The inbetween times

If you don’t take notes or leave reminders, you’ll never remember the details. This is becoming clear to me as I try to recount some of these earlier music projects. I have floppy disks that say 1998, but I know I made the beat on the MPC and not the Ensoniq EPS. I definitely reformatted most (or all) of my EPS disks, so it’s possible that dates carried over. I don’t remember floppy disks being incredibly expensive, but they must have cost enough to warrant erasing all of my old beats. In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

It’s hard to believe that the time between Cross-Eyed Dyslexics and Left Handed Straw was only about a year and a half. A lot happened in that time and that is when my style/sound took shape. Hanging out with Moodswing 9 and switching to an MPC2000 changed my approach to beats. Moodswing (Dave Cuzner aka Cuz) was way ahead of me at that point. He was deep into rare records and he was geeking out pretty hard on beats, doing things I hadn’t ever seen in person. Like any impressionable teenager, I was taking notes and doing my best imitations of what I liked.

“Trailer Beat” which would later become “Movie Trailer”

Moodswing taught me a lot about drum breaks. We were big DJ Shadow fans and he was finding the majority of the things Shadow sampled on Endtroducing and the earlier singles. He’d make tapes of stuff and we’d listen to them while driving around to record stores. When you hear the original sources, you start to understand more. This was also the time period of all the silly rules. Shadow had said in some interview that he’d never sample from a compilation or a repress. Looking back, especially with today’s “anything goes” approach, it all seems stupid, but I do think it ended up giving me some discipline that helped (and still does).

Limitations can be helpful, especially when you are making music. At that point in time, one of my biggest limitations was access to records (samples). Even if you had a ton of money, you’d still need to know what you’re looking for. I didn’t have money and I also didn’t know what I was looking for, so it probably made me get creative.

Up until that point, the majority of my record knowledge came from random chance discoveries and from liner notes with cleared samples. After hearing all of this stuff that Moodswing was playing me, seeing the covers, and picking up little tips, I started to find some cool records. I’ve never been someone with the rarest of the rare. If anything, I lean towards the oddball, private press, and not-necessarily-good records. I’ve lived in the Bay Area my entire life and there’s never been a shortage of people looking for records, so it helped to look for stuff a little bit off the path.

Ray at Grooves in SF

Besides a few one-off trips, the majority of my records have come from Rasputins in Campbell, Big Al’s Record Barn in SJ, Amoeba in Berkeley (and later the SF store), and Grooves in SF. In the late 90s, I was kind of afraid to shop at Groove Merchant. Grooves in SF was my special spot because it had a listening station and Ray, the owner, put out the weirdest stuff and it was usually cheap. I think the majority of source material for Left Handed Straw came from Grooves. I would drive up there when I lived in San Jose and I ended up living a few blocks from the store a few years later.

The main thing that happened between Cross-Eyed Dyslexics and Left Handed Straw and a big kick in the butt for me was the overly-imaginative and larger-than-life-intentioned project called Stuffed Animals. In short, the idea was to get as many people involved as possible and make an epic album that was like a play. Doseone, Why?, and Circus were all going to come to Oakland and work on it. I was around a lot those days, even driving up on weekdays, so it was a pretty exciting moment for me. They basically said I could be involved, but I was definitely intimidated. I didn’t quite feel like I was on the same level as everyone else. The recording process was very new to me. I’d never worked on things in the same room with any vocalists.

Yoni (Why?) asked me to make something a certain number of bars and I remember nervously struggling to count it out. They also asked me to add some background sounds to a beat and I added waves and some bells. That is hilarious to me now because it was all that I could really come up with at the time, but it’s not far from the type of music I still like to make. I love building soundscapes and anchoring songs to an environment.

To tie it all together, my newly acquired MPC, my new outlook on record shopping, and this gathering of creatives was the perfect storm. I really wanted to be part of something big and this definitely seemed like something huge at the time. There’s a song on Stuffed Animals with a beat that I made that has Why?, Circus, pedestrian, Dose, Sole, and L*Roneous on it. That is kinda nutty and I’d actually forgotten that they were all on one of my beats. To go from not having really worked with anyone, to now being part of something with all of these people was very exciting at the time. I’d listened to Circus’s “Farmers Market of the Beast” verse so many times and I was an enormous fan of L*Roneous’s “Imaginarium,” so this felt big. When I met Dose, he gave me a hug and told me that the new beats he heard were great and more mature than Cross-Eyed Dyslexics. It sounds geeky now, but the whole thing was pretty cool. I even gave Megabusive a ride to Oakland one day, which is funny because we are both from San Jose and that’s really the only time we’d ever interacted musically.

However, that record never became anything more than internet legend. It only exists as low quality demos. I think it was just too overwhelming to really fix any of it and it was probably also bigger in idea than reality. I don’t know exactly. The one thing I do know is that it was probably one of the most fun times I’ve ever had working on music. There’d be like 10 people in a room at a time and we were all laughing, sharing unreleased demos, trying to one-up each other, and coming up with some off-the-wall ideas.

I think that experience really helped me find my sound. Moodswing helped me find better records and showed me what he was doing on the MPC. Hearing Dose play the “Revenge of the Fern” demo for us and saying something like “it’s all Moog” got me on my toes. I knew I had to try harder. I think he played “It’s Them” and “Grass Skirt and Fruit Hat” at the same time and those songs basically exploded what I thought was possible. Jel is forever a legend for those two. Listening to them right now, still so amazing. “Grass Skirt…” is incredible.

To wrap things up, that was a boiling point for me. I had lots of new ideas and I was surrounded by inspiration and pressure. I was also a broke college student, so I had to make the most of what I had. I probably only had about 6 crates of records at the time and a lot of that was rap.

I ended up recycling a lot of those Stuffed Animals beats for Left Handed Straw, which I will cover soon.

Next up…

The Deep Puddle Dynamics “Rain Men” remix.