we made the deal,
Speaker 8: the pale investigations happened and Warner stopped choosing indies, so
Speaker 8: I never got that advantage, which was one of the
Speaker 8: reasons I made. Well year did that stop eight right
Speaker 8: eighty six?
Speaker 1: Right when we moved over there?
Speaker 8: Who knew?
Speaker 1: So how do you how do you curb the enthusiasm
Speaker 1: of an artist signed to the label that you know,
Speaker 1: because because by this point, you know, Thriller has gone
Speaker 1: full bloom and you see the potential of Michael Jackson
Speaker 1: selling forty million units and Prince is out there like now,
Speaker 1: black artists are finally getting there just due to live
Speaker 1: in the or at least the perception of it, because
Speaker 1: I know a lot of that is smoking mirrors. So
Speaker 1: you're on an independent label and knowing what I know,
Speaker 1: I know that the expectation factor of some certain artists
Speaker 1: are way high and above what the reality is like.
Speaker 1: They don't take into account. You have to do a
Speaker 1: show in Cleveland and it's five of you, So that's
Speaker 1: hotel rooms and there's a tour manager. What do you
Speaker 1: mean rooms? Okay, well, I mean, well just the idea.
Speaker 8: Look, we could drive back from Cleveland. We don't need
Speaker 8: to stay over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see, I'm taking my nineteen ninety five life
Speaker 1: this before. But you know it's.
Speaker 8: Business was ruined by then.
Speaker 1: Show. You never knew Hunger. I know. I'm so glad
Speaker 1: I got on the complete of that train boy, But
Speaker 1: how do you what's what's an what's an artist expectation?
Speaker 1: Especially an artist that's not aware of Hey, I gotta
Speaker 1: pay for this Billboard magazine ad to make sure that
Speaker 1: you're promoting, and that costs forty thousand dollars. I gotta
Speaker 1: you know. I'm sure that you've been on the many
Speaker 1: ends of an argument of an artist versus record exec
Speaker 1: Weren't we rich.
Speaker 8: Only after the majors got into the business and fucked
Speaker 8: it up for everybody else. It wasn't in the in
Speaker 8: the eighties, that was never an issue. We had to
Speaker 8: figure out, how do The issue isn't to get on
Speaker 8: the charts. The issue is to get exposure. Exposure leads
Speaker 8: to sales, that's it. Word of mouth leads to sales.
Speaker 8: Those are the things that we cared about. So how
Speaker 8: do we focus on maximizing exposure? So Tommy Boy invented
Speaker 8: the sticker. Tommy Boy invent started doing front page strips
Speaker 8: and billboard on every record we released. We treated twelve
Speaker 8: inches like albums. We worked them as if they were
Speaker 8: album projects. You know. We also worked our artists internationally
Speaker 8: like they weren't. We did the back page of the
Speaker 8: Source every week. We controlled the back page of the
Speaker 8: Source for ten years. We advertised in the Source when
Speaker 8: it was still staple together, tip sheet and out of
Speaker 8: Harvard University.
Speaker 7: How do you control the bat means that nobody can
Speaker 7: outbid you on the back.
Speaker 8: We had a subscription. We paid for it all we
Speaker 8: had it, you know, we paid in a FIR three
Speaker 8: and if in advance when they needed cash flow, and
Speaker 8: then we just we we had a contract with him
Speaker 8: for the back page. So you know, there were things
Speaker 8: that we you know, there are things that Tommy Boy did.
Speaker 8: You know when Greg Mack left the radio station, well
Speaker 8: when he when he left Houston where he was a
Speaker 8: hip hop radio DJ in Houston and we knew him
Speaker 8: and supported him. He came to K Day and he
Speaker 8: remembered that we supported a show a K Day. We
Speaker 8: supported you know, everybody's you know who had a hip
Speaker 8: hop publication when they started, and as their businesses grew,
Speaker 8: they remembered that we were always there at the beginning.
Speaker 8: So there's massive love for Tommy Boy all, you know,
Speaker 8: from the beginning because we nurtured everyone. And you know,
Speaker 8: there's very few people you could talk to in the
Speaker 8: business that don't have love for Tommy Boy, which is
Speaker 8: not a usual thing in hip hop, which is the
Speaker 8: world of haters mostly.
Speaker 10: That sound bite for Yeah World Wood that was on
Speaker 10: the Forces D's Unsung, they told a story I don't
Speaker 10: want to get your side of it about the they
Speaker 10: wanted to work with Teddy Riley and Teddy Rally was
Speaker 10: going to do tracks on I can't remember it was
Speaker 10: the I think it was maybe the third album and
Speaker 10: the label just didn't want to pay for it because
Speaker 10: Teddy was charging at that time.
Speaker 1: What was Teddy something that Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 10: It was exorbitant, But what was your what's your side
Speaker 10: of that? And was it something that just didn't make
Speaker 10: sense or how did you determine what to pay for it?
Speaker 8: I don't know, you know, I can't remember specifically. I
Speaker 8: do remember trying to get him, but availability and the
Speaker 8: kind of you know, like, would I pay fifty thousand
Speaker 8: dollars to clear a sample on one track? No, I'm
Speaker 8: not doing that, but you know Kanye will do that everybody.
Speaker 8: You know, there's economics in the music business, and the
Speaker 8: difference between indies and majors is the indies are have
Speaker 8: to make a profit or they go out of business.
Speaker 8: They just don't have to make a profit. They've been
Speaker 8: losing money for ten years. They're still here. They're not
Speaker 8: you know, they don't have to and their business is
Speaker 8: based on market share. So they will spend ten dollars
Speaker 8: to make five dollars as long as they can control
Speaker 8: x amount of the chart.
Speaker 1: We aren't.
Speaker 8: We aren't even in the same business that they're in.
Speaker 8: So when they got into hip hop, it changed the
Speaker 8: nature of hip hop, and it made it very corporated,
Speaker 8: you know, and kept some of the sort of the
Speaker 8: street creativity that came from discovering something on the street
Speaker 8: and starting with nothing and bringing to something to something
Speaker 8: where the second you signed, you know, the mayboch pulls up,
Speaker 8: get a bag of money.
Speaker 1: You know. So okay, being as though you're you're it
Speaker 1: was front loaded instead of so being as though you're
Speaker 1: one of the last execus that built this reputation off
Speaker 1: of the idea of groups. Now, in hindsight, I hear
Speaker 1: people say, especially in documentaries, that it's way more easier
Speaker 1: to control solo artists than it is a group, which
Speaker 1: leads to uh, I guess my my question about statso
Speaker 1: Sonic as an independent label owner, are you at any
Speaker 1: point thinking about the financial hindrance and the burden of
Speaker 1: dealing with six to seven people. I mean, you're dealing
Speaker 1: with a group, and I'm thinking.
Speaker 8: Live I think stet was right six oh with the drummer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Robby, Well yeah to me, that's their anger. Sorry,
Speaker 1: so well, of course whoever he is. No, But it's
Speaker 1: just like if I'm if I'm pretending i'm you, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about oh, God, a band that's back line, that's
Speaker 1: a twelve passenger van. If that uh I was saying hotels,
Speaker 1: You're like, so oh, I mean what I know, there
Speaker 1: weren't limitations back then, but clearly that was the last
Speaker 1: of an era because in the next ten years, the
Speaker 1: really of the next six years, the idea of a
Speaker 1: band or group, uh will become an endangered species thing.
Speaker 1: So why.
Speaker 8: We weren't thinking about touring because we're the label. We're
Speaker 8: you know, we're only contracted to make money when the
Speaker 8: group sells music, so we don't profit from their touring.
Speaker 8: I never really thought.
Speaker 1: But you never thought like, okay, well, touring will build
Speaker 1: up their popularity and thus we can make more records.
Speaker 8: And you know that hasn't always been the case for us.
Speaker 8: In fact, every group we signed, we we had never
Speaker 8: seen live till after we signed them, and they never
Speaker 8: really got gigs, significant gigs. I mean, I saw for
Speaker 8: some d's that made mean is exception for that. But
Speaker 8: Stets of Sonic, we heard the record, we signed them
Speaker 8: off the record, you've never seen them live, Dyala Soul.
Speaker 8: We saw there was not at that time, you know,
Speaker 8: they were developing their concept and Prince Paul you know,
Speaker 8: was involved obviously was the DJ in that group too.
Speaker 8: But mister Magic brought us that group. So mister Magic
Speaker 8: brought me the demo. I liked the demo, you know,
Speaker 8: and we brought them and we recorded them and actually
Speaker 8: in my apartment, we had a twenty four track in
Speaker 8: the second bedroom. When we moved Dancing Musical Report out,
Speaker 8: we moved the studio into the second bedroom. We had
Speaker 8: twenty four track and we recorded them in the bedroom.
Speaker 8: We put Mike's in the living room and.
Speaker 1: In an apartment.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they weren't home. We recorded during the day.
Speaker 1: What song was that? Did you recorded?
Speaker 8: Apartment? Just say stet. We tried to re record, but
Speaker 8: we tried to re record it because they had done
Speaker 8: it tape in the studio in Brooklyn and all they
Speaker 8: had was a cassette and something happened, they didn't pay
Speaker 8: their bill or whatever, and there was no master tape,
Speaker 8: and we tried to replicate it, and we ended up
Speaker 8: just using the cassette master from the cassette because we
Speaker 8: couldn't make it better. That's so dope, like you know,
Speaker 8: like sugar Hill was flashed the.
Speaker 1: Beat, No you chasing the demo?
Speaker 8: It's like literally, But we did record other tracks up
Speaker 8: there as well, and I remember Freu kwand Falling Sleep
Speaker 8: and uh and also mixed machine Wise, who was like
Speaker 8: amazing human beat bucks at the time.
Speaker 1: Now, okay, the I feel like the idea of Statso
Speaker 1: Sonic and the legend of stats of Sonic was bigger
Speaker 1: than what they actually were because and you know, for
Speaker 1: history sake whatever, I've been respectful on this stuff like okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're the second hip hop band whatever. I never, truly,
Speaker 1: I never really considered Stetso Sonic a hip hop band
Speaker 1: because when I listened to their records in instrument, it sounded.
Speaker 8: Like Bobby wasn't in the studio.
Speaker 1: Well it sounds well no, Well, I mean he was
Speaker 1: for the three or four important songs he was drumming on.
Speaker 1: But I always thought that was a marketing angle more
Speaker 1: than even when that.
Speaker 8: I think that was Daddyo's idea. By the way, oh
Speaker 8: yeah yeah, and.
Speaker 1: The Beastie Boy issue of Spin magazine.
Speaker 8: They were very interesting. Daddyo was very involved in the uh,
Speaker 8: you know, the marketing ideas and the concepts. We used
Speaker 8: to actually fight about it sometimes because we didn't always agree,
Speaker 8: but a lot of the ideas that are in stets
Speaker 8: sonic h are those. But you know, records like talking
Speaker 8: All that Jazz to me is still a classic. The
Speaker 8: first record about sampling really you know.
Speaker 1: It was it was so I'm saying, like, when you're
Speaker 1: doing this and by the time did they make their
Speaker 1: debut at the New Music Seminar?
Speaker 8: Maybe I can't remember which we're.
Speaker 1: Kind of skipping that you started the New Music Seminar.
Speaker 8: I co started it with a bunch of other people.
Speaker 8: There was another there was an so the DJ culture
Speaker 8: was exploding. There was a there was a rock oriented
Speaker 8: thing called rock Pool that serviced rock DJs, rock music,
Speaker 8: you know, post punk, you know, new wave and stuff
Speaker 8: like that. DJs that played specifically rock music at the time.
Speaker 8: And because rock was so big with the labels, they
Speaker 8: got big support from the record companies. Uh and disco
Speaker 8: was always like the bastard child of the music industry.
Speaker 8: That's why she just got rejected for the eleventh time,
Speaker 8: broke the record for the eleventh you know, of being
Speaker 8: I'm trying, I'm trying rejected. But Nile will get in
Speaker 8: this year on a special award, but.
Speaker 1: We're going to get Sheik in.
Speaker 8: Well, you gotta get Nol Rogers specifically because he he'll
Speaker 8: tell you the story about rappers, the light and the sample, and.
Speaker 1: He's a friend of the show. So for the New
Speaker 1: Music Cement, when was the very first.
Speaker 8: One in SII Rehearsal studios. It was a one day
Speaker 8: event in nineteen.
Speaker 1: Eighty Do you who performed?
Speaker 8: No, No, There were no performances at night. The first
Speaker 8: one was just a one day thing, the same day
Speaker 8: as the Billboard Disco Forum and the disco form fell off,
Speaker 8: and we packed like one hundred and fifty two hundred
Speaker 8: people in the room, and we're talking about issues with
Speaker 8: radio and issues DJ issues. We talked about remixing and
Speaker 8: things that nobody really was talking about elsewhere. And we
Speaker 8: didn't see disco as one hundred and thirty beats per minute.
Speaker 8: We saw dance music or DJ culture is something different.
Speaker 8: So we took the perspective, the DJ perspective, because both
Speaker 8: of our publications pooled our resources and reached out to
Speaker 8: the DJ community. So it was the DJ community and
Speaker 8: finally getting access to the music industry through the New
Speaker 8: Music Seminar, and then that built and built in nineteen
Speaker 8: eighty one, it grew. We went to a club, and
Speaker 8: then in nineteen eighty two it went to the Sheridan,
Speaker 8: and then it went to the Hilton for two years,
Speaker 8: and then to the Marriotte. You know, and I know
Speaker 8: that there's going to be an episode of of the
Speaker 8: Breaks where this giant fight at the New Music Seminar,
Speaker 8: the music episode. Yeah, yeah, are you sure the New
Speaker 8: Music Seminar that was like in the in the pilot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was in Oh yeah, yeah, that was in
Speaker 1: the pilot.
Speaker 10: But now we have an episode where it actually takes
Speaker 10: place at night.
Speaker 8: No, I saw the Coming Attraction store and it looks
Speaker 8: just like it. They did a fantastic job, Thank you man.
Speaker 10: We take We shot that actually at the what's the
Speaker 10: hotel across the street from penn Station the Yeah.
Speaker 1: Shot and shot at the Hotel Pennsylvania. The rats over there, boy, yeah,
Speaker 1: they got tales to tell. That's why we shot it.
Speaker 1: That's crazy. So what was your I guess when I
Speaker 1: first started hearing about the New Music Seminar? Well Search
Speaker 1: has his tales of that's when Russell first saw him.
Speaker 1: The night I remember with the infamous Craig g Versus
Speaker 1: Supernatural battle, like, what are your what are your fond memories.
Speaker 8: Of well, because I was running it. You have to
Speaker 8: understand that I I was dealing with registration, I was
Speaker 8: dealing with planning.
Speaker 1: And everything myself like, and I was.
Speaker 8: Doing Tommy Boy at the same time and Dance Music
Speaker 8: Report at the same time, so imagine all of that.
Speaker 8: And when this thing was happening, I would move downtown
Speaker 8: to our office and uh on Lower Broadway and we
Speaker 8: would uh you know, and I would work there for
Speaker 8: like three months of the year, and I'd come to
Speaker 8: the Tommy Boy offices two days a week and being
Speaker 8: the Seminar offices like three days a week. And then
Speaker 8: when the two weeks before, I wouldn't even come to
Speaker 8: the Tommy Boy offices. So you know, it was that
Speaker 8: kind of thing, you know. So it was it was
Speaker 8: so my memories of it are you know, the few
Speaker 8: panels that I got to see because I had to
Speaker 8: go to all of them and run around and do
Speaker 8: everything and sort of manage the stuff that I was
Speaker 8: trying to manage, Like you know, who was the keynote speaker,
Speaker 8: was Frank Zappa or whoever was going to speak. I mean,
Speaker 8: you know, the press and what was happening, people trying
Speaker 8: to sneak in which was happening. There was so much
Speaker 8: stuff going on. If there was a fight, which that
Speaker 8: happened at one time, that became legendary.
Speaker 1: Versus Lynch mob one. Yeah, that's I think.
Speaker 8: And I think also Miami was involved because I think
Speaker 8: what's his name was, Luke was involved with that as well.
Speaker 8: They were throwing tables. I was told in the panels clubs,
Speaker 8: and then I had to stay in the green room
Speaker 8: the panelists ready room to talk to to set up
Speaker 8: all the people, because I helped put all the panels together.
Speaker 8: So I had to tell explain to the moderator what
Speaker 8: we're trying to achieve from each each panel discussion, so
Speaker 8: that the level of discourse would be high enough and
Speaker 8: we would achieve what we're trying to achieve from each one.
Speaker 8: It wasn't just go up there and do whatever you
Speaker 8: want to do. It was like I was producing all
Speaker 8: of the events that were happening, and then at night
Speaker 8: then other people people were doing the showcases and the
Speaker 8: you know, all of the shows that would happen.
Speaker 1: Who were some of the most notable debuts that happened
Speaker 1: at the New Music Seminar that now our household names or.
Speaker 8: At least Nirvana. I wouldn't call it a debut, but
Speaker 8: they played a tiny little club and they played this
Speaker 8: and it was one of his last gigs before he died.
Speaker 8: Also was at the New Music Seminar, and there was
Speaker 8: a bunch of rock groups that came and did their debuts.
Speaker 8: You know, so much stuff happened at the seminar, and
Speaker 8: there were so many people that would come. I'm still
Speaker 8: hearing stories I didn't know about about people who got
Speaker 8: their start. Yeah, people met, you know, I know, a
Speaker 8: big producer at one point was the president of Atlantic,
Speaker 8: Danny Goldberg met his wife on the panel he was
Speaker 8: on at the New Music Seminar. Other people like Craig
Speaker 8: Kalman is the you know now the CEO of Atlantic
Speaker 8: used to come to the seminar before he really got started.
Speaker 8: And when you know, people used to head enter at
Speaker 8: the seminar. I didn't know if somebody told me RuPaul
Speaker 8: was an Internet I didn't know Rupol was an intern
Speaker 8: at the seminar, but I know I saw him at
Speaker 8: the seminar. Maybe it was that year or some other year.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's all a blurb because you know, there
Speaker 8: were there were like, you know, twenty five panels over
Speaker 8: three days and three hundred or four hundred speakers and
Speaker 8: five hundred bands performing. It was just so much happening.
Speaker 8: We had a team of like twenty people just to
Speaker 8: produce that event. Year round, we had like eight people
Speaker 8: year round working in an event.
Speaker 1: So what point are you now expanding, Tommy boy? When
Speaker 1: does Monica lunch coming too? The situation? When do you
Speaker 1: get a full staff?
Speaker 8: Monica was there almost from the beginning, So I started
Speaker 8: with Jazzy Sensation, and I think sometime I met Monica,
Speaker 8: probably around eighty one or eighty two, I can't remember
Speaker 8: which year. Okay, she started right around then, but almost
Speaker 8: from the beginning, it was just me and her first
Speaker 8: that were the only two people that worked there. And
Speaker 8: then we had we got another person as an assistant,
Speaker 8: and we started to grow it a little bit after that.
Speaker 1: What were your I mean, did you guys share the
Speaker 1: same aesthetic, like what the label should be or is
Speaker 1: it just like you know, is it her job just
Speaker 1: to hear with the.
Speaker 8: And by the way, we were also running Dance Music
Speaker 8: Report at the same time, so we were still putting
Speaker 8: the stickers on and writing the articles. And that while
Speaker 8: we were doing Tommy Boy too. So when she started,
Speaker 8: she was doing both things with me.
Speaker 1: Okay, she was.
Speaker 8: Doing everything I needed to be done, and that's I
Speaker 8: needed to do everything, So she did it all.
Speaker 1: What were your feelings towards the competition at least def Jam?
Speaker 1: Were you guys looking at them like.
Speaker 8: Well, Jeff, we were before deaf Jam started, right.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying once def Jam comes and it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: now the car is getting crowded.
Speaker 8: Well, I think run DMC was. It was it was
Speaker 8: more rush than it was deaf Jam. So run DMC
Speaker 8: was the first one and that was profile really that
Speaker 8: stepped into our territory in a significant way. And and
Speaker 8: you know, I had mad respect for what they're doing.
Speaker 8: And I'm very close friends with Corey Robin Steele who
Speaker 8: had that label. And so I don't know, it's you know,
Speaker 8: I don't know that. I never really was competitive. Really,
Speaker 8: I'm not a I'm not a good competitor. I'm much
Speaker 8: more a better innovator, you know. So I'm just I
Speaker 8: would look at what they would do, just so I
Speaker 8: wouldn't do that. You know, whatever they're doing, I want
Speaker 8: to do the opposite. Of that. That's sort of the
Speaker 8: contrarian thing I was talking about before. It's like, okay,
Speaker 8: so Russell's doing this and this, what can I do?
Speaker 1: He's not doing it? Brings us to day.
Speaker 8: Well, he used to call my music frantic because his
Speaker 8: music was more R and B influence. You know, he
Speaker 8: was the guy who would be hanging out at the
Speaker 8: you know what I would go to. If I would
Speaker 8: go to the T Connection and Bronx River Center, he
Speaker 8: would not be there. He would he would be drinking
Speaker 8: splits of Moe at at you know, at the Fever.
Speaker 8: You know, he was a fever guy.
Speaker 1: You know, wait, it just hit me. You had interactions
Speaker 1: with Jake King. Would you consider Club Nouveau a Tommy
Speaker 1: Boy artist or was that just adition?
Speaker 8: We put out all the twelve inches, so yeah, we
Speaker 8: broke all those records with our team.
Speaker 1: What about was tom like Social Club also in that?
Speaker 1: Are they okay?
Speaker 8: That was on my Cola Records? Social Club Don McMillan, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Liquor that guy the guy who like the last that's
Speaker 1: the unmalcol record, not Malacola. Yeah, that was digital, that's
Speaker 1: the West Coast.
Speaker 8: Underwater Rhymes was on my Cola. You know, all all
Speaker 8: of those records. He had also had what's his name
Speaker 8: from Miami, he had Luke Skywalker was there. You know,
Speaker 8: all of the Bay Area groups were on the because
Speaker 8: he owned the pressing plant on Santa Monica Boulevard, so
Speaker 8: everybody went to him to get records pressed. So he
Speaker 8: became the default label. He was a tugboat captain from Alaska.
Speaker 8: Don McMillan. He didn't know to say no, He just said,
Speaker 8: all right, I'll press it. So you know, he ran
Speaker 8: the front door and the back door in the pressing plane.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 8: So you know he he could have been the biggest
Speaker 8: record company in the world if he had paid people
Speaker 8: and done things right. But you know, everybody complained that
Speaker 8: he wasn't. He wasn't straight with people.
Speaker 1: So he just got people to the next level, which
Speaker 1: was well.
Speaker 8: He got the record out and got them established.
Speaker 1: You know, I see so because I guess, well, you know,
Speaker 1: me wanted a Grammy. I believe were at least who
Speaker 1: did deal with it. I'm still lean on Manuva. So, uh,
Speaker 1: what was it about them at you know, did you
Speaker 1: feel like we should expand to the West coast and no,
Speaker 1: I think or did they come to you.
Speaker 8: Well, we had a relationship with Warner So that was
Speaker 8: a record label that was signed to Warner that I
Speaker 8: liked because I was a big fan of Time at
Speaker 8: Social Club, which I think was one of another one
Speaker 8: of the biggest twelve inches of all time. It was
Speaker 8: one of those record of the year records that never
Speaker 8: got the credit that it due. And I went and
Speaker 8: found them, and you know, I said, let me do
Speaker 8: this because I know what to do. You guys aren't
Speaker 8: going to know what to do on Warner Brothers really
Speaker 8: wasn't like a black music label. They didn't really break
Speaker 8: very many black artists at all, and they definitely didn't
Speaker 8: know what it.
Speaker 1: Is that odd to say that for at that point
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, eighty six, that they still don't know
Speaker 1: how to like. So that Harvard report stuff was just
Speaker 1: for not at least the Harvard report from the seventies, like.
Speaker 8: I don't know that.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, well there was there was a Harvard report
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two that specifically told the majors that
Speaker 1: you should start investing in black label. So as a result,
Speaker 1: Philly International gets inquired acquired from CBS Labels start you know,
Speaker 1: Echo to Atlanta.
Speaker 8: I never saw that report.
Speaker 1: It's yeah, it's too bads Harbor report.
Speaker 10: So but the thing is, I don't think Warner Brothers
Speaker 10: ever recovered from that though, Like they never really, I
Speaker 10: mean even when you talked to DJs and they would
Speaker 10: just tall you straight up. If we saw Warner Brothers logo,
Speaker 10: we knew it was whack. Like when it came to
Speaker 10: like hip hop or whatever, like.
Speaker 8: That Graham Central Station that was imprint and they had
Speaker 8: some didn't that at some period that had some George
Speaker 8: Clinton stuff for a minute, didn't they?
Speaker 1: Uh for the Funkadelic, the Funkadelic stuff, Parlotte Parliament, some
Speaker 1: of that stuff. One Nation Undergroove and and Uncle Jim.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I would have thought that that. So you
Speaker 1: actually went to mo Austin just said, yo.
Speaker 8: Let me do this. You know I can do it.
Speaker 8: I can handle the guy, and I can make it,
Speaker 8: you know, make it work and break it for you.
Speaker 8: So I got the twelve inches on that.
Speaker 1: Which leads me too while you treat me so bad.
Speaker 1: All right, So my favorite hip hop group of all
Speaker 1: time day Los Soul.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 1: First of all, just the marketings unprecedented. I mean shit.
Speaker 1: The first time I almost got suspended from school was
Speaker 1: hanging those damn day Loss stickers all over all over
Speaker 1: where I shouldn't have h in school.
Speaker 8: That was our second sticker, by the way, the first
Speaker 8: one was st e.
Speaker 1: T Stet stickers were first.
Speaker 8: That was the first sticker, and it was you know,
Speaker 8: it was orange and they cost three cents each. And
Speaker 8: that was sweet market the beginning. It was a crazy
Speaker 8: street market.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you were the first. I guess, yeah, your label,
Speaker 1: because that's no other label I recall really.
Speaker 8: But everyone so I innovated, and everybody took the stuff
Speaker 8: and out competed me, you know. You know, they went
Speaker 8: from stickers to giant stickers, to wrap cars, to wrap vans,
Speaker 8: to wrap whatever.
Speaker 7: They're basically giving you credit for come creating the promo, right.
Speaker 8: Like, you know, we just little things, you know that
Speaker 8: to get to get exposure to me. A three and
Speaker 8: six sticker that's fluorescent, that just has a few letters
Speaker 8: on it, if you put it on a payphone or
Speaker 8: on a latrine at the right club, you know it's
Speaker 8: going to be seen by a lot of people. We
Speaker 8: did one for opp Those were the three big ones
Speaker 8: that I still want that opp sticker. I remember where
Speaker 8: they went at Magic City during the Jack the Rapper conference.
Speaker 8: That made everybody, every program director was in the audience,
Speaker 8: and when they saw that on that the booty slap
Speaker 8: with the OPP on it, they went back and every
Speaker 8: time they heard opp there was that connection that was
Speaker 8: the originative.
Speaker 1: So when you when you get Daylight, is it you
Speaker 1: that's trying to sell up the angle of hippie daisy? Yeah,
Speaker 1: the hippie image. It was.
Speaker 8: It was an obvious thing that they you know, I
Speaker 8: did to find what the front arc cover was with
Speaker 8: Monica and somebody in the press said that, I mean,
Speaker 8: there was a review that said that, of course the
Speaker 8: alliteration saying the hippies of hip hop makes so much sense,
Speaker 8: you know. But then they got reactionary about all that stuff,
Speaker 8: which is really what really pissed me off a little
Speaker 8: bit more than the react than people saying that who
Speaker 8: cares what people say? Do you think the whole idea
Speaker 8: with me, myself and I is that you're not influenced
Speaker 8: by what other people say, and now you're influenced with
Speaker 8: other what other people say, and you come back with
Speaker 8: Dala soula is dead.
Speaker 1: Well, it's my favorite don't jump the gun just yet.
Speaker 1: I mean, let's talk about the happy period. So uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, what do you what do you? What are
Speaker 1: your thoughts?
Speaker 8: And it came up with the daisy age? Do you
Speaker 8: think I came up with that? You think that was
Speaker 8: a marketing idea? Of course, the sire of the phones,
Speaker 8: all of that stuff, everything was them all we do.
Speaker 1: But it's set a precedent because what because this is
Speaker 1: now the first time. I mean when Nation of Millions
Speaker 1: came up, that's the first time I heard white critics
Speaker 1: salivating over hip hop. But when three f On Rising
Speaker 1: came out, suddenly kids in my geometry class are having
Speaker 1: hip hop discussions minus me, Like suddenly, it's I see
Speaker 1: the I've seen the first hand effects of how that
Speaker 1: album worked brilliantly. So I'm just saying that, like, at
Speaker 1: what point did you feel as though, like instantly? Was
Speaker 1: it when you first signed them for Pluck Tuning or was.
Speaker 8: It I mean when we signed them at the beginning,
Speaker 8: we didn't know. I remember hearing the record through the wall.
Speaker 8: They were playing it for Monica and I heard it
Speaker 8: through the wall and I came in to see what
Speaker 8: it was. Because usually when a record sounds great through
Speaker 8: the wall, it has a good shot of being a hit.
Speaker 8: If it doesn't sound like anything through the WALLBB he
Speaker 8: doesn't have. I mean, you know, you need to be
Speaker 8: able to hear a hit two cars away, you know,
Speaker 8: if you're in a driving kind of a situation, And
Speaker 8: that was one of you know, it's something that is
Speaker 8: so different from everything that's the status quo. You know,
Speaker 8: something that penetrates the noise floor is important for indie
Speaker 8: labels to have something that nobody else is saying that
Speaker 8: can go beyond and that I heard it, A nice
Speaker 8: heard it, And when Monica and I talked about it,
Speaker 8: and I said, this is either going to be really
Speaker 8: big or it's going to be nothing at all. There
Speaker 8: is no in between with the record like this. This
Speaker 8: could not connect at all because it's so bizarre and different.
Speaker 8: Most stuff that's bizarre and different doesn't connect or it
Speaker 8: could connect. So it was our job to try to say,
Speaker 8: all right, how do we tie it together and connect
Speaker 8: the dots to make people get it.
Speaker 1: You know, do you remember the Bill Coleman right up
Speaker 1: in Billboard about that record? Yeah, it's again because the
Speaker 1: late eighties and just the overall disdain of hip hop
Speaker 1: with music critics really not treating it as for art.
Speaker 1: For him, I'll say that Nelson George and Bill Coleman
Speaker 1: at at Billboard wrote to like major like these three
Speaker 1: paragraph love letters about the record, which I felt was
Speaker 1: a game changer, at least for the At the time,
Speaker 1: I was working at a record store. So even like
Speaker 1: rock critics were like which one, I was working at
Speaker 1: Sam Goodies and in Philly, Uh, shout out to Sam
Speaker 1: Goodies on nut. They fired me afterward, but you know,
Speaker 1: and then they're putting up the display. Suddenly it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: we're hearing buzzz about this. They read Bill Coleman's article
Speaker 1: and suddenly like the main walls having a dayl out
Speaker 1: display all of a sudden, like I see the effects
Speaker 1: of it to you. I mean, so this wasn't a
Speaker 1: thing like a Mastermind meeting. I don't know, maybe in
Speaker 1: my head I'm just having a Uh.
Speaker 8: There were a lot of meetings at Tommy Boy where
Speaker 8: we talked about how can we penetrate you know, culture
Speaker 8: with this, in the media with this, and Monica had
Speaker 8: a great relationship with Bill Coleman and you know, and
Speaker 8: most of the media it wasn't just that. Also it
Speaker 8: was the Village Voice, because the Village Voice reviewer was
Speaker 8: the you know, grand dame, the main guy who everybody
Speaker 8: else followed, and when he wrote it up, everybody he
Speaker 8: was the guy that wrote up Also Africa Bambada, and
Speaker 8: everybody wrote out to what's the guy's name.
Speaker 1: Oh, Robert Chris Gal.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Chris Chris was you know, he still is, you know,
Speaker 8: but in the era of rock journalism, he was one
Speaker 8: of three guys, maybe the number one guy. He was
Speaker 8: so important. Whatever he said everyone had to take seriously.
Speaker 8: So he wrote wrote it up positively, and he had
Speaker 8: written up and bought it positively, so he was open
Speaker 8: to what we're doing because he knew we had interesting
Speaker 8: stuff and he was interested in that, in that kind
Speaker 8: of thing. So it was the combination of all of that.
Speaker 8: I don't really think that many people read Billboard, you know,
Speaker 8: outside of culture, but it was mainstream. New York Times
Speaker 8: gave it an amazing review. It got crazy reviews from
Speaker 8: everybody is you know, So press was one of the things.
Speaker 8: But before that, we had already put out Potholes in
Speaker 8: My Lawn as a video, which, by the way, the
Speaker 8: record wasn't successful.
Speaker 1: The Potholes was, but that video was crazy.
Speaker 5: It was crazy, and that was my first exposure to Dayla.
Speaker 8: With the motorized skateboards and all that stuff. It was
Speaker 8: a new concept at the time. Yeah, and we shot
Speaker 8: that with the Super eight or something like that eight
Speaker 8: millimeter video camera because you know, we didn't have We
Speaker 8: weren't making videos yet. It was till early days and
Speaker 8: no one was really getting play yet on videos. Also,
Speaker 8: I think MTV might have embraced Dyala Soul early and
Speaker 8: they weren't embracing that much black music at the time.
Speaker 1: But d TV Wraps was out, so by the time
Speaker 1: it was kicking in.
Speaker 2: The one discussions to do that. To appeal Dayla to
Speaker 2: white audience never never can And I say that only
Speaker 2: coming from a place for me.
Speaker 1: The early.
Speaker 2: Hip hop groups that appeal to white audiences were Dayla, Tribe,
Speaker 2: clal Quests, and a few years later was the Roots,
Speaker 2: Like those were the We never actually talked about that.
Speaker 2: I mean, I just I just wonder about because because
Speaker 2: that was a lot of a lot when I first
Speaker 2: started getting into tip hop, the white kids were talking
Speaker 2: about Dayla, soho on try calal Quest. I feel like
Speaker 2: those somebody somebody somewhere said something or I don't know
Speaker 2: how that, How did that happen?
Speaker 8: That's why I so penetrating into white media is what
Speaker 8: did that? So we were trying to get on MTV
Speaker 8: because we wanted as much exposure as possible, but we
Speaker 8: didn't label it white exposure. That's what you're saying, we
Speaker 8: don't want we don't. Like I said when I went
Speaker 8: into the Tea connection, that's just not the way we
Speaker 8: think about it. How much exposure can we get wherever
Speaker 8: it is, if it's white or black. I don't really
Speaker 8: give a shit if it's Latin or whatever.
Speaker 2: And I'm not trying to label it. What I'm saying
Speaker 2: is how did it happen? Because that was the college
Speaker 2: and that's that's what I'm interested in. I don't care
Speaker 2: what you call it. I just I just think that
Speaker 2: to me that that that was a.
Speaker 8: So we did a lot of things that we did.
Speaker 8: We had a we had a show at the Ukrainian
Speaker 8: National Home that was the first promo show to introduce them,
Speaker 8: and we invited the press to that show and they
Speaker 8: did a thing live there where they did the Bob
Speaker 8: Dylan thing where they held up the cards, the cards
Speaker 8: and dropping the cards. So that made a connection to
Speaker 8: people that this wasn't the an ordinary rap group that
Speaker 8: they're thinking about things that maybe are you know, at
Speaker 8: a different level than other rappers are thinking about things.
Speaker 8: And you know, but we didn't penetrate radio. We had
Speaker 8: no luck at radio and till Me myself and I
Speaker 8: so and it was it was that song that really
Speaker 8: made them, that took them over the hump. We were
Speaker 8: getting pressed, and we were getting some interest and people
Speaker 8: were finding out about it, but we didn't have a
Speaker 8: record that was really connecting until Me, myself and I
Speaker 8: came out.
Speaker 1: Did you know, was it when you heard it or
Speaker 1: was it like, Okay, of these twenty four songs you
Speaker 1: gave me, this song number eighteen is the one I
Speaker 1: could probably work well.
Speaker 8: So we have to talk about Prince Paul. And this
Speaker 8: is because Prince Paul produced the record, and Prince Paul
Speaker 8: was responsible for many of the samples on the album,
Speaker 8: and Prince Paul's style is obscure samples and it was
Speaker 8: I used to have fights about that as much with
Speaker 8: Prince Paul as it is with the rest of the group,
Speaker 8: because the cost of a sample is almost the same
Speaker 8: whether you sample something that's unknown or something that people
Speaker 8: would know. And what we're always looking for, especially because
Speaker 8: I know I have to bring the records to radio myself.
Speaker 8: When I bring the records to radio, if there's this
Speaker 8: familiar bridge, something that can take people from the unfamiliar
Speaker 8: to the familiar, we can speed up the number of
Speaker 8: listens it takes to make an unfamiliar record familiar. This
Speaker 8: is like behavioral science, I suppose you know. But so
Speaker 8: if you sample knee Deep and people have already played
Speaker 8: Knee Deep, you know, one spin and people will go,
Speaker 8: I know that sounds familiar. I get it. That's the
Speaker 8: spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of intellectual lyrics
Speaker 8: go down. So if we're trying to do something that's set,
Speaker 8: that's really forward sampling and really forward lyrically, at the
Speaker 8: same time, we could be just it's the tree falling
Speaker 8: in the woods and no one hears it. You know,
Speaker 8: we need people, we need to get exposure. So we
Speaker 8: needed something to get people over with that. And there
Speaker 8: was a little bit of debate because the group doesn't
Speaker 8: really like me. It's myself and it's not their favorite song.
Speaker 8: I've seen them say we hate the song, we hate
Speaker 8: the song, we hate the song, while they're singing to.
Speaker 1: Song, here's our hit.
Speaker 8: We hate the song, but it you know, and you
Speaker 8: know you could talk to Mason, you know about it.
Speaker 8: He was a proponent because he's a DJ's a proponent
Speaker 8: because he knows what that means for the dance. For
Speaker 8: he claims that he pushed the group to make that happen,
Speaker 8: or allow that happen, or to even use that and
Speaker 8: let it beyond the record. But to me, that was
Speaker 8: the semil record. And you know, you talked about led
Speaker 8: Zeppelin before. If it wasn't for a Whole Lot of Love,
Speaker 8: we wouldn't know about Zeppelin. A whole Lot of Love
Speaker 8: crossed over and it was a giant hit across many formats.
Speaker 8: You know, you need a record that takes takes an
Speaker 8: artist beyond and then they have the poetic license to
Speaker 8: do whatever the hell they want to do. And so
Speaker 8: that got day Less sold the right to do anything
Speaker 8: that they wanted to do. And to this day they're
Speaker 8: doing everything that they want to do the way they
Speaker 8: want to do it. They don't always sell a lot
Speaker 8: of records, but or generate you know, an enormous amount
Speaker 8: of excitement, but at least they're doing what they want
Speaker 8: to do, which most artists don't get to do.
Speaker 10: What is it that's keeping daylight off the streamer services?
Speaker 8: I mean the Tommy Boy because Warner Brothers controls those masters,
Speaker 8: and those masters are no they have samples on them
Speaker 8: that they they don't have the contracts or something like that,
Speaker 8: and they haven't recleared them or they're not comfortable that
Speaker 8: they're covered. But it's you know, the same people that
Speaker 8: clear those samples, cleared Naughty by Nature, House of Pain,
Speaker 8: and Digital Underground samples, so and all those are available.
Speaker 8: So I don't understand why what the reason is, but
Speaker 8: I'm in there.
Speaker 1: You're not personally, you're not responsible, you're not holding it hostage.
Speaker 8: I haven't owned the old Timmy Boy catalog since two
Speaker 8: thousand and two when Warner bought it. I'm trying to
Speaker 8: buy it back right now. Hopefully by the second half
Speaker 8: of this year, I'll have it back. And that's my
Speaker 8: first order of business, Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: When all is said and done, this is what three
Speaker 1: Feet High and Rising has at least achieved, which is
Speaker 1: every sample on that record has made music experts out
Speaker 1: of anyone who was between the ages of twelve and
Speaker 1: twenty two at the time of that album came out.
Speaker 1: Now I'm searching for it. I mean, did I really
Speaker 1: care about Houses of the Holy by led Zeppelin and
Speaker 1: my sister's recollection? Second I heard that break, I was like,
Speaker 1: oh shit, that's a day long soul. Now I'm a
Speaker 1: led Zeppelin expert. I'm going through their whole catalog. Tore
Speaker 1: recontextualized all the rock stuff right before Can You Keep
Speaker 1: a Secret? Like all those things, it's packed. It's an
Speaker 1: education pig. So at no point was it ever told
Speaker 1: during the negotiations or whatever, like lawyers are talking to
Speaker 1: each other. At no point was it ever explained to
Speaker 1: the Turtles but to flowin Eddie that hey, guys, this
Speaker 1: is actually a great thing for you because now your
Speaker 1: music is getting reintroduced to a whole new audience. Was
Speaker 1: it just like fuck you pay me? Or are you
Speaker 1: really even dealing with Floe and Eddie? Is it their lawyers?
Speaker 8: Their lawyers? But evidently I found out what happened is
Speaker 8: that one of the daughters heard the record until dad,
Speaker 8: have you heard this? Now you have to understand the
Speaker 8: song is called You Showed Me by the Turtles, and
Speaker 8: I was a Turtles fan. I bought Happy Together when
Speaker 8: that came out, and I you know, I mean, I
Speaker 8: liked it. I liked the Frank Zappa version better. But
Speaker 8: the thing I really thought was interesting about it is
Speaker 8: that Prince Paul slowed down the record from forty five
Speaker 8: to thirty three and used it at thirty three. So
Speaker 8: he used a very tiny amount and an interstitial piece,
Speaker 8: So he figured, why should I even clear this? Nobody's
Speaker 8: even gonna notice, but they noticed, you know. That's the problem,
Speaker 8: even if you use a little bit and they notice.
Speaker 8: You know. But there are people who have won cases
Speaker 8: in the last two years about deminimus uses, and probably
Speaker 8: today that case they wouldn't If somebody had wanted to
Speaker 8: take that case and appeal it, they probably wouldn't win it,
Speaker 8: depending on who the judge would be, because there have
Speaker 8: been a few that for something that small and that
Speaker 8: the minimus what would not be would you know, would
Speaker 8: not be recognized.
Speaker 1: Because it's it's not even that loop, isn't even the
Speaker 1: sample that loop is. Actually you did a thing.
Speaker 8: I'm looking at an instagram that you you posted last
Speaker 8: September saying, this is what's beautiful about hip hop, and
Speaker 8: this is what I wish publishers and record labels realize.
Speaker 8: This is this is you quest love by making unattainable
Speaker 8: and only an option for the rich.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: But but what these what these greedy lawyers uh and
Speaker 8: corporate leeches don't comprehend, is that sampling is an education
Speaker 8: and it gives back. And you said, driving home from
Speaker 8: Brooklyn Bowl and I hear on the radio a song
Speaker 8: that sounds like a familiar sample, I just am it
Speaker 8: and I copped the original. Actually the entire album evidently
Speaker 8: was a Jazz Crusaders record, right. Yeah, I get enlightened
Speaker 8: with more great music, and the labels get another investment
Speaker 8: in its product for me forty years after its release.
Speaker 8: This is when the music is beautiful. It isn't beautiful
Speaker 8: when you don't reinvest in your crops for real label
Speaker 8: and publishing house presidents of you meet hip hop halfway,
Speaker 8: and I'll do and it'll do some good. I love
Speaker 8: to have that conversation because I'm deep in the middle
Speaker 8: of that and I've been trying to reach you about that.
Speaker 8: So I'll do it on the air.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. Yeah, I mean, I know for a
Speaker 1: fact that I've purchased at least I mean, I'm now
Speaker 1: a guy that collects covers of songs. I know I
Speaker 1: have at least ten to fifteen copies of you showed
Speaker 1: me done by other people. You know, so they've actually
Speaker 1: gotten the return off of that use in other ways,
Speaker 1: but not really realizing the ripple effects of it. But
Speaker 1: I just feel as though because it's such an it's
Speaker 1: such a litigious atmosphere now and only the rich will
Speaker 1: be able to truly benefit from sampling that it's it's
Speaker 1: it's literally killing the music game right now. So thank
Speaker 1: you thanks for the setup.
Speaker 8: So besides still running Tommy Boy and still signing hip
Speaker 8: hop groups today and artists, I am also involved with
Speaker 8: a new startup business from Sweden called Buzz that's called
Speaker 8: track lib, and track lib is a company that's designed
Speaker 8: to make sampling fast, easy and affordable. We're going to
Speaker 8: all of the labels and publishers and getting all of
Speaker 8: the rights for masters, especially the older stuff, on a
Speaker 8: pre cleared basis, so people can download and sample a
Speaker 8: record for one hundred dollars, five hundred or twenty five
Speaker 8: hundred dollars in five minutes online without you.
Speaker 1: Okay, can I believe this song real quick? This is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite all set. That's all. I just
Speaker 1: wanted to play the air horn for that might get
Speaker 1: them a.
Speaker 8: Towel, so you know. And we're deep into it. We're
Speaker 8: very close with all three majors. We got twenty two
Speaker 8: label signed, we signed VP Records, Regae labels, we're putting,
Speaker 8: we're loading masters up now. It's in beta, private beta
Speaker 8: until October. It's going to be a revolution because for
Speaker 8: two dollars, you can download a wave file, drop it
Speaker 8: into a new mix. When you're ready to do it,
Speaker 8: you can you go back online. You can get a
Speaker 8: license in five minutes or three minutes online for as
Speaker 8: little as fifty dollars or one hundred dollars. And you
Speaker 8: have to agree to give up x percent of the
Speaker 8: derivative work on the publishing and the master's side, either
Speaker 8: ten percent, twenty five or fifty percent, depending how much
Speaker 8: of the original, how much you master you use. If
Speaker 8: it's over fifteen seconds, it's fifty percent. If it's under
Speaker 8: it's if it's under two sets, if it's two or less,
Speaker 8: it's ten percent. It's up to fifteen seconds, it's twenty
Speaker 8: five percent. That's it, so people can start sampling again
Speaker 8: and they'll be able to open up.
Speaker 1: We're I've been dreaming of this moment.
Speaker 8: That's why I've been trying to reach to reach go
Speaker 8: on your radio show.
Speaker 1: To talk to you. Someone sees it, So listen.
Speaker 8: Let me tell you who's The creative Advisory board already
Speaker 8: includes Prince Paul Large, Professor, Pete Rock, Peanut butter Wolf.
Speaker 8: You know, I wanted to talk to you about joining
Speaker 8: it too, because you're the perfect eye. You're already outspoken.
Speaker 1: I'm there. Wow, this is the greatest news. What's what's
Speaker 1: the name of.
Speaker 8: The track lib like track Liberation? Thank you?
Speaker 1: Where was this in two thousand and three? Wow?
Speaker 8: Well, and I talked to these labels, you know, when
Speaker 8: I talked to Aaron Fuchs or I talked to armand Balading,
Speaker 8: who controls the Old Judge's Parliament, And you know they're
Speaker 8: telling me. You know, arm ensued four hundred and seventy
Speaker 8: seven people for foot sample infringements and at the end
Speaker 8: of all of it break even. He didn't make any
Speaker 8: money from it, So if it had gone through track Live,
Speaker 8: he'd have made a ton of money. Because it wouldn't
Speaker 8: cost anything, and nobody would need a lawyer to clear
Speaker 8: a sample again or sample, and a replay even costs
Speaker 8: thousands of dollars, So to use the original it's cheaper
Speaker 8: now than to even do a replay, except that you
Speaker 8: have to give up part of the deriver of work.
Speaker 8: But I think that's a fair thing, and I'm telling
Speaker 8: all the rights holders you'll make more money because the
Speaker 8: only person who can afford to clear samples now is
Speaker 8: Kanye and maybe eight other people. There's like literally ten
Speaker 8: people who can afford fifty thousand dollars per track to
Speaker 8: clear a sample.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm glad you see it the way that I
Speaker 1: meant it, like it came from a heartfelt place. One
Speaker 1: of the aforementioned executives that you talked about actually tried
Speaker 1: to call my boss's boss's boss at my current job
Speaker 1: to get me dealt with because he felt as though
Speaker 1: I was trying to, first of all, be anti Semitic
Speaker 1: and disrespectful to his way of practice, which was never
Speaker 1: the case whatsoever. But this is a guy that, as
Speaker 1: far as I know, has made a living suing rappers,
Speaker 1: exactly rappers just for b boxing, just for using even
Speaker 1: half of his even a cake or a snare of
Speaker 1: his work. I mean, I understand it's a business, but
Speaker 1: you know, George Clinton once explained, he's like, yo, the
Speaker 1: reason why it wasn't by design that you know, I'm
Speaker 1: part of the West Coast g funk fabric. He's like,
Speaker 1: I came in cheap. He's like, right, I came in
Speaker 1: so cheap that I made you want to come back
Speaker 1: from more. And my prices were fair, and thus people
Speaker 1: always came back to me. And I just never understood, how,
Speaker 1: you know, in any type of music. I doubt that
Speaker 1: any no type of music, I mean even something as uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's pick fleet You told me, Steve that either
Speaker 1: you or Captain Kirk told me that Fleetwood Mac's uh dreams.
Speaker 1: If you look at the original reel on uh of
Speaker 1: of of of of the real the track listing, it's
Speaker 1: still called spinners. I'll be around sound alike, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean? Wow? So it's like no, but that's wow.
Speaker 1: It is a sound like yeah, exactly. So there's no
Speaker 1: song that's created that doesn't start at least with playing
Speaker 1: another song and figuring out, okay, now, what's my version
Speaker 1: of this? If I just take the Rubik's Q but
Speaker 1: the fabric and mix it up. But I feel as
Speaker 1: though the music business, which is catalogs, are suffering right
Speaker 1: now because no one's going back to those catalogs and
Speaker 1: using them unless it's being marketing.
Speaker 8: That's my argument. When I'm talking to all of them,
Speaker 8: I said, you've got hundreds of thousands of tracks, and
Speaker 8: in the case of the majors and even indies, tens
Speaker 8: of thousands of tracks that you don't get sync deals for,
Speaker 8: you don't get licenses for, nobody knows about, and they
Speaker 8: sit there collecting dust. That's the stuff we want. We
Speaker 8: want create diggers to be digital and find stuff fast
Speaker 8: and use it often so that you can have a hit.
Speaker 8: And I got the list of the one hundred most
Speaker 8: sampled records of all time.
Speaker 1: Here hit me.
Speaker 8: The first is the B side of a record by
Speaker 8: the Winstons. It's called Ammon Brother, you know, and that's
Speaker 8: the most sampled record of all time. The second one
Speaker 8: is Cheanze labat by B side. The third one is
Speaker 8: Lynn Collins. Think which is it takes two? Right?
Speaker 1: Wait?
Speaker 8: What'll second B side change? Labat?
Speaker 1: Oh Fresh of course?
Speaker 8: Right? James Brown, Funky drummer. And by the way, the
Speaker 8: James Brown catalog is already in for track lib. The
Speaker 8: guy who controls the estate wants it to be in Yeah,
Speaker 8: he does, and universal and I warn a chapel who
Speaker 8: controls the publishing are you know, are happy to make
Speaker 8: it available because the artist wants it. Some of the times,
Speaker 8: the problem is that the artist wants to approve each
Speaker 8: and every sample, and that won't work in track lib
Speaker 8: because everything has to be preapproved.
Speaker 1: Sorry, Bob James.
Speaker 8: Yeah, when you're shopping, you want to be able to
Speaker 8: know what something's going to cost before you buy it.
Speaker 8: People who sample have no idea what it's going to
Speaker 8: be cost or even if they have permission to you.
Speaker 8: So I'm telling people that ninety eight percent of the
Speaker 8: sampling that happens now is unauthorized or replaced. So you're
Speaker 8: losing all the money. And everyone's telling me, hey, our
Speaker 8: sampling business has gotten way down. Duh. You know at
Speaker 8: some point, you know there's five people left that can
Speaker 8: afford the sample. You got it exactly right. Dougie Fry
Speaker 8: is number five, Lotty Dottie, James Brown, James Brown with
Speaker 8: funky presidents yep. Then public Enemy bring the noise, which
Speaker 8: got to have samples on it already too. So the
Speaker 8: other thing with track lip is we can't put samples.
Speaker 8: We can't sample a sample. So what we need to
Speaker 8: do is get stems of the acappellas for the hip
Speaker 8: hop stuff, so people could sample the wrap stuff without
Speaker 8: resampling the samples. You got to go back to the
Speaker 8: original sample to get the samp. But we can direct
Speaker 8: people then honey drippers and Pizza the President.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, Pizza President. I thought that
Speaker 1: been number one. Well that's the one.
Speaker 8: Pizza the President is probably going to go to number one,
Speaker 8: considering the President today.
Speaker 1: So here here's a question for you.
Speaker 5: Let's say I buy a track off of the service,
Speaker 5: but it sounds too clean, you know. Let's say I
Speaker 5: have a vinyl copy that sounds dirty and I want
Speaker 5: the dusty and all that, you know, I want all
Speaker 5: that that that sonic character in the sample. Am I
Speaker 5: still allowed to buy the track online and still use because.
Speaker 8: The one that you're gonna get especially fingerprinted and watermarked,
Speaker 8: and you can always add vinyl crushy sounds as an effect,
Speaker 8: if that's what I mean. I remember buying Dala Soul
Speaker 8: a record cleaner so that they could clean the records
Speaker 8: for the samples, but they never wanted to do anyway.
Speaker 8: They were also according to a dot which was another thing.
Speaker 1: Where do we go to get it? What's the site?
Speaker 8: Tracklib dot com?
Speaker 1: Tracklib dot com?
Speaker 10: Okay, right, I think we're going I forget the show. Wait,
Speaker 10: we still got lots even we got a lot to cover.
Speaker 8: And number nine was Melvin Bliss synthetic substitution. And the
Speaker 8: number ten was run DMC. Here we go Live at
Speaker 8: the Funhouse.
Speaker 1: Ah yeah, oh damn, I can't tell you.
Speaker 8: Another one I thought was really interesting. Number eleven was
Speaker 8: Mountain Long Red.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, of course I love that. That was a
Speaker 1: coup I used to go see play when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. Yes, absolutely, that makes sense. I never would
Speaker 1: have thought, Wait, you have your top one hundred?
Speaker 8: Ye?
Speaker 1: Can I hear the bottom ten? Can I hear ninety
Speaker 1: to one.
Speaker 8: Ninety? Led Zeppelin? When the levy breaks? Von Mason bounced
Speaker 8: for Rock Skate Roll, Herman Kelly and Life dance to
Speaker 8: the Drummers beat, which I can't believe is that low
Speaker 8: knee deep Funkadelic. We just talked about Detroit Emeralds you're
Speaker 8: getting a little too smart, Rob Bass. It takes two
Speaker 8: already a Linn Collin sample, so it must be a
Speaker 8: part that's hit. It is often used Blowfly Sysame Street,
Speaker 8: that's funny. The Brothers j ain't we funking now?
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 10: Okay, okay with that, Yeah, Curtis blow Tough, uh Dja
Speaker 10: Trace and Pete Parson, Sniper and Dyke.
Speaker 8: But and the Blazer's lot of woman be a woman
Speaker 8: that I let a man be a man, which is
Speaker 8: we used it with sets to sign it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was about to say that the Sally thing
Speaker 1: that's number one hundred, that's I think, well, okay, at
Speaker 1: least in the especially in the case of when the
Speaker 1: levee breaks. Yeah, a lot of people just gunsy about
Speaker 1: using certain publishers because they know that they're going to
Speaker 1: come for the loot. Yeah, like a lot of that stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no reason why in Peace to President
Speaker 1: is the number one sampled number eight, But there's no
Speaker 1: reason why it should not be the number one because
Speaker 1: that's the well.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and when it gets to be part of Track Live,
Speaker 8: it'll go to number one.
Speaker 1: Then oh my god, what happens?
Speaker 7: You know?
Speaker 8: The thing is everybody uses it. So what we really
Speaker 8: want to encourage is great, we want to have as
Speaker 8: much of this stuff as we can get, but we
Speaker 8: want to drive you know, if we can't get Dyke
Speaker 8: in the Blazers, what sounds like that, So we want
Speaker 8: to direct people to. If we can't get it, we'll
Speaker 8: still have an there and direct people to something that's
Speaker 8: close enough that people could still use affordably, because we
Speaker 8: don't want people to go away or cheat because they
Speaker 8: can't use exactly that, especially if they're using this as
Speaker 8: a musical creation tool, which track Club will become. Eventually,
Speaker 8: they'll be built into all the digital audio workstations. It's
Speaker 8: gonna be in logic, it's gonna be in the fruity loops.
Speaker 5: And wouldn't it be cool if questlov had you know,
Speaker 5: some custom drum breaks available on track lad for sale.
Speaker 1: You know what what you don't know is happening right
Speaker 1: now is like I'm doing my own I'm doing my
Speaker 1: own homemade version of that now because as we speak,
Speaker 1: my phone is probably buzzing to death. Ever since late January,
Speaker 1: I've gathered the entire gods of hip hop beat making,
Speaker 1: from Primo to Pete Rock to Lars Professor to not
Speaker 1: to just Blaze the Swiss Beats, to Kareem Riggins to
Speaker 1: DJ Harrison. Those guys are like He's blowing their minds
Speaker 1: right now as we speak on this phone, Like I
Speaker 1: literally in ninth wonder like I've I have on my
Speaker 1: text chain thirty one beat makers and I've been giving
Speaker 1: them a break beat a day. But as of now,
Speaker 1: of March first, they've done turned it into like I'm
Speaker 1: still giving them a break beat a day, but now
Speaker 1: they're just on some next shit. They are now making
Speaker 1: records together, they're collect they're producing Conway's record like they're
Speaker 1: so something's happening. Even right now as we speak, like
Speaker 1: my battery is probably going low because now not Pete
Speaker 1: Rocket Notts are having a isolated baseline contest. It's like
Speaker 1: name literally like that's going on right now. I know
Speaker 1: there has to be at least three to four acts
Speaker 1: that you almost had that you didn't get, Like, are
Speaker 1: there any that comes to mind, like I almost signed them,
Speaker 1: or we almost had.
Speaker 8: Them, or I dropped them before they got big? About that?
Speaker 1: Forgive Prince Rocky.
Speaker 10: You're talking about Yeah, I know you guys are geniuses here.
Speaker 10: You gotta realize that there's a lot of people listening.
Speaker 10: If you listen to that beat, that is classic rizz joint.
Speaker 1: I mean it's weird though. It's like based off a
Speaker 1: George Michael hook. I got to Ladies, Wait that wasn't that?
Speaker 1: Was that? On Faith? It's the song is based on
Speaker 1: a George Michael and Jody Wattley songs on the Jody
Speaker 1: Watley album. Oh okay, the first or the second one?
Speaker 1: Was the first one? Okay? Well, I knew it was.
Speaker 8: You guys are scary man, you know everything.
Speaker 1: It's literally a collective of of music nerds right here.
Speaker 1: So so, so who did you Who was a close
Speaker 1: call for the label besides the Roots New Addition? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was going to say, you had Arthur Baker, Like
Speaker 1: why not?
Speaker 8: So no, we had the Johnson Crew. So Michael Johnson's
Speaker 8: brother is Maurice Starr. Maurice Star produced New Addition. They
Speaker 8: brought it to me a Candy Girl right. And this
Speaker 8: was right after I got the letter from kraft Work
Speaker 8: and I was shell shocked and I listened to it.
Speaker 8: I go, well, if Kraftwork has a problem with Planet
Speaker 8: Rocky Jack, we got a big problem with the Jackson
Speaker 8: five on this and they're ten times more powerful. What
Speaker 8: will I do? So I passed, And that was one
Speaker 8: of the dumb dist threads. Definitely, never act out of fear.
Speaker 8: Always just do it and figure the shit out later,
Speaker 8: you know, go for it, you know. And then the
Speaker 8: other one is there was there were a couple of
Speaker 8: them that I came close to getting, but I can
Speaker 8: get I wanted. I really wanted Dougie Fresh. I never
Speaker 8: got that.
Speaker 1: Lottie Dotty. Yeah. Wow, that was when it was One Records.
Speaker 1: Well it was Dana's last Fantasy.
Speaker 8: Yeah. No, actually it got sold to Fantasy. Later it
Speaker 8: was Donya. I don't think it was Fantasy. Originally it
Speaker 8: was Donya as an independent label out of the Bay Area,
Speaker 8: and then I think it went into Fantasy.
Speaker 1: So's an odd choice.
Speaker 8: I know, it's really weird.
Speaker 1: You pursued him and he was like, nope, I'm going on.
Speaker 8: He performed at Tommy Boy offices. He came to our
Speaker 8: offices up on ninety second Street, and we used to
Speaker 8: do this Wednesday night thing where groups could come up
Speaker 8: and audition and do stuff. You know. We did it,
Speaker 8: didn't do it for very long, but one of the
Speaker 8: people who came by, and I remember him beatboxing in
Speaker 8: the office. Was was him, and there were a few others,
Speaker 8: you know. I sometimes I don't always know about him
Speaker 8: because especially after nineteen ninety when the company started to
Speaker 8: have a lot of employees and got really big, sometimes
Speaker 8: people come in or different A and our guys had
Speaker 8: stuff Like I just was talking to Lord Jamar the
Speaker 8: other day, was by the office and he said brand
Speaker 8: Nubian was supposed to be on Tommy Boy, but Dante
Speaker 8: was the A and R guy, Dante the scrub, and he.
Speaker 1: He was our second He went to a lecture. He
Speaker 1: was our second guest on the show. Oh yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, where was your relationship with Dante?
Speaker 8: He was then one of the A and R guys.
Speaker 8: He's the one who brought in Queen Land TeaF so
Speaker 8: we're talking about Queen the t for that, that's the expression.
Speaker 8: So he's the A and OUR guy, the one an
Speaker 8: R guy and Tommy Boy who brought in the most
Speaker 8: stuff we got. We had a lot of a lot
Speaker 8: of A and R guys, dozens. He's the only one
Speaker 8: I can remember as actually having impact in bringing in
Speaker 8: artists that actually made money.
Speaker 1: So did you trust this year? Yeah, and I mean
Speaker 1: I know that with A and RS they have to
Speaker 1: watch the budget make sure that that doesn't go over
Speaker 1: any of those things. Like was he like your trustworthy,
Speaker 1: your best student, or however you want to he was.
Speaker 8: He was his own best student. You know, he knew
Speaker 8: what he wanted. He wasn't really interested. You know, he
Speaker 8: has his own way of seeing things, at least at
Speaker 8: that time. He's let's call it impetuous.
Speaker 1: But at the time, did you know that he was
Speaker 1: bringing you history?
Speaker 8: Yeah? He did with I mean he was he was
Speaker 8: our trusted A and our guy. So yeah, he brought
Speaker 8: some stuff in, so that was great. He brought in
Speaker 8: a couple of cool, really great things. And I can
Speaker 8: tell you I appreciate him more ten years later, after
Speaker 8: I went through twelve other A R people who didn't
Speaker 8: ever bring anything I could really think. You know, what
Speaker 8: he did was pretty great, you know, but you know,
Speaker 8: he was short tempered and impatient about stuff. He also
Speaker 8: didn't always want to hear the other side of you know,
Speaker 8: the corporate shit we have to deal with, you know,
Speaker 8: his corporations to get things through and to the cost
Speaker 8: and making things happen. So we could always do everything,
Speaker 8: but you know, and they're all also there are other elements.
Speaker 8: And he also wasn't a guy who liked to bring
Speaker 8: the record to radio and get exposure for artists. And
Speaker 8: so when whenever we looked at artists, we looked at
Speaker 8: their unique appeal and then we look at what what
Speaker 8: is their route to exposure for them? How can we
Speaker 8: get exposure? I mean we signed artists that had like
Speaker 8: Dala Soul. There was no route to exposure when we
Speaker 8: signed Daala. So but sometimes you just do things because
Speaker 8: you love it. If Dala Soul was half a million
Speaker 8: dollars to sign, we wouldn't have signed Daya so we
Speaker 8: couldn't have.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, uh, Poss told me that the
Speaker 1: recording budget for three feet High it was like twenty
Speaker 1: eight thousand dollars exactly. Wow, how's that? How's that even
Speaker 1: able to have?
Speaker 8: I think we might have cleared the samples on that
Speaker 8: budget too in those days.
Speaker 1: That tells you how bad it is today. No, no,
Speaker 1: but I'm just saying just in comparison. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: feeling like my early years was like nightmares.
Speaker 8: But if I if you know, when you're an independent
Speaker 8: label I always think about, you know, the days of
Speaker 8: Morris Leeve. We were talking about before seven inches is
Speaker 8: all that's sold in seven inches label sold seven inches
Speaker 8: to stores for twenty nine cents, and they cost twelve
Speaker 8: sense to make, so the margins were really tiny. So
Speaker 8: a gold record might have meant, you know, one hundred
Speaker 8: thousand dollars in those days. You know, in this era
Speaker 8: we were selling twelve inches, and twelve inches at four
Speaker 8: ninety eight was how we made most of our money.
Speaker 8: The album sales were ancillary. Most of our artists, we
Speaker 8: did deals for twelve inches and an option for an
Speaker 8: album that we would pick up later when we had
Speaker 8: to make we I think with Dala we made a
Speaker 8: firm option for an album. If we didn't, we picked
Speaker 8: it up right away, even before we released Me Myself
Speaker 8: and I, because we knew what it was. But the
Speaker 8: deal was economical enough that we could justify it taking
Speaker 8: a risk. And so what you said about sampling is
Speaker 8: also true to artists. An artist that's saying something very
Speaker 8: different than what everyone else is saying right now, or
Speaker 8: has a sound that's unique and doesn't sound like what's
Speaker 8: out there, shouldn't expect to get the kind of deal
Speaker 8: that somebody that sounds like Rihanna is going to get
Speaker 8: because people who think it's the next rounda will pay rion,
Speaker 8: you know, next round of money. People who are saying, look,
Speaker 8: this is a fifty to one shot, but I love it.
Speaker 8: That music should still come out. We need more crazy
Speaker 8: records coming out that break expectations and that we don't
Speaker 8: have to have sales expectations. When an artist signs for
Speaker 8: half a million dollars or even for two hundred and
Speaker 8: fifty thousand dollars are way high. And if you don't
Speaker 8: if the first single isn't a hit, you're dropped. I mean,
Speaker 8: you heard all the Interscope stories about these artists. They
Speaker 8: were signing for a million dollars and dropped before the
Speaker 8: album came out the first single didn't hit. It's too expensive.
Speaker 8: There's taking gigantic advantages. Advances is not really the best
Speaker 8: advantage of the artist. The artists really should say, how
Speaker 8: do I get a bigger piece in the back end
Speaker 8: than a giant piece in the front end. But managers
Speaker 8: commission that piece, lawyers commission that piece, so everyone gets
Speaker 8: bad advice. Artists that are super creative hold on to
Speaker 8: as much of the equity as you can hold on
Speaker 8: to it and get paid a bigger piece and take
Speaker 8: a smaller advance and always get more times at bat
Speaker 8: like more times it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's like, yo, if my first one don't pop,
Speaker 10: at least let me get exactly.
Speaker 8: My thing is, what if it's the third swing or
Speaker 8: the fourth swing. All those artists that signed to the majors,
Speaker 8: they don't get a third swing. It's strike two, you're out,
Speaker 8: Strike one, you're out. You know what if their best
Speaker 8: record is on the second album, You're not getting to
Speaker 8: the second album. It's just not going to happen in
Speaker 8: this economics. So you either let your lawyers and managers
Speaker 8: from the old days still convince you got to get
Speaker 8: the biggest upfront deal because it's good for them, for
Speaker 8: the biggest you know, from the biggest labels, or you
Speaker 8: signed to an indie or put your record out yourself
Speaker 8: on tune core. But if you know, you still need
Speaker 8: a team that's got to help compliment and build a
Speaker 8: marketing plan and execute and try to get you exposure
Speaker 8: and help you with a reality check and you know,
Speaker 8: guide you through the process. You know, I don't know,
Speaker 8: you know, it just seems to me like that. There's
Speaker 8: I think that in this day and age, artists should
Speaker 8: be smarter. They shouldn't be taking traditional record deals anymore.
Speaker 10: You said, you have a meet coming up out there,
Speaker 10: you have a meeting with Naughty by Nature and there's
Speaker 10: a story about trech and some wildlife in the offices.
Speaker 1: Was that real?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Okay, that was real?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What happened?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 1: How did what? What was that situation? And how did
Speaker 1: that situation go?
Speaker 8: First, I want to say, now, Tommy Boy only ever
Speaker 8: had to have guards or any kind of armed anything
Speaker 8: in our office two days. In the history of the company,
Speaker 8: we never had bulletproof glass. We never had beef with
Speaker 8: artists or anything like that. But there was a time
Speaker 8: when Trench wasn't in touch with KG and Vinnie or whatever,
Speaker 8: and we were working trying to work something out where
Speaker 8: they can do something on somebody else's record, and by
Speaker 8: the way, it had already been worked out and with
Speaker 8: everybody else, Buttretched didn't know, and he was pissed off.
Speaker 8: So he came and he but he let some garter
Speaker 8: snakes and mice from the pet store loose in the office.
Speaker 8: And I found out later that were you in the
Speaker 8: office with Now. A lawyer told him to do it.
Speaker 8: Paul Marshall, who passed a few years ago, who was
Speaker 8: actually the lawyer that represented the Beatles when they went
Speaker 8: to VJ. I actually told him that they should do
Speaker 8: it full Marshall told me this, which I found.
Speaker 1: I just want to read one an hour before when
Speaker 1: he's at like pet Co. Yeah, are you looking at this?
Speaker 1: A whole house pit something like that by the Snakeable.
Speaker 10: But now y'all are cool, now, y'all? Yeah, okay, cool, Now, okay,
Speaker 10: you're trying to work with them.
Speaker 1: You know. The thing about Naughty is all right, so
Speaker 1: we're There have been some times where we've done shows
Speaker 1: with Naughty and between the audience reaction and just the
Speaker 1: orange slaught of hit after hit after hit after hit
Speaker 1: anthems like I mean, Naughty by Nature is catalog bar none.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm so At the time when I was
Speaker 1: playing it, I was like, Wow, when they came out,
Speaker 1: I didn't show my full appreciations as I should have.
Speaker 1: But now in like, there should be no reason in
Speaker 1: the world why they don't work until they're ninety. I mean,
Speaker 1: not until they're they're they're long gone, Like these songs
Speaker 1: still work and as long as Naughty is willing to
Speaker 1: do it. I mean I almost feel as though, like
Speaker 1: Naughty is probably the most credible pop hip hop act.
Speaker 10: I would say maybe either them what I'm with you
Speaker 10: them and like Wu Tang because like the first Wu
Speaker 10: Tang album, but I don't think.
Speaker 1: Wu Tang knew That's the thing. It's like, like Wu
Speaker 1: Tang's first record is full of all these modern yeah,
Speaker 1: like they're referencing Donnie Marie and Underdog and the Flintstones
Speaker 1: and you know, a schoolhouse rock like real. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're like day La Soul, but it's so grimy that
Speaker 1: you forget that they're coming from that. But just in
Speaker 1: terms of Naughty by Nature, it's like they're giving you
Speaker 1: anthem after anthem after anthem. How come? And I'm asking
Speaker 1: this kind of is two short questions. How why weren't
Speaker 1: they marketed as like pop hitmakers? Well, no, no, no, I mean.
Speaker 8: Because that is death if we had done that, if
Speaker 8: we had worked there, I mean, that is Flames the Machete.
Speaker 8: I mean, they were pop back, but they had to
Speaker 8: be disguised a little bit harder, you know, otherwise it
Speaker 8: would have come off as whack.
Speaker 1: So you're saying that that's were they aware of it,
Speaker 1: because yeah, I mean, hip Hop Array isn't a pop
Speaker 1: song per se. I mean as a Curtis Mayfield breakbeat.
Speaker 1: He's arguing with you kind.
Speaker 5: Of look at Cage's production though, because you always have
Speaker 5: those nice little pretty keyboard lines, piano lines and stuff.
Speaker 1: So I mean, yeah, but so did Tribe and Slum Village.
Speaker 1: But it's just mightn't have hooks. They didn't have hooks.
Speaker 8: That was an arena anthem. And you have to understand,
Speaker 8: at the same time, Tommy Boy was putting out.
Speaker 1: Jack jams about Saya.
Speaker 8: And so we had a relationship with all of the
Speaker 8: arenas in the country and all of their music directors,
Speaker 8: so we could get when we whatever we put on
Speaker 8: that record would be played in all the arenas. And
Speaker 8: so when Hip Hop Array went on that record, it
Speaker 8: got played in all of the arenas. So one of
Speaker 8: the reasons that got big and it's still big now,
Speaker 8: is because a lot of Tommy Boy acts became arena
Speaker 8: anthems because we controlled jock jams. And you know, I think.
Speaker 1: Just discovering that right now, but I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: House of Pain.
Speaker 8: Will fall into that too, because we didn't talk about
Speaker 8: that which that album was the.
Speaker 5: You know, you didn't talk about my favorite, one of
Speaker 5: my favorite hip hop groups of all time.
Speaker 1: Underground. Yeah, one question I had the Tommy Boy was
Speaker 1: it a Tommy Boy Black Black label and Hilver label? Yeah?
Speaker 8: What was?
Speaker 1: What was that era?
Speaker 8: That was for the underground beats we had, We had
Speaker 8: Silver and we had Black and Black was supposed to be,
Speaker 8: you know, for a bunch of twelve inch singles where
Speaker 8: we were prospecting for things but that we're going for
Speaker 8: sort of an underground hip hop audience and trying to
Speaker 8: find something that would be able to launch through DJ
Speaker 8: specialty shows, you know, and college radio. That's what you know.
Speaker 8: That was. That was that attempt. Nothing that actually really
Speaker 8: can't ended up coming through, but we could sign. We
Speaker 8: wanted to increase our bandwids so we could sign more music,
Speaker 8: and so we did it that that way, and Silver
Speaker 8: was disco, dance, orient and more stuff because you know,
Speaker 8: Tommy Boy was always a DJ label, so we you know,
Speaker 8: we while we were putting out all this hip hop,
Speaker 8: we were also putting out EDM electronic music that's not
Speaker 8: necessarily hip hop. We put out eight o eight State,
Speaker 8: you know, Information Society, which you did mention before. But
Speaker 8: then there's a whole bunch of things like we put
Speaker 8: out Cold Cut and and LFO you know so, and
Speaker 8: those were like the first electronica records in America we
Speaker 8: put out. So it's not just in hip hop where
Speaker 8: we pioneered. We pioneered in other genres as well.
Speaker 10: So what made the artists leave Tommy Boy? Because I'm
Speaker 10: looking at all the people you name and like once
Speaker 10: they left Tommy Boy, like that was kind of it
Speaker 10: for them.
Speaker 8: Maybe that was their time. I guess, you know, everybody
Speaker 8: thinks that if they're only on a label that spends
Speaker 8: more money or that's more powerful, they should do better.
Speaker 1: But you did you ever have aspirations to turn Tommy
Speaker 1: Boy into a major? Uh?
Speaker 8: Like I said?
Speaker 1: Or you always had an independent spirit.
Speaker 8: I like to be the innovator more than the you know,
Speaker 8: the competitor. I like to you know, be the first
Speaker 8: one in and try to do something nobody else didn't have.
Speaker 8: People say wow, you know that, that's you know, a
Speaker 8: turning point for me in my life. And people can
Speaker 8: say Planet Rock was that for a lot of people
Speaker 8: day all I was that for a lot of people.
Speaker 8: You know, I'm sure there are a lot of women
Speaker 8: who could say Latifa was that for even though her records,
Speaker 8: you know, never went gold for us. You know, her
Speaker 8: music video gold. The only gold record she had was
Speaker 8: after she left, Like wow, ladies first all they were
Speaker 8: claimed and you know, but you know, part of it
Speaker 8: was females and hip hop. You know, females and hip
Speaker 8: hop never sell as much as males and hip hop.
Speaker 1: That's the whole show.
Speaker 8: And I don't want to keep track. I know what
Speaker 8: could happen, man, I got to get there.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you, Tom, I appreciate your wisdom. Just one
Speaker 1: last question, where do you feel music, dance music, hip
Speaker 1: hop culture, Like do you still feel that it's thriving,
Speaker 1: has some life left as this.
Speaker 8: Which one dance music.
Speaker 1: Just in general?
Speaker 8: Like, well, when track Live is successful, it'll be a
Speaker 8: whole renaissance because if you can unleash all of the
Speaker 8: catalog in the world and let people access it, we're
Speaker 8: going to see a musical renaissance like we never did before.
Speaker 8: And I think if it can happen, well Trump is president,
Speaker 8: so much the better because I think we're going to
Speaker 8: have a lot of great music over the next four
Speaker 8: years in.
Speaker 1: Your mouth to God's yours. Well, thank you very much,
Speaker 1: Tom Silverman, I appreciate it. Man, I'm sorry after he
Speaker 1: up the the the bomb about the sample clearance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was I just absolutely lost the script to the
Speaker 1: entire show. I have regrets. I don't have reflections. I
Speaker 1: have regrets because I you know, there there were some
Speaker 1: Digital Underground stories and man, damn, I didn't get to
Speaker 1: ask about AI part one, two and three, and ye
Speaker 1: did we get put three? We never well I wanted
Speaker 1: to know what happened. But we can, you know, have
Speaker 1: Prince Paul, we can have no but Prince Paul was
Speaker 1: also working on part three. He was he was supposed
Speaker 1: to yes the return. So uh, you know, I've learned
Speaker 1: that I have to ask more concise questions on question.
Speaker 1: You know it only took you twenty five episodes.
Speaker 10: Here, you know, yo what it is because this is
Speaker 10: what I learned in this episode. Yeah, yeah, it's okay,
Speaker 10: this is what it is. This is our dynamic, this
Speaker 10: is what this is what we gotta be. Okay, I'm
Speaker 10: the video, you're the pop up bubbles, Like this is
Speaker 10: how we So it's like if we do it for
Speaker 10: moving on, or you can meet a video and I.
Speaker 1: Can be whatever.
Speaker 10: But we have to have just like a continuous track
Speaker 10: where it's just beats, just boom boom boom, boom boom,
Speaker 10: and in those beats it's like hey, pop up, bubble
Speaker 10: for like two minutes and then okay, back to the beat,
Speaker 10: because like.
Speaker 1: We never even get to like I forgot, where do
Speaker 1: we get lost? Where did I lose?
Speaker 7: I think we did good this time.
Speaker 10: I mean, whoa cool, But we didn't get to get
Speaker 10: to like the meat like an audience.
Speaker 1: But the thing is, I don't think I also don't
Speaker 1: think that Tom is full of the stories we really
Speaker 1: wanted to, you know what I mean, like Latin quarter stories.
Speaker 1: There was that time when you know they had a
Speaker 1: machee at my neck.
Speaker 10: Well, I don't think you would have those stories. I think,
Speaker 10: like with people like him, like what we have. I mean,
Speaker 10: three hours sounds like a lot of time, but when
Speaker 10: you're dealing with a motherfucker like that, it's really not.
Speaker 1: Get on Q tips. So give ourselves some credit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like you kind of gotta I think, just
Speaker 1: have him.
Speaker 10: If we just went just beat the beat to beat hell,
Speaker 10: that's two hours easy, just right there if we just
Speaker 10: want to see with me.
Speaker 1: The first the first hour goes by so slow, and
Speaker 1: usually when it gets to like one hour fifty minutes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, this is your tweeting right now.
Speaker 1: I can see the tweets coming in. Yeah, listening to
Speaker 1: like a fucking well, First of all, anyone is still
Speaker 1: sticking with the show. They are die hard. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you. The best twelve of y'all. We can only
Speaker 1: build up from there. Thanks mom. I still feel as though,
Speaker 1: you know, there's there's major knowledge that we game from
Speaker 1: the show. But I will admit that once he started
Speaker 1: talking about the idea of sample clearances being a thing again,
Speaker 1: that's amazing. I absolutely just threw the script out the show.
Speaker 5: I knew that was gonna happen to because we were
Speaker 5: actually talking about that before before we started, and.
Speaker 1: I was like, when he's this, the show is over. Well,
Speaker 1: ladies and gentlemen on behalf of I'm sorry, did you
Speaker 1: learn anything.
Speaker 7: I'll just keep it short and simple. I was just
Speaker 7: gonna say I appreciated what he said. He was an innovator,
Speaker 7: not a competitor, you know what I mean? And I
Speaker 7: just not for nothing. That's dope, and it's good to
Speaker 7: know that you can. You know, fear is a powerful thing.
Speaker 10: And the fact that he was like, you know, the
Speaker 10: common threat I kind of run through his career is
Speaker 10: that he's like, I mean, he's essentially a filter. Like
Speaker 10: he's a person that's saying, hey, like with the dance
Speaker 10: the discold mag like this is what you need to
Speaker 10: get on, you know what I'm saying, like kind of
Speaker 10: being just the you know, just kind to be in
Speaker 10: that conduit of like helping people sift through all the
Speaker 10: garbage and saying, Yo, this is what the fuck y'all
Speaker 10: need to be on. And uh, he's a filtering like
Speaker 10: a facilitator. That's what I picked up from his career path.
Speaker 10: Like even with them doing the track lip stuff, that
Speaker 10: is something that I mean, it can make a lot
Speaker 10: of money, but it is also something that again.
Speaker 1: It filters through all the bullshit.
Speaker 10: So if you already know there's no in hell I
Speaker 10: can clear this sample, let me give you a list
Speaker 10: of samples or library samples that you know you can clear.
Speaker 5: I'm just waiting to find out how the major labels
Speaker 5: are going to screw it all up, because they always.
Speaker 1: Forge, always do.
Speaker 10: I'm saying, imagine, it's gotta be some kind of scale,
Speaker 10: because I mean, you can't tell me that like they're
Speaker 10: gonna charge Kanye the same thing is Rihanna Wright, right
Speaker 10: right right, It's gotta be something.
Speaker 1: It'll be a jig. And I think, but I feel
Speaker 1: as though if we just come up with and the
Speaker 1: thing was he was doing percentages, if it's minimum usage,
Speaker 1: because what what I was trying to explain was the
Speaker 1: main loop of transmitting line from Mars is really the
Speaker 1: hay Jude Wilson picket loop. That is just that's the
Speaker 1: one second turtle thing. And so it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: if there is a fair percentage thing going on, then
Speaker 1: you know it's free for all. But you know, now
Speaker 1: you deal with publishers that just say, you know, I
Speaker 1: want seventy five percent in bet and if they use
Speaker 1: the second one, I want seventy five and there's no
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty percent pie. You know, so it's
Speaker 1: for me that is the best. I mean, even if
Speaker 1: it doesn't come to fruition in my lifetime in a
Speaker 1: way that's like fair and like quote back of the day,
Speaker 1: I mean, just the fact that someone else is thinking
Speaker 1: of it because I spend every waking moment wishing that
Speaker 1: one of these publishing house people would just get on
Speaker 1: they crack dealer ship. Yeah, because I know they're not
Speaker 1: making money. They're just sitting on on publishing and not
Speaker 1: making it work. So you know, let's let's keep keep
Speaker 1: shout out the track. Hopefully they make it work.
Speaker 10: They need to get mad live and Mad live for
Speaker 10: track live, like just that could be.
Speaker 1: A market for the mad Lib DJ Harrison Yes, my
Speaker 1: man shout out to him, Richmond v A. So, but
Speaker 1: I think what he's thinking about that kind of ship,
Speaker 1: that's hot. I thought I needed.
Speaker 2: I thought it was interesting how he looked at the
Speaker 2: artist as a whole. It was about marketing and promos
Speaker 2: and whatever. It wasn't just about whether the music was good.
Speaker 2: The music understand had to be good. And then his
Speaker 2: ability to exploit everything about it was sort.
Speaker 1: Of amazing to me.
Speaker 2: I thought, I just I don't think like that at all,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 10: So, yeah, the way he thought about it as a
Speaker 10: label guy, because that was something that I had argued,
Speaker 10: you know, whereas like back in the day, it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 10: what if we take a smaller percentage up front? To
Speaker 10: a smaller advance to ensure that we can get more
Speaker 10: on along. And like every manager, every attorney they're all
Speaker 10: like they.
Speaker 1: Want to get as much you can up front because
Speaker 1: that may be the only money you see. And it's like, well, well, ship,
Speaker 1: if you take five hundred dollars, that it is gonna
Speaker 1: be the only money you see. You know what I mean?
Speaker 1: But I don't know. It was it was good to
Speaker 1: hear him, hear the.
Speaker 2: Stickers and things like that, Like you see all those
Speaker 2: stickers fucking everywhere, and they were all about it was
Speaker 2: a visual thing as much as an audio thing, which I.
Speaker 1: Thought was very interesting. It's called branding, thank you.
Speaker 7: It's like a fifteen year old word branding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's branding. Yeah.
Speaker 10: They were more famous like they were was probably next
Speaker 10: to Death Jam. They were like the only label I
Speaker 10: can remember that I could I would buy based on
Speaker 10: market on Tommy Boy if it was a Tommy Boy record, Like, okay.
Speaker 1: They could be official. That was the Cold Sign exactly.
Speaker 1: This could be official. Uh Any thoughts, Bill, I.
Speaker 5: Mean, I kind of really want to piggyback off of
Speaker 5: what everybody else has said about about tom being a
Speaker 5: label guy. Excuse me, and thinking of the track, think
Speaker 5: in the way that he thought of it. I mean,
Speaker 5: I hate to say it, but it reminds me of
Speaker 5: thoughts that I've had, you know, coming up. I mean
Speaker 5: actually his whole interview, you know, just from the fact
Speaker 5: that he was doing tip sheets and stuff like that
Speaker 5: when he was younger. I mean, I was coming up
Speaker 5: with making up charts of my own when I was
Speaker 5: like ten, twelve, thirteen.
Speaker 1: I meant your own chart.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was making up charts because no, I was like,
Speaker 5: when Jet Magazine needs to come home, I read, I read,
Speaker 5: I read back to the front. I read Jet magazine
Speaker 5: back to front. I ever read Jet from front to back?
Speaker 1: I don't know, I always read it back to front.
Speaker 1: Did from no, no, no, Did I take the Beauty
Speaker 1: of the week, Beauty in the week in the back?
Speaker 1: She was in the middle. She was in the middle.
Speaker 1: She was like a Beauty of the week. I didn't
Speaker 1: read it past that. He's like it was a society,
Speaker 1: it was the same week. And than the quotes, the
Speaker 1: celebrity quotes that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but from like doing the tip sheets and and
Speaker 5: just the way that he was, you know, pretty much
Speaker 5: said that he's contrarian and it's always thinking about what's
Speaker 5: missing and what's not there. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 5: of myself paint with and makes me realize that I
Speaker 5: just wasted thirty seven years of my life.
Speaker 1: Gentlemen, I'm paying Bill wasted, Boss Bill Franzigelow. Why are
Speaker 1: you and Sugar Steve any words? Sugar Steve all the people?
Speaker 12: Any words he's supposed to ask me for you, Engineer.
Speaker 12: That's it, Ladies and gentlemen, come back for next week's question,
Speaker 12: Love So Free When I'll.
Speaker 1: Tell you what I learned last week Quest Love Supreme
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