CJ Moore [Black By Demand] – The Unkut Interview, Part One

CJ Moore has been at ground zero for more classic hip-hop records that most of us can either count, through his work as an engineer at 1212 during the Paul C. era, with his group Black By Demand and with his work for Akinyele and Kool G Rap to name a few. After chopping it with CJ for three hours, there’s a lot of material to get through and a lot of behind the scenes stories to drop, so let’s begin with how it all got started.

Robbie: When did you first get involved with music?

CJ Moore: About 83, 84. My brothers had a DJ group, and I was just a guy around the group. They were into the deejaying aspect of it and I was into the rapping aspect of it. I started getting into the technical side of it around 84, 85. My mom had bought me a little portable piano and I started making my little compositions from that point. That stemmed into me being the guy who understood a lot of the technical ins and outs as far as equipment was concerned, and I took it from there.

You didn’t study engineering formally?

I just picked it up as I went along. It was a studio called 1212 that I worked at, I was 14, going on 15. I had made a record called ‘We’re Gettin’ Paid.’ My aunt had bought me a drum machine, called a Casio RZ-1. One of the first sampling drum machines, it had like a 2.5 seconds of sample time on it, so I started making my beats from that and using my little piano. I took it into 1212, and the guy who owned the studio – his name is Mick Corey – he took a liking to the fact that I had never been in the studio before, how I kinda knew my way around to where I recognised what I was looking at. I knew how to get in and out.I used to go over to Sam Ash and Manny’s on 48th Street after school and play around with the equipment until they kicked me out. I would watch people and at some point I would overhear conversations about studios. I was trying to get in these places, but I didn’t have the money nor the backing, as far as you get into the buildings and they see this little kid trying to come into a music building. They looking at me like I’m crazy, with no supervision. 1212, I saved up my little money and went and did the sessions. I asked him, ‘I would love to work in a place like this!’ And he said, ‘Why not?’ I liked at him like he was crazy. He was asking me what did I know about this and what did I know about that and I was answering all of the questions right. He was talking about ratio and threshold and attack and things of that nature. I understood that because I used to read a lot and picked it up from that point until I really got my hands on it. I had some sort of a tutorial head-start due to literature.

A lot of sessions that were coming in and out of there, he asked me did I want to sit in on some of the sessions. Naturally I had to ask my mother to see if she would allow me to be out, cos a lot of the sessions were at night. At first they were weekends, and I started sitting in on sessions like Black, Rock and Ron and Son of Bazerk. It had been two weeks and one of the engineers called out and couldn’t make it, so I filled in. It was Ultramagnetic’s session. We started playing around, cos they were originally doing most of their stuff with Paul C. Then wound up I ended up taking the Black, Rock and Ron session and I did all the songs for their album. Then Son of Bazerk, did their songs. Organized Konfusion were some guys that came in and I did their stuff.

Were they Simply II Positive back then?

Yeah, they were Simply II Positive then. During that time, I had already been spoken for over at Tommy Boy Records. I was originally signed to Warner Bros. but then they bumped me down to Tommy Boy, that was the rap label that Warner Bros. owned. I had cut a record called ‘All Rappers Give Up’ back with ‘Can’t Get Enough.’ With Organized Konfusion, I was trying to get them to go over to Tommy Boy. We had this record, ‘Bra,’ that we had sampled, and one of the acts on Tommy Boy, I think it was De La Soul, had simultaneously used the same sample, and Prince Po accused me of giving the track to one of those guys. I’m like, ‘Hey, it’s a record! People sample, I don’t own the exclusive rights.’ So they started working with Paul C.

Guys like Large Professor came in the studio, I tracked and mixed ‘Watch Roger Do His Thing,’ his first record for Main Source. You had Stezo. Between Paul C and myself, we were splitting a lot of sessions. The big ta-do was me being this young, black kid from the inner city, from the projects. A lot of people wanted to see that. ‘Yo, you’ve gotta check out this little kid in the studio!’ People were fascinated with just the idea of that, so I was starting to get called into different studios like Power Play, Electric Lady and Chung King. I started combing being an artist and being an engineer by trade. The Tommy Boy thing kicked in and then we were going into album mode. ‘Can’t Get Enough’ did real well, ‘All Rappers Give Up’ did real well, it was an A and B side, but then it flipped because ‘All Rappers Give Up’ became the number one record in LA for an extremely long time. They had a radio station called KDAY, the furst 24-7 rap station. I had never been in California a day in my life, and I couldn’t believe the impact that the record had. We’re talking about 88, 89.

Ice Cube would later sample the same loop, wouldn’t he?

Right, on ‘How To Survive In South Central.’ In hindsight, it was almost like he was paying homage to the record. I was one of their favorite artists and I was on tour with them. I didn’t know who they were. You’ve got this hot young rap act from New York and you’ve got this underground rap act from California, which was Eazy-E and NWA. When I got off the plane our acting manager at the time, Ed Strickland, he said, ‘You’ve got a show with these guys.’ It was Ice-T, Eazy-E, NWA, us and Spice 1. We played at a place called the Artemus Ham Hall out in Las Vegas. We saw these dudes coming down the escalators and it was like, ‘Who are these dudes with the big silly curls?’ It was a totally different transition how Californians dress and how New Yorkers dress. We kinda bumped heads in the beginning. They didn’t know we were a rap group and I didn’t know we were a rap group because none of us had videos at the time, so they looked at us and we looked at them with crazy looks. We got introduced and we did the soundcheck, and Eazy-E had the assumption that Black By Demand were Run-DMC status because the record was so huge out there. Between three stations we were getting twenty spins a day, and because we had pictures out there for the concert we could barely even get out of the airport!

We were one of the first guys to ever use Roger Troutman on any type of record and do it in the manner that we did it. That sorta set a trend, so the field started opening up. ‘You Got’s To Chill’ and those other records kinda hit at the same time, but we were playing that record in the streets before it got to radio. People were getting a glimpse of it in the clubs, in the streets, which was real mixtapes back then. Then we did ‘Dearly Beloved’ which did extremely well for us – we travelled the country and lots of parts of the world.

Why did you decide to flip Yes’ ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’?

I didn’t want to do that record. Tommy Boy came to me and they said, ‘I need you to do this.’ Which was something like Tone Loc. ‘Funky Cold Medina’ was out, and I’m like, ‘Go get him to do that record!’ We got into it, I walked out and I said, ‘You know what? I’mma give ‘em what they want.’ I happened to be be going through my brother’s records and I came across ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart.’ So just for kicks I sampled it, I played some instruments over the sample and then I went and got ‘Apache’ and some other things and put the drums together. We brought it onto Tommy Boy and collapsed the entire staff, everybody just lost their mind. We were looking at each other like, ‘What the fuck? Are they serious?’ It was so left-field what we were doing. We had another record called ‘In The Midst of Funk’ which was the flipside, and we wanted the video to that record. They forced us, we did the video for ‘Dearly Beloved’ and it did well. ‘In The Midst of Funk’ wound up getting more radio play, commercially, but ‘Dearly Beloved’ had that television airplay. That’s when Yo! MTV Raps was hitting, with Doctor Dre and Ed Lover. They were good friends of mine, so they found a way with Ted Demme – who was their producer – to rotate the record. I started getting really heavy into production. Tommy Boy wouldn’t take the records that I was doing, so I started taking those same records and taking my voice off and letting other people rap over it.

Was this for the Black By Demand album?

Right. We would give ‘em a bunch of songs and they would tell us, ‘That’s not you.’ How are you going to tell us ‘that’s not you’? You’re not me! That was a similar beef everyone at Tommy Boy was having. Dante Ross, who kind of discovered us, he fought for us as much as he could, cos he was a heavy hip-hop head and he was into the raw guts of hip-hop. They were into the commercialism, they wanted to cross that road, but the artists that they signed weren’t really the artists for that. Even with De La Soul, they created that whole ‘DAISY Age’ thing. I remember going to all these meetings with Uptown and De La Soul and Stetsasonic, Latifah. It was just a constant bicker and fight on creative control. They wouldn’t let me get off the label. Delicious Vinyl wanted to sign me, Motown wanted to sign me, Uptown wanted to sign me, so I had a bidding war going on. All these execs were coming to the table and every time I it turned around, the number was getting higher, so I said, ‘I’m young, I’ll wait this contract out. I’ma get heavy into production.’

I was already engineering for other people, and Dr. Butcher and myself started going head-over-heels doing tracks. I was the more technical person, cos I understood how to deal with a lotta the electronics in the studio. Father MC was a friend of mine and he was trying to get a record deal, so he was coming into 1212 but he just wasn’t hitting. I had this record called ‘I’ll Do 4 U’ and I said, ‘I’ma take me off and put you on it.’ Took it over to Uptown and they wanted to mess with it, but they didn’t want to mess with a young kid like myself. I wanted a production deal. I was handling my own business, I had a powerful lawyer, his name was Bill Krasilovsky – he wrote This Business of Music. People followed this book like the bible, and he was also lawyer for so many of the presidents of these major companies, so I had the advantage of having a lawyer of that stature, that knew how to get to anybody, anyway he could. They wanted to do a ‘deal for hire,’ so I told Father MC, ‘There’s an opportunity on the table, I don’t want to hold you back.’ I made a couple of dollars from the situation and then Father MC went on to have his career.

Then I find myself with Joe Public, which Lionel Joe managed. Ed Strickland took me under his wing and I started getting around the George Clinton’s and the Bootsy Collin’s and the Mtume’s and the Jazzy Jeff’s. I got an opportunity to be around these people and I was learning, things were rubbing off, so I found myself getting involved in a lot of projects, just like the older guys did, where you might find Bootsy Collins played bass on a Stevie Wonder but you don’t see the credit. That was sorta like me to a degree, cos I was so good at arranging stuff and seeing vision of how a chorus should be put together, how the breakdown should lay in there and different little integral parts of a record, so I found myself getting involved with those guys a lot. On the R&B side, I wound up getting in the studio with Joe Public and we did ‘Live and Learn,’ ‘I Like’ and ‘I’ve Been Watching You.’ But Lionel took credit away from us and put us down as writers, as opposed to us being put down as the production that you contributed. I didn’t really understand how potent that was on a platinum record, where you have executives looking at the credit and saying, ‘These guys are the writers – I wanna get in touch with the producer!’ [laughs]

After the Joe Public ordeal, it’s ’92, ’93 and I finally get off Tommy Boy. I’m looking for another deal and I wind up getting signed to Chrysilis Records. Ed Strickland worked over at Chrysillis, he had jusy did Gang Starr. Then there was so sort of racism case that happened over there, where Ed Strickland was accusing someone of racism, so he wound up having to resign. So now I don’t have any kind of representative at the label and they’re looking at me like I’m Japanese! So they gave me a release and I kept it moving and me and Dr. Butcher had a strong conversation, we’re approaching ’95. He said, ‘You remember Akinyele, who did that record with Large Professor?’ So we got involved. I had a relationship over at Power Play Studio in Queens, so I went to the guy who owned it and I said, ‘I want to rent your Studio C building for two months. I don’t want nobody up in here.’ We cut the deal. Akinyele was signed to Loud Records, and we started doing his album. Akinyele had beats from a lot of people, so this guy named C4 came in, it was Butcher’s friend. I was the engineer, the producer, mixer. He had these samples, the elements of ‘Put It In Your Mouth.’ Akinyele had gotten comfortable with me, so our motto was, ‘Let’s just get down what we need to get down, CJ – you take it from there and turn it into something.’ That’s what happened to ‘Put It In Your Mouth.’ It was super sloppy, the sounds weren’t crispy, so I was like, ‘I’ma take this home, re-sample it. A new kick, coming from the same source but sampled the right way, the snare, etc’ C4 stormed out, he was so pissed. ‘What the fuck are y’all doin’ to my record?’ Akinyele was like, ‘Shut the fuck up. I paid you for it so it’s mine. Get outta here!’ The A&R guys from Loud Records were on my ass, so I’m telling Ak, ‘Get everybody out of the studio. Just you, me and Dr. Butcher.’ We shut it down, we finished that record. Kia Jefferies, who sang the vocals, she had a good idea, she went in there and we polished it up and that became the intro of the record. All of a sudden, the entire thing is starting to come together.

I did a rough mix on it, we brought it into the label and the label was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ So Ak turned around and said, ‘Fuck you, I want out. We’re gonna buy ourselves out of the contract if you won’t get behind it.’ Jessica Rosenblum was his manager at the time, she also ran all of the major clubs that were popping at that time – the Tunnel, the Palladium, the Ritz. She had the DJ’s under wing, so she made the DJ’s play ‘Put It In Your Mouth’ in the club, the record started getting up. Now all those same people that were on our neck – including C4, who didn’t agree with nothing. Now C4 is bragging about him being a person on the record, when he was totally against it. [laughs] We knew what we had, because the goal was to go somewhere where everybody wasn’t. If everybody’s going right, we’re trying to go left, but we’re gonna stay there so hard that we’re gonna carry that whole committee onto our side of the street and we’re gonna walk ‘em down a lane. That’s exactly what we did.

Butcher and myself proceeded onto the rest of the album, we must’ve did 40 songs on there. I started recording Kool G Rap at the same time, synced him with Butcher again and brought him in there on the downtime of Ak. By us controlling the building, we had 24-7 reign of anything we wanted to do. The money we spent to rent the studio out? We made it back on sessions, because I had such a catalogue of people that I was recording. The Mic Geronimo’s, the Royal Flush’s and the Sauce Money’s and all those guys. Then Ak made a move and it turned into an EP, because the record got so hot the direction of where Akinyele’s career was going took a u-turn, and no everything was sex, sex, sex. We had this hip-hop album and it was so ahead of it’s time and so different and so left-field that he would have gotten so many accolades from it, but he went the EP route. It was successful on that side, but it took from what he could have been as a well-rounded artist. Nobody wanted to hear anything but that from him, it becomes typecast. This guy is Richie Cunningham in Happy Days, so that’s the only thing he can play for the rest of his life.

Part Two covers CJ’s involvement with what could have been the greatest rap supergroup of all-time, working with Kool G Rap, his sessions with Ultramagnetic and the mystery surrounding Paul C’s untimely demise.