The Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde 9781501321276, 9781501321306, 9781501321283

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BIZARRE RIDE II THE PHARCYDE

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series: The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly The Modern Lovers by Sean Maloney Homogenic by Emily Mackay Uptown Saturday Night by Will Fulton & Patrick Rivers Workbook by Walter Biggins & Daniel Couch Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry Return to the 36 Chambers by Jarett Kobek Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Rubin Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Peepshow by Samantha Bennett In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony Transformer by Ezra Furman Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti and many more …

Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde

Andrew Barker

Bloomsbury Academic An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Andrew Barker, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2127-6 ePub: 978-1-5013-2129-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2128-3 Series: 33 13 Cover image © 333sound.com Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed and bound in the United States of America

Track Listing   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

“4 Better or 4 Worse (Interlude)” – 0:38 “Oh Shit” – 4:30 “It’s Jiggaboo Time (Skit)” – 1:28 “4 Better or 4 Worse” – 5:07 “I’m That Type of Nigga” – 5:21 “If I Were President” – 1:06 “Soul Flower (Remix)” – 4:23 “On the DL” – 4:23 “Pack the Pipe (Interlude)” – 0:25 “Officer” – 4:04 “Ya Mama” – 4:22 “Passin’ Me By” – 5:01 “Otha Fish” – 5:23 “Quinton’s on the Way (Skit)” – 2:10 “Pack the Pipe” – 5:08 “Return of the B-Boy” – 3:32

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Contents

Interlude: 4 Better and 4 Worse 1 Chapter One 7 Chapter Two 15 Chapter Three 25 Chapter Four 31 Interlude: If I Were President 45 Chapter Five 51 Chapter Six 55 Chapter Seven 63 Interlude: Quinton’s Here 75 Chapter Eight 81 Chapter Nine 85 Chapter Ten 89 Chapter Eleven 93 Chapter Twelve 101 Chapter Thirteen 107 Chapter Fourteen 113  vii •

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Interlude: The Pipe 121 Chapter Fifteen 125 Acknowledgments 131 Works Cited 133

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Interlude: 4 Better and 4 Worse

Studio sessions for the Pharcyde’s debut album, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, were nearing the home stretch on Wednesday, April 29, 1992, when a mostly white Simi Valley jury acquitted the LAPD officers charged with beating Rodney King on all counts. About an hour later, demonstrators gathered on the corner of Florence and Normandie. At the Pay-Less Liquor Store nearby, a group of protestors got into a scuffle with the store owner’s son, and escalations ensued. From this initially small and isolated incident, the Los Angeles riots began, intensifying into multiple crisis points spread throughout the greater metropolitan area. The resulting unrest would go on to cause nearly a billion dollars in damages, injure thousands, and, ultimately, claim fifty-five lives in the span of just six days. Florence and Normandie is about four miles from the Pharcyde Manor, the dilapidated duplex on Budlong Ave. that the group had made their home since signing a record contract with Delicious Vinyl. The next day, the riots spread further, with smoke from the multiplying fires visible from most points of the city; the looting and destruction had crept out of the  1 •

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South Central core and into surrounding areas. On that day, John “J-Swift” Martinez (the twenty-one-year-old who had produced all but one song on the Pharcyde’s album) hopped into his brother Pedro’s Volkswagen van along with bandmates Emandu “Imani” Wilcox and Trevant “Slimkid3” Hardson. Together, the group headed toward the Fox Hills Mall in Culver City (subsequently remodeled and renamed the Westfield Culver City), just over the hill from the Inglewood apartment where Pharcyde had formed a little over a year earlier. “A lot of shit went down,” Tre Hardson remembers of that day. “A lot of shit. People were robbing banks, breaking in everywhere, robbing people. We watched this guy shoot open the door of a gas station with a shotgun, run in there, and steal all the money. Just like that. And for us it was like, ‘Whoa, that shit is crazy!’” By the time they got to the mall, chaos was about to break loose. “Someone had just broken the door open,” J-Swift recalls, “and we all went running around inside the mall. By the time we came out, the cops were closing in with clubs and guns out.” Culver City was one of the hardest hit of all the satellite cities surrounding Los Angeles. Yet, in contrast to the situation in the heart of L.A., where the LAPD was stretched to the breaking point responding to the tumult, the Culver City Police Department had mobilized its full forces to protect obvious looting targets, with the Fox Hills Mall being one of the most obvious.1

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“I made the mistake of jumping into my brother’s 4-cylinder VW van, with no kind of power,” J-Swift continues. “I must have been moving at like two miles an hour when this cop came up to the passenger window like, ‘Hey!’” Tre and Imani had both taken cover in a patch of shrubbery, and managed to escape. J-Swift, however, was sprayed full on in the face with a blast of mace, pulled out of the van, and handcuffed to a parking meter. “And I heard [the cop] screaming, ‘Open your fucking eyes!’ Finally I managed to, and I said, what, why? And he was like, ‘Is this your cash register?’ And all the sudden there’s a cash register on the ground right in front of me, and I’m like, ‘No it’s not my fucking cash register …’” To be arrested for being in close proximity to a stolen cash register at the peak of the L.A. riots brings to mind Apocalypse Now’s famous line about handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. Nonetheless, the cops hauled J-Swift into jail. Thanks to the overload of prisoners, it wasn’t until five days later that he was finally released, bailed out by his mentor and former high school music teacher, Reggie Andrews. Rejoining his Pharcyde bandmates—who also included Romye “Bootie Brown” Robinson and Derrick “Fatlip” Stewart—in the studio a week after the riots, J-Swift’s homecoming quickly went sour. “I just gotten out of jail, and in the studio I see this label promo copy for [Bizarre Ride] lying there that says: ‘Produced by the Pharcyde and J-Swift.’” The shared production credit was news to him. “And I said, ‘Hey what’s this all about?’ And they just kinda went, ‘Oh, well you were gone, and we had to …’  3 •

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“They went to the label when I wasn’t there and put their names in front of mine. I said, ‘Look, my daddy was a musician, I’m a second-generation musician. I’m not with this. I will fuck all you niggas up.’ I was seriously ready to fight all four them. The engineer was terrified, ducking under the board, calling [Delicious Vinyl president] Mike Ross. ‘Mike you gotta get over here, this is crazy.’ Mike got there in three minutes, because he lived up on the hill right above the studio. And he says, ‘What’s going on?’ I said, ‘Fuck these niggas! Look at this label copy.’” While J-Swift eventually agreed to give the Pharcyde co-producer credits on the album, the animosity wasn’t so quick to subside. “I’ve been playing music since I was five years old,” he recalls thinking, “and you motherfuckers have the nerve to act like you’re the reason you’re rapping over these beats? It really was a turning point.” J-Swift and the original Pharcyde lineup finished Bizarre Ride shortly after the confrontation. They have yet to all work together again. *** Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde does not play like a record of the L.A. riots. In fact, compared to albums from the group’s L.A. contemporaries—Ice Cube’s Death Certificate, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Above the Law’s Livin’ Like Hustlers—it often seems to have emerged from a parallel timeline. Where others were incendiary, reactionary, and often flat-out nihilistic, the Pharcyde embodied hip-hop’s counter-impulse toward joy, color,  4 •

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reflection, and self-deprecation. And yet the group’s history was as fundamentally shaped by the cataclysms of 1992 as anyone else making music on the West Coast. Like everything about the album and the group, the making of Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde defies easy categorization. Bizarre Ride is an album that virtually everyone who cares about hip-hop knows, yet it took nearly four years for it to reach Gold sales status. It’s as quintessentially Los Angeles an album as you’re likely to find this side of Love and the Beach Boys, yet it couldn’t have been more out of step with the direction that West Coast hip-hop was heading. While local labels like Ruthless Records and the nascent Death Row Records were already calcifying their tropes of steely machismo and aspirational fantasy, the Pharcyde kept it real in their own way, exploring the joys and sorrows of being young, gifted, broke, and way too clever for your own good. Like the city that produced it, Bizarre Ride wears its complications and contradictions on its sleeve. It’s a weed-drenched party album about shyness and unrequited love. A swirl of jubilant SoCal psychedelia recorded in the midst of the Rodney King trial. A blast of black consciousness that still makes room to poke fun at Public Enemy and reference the Pixies. A sophisticated, deeply sourced patchwork of jazz, soul, and live instrumentation punctuated by “ya mama” jokes, prank calls, and Simpsons references. A seamless melding of four highly diverse lyricists who seemed almost psychically connected, several of whom now no longer speak to each other.  5 •

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A touchstone for an entire generation of off-center MCs, Bizarre Ride sketched out a whole strata of emotions that other rappers hadn’t yet dared to tackle, and to a certain extent still haven’t. Here’s the rest of the story, for better and for worse …

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Chapter One

Born Trevant (Tre) Hardson in 1970, the boy who would eventually be known in the hip-hop industry as Slimkid3 hadn’t grown up with aspirations to become a rapper. The child of a single mother, Tre spent his childhood living near the corner of Slauson Ave. and Central Ave. in the heart of South Central. He graduated from Inglewood High School in 1988 and enrolled in El Camino College in Torrance, with a mind to majoring in psychology and electrical engineering. In college, Tre’s primary source of income came from piecemeal gigs as a hip-hop dancer. Midway through his first year at El Camino, he met Emandu “Imani” Wilcox through a mutual friend. At the time, Wilcox, a Compton native and like-minded dancer, was still a senior in high school. “I think El Camino was a little connecting section, where a lot of people got together,” Tre says. “I had a lot of friends in the dance scene, and I met Imani through that. “When I was at El Camino there were just all these regular (local) parties you would go to. Where I got super into it, was when me, my friend Kai and Imani used to go to this place called Zapp in Anaheim—the  7 •

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DJ there was Tony Stewart, who was one of the top guys. We would go down there, and that was where we got our little practice on, picked up some ladies, started really getting into it. We would always end up at places like Hollywood Live, or Water the Bush,1 as well as Guadalinda’s. While we were dancing at Guadalinda’s, the guys who would eventually be the Black Eyed Peas were getting their start there too, so that was a real important meeting point.” Though N.W.A and DJ Quik would be the names that put L.A. on the national hip-hop map starting in 1988, Southern California had enjoyed its own indigenous scene for years, one that skewed closer to the flamboyant electro-hop of Soulsonic Force than the tougher-than-leather boom-bap throbbing out of New York. While L.A. did have a few established hip-hop venues, the scene mirrored the city’s sprawling commuter culture; the top DJs made their marks not through club residencies but rather as mobile entertainers, rocking house parties, high school auditoriums, and skating rinks. Skateland, on 135th and Central, and World of Wheels, on Venice and Vineyard, for instance, both played host to a striking number of recognizable 1980s New York rap figures (LL Cool J, EPMD, Eric B. and Rakim) between them. Uncle Jamm’s Army—Rodger Clayton’s floating DJ posse, which in the mid-’80s could easily fill up the 10,000-capacity Memorial Sports Arena via word-ofmouth and carpet-bombing flyer campaigns—was the

A weekly club at the former Hollywood punk palace the Stardust Ballroom. 1

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big fish of the L.A. circuit, but the likes of Ultra Wave Productions and Lonzo’s World Class Wreckin’ Cru (from which N.W.A sprung) also helped make up a rich musical landscape. In addition, Greg Mack’s famously low-bandwidth radio station KDAY offered the first dedicated hip-hop programming in the country. The dance scene was a thriving component of the whole musical environment. “We all go back to Uncle Jamm’s Army,” Imani reminisced in 2016. “Old-school KDAY shit. It wasn’t really breakdancing, they called it freestyle or street dancing or b-boying, but that’s how it started for us … Our whole style really came from us dancing, because we interpreted the rhythm a little bit differently than niggas that just came up rhyming.”2 There was only so far one could go hustling up gigs, however, and Imani and Tre saw a new phase of their lives open up when they crossed paths with a diminutive, volcano-tempered high school piano prodigy. *** J-Swift was born Juan Manuel Martinez in Madrid, the son of an Afro-Cuban salsa musician and bandleader. He moved to the United States when he was still a toddler, settling in Inglewood with his siblings Pedro and Mercedes. Picking up piano at age five, Martinez joined a music conservatory the next year and started performing regular recitals as a grade schooler, playing mostly jazz.

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Shortly after he enrolled in Locke High School—a short, wide-eyed kid with an explosive Afro—he met the mentor who would change his life. Reggie Andrews taught music at Locke, and stands as one of the most undersung heroes of South Los Angeles music. A former producer and bandleader, Andrews straddled the line between educator and working musician for most of his forty-year career, even notching up a No. 1 R&B hit back in 1982 when he co-wrote the Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip.” (The song stayed at No. 1 for five weeks, and went on to win a Grammy.) But his contributions as a mentor for disadvantaged young talent would come to happily overshadow his recording career. “Early in my career, I asked myself, I can either be like Herbie Hancock, or I can help to create more Herbie Hancocks,” Andrews said. “It was an easy decision for me.”3 Drawing on revenues from his time at A&M Records, Andrews established an after-school program he called South Central Unit (SCU) where he would help teach promising students and young neighborhood musicians, setting up the better ones with auditions and showcases, and introducing them to his industry contacts. His notable mentees include the likes of Tyrese Gibson (whom Andrews arranged to appear in a 1994 Coca-Cola ad that first caught the attention of acting and modeling scouts) and multi-talented bassist Thundercat. Tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington—whose 2015 album The Epic gave twenty-first-century jazz the same sort of

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dayglo shot to the arm that Bizarre Ride had given ’90s hip-hop so many years earlier—was one of Andrews’ students as well. SCU boasts a wide-ranging and storied alumni network, yet few worked as closely with Andrews as Martinez did. Through Andrews, Martinez started producing new jack swing-style R&B tracks, alongside another frighteningly young talent, John “L.A. Jay” Barnes. Like Martinez, Barnes was a second-generation musician, his father having worked with Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers. Martinez and Barnes quickly found themselves learning their way around a professional studio, coming up with song ideas for groups like Bell Biv DeVoe and the Good Girls, respectively. By the time he was 15, Martinez was making between four and five thousand dollars every few months from his music, and, thanks to Andrews, he had all sorts of prohibitively expensive equipment at his disposal, including an Akai MPC60 (a then cutting-edge sampler and sequencer with which many of the era’s hip-hop beats would be crafted) and a Fender Rhodes piano (which he would later inherit). For a kid raised on government assistance in Inglewood, having access to these sorts of resources and opportunities was a revelatory confirmation of his potential to make music a serious career. Despite his early success, however, Martinez wasn’t exactly thrilled about the style of music he was making. All he needed, however, was a nudge in a new direction. In the summer after his sophomore year of high school, Martinez took an internship at KKGO, a non-profit jazz station that broadcast out of a small facility on Mt. Wilson. Record labels had the tendency •

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to send out promo copies of records willy-nilly, and whenever the station got a shipment of records that didn’t fit their format, they handed them off to the young intern. One day, a 45” advance copy of Big Daddy Kane’s 1988 single “Ain’t No Half-Steppin” arrived in the mail and soon found its way into Martinez’s hands. He took it into one of the station’s soundproof rooms and dropped the needle. “As soon as I heard that beat drop,” he remembers, “I was like, I am done.” Martinez was hardly unaware of hip-hop, listening to KDAY whenever he had a free moment, but the sounds of Marley Marl’s production sent the gears in his head churning. Built on a drum sample of the Emotions’ “Blind Alley,” the song brought a subwoofer-shattering low-end while still remaining light on its feet, and Marley’s playful blend of piano samples and horn stabs boasted a degree of innate musicality that few other hip-hop producers at the time could touch. For a jazzfluent yet restless young musician, the song switched on a light bulb. He now knew what he wanted to do with his life, even if it would take him a while to fully commit to his new passion. He was still making good money as an R&B producer, for one, and his sister had started her own all-girl group, which would later be named the Jazzyfatnastees. Yet, “hearing that song was the real pivot point,” Martinez recalls. “Two years later, I started getting really tired of doing all this bullshit crap R&B. It was so easy, it was like here, write a stupid hook, do a little beat and put a few hip-hop elements in. It was good for the moment, but it just got to the point where I just didn’t feel it. My dad was true to his roots and his self as •

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a musician, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to be known for this crap.’ “So I remember, me and L.A. Jay were working with Ricky Bell and Ryan Devoe, and they started changing around our productions without telling us. It was bad enough that we had to do this kind of stuff. But then they went and changed up our productions, like man … I remember clearly the day where we came out of the studio after they had changed our mix, and we didn’t have to say much. I just looked at John. We were leaning on new cars, ’cause we got decent money from these guys, and I said, ‘You know what dude, you can do what you want, but I’m never coming back.’ And he said, ‘Neither am I.’” “The next time we saw those cats was at the Pharcyde record release party, where they were congratulating us.”

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Chapter Two

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, hip-hop was on its way to exploding into what would become a national cultural force, but the L.A. community that supported it was still a relatively small one. Within this insular scene— connected by the same few club nights and freestyle spots—it was only natural that kindred spirits would eventually find each other. In the case of the Pharcyde, it was repeatedly the women in their lives that drew them together. Tre remembers: “When I was at El Camino, I hung out with this cat named Robert Tillis, and I used to write rhymes with him in school. I really still didn’t have any intention of becoming a rapper seriously, I just always wrote poetry and raps. And Robert was like, ‘Why don’t you come check out my girlfriend’s brother. He’s like 15 years old, but he’s got beats and the whole deal.’” Tillis was dating Mercedes Martinez, whose brother Juan Martinez (John) had recently taken on the nom-dubeats of J-Swift. Tre and J-Swift hit it off immediately, and the latter decided to bring Tre’s whole crew back to SCU to meet Andrews. Before long, the group were virtually living out of Andrews’ SCU setup in northern •

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Inglewood, and Tre and Imani had named their dance crew 242. SCU was made up of three bungalows all owned by Andrews in the same eight-house lot on La Cienega and Hill. Just north of the 405 freeway, these bungalows were set in the shadow of the Ladera Heights foothills (which would be immortalized as “the Black Beverly Hills” by Frank Ocean two decades later). The area was, and remains, a rather nondescript chunk of residential blocks; the closest thing to a nearby landmark is the Randy’s Donuts building a few blocks south. Run-down apartment buildings with incongruously grand names like “Knowlton Manor” surround the lot. The SCU complex itself was made up of two blocks of single-story houses separated by a small brown courtyard, each with two larger backhouses that opened into a small alley. Andrews kept the bigger house in the back, which was equipped with a large mirrored room for dancing, a clutch of equipment, and a home recording studio. When he turned 17, J-Swift moved into the frontmost of Andrews’ apartments on 7027 La Cienega. There, Swift, Barnes, and 242 would while away the hours making music and smoking weed unimpeded, then step outside to the tiny porch that faced the street and watch passersby on lawn chairs in between sessions. By now seriously beginning to learn his way around sample-based hip-hop, J-Swift finally set his sights on the goldmine that he’d discovered in his mentor’s garage. “Reggie was a product of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s,” J-Swift says. “And he had this garage with at least 10,000 different records in it—at least. He was a serious collector. •

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“So finally one day I went to him and I said, ‘Dude, can I check out these records? All I want to do is sample them, I’ll give ’em right back to you.’ And he was like, ‘Well, you know this is my collection, I don’t know …’ So I said, ‘How about if I just take one crate at a time?’ And he allowed me to do it. Were it not for that, I don’t know what I would’ve been doing. Were it not for that, we definitely wouldn’t even have that album. All of the samples [that J-Swift later used to create Bizarre Ride] came from Reggie’s garage, all of them. And I’m sure I didn’t leave the garage in a tidy fashion. I was a crazy young nigga then. “I mean, I’m 44 and I’m pretty crazy now. But I back then? God damn, how did anybody stand me? It was only because I was dope. That’s the only possible reason. If it wasn’t for that, I would’ve been kicked out years ago.” With J-Swift now busy spelunking through Andrews’ volumes of vintage grooves, Tre and Imani were busy learning the finer points of songcraft along with Andrews’ other protégés, intent on turning their dance crew into something more. “We’d have music meetings every Tuesday,” Tre remembers. “If you were in a group and you made a song, we would all sit collectively and listen to that song. And we’d talk about the individual parts, which ones could be better. Do you think the lyrics were good? You might’ve thought they were good, but they could be better. And we’d try to really not have an attitude about it. [Andrews] taught us how to take constructive criticism, because it’s not about us, it’s about the song. “A lot of the musicians he had there were extremely seasoned. It was all quality. So just to know that man was •

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everything, seriously. Because you want to put yourself into a position with other people who are higher up than you, knowledge-wise, so you learn how to climb the ladder. And back in the day, the quality of music was really good, the bar was extremely high. For us to get a break was kind of a miracle. If you weren’t like a Patti LaBelle or a Michael Jackson, it was difficult to get in. And songwriting is super important, or it was super important. You look at a song: how does it make you feel? Does it mean something? Is it real? Does it have soul? What’s the cadence like, what’re the lyrics like? All those little questions. There was a lot to think about. Music production, EQing, frequencies.” Through SCU, Imani and Tre were introduced to another dance crew, called GTI, which included Robert Vinson and Romye “Bootie Brown” Robinson—a dancer raised in the more idyllic environs of Pasadena, whose first musical love wasn’t hip-hop, but rather Duran Duran.1 For Tre, GTI already came with a degree of renown: Not only were they kings of the local dance scene, they even had a corresponding girl group, also called GTI, who recorded their own music at SCU. “These guys [GTI] were just the best fucking dancers in Los Angeles, period,” Tre says. “You could not fuck with them. They were the dopest shit. So from the first day, 242 and GTI crew became like brothers, along with J-Swift. We were at SCU every day. We did everything together. If one person didn’t have any money, it didn’t

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matter, we were all eating. We made sure everything was cool for everybody. “I feel like Romye was probably the only one of us that had a job sometimes, to be honest, but he was always making sure we were good.” The foursome—Tre, Imani, Romye, and Robert Vinson—soon merged into a loose unit, and, thanks to Andrews’ industry connections, the gigs started becoming more lucrative. Toni Basil, of “Mickey” fame, served as a key insider source, tipping them off to the less publicized dance contests and music video auditions. (“She’s an O.G. for real,” Imani said of Basil. “She’s a G from back when.”2) Likewise, Rosie Perez, hot off her breakout role in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, pulled some strings for the group to audition for Fox’s hip-hop sketch comedy show In Living Color, in which they were featured on two episodes as “Fly Guys.” Meanwhile, Andrews kept setting up meet-and-greets and industry showcases for the group around town. “We danced for Candyman, danced for Tone Loc,” Romye remembered. “You know how rappers used to have all these niggas boogying in the background? We were the niggas in the background, boogying.”3 *** As for the Pharcyde as we know it on Bizarre Ride, there was one key piece left. Derrick “Fatlip” Stewart grew up

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Aaron, 138. GGN News. •

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in the Fairfax district, several miles due north of SCU’s Inglewood digs. A dancer as well as a musician—his mother was a church choir director—Fatlip had been part of a crew called the Jammers (he was known as Jammer D) but had broken off to become a solo artist, soon hitting the showcase circuit. J-Swift caught him during a showcase at the Total Experience club on Crenshaw Blvd., and remembers the aesthetic whiplash well. “He was the nerdiest nigga you’ve ever seen,” J-Swift says with a laugh. “When he came onstage he was wearing an argyle sweater, a baseball hat, glasses with lenses—he doesn’t even wear glasses—and argyle socks. And he was totally pigeon-toed. He was just weird. Me and Reggie were there together, and we were like, ‘Who is this weird nigga?’ Then he opened his mouth and started rapping, and it was over. I was like, fuck. I’d never seen anything like it. He tore that shit up.” J-Swift made it his mission to meet up with Fatlip, and got his chance soon after when he ran into him at the Paradise 24 club in Inglewood. Fatlip was hanging around outside, and J-Swift made his introduction. “I said man, I saw you at a showcase, and I’ve got to produce you. I gave him my number, said my name is John Martinez, but I go by J-Swift. He was like, ‘J-Swift? Yeah, okay,’ and he left.” That might have been that—Los Angeles was crawling with ambitious young men who imagined themselves producers, and there was no reason for the twenty-yearold Fatlip to imagine this pushy seventeen-year-old hanging around outside a club was worth bothering with. But J-Swift continued his night at Hollywood Life, and spotted a woman in the parking lot named Tabitha. •

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“She was going around the parking lot putting up fliers for something, and she had a big-ass booty, so I had to follow her, you know,” J-Swift says. “I tried to get at her, but she didn’t want to get with me because I was this weird short kid with long-ass arms. But a few weeks later, she shows up at my house—turns out she was dating my homeboy Miguel, who was a dancer. She was shocked to see me, like, ‘Isn’t that the guy who tried to get at me …?’ But then she came into my room and saw all the keyboards and equipment I had, and she was like, ‘whoa.’” Tabitha, it turns out, was best friends with Fatlip’s girlfriend, and ran into the both of them the next day. “Fatlip was telling them about this weird little short dude who was bugging him about saying he wanted to produce him. And Tabitha was like, ‘Wait, what’s his name?’ Fatlip said, ‘Uh, I don’t know, let me look … John Martinez.’ And Tabitha said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the guy who was trying to get at me in the parking lot—he’s so weird. But you know what, I ended up at his house yesterday, and he had all these keyboards and stage lights and equipment …’ “Fatlip jumped on the bus that day to come down to Inglewood to see me,” J-Swift says. “Like, literally that afternoon, he just called me and said, ‘Yo, I’m coming over.’” *** Tre remembers Fatlip’s introduction to the rest of the SCU clubhouse. “J-Swift was always telling us about him, how dope he was and the whole deal. And granted, he was dope •

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as fuck. But I remember he came by with his girlfriend once, and it was at a time when one of my crew members had beef with somebody—probably because of a girl. So one night we were all chilling, Fatlip came over with his girl, everything was chill, and the next thing we knew there was this knock at the door: Bam bam bam bam bam, and then some voice yells, ‘Y’all motherfuckers come outside!’ And we were like, ‘Fuck you, who are you!’ And Fatlip was like ‘Wait, what’s going on?’ I was like, ‘Yo, you and your girl wait in the closet, we’re about to handle this shit.’ So shit was just jumping off, and he was hiding in the closet the whole time.” It was a chaotic introduction, and even afterward, Fatlip and Tre didn’t gel immediately—in fact they fought often, sometimes physically, for years to come— but the former’s talents were undeniable. Sure, Tre had been rapping casually since he was 13, and Imani and Romye were both quick studies, but Fatlip’s skills were on a different level. A serious student of deep-lyrical New York rappers—like J-Swift, he looked to Big Daddy Kane as a primary influence—Fatlip had also spent time at the storied open mic nights at the Good Life Cafe, which nursed the careers of the Freestyle Fellowship, the Jurassic 5, Medusa, and Busdriver. (One die-hard habitué, Ava DuVernay, later made a documentary about the scene, before moving on to direct Selma and Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time adaptation.) Fatlip’s abilities were so advanced that J-Swift had originally intended to produce him as a solo artist, and was surprised when Fatlip wasn’t interested. “I talked to him personally,” J-Swift says, “and I said, •

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why do you wanna be in a group with other niggas? And he was like, ‘Well, if I do an album, I’ve gotta do three verses, 16 bars each, on every song. Do you know how many verses that is?’ He said, ‘If I get with a group, then I’ve only gotta do one verse each song.’ I was like, this is the craziest logic … but that was Fatlip.” Around this time, 242 made a decision to concentrate on making hip-hop. Vinson wasn’t crazy about the idea and bowed out, going on to become a professional dancer of some renown, touring with Janet Jackson. His departure conveniently left a hole in the roster, and there was an obvious candidate to fill it. Tre laughs when he remembers the conversation. “One day the guys were like, ‘Yo Tre, I think we’re gonna have to merge things, put Fatlip in the group. What do you think?’ I was like, ‘Ahh, no! Fuck that fool!’ Why him?’ “Then I thought about it and decided, all right, fuck it. I mean, it really did make total sense.” Fatlip soon became a fixture at Andrews’ place. Andrews set up more and more showcases for the group, but with the strain of getting one rejection after another, gradually things started to crack. “Out of everything that was going on, the majority was still the dance part,” Tre says. “But at the same time we were making music and trying to get a deal. Because we were trying to get signed, I feel like we performed for every record label that meant anything. And then finally, we got fed up, and just sort of said, this is the last motherfucking audition we’re gonna do. So much so that we would just do crazy shit at the auditions and not give a fuck. Because we just lost it a little bit. •

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“One day, Reggie was like, ‘I got another audition for you to do,’ and we’re like, ‘All right … cool.’ So we got all these workmen outfits, like if you worked at a mechanic’s. We each put one on, and we didn’t have nothing on under it. And on our asses we wrote the name of our band, all the way down to the last ass, right? So we did our performance, did our shit, and when we were done we unzipped, showed our asses, and we were out. “And I feel like the day we stopped giving a fuck, that was the day that everybody suddenly started giving a fuck about us.”

•

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Chapter Three

If we take DJ Kool Herc’s first party on 1520 Sedgwick Ave. as the birth of hip-hop, then the music had already been around for well over fifteen years at the turn of 1990. But as a commercially viable genre, hip-hop was barely out of diapers. The term “gangsta rap” had been in circulation for about a year. Yo! MTV Raps, which overcame the station’s aversion to hip-hop and quickly became its highest rated regular program, had only been around for a year and a half. The Billboard album chart had seen exactly two hip-hop albums reach No. 1, and no rap song had yet reached No. 1 on the singles chart, unless you count Blondie. The Grammys had inaugurated its first award to acknowledge rap music just a year before, and they presented it off-camera. As popular as singles from the likes of LL Cool J, the Fresh Prince, and the Beastie Boys had become, rap was still the bastard stepchild of radio. Aside from a few one-off hits and novelties, rarely did hip-hop songs manage to get any real grip on pop radio programming. Even the black stations that were best poised to tap into hip-hop’s core urban audience would often relegate it to late nights and specialty shows, with the music serving as a subtle •

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flashpoint between the sensibilities of Baby Boomers and Generation X. “Black radio hated rap from the start, and there’s still a lot of resistance to it,” Russell Simmons complained to the Los Angeles Times back in 1990. That week, in early February, twelve of the top 30 albums on Billboard’s black music chart were rap releases; of the top 30 most played songs on black radio, only one was a rap song.1 But even the holdouts were soon forced to hold their noses and get with the times, thanks to a single album release later that month. MC Hammer’s Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em dropped in February of 1990, and, by December, it would be certified Platinum. In spite of nearly universal disdain from the hip-hop community, it spent twenty-one weeks at the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart, later becoming the first-ever rap album to be certified Diamond by the RIAA, indicating sales of more than ten million. A few months later, Vanilla Ice released To the Extreme, which topped the charts for sixteen weeks. The ubiquitous “Ice Ice Baby” became the first rap single to top the Billboard singles chart. For hip-hop lifers, it was a toxic trade-off. After battling the industry-wide assumption that rap was a flash-in-the-pan youth novelty, the industry was suddenly taking it seriously as a commercial force, and it was all due to two releases that were, unmistakably, flash-in-thepan novelties. ***

1

Hilburn. •

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There were a few in the industry, and in radio, who had understood hip-hop’s potential from the beginning. One of them was KMEL program director Keith Naftaly, who introduced heavy hip-hop into the San Francisco station’s regular rotation, right across the Bay from Hammer’s hometown. Personal tastes aside, radio programmers nationwide were now suddenly interested in exploiting his know-how, and previously oblivious record labels were starting to look more closely at rap as an investment opportunity. Fortunately, one of the biggest radio conventions of the year took place in KMEL’s backyard. The Gavin Seminar, organized every February in San Francisco by the publishers of radio trade paper the Gavin Report, had become a key date on the radio industry calendar by the dawn of the 1990s. It was a fitting venue for the mainstreaming of hip-hop: the paper’s founder, Bill Gavin, had been an important bulwark against Lee Abrams’ crypto-segregationist radioplay strategies—which codified the distinction between “black” R&B and “white” rock and roll on the airwaves, even though the two genres were still as much alike as different—hiring black DJs and playing black music even on the whites-targeted “rock” radio formats. In fact, the Greatest Generation-aged Gavin had been passionate about playing rock and roll back when it, too, had been dismissed as “mongrel music” by older programmers.2 By 1991, the Gavin Seminar was steadily being infiltrated by upstarts from the hip-hop generation, and that

2

McCoy, p. 264. •

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year’s attendees included among others Dante Ross (who signed the likes of Pete Rock and Brand Nubians to Elektra), Jeff Sledge (later Jive Records’ star A&R), and Paul Stewart. Born and raised in the Baldwin Hills area of L.A., Stewart had gone to college at Sonoma State, then returned to L.A. to try his luck as a DJ. Spinning records at Water the Bush by night and working as a barely paid intern for Arista Records by day, Stewart quickly became one of the better-connected guys in the L.A. rap scene. He did street promotion for the fast-rising local label Delicious Vinyl and founded his own mini-company, PMP (Power Moves Promotions). He first tried his hand at artist management with a fledgling trio called House of Pain, and really started attracting attention when he landed them a deal with Tommy Boy Records. (Their breakout single, “Jump Around,” would become nearly ubiquitous in summer of 1992, and is likely playing on a sports arena soundsystem at this very moment.) At the Gavin, Stewart was shopping the Watts-based rapper Ras Kass, while his friend Lono Brazil, whose professional life encompassed everything from the Chicago house scene to New York radio to hip-hop artist management and fashion, kept steering aspiring young MCs his way. “Lono kept telling people, ‘Oh, you should rap for this dude, he gets people record deals,’” Stewart remembers. “Which was kind of not true, because I’d only gotten one group a deal at that point. But it was a big deal, so …” One night, Brazil, Stewart, and Stewart’s partner Malik Levy had been drinking and smoking weed for hours in Brazil’s hotel room at the Marriott Union •

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Square. After midnight, Ras Kass brought three of his friends up to the room. They were rappers and dancers from L.A., in town for a backup dancer gig. Brazil, as usual, told them that Stewart got people deals. “This I’ll never forget,” Stewart says. “The guys got into this little huddle for a minute, and then just came out rapping. It was in this little hotel room, so they were jumping on top of the bed, running all over the furniture. They were so animated. And it was like, after a few seconds, we were dying. We were just on the floor, laughing. We were already quite intoxicated, you know, but I remember hearing the line about ‘ya mama ate 22 burritos’ and just crying. It was just so fresh. Everyone liked bagging and snapping, that was the big thing back then, all of the ‘ya mama’ stuff. And they were doing it so perfectly in this song. “The next day, I asked my homeboy Malik, who was our partner in the street promotion company, I said, ‘Were they really that dope, or were we just that faded?’ And Malik was like, ‘No, they were dope.’ They were dope.” *** Stewart’s surprise guests were, of course, Romye, Imani, and Fatlip, who had been in San Francisco as dancers for Gang of Textbooks, a long-forgotten R&B act. (When asked where he was during all of this, Tre shrugs: “Back in L.A., probably fucking around with my girl.”) Back home, Stewart arranged a meeting with all five, including Tre and J-Swift, and told them that if they could put what they’d done for him in that hotel room onto a •

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demo tape, he could get them a deal. The group already had three songs in varying degrees of completion—“Ya Mama,” “Officer,” and “Passin’ Me By”—and J-Swift started working at SCU to mix up a proper demo. The chance meeting with Stewart had come at an ideal time, as the group’s new musical direction had started to drive a rift between them and Andrews. “Reggie Andrews is a great guy,” Stewart says, “but he was an old school guy. The stuff they had been doing as 242 had more of an R&B vibe, and that’s the kind of stuff that he was comfortable shopping to the A&Rs he knew. But then when they became the Pharcyde and started doing ‘Ya Mama,’ there was a sort of social disconnect. I don’t know if he thought it was offensive, but he didn’t want to shop it around. Then when they played it for me I was so over the top about it, that they were like, ‘we’re gonna roll with Paul.’” And with that, Paul Stewart became the Pharcyde’s manager. While J-Swift stayed at SCU, the other four moved into Stewart’s one-bedroom backhouse next to a carwash on Sunset and Highland, where they stayed for the better part of two months, until they got their first check. “Those were some crazy times,” Stewart says. “Late at night when I was finally going to bed, they’d still be laughing and bagging on each other in their sleep.”

•

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Chapter Four

The origins of the Pharcyde name are simple. As J-Swift tells it, the five of them rented a VHS copy of Oliver Stone’s The Doors while back at SCU, and to get into the right mood, popped a few handfuls of magic mushrooms before hitting “play.” In an altered state, Jim Morrison’s message of “breaking on through to the other side” struck a strong chord, and the group toyed around with the concept as a band name. At first, they settled on the Other Side. “I still have some old, old cassettes from those days that say the Other Side on the label,” J-Swift says. “But we weren’t really sure. We kept thinking like, nah, that’s not quite right, that doesn’t quite fit. And I believe it was Imani who finally came up with the idea of the Pharcyde. But it came from all of us throwing out ideas collectively.” Tre concurs. “We were going through a lot of names. We had a bunch of ideas on a paper. And I think it was Imani who finally came up with it. We always had this idea that everything you do, you should take it to the furthest possible level, so that’s the Pharcyde concept. We were always thinking about people who had that •

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moment, where you take an idea as far as it could possibly go. Michael Jackson had one, back on ‘Motown 25.’ The way he does ‘Billie Jean’ with the hat, when he does the Moonwalk, we would say that was his Pharcyde moment. That was the drive, and how we aspired to do things.” And as for the non-traditional spelling? “We were just trying to make it look cool,” Tre says, simply. “Plus, you have that element where you take ‘phar’ like ‘pharmaceuticals,’ and ‘cyde’ like ‘cyanide.’ “You know, these were kinda dark kids we’re talking about here.” *** Stone’s Doors movie might seem like an overblown Baby Boomer curio these days, but without it and some mild hallucinogens, the Pharcyde’s name and most timeless song might never have existed; it was from this impromptu SCU screening of The Doors that “Passing’ Me By” was born. “We learned a lot from Mr. Jim Morrison,” Tre laughs. “Especially during our mushroom times.” According to J-Swift, shortly after finishing the movie, Fatlip meandered into SCU’s recording studio and attempted to do a Morrison impression, hollering at the very highest reaches of his vocal register. The tape happened to be rolling when he sang the line, “she keeps on passing me by.” It was a stroke of luck that it was. Fatlip has repeatedly noted that he never managed to hit those notes the same way again: The chorus of “Passin’ Me By” that appears on Bizarre Ride is ripped directly from the 8-track recording of the first time he sang it. •

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It was the best hook the group had come up with yet, and fortunately, their greatest beat to date was ready and waiting for it. The instrumental backbone of “Passin’ Me By” was actually crafted from two different, seemingly incompatible beats: The main beat layered the organ intro from Quincy Jones’ “Summer in the City” over Jaco Pastorius’ bass from Weather Report’s “125th Street Congress” and the drums from the Skull Snaps’ “It’s a New Day”; the other was a jazzy fantasia drawn from Eddie Russ’ “Hill Where the Lord Hides” with a scratched interjection from Whoodini’s “Friends.” (An intro sample of the backwards drums from Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” contributed some additional psychedelic flavoring.) Musically speaking, the two very different beats shouldn’t have meshed together at all, but Bootie Brown suggested combining them—one for the verse, the other for the chorus—and from that point on, a freaky alchemy took over. “Passin’ Me By” was hardly the first hip-hop love song. LL Cool J’s winningly soporific “I Need Love” had been a minor hit back in 1987, and De La Soul’s “Eye Know” has soundtracked countless college quad makeout sessions from 1989 ’til infinity. It wasn’t even the first unrequited hip-hop love song, arriving a few years after Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” But as for sheer depth of feeling and variety of experience, it set a bar that hip-hop has still struggled to clear. When Kanye West dropped The College Dropout, latterday pop critics hailed it as a breakthrough in confessional everyman rapping. Millennials by the million would later give similar props to Drake’s endless succession of passive-aggressive champagne-room humblebrags. But •

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for the depth of its honesty and emotional universality, nothing touches “Passin’ Me By.” For lovelorn youngsters who struggled to relate to the big pimping fantasies and curdled misogyny emanating from gangsta rap, the song covered every conceivable base. Bootie Brown’s opening verse is the sweetest, offering bittersweet recollections of that first schoolboy crush, when you only have eyes for the most unattainable of targets—in this case, a teacher. Tre’s half-sung second verse is full of boyhood reminiscences, calling back to the days of truth-and-dare and playground flirtations, and the hard knowledge that puppy love fades in an instant. Imani’s verse is a wonderful display of narrative compression, as he spends his quick eight bars waiting patiently for a girl to leave her nincompoop of a man and finally realizing it isn’t worth it. And Fatlip’s closing verse—separated from the rest of the song by a quiet bass breakdown, as if the song itself is stopping to gather its thoughts—is simply one of the most poignant 16-bar rhyme collections ever committed to record, a lyrical stunner on par with the best of Biggie and Nas. If the Pharcyde had never cut another record, their legacy would still be intact thanks to this song alone. It offered a whole generation new shorthands for heartbreak: “She was a flake like corn,” “I guess a twinkle in her eye is just a twinkle in her eye,” “I did not really pursue my little princess with persistence”—it’s easier to list the song’s lyrics that haven’t become touchstones. As is often the case, the key to the song’s appeal lies in the specificity of its details. The object of LL’s affections in “I Need Love” was just that, an object—a platonic anygirl •

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whose only defining characteristic is that our narrator is interested in her. In “Passin’ Me By,” Bootie Brown remembers the make and model of his romantic rival’s car, the hour he used to pick her up, and the telling order with which he graffitied their two names on the bus: his paramour’s first, his own name last. You can picture his melancholy face framed in the heart he’s carved on the school bus window as he watches Lee’s Z speed off. Tre’s goofy use of “edjamacated” in an otherwise serious verse serves as both a joke and a defense mechanism—he’s eager to laugh off his growing lack of maturity, but you can be damn sure he’s spent hours thinking about it. And Fatlip plays with mood throughout his verse, vacillating expertly between cursing the heavens for his sad fate, and acknowledging that it’s entirely his own fault. The song’s legacy has expanded continuously since its release. Fatlip’s “my dear-my dear-my dear” breakdown was later bitten wholesale in 2001 by R&B heartthrob Joe for his single “Stutter,” which topped the R&B singles chart for four straight weeks. In Robin Thicke’s inescapable 2013 single “Blurred Lines,” which topped the pop singles chart for twelve weeks, T.I. shouted the song and the group out by name. Dr. Dre sampled the song on his septuple-Platinum album 2001. Freeway sampled it in 2010. Anyone who found themselves at an early 2000s candy-rave surely found themselves dancing to Aphrodite’s hyperactive dance remix. Hipster dancebots Hot Chip remixed it yet again in 2008. Browse through the depths of YouTube today, and you can find Adele-style acoustic-guitar renditions of the song from cute British girls who were themselves still a twinkle in their parents’ eyes when the song came out. •

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The Pharcyde knew they had something special from the beginning. J-Swift recalls driving down to L.A. Jay’s studio to play the group the beat—Jay was midway through making a beat that used the same Skull Snaps sample, and upon hearing what J-Swift had done, promptly erased his own. Tre remembers the lyric-writing session: every member of the group retreated to separate corners of the room with a notebook, spilling their guts as the beat looped over and over for hours on end. “‘Passin’ Me By’ was one of those songs that really reflected our reality,” says Tre. “Because every day, at 5:30, when it’s hella traffic on La Cienega and Hill, we’d be standing outside of SCU watching the girls go by. There was nowhere they were gonna go, so they had to pass by and see us. So we’d be kicking back in little lawn chairs and shit, smoking weed, and just watching them be. Not saying anything, just watching and dreaming. That was the energy of ‘Passin’ Me By.’ It’s all real. “A lot of my verses that are about girls are about a bunch of different girls. It’s like a girl smoothie— hashtag: #ladysmoothie. For ‘Passin’ Me By,’ I remember thinking about my first relationship when I was in high school. Shellie was the name of my first real girlfriend. It was a real thing. And then I was thinking about the others I was trying to get at when I was a teenager. There were always a couple of girls I was feeling, and either they weren’t feeling me, or they were feeling me and never said nothing, which is worse. That happens every day! Like, let it be known, motherfucker! I was dealing with the ‘let it be known’ phase for a large part of my early life.” •

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*** If “Passin’ Me By” was an instant classic-in-the-making, the rest of the group’s first demo was hardly a drop-off. It certainly wasn’t intended this way, but the three songs on the group’s demo served as a perfect little preview for how far the group’s ambitions could someday lead—reaching back into hip-hop’s pre-history with “Ya Mama,” offering a cracked mirror to the present with “Officer,” and giving a glimpse of the music’s future on “Passin’ Me By.” As Stewart notes, “Ya Mama” couldn’t have been more firmly in the zeitgeist of the early ’90s. Thanks to shows like In Living Color, descendants of the off-color comedy stylings of Redd Foxx were now being beamed into millions of homes on the Fox network, and the popularity of mama jokes would grow so universal that James Percelay, Monteria Ivey, and Stephan Dweck created a bestselling book series, Snaps, in the middle of the decade. But the history of the insult comedy rounds went back much further than that, to the ancient African-American tradition of the Dozens. First named in song back in the 1920s, and arguably traceable back to oral traditions in pre-diaspora Africa long before, the Dozens is at heart simply a good-humored battle of insults; often rhymed, sometimes poetic, sometimes philosophical, sometimes gloriously vulgar. Succinctly defined by sociologist and Fisk University president Charles S. Johnson way back in 1941, “The Dozens is one form of ‘talking’ recreation often engaged in by rural boys. It is usually played by two boys before an appreciative, interested audience. The object of the game •

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is to speak of the opponent’s mother in the most derisive terms possible.”1 Simple in concept, the importance of the Dozens upon twentieth-century black American culture is difficult to overstate. Traces of the Dozens can be heard in jukejoint blues standards, and in the writing of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Yet the most obvious modern incarnation of the Dozens is the rap battle—as Quincy Jones once told me, “I was rapping back in 1939, with the dirty-dirty Dozens”—and “Ya Mama” just brought the practice full circle. In the group’s hands, over a tough beat based on Stephen Stills and Al Kooper’s cover of “Season of the Witch,” the snaps go from street level to surreal and back again, from fat jokes to left-field references to Lou Rawls and Ricky Bell (J-Swift must have loved the latter), and, thanks to the intro added for the album version, the group takes aim at a number of their peers. As the song starts, Fatlip and Bootie Brown hype each other up, preparing to drop knowledge like the more intellectual MCs of the day (a sample from Jesse Jackson’s speech at Wattstax puts us right in Public Enemy territory), and then, just as the tension has built to a fever pitch, comes Fatlip’s first line: Ya mama’s so fat … The comic timing is straight out of Looney Tunes—a Wagnerian prelude that gives way to the class clown making armpit fart noises. As Imani explained to journalist Brain Coleman, “We got dissed for that song by hardcore rappers. But, I mean,

1

Wald, x. •

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we dissed ourselves on that song, so who cares? Nobody is ever as hard as they say they are, so we just had fun with shit … Some people thought it was funny, some people thought it was wack. But ultimately it opened up a lot of doors for us because a lot of people talked about it.”2 *** “Ya Mama” may have offered an affectionate jab at hip-hop’s more self-serious currents, but “Officer” was a far more complicated beast. The song starts with one of the group’s greatest parodies, as J-Swift offers a noteperfect Flava Flav impression leading into Fatlip’s first lines, which give a lyrical titty-twister to Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” “Black Steel” is a vicious indictment of the U.S. military and the prisonindustrial complex; “Officer” trains its initial crosshairs on a more modest establishment: the DMV. In its own way, the song is just as funny as “Ya Mama,” and just as thematically coherent as “Passin’ Me By,” with each member seamlessly picking up the story thread of a bunch of knuckleheads heading to school with no license, insurance, or even registration. It’s been a decade since their car’s tags were updated, and probably just as long since it’s been washed. (Tre’s brief dramatic interlude— added later for the album version—still provokes a laugh-out-loud twinge of recognition from anyone who spent their early adulthood in less-than-luxurious living situations.)

2

Coleman, 329. •

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But as funny as the song is, it almost dares you to laugh. None of the Pharcyde were gangsters; the overwhelming majority of young men living in South L.A. in the early ’90s weren’t either. But the sort of simmering anger that fueled N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” and Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” were hardly foreign concepts. Los Angeles was still in the iron grip of police Chief Darryl Gates, and the LAPD’s gang task force unit still treated any area south of the 10 freeway with the sort of tactics more suited to an occupying military force than a domestic peacekeeping corps. In March of 1991, the City of Los Angeles commissioned a study of the South L.A. regions for urban planning purposes; reading it today gives the same sort of feeling you get at the beginning of a disaster movie, as the eggheaded scientist runs around delivering dire warnings that the imperious authorities shrug off. The report warns of “an unusually high number of unoccupied dwelling units,” “severe shortage of parkland and recreational space,” “a 26% shortage of doctors,” “13.3% more rat complaints” than elsewhere in the city, “infant mortality rates three times the LA County average.” And on and on. “It is beginning to be apparent that if the deterioration (in South Central) is allowed to continue, the remainder of the City will be adversely affected,” the report said. “The social consequences of physical and economic deterioration could be even more significant.”3

3

Los Angeles Department of City Planning, 1–6. •

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How could anyone in City Hall have possibly been surprised by what transpired just one short year later? And this was what everyone in the L.A. hip-hop scene was dealing with in one way or another, from Dre and Cube to the Freestyle Fellowship and the hippies at the Good Life. Pharcyde was no exception. “Looking at it now, ‘Officer’ was a symptom of the kind of PTSD that is strong in this area,” Tre theorizes. “It’s still strong in my mind, and I’m 45. There’s a lot of differences in the neighborhoods now, a lot of things are changing, but in my mind, those neighborhoods are still the same. Those police rolling by you are the fucking same too. “We really weren’t saying fuck the police. But I’m so glad that we were the type of young kids that we were. Because we had fears,” Tre remembers. “We had a lot of fears about being in trouble and going to jail. And a lot of us still do.” “Officer” fell out favor somewhat with the group, and they rarely played it live. But hearing it now, it’s a fascinating window into the creeping sort of unease that discriminatory policing breeds among regular kids and troublemakers alike. These traces of police discrimination and violence pop up again and again, even with a group that avoided gangsta posturing as assiduously as the Pharcyde. For all their mischief and irreverence, they were still four young black men living in a dangerous area that was only months away from an outright explosion. “It becomes part of your programming,” Tre says. “Black boys are always thinking about jail. It’s always there, always on your brain, just not going to jail. I’m sure it’s the same with Hispanics. So when you see cops •

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rolling around in your neighborhood heavy all the time, all you’re thinking about is trying to stay clear of the cops. And then by trying to avoid them, you end up walking right into that trap. That’s what you create every day. It’s just not healthy. Wearing a baseball cap was one of the lyrics in the song, and it’s true: If you were rolling four or five deep in a car, all brothers, they’re gonna pull you over. That was just a fact. So ‘Officer’ is an important thing.” *** The group had only recently been minted, and per Stewart, the chain of command hadn’t completely gelled, “but it was very clear that J-Swift was sort of the group dictator. And Fatlip was just out of his mind from the beginning. He was always the one making things difficult. He could never finish a verse.” Despite tenuous social dynamics, it was clear that this group was something special. Stewart may have been impressed by the Pharcyde’s freeform performance in Lono Brazil’s hotel room, but it was the demo that revealed just how much burgeoning potential the fivesome had brewing. J-Swift’s beatmaking confidence was growing by the day, and he was already churning out intricate sonic collages that were infinitely more sophisticated than anyone could have reasonably expected from a teenager. And as for the rhymes, the four rappers worked remarkably quickly to figure out what their individual styles should be, and exactly how to harmonize them. Fatlip had spent the longest time as a serious rapper, and it showed. His range was the widest, capable of •

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mutating from high-energy derangement to booming authority to quieter introspection with disarming ease. He maintained an effortless balance between intricate internal rhymes and A-to-B clarity; he never sacrificed rhythm for a good punchline, nor narrative coherence for a cheeky adlib. When The Source would later include a Pharcyde verse in their Quotables column, it was inevitably one of his. Imani’s style feels the most improvised, and his hyperenergetic delivery seems to come naturally. Watching the group’s earliest on-camera interviews, Imani invariably tends to be the one hamming it up, constantly freestyling; if he had somehow ended up in a sketch with Jim Carrey during the group’s stint as dancers on In Living Color, no doubt he would have killed. Listening to Bizarre Ride from front to back, Imani manages to include not one but two ya mama jokes before we even get to the song titled “Ya Mama,” which is no mean feat. Like Fatlip’s, Tre’s flow still sounds remarkably modern. The singing hybrid MC has become such a staple of hip-hop radio over the past decade—Drake’s dubious claims of authorship aside—that it’s easy to forget how conspicuously his style stood out in a period before Lauryn Hill and Andre 3000 would freely stretch their pipes in the middle of a bar. His raps are also the jazziest, giving way to Dixieland-style scatting on a dime. Bootie Brown’s vocal tone was certainly the most distinctive: High-pitched, nasal and hoarse, it’s the type of sound that could have easily become grating if misused, but he quickly figured out when to tone down his adenoidal holler and when to play it up. His casual use of enjambment on “Passing Me By” is sublime (see •

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the deceptively simple way he links “question” with “desk, and” midway through his verse), and his doubletracked dissertation on the merits and drawbacks of tobacco in blunt-rolling on “Pass the Pipe” is both infectious and instructive. But just as important as their individual brilliance, these four rappers sounded unmistakably like a unit, and their chemistry was all the stronger for being so obviously unplanned. With Fatlip holding down the low end, Tre adding the smooth lead melodies, and Imani and Bootie Brown serving as a sort of rotating tenor– countertenor tandem, they were the closest hip-hop had come to approximating the barbershop quartet. The group had a name. They had a manager. And they had a demo that gave a clue what they could do with the proper resources. Now all they needed was someone to hear it.

•

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Interlude: If I Were President

Delicious Vinyl got its start in 1987, the brainchild of two hip-hop-obsessed white DJs who met as teenagers at the L.A. club Rhythm Lounge. Matt Dike was a New York transplant. Michael Ross was a Long Beach native who cut his teeth spinning records while enrolled at UCLA. Dike and his first business partner John Sidel started a club in the mid-’80s called Power Tools, which grew from a regular afterhours party at a storefront in the Crenshaw District to eventually take up several rooms at the Park Plaza Hotel across from MacArthur Park, just west of Downtown. Sidel would fill the space with bizarre performance art installations—one night, he dismantled a wrecked car with an acetylene torch next to the dancefloor; on another night, a woman dressed as a 1950s housewife fed hopped-up clubgoers fried liver and onions—while Dike and Ross manned the turntables. Andy Warhol stopped by once, shortly before his death, and the Beastie Boys performed to a capacity crowd in summer of 1986. By spring of 1987, Dike and Sidel shut the club down, pleading burnout.1 1

Purrier. •

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The club’s most important guest, however, was Fab 5 Freddy, the inimitable figurehead of early New York City hip-hop, who visited on a trip to L.A. in ’86. He befriended Dike and Ross, and the two Angelenos tried to convince him to record a song for them— considering his standing as hip-hop’s great curator, few people understood why Freddy didn’t want to pursue a recording career of his own—using his signature line from Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It as its hook: “Let’s do the wild thing.” Attempts to record with Freddy didn’t go anywhere, but the seeds of the idea later sprouted when Ross recruited a charismatic, gravel-voiced former member of the Rolling ’60s Crips—Anthony “Tone Loc” Smith—to take a shot. Produced by Dike and Ross on the back of a sample of Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin’,” and featuring ghostwritten lyrics from a USC student named Marvin Young, Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing” would quickly become one of the biggest hip-hop singles of the 1980s. Delicious Vinyl, as the two had dubbed their nascent label, first tested the waters with Tone Loc’s single “On Fire”/”Cheeba Cheeba,” which got decent play locally on KDAY. But “Wild Thing,” with its cheeky, microbudget music video directed by a very young Tamra Davis, became a sensation. The song quickly spread nationally, and a few months after its November ’88 release, it had reached No. 2 on the Billboard hot singles chart (second only to Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up”). As one of the first releases from a two-person label operation, this sort of instant success was almost unbelievable. But it was hardly a fluke: Tone Loc’s follow-up single, “Funky Cold Medina,” also ghostwritten •

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by Young, reached No. 3 a few months later. Tone Loc’s debut LP climbed all the way to No.1 on the Billboard album chart, making it the second hip-hop album (and the first from a black artist) to hit the summit. It went on to sell more than three million copies. To follow that up, Dike and Ross looked no further than their diligent staff lyricist. Marvin Young became Young MC, and cut “Bust a Move,” landing him a No. 7 spot on the pop singles chart and a Grammy Award for best rap performance. His subsequent LP, Stone Cold Rhymin’, broke into the album top 10.2 Delicious Vinyl had, in the course of about a year, suddenly become one of the most successful new indie labels in the U.S. Ross and Dike made a deal with Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Records, to distribute the catalogue. They moved from their ramshackle Melrose offices to more respectable digs on Sunset. Steve Rifkind, who would later play an instrumental role in breaking the Wu-Tang Clan as founder of Loud Records, helped Delicious establish itself as a more professional outfit after knocking on Ross’ door. “He said he wanted to help me work retail, and at the time I didn’t even know what the fuck that meant,” Ross says. By 1991, Delicious Vinyl had grown to around twenty full-time employees. And yet as rapidly as it had risen, the label suddenly found itself in a period of transition. Dike had gradually started to grow away from the venture, pursuing his own projects while Ross led the label by

2

Charnas, 227–30. •

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himself. Delicious had already succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, but Ross was at a loss as to how to steer it toward long-term viability. One aggravating issue after another started to pile up. Young MC attempted to jump ship to Capitol Records, initiating a long legal battle. Tone Loc was busy enjoying his success—really enjoying it, to the point that Ross struggled to get him to focus for long enough to record a follow-up. Ross’ newer signing, Def Jef, struggled to break through. Island Records was bought out by PolyGram, and the resultant corporate consolidation left Delicious in need of a new national distributor. (They would later forge an agreement with Doug Morris and Atlantic Records, which came with problems of its own.) “You know, I was 30 or 31 years old, and we had had all this success, but I was going through a period where the whole thing was starting to get stale for me,” Ross remembers. “My partner was kinda checking out at that time, and stopped being as active. And then MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice and all this shit had happened after we dropped our original thing with Young and Tone, and all the sudden there’s all this absolutely awful commercial rap that just destroyed the business. “There were still dope groups making great records, but the [business] equation changed. Tone sold three million records off of two big tracks, which was phenomenal, but now you’ve got Hammer, selling 10 million albums just off of one single? And I’m thinking here, like, fuck: I guess we gotta do another Tone record, and now it’s gotta be huge. And then I’ve got another Young MC record I’ve gotta make, and they’re both losing their minds, I’m having trouble dealing with my •

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artists … This white kid comes to town named Jesse Jaymes, and we put out his record because I couldn’t get Young MC to work with me. So here I was trying to make a pop record with a white rapper, and it was just … I had to just flip the switch and try to make records with MCs that I was really feeling.” Most of the label’s future hopes were pinned to a London band called the Brand New Heavies, an instrumental funk group who came up in the British acid jazz craze. At Ross’ urging, they added a female vocalist named N’Dea Davenport—introduced to Ross by Fab 5 Freddy— and started making noise in the U.S. At an early gig in New York, the group was joined onstage by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest and MC Serch of Third Bass, and the collaborations went over well enough to convince the group to try adding more elements of hip-hop to their sound. “A lot of rappers were getting down with the Brand New Heavies because they were this live band that was doing cool jazz funk, and a lot of rappers at the time were sampling lots of jazz funk, so getting onstage with them was a cool thing to do,” Ross says. “Because there weren’t a lot of people doing live music at the time, mostly just samplers.” For the group’s next album, Heavy Rhyme Experience, Vol. 1, Ross had them record ten instrumental tracks, and then scouted out Stateside MCs to rap over them. It was a murderer’s row of left-of-center rappers: in addition to Q-Tip, Ross had recruited MCs like Guru from Gang Starr, Kool G. Rapp, Black Sheep, Masta Ace, and Grand Puba. He only had one track left to finish when one of Delicious’ youngest employees, Lamarr Algee, brought him a demo. •

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“So I was deep in the process of making that Brand New Heavies record, and sort of figuring out how to go into that next phase with the label, and I heard this demo. There were three songs on there. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

•

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Chapter Five

Lamarr Algee graduated from L.A.’s Crenshaw High School in 1988, and was still in his teens when he started doing college radio promotion for Delicious. He started working at the label at the end of Stewart’s tenure, right after the move from Melrose to Sunset— his first promo project was the Brand New Heavies, whose college radio campaign he handled while still technically an intern. “It was a really free-spirited kind of place,” Algee says of his early days at the label. “Professional, but very, you know … open. It had a lot of that hippie vibe going on, very artsy. Mike was more of a creative guy, and there was never too much pressure to bring things in, no one was sweating anything.” Shortly after his revelatory late-night encounter at the Gavin, Stewart swung by Algee’s apartment in West Hollywood and asked if he wanted to take a trip down to Inglewood. They listened to the Pharcyde demo on the drive down. “I loved it immediately, and then as soon as I met the group and saw them doing beats and things, it blew me away,” Algee says. •

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Algee didn’t have any actual A&R experience, but he knew he had to get the demo to Ross. He was particularly impressed with J-Swift, who quickly became a personal friend and soon started living with him in West Hollywood, while the other four stayed with Stewart. In spite of his history with the label, Stewart didn’t take the group to Delicious right away. He had a bit of currency in the industry after arranging House of Pain’s deal, and he tried shopping the demo through his contacts with some of the bigger labels, among them Motown, Def Jam, and Jive. Tre remembers, “As soon as we had separated from Reggie Andrews, Paul started setting up meetings. I think our first meeting was with Matt Jones up at Motown, and he was super cool. We were really gonna fuck with them because of Matt. But he took us out to a really nice dinner—and remember, we were still in our don’t-give-a-fuck mode—so we said, ‘Free dinner? We could do this all day.’ And we did! We had dinner with Def Jam, we had dinner with all these different labels … it was great.” As for weighing the competing label offers, “we weren’t turning anyone down, per se,” Stewart clarifies with a laugh. “I had enough attention in the industry that labels were listening to what I was bringing, but a lot of people definitely slept on it. I mean, that demo had ‘Passin’ Me By’ on it, so you would think anyone that has ears would know … But some people definitely slept on it. “Jive did want to sign them. The guys really wanted to sign to Def Jam, but Def Jam didn’t want to sign them; they gave them a look, and then ultimately they •

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passed. We also were dealing with some other labels like Motown that just didn’t understand it culturally.” The Pharcyde’s difficulties finding the right cultural fit at some of the major labels was hardly a unique dilemma. With few exceptions, the landmark hip-hop of the past decade had all come from scrappy upstart labels like Sugar Hill, Def Jam, and Tommy Boy, which fought their way into the label ecosystem. The majors had begun to add hip-hop experts to their A&R staffs, but even they often faced stresses from their own uncomprehending label bosses. But if there were cultural barriers elsewhere, Ross understood it right away. “Lamarr brought in the demo, which started with ‘Ya Mama,’” Ross says. “It was pretty hilarious—the ‘Season of the Witch’ sample was really dope—and I thought, ‘man, I hope this continues.’ Then the next song is ‘Officer,’ which was a funny little track, great James Brown sample. And then it was ‘Passin’ Me By.’ I remember listening to it through to Tre’s verse, all the way to the line where he says, ‘I guess a twinkle in her eye is just a twinkle in her eye,’ and after I heard that I said, ‘Look, just stop the tape. We gotta make this happen right now.’ That line just explained the whole group in general: these underdog kids trying to make it happen.” Ross, Algee, Stewart, and the Pharcyde got together shortly thereafter, in the relatively low-key environs of Hamburger Hamlet on Santa Monica Blvd., and started hashing out a deal. By this point, Algee had started to meld with the group, smoking weed and hanging out with them regularly, and J-Swift and Ross took a shine to one another immediately. •

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“I had worked with a lot of artists already, so I could see that each guy sort of had his own situation happening,” Ross says. “But me and J-Swift connected right away, because J had such a big personality. And he knew who I was, apparently, so he knew how to talk to me about business. You could tell that he wanted to have his own label at a certain point. And he had a ton of talent, I could hear it just on the demos. So I was talking about music right away, about the kinds of samples he was using. I knew he was dope. I knew they were dope. I could talk to them as artists. I told them I could literally get them in the studio tomorrow, so let’s get into the studio.” Stewart was the last one to get onboard. “I was still trying to get a deal with a bigger label. But they were so burned out on the process by this point, that even when I was like, ‘Hey, you know Jive’s still coming in with an offer maybe …’ They were like, we just feel comfortable with Delicious, let’s do this.” Ross wasted no time giving the Pharcyde their first assignment. “I had the instrumental for the last song on Heavy Rhyme, which was this kind of loopy track. I said, ‘Look, here’s your track. You guys wanna be on this record? Go home and fuck with this and let’s see what you got.’ They came back literally a day or two later, and I think we officially signed them in that interim period. Then we went straight into the studio, got a quarter ounce of weed, and cut ‘Soul Flower.’”

•

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Chapter Six

The version of “Soul Flower” that appears on Bizarre Ride is a remix of the group’s first Delicious Vinyl session— with J-Swift buttressing the Brand New Heavies’ live funk beat with a club-ready sample from the Fatback Band—and contains two new verses. Fatlip’s pitchshifted vocals allowed him to play around with a quickly discarded alter ego, the Farmer Man. Bootie Brown came up with an entirely new verse too, but Imani’s remains much the same, and it speaks to the group’s nervousness and excitement as newly signed recording artists. After calling Ross the “genie” giving them three wishes, Imani offers an aside that almost functions as a little prayer: “The Pharcyde is coming and I hope we’re not wack / But at this point there’s no turning back.” Having just recently met them, Ross got his first look at what the group could come up with literally overnight, and any jitters he might have been feeling about his new signings quickly evaporated. “That was a very funny session,” he says. “Hilarious. But until we got into the studio I didn’t know what we really had. Each rapper sort of had his verse written, except •

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for Fatlip, of course. And they just went in and each guy killed it. I think they felt a little nervous because it was the first time they were in the studio with somebody else, but it was a very loose session. I always wanted to make things super loose. We all smoked a ton of weed, and everyone just went in there and did their thing. “Fatlip did have a verse written, and he was the last guy on the record, but he decided he didn’t like it afterward, so we ended up cutting him again. Which was a sign of things to come. But it was always worth it. Fatlip’s verses were always pretty good the first time, but he always wanted to do it again. His verse was amazing on that track.” With their intro to the wider world of hip-hop now ready for mastering, Ross began preparations to book a studio and cut a full-length right away. But first, the group had to do something about their living arrangements. After all, Paul Stewart’s one-bedroom house wasn’t getting any bigger. *** The Pharcyde Manor plays an indelible role in the group’s early mythology. Few of the early newspaper profiles of the group fail to mention it, and the idea of the four bouncing off the walls of a Victorian abode all day, hatching adventures and making up secret handshakes, helps give Bizarre Ride a certain Hanna–Barbera charm. In reality, it was more of a rehearsal space and occasional crash pad for the group, though it still would have been an excellent place to find yourself on a Saturday night in early 1992. •

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Procured by Ross shortly after the group signed to Delicious, the Manor was a pre-war two-story house located on Budlong Ave., just south of Adams Blvd. Still technically South L.A.—the 10 freeway sits within shouting distance to the north—the Manor was a fair distance from Inglewood, located in a diverse neighborhood filled with working-class families and generally affluent students from the nearby USC campus. The house sits on an usually leafy stretch of Budlong. Driving through the neighborhood today, it’s notable for its preponderance of shaded front porches in an area where window-bars are still a standard feature. The house may have been a bit dilapidated, but it was dilapidated in a charming sort of way—“broken-in” would probably be the clever realtor’s term. The wall next to the central stairway was a perfect canvas for a twelve-foot-long graffiti mural, while the furniture-less living room was a perfect spot for still another. (“So much for the fucking security deposit!” Tre says. “They were so pissed with us when we moved out.”) The occupancy of the Pharcyde Manor on an average night ranged anywhere from zero to thirty. Scene photographer and journalist Brian “B+” Cross remembered stumbling into the Manor one night to see no less than twenty well-known local MCs all freestyling at the same time. But the Manor was more of a clubhouse, flophouse, rehearsal room and party pit than a permanent residence1—most nights, the Pharcyde retreated to the comparative comfort of their girlfriends’ cribs.

1

Kuvadia. •

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“But that was still the perfect place for us to be,” Tre says. “It was almost set up like SCU. Our living room had literally no furniture … actually, there was really no furniture in the whole house, now that I think about it. In my room all I had was a desk, a futon on the floor, some shredded white curtains—because I wanted to put the black light on at night and make it look like ghostly shit—and some milk crates up against the wall with books and clothes. So I usually stayed at my girlfriend’s house to live like a normal person. “We all basically did the same shit. But it was perfect for rehearsal. I think the only person who actually lived there full-time was Mark Luv, our DJ. And we had the DJ setup in the corner of the living room, with our monitors on the floor. So every morning Mark Luv would be in the corner spinning records. We’d get up one at a time if we were crashing there. Like, I’d get up at 10 o’clock and go in there and freestyle. Then I’d leave to go to my girlfriend’s and Romye or Fatlip would come down and freestyle. Someone else would come and spin some records, someone else would be stretching or practicing some dance moves. There was always something happening. It was a functioning place, like a clubhouse. But that place made history.” Asked about the Manor, Imani recalled the hours spent “smoking, listening to records, learning the machines, dancing. It was like Animal House, just for hip-hop. We didn’t have no locks on the doors, and mo’fuckas would come through whenever they wanted.”2

2

Coleman, 231. •

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Plenty of people from the scene made their way to the Manor. When Algee was between apartments for a few weeks, Bootie Brown offered up his room. Another frequent visitor was an ebullient, oversized DJ and hanger-on named Kurt “Big Boy” Alexander. Shortly after the release of Bizarre Ride, he would get his first industry job as the Pharcyde’s bodyguard on tour, and shortly after that, become the hip-hop generation’s answer to Howard Stern with his morning show on Power 106. (“He was a lot of fun, always had jokes,” Algee says of Big Boy. “And he had a lot of little talents. He could give you a fantastic haircut, fade you up real good. Back then I had this old [Nissan] Z, and he got me some new rims—where he got ’em from, I didn’t ask. He also used to get these old flip-phones with the chip so you didn’t have to pay for them, he’d hook you up with that. He was kind of a hustler.”) “I only went there a couple of times,” Ross says of the Manor. “But I think that’s where they really got their vibe started as far as the four of them just riffing and figuring out how to do hooks and delineating the chain of command.” “I was with them for a while when they had that house, and they all managed to coexist there,” Stewart says, noting that their chemistry seemed to solidify once the Manor came into play. “Yeah, maybe Fatlip was a little more of an oddball, but they were all a bit crazy. I think they had a certain creative respect for each other. They were all b-boys, everybody was helping pull samples for the record, so they were all more than just rappers—Fatlip’s always been a hell of a DJ. They just coexisted amongst the craziness.” •

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*** Finding a place to live was easy enough, but finding the right place to record took a bit more doing. Feeling good about his new signings after watching the “Soul Flower” sessions, Ross was keen to get the group back in the studio as soon as possible. The first official sessions for Bizarre Ride took place in late 1991, at Paramount Recording Studios on Santa Monica and Vine. The group wanted to tackle the three songs from the demo first—especially since so many of their other songs were still taking shape—and they settled in to cut “Ya Mama.” But something was off; the vibe was all wrong. “These guys needed to be able to just live in the studio to find their way around things, and Paramount was very hourly,” Ross says. “We were in there for eight hours and then we had to leave. All the recording I had done in the early days of Delicious, we had our own studio, so we were never really under pressure to be in a studio and have to leave. Recording sometimes just doesn’t work that way, so it’s nice if you can lock it out and kind of live there. “Plus, Paramount was a big studio, the guys had never probably worked in a really big studio before. We did ‘Ya Mama’ there, a few versions, but it never really came out right.” Ross had been doing some other work at the smaller Hollywood Sound studio on Selma and Cahuenga, where he met a twenty-four-year-old production assistant, Eric Sarafin. Sarafin had worked for four years at Dimension Sound Studios in Boston, moved to L.A., and paid •

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the bills setting up mics for string sessions at Capitol Studios. He had just landed his gig as an assistant at Hollywood Sound—three blocks south of his old job in the Capitol Records building—and quickly became friendly with Ross. “He had been in there two or three times and he would go to sessions, so I would talk to him,” Sarafin says. “He was always complaining about the recording studio where he had the Pharcyde set up, which I found out later was really a piece of shit. And listening to him complain, I said, ‘Shit, why aren’t you recording it here then?’ And Jesse, the owner of the studio, had opened a little production room upstairs, which he was willing to rent for $35 an hour, and that’s what Mike was paying for the [Paramount]. “Once he told me he was still deciding where to cut the album, I said, Mike, dude, it costs you $35 an hour, I’ve been recording for four years myself, so come on up, I’ll record these guys. You won’t have any problems, we’ve got access to all the microphones here, you can come downstairs [to the main studio] whenever you need to, and they can just camp out here.” Ross liked the idea, paid to lock out the studio, and for the next eight or nine months the first-time head engineer and first-time rappers had their run of the place.

•

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•

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Chapter Seven

As the Pharcyde got settled into their new digs, their engineer had a bit of a trial-by-fire. The group were laying down vocals for the uptempo party-starter track “I’m That Type of Nigga,” and had trouble bringing the same level of enthusiasm that they brought to their freestyled performances. Part of the problem, perhaps, was the fact that they were recording on a Neumann U47 microphone—an extremely expensive, extremely sensitive room mic that sits encaged on a shock mount, not to be touched. For young performers used to gripping the microphone in an intimate embrace, rapping into a hands-free stationary mic felt foreign, and Fatlip decided to get a bit more intimate with it, yanking it out of its mount and tearing around the studio with it in his hand, sending the sound levels haywire. “Eric was just shitting himself,” J-Swift laughs. “He was just, ‘No! What are you doing?’ And I could see why: that microphone probably cost ten stacks back in the day. So he said, ‘Look, if anything happens to that mic, Delicious is gonna pay for it.’ We were like, okay, that’s fine.” •

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“I knew letting them hold the Neumann was going to be a disaster,” Sarafin says. “But I also knew that politically I couldn’t be the guy saying no to them right away. So I let them do it. And Mike came in later to cut the daily, and he was just horrified at how bad it sounded. I was like, ‘Dude, you gotta tell them they can’t be holding the U47 like that. I can’t tell them off on the first day.’ And he was so relieved, like, ‘Man, I was thinking I’d have to go back to Paramount.’ “They were a bunch of knuckleheads, really,” Sarafin reflects. “I was the new guy on that first day, and I was basically the babysitter—the guy who had to be there. They were very cool with me from the beginning, but they were always gonna try to push the boundaries. I knew what was going on.” “Eric Sarafin—I liked that guy,” J-Swift says. “We clashed a lot, but I learned a lot from him, and I think he learned a lot from me.” For Tre, adjusting to life in the studio was more of a philosophical matter. “I remember going into the studio one night at the very beginning, and of course we were all high. I was on the mic, about to do my verse, and I started tripping out a little bit, in the sense that I was really thinking about what this all means for us to rap on tape. I was like, this is gonna exist forever. Like, damn, forever and shit. Wow. That’s crazy. My soul is on this fucking tape for fucking ever. And that blew my mind. I started crying, man, I shit you not. It fucked me up. And I knew at that point that whatever we say holds weight. So what are you saying? You know what I mean? What the fuck are you saying? It was one hard lesson to hit, just pow. “But that helped me to, when I get in the studio, •

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to really honor the soul inside of music and what that means. Honoring everything and everybody that took part. For Eric Sarafin, for being there on time every fucking day that we wasn’t there or showed up late as fuck. All the working parts. And also just to be in a studio where a lot of greats have been before you. Like, Prince had recorded in that studio, also Patti LaBelle, Earth Wind and Fire. The first real echo room was in Hollywood Sound, and they showed us how they did it. A lot of that history was there. It’s a huge vortex in there. I don’t know if people believe in that shit, but I do. I felt ghosts in there all the time. They were there for us, they welcomed us there, and they helped us make this fucking record which was a classic.” *** Compared to the insane pace with which the Pharcyde came together, secured a label deal, and recorded their first guest appearance, the next several months finally saw them begin to live their lives on a reliable schedule. Five days out of the week—sometimes six—the group was in the studio. Sarafin would arrive at noon, the four rappers would start to straggle in by 4:00, the serious recording work would start by 8:00, and by midnight, they were out. Every day, they ordered takeout from a Chinese joint down the block, always the same order. “It was a great time at first,” J-Swift says. “Not to mention we had all been down in Inglewood, and now we’re up in the middle of Hollywood, and Mike Ross is bringing all these fly-ass women to the studio, shit like we’d never seen before.” •

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Plenty of people passed through the studio during the sessions, from Tone Loc to fellow SCU alums, especially a teenage “little brother” group to the Pharcyde that J-Swift was developing, called the Wascals. The group’s star MC, Buckwheat, would contribute both of the album’s two guest verses. “He was just a 15-year-old killing machine as a rapper,” J-Swift recalled. “Most of the band kind of lived there while we were making it,” Ross says. “But J-Swift especially—he was literally sleeping there under the Neve [mixing] board in the big room.” As J-Swift remembers it, it was actually the studio pool table he slept under. But the confusion was understandable, as he didn’t like to let the mixing board out of his sight, never trusting the manufacturer’s claim that the machine had total recall of his own finely tweaked settings. “I was paranoid,” he says. “I used to put tape over the SSL, over the board. A big giant X saying ‘do not touch my shit.’ Because even though the board autoremembered all of the positions of the faders, it wouldn’t come back exactly, there was always something just a little off. So not only would I tape the board up, but I’d sleep under the pool table, so that the minute that they’d open, I could get right into the studio. “I just don’t like people touching my shit.” And if Sarafin had any worries about the group’s idiosyncrasies or greenness in the studio, he quickly came to recognize the quicksilver magic they were committing to tape. “It was a pretty amazing process, actually,” he says. “I started to develop a very high regard for those guys, •

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and at this point I view them as geniuses. Because they really were, and are. They delivered rhymes, and I can’t even tell you … The rhymes are so good, they’re just so good.” The sessions were hardly without their challenges, of course. For one, J-Swift insisted on recording all of the “Passin’ Me By” drops—the pauses where parts of the beat fall away, leaving the naked vocals—in the most painstaking manner possible. Digital recording technologies were advanced enough that the group could have done them on the Neve board with little sweat, but J-Swift decided they needed to be done by hand. “So instead of going to the automated Neve downstairs, he wanted to do it on this really old and crunchy MCI console upstairs,” Sarafin says. “On that one, every time you pushed the ‘mute’ button it would always make this ‘crrrchkt’ sound. It was really dirty. If you listen to the track really carefully, you can still hear those little pops— crrrchkt!—every time they do a drop.” “Were we complicated?” Tre asks rhetorically. “All this technological innovation and shit at our fingers, and we were doing it all analog. We were tired too, we had to do it like eight times. ‘Okay, okay … it’s coming up, right … here? … ahh! Nigga, we messed up!’ But those were the little parts that made that whole shit magical.” “J-Swift just did a lot of crazy stuff in the studio,” Algee says. “He was really specific about capturing different tiny little things. Like ‘Passin’ Me By’ had a little bit of vinyl crackle in the Quincy Jones sample, and he would insist that the crackle remain there. They wanted to take it out, but he really put his foot down that the crackle had to stay.” •

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*** Aside from “Passin’,” “Officer,” and “Ya Mama,” the rest of Bizarre Ride was either written or completed in the studio, and while none of it attained the timelessness of “Passin’,” the album saw the fivesome stretch in some remarkable musical directions. For J-Swift, making an album that never repeated itself or lapsed into a comfortable default mode was a matter of personal pride. “I already had experience in [professional] studios, so I was not intimidated by that,” he says. “The only thing that really intimidated me was the fact that I don’t like album fillers. All the dope hip-hop albums I loved were things you could listen to from beginning to end. And so I was terrified of having any kind of song that was not at the same level as the rest. I didn’t even care about whether it was gonna be a single that appeals to a certain demographic …especially then, because hip-hop was just starting to break through [to radio]. I didn’t care about that. All I cared about was I don’t like albums with punk-ass songs that you know they put on there just to complete an album.” If you ask J-Swift, nothing else he achieved in the studio that year equalled “4 Better or 4 Worse,” a deeply experimental track that introduced a whole new color into hip-hop’s sonic palette. The producer started working on an embryonic form of the beat back at SCU. He hadn’t intended it for the Pharcyde, however, earmarking it for a future personal project. But Fatlip happened to show up in time to watch him pull an unusual trick with his Rhodes piano, just recently inherited from Reggie Andrews. •

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“I loved the sound of that Rhodes,” J-Swift remembers. “So I had these chords I had written, and played it myself with one of those cheap tape recorders—the kind where there’s nothing but a big red ‘record’ button—sitting on the foot of the speakers. I got maybe 30 seconds of it. I had to tell Fatlip to be quiet, like, ‘Dude, I’m recording this.’ Then I took it to the studio, and just sampled the cassette. And it sounded like an old-ass record. “That beat wasn’t the same beat you hear on the record, but I put a beat together with that sample real fast—that’s why they called me J-Swift—and Fatlip heard it and just went, ‘Dude, you’re in the group.’ I was like, wait a minute, this is for my own shit here. He’s like ‘Nah dude, we need this. You’re in the group.’” For the version that appears on Bizarre Ride, J-Swift took the Rhodes auto-sample, and combined it with a drum break near and dear to his heart: the Emotions’ “Blind Alley,” most famously sampled by Marley Marl on Big Daddy Kane’s “Ain’t No Half Steppin’,” the record that defined J’s own journey to hip-hop. Usually, re-sampling an identifiable break from such a wellknown song would be a sign of beatmaker laziness, but J-Swift worked diligently to make it an homage that worked on an almost cellular level, splicing and dicing until there was nothing left of the original rhythm, but rather an almost inaudible spiritual trace—a fingerprint. “I chopped it to the point where it didn’t have any of those same grooves, and believe me, I had to be surgical. I had to chop it into so many small pieces, but you can still hear little things from ‘Blind Alley.’ Then I looped my sample from the Rhodes, and then I added a bit of •

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guitar from [the J.B.’s] ‘Rockin’ Funky Watergate,’ which I don’t even think they cleared. “I still feel like that beat was my crowning achievement.” In his memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues, the Roots’ drummer Questlove agreed, recalling having his mind rearranged by J-Swift’s production on the track: [1992] was the year I really started to make music, so I started to listen a little differently,” he wrote. “The Pharcyde album was a highly unexpected sucker punch. It was one of the greatest surprises I have ever had as a music consumer. I didn’t like ‘Ya Mama,’ but [our manager] AJ Shine told me that maybe I should reconsider my position. And I did, tremendously. That record just knocked me flat, especially ‘4 Better or 4 Worse.’ Back in the 1970s, Parliament had animated commercials for their records, and on the one for Motor Booty Affair, there was a kind of watery effect that happened to the picture when the Fender Rhodes was playing. When I heard the tremolo effect on ‘4 Better,’ that’s when I knew that we needed a Fender Rhodes. That’s kind of how Scott Storch got into the group. We wanted that sound, that possibility.1

Before the song’s effect on the Roots would yield dividends, however, it left a similarly profound impression on Pete Rock. After the release of Bizarre Ride, Lamarr Algee accompanied the group to New York, and met with Pete Rock, who had been wracking his brain since

1

Thompson, pp. 111–12. •

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hearing the album, desperate to figure out where the sound had come from. J-Swift relates: “He told Lamarr, ‘Dude, I know what that record is, I know what that record is … all right, what is it?’ And Lamarr told him that it wasn’t a record, that I had recorded it and looped it myself. A couple months later, Pete Rock came out with a song called ‘One in a Million,’ and it was all Rhodes. That, to me, was such a compliment.” The instrumental was bold enough, but after solid verses from Tre and Imani, Fatlip took the entire track hostage for its final two minutes. First spitting and sputtering through a truly deranged, loosely rhymed prank call, Fatlip keeps improvising beyond the point of reason, as the song devolves into in-studio cross-talk (at one point he yells for Romye, who seems otherwise engaged), meta-nods to the absurdity of the whole performance, and finally, an extended outro featuring a Black Sheep parody and what sounds like an inspirational high school lecture delivered in the midst of a full frontal lobotomy. You can practically hear the drool hitting the microphone. This was hip-hop as performance art, juxtaposing a club-ready beat with an inexplicable dive into the weirder corners of the subconscious, much like John Sidel dismantling a car next to a crowded dancefloor at Power Tools. It’s easy to see the song providing a throughline from the high-concept camp of Digital Underground straight to the nihilistic mischief of Odd Future twenty years later, and it’s yet another example of the Pharcyde’s ability to secure its place in posterity while simultaneously compromising its place on the 1992 pop charts. •

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“4 Better or 4 Worse” was later released as the album’s third single; it did not manage much radio play. *** As the West Coast’s resident oddballs, guided by a brilliant producer with an encyclopedic command of musical marginalia, the Pharcyde have often been seen as West Coast equivalents to De La Soul and Prince Paul. Superficially, the comparison holds, although J-Swift’s production tended to run a middle path between Prince Paul’s dizzy kitchen-sink phantasmagorias and the meaner, head-snapping slap of DJ Premier and Pete Rock. The track that shows J-Swift at his most Pauline, however, is surely Bizarre Ride’s leadoff track, “Oh Shit.” Riding a blunted riff from Donald Byrd’s 1967 jazz workout, “Beale Street,” the song is a grab bag of highenergy nonsense, featuring what sounds like a bicycle horn as punctuation and scratched-in commentary from Richard Pryor’s 1978 live album, Wanted. Like “4 Better,” it kicks off with virtuosic, skillfully twisted verses from Tre and Imani, and, like “4 Better,” Fatlip’s concluding verse serves to immediately erase all memory of them. “Oh god, that verse is legendary,” Ross says. For his sixteen bars, Fatlip tells an off-color anecdote about picking up a cutie on Crenshaw Blvd., taking her to the beach, and almost reaching second base before noticing her oversized feet, which leads to the realization that he has picked up a man in drag. This was, impressively, not the first rap song about a gender-bending late-night hookup to appear on Delicious Vinyl: the •

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third-verse of Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina” sees our narrator make a similar discovery, opting against engaging with any “Oscar Meyer wiener,” and laughing the whole thing off. Fatlip’s verse goes into considerably more detail, but it’s still possible to read it as an homage. Of course, it wasn’t. If anything, it was a drastically toned-down account from Fatlip’s own life. “One time I went out with a transvestite,” he told Spike Jonze in the 2003 mini-documentary What’s Up, Fatlip? “I met this girl on Crenshaw, and she looked really good—Filipino. I was rolling with my boy Daniel, and I didn’t have no shoes, ’cause he’d just picked me up from the house. He said, ‘Let’s roll down Crenshaw’ …” Spotting a girl in a car behind them, the shoeless Fatlip had his buddy run back to give one of them his number, having only seen her from a distance. Cut to a few days later, and “My mom kinda suspected something, because she had a deep voice. Like, ‘Who is that Talisa calling you all the time?’ I was like, ‘No ma, that’s just her accent.’” Fatlip took her on a date to the beach, and before long they started making out. “She’s grabbing me on my ass, and I think it’s going on, but then when I go for the titties, she moves my hand. I try to touch her down there, and she moves my hand …2 General attitudes toward sexuality have changed enormously in the twenty-five years since Bizarre Ride was released, but as of 2016, there are still no openly gay major rappers. In the early ’90s, the notion would have seemed almost impossible: From Ice Cube’s

2

What’s Up, Fatlip? •

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“No Vaseline” to Dre’s “Dre Day” and Eazy-E’s “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s,” the intraband diss tracks from the Pharcyde’s mirror opposites in N.W.A all seemed to hinge on intimations of homosexuality. For a rapper to appear to be anything less than a hairy-chested satyr was reputational suicide in the harder corners of hip-hop. Yet here, Fatlip was not only open about his own left-ofmainstream sexual experiences, he made it the subject of his first verse on his first album. “The beauty of that album is that these guys were young, they had a lot on their minds, and they had no rules,” Ross says. “They weren’t fronting. And Fatlip personifies that. There’s no territory he wouldn’t get into.”

•

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Interlude: Quinton’s Here

More often than not, skits can be the death of hip-hop records. They disrupt the flow of the music, they’re rarely anywhere near as funny as the artist must have assumed, and once iTunes and other digital, track-based platforms became the predominant medium for listening to music, most rap fans would tend to go through a newly downloaded album and move any track marked “(Skit)” to the trash. Bizarre Ride is the greatest exception to this rule. Not only are the album’s skits uniformly hilarious, they actually contribute to the album’s overall flow, and, on repeat listens, some even reveal unexpected complexities. The skits on the album were all recorded during one mammoth session in Hollywood Sound’s B-room. With DATs recording continuously, J-Swift vamped jazz chords on the piano while a drummer named JMD (who would later play on Freestyle Fellowship’s art-rap classic Innercity Griots) followed along, and the Pharcyde goofed and joked and ad-libbed until they stumbled upon workable routines. Later, J-Swift combed through hours of improvised lunacy to craft the best bits into proper skits with a few overdubs and backing vocals. •

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“They might have had a few of those ideas rehearsed, maybe they’d goofed on some ideas in the Manor, but they were really just riffing all day,” Ross remembers. “‘If I Were President’ seemed very spontaneous, it just sort of kicked in. Fatlip was an improvisational genius—he was always doing voices and impressions and bizarre shit. This is the kind of stuff they were doing before they even came to me, just riffing on each other, cracking each other up and getting into shit. We could’ve taken other things from that session and probably turned them into full-blown songs.” The greatest of the album’s skits, and thereby one of the greatest album skits ever released, is “Quinton’s on the Way.” Serving as a lead-in to “Pack the Pipe,” it opens on our heroes as they start to squabble and argue. Just as their voices are hitting an uncomfortable pitch, the phone rings: it’s Quinton, the gang’s friendly weed dealer, who promises to be there in twenty minutes. With this news, the group breaks into a giddy showtune of celebration that nods to everything from Cole Porter to Louis Armstrong. Bizarre Ride as a whole is so successful at building its own self-contained world that it almost plays like a surreal sitcom pilot, replete with in-jokes, catchphrases, and minor characters to be revisited and fleshed out in later episodes. When I first listened to the album as a kid, I naturally assumed that Quinton was a sort of fictional Cosmo Kramer-esque character designed to burst through the door whenever scenes at the Pharcyde Manor were getting too tense, or at the very least, a composite of the Pharcyde’s weed guys, like one of Tre’s #ladysmoothies. •

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Which is why, despite learning many years ago that Quinton was in fact a very real person, it still felt vaguely surreal to find myself meeting up with him for burgers and Bloody Marys in Westwood. *** Quentin (real spelling) Howze experienced the sort of career trajectory that one only really finds in the music industry. An L.A. native, he left home at age 16, and by the time he’d hit his early-mid-20s, he had been, respectively: a prison inmate, a weed dealer, a reluctant recording artist, an indie record label exec, and the Pharcyde’s road manager for the Labcabincalifornia tour. For most of the past two decades, Howze has made his living investing in real estate—for a while, Lamarr Algee was his business partner. He’s a tall, stocky 45-year old with a highly infectious laugh and three kids. He’s easily the most immediately likable person I met in the course of writing this book. Like Tre and Fatlip, Howze first hooked up with J-Swift through a woman. Nineteen years old, and fresh off a short prison sentence on a minor charge, he started dating a girl who turned out to be the older sister of one of the Wascals, which meant it was only a matter of time before he ended up at 7027 La Cienega. “At the time, as everybody knows now, I used to sell weed,” Howze remembers, “so I’d give J-Swift weed, and then when it was time for him to go to the studio he would call me, and I used to come down. “Back then, to pass the time, we’d talk about each other a lot, joking and stuff. And I was kinda good at it, so •

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me and J-Swift and Lamarr, we all got along. And when they took me to the studio I got along with everybody. I had just gotten out of jail on work-release. Every day I would go from work-release to the studio.” Howze was a lifelong hip-hop fan, sneaking out of the house to catch Uncle Jamm’s Army as a kid, and hitting up the Good Life later on. He’d tried his hand at rapping in middle school, and though he had zero intentions of following that up as a career, he could tell immediately that his new buddies / customers were onto something. “This was back when all the record companies had huge budgets, so you could get a demo deal before anyone had even heard your song. Everybody had a record deal. Even if you were just a tax write-off and never actually did anything. But I could tell [the Pharcyde’s] music was incredible. It was something different.” Quickly becoming a regular at Hollywood Sound, Howze would join in with the group when they were freestyling or breaking each other’s balls in the studio. (“There were all these little joke sessions that never made the album.”) He was surprised enough to learn that one of his off-the-cuff joke rhymes would go on to make the record—that’s him with the brief ya mama freestyle at the end of “Pack the Pipe”—but he couldn’t believe the group wanted to dedicate a whole track to him. “It was such a weird thing,” he says of “Quinton’s on the Way.” “And honestly I was a little paranoid about them doing it because … you know, the nature of it all. But by that time, I had already stopped selling, and started doing some record business stuff with J-Swift. So I figured, ‘Well I’m not doing it anymore, so okay.’ But •

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yeah, it was a surprise. I came into the studio one day and it was already done. They just had me do the voice-over.” Besides, the skit was such an inside joke. Who beyond the band’s immediate social circle would possibly know it was him? “Sometimes they would call me out at their concerts, and the crowd would go crazy and shit,” he says with a laugh. “I was still more or less paranoid, but I figured it would go away pretty quick. I mean, I definitely didn’t think they’d still be touring off that same music twentyfive years later. “And who knew what was going to happen with the internet and everything? I didn’t like that part that came with it. Like if I’m meeting my neighbor, ‘Hi, I’m Quentin Howze, nice to meet you,’ and you google my name, all this would just pop up. “I’ve had that happen too, where I’d be dating someone, their mom would google me, and be like, ‘Hey …’” *** Howze would eventually follow J-Swift to his subsequent, ill-fated deal at Tommy Boy Records, where he headed up the nascent label’s business affairs. He was busy learning the lay of the land as a businessperson when he and J met with Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman, who suggested Quentin capitalize on his micro-fame from Bizarre Ride by recording a follow-up single, with Howze himself on the mic. “I didn’t want to do it,” he says. “I just kinda went along with it. The whole thing was basically an accident—I really wasn’t a rapper, it was all just happening so fast.” •

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The J-Swift-produced track, credited to “Quinton” and dubbed “Quinton’s Here,” features the Jazzyfatnastees on the hook, and even spawned a video. Like an ultra-lowbudget precursor to Smallville, it follows Howze as he cruises L.A. in his convertible Mustang, hitting up parties that change from black-and-white to color when he arrives. (Fatlip and J-Swift have cameos.) He still seems both amused and incredulous talking about it: “It was all very fun … very fun. I have great memories. And it’s good to see that the project I was a part of still lives on. “I mean, I got out of jail in ’92, and we got that distribution deal in, what, ’94? Two different worlds in seconds almost. You don’t usually see so much happen in your life in five years. Most of the other five-year [periods] of my life were pretty uneventful in comparison.”

•

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Chapter Eight

Fatlip wasn’t the only one to spill some embarrassing personal baggage on the record, of course. Though considerably less explosive than his bandmate’s Crenshaw cruising travails, Tre gave a nod to his own personal Achilles’ Heel—a sensitivity to marijuana that couldn’t have put him more out of step with his bandmates. “We had [smoking] sessions all the time,” Tre says. “All those guys smoked constantly—they’re probably smoking right now, I’m sure of it. Especially J-Swift. That nigga was wake-and-bake. “But me and weed, we have our moments. Sometimes we’re cool, and we can do a lot of shit together: We’re feeling fresh, we can freestyle good, we can fuck good … And then there’s those times where it scares the shit out of me, like, ‘Am I gonna die? How about … now? Am I gonna die now?’ Sometimes weed is your friend, and sometimes it can be a real dick.” For his opening verse on “Pack the Pipe,” Tre gives a vivid snapshot of the bad end of a blunt, where suddenly nothing is where it needs to be, the fear starts to take over, and the high seems like it’ll never end no matter how badly you want it to. It was a surrealistic •

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interpretation of an actual experience he had shortly before making the album. “I had a bad trip,” he says. “A real bad trip. So much so that the ambulance came out. And they even scared me more. They said, ‘Okay, it’s only weed, you’re probably gonna be all right, but if we take you to the hospital we’re going to have to call your mother.’ I was like, ‘Fuck y’all, man! I need your help! Don’t you understand I need your help? Why you gotta tell my mom, bitch! I’m fucking dying over here!’ I was losing it. So they’re like, ‘Well, what do you want us to do?’ And I was like, ‘Just leave, let me die on my own.’ I went back in the house and got my shit together. And they were right—I mean shit, it was just weed. Anxiety is a motherfucker, man.” Perhaps appropriately, Tre wasn’t present the night at Hollywood Sound when J-Swift, Imani, Romye, and Fatlip hatched the seeds of “Pack the Pipe.” As Algee recalls, J forged the beat—centered around a woozy sample from John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman’s “Autumn Serenade”—extremely quickly, then gathered the troops. “He had just made the beat,” Algee says, “and then immediately everyone heard the song and said, ‘Oh, this is a freestyle song,’ and they all started freestyling. Even the hook was something they just came up with off the top of their heads—might have been J-Swift, actually. They were all basically in a circle, the lights were off, and they all just rapped to each other.” Aside from the four tracks that existed in some form prior to the start of the Hollywood Sound sessions, “Pack the Pipe” is the only one on the album that features all four members, and each of them are at the top of their •

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game, tackling such well-worn territory from completely novel angles. The various noises that seem to arise from every corner of the track—laughing, whispering, Bootie Brown yelling out the chorus to the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”—conspire to create a smoky atmosphere so dense you can almost smell it. Tre is still kicking himself for missing the freestyle sessions that led to the song—“I was probably back with my girl,” he speculates, “smokin’ or strokin’, that’s all we were doing”—but the studio was full all the same. P.E.A.C.E. from Freestyle Fellowship was there, as was Quentin Howze, who, incidentally, was the owner of an elaborate weed-smoking apparatus that would soon send Tre off the deep end once again. “I remember a time where Quentin brought this machine in,” Tre says. “It was this big device with all these tubes sticking out. You packed the bowl, everybody got a little tube, and you put your thumb on the end. He lights the bowl, and everybody sucks from their tube at the same time. It starts pumping fucking smoke through your body, just a shit-load of smoke. “So we were doing this for a while, and then somebody suggested we go to the movies. So we piled into Quentin’s Mazda MPV—he used to drive a minivan—and this motherfucking minivan turned into a motherfucking hearse, as far as I was concerned. I was just looking up at the ceiling thinking, ‘Wait, am I in a casket? This fucking blows.’ And then we got to the movies, and we were in the theater, and I’m trying to still have as much fun as I possibly can. And then all the sudden I started seeing these skeletons dancing on the screen. Fuck. That shit was terrible.” •

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•

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Chapter Nine

The riots came and went, and after his five-day imprisonment and subsequent studio blow-up, J-Swift was feeling disillusioned. As he tells it, he was plenty ready to chart his future course and move on to his other projects, the Wascals and the Jazzyfatnastees, but the album still needed another song. He immediately thought of his old compatriot from the new jack swing days at SCU: John “L.A. Jay” Barnes. “I knew he was the heir apparent,” J-Swift says. “So I told Mike, I got this guy, his name is L.A. Jay. And Mike said, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ I was like, trust me.” Per J-Swift, introducing L.A. Jay into the mix required a bit of subterfuge. The song he was working on, “Otha Fish,” was a one-man show, essentially a Slimkid3 solo track. Previous tracks might have only included three of the four rappers’ verses, but dedicating a whole song to one voice might have been politically dicey. So J-Swift was tasked with distracting the other Pharcyde members in Hollywood Sound’s lower studio B while L.A. Jay and Tre worked it out upstairs in studio A. “We literally had to not let them know what was going on until the song was done,” he says. “And when it •

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was, Tre and L.A. Jay came down to studio B, they played that shit, and no one could deny it.” “It was very fresh, and a different experience from working with J,” Sarafin recalls of L.A. Jay. “J-Swift was a bit of a super-ball. And John [Barnes] was the exact opposite, very low-key, just [deep voice] ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. It’s all good.’ It was a completely different experience.” Built on a flowing, aqueous flute sample from Herbie Mann’s “Today,” “Otha Fish” sounds like no other song on Bizarre Ride, and indeed, no other song in the early ’90s hip-hop landscape, period. Low-key in its energy and amazingly formally dense, the song owes as much to jazz as hip-hop, conjuring a slippery musical vibe that would be equally at home in a swinging ’60s Parisian juke joint as a Hollywood club. It was also the first time that Tre’s smooth singsongy flow was allowed to fully explode into actual song, a device he would utilize with greater frequency on the Pharcyde’s followup, Labcabincalifornia. Like so much of Bizarre Ride, the lyrics were bitingly autobiographical, with Tre dissecting his first real heartbreak. This was no #ladysmoothie; it was about a very specific case. “That was a relationship that was happening at the very start of all the things we were going through at SCU,” Tre explains. “And it ended right before we got signed. This girl was one of the strongest women I had ever known. I mean, she was hardcore. She was not to be fucked with, or you might get shot. She taught me a lot, and she wanted to see me do well. She didn’t want me to be a part of the lifestyle that she had, which was kind of the gangsta thing. And I’m not a gangsta, obviously, I was •

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just a man in love. But as for taking [the relationship] to the next level, I wasn’t ready for it. And she knew it, so she broke up with me. “She really wanted me to excel, and I didn’t get it at that time, so I took it hard. That’s what ‘Otha Fish’ was all about. All of it. Even about the other guy who comes in and scoops her up, he was somebody that she used to know. They might have dated before me and her did, and then they just got back together. And he was a real one, man. He didn’t budge.” Tre went over to confront his girl’s new paramour, and things degenerated quickly. “I don’t know what the fuck I said to him. He didn’t give a fuck, he told me, ‘Just get your shit and go. Do you want a taste of this gun, or do you wanna keep walking?’ And I was yelling at him like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about you and your fucking gun, that’s my woman!’ But of course the end result was me in a car blazing off. “It was good though. Hurt can be big, but you can’t let it make you fall. So that’s what ‘Otha Fish’ was basically all about. Love is fucked up. Love does its own thing. It was a good learning process, and guess I started writing it that second that I got superbly dissed. Because it was a part of me. I just carried it around until it got to the right beat.” All of that is there in the song—the love, the hurt, the bitterness, and the unpleasant creeping suspicion that your ex’s new man might actually be able to provide what you can’t. Coming as it does right after “Passin’ Me By” on the album’s track listing, it makes up half of the most strikingly honest ten minutes of heartbreak hip-hop ever recorded, the two songs moving from wistful puppy love to the harsher adult experience. •

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The group weighed two versions of the song. The first pass was a more traditional take, with a far more straightforward, less musical delivery from Tre, and a completely different central melodic sample. But the second, jazzier version won out. Listening to the two side-by-side, it’s remarkable how much the alterations allowed Tre to expand the emotional range of his delivery, all without changing a line. The original version features lines where Tre raps and lines where Tre sings; the album version sees him toe the line between both in a way that lets the song continually surprise you, no matter how often you hear it. “When you listen back to the original, it’s cool,” Tre says. “But it got shat on by this remix that’s on the record now. There were a few other remixes too, but this one fit so perfect, that I just followed the energy of where the fuck it was taking me. And I was really so deeply going through that situation that it felt fresh, and I just went there, followed it, and that’s where it went. And that’s how [my style] was born, I suppose.” Selling “Otha Fish” as a radio single was another matter, of course, but its place on the album offers a striking signal that the group had plenty of other gears to shift to. “The song was super dope, this incredible hip-hop poem,” Ross says. “It might have been a little too far out at the time … but it was a big left turn. Which is dope, because that’s what the group was about, left turns.”

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Chapter Ten

“One thing I’ll always remember about negotiating with Mike Ross,” Paul Stewart recalls, “is that all the other labels were like, ‘Okay, the album [budget] is $150000, and we’ll give you $25000 for an advance, and …’ Mike said, ‘Look I’ll give you an advance, and then the album is gonna take what it takes to make.’ And I remember thinking okay, that’s real. Like, how many brush strokes did it take Picasso to make a painting, and did he have to budget it out before? How can you budget out art like that? I never understood that process. And if you understand the math—which we didn’t—you usually wanna do it for as cheaply as possible, because you’ve got to recoup. So I really respected that.” But as accommodating as Delicious Vinyl might have been, at a certain point the group was going to have to deliver a finished record. Ross worked hard to cultivate an atmosphere where the group felt it had artistic autonomy, but balancing that freedom with an eye on the bottom line was always going to be complicated. “I’ve worked on a lot of albums where there’s a lot of pressure, and there was never any pressure on this album,” Sarafin says. “They would never outwardly •

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emote about a verse. If they wanted to redo it, they’d redo it, and no one ever gave them any flak about it. Mike never bothered them about it. I never bothered them about it. J-Swift was all for it. And everybody just kinda worked with the understanding that we’re just going to make this until Mike pulls the plug. Or until it’s done, one or the other, and I honestly don’t know which happened first.” Ross never set out a budget for the album ahead of time, though he estimates the total cost was around $150000. “I decided it would cost whatever it cost to make,” he says. “Which doesn’t mean unlimited … But it’s gonna cost what it’s gonna cost. I’m not gonna let it go crazy, but obviously I’m locking out a studio because I don’t want anybody to be stressed. That’s partly why I wanted to run my own label. There’s no CFO, so …” *** As fun and freewheeling as most of the Bizarre Ride sessions were, the group experienced its share of tiffs and bouts of nervousness. Part of it was an outgrowth of the SCU tradition of group critique—the idea that the group had to be one another’s editors. But there was certainly a sense of anxiety as well. Ross recalls: “I remember Tre was always asking, ‘Was that good enough? Are you sure this isn’t wack?’ They were never really sure how dope they were. Obviously J-Swift was telling them that, and we were cracking up. But the fact that they weren’t really sure, it’s almost like ignorance is bliss. It was just so pure. Almost every day I’d go to the studio and they’d have some really funny •

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hook and they’d be really excited for me to hear it. Although Fatlip used to kick me out of the studio. I’d be like, ‘What the fuck?’ Like, very early on, they were in the vocal booth at Hollywood Sound, they’re running through a hook, and Fatlip just comes and says, ‘Can you leave?’ I was like, uh … yeah man, fine.” Perhaps that nervousness was also a product of just how unique the album sounded. Obviously, the Pharcyde’s innate goofiness and sarcasm was never going to allow them to mimic the harder sounds coming out of Ruthless Records and the newly minted Death Row, but with the mainstream of hip-hop already moving so clearly in one direction, swimming completely against the tide must have been nerve-wracking. “That was a dilemma that broke out,” Steward says, “because Fatlip was always yelling, ‘This shit ain’t bangin’ in the hood, homie! We’re wack!’ He was always saying shit like that. ‘This shit ain’t bangin’ in the hood.’ Those conversations were happening all the time. “Finishing the album wasn’t easy. Especially with a guy like Fatlip in the band. It was this weird cross between perfectionism and fear of success.” Tre remembers the end to production as something of an anticlimax. “The lines were pretty blurred as far as the deadlines were concerned. Finally Mike was like, ‘Look, we gotta put this record out, we did all the footwork for the promotion, we’ve gotta get going.’ So we all just sorta stopped and thought, okay, let’s wrap it up then.” In fact, the sessions ended with one song still left to finish, a J-Swift production called “My Man,” which has still never been released in any form, even after an entire Pharcyde rarities collection. •

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“It was gonna be a dope song,” Tre says. “It had a John Klemmer sample. And the way things were back then, that would’ve been such the perfect song to be on there, just because of how J-Swift chopped that up. It was fucking delightful. J-Swift was just a little-ass genius. “So that was the one that got away. Just not enough time.”

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Chapter Eleven

Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde was released on November 24, 1992. For the cover, Stewart recruited a wellknown graffiti artist named Richard “Slick” Wyrgatsch, whose clothing company Fuct was a hot commodity in the skater world. Emphasizing the group’s more cartoonish,  Fat Albert-esque tendencies, it offered an explosion of color, with the members’ comic avatars headed down a rollercoaster into a funhouse portal. Only when you opened the booklet could album-buyers see the more lurid implications, complete with vagina dentata imagery. (Slick also designed the Pharcyde’s iconic sticker logo, in which an anthropomorphized fire hydrant lifts its leg and pees on a dog. Street teams plastered the stickers all over the city—“I think we even got some into the backgrounds of a few movies,” Algee says.) The album’s sequencing was very much in sync with the artwork; the transition from a gentle jazzy intro into the frantic “Oh Shit” mirrored the slow climb and barreling drop of the carnival-ride cover. From a commercial standpoint, it wasn’t the most conventional structure. The album’s most accessible singles—“Passin’ •

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Me By,” “Otha Fish,” “Ya Mama”—were all on the back half, with the jagged journey of “4 Better or 4 Worse” and the politically charged skit “It’s Jiggaboo Time” hitting listeners right upfront. As ever, however, there was some method in the madness. “The sequencing was a conscious band decision,” Ross says. “They had kind of come up with this idea where, if you look at the song titles in order, minus the skits, it kind of makes sense as a sentence if you read from the first to the last song.” The track listing as it appears on the back of the record (with a nod to the never-completed “My Man”):  “Oh shit, it’s jiggaboo time. 4 better or 4 worse I’m that type of nigga. Well, if I were president I would legalize the soul flower, but that’s on the DL, see. Hay Officer, last night I saw ya mama in a saggin grapefruit-yellow bikini. I stepped to her right, but she keeps passin’ me by 4 otha fish. Oh well, since Quinton’s on his way with the company bag, pack the pipe and rock the return of the b’boy tape my man.” “It’s this whole paragraph that kinda makes sense,” Ross continues, then pauses. “At least, when you’re high it does.” *** Before the album dropped, Delicious released “Ya Mama” as a single, along with a goofy, low-budget video. The song got some college radio play, but Ross intended it more as an introduction to the band, with the bigger guns to come later. •

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Even before “Passin’ Me By” was cut as a single, however, the album was starting to build momentum with the right people. Not a week after the record release, the Pharcyde got a call from Q-Tip and Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, telling them how much they loved it. The Beastie Boys were huge fans, and they would later feature the Pharcyde in the first issue of their magazine, Grand Royal. (Mike D conducted the interview himself, and the band photo was shot by an ambitious aspiring film director named Spike Jonze.) “More than record sales, the Pharcyde had a huge industry buzz,” Howze says. “All the A&Rs, all the people in the scene just loved it.” For the album’s engineer, the knock-on effects were already kicking in. “When I cut that album I was making $10 bucks an hour,” Sarafin says. “By the time it came out, I was a mixer for hip-hop albums, working independently outside of Hollywood Sound. The album had such a huge buzz within the industry itself, that the sales almost didn’t even matter … It’s crazy how many people knew that album, especially at that time. And then later when I started doing more rock gigs, the rockers would find out I did the Pharcyde album and they wanted me on their projects.” The Pharcyde’s explosive live shows added to their following exponentially. Thanks to their background as dancers, and their experiences working with old pros at SCU, the group were miles ahead of many of their peers when it came to putting across their music and tearing stages apart. “You couldn’t fuck with our show,” Tre says. “We weren’t playing. We did not fuck around. It was serious.” •

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“It was through those shows that I got to understand the transference of energy,” Howze says. “Later on, they would be on tour with some of these bigger, Platinum artists at the time, and they would have a better response from the audience—not necessarily because the songs were better, but just from their energy being transmitted.” “They all danced their asses off, they all rapped, did crazy shit, it was really phenomenal,” Ross says. “Fatlip would do the most ridiculous shit you could imagine. He’d go onstage in a diaper.” *** It was hardly the only L.A. rap album building buzz at the time. Just three weeks after Bizarre Ride dropped, Dr. Dre released The Chronic. Looking back, it’s easy to see those two albums delineating an essential split in L.A. hip-hop that would last for years to come: the gangsta and the backpacker; the vulgar blockbuster and the smart little indie; the mainstream juggernaut and the mischievous pop chart interloper. In reality, the two worlds weren’t so far apart. The Pharcyde were most emphatically not gangsters. But they were also dyed-in-the-wool hip-hop fans, and appreciated the genius of what their gangsta-associated peers were doing. The reverse was true as well. Ice Cube loved the Pharcyde, and was one of the first big-name rappers to invite them on tour. Snoop loved the Pharcyde. Tupac loved the Pharcyde. Eazy-E started inviting the group to parties at his house. Nonetheless, the two albums entered the canon as though they were incompatible warring rivals. They •

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were even reviewed in the same February 1993 issue of The Source, whose 5-mic rating scale still served to set the tone for how albums were received in the hip-hop community. The Chronic, which led off the review section, was awarded 4.5 mics. Bizarre Ride, which came at the very end of the review section, unsigned, had to make do with 3.5. The nameless critic was upbeat though, calling it “as much fun as a day at Great Adventure,” and praising “Otha Fish” and “Oh Shit” in particular. (Bizarrely, “Passin’ Me By” is one of the only tracks that goes unmentioned in the review.) The write-up ended on an ominous note, pondering the group’s place in the rap firmament: The Pharcyde will inevitably face acceptance problems as their left-handed, yet inventive concepts might be too esoteric for some b-boys. Nasal vocals over tracks that include much live instrumentation and sparse amounts of scratching may force some to ponder their role in the world of hardcore hip-hop. Sincerity and enthusiasm for the art form hopefully won’t be mistaken for happy-rap crap. The question many will have to answer for themselves is whether a trip to the Pharcyde is a step backwards or a leap into the future?1

As for the mainstream press, Bizarre Ride finished tied for 100th on the Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll that year, well below nine other hip-hop releases, including such long-forgotten or dismissed rap records

1

The Source, 51. •

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as Basehead’s Play With Toys, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury, Kriss Kross’ Totally Krossed Out, and the poll’s No. 1 finisher, Arrested Development’s boho-hippie-hop debut, 3 Years 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of … . In a sort of dissenting opinion essay published along with the poll results, longtime Village Voice critic and poll organizer Robert Christgau took aim at the bougie sensibilities on display in those results, and noted the yawning disparity in rap tastes between the collegeradio-raised ranks of “thirtyish mainstream” rock critics and the younger, browner, hip-hop proponents. He wrote: “Of the 10 albums just cited, only the Pharcyde’s gets me going for more than a cut or two. The same goes for the electorate, where our sizable little contingent of rap specialists … gave the above-named most of what support they received.”2 In other words, maybe pay attention to the critics who actually know what they’re talking about. As gangsta rap became a bigger and bigger commercial force, the urge to prop up an alternative became even stronger, and some of the more critically adored alt-rap acts of the era—Arrested Development first and foremost—often seemed to be held up by critics as exemplars of the genre’s authenticity for reasons that were more political than artistic. Like alternative rock, the “conscious” or “alternative rap” labels only made sense in the context of what they weren’t, rather than what they were. And as time went on, the “conscious” label started to become something of a backhanded compliment, a

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Christgau. •

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testament to an artist’s seriousness that might as well also serve as an artificial ceiling imposed on his or her album sales. There was something particularly odd about seeing the Pharcyde forced onto the more academic side of the gangsta-conscious dichotomy. After all, this was a group that very conscientiously avoided taking anything particularly seriously, who gave little rib-nudges to self-serious political rappers whenever they could, whose debut single was an intentionally puerile collection of fat jokes and fart jokes. And yet, just because they avoided rapping about gunplay and appeared to actually be having fun on their records, the Pharcyde were habitually looped in with hip-hop’s crowd of daishiki-clad liberal arts majors. As William Jelani Cobb would later write: “Pharcyde was probably the most thoroughly conceived and flawlessly executed of any of the alternative releases of the era … [But] the fact that the troublesome ‘alternative rap’ label could be plastered onto the diverse array of lyricists who found interest in subjects beyond underclass crime drama was itself more indicative of what ‘mainstream’ hip-hop had become.”3 *** Whatever esoteric quibbles critics may have had about the record, it’s likely that few in the band cared after March 18, 1993, when “Passin’ Me By” was released as a single. Along with a striking black-and-white video that featured the group floating across playgrounds upside-down, the

3

Cobb, 66. •

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song would quickly become inescapable for anyone with even a passing interest in hip-hop. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard rap singles chart, as well as No. 1 on the magazine’s Heatseekers chart, which measured smashes from new or developing acts. It wasn’t long before radio, TV, and newspapers came calling. The group returned to In Loving Color and performed to screaming fans at the end of the show. They rocked the stage on Arsenio. A hysterical interview for Rap City saw a straight-faced Fatlip explain that they had achieved the upside-down effect in the “Passin’” video by working with a group of Eastern European mystics who gathered around in a circle and levitated the Pharcyde with their positive psychic energy. The “Passin’ Me By” video had become omnipresent on Yo! MTV Raps when the station sent Fab 5 Freddy to L.A. for a special show. For most of America, this would provide their first glimpse inside the Pharcyde Manor (where the whole episode was taped), as well as their first snapshot of the group’s variegated personalities. While a bemused Freddy tries to keep things on track, Imani steers the conversation, freestyling and offering a stream of shout-outs. Bootie Brown makes game attempts to seriously discuss the ins-and-outs of video budgets, only to be continually interrupted. Fatlip introduces the “Ya Mama” video by complaining about it: “I’d just like to say that the ‘Ya Mama’ video was wack, because the director didn’t let the Pharcyde express their true creative juices.” Tre can barely say a word, as he appears to be higher than anyone had ever been on national TV since Sly Stone’s glory days on The Mike Douglas Show. In other words, it was just a normal day at the Manor.  100 •

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Chapter Twelve

Bizarre Ride was certified Gold by the RIAA in 1996, in honor of crossing half a million total shipments. By modern album sales standards, that would be a modest success. But considering the far healthier state of the music industry in the 1990s, and the ubiquity of “Passin’,” it hardly qualified as a smash. Interviewed by Rolling Stone ten years later, Eminem used Bizarre Ride as a case study for the fickleness and arbitrariness of the industry. “The truth is, [a career] could end tomorrow,” he said. “I’ve seen so many albums get slept on. Pharcyde’s first album should have been huge, that shit should have sold six, seven, eight million.”1 As Paul Stewart recalls, the fact that the album seemed to hit an early ceiling aroused a bit of suspicion in the group, especially after a chance encounter with one Tupac Shakur. “Tupac told them, ‘What do you mean your record ain’t Gold? I hear “Passin’ Me By” everywhere. Your

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label’s ripping you off.’ After that, the whole white-devil record label thing became a bit of a factor.” So why didn’t Bizarre Ride manage to go on to sell copies commensurate with its acclaim? Per Algee and Ross, there were multiple factors, all traceable to the music industry’s latent anachronisms, back-patting deals, and prejudices. For one, as Algee relates, the record business had still yet to completely embrace or understand hip-hop, and some of the veteran R&B execs were the worst offenders. At the time, Delicious Vinyl had a distribution agreement with Atlantic Records, and record stores were still largely reliant on label reps dictating which albums to stock. “Atlantic’s head of marketing was this guy named Dwight Bibbs, and he was a real R&B guy,” Algee says. “He didn’t believe in rap that much at the time. He would have field reps who would go out to the record stores, back when they still had record stores, and they would push all the label’s records, but the Pharcyde was not the big priority for them. They went Gold later, but I really believe the Pharcyde could’ve had a Gold record right off the bat, maybe even a Platinum record, but Atlantic was underserving it.” As for the record that Atlantic was pushing in place of Bizarre Ride? Niice ’n Wiild, from a would-be new jack swing heartthrob named Chuckii Booker, which ended up selling far less than the Pharcyde, even with the label greasing its wheels. “So for the little record stores, instead of ordering twenty Pharcyde records, they’d order five Pharcyde records. And I knew this because I was talking to all  102 •

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the reps, I was getting warned. They were telling me, ‘Yo, they’re telling us not to push this as much. There could be more orders than you’re actually getting.’ It was probably like fourth on their list of priorities, and Chuckii Booker was way up at the top. “And you’d talk to the record store people, like the younger people at the front counter, they knew the Pharcyde was hot. But they weren’t the people ordering the records. That was always the older guy who owned the store, and he would just go for what the field reps were pushing. So I’m talking to the cool kid at the counter, like, ‘Where’s the Pharcyde?’ And he’d be like, ‘We only ordered four, we sold out. People are coming in and asking for it, but we just can’t keep it on the shelf.’” *** As for TV exposure, “Passin’ Me By” was still a staple of Yo! MTV Raps, and it became the No. 1 most-requested video on BET’s Rap City. But in order to really take off, Ross knew he had to get the video onto MTV’s regular rotation alongside the new Pearl Jam and Madonna clips, just as he had with “Wild Thing” and “Bust a Move.” The problem: MTV only had one new music slot to fill in their rotation, and they’d narrowed the candidates down to “Passin’ Me By” and “Slam,” the stomping agro-rap anthem from the Def Jam-signed Queens group Onyx. Ross flew to New York just to lobby the station, meeting with MTV’s executive vice president of talent and artist relations, Rick Krim. “I’m in there being like, trust me, these are the guys,” Ross says. “This is gonna be the biggest shit, they’re  103 •

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incredible. And they liked it, they knew we shot a super dope video. But then of course Russell [Simmons] goes in there and pulls his power move, and they picked ‘Slam’ instead … “Look, I know there was this buzz in New York about Onyx, because they’re on Def Jam, and they had their whole punk-rock-kinda-whatever-the-fuck-theywere thing going on, so no disrespect … but come on, man! Really? You’re gonna pick ‘Slam’ over ‘Passin’ Me By’?” Ross has told this story before, but he still seems to get genuinely frustrated the more he thinks about it. “MTV was very New York-biased,” he says, “and I just couldn’t make that connection that they needed. And there weren’t two slots, there was a just one fucking slot. So ‘Slam’ got all that play. But tell me: what’s the classic now? Time tells. If MTV would have really slammed it, the Pharcyde would have been something else. It stands the test of time, and it’s a classic fucking record. But as far as sales, especially in that first window when a record comes out and you can really sell a lot, they would’ve sold a lot more. That was disappointing.” For a follow-up, Delicious released “Otha Fish” as a single later, and recruited a director named Kevin Kerslake, a rising star thanks to his video for Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” to helm a big-budget video. (Given that it was essentially Tre’s show, Fatlip refused to participate in the video shoot.) “That record died a horrid death because there was nowhere to play it,” Ross says. “Too progressive. Pop radio played ‘Passin’ Me By,’ and of course it killed on hip-hop radio. But you try to give Power 106 ‘Otha Fish,’  104 •

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and it’s just a little too left-field. In another era, I really think they would have played it. “We get a little bit too progressive sometimes thinking people are going to catch up to us, and you’re asking a lot when you’re talking about corporate radio. Even back then, it was rare that you could find any DJ who was just playing what he wanted. I thought maybe we had built up enough goodwill that we could break through with ‘Otha Fish.’ I was wrong. “And then MTV didn’t play the video, even though Kevin Kerslake directed it. The whole thing kinda sucked. It was a disaster.”

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Chapter Thirteen

J-Swift had a good general idea what he wanted to do next. He was still steamed over the falling out with the Pharcyde, and got particularly annoyed when the group headed off to New York without taking him along. (Though he does note that his mysterious absence helped make him a sort of “urban legend” in hip-hop’s birthplace.) But however much sales might have stalled, the industry and those in the rap ecosystem were still buzzing about Bizarre Ride, and his stock as a producer had exploded. He had new acts he was developing, particularly the Wascals and the Jazzyfatnastees, and he made it clear he was on the market. “After Bizarre Ride, I had my groups, I had the Wascals, and I knew I had a handle on producing,” he says. “Not just producing, but creating a world, a concept, an alternate universe, if you will, with my groups.” Algee had connections at BET, and talked the cable network into doing a West Coast rap special, in which both the Wascals and the Jazzyfatnastees would be featured. The Jazzies did an acappella performance, and the Wascals freestyled. The special was enough to turn a few heads, one of those belonging to Eazy-E,  107 •

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who attempted to sign the Wascals to Ruthless Records. According to Algee, J-Swift intervened and talked the group out of it. (Eazy-E would go on to sign Bone Thugs-n-Harmony instead.) Lyor Cohen of Def Jam tested the waters. Monica Lynch, longtime president of Tommy Boy Records, had been looking for a group to compete with En Vogue, and took a shine to the Jazzies; Algee flew down to Atlanta for preliminary talks with her and label founder Tom Silverman. Meanwhile, there was another particularly big fish circling J-Swift. Rick Rubin, the irrepressible co-founder of Def Jam, now operating on his own with Def American, had somehow heard about J’s groups before the special even aired. J-Swift had been partying with an A&R exec named Paul Pontius (who would later go on to sign nu-metal bands Korn and Incubus) at his house in the luxe Nicholas Canyon area of Malibu. Up in one of the hills nearby, he found a particularly pleasant little clearing with an ocean view and boulder to recline on, and started bringing friends there to smoke weed, much to the chagrin of Pontius’ neighbors. For whatever reason, “J-Swift was insistent that we take Rick Rubin up there,” Algee says, “so we got a car and drove him all the way up to Malibu to have the Jazzies sing to Rick up at that rock, and they offered us a deal.” J-Swift remembers the conversation well.  “I told Rick Rubin, ‘Look, first I want a million dollars.’ And I remember my partner [Algee] choked, and the A&R was terrified. But Rick just looked at me for a while, with his long-ass beard, real calm, and said, ‘What’re you gonna  108 •

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do with a million dollars?’ And I said, ‘First, I need $600,000 for operational costs, and then I need $400,000 for the first budgets on albums from my two groups.’ And that made sense to him, so he said, ‘Why don’t I give you $800,000 first, and then …’ I interrupted, ‘And I want to own the masters.’ He said, ‘Why do you want to do that? Why don’t you just start your production company, and let us help build you up?’ “In hindsight, that made sense.” But owning his own masters had become a key condition for J-Swift, having already been through a songwriter’s deal with Andrews that didn’t turn out to be as lucrative as he’d first imagined. He turned his attention to Tommy Boy instead, and Silverman agreed to J-Swift’s terms: He would own the masters on everything he produced, and license them to Tommy Boy for a seven-year period. “And they offered me a million dollars,” J-Swift says. “So they won.” In Billboard, Tommy Boy announced their deal with Swift to create Fat House Wreckords. J-Swift would serve as A&R, Howze would head up business operations, and Algee handled marketing.1 *** J-Swift and Algee got started on setting up his new production company, but the strength of the hot young producer’s convictions—all of them technically

Flick, 26.

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admirable: retaining complete control of his business, never compromising his work, bringing his protégés along with him—started getting in the way of steps that could have cemented his place in the industry. “He didn’t want to work with any [of the label’s] other artists,” Algee says. “Tommy Boy was really trying to get him to do music for Naughty by Nature and Queen Latifah, they wanted to really build him up as a producer. That would have helped him so much. But he only wanted to work with his own acts. He only wanted to work with the Jazzies and the Wascals, groups that he was personally attached to. He wouldn’t do any other outside work, and that was a mistake. “He was always a very artistic person, and he has an extreme personality. He was like TNT in a bottle. I see Kanye West today, both in his music and how he rants on Twitter, the way he’s this unrestrained emotional person, and that reminds me a lot of J-Swift. So many similarities. J was the predecessor to Kanye, he just never got that mass exposure.” (Interestingly, Kanye has gone on record calling Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde his favorite album of all time. Of all time.) “J-Swift is a really smart person,” Howze says. “He was ahead of his time. He demanded to own his masters, and he wouldn’t even do a remix unless you were giving him a distribution deal. But to look back on it all, it could have been a mistake. “Tommy Boy wasn’t making a lot of money off of us. We owned everything. So what’s in it for them? I think J-Swift negotiated a deal so tough that when Tommy Boy looked at the numbers, the Xs and Os, they just  110 •

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didn’t see how it was worth it. They were paying for promotion, marketing, you name it. And then not getting much in return. Their cut was small. So unless we give them material that they think can sell millions, why do it at all?” J-Swift concedes that he unwittingly set himself up for failure during his Tommy Boy tenure. “In hindsight … and I don’t like to say these kinds of things, because none of it means anything—woulda-coulda-shoulda, it’s all crap. But in hindsight, I think I reached too far.” And it wasn’t as if he didn’t try. J-Swift and Algee rented out an enormous house in the chic Whitley Heights enclave of the Hollywood Hills, and started assembling their own studio. They moved the Wascals out of their two-bedroom Leimert Park apartment into a Pharcyde Manor equivalent, dubbed the Wascal Castle, out in Santa Monica on 14th. But reality closed in quickly. “We did not know what we were doing, business-wise. Just not at all,” Algee says. “We were a bunch of kids, smoking a lot of weed and making music. The music part was happening—J worked in the studio pretty diligently. We were just slow to get that album done.” The Wascals album does exist—it was finally released on Delicious Vinyl in 2005—and J-Swift made time to produce material for Quinton. But Tommy Boy was not the sort of loosey-goosey hippie company that Delicious was, and Silverman was not the type to let proceedings drag on. “What I didn’t realize when I signed [with Tommy Boy] was that they were more into fashion and all that crap,” J-Swift says. “Whereas Rick Rubin was like me,  111 •

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he’s a true man of music. So you could say that was a mistake. But c’mon, I was 21 years old.” “I remember Tom Silverman coming over to check on us at that big house in Whitley Heights,” Algee says. “We had barely any furniture in the place, we just had some bedroom furniture, a couple of desks with some phones, and a few computers. I remember him coming over to show us a profit and loss statement, and it was like he was talking a foreign language. I’m pretty sure he figured out right then and there that we might not be making it. “A little after that, we had a situation where some people tried to rob us for our studio equipment—they came in there with guns, and tried to steal our stuff. They didn’t get away with it in the end, but when we told Tommy Boy about that, they were like, ‘Fuck, this is a mess.’ At that point they kind of wanted to take back control of the group. And it started going downhill from there.” J-Swift’s million-dollar deal with Tommy Boy soon disintegrated.

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Chapter Fourteen

While J-Swift negotiated his way into and subsequently out of a million-dollar deal with Tommy Boy, the Pharcyde’s second album, Labcabincalifornia, was released almost three years to the day after Bizarre Ride. It is in many ways a prototypical “difficult” second album: darker, more mature, more brooding, and more uneven than its predecessor. De La Soul is Dead is an appropriate comparison point, and, as in the case of De La, there are fans who will make strenuous cases that it’s the superior record, but they’re certainly the minority. Labcabincalifornia charted higher than Bizarre Ride, but sold less overall. Its high points are arguably just as high, but its low points are lower—in fact, Bizarre Ride doesn’t really have any low-points—and it lacks the thematic unity that made the Pharcyde’s debut such a front-toback joy. Most importantly, the four members of the Pharcyde had undergone a rather profound series of life changes in the three years since they’d last recorded, and the weariness, wariness, and restlessness that a life on the road and in front of cameras produces is all over the finished product.  113 •

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“What happened with Labcabin was we were all a little more jaded because of the things we learned along the way about the industry,” Tre says. “On Bizarre Ride, we were so happy to have a deal and to be recording. Everything was so fresh and new. But business really gets to you. And we got superbly jaded, and that’s what it felt like when you heard the music. It was a little bit darker. It wasn’t happy-go-lucky. It was real different.” There were several other reasons why. *** Shortly after the release of Bizarre Ride, the Pharcyde, along with Lamarr Algee, made their maiden voyage to New York. They alighted at a TriBeCa club at 161 Hudson called Wetlands one night, where they were caught up in a massive brawl that changed the tenor of the group. “It was a real rowdy crowd,” Algee remembers of the club. “Real Double X Posse, ‘Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down,’ and all these headbanger types of things.” “I think a couple of crews there must have had beef with each other,” Tre says, “and there was a lot of hostility floating around. What happened with us was, Fatlip kept getting bumped into, and he was like, ‘Can you stop fucking bumping me?’ And the guy was like, ‘Yo, sorry man, whatever.’ And then, Fatlip saw that I was there, and he kind of took a turn. At that point it could have been totally squashed. But Fatlip was like, ‘Nah man, fuck you.’ And I was like, ‘Fatlip, we are not in Los Angeles. These are not our homies. We’re surrounded by people we don’t fucking know.’ But  114 •

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as soon as he said that, I got pushed to the side, they grabbed Fatlip, shit was happening, and it was just an all-out bar brawl.” Tre continues: “I didn’t know the rhythm of what was going on, and to be honest with you, I was scared as shit. All I know is our crew got fucked up pretty bad. Romye got taken to the hospital. I was in New York for the first time—we all were in New York for the first time—and when I went outside, I didn’t know which way to go. Everybody had gotten separated inside, and I was by myself. And then I see these two crews just running at each other, it was like Clash of the Titans. It was the darkest night.” “Certain group members might have had animosity afterward,” Algee says. “Like someone should’ve helped them more in the fight, but I don’t know. I never did talk to them about it.” “I had zero courage that night,” Tre admits. “It’s nothing I’m proud of at all. I feel like I could’ve done more to help, and I didn’t. Just a straight punk. We could’ve all gotten killed. Fear can kill you. But it ain’t about being tough and macho either. Sometimes you just do what you can and get out.” “There was a drastic change in the band after that,” Stewart remembers. “The fun kind of went out of it afterward. It used to be all innocent … It just got darker.” It was around this time that the group recruited Big Boy to run security, having already hired a co-manager named Deon “Suave” Green, who had previously managed Tone Loc. Stewart and the Pharcyde parted company shortly after, with Stewart going to work for Ice Cube’s  115 •

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company, Street Knowledge; Stewart says Cube’s love of the Pharcyde helped him land the job. Over the next few years, Stewart would go on a tear, setting up deals for Coolio, Warren G, and Montell Jordan, and serving as music supervisor for John Singleton’s Poetic Justice. He’s currently running a publishing company, in addition to a steady career in film and television—he was responsible for the music in Craig Brewer’s Hustle and Flow, which resulted in Three 6 Mafia winning one of the most unlikely Oscars in Academy Award history. *** Having outgrown the Pharcyde Manor, the group relocated to new digs, which they duly dubbed the Lab Cabin. The Cabin was bigger, nicer, and located in a tonier part of town—Los Feliz, on Waverly Drive near St. George St. It was an historically significant location: just across the street was the infamous LaBianca house, where Charles Manson and his “family” murdered supermarket owner Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary, writing “Helter Skeelter” [sic] on the wall with their blood. Tre reports seeing at least one ghost while living there. One of the bigger upgrades was the presence of a home recording studio—hence the “Lab” in Lab Cabin—and roughly half of the tracks on Labcabin were produced by Pharcyde members themselves. “We still had no furniture in the living room,” Tre says, “but the bedrooms had real beds this time.” ***  116 •

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It’s hardly a coincidence that the increasing esteem Labcabin has enjoyed over the years has grown in tandem with the near-canonization of a then little-known producer who worked on it. With J-Swift out of the picture—he claims Ross offered him $25000 to produce a single track on Labcabin, and he refused—the group were actively seeking out new producers to supplement their own work. At the top of their wish list was Q-Tip, who met with the four in his own studio in New York, telling them he couldn’t make the schedule work. He did, however, give them a beat tape that he credited to a young producer named Jay Dee. Since Tip’s birth name was Jonathan Davis, the group assumed that the Jay Dee moniker was a secret Q-Tip pseudonym; they were mistaken. James Yancey, aka Jay Dee, later J Dilla, was a twentyyear-old Detroit-bred beatmaker whom Q-Tip had spotted early on, and the Pharcyde liked his work enough to fly him out to L.A. While there, he would produce half a dozen of the album’s seventeen tracks, of which “Runnin’”—built on a hypnotic Stan Getz sample, with a drum pattern whose complexity only reveals itself the thirtieth or fortieth time you hear it—would go on to attain a status near or equal to “Passin’ Me By” in the group’s repertoire. (Another of his productions, “Drop,” built around a trippy backward sample, would later get a perfect video component. Shot by former Grand Royal photographer Spike Jonze, the song’s video was created by shooting the foursome stalking through Downtown L.A. backwards, then replaying the footage itself in reverse. The group even hired a linguist to teach them to rap backwards,  117 •

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so that their lip-synching would loosely match up with the track in the finished product. The video remains a landmark of its era, and along with his work on the Beastie Boys “Sabotage,” it would help launch Jonze as a top-tier Hollywood director. Yet despite boasting production from a man who would go on to become one of the most venerated producers in hip-hop history, and a video shot by a future Oscar-winner, the song itself topped out at No. 93 on the Billboard Hot 100.) As for the recording process itself, Ross describes it as “total chaos. Dilla was this young kid doing his beats and watching these four guys fight all day, and then I was coming in trying to keep them all on the rails to finish the tracks we needed to finish. So for him it wasn’t very pleasant. “I mean, it wasn’t always like that, but it wasn’t fun and games the way it was for Bizarre Ride. They did their verses, and they came up with some great songs, but they were becoming more individualistic by then.” (Dilla would later frequently tell a story about Tre and Fatlip getting into a full-on fist fight in the studio over which drum filter to use on a track, and he used the Pharcyde’s chaos as a model for what not to do regarding the band dynamics of his own group, Slum Village.)1 *** J-Swift says that Ross called him down to Hollywood Sound one day in the midst of recording the album, just

1

Ferguson, 46.  118 •

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to play him the beat for “Runnin’” before anyone had laid down a verse. J-Swift has nothing but praise to offer for Dilla’s production, though he hastens to add: “There are some people who say Labcabin is their favorite album, and that always ticks me off. Because Dilla didn’t do that whole album, and the rest of that album is garbage. Just garbage.” Ross is far more measured in his assessment. “De La took a ton of shit for their second record, but people love it now. And people love Labcabin,” he says. “Now for me, I was disappointed by that record. We didn’t have the consistency that we had on the first. There was a lot going on making that record, it was just total drama, and it shows a little bit. There’s some great shit with Jay Dee, and there’s some real classics on there. ‘Runnin’’ has a great hook and just such a killer, ridiculous beat. But after the two or three really great records, it falls off. That’s just my opinion … except it’s kind of a fact. Especially compared to Bizarre Ride, where every track is phenomenal.”

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Interlude: The Pipe

Labcabin might have been the Pharcyde’s “dark” album, but around the same time they were touring in support of it, J-Swift’s life was entering a period of profound personal darkness. In addition to his crumbling deal with Tommy Boy, the producer was facing a far more difficult personal crisis: a debilitating addiction to crack cocaine. “I was too cowardly to put a gun to my head, so I tried to smoke myself to death,” J-Swift told the LA Weekly with typical candor in 2012. “The real problem was depression. I had issues with my career and letting my father down. Depression brings doubt, doubt brings fear, and fear brings death.”1 Production offers were still forthcoming, and he managed to finish remixes of Prince’s “Letitgo” and Massive Attack’s “Protection” in 1994 and ’95, respectively. But as his addiction grew worse, he eventually found himself working as a pimp to earn money, and finally living on the street, out of a sleeping bag on La Brea Blvd. in Hollywood.

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Weiss.  121 •

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Recognized begging for change by Shauna Garr, a film and TV producer responsible for the Method Man and Redman film How High, J-Swift made several efforts to get clean, all recorded for a prospective VH1 reality show. The TV show idea eventually collapsed, and that footage—some of it nearly unwatchable in its brutal intimacy—later became a documentary, 1 More Hit. Miraculously, J-Swift eventually managed to kick his habit, and performed with Fatlip and Tre on tour in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Bizarre Ride in 2012. In early 2015, however, he was hit with yet another setback after playing a show in Vancouver: despite having lived in the U.S. since age two and obtaining a permanent residency, he was facing a deportation hearing thanks to a drug possession charge from years before. He thought he was able to travel to Canada while the hearing was on appeal, but as soon as he tried to re-enter the U.S., he was turned away and sent back to his country of origin, Spain.2 He’s since been living in Spain—joining Tre and Fatlip on European tours, while finishing up a solo album—but as of this book’s writing in May 2016, he expresses hope he’ll be allowed to return soon. “Once I get charges erased, I can come back into the States,” he says. “It’s all about the disparity between powdered and rock cocaine, but really it’s all about money. Everything is.” As Howze says, “I’ve never met a man like him. J-Swift has been homeless, living at a bus stop, but whenever I’d

2

CBC News.  122 •

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see him he’d never be sad, never be complaining. Crying is out of the question. He’s beyond resilient. I don’t know anyone who could deal with those sorts of extreme ups and downs and still keep their mind straight, and stay happy.”

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Chapter Fifteen

For anyone who has ever been in a group or spent significant time associating with someone who has, band breakups rarely come as a surprise. Aside from marriage and family, few relationships are as intimate, and unlike most any other job, being in a successful band means having your professional life forever tied to people you were friends or co-workers with in your teens and early twenties. Groups that can manage to weather inevitable interpersonal changes and artistic maturation while also dealing with the various mundane terrors of the industry and still remain cordial are rare in any genre, and hip-hop does not have the best record. N.W.A, EPMD, Mobb Deep, Goodie Mob and the Fugees all splintered with very public displays of acrimony. A Tribe Called Quest endured wrenching behind-the-scenes drama. Outkast clearly grew apart at the height of their fame. Even Public Enemy struggled to remain a unified front, with Professor Griff and the Shocklee brothers cycling in and out. (The Wu-Tang Clan was fortunate enough to have nine members, meaning that a third of the group could be missing from the stage at any given point and they’d still have enough original members to staff a  125 •

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hockey team. De La Soul, by all accounts, have always been and remain very close friends, which makes them the exception that proves the rule.) The Pharcyde has technically never broken up, but the original lineup started to disintegrate in the late ’90s. Fatlip was expelled from the group first, in 1997. A persistent rumor at the time blamed his exit on a crack addiction, which was not true—Fatlip admitted that his casual dabblings in cocaine and ecstasy were looked down on by the rest of the group, but the real culprit was burnout, which led to him opting out of one of the endless tours following Labcabin. “Romye really started to take charge of the business aspects of the group,” Howze says. “But Fatlip is the kind of guy who marches to his own drum. He’s not on your time or anyone else’s time, he’s got his own flow. So imagine that with three other guys, and one of them is really becoming a serious businessman, like, ‘Dude, it’s ten o’clock, we gotta get going, what’re you doing?’” The Pharcyde soldiered on as a trio, but as they were about to release 2000’s Plain Rap amid a whirl of record label conflicts, Tre abruptly quit to pursue a solo career. From that point forward, excepting a brief period in 2008, the Pharcyde has been a duo consisting of Imani and Bootie Brown. (In a 2015 interview with White Label Radio, Imani seemed accepting of Fatlip’s exit, but still holds some resentment toward Tre, albeit hilariously expressed resentment: “We had opportunities to talk about it, but his whole thing was that he didn’t want to go into the past. And I feel that, a little bit, but … When you’re the girl that got cheated on, and the nigga is like, ‘Let’s just  126 •

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forget about it …’ What? I was the girl who got cheated on, I need an answer! He was like, ‘Baby, let’s just move on …’’’)1 Delving too far into the knotted, complicated grudges of former band members is rarely productive—down that path are the twin traps of armchair psychoanalysis and endless rounds of he-said-she-said. Besides, in the case of the Pharcyde, it’s easy to sympathize with both camps. As beloved as Bizarre Ride and Labcabin remain, the Pharcyde was never a Platinum-selling band, and bills don’t stop coming just because MTV has ceased to play your newest video. Imani and Romye toured regularly, and released a stoner-rap album called Humboldt Beginnings in 2004. It wasn’t very good, but neither was Tre’s solo album, Liberation, which had the advantage of coming and going without the burden of expectations that came with having the Pharcyde name on the cover. (Incidentally, Fatlip’s long-delayed, little-heard solo album, The Loneliest Punk, is a low-key masterpiece of self-lacerating wit, on par with any episode of The Office in its balance of humor and sometimes uncomfortable introspection.) Romye and Imani legally own, and are highly protective of, the name “the Pharcyde,” and on one level you can understand their defensiveness. After all, they were the ones carrying the banner through the tough, lean years, figuring out a way to survive on their own, enduring endless questions about the split. Who

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White Label Radio.  127 •

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wouldn’t feel a sense of moral ownership in similar circumstances? At the same time, it’s tough to argue that the two-man Pharcyde offers much more than a dull, bittersweet echo of the full, original complement. Thanks to a lucrative offer from promoter Chang Weisberg, the group buried the hatchet with Tre and Fatlip long enough to perform at the 2008 Rock the Bells tour—along with A Tribe Called Quest, whose painful backstage blowup at the tour’s Los Angeles leg can be seen in Michael Rapaport’s documentary Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. (I saw the Pharcyde perform from the wings at this show—as I recall, it was the first concert I attended as a professional music critic—and they were magnificent, so much so that it didn’t seem unreasonable to expect a new album from them at some point in the near future. Then again, from my spectator’s vantage point, Tribe seemed to be doing just fine too.) This détente didn’t last long, however, and history soon repeated itself in a more farcical and accelerated manner. Fatlip was the first to leave the Pharcyde reunion, followed shortly by Tre. The two apostates, along with J-Swift and L.A. Jay, later got together to mark the twentieth anniversary of Bizarre Ride with a concert at West Hollywood’s Roxy in 2012, with the act billed as Bizarre Ride Live. The concert, followed by a tour, was organized by Ross, and disputes with the Pharcyde over the proper billing for the splinter group have since led to all sorts of truly unpleasant recriminations. Romye and Imani eventually sued their former bandmates for improperly using the Pharcyde name, and in August of

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2013, a judge ruled in their favor.2 Fatlip responded with a characteristically funny-sad-angry tweet: “The least known members of Pharcyde just successfully sued me for using the name Pharcyde. Anybody got 100 racks I can borrow?” Such is the state of the original Pharcyde lineup in 2016: Bootie Brown, Imani, and the Pharcyde name are on one side; Fatlip, Tre, J-Swift, L.A. Jay, and Mike Ross are on another. And the gulf between them seems daunting indeed. “I’m worried that everything that happened later might color this [book] in a bad way,” Ross admitted to me in the backroom of his newly minted, hip-hop themed Adams District pizzeria, Delicious Pizza. And he’s probably right: in spite of half a year of back-andforth between myself and the Pharcyde’s manager and lawyer, Romye and Imani were ultimately not available to sit for new interviews before this book’s due date. I’ve done my best to represent their contributions and positions in spite of this, though their absence has surely tilted the balance in some unintended way. “There’s so much bad blood now between me and Romye and Imani, and between Tre and Romye and Imani,” Ross continues. “But at that time, there was absolutely no beef, and that’s important to remember. Bizarre Ride couldn’t have been made without all five of them, because everyone had a huge contribution. It’s a shame. It’s funny, because any beef that might have

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Warmerdam.  129 •

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existed at that time was more about Fatlip and Tre and J-Swift, and those guys are all still friends.” And besides, none of what happened afterward could possibly besmirch the eternally growing reputation of Bizarre Ride, any more than the fact that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger haven’t spoken in years colors the brilliance of Exile on Main St. It will remain a high-water mark for adventurous production, incidental genius, foulmouthed hilarity, and heartbreaking pathos for as long as imaginative kids are still reciting rhymes over beats. “No matter what else went down, I loved how well we worked together,” Tre says. “We always had the what-ifs. ‘What if this happened? What if that happened …?’ We were always thinking in our own specific way. Sometimes it was deep, sometimes it wasn’t, but it was a way of thinking. Even down to something silly like the fire hydrant [logo]—what if the fire hydrant pissed on the dog? And we’d just laugh about that shit. It was exactly how we thought, all the time. Even if we we’re not all together now, despite all the shit that may be happening, we still think the Pharcyde way. I do, Fatlip does, Imani does, Romye does. I think that’s why we were a brilliant ass group. “It was supposed to happen,” Tre concludes. “We were meant to be with each other.”

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I am immensely grateful to the people who generously shared hours and hours of their time talking me through their memories of making this record: Tre “Slimkid3” Hardson, John “J-Swift” Martinez, Mike Ross, Quentin Howze, Paul Stewart, Lamarr Algee, and Eric Sarafin. Big thanks are due as well to the wonderful people at Bloomsbury, starting with Ally-Jane Grossan, who commissioned this book, and Michelle Chen and Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, for their patience and encouragement in seeing it to fruition. Thanks to Jeff Weiss—truly the Suga Free of music journalists—and Shauna Garr for pointing me in the right directions. Thanks to my mentors at Variety, including but certainly not limited to: Steven Gaydos, Carole Horst, Justin Chang, Steve Chagollan, Cynthia Littleton, and Peter Bart. Personal shout-outs to Matt Odom and Lawrence Marcus, proud Sycamore alumni. To Michael Lekich, il miglior fabbro. RIP to Jeremiah James Henderson, always my biggest booster and toughest critic. Love to Mom, Dad, Sam, Kristen, Daniel, Santa, Jocelynne, and the rest of the Barker, Avila, and Luzanilla clans.  131 •

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A cknowledgments

The most profound thanks of all are saved for Miranda and Doris, to whom this, and everything else I do, is dedicated.

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Works Cited

Print Aaron, Charles. “California Dreaming.” Spin, April 1995. Alvin, John. “Artist Spotlight: Interview With Fatlip of the Pharcyde.” Disarray Magazine, November, 2012. “ASCAP Members Michael Giacchino and Reggie Andrews Are Shining Stars at ETM-LA Benefit.” ASCAP.com, October 28, 2010. Boza, Anthony. “Eminem: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, July 4, 2002. Charnas, Dan. The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. New American Library: New York, 2010. Christgau, Robert. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Alternative, Alternative, Who’s Got the Alternative?” Village Voice, March 2, 1993. Cobb, William Jelani. To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic. New York University Press: New York, 2008 Coleman, Brian. Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies. Fillard Books: New York, 2007. Ferguson, Jordan. Donuts. Bloomsbury Academic: New York, 2014. Flick, Larry. “Dance Trax: Stars Align for Cosmic Baby; Coming Home to Tara.” Billboard, January 29, 1994, 129.  133 •

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Hilburn, Robert. “Rap: The Power and the Controversy.” Los Angeles Times, February 4, 1990. Hill-Holtzman, Nancy; Chazanov, Mathis. “Riot Aftermath: Police Credited for Heading Off Spread of Riots.” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1992. Hochman, Steve. “Thrillin’ and Chillin’: Life With the Pharcyde.” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1993. “J-Swift of the Pharcyde Facing Deportation in Vancouver.” CBC News, March 20, 2015. Kuvadia, Amy. “The Hidden History of Compton Hip-Hop, Part One.” TheKindland.com, February 7, 2016. McCoy, Quincy. No Static: A Guide to Creative Radio Programming. Backbeat Books: New York, 2002. Purrier, Jeff; Hochman, Steve. “Owners to Pull the Plug on Power Tools.” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1987. “Review: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde.” The Source, February 1993, p. 57. Sandler, Eric. “Imani & Bootie Brown Are the Pharcyde: Celebrities on the Brink of Insanity.” Revive-Music.com, June 11, 2012. “South Central Los Angeles Plans: A Part of the General Plan for the City of Los Angeles.” Los Angeles Department of City Planning, March, 1991. Thompson, Amiri “Questlove.” Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove. Grand Central Publishing: New York, 2013. Wald, Elijah. The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama. Oxford University Press: New York, 2012. Warmerdam, Elizabeth. “Bizarre Ride Can’t Call Themselves Pharcyde.” Courthouse News Service, August 6, 2013. Weiss, Jeff. “J-Swift Made Big Hits With the Pharcyde Before Tragedy and Drugs Nearly Took Him Down.” LA Weekly, March 11, 2012.

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Video GGN Hood News. “How Pharcyde Met J Dilla & Snoop.” YouTube video, March 3, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sv7E_77Arbs “What’s Up, Fatlip?” The Work of Director Spike Jonze: A Collection of Music Videos, Short Films, Documentaries and Rarities. Dir. Spike Jonze. DVD. Palm Pictures, October 28, 2003. White Label Radio. “The Pharcyde Interview.” YouTube video, March 8, 2015. http://www.whitelabelradio.net/ the-pharcyde-interview-video/

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Also available in the series:

   1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes    2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans    3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis    4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller    5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice    6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh   7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli    8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry    9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

  10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos   11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard   12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo   13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk   14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore   15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths   16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy   17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis   18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz

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  19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli   20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes   21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno   22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi   23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks   24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder   25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese   26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken   27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes   28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven   29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper   30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy   31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario   32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis   33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green

  34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar   35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti   36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal   37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan   38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth   39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns   40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson   41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard   42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy   43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck   44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier   45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier   46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt   47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive

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  48.   49.   50.   51.   52.   53.   54.   55.   56.   57.   58.

  59.   60.

Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen

  61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl   62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate   63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay   64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier   65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton   66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards   67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal   68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson   69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol   70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois   71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten   72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles   73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

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  74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson   75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent   76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin   77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks   78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr   79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer   80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost   81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell   82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield   83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman   84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen   85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton   86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem   87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody

  88.   89.   90.   91.   92.   93.   94.   95.   96.   97.

  98.   99. 100. 101.

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Nelson by Darran Anderson They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild Sigur Rós’s ( ) by Ethan Hayden Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner

A lso available in the series

102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetablesby Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod

112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

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