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

Concluding the three part interview with Black By Demand front man CJ Moore, he covers working with Paul C, Ultramagnetic MC’s and Super Lover Cee, the importance of engineering and chopping, getting ripped off on the ‘Rump Shaker’ single and his deep crates of unreleased material.

Robbie: What was your involvement with Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd?

Super Lover Cee lived in the building behind mine. He has a group called Future Four MC’s, which was Super Lover Cee, myself, DJ Rudd and there was another DJ named Tiny Tim. We did shows around the neighbourhoods and then we disbanded. I was the guy doing the beats and the choruses and putting the track together. When I did ‘All Rapper’s Give Up,’ I had not gotten a deal just yet. He was hanging out of his window, cos he lived on the first floor, he was playing some stuff and he said, ‘Yo C, listen to this!’ I’m standing by his window and I said, ‘Let’s put it together.’ He wound up putting it together and I wound up tightening it up. When I brought him to the studio to do the session and introduced him to Paul and Mick, Paul C. didn’t want to do the session. He couldn’t hear it, he didn’t see anything pleasurable about it. He wound up doing it. As far as the entirety of the project, when he did their album Girls I Got ‘Em Locked, I did not do any of those records. But a lotta those routines we had in the Future Four? He wound up using them.

What are your best memories of Paul C.?

People thought he was black guy! [laughs] Because of the style and influence that he would put on records. We would go to each other’s house and we would just play stuff. Paul also played bass, so sometimes I would get Paul to play bass over my stuff, and I was real great at drum rolls and different types of kick/snare patterns, and I would do a lot of that. Me and Drew became what me and Paul was. Paul was determined. He was the kind of guy that would sit there for two hours on a kick drum and try different things. Even though he was older than me, he didn’t have that much more experience, because Paul was in a band as a musician. He transcended into hip-hop as he got into the studio. Before that he was playing funk grooves in a band, but he always had these guys in his neighborhood, in Laurelton, like Rahzel and Black, Rock and Ron and Mikey D. They knew Paul was into the music. ‘We can go through Paul and get some music done.’ Paul would have these ideas and he would put them together so fly – he had a different approach, he had his sound.

When he did the Stezo record – I did the a-side, he did the b-side – Paul wound up putting the record together and the approach that he had was a little eclectic. He started with the snare, then the hi-hats and then put the kick drum in. Then went around and got the hi-hats and resampled them and did all kinds of little things to it. It was kinda cool the way his approach was on it, because it made sense to him. When it was all put down and together, a person like, ‘What is he doing? I don’t get it, I don’t understand.’ Just wait a minute, let him finish! If you would pick up some of these records that he used, you would say to yourself, ‘Where is this part in this record that he sampled?’ It doesn’t exist, because we would recreate the grooves. That’s one thing that he got from me, as far as recreating the grooves. What I got from him was the diligence of, ‘Just sit there ‘till it’s right.’ For some reason I have a gift of frequency, I can understand almost by the number, close and the proximity, because I have super-sensitive ears. That was gift to that equation. We just had such a great blend and a great mesh.

Ultramagnetic was the most ultimate, freaky, crazy, weird-ass sessions that you would ever be in. Ced-Gee used to do his tracks on an Akai 12-track hard disc recorder, he was one of the only ones that ever used that shit. I was sitting in the control room [at 1212] and he told me, ‘Yo C! There’s something about the static, I’m telling you. You don’t hear that? Listen! Listen! Shhh!’ I’m like, ‘This motherfucker’s crazy!’ He said, ‘Listen! It’s the static! It’s the fidelity! Owww! It does something to you!’ He bugged out. It was crazy! And Ced-Gee don’t drink! [laughs] In general it was just so weird. One time I set-up Kool Keith in the mic booth, and Kool Keith – to me – never made sense. He’s like, ‘Wikkety wack, wack, wack, wikky!’ The freakiest lyrics you would ever hear and it was so comical and just so dope at the same time, because the rhythm was sick! And Ced-Gee with, ‘You’re a roach, known pesticide/Filthy, very dirty to me!’ To be in that studio room at that time, I had so many bite marks in my jaws cos I used to go under the board and laugh my ass off. You couldn’t see me from the mic booth! When it was over and we got into really listening back? I developed, ‘I hear where you’re coming from!’ We wanted to clean the records up. We wanted to take the static out – he wanted to put it in! That’s what became unique about Ced-Gee.

Do you and Paul C. help with the programming?

He did most of it. Paul would clean some of it up, I would clean some of it up. A lot of what you heard was phenomenal editing. Pulling out the things that were necessary and putting necessary things in. I was heavy on dropping the beat, because I came from the parks where when you’re rhyming and the DJ is spinning the records back and forth on two turntables, the minute he pulls the needle off or moves the fader and it’s silence, you get to say your punchline and the crowd goes, ‘Ohhhh!’ That was the highpoint of you being an MC! I translated that into the records. For example, ‘Calente is my name but then I seldom tell it.’ That was a drop. Nobody did that on record at that time. By me doing that and highlighting the points, engineers and rappers were like, ‘I gotta do that!’ So they started doing that from that point. Another thing I used to do was drop the beat and then come back. Usually, people come back on the kick, but what I would do is I’d drop the beat and I’d have this big, gas, garage snare splash-down, so when it would hit, instead of being ‘Pop!’ it was ‘Poppppppp!’ Sounded like you were in the Grand Canyon. That’s what you’d hear during the drop while the person was rhyming, and then the beat would come back on the one. I did that on a Black, Rock and Ron record, and you can look back at the years and so how long ago that was, and then I kept repeating it.

Then edits came into play, where people had to do clean versions of records. I said, ‘Let me do a bunch of sound effects – reverses, huge scratches.’ Stretch Armstrong was good friend of mine – I had built his studio – and he played on the radio, so he needed clean versions of all the records that nobody else would play. So I started throwing these sound effects in there, ‘Zzzzuut! Dut-dut-dut!’ Then you start seeing all these different producers starting to do that. But I never in my life started claiming, ‘This is where this started.’ But I was around when Marley Marl wasn’t Marley Marl. Being a 13, 14 year-old. The Dick Charles’ and the Patrick Adams’. Dealing with Luther and Janet Jackson and those guys. I was seeing the suit and tie straightforward approach, and I had the straightforward approach with some jeans and a t-shirt.on, and it was interesting to people.

I remember when he was working with Rakim, he would come to me. ‘What do you think about this one? I’m getting ready to sample this. I’ma put some of these on the tape, just take it home and listen to it and tell me what you would do with it.’ That’s what we would do. ‘Yo Paul, you should do this…’ And then he’ll come back and he’ll do something else. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s kinda crazy!’ With the Let The Rhythm Hit ‘Em tracks and stuff. When he passed, the whole situation was in limbo. ‘Paul died – he had these discs. He had the whole, entire what was going to happen of the album. What are we going to do?’ I didn’t want to touch it, I’m like, ‘Don’t mention nothing to me.’ Large Professor was sitting on the side, that’s how he got his opportunity right then and there. Where I backed out? He came in.

Why did you back out? Were you too upset at the time?

Yeah, I was just too close to him. It was just too much at the time. I’ll never forget – I was late for a night session, coming in. You had to ring the buzzer downstairs, I’m ringing the buzzer, ringing the buzzer. I’m like, ‘What the hell is Mick doing? I know he’s up there, I see the light!’ He comes down stairs and he just leans on the wall, opens the door and he ran and just hugged me. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Tears all through his face, and he says, ‘Paul is dead.’ He just fell apart. Me and him were sitting there for half an hour – fuck the session – we’re just losing it, together. He explained to me what he heard had happened. We went upstairs, we cancelled the session and we went through emotionally what we had to go through and proceeded on. That was the straw that got ripped right out of the camel’s back. Like, ‘I can’t do this, man. I’ma step away from music for a little bit and get my head right and keep it moving.’

There was a point where he was dealing with Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd when me and Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd fell-out. At the same time, they had a problem in the neighborhood and they had to leave the neighborhood and they went over and stayed with Paul C. This is kinda when the thing went down, and Paul C. trying to play the middle guy – semi listening to these guys – kinda fell-out with me a little bit, but it was like a month prior. I’m talking to his wife, I’m like, ‘Why won’t Paul pick up the phone?’ He finally picks up the phone, he was real short with me, and I’m trying to figure out, ‘What the hell? We was just buddy buddy?’ I guess these guys got in his head, so I wound up looking for those guys – Supe and Caliente – having a problem with them. ‘What are you getting in front of me and my friend for?’ I put one and two together and it had to be that. So when he passed, everyone was thinking it was because of their problem – somebody came to look for ‘em, mistaken identity, and wind up getting Paul. No one saw Super Lover Cee and Cassanova Rudd. They disappeared! Finally they surfaced, it got cleared-up. Supposedly they had nothing to do with it.

It was hard, I didn’t want to touch anything that he touched. I still have discs that he had involvement. He had 20 or 30 of my discs – I didn’t want ‘em back. I was working on a group called Phaze ‘N Rhythm, they were on Tommy Boy too, ‘Swollen Pockets.’ I was so heavily in demand at that time, and I didn’t want it. I was turning down four or five groups a week. Aaron Fuchs, who owns Tuff City Records, he was calling me off the hook to work with his acts. Will Sokolov over at Sleepings Bags [sic] he was calling me to work work with his acts. He wanted to sign me and I didn’t want any parts of it.

Can you explain the importance of the engineer on producing records?

Some people would take a drum loop as it is on the record and put a good combination of another record, which is the musical loop part of it. Some of the EQ’ing would come into play where you filter out the bass or you filter out the highs. You may find two or three loops and then you would find a kick, a snare, a hi-hat and maybe a crash and a drum fill and some scratching – a lotta people would produce that way. Large Professor wasn’t the guy who was really chopping stuff up. He wasn’t taking the beginning part of the record and the ending part of a record and squeezing it together to make it sound like a different side of the record. The Easy Mo Bee’s would do, that Pete Rock’s would do that, to a degree. He was probably a tad more advanced than Large Professor was. I was a consummate chopper. If you wanted to control ‘Impeach The President,’ you would take each kick, each snare, and then the hi hat. You would put ‘em back together, but you would control the quantization of that beat and loosen it up a little to give it that live feel. Now you’re at an advantage – if you want the beat to change at some point of the record, or you want to pull the snare out in certain areas? You could do that. A loop? You can’t do that.

Looping was a craft, to a degree, and sampling was an art. My approach was, one two-bar loop might consist of eight different places from that same record, but you would listen to it as if the musicians played it just like that. Some of us would take a real live bass player, and whatever the bass was doing, we would do that and then some. This is tricks, a lot of that we created in 1212. I don’t know if anyone was doing this at the time, but I discovered – I pulled the jack out of the SP-1200 one day, but it didn’t come all the way out, it came half-way out. When you pull a jack partially out, it creates a filter. You’ve got outputs 1 through 8 in the drum machine, and each of those jacks had a different frequency filtration on it, so if you would pull a jack halfway out it would cut the highs off, with 8 being the most wide-open. They did that purposely for whatever reason, but it was never in the instructions, so people didn’t know about it. We would take an 808 kick and put it on Output 1 with the jack halfway out. That 808 kick was so monsterous, because it was an 8-bit sampler. That’s how the records that had 808’s in ‘em were so incredible back in the days, but they weren’t obtrusive.

Today, 808’s resonate, and it sounds disgusting. You can’t even get a kick and a snare, because they want it loud. We had ‘em low and heavy, and a lot of that came from the filtration part of that. We would add an 808 kick to the loop, and then repeat that real low with a 909 underneath the loops to re-enforce the kick drums, to give it the bottom, to give it the bass and the body. You’re hearing the loops, ‘That’s Impeach The President, that’s Funky Drummer.’ But we added these integral parts so it took it away from the era it came from in the 60’s and 70’s and brought it to the 90’s where it was heavy. They used to pan records real hard back then. They used to take the drums and pan it hard left, and take the music and pan it hard right. Sampling stereo, we realized you could actually pan right and get the music out and just get the drums by itself. Some of those things that we don’t get credit for, for understanding the technology and manipulating it the way that we did.

People got exposed, where people were asked to add more elements to their production. The people that disappeared where the the people that could not go beyond sampling. That’s when the musicianship or the creativity came in, where you had to be forced to be creative, so guys like the Large Professor’s and the Lord Finesse’s started disappearing to a degree. Nothing against them – people can say the same exact thing about me – but I jumped into other worlds because i can play. So I was able to do Joe Public, I was able to do Meshell Ndegeocello and R&B acts, as well as a lot of hip-hop acts that had a lot of gut and beat to ‘em. On the west side you had a guy named Battlecat was who really similar. The process of sampling was definitely an art. People always looked at it as stealing. ‘That’s not no talent!’ But we really re-birthed a lot of those artists. James Brown, who had not had a record in years, he wound up coming back because of that.

It made him relevant again.

Absolutely. The Isley Brothers, The Gap Band, Kool and the Gang – I kinda made Kool and the Gang with ‘Can’t Get Enough’ – and Earth, Wind and Fire. A lot of people were looking at you as these young, urban guys, and there’s a way to kinda denigrate or snatch a lotta that credit, where those same R&B guys and those executives found themselves reaching out to us for credibility, because hip-hop was taking over. ‘OK, we need to be validated. Let’s go and grab these guys.’ The closest they could get was Teddy Riley, they didn’t get the right guy. They got an R&B guy who’s trying to do rap.

‘Rumpshaker’ was originally done by my hands. The Disco Twins had a studio in Jamaica, Queens, and Ty Fyfe came to me and I did his session. He didn’t know shit about any kind of instrument, he just had these records and I took ‘em and sampled ‘em, put it together and put it on a disk. He disappeared and went to Virginia and we hear ‘Rumpshaker.’ So I was at him for a really long time.

Were you ever compensated for that?

Never did. When I got to the bottom of it, he had business partners that were dealing with my business partners, so we wound up doing something different on another end where i was heavily compensated for something else. That felt like my payback.

Do you have a lot of stuff in the vaults that’s never been heard?

I got so much unheard stuff. I have Stretch, Tupac, Biz, some Organized Konfusion stuff. I got some Stezo, Black, Rock and Ron, Son of Bazerk, Flavor Flav – I’ve got some stuff! [laughs] Of course G Rap and Akinyele, Free who used to be on BET – she’s super-duper talented, man. She was supposed to be the replacement for Lauren Hill, cos Wyclef had signed her. Didn’t work out. I have two briefcases of DAT’s – nothing but mixes. I had the liberty of being by myself and doing my own mixes as well. I would do a mix, then I would do a dub edit, extended versions, TV versions and things of that nature. I was good at splicing tapes, so I would physically cut the tape apart and make reverses and all kinds of little crazy edits.

So you have a lot more Akinyele material apart from the stuff he released on the ‘Lost Tapes’ album?

That man got about three albums that people haven’t heard. G Rap got about an album worth of stuff. We just recorded at the liberty of recording – the budget was there – let’s just go, let’s just bang out as much as we can. Fortunately, a lot of that stuff I was at the helm of. Some of it I produced and some of it I had creative control as far as the engineering and mixing part of it. A lot of the executives would come to me and say, ‘This is your baby, this is your project. Bring me something.’

You also worked on the Uptown record? It sounded like he caught a tough break over there.

Tommy Boy’s notorious for killing people, they would just kill your career. When Dante Ross came to me, I didn’t know who Uptown was. All I heard was that, ‘He was at some battle – he went against Kane, or he was rhyming the same time as Kane – and he did better than Kane. I think you should mess with this dude.’ That’s how Dante sold him to me. I was busy at the time, I said, ‘I don’t have time to get into production right now, I’m getting ready to go on this road-trip. I’ll get it when I come back.’ He said, ‘Nah, we need to get it now.’ Dante came to my house, I took out my drum machine. I think I took a hi-hat and some snare rolls from the records he had, then I grabbed some records outta the crate and I started putting it together. We went to 1212, I laid the record down and I did some extra stuff when Uptown got there. Dude was sharp – he’s another underrated rapper. He nailed it. I think he’s one of the dopest MC’s I’ve ever worked with. I was always intricate as far as putting patterns together – Uptown was another guy who did that as well. He kinda impressed me. When I got home, I was telling radio DJ’s – ‘Yo, Red Alert. There’s this dude Uptown, you need to get on it.’ I got at Funkmaster Flex, Chuck Chillout – I was prepping these dudes.

Unfortunately, when I read the article [Uptown – The Unkut Interview] he was under the assumption that myself and Dante had took his portions of the money. We probably made a couple of hundred dollars upfront off that. You get a production contract, there’s an artist portion of the contract and there’s a production portion of the contract. All of that stuff in the chorus? That’s my voice. I came up with the chorus and he wrote all of the lyrics. In that interview he said he didn’t get any money afterwards, I believe that record did well. I wound up splitting the royalties with Dante, and I didn’t think that was fair. But he brought me the project, and I’m working on all these other big things so it really doesn’t matter. He [Uptown] was supposed to get 50%, but this is what Tommy Boy were notorious of – Tommy Boy would either take 100% of your publishing and pay you for it for your first record, or they would take 50% of it. On a single, you’re supposed to get 7 points. Points are, in layman’s terms, spoken to on the dollar. So if the record sold for $7, you’re supposed to get 49 cents – hypothetically. The 49 cents is what the participants get. You might have a producer that might say, ‘I want 2 points.’ That leaves the artist with 5 points. He might have a writer that wants 1 point – that leaves him with 4 points. I’m pretty sure Uptown’s contract looked like that. That’s from not having a lawyer to look into it, unfortunately. Uptown, I thought that he was gonna be the next cat. I was proud of that record.

I thought it was an MC Shan song when I first heard it, but I said, ‘Damn! Shan got nice all of a sudden!’

[laughs] That’s so funny, everybody thought that. When people figured out that it wasn’t Shan was when they heard that the kid was nasty. His voice sounded exactly like MC Shan, and I think that’s why Marley Marl wouldn’t play it at the time. I went to school with [Brother] J. Actually, J beatboxed for me in the talent show in Murray Bircham [laughs] I was rhyming and J was my beatbox. I was in the tenth grade. I didn’t know that J rapped until I heard him on a record, and I went to school with him from 10th grade to 12th grade. I went to a meeting – they had this thing called The Vanglorious Movement – Lumumba Carson, which was Sonny Carson’s son, Professor X. We were in the Latin Quarters, and it was MC Serch – that’s how MC Serch got his name, he was searching for knowledge – KRS-One, Just-Ice, Daddy-O and Lumumba Carson. That’s when I met Lumumba, and they were creating a crew, almost like Zulu Nation. ‘The red, the black, the green’ – when I heard that on the record I was like, ‘Oh shit! He used to say that shit at the meetings!’ Then J came out and did his thing, I was so proud of that dude.

Me and Ice Cube on the road was inseperable, because we were the two young guys. I wrote everything and did everything in my group, and he damn near did everything in his situation, and he never did get that credit. I’ll never forget, he told me, ‘Man, they’re riding around in Mercedes – I’m getting around in a Suzuki Sidekick!’

Was this just before he left NWA?

Absolutely, which at the time was the best move for him. When we would do sound check, Eazy-E and all of them would be somewhere else, and Ice Cube would do the sound check for everybody’s parts. We were too young to get into clubs and stuff, because we were underage, so when we were in Vegas and gambling towns, they would chase us out all the time, cos we looked like little kids. It was crazy.

What record would you play to someone to let them understand the CJ Moore sound?

I would say ‘All Rapper’s Give Up.’ Engineering-wise, I would say Akinyele’s ‘Put It In Your Mouth,’ because it was a rebel song. It wasn’t supposed to happen.