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OK - here is the last part of the article. Enjoy!

PART 2
THE PHONE INTERVIEWS

Why are there no instrumentals in the new album?
MIKE D: When we first played each other’s stuff that we were working on individually, it was pretty much all programmed beats that we’d each been doing on computers. Some [beats] were on the 1200s and others were on the MPC, but it was mostly on computer. It was mostly hip-hop and we pretty much stayed with that. The only times when we picked up instruments at all was when there was a specific sound that we wanted on a song, [like] it was just easier to plug in a bass. But even then, we generally would chop it up and re-sequence it through computers.
You cited hip-hop’s middle school period as an influence on your new record…
ADROCK: I don’t know that it necessarily played such a big deal in influencing this specific record, but it’s always a day-to-day influence. Just because it was such an important period of time for the three of us. Rap was [long] around, but it seemed so new and exciting because we were being part of it at that point. Everything seemed so exciting. Just the style and the fashion, and the innovativeness of people branching out and doing different things.
That song, “Roxanne, Roxanne,” is a classic. It’s not like a story song, but it is in a way, and just, like, how many songs came from that song is so ridiculous and hilarious. There’s like twenty different “Roxanne” records after that one. It was like being in high school. I mean, we were in high school, but it really felt like high school as a musical form, where you really didn’t give a shit. It’s not like people weren’t serious about what they were doing, but there weren’t rules that you had to follow, and there wasn’t a dress code that you had to follow. People were just doing crazy shit. It was that not giving a fuck-type of feeling.
MCA: There’s also a lot of other stuff from the old-school period. I mean, the “Triple Attack” sample obviously came from the Sugar Hill Gang. Even its hook is an interpolation of their “Double Trouble” song. There are different influences all over the place. You’ve got the Dead Boys in there, and Ernest Shackleton-he was an explorer from England who tried to be the first man to get to the South Pole. But he did not succeed at that, among other things he did. [laughs] Oren Lees, he was in charge of the stores or supplies [of Shackleton’s ship on the South Pole expedition]. Sorry, we can carry on and on. [laughs]
MIKE D: The most obvious song is “Oh, Word?” That song is reminiscent of Grandmaster Flash and Larry Love. That era of hip-hop that’s firmly in the middle school. Grandmaster Flash is an old-school [artist], but that record with Larry Love was really middle school. We grew up so much on old school and middle school that their influence is in there. It’s more about how we’re a vocal group, and the interaction of our voices more than anything else. Within present-day hip-hop, even in rap groups, one MC gets sixteen bars and another gets sixteen bars; it’s not about vocal interaction in any way. For us, that’s the heart of what we do.
Going back to the studio process for Licensed to Ill: I’ve read that the limitations of studio technology forced you guys to spend many hours into the early morning trying to get the samples and beats sequenced right.
ADROCK: That was mostly Yauch. He was the main technological one. DJs would cut two copies of records, and that made sense. But none of us were that good to keep it on the beat for a whole record. [laughs] So we went to Yauch’s apartment and he took the Led Zeppelin beat and he has a little reel-to-reel. He copied it a bunch of times, spliced them all together and had it running as a loop. That was so high-tech to me; I couldn’t believe that he actually did that! I don’t know what the fuck he did.
MCA: When we looped the beat from the intro of that Zeppelin song, we made a quarter-inch tape loop that ran around the room, and we had to balance it on mic stands to not get tangled up. The tape loop was just spinning on one machine. When you’re making a tape loop, you’re tricking the machine. The tape is going around in a circle and in this case the tape loop was pretty long, so we had to dangle it off of stuff. It was certainly more complicated lining things up than it is now. There is a lot of software around where you get just a bunch a interesting stuff and sync it up. But back in those days, it was much more of a procedure.
MIKE D: Technology dictates to a certain degree what you end up doing on a give record. Maybe at the time [of Licensed to Ill], there was the Fairlight [CMI, Computer Musical Instrument], which was tens of thousands of dollars. We didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars. [laughs] With Paul’s Boutique, we wanted to have stereo samples, and the cool thing is that Matt King from the Dust Brothers had a computer-science background. He’d use his PC to sequence two mono samplers, where we sampled each mono side so we’d simulate the stereo that way.
In the transition from Paul’s Boutique to Check Your Head, what inspired you guys to pick up your instruments again?
ADROCK: We were just in L.A. listening to lot of music. We didn’t tour for the Paul’s Boutique record; we just did some shows. We were basically in L.A. with nothing to do but hang out.
I bought a drum kit from Money Mark’s brother for fifty dollars, and I set that up in my apartment. I already had a guitar, and I guess that either Mike or Yauch came over one say and we started fucking around. And then Yauch brought a bass down and we just started playing. It wasn’t like, “Let’s do this!” It just happened from there and it was really fun. We’d been a hardcore band, and we never really tried to do anything other than that. So we started playing some funky shit that we never thought we could really play.
MCA: A lot of the music we were listening to was instrumental; groove-oriented jazz and James Brown. There’s also Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff. We’d listen to those things and then play our own thing with some of them in mind. Later, when we had our own studio, we’d throw up songs and figure them out. But early on, we weren’t doing that.
MIKED D: We were inspired by the music that we sampled on Paul’s Boutique, like Meters, Jazz Crusaders, or whatever. That inspired us to just try playing shit like that. It was not like we were able to, because those groups had incredible musicians. It was like we felt like we wanted to do something different, and we were inspired by that music. When we started Check Your Head, we didn’t sit down with books and write some rhymes, it was more about picking up some instruments to see what happens. [In L.A.] we had nothing to do except playing instruments, buy records, and get stoned. [laughs] It was a cool time because Paul’s Boutique didn’t commercially live up to what Capitol’s expectations were, and it was pretty much when everyone who was at Capitol when Paul’s Boutique came out either left or got fired. We had this weird sense of freedom, because there was nobody [at Capitol] that we were in touch with. It wasn’t like there were these people there counting on us to sell millions of records. Nobody was on top of us; we could just go off and do our own shit. Adam had this little apartment in Hollywood, and we just set up in his bedroom a drum kit, one organ, Yauch had his bass and amp, Horovitz had his guitar and effects pedals, and we just started playing. A lot of times we would just record everything, which was really embarrassing because there were a lot of horrible things. We recorded everything and listened back, or we recorded and made pause-tapes of what we thought was good and said, “Let’s make this the verse and let’s make this the chorus.” Or we’d listen to a really cool record and say, “Let’s make something like this.”
What were some key records that prompted you to mess around during this period?
ADROCK: The Crusaders, Eugene McDaniels, and James Brown records were always important. A lot of funk and reggae records and the Slit’s album were a really big deal to us. The punk-disco bands were also a big influence-like Gang of Four and ESG. Just a mixture of different things. And bands like the Clash were always important in how they tried to do different things. We just were into funky music and wanted to play it. At that particular moment in time, we weren’t really listening to rap or punk; all we were doing was finding beats and samples. But we were like, “Fuck, let’s just play it!” Having four dudes stand around a sampler just wasn’t exciting. [laughs]
The Meters was a major inspiration. Like a punk-rock band, they just played very simple stuff, but the way they played it was very intricate and deep. Each one of them played a simple, basic line, but when they put it all together, it sounded really great. We were going with that theme. If we just stuck to our own simple, little thing, then it just might sound good. And then there’s the Substitution’s 45, “In Brussels.” [laughs] There are too many stories. It’s like getting that Boy Scout record and finding crazy samples. During that time was when I realized that you could go outside of what you were [usually] trying to do. I already figured out that rock bands had beats at that point, [and] collecting jazz and funk records was an obvious. But I didn’t realize that anything made between ’70 and ’74 had attempted some funky shit. This was the late ‘80s and I didn’t know that! I’m talking about off-Broadway musicals, TV jingles, and children’s records. It was just very exciting at that point; being in this city and really have nothing to do but go eat, smoke weed, hang out, buy records, and play music. It was very fun. [laughs]
MCA: Definitely the Jimmy Smith stuff, Groove Holmes and Jimmy McGriff. Also, early Funkadelic stuff like “Red Hot Mama,” ‘70s[-era] Miles Davis, and definitely James Brown, the Meters and Crusaders. We were definitely finding records off the radar, but none of them are now coming to mind. [laughs]
MIKE D: For sure, the Meter’s whole catalogue. The Crusaders’ Southern Comfort album, and Ken Lee Jackson and the Politicians. Also jazz shit like early ‘70s CTI records like from Stanley Cherry or George Bensen.
When if came down to cutting a record, how did the studio process work with Mario C producing?
ADROCK: By that particular time, we had hours of music that we’d played. Like hundreds of hours of DAT tapes of just bullshit jamming. I guess that whatever we liked, we worked on some more, edited it together, and played stuff on top of it. But we worked with Mario on Paul’s Boutique; he was the engineer for that whole album, so that was how we knew him. We actually met Mario when we played a show in L.A. He was a friend of our friend Matt Dike- he owns Delicious Vinyl and used to run a club. We played that club and blew the speakers on the first song. And then this guy came from the audience named Mario and went up to Matt Dike and said, “Hey, I do sound, I got my own PA, let me do your sound!” That was how we hooked up. Mario and Money Mark grew up together, so that was how we knew Mark.
MCA: Mario had a lot of ideas about how to mic stuff. He really helped us build [the G-Son studio]. He was just a collaborator on what sounded good.
MIKE D: It kinda evolved with the technology we were doing at the time. On Check Your Head, we started in Adam’s bedroom, and then stopped doing that after a few times, because he had a downstairs neighbor with a gun and a motorcycle, and he wasn’t too psyched about us playing. We then moved into a practice space and Mario came down with a DAT machine, our first big technology that we bought. We’d just set up a couple of mics and just do everything that we were doing, and we then listened back and made pause-tapes. It then came to us actually, building G-Son studios. Mario and Mark were pretty involved in that, and Mark, being the carpenter, helped build it. Mario also helped us select the gear and all that. Once we got into G-Son, we would just start and mess around for a while, and when things sounded halfway decent, we’d tell Mario, or a lot of times he just knew when to roll the tape. We might be just running the DAT the whole time and whenever things sounded like they were coming together, he’d just roll the two-inch multi-track.
Did Money Mark make a major impact?
MCA: Well, Mark was very involved from the beginning of our work on Check Your Head. We first started by getting together and jamming at Adam’s house and invited Mark over. While we were doing press for Paul’s Boutique, we started jamming and invited Mark to join us. It was basically Mike on drums, Adam on guitar, me on bass, and Mark on keyboards. Then we went to a practice space for a little bit after getting kicked out of Adam’s house when the neighbors got mad. [laughs] While we were in a practice, we then found a place to build a studio. [G-Son] used to be a dancehall- the live room was like this huge room with an arched ceiling, and we built the control room in a closet because the live room was so big that we used to play basketball in it. The control room was in a tiny room that we had to squeeze into; it was basically two closets that we broke down the walls [between].
MIKE D: With Mark, that was the essential ingredient needed. It was like if you were trying to make a cake and you didn’t have egg-substitute powder for vegan. Or it was like if you were making chocolate-chip cookies and it just wouldn’t be right without the chocolate-chips.
When the group was experimenting with live instrumentation, did you consider the possible reaction of the hip-hop community at large?
MCA: Yeah, it was interesting. When we finished Check Your Head, we did an interview with The Source magazine. The Source said something about us making a hip-hop record, and we were like, “Well, it’s not just a hip-hop record, there’s other stuff on there too.” I guess they were shocked and disappointed. They were like, “What do you mean?” I remember we were on some big shows at colleges, and it seemed like people were into it. “So What’cha Want?” and “Pass the Mic” were on that record, and people got psyched. Part of the objective of that record was that we were making a mixtape. It was around that time when we started making mixtapes- basically trading pause-tapes with each other. On a lot of those pause-tapes, there would be a hardcore song and right after that a groove song, then a funk song and then a hip-hop song. Sometimes we were putting old things we were listening to and new things we were finding. So we made copies of these pause-tapes and trading with each other. In a lot of ways, Check Your head is a pause-tape of that style- but we played music on it.
MIKE D: Honestly, with the state of heads we had, we weren’t thinking about that at all. At first, we planned Check Your Head to be an all-instrumental album. Somehow, when Biz Markie came to town to do a TV show, he came by the studio just for fun. We played music over his rhyming and that got us back into Mcing. At that point, it was validating. Now you see a lot of hip-hop groups do something with a live band, but at that time, it wasn’t a common thing or something that was explored much. Q-Tip and Africa from the Jungle Brothers came by the studio and heard what we did, and they’d get on the rhyme. We definitely didn’t think, “Oh, MCs are going to think this or that.”
In transitioning from Check Your Head to Ill Communication, the band got more serious about their instrumentals.
MIKE D: [On Ill Communication] our goal was to elaborate a little bit and try what we hadn’t done yet. The way we performed the percussion was a little more thorough. On Check Your Head, dubbing in drums was an afterthought, while they were more integrated in Ill Communication. We spent more time listening to what we were doing and thought, “Oh, let’s spend more time doing this.” Check Your Head was more like rolling the tape and taking the best bits and literally razor-blading them together.
With these instrumentals, do they have narration? Do they tell any specific stories from your lives?
ADROCK: No. [laughs] We’d like it to be a little deeper maybe, but with the final product, not really. It’s not like one person starts the thing, it’s, like, four different people playing together. It’s not like one person saying, “Ok, picture this in your head and take it from there.” It could be four different stories for each song. [laughs]
MIKE D: It wasn’t like, “Oh this is going to be the sunrise!” [laughs] It wasn’t like, I think, Cannonball Adderley, who release this album that had songs about astrological signs and went, “Scorpio, Weee!” [laughs] We didn’t have any shit like that. It was somehow more like watching a film clip without the sound in, playing instrumentals for that record. It works more like soundtrack music, but without telling the story so much.
Any new influences or key records that drove Ill Communication?
MIKE D: I remember getting more into Mile Davis’s On the Corner. That whole era of Miles. I remember listening to Sly & the Family Stone’s early albums. I got into more of the free-jazz world with Albert Ayler. Definitely Herbie Hancock for sure.
I’ve read that you guys have a particular hobby for each record that you record, like basketball, dominoes, and video games.
ADROCK: We had a basketball court and a half-pipe skateboard ramp at our [G-Son] studio. We did a lot of basketball, skating, and eating. It was all part of a team thing. We’d all order food together, mostly from Noni’s, an Italian restaurant from across the street.
MCA: [laughs] Yeah, they distracted us from the records. We played a lot of mahjong in the making of this last record.
MIKE D: Check Your Head was dominoes. Ill Communication was Sega video golf. Hello Nasty was definitely Boggle. On the new record, we actually split off into different games. Mahjong for Yauch, Scrabble for Horovitz, and I was definitely into a game called Critter, which was a version of Mexican train dominoes.
Why did you eventually move back to New York?
MCA: It kind of just happened over a period of time. I moved out of L.A. first. I packed up my house in L.A. when we went on tour for Check Your Head, but Mike and Adam still lived out there. I was kind of going nomad, like I’d put a bunch of stuff in storage and then just went around on tour staying in hotels. Sometimes I stayed in sublets and rented month-to-month in different spots. I was trying to spend as much time in New York, but I always ended up going back to L.A., because that’s where the guys and the studio were. Adam then decided to move back to New York and that shifted the balance. Mike then got an apartment here; he goes back and forth to L.A. Adam and I now live full-time in New York.
As Hello Nasty was pieced together over a two-year period, was there a theme, or was it just something that happened?
ADROCK: It all just sort of happened, branching out into different areas. It definitely was our most idea-based record, where we were like, “Let’s try this.”
MCA: Maybe so. There were some left-field-type of cuts. There was this band…I can picture them on their album cover where they’re on a rooftop. It’s from the ‘60s and it’s all synthesizers. It’s…not coming to me. I’m bad with names.
MIKE D: Hello Nasty was actually about not having a central theme. It was more about feeling free and empowered to try out every different thing we could try and somehow make it all come together on one record. We’d bring in all these different ideas. It felt like there wasn’t anything that we couldn’t try. If we were listening to Os Mutantes and wanted to make crazy shit like that, we did it. We took beats from a crazy, old drum machine and put it through these effects boxes and then looping those and layering it with other beats we tried. We plugged in every piece of gear that we own and every different idea and saw what came out. There was some techno and drum ‘n’ bass stuff that I got exposed to in Europe, so that sort of came in. I also got into the Switched-On records with the electronic composer-type shit like Dick Hyman. With Lee Perry appearing on the record, we were playing some instrumentals that we thought it’d be amazing if somehow Lee played on the record.
Out of curiosity, how were those video game sounds on “And Me” produced?
ADROCK: They are sounds that you can’t really put on a document, because they’re undocumented sounds! [laughs] They’re sounds that are out there in the world. [laughs] [“And Me”] was basically about the telephone and my reaction to computers. You know that when you’re far away, you’re always on the fucking phone, calling home or a girlfriend? It’s like your lifeline feels like fiber optics in your veins and shit.
As for the lawsuits from the Jimmy Castor Bunch and James Newton, how did they affect the band’s outlook on sampling?
ADROCK: The Jimmy Castor thing was interesting because we nearly stole his entire song and put it on ours without paying him. It was like, “Oh yeah, that’s right, if you take a whole bunch of somebody’s song I can see their argument.” We just took a whole lot of his record “Hey Leroy” and put it in our song, “Hold It Now, Hit It.” It’s like, [the vocal clip] “Hey, Leroy!” and then it just plays a whole percussion break of his thing. His lawyers got in touch with Def Jam, and was like, “Hey, you can’t really do that.” And so we paid him. The James Newton thing was a drag. We actually paid for the sample, but the guy felt like it wasn’t enough. And then ten years later he came back to us. I think it was his lawyers who really wanted to get some money, and so they convinced him to do this thing, and it turned into a whole fiasco. It was very weird, because we actually signed contracts and paid for the sample. But I guess that wasn’t good enough.
MCA: It definitely made me more hesitant, especially the Newton one, which was really ridiculous. I remember going into [To the 5 Boroughs], and just felt like, “Let’s make an album with no sampling on it at all,” because it was just a pain in the ass. But, of course, once we started making it, we ended up sampling stuff because it just sounded good, and it’s fun to sample. But [those lawsuits] definitely left a bad taste in my mouth, especially when we got harassed [by Newton’s lawyer], even after we made an effort to clear that sample. We ended up getting screwed. There are two different issues: When you clear samples there’s publishing and master-usage. On that particular one, we cleared the master, but we didn’t clear the publishing, because we didn’t feel that it was a songwriting issue- which the judge ended up agreeing with us in the end, both judges. We won the case, and [Newton’s lawyer] brought it to another judge.
MIKE D: It definitely makes you more cautious. In the James Newton [lawsuit], we did everything we were supposed to do. That’s what the lawsuit [trial] proved; that was a sample we cleared. When we started our new record, we were just so pissed off about that. We cleared that sample the way we were supposed to do with his record label, and we still got sued over it. When we started [on the new record], we left [sampling] alone for a minute, but we ended up going back to the well and loop up a couple of [samples] and say, ”This feels good, we gotta do it!”
Still digging for ideas?
ADROCK: Always. I’m feeling the Muppets right now. The Muppets have beats; you’d be surprised!
MIKE D: For me, it’s about the Sesame Street ‘70s shit. They had incredible music guests on the show, like Stevie Wonder, who did the best TV musical performance ever. They had songs, beats, and had it all. Being a dad got me up on the Sesame Street beats.