Bobby Simmons [Stetsasonic] – The Unkut Interview, Part Two

Continuing my discussion with Stetsasonic drummer Bobby Simmons, we discuss touring, Flavor Flav ethering Prince, the rivalry with EPMD, beef with WreckX N Effect and vaulted tracks.

Robbie: Touring must have been essential back then.

Bobby Simmons: The best tour I’ve ever done was that Run-DMC Run’s House tour. Every night I would sit on the side of the stage and I couldn’t wait to watch Run and them’s show. Run and them were just amazing to watch. When you watch Krush Groove and you saw Jam-Master Jay cut that “Run! Run!” You were like, “Oh shoot! They getting ready to do something!” It was really that kind of intensity in the air, waiting for Run to come on, and DMC just standing there with his arm’s folded. You just couldn’t wait to see Run walk out! Then when he came out, Run really controlled you with what he said. You didn’t see that in the movie. You didn’t get to see people take their Adidas sneakers off and put it in the air. When I saw that, I said, “This is it. It’s finished.” Who in the world can get everyone in Madison Square Garden to take off their sneakers and put them in the air? All you saw was different colored Adidas in the air. It was amazing to see that command. It was beautiful.

Did you feel a lot of pressure sharing the same stage as Run?

It did help us step our game, because Daddy-O, Delite and Fruikwan had to be as good at commanding the crowd as well as Run did. When we performed, before the show started you saw the drum kit on the horizon, you saw the keyboard on the horizon and you saw the turntable on the horizon, so people used to get confused. “Is a band coming on? Are they a rap group?” So we had to make it clear to people and step our game up. The first show on that Run’s House tour was Tallahassee, Florida. We shared the tour bus with Public Enemy. We did a hot twenty minutes – ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’ was our second single, and ‘Sally’ was already a big record – and Jam-Master Jay met us on the side of the stage, and he said, “You don’t see nobody in hip-hop doing what you’re doing. Everybody else rhymes over their instrumentals – you guys play your records live.” I’ll never forget that.

Lyor Cohen, at the time when Russell was managing us, he used to always get us and EPMD into a fight. Strictly Business album was the hottest record of the summer of ‘88. You can’t front, even we loved it! But when we played certain cities and certain areas, we were bigger than EPMD, so we used to say, “Let EPMD open us for us.” Lyor used to always be like “No, EPMD got the number one hip-hop record in the city right now and the record is going gold!” We used to be like, “Yo, but DC is our city! ‘Sally’ is a big record in DC.” “No, ‘You Gots To Chill’ just went gold, Daddy-O!” He got us into fights with EPMD so much that when we played overseas we had to flip the bill between EPMD and us. First half of the tour in Germany was EPMD headlining, the second half – in London and France – we headlined. But we killed EPMD every place we went anyway. We murdered them every show! [laughs] It was in fun though, it wasn’t like we hated each other.

Can we talk about the recording process with the Stetsasonic albums?

The first album I wasn’t in New York much because I was traveling with Lilo, so when they were recording Daddy-O would either play it to me by phone and I would let him know, “That’s hot!” or “Do this version.” In Full Gear was pretty much all of us, because at that time in our creative flow we were all coming up with ideas on how to do things. Me and Daddy-O did ‘Showtime,’ ‘This Is It Y’all,’ ‘Float On,’ ‘It’s In my Song.’ Prince Paul did stuff like ‘Pen and Paper,’ Delite did ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz’ and Fruikwan did ‘Sally.’ That was the best album for us, we had fun doing that album and spending Tommy Boy’s money.

The Blood, Sweat and No More Tears album was at a time where we weren’t even focusing with each other. Fruikwan had already quit the group, we sold a gold record with ‘Self Destruction’ and me, Daddy-O and Prince Paul were doing production work on other records. Me and Daddy-O was working on Audio Two’s album at the time. Daddy-O did the ‘Top Billin’ record and I did ‘When the Two Are On The Mic.’ We were trying to craft our producing skills to make sure we were good at what we were doing, not only for Stetsasonic but for other artists. And of course there was Prince Paul in the studio working on De La Soul records. That album sold two million copies, so Prince Paul set of mind was going more into production. He did ‘The Gasface’ with 3rd Bass, he got a call to do the Big Daddy Kane album, so his work started becoming demanding. Daddy-O the same way – he got a call to produce the Third World album, he did the Forbidden Love record, he did the Cookie Crew album. I got a call from Vernon Reid to do Living Color’s record, ‘Funny Vibe,’ and me and Prince Paul did that record together. I was producing Whodini’s next record on MCA, cos they had left Jive. I did ‘Judy’ and ‘Freaks.’ After the Living Color record I got a call to produce a song for the ‘Rocky V’ soundtrack. I produced the song ‘Home Sweet Home’ for The 7A3, and it’s actually in the film when Rocky goes back to the old neighborhood. Everybody was just in their old zone, we weren’t even friends. When it was time for us to go back into the studio, cats was like, “I’m working on such-and-such album.” In order for me to get the album to be what it is, I had to tell Prince Paul, “Submit the track, I’ll get the guys to write to it and then I’ll go and mix it. Then you let me know if you like the mix or if you want to do your own versions to it.” I took more control of the Blood, Sweat and No Tears album as far as getting it finished.

Why did the cassette version of the third album have so many extra songs?

That was my idea. CD’s were getting popular in 1991, and we recorded a lot of songs for that album and we had to figure out how to fit most of ‘em on it. So I said, “Let’s put a few on the cassette, put a few on the CD and let the LP be shorter.” I put ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ on the cassette, which was a mistake. I should have put it on the CD.

What was the motivation for making the album if you were all doing your own thing by then? Pressure from Tommy Boy?

We were under contract to Tommy Boy for four albums. After doing the ‘Blood, Sweat and No Tears’ album, Russell offered to pay Tom Silverman for Stetsasonic so he could sign us to Def Jam, like he did for EPMD with Sleeping Bag. Russell offered him money and Tom Silverman wouldn’t let us go. We were clashing with Tom Silverman, because he was pinning Daddy-O and Prince Paul against each other. “Y’all should let Prince Paul produce the whole next Stetsasonic album!” I guess he felt Prince Paul was able to give Stetsasonic a new sound or new concept. Tom Silverman said, “Look, we don’t know how to market you guys as a hip-hop band. We need to find a concept that’s going to work.” But we didn’t want to change who we were. We used to have mad arguments with Tom and Monica. By the time it came to the fourth album and Tom Silverman wouldn’t let us off the label, we said, “If there’s no group, you can’t get no record. So guess what? The group don’t exist no more.” By ‘95 we were no longer under contract with Tommy Boy.

Uptown mentioned you did some songs together that didn’t come out?

I loved the article on my boy Uptown, that was actually the first record I ever did. I did that while we were on the Run’s House tour, the summer of ‘88. Dante [Ross] called me, he was telling me about this kid that they just signed to see if we could work together on something. I believe I still have a cassette somewhere in my house of another track that we did called ‘Let It Drop.’ We did a couple of stuff that didn’t make it that I did final mixes on too. I guess Tommy Boy didn’t know whether or not they were gonna release a full album, and they were just kinda testing him out with a single to see what they were gonna do with him as an artist. They was prepping De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising and Latifah’s album, so they were concentrating on those two albums at that moment.

What did you do after the group disbanded?

I put a band together for Christopher Williams and Mary J. Blige when they were all starting out and everybody needed live bands to do live shows. I was also still producing records, I produced a record for Smif ‘N Wessun, I did a record for them called ‘Do Real Things.’ Daddy-O did the Red Hot Chilli Peppers record, and on the song ‘Higher Ground’ that’s me playing the drums! Daddy-O didn’t like the drums on the original version, “This needs to be beefed-up, this is Stevie Wonder! Lemme call Bobby!” I also got to jam with Prince, I was like a kid in a candy store! My friend Tony Mosley – Tony M – was in the New Power Generation, and Tony invited me to Radio City Music Hall, so I went down at 1 in the afternoon. Prince and them were sound-checking, so I’m thinking, “Sound-check will be over by 2 o’clock.” He was sound-checking from 1 o’clock to 6 o’clock! That’s how much this dude Prince is such a perfectionist! That’s like some James Brown thing. You don’t leave your instrument until he says, “We’re done.” We met Prince prior to that in Minneapolis, he came to see our show when we played the First Avenue club when we did the Public Enemy Bring The Noise tour. When he came to the show it was snowing and the club was packed! He was standing against the wall and he had on this long, black trenchcoat and black gloves and shit, when his hair was real long, like that Graffiti Bridge looking hair-do, and Flavor Flav spotted him in the back while Public Enemy was performing. Flav said, “Yeah we understand we in Minneapolis, we in Prince town, but PE is up in the motherfucker! Let me tell y’all something – fuck Prince! Let me hear you say ‘Fuck Prince!’” The funny thing is everyone in the audience knew he was there and they just did it. He got the audience to say it. “Fuck Prince!” [laughs] I’m not sure if he was on cocaine or he was drunk, but I was like, “Yo Flav, you buggin! What is wrong with you dude?” [laughs]

What caused the issue you guys had with Wreckx N Effect?

‘Anytime, Anyplace’ was a record where we went in the studio the next morning. We had just got off doing some spot dates with Guy, and Teddy Riley’s brother Mark – his group Wreckx N Effect didn’t like how we were saying we were the “hip-hop band” or using instruments in hip-hop songs. I guess Mark and them felt like, “Nah man, ain’t nobody gonna be taken acclaim of the name.” I guess they thought we were trying to take on the name ‘New Jack Swing,’ but we didn’t say nothing about New Jack Swing! Some of these rappers felt like they could take on rappers that came before them. So they did a record and Wise played the part where they said, “Stetsa is the runner-up/and by the way, the new guy – he sucks!” They were talkin’ about Wise, because Wise started rhyming [more] because Fruikwan wasn’t in the group anymore. We saw them at the New Music Seminar and we approached them. Teddy Riley and them had what you call “henchmen”. Gene Griffin was this henchman who worked with criminals in Harlem. Of course we had our Brooklyn guys with us, cos we knew how they traveled. We had pretty much the whole of Brownsville in the lobby of the Marriott hotel. We saw them on the escalator and Daddy-O said, “Yo, what’s the situation about y’all dissing us on your record?” And they got really upset. It was July 1989 and a fight almost broke in the Marriott hotel between us and Wreckx N Effect. Fortunately, security and Teddy Riley also calmed the whole thing down, so we came to the conclusion where we weren’t gonna fight in the hotel, cos we didn’t want to ruin the reputation of the seminar and the hotel. Kedar Massenburg, who was managing us, got Daddy-O and Teddy Riley to talk, “Hold your people back, we’ll hold our people back.” We said, “Don’t worry about it, we’re gonna get at y’all!” We figured we’d get at them on record.

The next morning we did the record and we recorded it in Daddy-O’s house. We told Tom and them, when we put out ‘Speaking Of A Girl Named Suzy,’ put that on the b-side. That kid got shot that same night. Wreckx N Effect was three members – it was Markell, Aquil the rapper and the other guy [Brandon Mitchell], he was the DJ. He got killed at a club. We wanted to make sure he got shot had nothing to do with us, cos people thought, “Yo, they got into something with Stet! Maybe that had something to do with it!” We wasn’t even at the party they went to. Come to find out he got killed over a girl. We were glad that that got clarified, cos we didn’t want nobody thinking we were going around just shooting people for dumb stuff. Daddy-O said, “We the type of dudes that pay our respect to people – but still put the record out so Markell and them know!” [laughs] I kinda felt bad. “But D – the dude got killed!” “Nah, this record is hot! Put it out anyway!” People loved it.

Did you have issues with any other crews?

The only one who approached us, on some slick stuff but never on record, was MC Hammer. This was before ‘You Can’t Touch This.’ We played Detroit, the Joe Lewis arena. MC Hammer was like, “Yo, I’m big in Detroit! We gonna smoke everybody in the show in Detroit!” He was taking shots at everybody. He was the opening act for us, the tour was Public Enemy, EPMD, Big Daddy Kane and Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. Ice-T was on it too, but MC Hammer and NWA they did spots dates with us. They didn’t do New York , they didn’t do D.C, they only did Oakland and the mid west/west coast area. This is when it was just MC Hammer and his two dancers and 2 Bigg MC. He was friends with Daddy-O too, and he said, “I’m smoking everybody tonight! I’m smokin’ you, I’m smokin’ Ice-T, I’m smokin’ Public Enemy!” To be honest with you, he did good. Hammer smoked, but that was Public Enemy’s night. Then Hammer came to us after he saw us perform and he told us 2 Bigg MC laughed at us. He said, “Look at Stetsasonic! They look like the Silver Screen Band!” [from The Little Rascals TV series] Then MC Hammer looked at 2 Bigg MC and said, “Don’t laugh, that ain’t funny. We getting ready to do that next. We’re gonna do it bigger!” To this day, he’s a friend of ours.

We was always into listening to different styles of rap music, it didn’t have to be what we were doing in New York. When we were on our tour bus it was a lot of different stuff. We heard about NWA through Wise – Wise was friends with MC Ren. When Ren gave Wise a cassette after we left LA, we were on the bus and we heard this song, ‘A Bitch Iz A Bitch’ and we was like, “What the?” But we liked what they were doing. We were the first ones that let Luke Skyywalker co-produce our record [“Miami Bass”], because we were fans of the 2 Live Crew back in ‘87. Everybody in New York? They didn’t want to hear no 2 Live Crew! All they wanted to hear was Rakim and Boogie Down Productions! Once we got into town, we always found people to take us around to the city, cos we wanted to go to the record store to look through the bins find records. Back then, 2 Live Crew didn’t have a record deal, so they were selling cassettes from out of their car, so we were buying from them! That gave Daddy-O the idea, “Yo, we could do a record like this with someone who’s not from New York. I just got a call from Lisa and them, they want me to work with this group called the Cookie Crew.”

What can you tell me about Wise?

Daddy-O always used to call him the “sex symbol” of the group, he would come out on stage and the girls used to go crazy. Wise used to dress in his Bally sneakers, his tracksuit and his big Cazels glasses with the gold frame.

What was the chemistry between the three MC’s in the studio?

Between Daddy-O and Delite, the chemistry was good. When Fruikwan left the group I was sad, cos Fruikwan used to say the illest lines on his songs. Daddy-O was more raspy and hard, Delite was very outfront and Fruikwan had the voice that fit in the middle. They were competitive at times, but competitive so that they could make the record work.

Why did Fruikwan leave the group?

It was in January 1989, we had a meeting at Rush Management, Russell Simmons office downtown in Manhattan. We got a call that there was going to be the first hip-hop awards show ever. It was gonna be at the Apollo. Daddy-O got real excited, “You see what Guy and them is doing? They wearing slick suits and slick outfits. My man has these outfits for us and he’s got these genie pants and we can wear our Ballys with these pants and he’s got these shirts!” These shirts had gold and glitter, sparkle-type black shirts. I think he was so excited about what Guy and Teddy Riley was looking like that he felt like we should upgrade to that look. Everybody in the group is like, “Nah man, let’s just stick to the track pants and sneakers and do what we gotta do.” Daddy-O was firm. “I’m telling you, we’ve got to look better, cos Heavy D and them is wearing suits now!” Fruikwan was the type of dude, like, “Yo man, I’m not wearing those pants, man.” Fruikwan used to tailor his own clothes. “I’ll make my own joints, I’m not wearing these pants.” He just wasn’t having it. Daddy-O started to get mad. “If you’re not gonna wear it then you can just leave! You can be out! This is important to us! Tommy Boy is gonna put money behind us on the next record!” So Daddy-O and Fruik just got into a discussion in the other room and ended up with Fruikwan leaving Rush management and we ain’t see Fruikwan since! Here’s the funny thing – Wise, Daddy-O and Delite wore the suit! [laughs] I’ve got the video tape!

What was the story with ‘Float On’?

That was Delite’s idea. When we originally did it, it was a lot more dusty – we used the original record with the scratches in it – and we used ‘Impeach The President’ as the beat. Russell Simmons told Daddy-O, “Yo. that’s dope! But don’t make it hip-hop. You should get Vinny Bell and Alvin Money to produce it as an R&B rap record.” They was producing for Rush at the time, they was producing Alyson Williams, they was producing Oran “Juice” Jones. We liked the version that they did, we we weren’t mad at it. It was pre-R. Kelly and pre-Guy. That’s the reason of having the cassette – I’ve still got the original version!

Any plans on releasing that kind of stuff?

That’s what I was talking to Prince Paul about. There was a song that was supposed to be on the In Full Gear album, it was a diss to EPMD called ‘You Thought It Was Your Thing?’ We did an answer-back record to their first single, ‘It’s My Thing,’ over the same record, like, “We’re gonna do this better than y’all!” But Tommy Boy never released it. We still got a lotta stuff we did. We’ve got a freestyle trap that we did on the Mr. Magic radio show, allathat. I said this would make a great project for Rhino Records to put out where they could put ‘Talkin’ All That Jazz,’ ‘Sally,’ ‘Go Stetsa’ and add all this unreleased and b-side stuff to it.

Back to Part One.

This interview is also available in the limited-edition book, Past The Margin: A Decade of Unkut Interviews, available here.