You really started collecting records at age five?
My siblings were already teenagers. My folks were trying to get these kids out of the house and then here comes Paul. I wanted to be like my older brothers, and they collected music. My dad loved music and was a jazz guy. I'd look at his collection and think, "He has a bunch of records!" But now I realize it was just [gestures to show a 2-foot stack].
It all depends on what's in the stack, right?
His was hardcore jazz. [John] Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. For a kid's ear, it's not like a melody you catch on TV. It was more [mimics Monk's percussive piano chords]. Listening to that with him and my mom's records… everything was focused on records. Back in those days, department stores had record sections, and I told my mom I wanted the 45 of James Brown's "Hot Pants [(She Got to Use What She Got to Get What She Wants)]" and King Floyd's "Groove Me." They were 99 cents each. Those two records were the beginning of my collection.
This is just a Long Island suburban department store. Not digging in crates at A-1 [Record Shop (legendary East Village record store)]?
[laughs] A-1 didn't exist. I don't think the owners were even born yet! Just regular department stores, like Korvettes or TSS (Time Square Stores) all had record sections that also stocked cassettes and 8-tracks.
You developed into a DJ before joining Stetsasonic. How did you move from collecting to learning the craft of DJ-ing?
I started DJ-ing when I was 10, and that was prompted, again, from having older siblings. They'd talk about getting a Pioneer turntable or a new needle, so my focus was on what they had. In those days, I'd ride my bike to the park, and they'd have these big speakers set up. In Long Island, I'd hear "thump thump thump" and know somebody's having a party. As I'd ride closer, I'd see all these people outside, speakers blasting, and the turntables. I would sit in front of the DJ on my bike thinking, "That's what I want to do!" We had one of those component sets that had a turntable and maybe an 8-track attached to it. I got another cheap BSR turntable, and I put it on top of the console. I ran the two turntables left and right side into the console and channeled it out to mono. I could mix from one turntable to the next with the balance knob. After a while the knob got pretty loose!
The one knob you needed.
This was before scratching, so from there it was really about trying to get money. At that point my dad had passed away and we were a single parent household. "How do I get this money to buy records?" Equipment was just way out of pocket. Slowly but surely, I got a better setup, but I think learning how to DJ on something rickety made it easier by the time I got something legit.
It's like finally driving a nice car.
It's just like driving a car. I had this one-wheeled car and I balanced it out. Now I've got four wheels. I could turn corners without a problem. It made me that much more skillful and even more mindful of every little thing about a turntable. It's like when you see Terminator X [Norman Rogers] and he takes something and breaks it down. You had to figure out how things worked and why it worked. You opened it up. You took it apart. Let's tighten the clamps. Let's oil it, let's clean it. It's like going to Cuba and they got all these old cars. Where are the parts? They're making them themselves because they can't get parts and they are trying to keep these cars from the '50s and '60s working. That's how I analyze music as well: From the technical side of the equipment, to looking at music and doing the Terminator X thing, to dissecting every little part, every tone.
That's the same way you approach conceptual albums like A Prince Among Thieves.
Everything is a picture in my head. When I first saw Pro Tools in the '90s, I wished I was able to afford it, and I wish I'd used it for A Prince Among Thieves. I did that all manually with MIDI and samplers, but I already visualized music like that in waves and layers. By the time Pro Tools came around it made it easier for me, because I'd already been visualizing music.
Going back to your formative DJ years, who inspired you beyond local parties?
It started with Afrika Bambaataa's [Lance Taylor] mixtapes and the way he selected music. Jazzy Jay [John Byas] was one of his DJs with [Universal] Zulu Nation, and he was a big inspiration for me – his scratching was way beyond everybody else. All I had was a tape and my imagination; playing it over and over again and hearing how good he was. That got me into the skillful part of it. Bambaataa's record collection was so deep that even with Shazam [app] some of it is impossible to find. I think that helped with sampling too. Having a diverse palette – and listening to what he did – made me look for different music than I would normally play.
How did you connect with Stetsasonic?
I can remember the day clearly. I was on my Schwinn [bike] with some green Nikes I got off the clearance rack. My friends next door said, "Yo, we're going to Brooklyn to DJ this block party. You want to come?" We all squished in a van, and when we got there it was a battle with two or three other DJs. They'd stack up the speaker towers with bass bins, mids, and horns. I had practiced so much in my room that by that time I was doing tricks, like back and forth really fast, behind the back, and so on. If you would've caught me back then, I would've said, "I'm the best DJ I know!" [laughs] I felt that way, because I was ridiculed for starting with so little. Being a DJ was about going to the park and having power, and I didn't have the power. It was just practice, practice, practice. I had the skillset, but nobody could hear it if you didn't have the power.
Hearing you through the outdoor speaker towers.
At this battle I was showing off, and it took the crowd from all the other DJs to come watch me. One of those groups of people watching me was Stetsasonic. This was back in the days of hip-hop guys wearing spikes around the neck, leather, and drapes of fur. They were real showboat-y, and I thought they were a gang or something. They were looking for a DJ and asked me to join the group. That's how it started. We were doing parties, shows, and the next thing you know we were making a demo. I was a kid. I didn't know what a demo was. I'm like, "Okay, just put some scratches on it." Next thing you know, I'm at Tom Silverman's Tommy Boy Records. It wasn't in my plans. Some people have an 8x10 glossy, "I'm going to be this and be that." I was just there. I loved music and I loved DJing. Making records was way beyond my scope of imagination. That's for The Fat Boys and Run-DMC, but I was from a small town, Amityville, Long Island… who does that?
What was the studio experience like making Stetsasonic's In Full Gear?
It was a studio called Calliope [Studios] on 37th Street and 8th Avenue. Acoustically, it was a horrible place, but it was comfortable because it was a big loft. It was open, it had nice big speakers, you could walk around. Bob Power [Tape Op #60] was one of the engineers, and I had just started college for audio engineering. I didn't see a future in being an artist but I could see one in becoming an engineer and shaping sound. Bob probably doesn't remember, but one day he turns and says, "You'll never learn this by looking at me," which was pretty disheartening! I don't know if you've seen the meme of Homer Simpson slowly backing into the bushes?
You sunk back into the racks of compressors. But you were scratching on the record, and maybe using drum machines, like the Roland TR-808?
We had a Technics 1200 turntable and a cheaper Numark mixer that I still have. It's all faded out on top. It had two short faders, a crossfader, and a cue system. No EQ, and Numarks didn't have VU meters, just two lights for left and right. If it hit 0 dB it would pop on, and that was about it. My friend, Don Newkirk, who passed away last year, his brother had bought an 808 in the early '80s. I saw this thing in junior high school, and thought, "What kind of beatbox is that?" I learned how to program it, and then someone down the street had an Oberheim DX. By the end of high school, I bought a Sequential Circuits TOM drum machine, which I still have. I programmed the title track for Stetsasonic On Fire with the 808 and tripled up hi hats doing that "tszz tszz tszzz" thing before drum and bass music came along. Before I got to the studio, the first sampler I used was the Casio SK-1, which taught me so much about speeding up and slowing sounds down. When we got to Calliope it was the AKAI S900 and the E-mu SP-12. During that time for home projects, I used a Digitech guitar pedal that sampled and looped up to 8 seconds, and that was everything. I figured out how to take the Sequential TOM's trigger button and use it to trigger the sampler. Oh, man; that was the next phase! The guitar pedal wasn't designed to sample records, but necessity is the mother of invention.
I learned on an AKAI S1000 but didn't know how these sliders functioned on the E-mu.
There were a few different things to do with the sliders. Mainly adjusting the levels but also the tuning. Or the slider could determine how long the decay would go. It was multi-functional. Nowadays it may seem archaic, but you used these sliders for sample truncation based on little movement increments. There's nothing that feels quite like it.
Have you seen what they're selling for used these days?
I have no idea. Man, forget the stock market. I should've invested in buying ten of those!
Would you be able to sequence full songs within the E-mu?
Well, it depends on the era. If we're talking about Stetsasonic, I used it for "Bust That Groove" because they had it in the studio, and the whole song was just drums, other than that little "duh duh duh duh" sample. Because the sampling time is so limited, like two point whatever seconds, some producers would speed up the sample [when] recording in, and then pitch it down. You could hear it in a lot of the early Ice Cube albums; everything has that digital processed sound.
De La Soul was part of the Native Tongues scene that formed at Calliope. Was there a camaraderie among the producers working there?
De La Soul had started a friendship with the Jungle Brothers probably right after De La's "Plug Tunin' (Last Chance to Comprehend)" single. That was our first single in '87, before "Potholes in My Lawn." We're in the studio, and Pos [Kelvin "Posdnuos" Mercer] was talking about looping. The Jungle Brothers asked, "What's that?" It turns out that on the Jungle Brothers' record, they did everything manually. Those aren't loops. It's cuts and repetitive punches. I had an edge because I'd worked with Stetsasonic in the studio before that era. I knew the technology a little better, and going to college helped a little too. Bringing them to the studio to watch us work later led to A Tribe Called Quest, which led to Tommy Boy signing Queen Latifa [Dana Owens] and then Monie Love [Simone Johnson]. We all just got along, and the studio was so huge. You would find all of us in the same place, hanging. [Kool DJ] Red Alert [Frederick Crute] was there one time: he's on one of the records. If you were hanging out, we'd grab you for the vocal booth. It was before lawyers and, "I need a clearance," and…
Points on the record…
Exactly. "What am I getting for this?" It was about the vibe of the music.
Making De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising honed in on your use of the AKAI S950 and E-mu SP-1200 samplers and became your breakthrough production credit.
Stetsasonic was an introduction to the technology. De La Soul was pushing the technology into realms of where our imagination took place. People really don't understand how we did it without computers. It's sitting down, hearing something in your head, and going, "How can I make that? What will it take to make it?" Also, pushing the engineer to help us figure it out. How do we make Maseo [Vincent Mason Jr.] sound like he's underwater? How do we layer these samples so they're in key? "I hear this horn and it goes well over this bassline, but it just hurts when I hear it because it's out of key. How do we do that?" We had something called a pitch shifter. This Yamaha SPX90 could pitch shift it, but then it was delayed. How do we push it back a bit? Well, we'd stripe the 2-inch tape with time code and… [laughs]... this is gonna get technical! We'd feed the time code to a delay. If we hooked the sampler up and there was a delay, we'd be able to delay the time code and push the sample front or back.
Wow.
To make it read differently. Sometimes we'd have a sample falling on the one, but the snares are off. So now we're playing with samples, via pushing the clock of the computer back and forth to make the sample go back and forth. Not now, where you can look at a computer and go [click]. It took a lot of thought. It took the imagination and then figuring out technically how to get there. That's where 3 Feet High and Rising propelled us farther. It's listening and being inspired by It Takes a Nation of Millions… and how they [Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad] used a lot of samples. They used a lot of blips and sounds, and we wanted to do that with loops.
Were you making these instrumentals out in Amityville or at Calliope?
It was both, but our ideas would always be generated at the house. One thing I learned early on was that the studio was very expensive. A 2-inch tape reel was between $100 to $125, which was 15 minutes at 30 ips – the speed to get a decent quality. So, that's expensive. Back then, songs were 4 to 5 minutes each, so we'd only get a small amount of songs on there. We needed a little 4-track cassette recorder at the house. I had a Vesta Fire MR-10 4-track. I couldn't afford a Tascam back then! We sketched out the ideas and then took them to Calliope.
But the genesis of the songs happened in Long Island at home. Did you have a name for that studio?
It still holds to this day, even though it's moved around a few times: Paul's Coffee Shop. Going to school in the morning, we used to pass this place called Paul's Coffee Shop and nobody was ever in there. I think it eventually closed down.
Where did you go to look for records? I assume Maseo, Pos, and Trugoy [David "Trugoy the Dove" Jolicoeur] also brought in samples?
Oh, yeah; they found a ton. Back then, it started out with your parents' records, or your siblings' collection. 3 Feet High and Rising was mostly music we grew up with and were familiar with. Later on it was about going to other people's houses – people on the street with a stack of records – anywhere you could find them. Record shops came later. Once I started going to record shops, and I saw sections labeled "Drums," "Horns," etc., I was like, "Okay, it's already been dug." It probably wasn't until the late-'80s, '90s, when people started to really dig [in the crates]. De La Soul blames me for this! They said, "Yo, nobody was looking for stuff until you went on MTV!" There's a clip where I'm holding the Sequential TOM and saying, "You can find anything!" and I played a Mickey Mouse record. Then it permeated. I don't want to say I was the one that started digging, but I think it was a catalyst.
You've spoken about making the Gravediggaz album [6 Feet Deep] in a dark basement. Were you pulling samples from new sources? I love the guitar sample on "Defective Trip (Trippin')."
I don't remember the artist, but I can picture the record.
It's listed on <whosampled.com> as John Ussery "Listen to the Melody."
Yeah. That was very random. I was making dark stuff because I was depressed, you know?
