Aaron Fuchs [Tuff City] – The Unkut Interview, Part One

Aaron Fuchs‘ Tuff City label was the David to Def Jam‘s Goliath in the early 80’s. The label would go on to deliver important records from the Cold Crush Brothers, Spoonie Gee, The 45 King and Lakim Shabazz, to name but a few. Aaron talked extensively about how to keep your head above water in the record game and offered some interesting opinions about where hip-hop might have ended up if Harlem hadn’t gotten involved.

Robbie: What’s the longest that you’ve been in one location?

Aaron Fuchs: Five, six years. In New York City, no matter what business you’re in, you also have to be in the real estate business. It’s just chaotic keeping an office address for more than a few years at a time.

What are your proudest achievements as a record label so far?

I was very proud to be on the scene around ’82, when the electronic drum machines came on the scene. I described it as ‘a thousand flowers bloomed.’ You previously had all your DJ’s just looping or sampling beats from the same body of records, and when the electronic drum machines came in, all of a sudden it seemed like the unique sub rhythms of the DJ’s ethnic backgrounds – because hip-hop is a very Pan-Caribbean music-came to the forefront – it was wonderful to be working with Charlie Chase and Master OC, who were Puerto Rican; Pumpkin, who was Costa Rican;and Davey-D who was American black. It was really reflected in their different approaches to rhythms. What a wonderful time to be making music.

How had you met all these guys?

Hip-hop was incredibly small when I got into hip-hop, circa ’78. The communications medium for hip-hop was a 7 x 5 sheet of paper called The Phillip Edwards Report. He was the guy who had the bright idea to list all the stores in the metropolitan area and create a list of records that they were selling and distribute them around the boroughs. When I told Bambaataa, I wanted to sign an MC crew, I didn’t know he’d bring me the greatest of all-time, the Cold Crush Brothers. When I befriended Barry Michael Cooper, because we were both music critics for the Village Voice, I had no idea that he had cultivated a friendship with Spoonie Gee, who was the most influential of hip-hop artist of the old school era.

What can you tell me about your experiences as a music critic?

Criticism started because of Dylan and John Lennon. All of a sudden, lit. majors had something to write about with rock & roll. I always had a niche because I was one of the very few guys writing about black music, so while the review of the new Beatles or Dylan album was always taken, the review of the Wilson Pickett album or the Aretha Franklin album was always available.

And you were more than happy to take that on board.

Yeah. Happy to be able to hang out in Atlantic Records, happy to be able to fill junkies need for music.

Do you feel like it was an obsession for you at that stage?

No. It was an addiction. I interviewed Bob Marley once and he pulled out an ice cream cone of a blunt. I had only been smoking skinny jays at the point and I never pressed the on button of the tape recorder for the interview! But even when I was not stoned I had a need to be listening to music either live or on record every day of the week

How did you make the transformation from critic to label owner?

Beyond merely reviewing albums, I was making predictions in print that were like A&R calls. I reviewed Al Green‘s first album for Rolling Stone and spoke very, very highly about it. ‘Watch this guy, he’s gonna happen.’ Six or seven months later he put out ‘Let’s Stay Together’ and the record company used my quotes as part of their campaign. That really wasn’t happening with critics, and I saw it happening with me a few times. There was also the luck of being early and ahead of the pack. When I decided I wanted to make it my business in 1980 it wasn’t competitive. There were very few, if any, companies that saw it as something that would have long-range potential. Because I was a journalist, and also historically minded, I saw hip-hop as part of the continuum of American black music tradition. I thought it was here to stay,I was betting very long,, so it enabled me to hang in there through mistake after mistake, which might have sunk me had I gotten in later on when it was more competitive or if I was less inclined to stay with it.

It was still regarded as a fad at that time?

If you were a historian as I was, you were hearing the same things you heard about rock & roll. ‘It’s black! It’s jungle music! It’ll never last!’ I had other notions. There’s that Bob Marley expression, ‘Who feels it, knows it.’ It was the reverse for me – I knew it, and then later I felt it! It was strange to me in the beginning, but I knew it was gonna happen and then I grew to love it.

What was the first record you released?

It was a record called ‘Beach Boy’ by Vertical Lines. I had put my trust in Barry Michael Cooper. He’s known for writing the script to New Jack City, but what he was doing earlier around 1980 is still not sufficiently heralded. He was talking to Jamaican born Harlem record label owners to put out his hip-hop productions. These guys started out making Jamaican music in the first place, so to be convinced to get into into hip-hop was a big leap, and then he was into the Kraftwerk-like techno style of it. It was amazing, both for the artistic leap it represented for him but also for the leap of faith he was making these shopkeepers take for him. I’m very proud to have worked with him and having picked up some of his earlier recordings. So I trusted him to make this record. Unfortunately he made this down-tempo electro record with a little doo-wop vocal, and nobody wanted to know. I remember there was this iconic record man in the Bronx named Brad,he had put out ‘Catch The Beat’ by T-Ski Valley, and he kept saying to me, ‘There’s no foot, man! There’s no foot in that record!’ . All these years later It’s gone on to have some kind of cult status but then nobody wanted to really hear a record like Vertical Lines.

You weren’t selling many copies at the time?

That’s right. But it wasn’t sinking me. At that time the economies of scale were smaller. Even if you didn’t make money you weren’t really bleeding money because you weren’t embarking on some sort of national campaign with a $100,000 video and a $100,000 promotion budget. You had a somewhat receptive local radio market and you had a local sales market. It was a good way for a small businessman to sustain. I had my first success with the follow up, ‘Smurf Across The Surf’ we were much more in the groove. That could be deemed to be a classic ‘electro’ record. It was released on the heels of ‘Planet Rock’ so it was uptempo that way, but the beautiful thing was Afrika Bambaataa did the mix. He stripped it down and dubbed it up and then, on the heels of further criticism by Brad, I overdubbed the live kick drum and it was off to the races. We made some noise locally.

What was the record that really put you in business, sales-wise?

I had a CBS deal [now Sony Records] and all the records I did with them sold because there was this incredible sales machine over there. There was an expression in the music business called ‘losing records,’ which meant you could sell a lot of records and not really know how to explain it. They just knew how to put records everywhere so you can get impulse purchases. But even though I had records that got on the radio and sold records for them, it wasn’t til I left them and went indie that I had a record that really secured me, to make me feel, ‘OK, rent’s gonna be paid for a while, ‘The Godfather’ by Spoonie Gee. That was a Marley Marl production. That got into daily rotation. There were two kinds of plays that hip-hop got at that time – a kind of of lesser rotation in the evenings, and hip-hop shows and dance shows on the weekend – and then there were the hits, which were integrated into daily rotation by these stations which were really still R&B stations. They were playing hip-hop to boost ratings. So it was a cross-over in that way. Cross-over has traditionally been from R&B to pop, but in those days with hip-hop you had to cross-over over to R&B! That secured my existence as a company.

‘The Godfather’ album was a comeback of sorts for Spoonie Gee, wasn’t it?

How well I know, because when we put the 12” out we weren’t getting orders for it. I finally went to one of the important retailers – Music Factory – and said, ‘This record is getting all kinds of rotation, why aren’t I getting any orders for it?’ They said, ‘Oh, we thought it was the new Rakim record!’ Spoonie had been quiet for so long, and Rakim had become very popular, having been influenced by Spoonie.

Did you recruit Teddy Riley for that project specifically?

There’s a big story about Teddy Riley in those days, he was almost like the property of a big drug dealer – in a manner of speaking. I don’t even know if he was eighteen. He was a young, brilliant kid. We made those records in his mother’s living room. You didn’t have to be a genius to know how important Teddy Riley was at that time. I think it was an iconic piece on Teddy Riley in the Village Voice that got Barry Michael Cooper his entree to Hollywood. Teddy was tied, if you will, to a ‘gangsta.’ I’m fairly ambivalent about this; but you don’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. Gene Griffith, Teddy’s ‘mentor’ and I were peas in a pod. We both had associated label deals at CBS, and there was a uniformity of bad experience to people who had that deal. They were a division of Epic, and at that time Michael Jackson was having his hugest success with Epic with the Thriller album, so that everybody else who was there was secondary, but even at that strata they were able to break Boy George and Cindy Lauper. We were a strata lower beneath them. Fast forward a few years,and word was Gene had been locked up or something, when I stuck my deal for Spoonie with Teddy. Word got out that Gene was set to return, so Teddy put all outstanding deals – including ours – on hold and we feared we the deal wasn’t going to happen. But god bless him, when he returned Gene green lighted the deal.

The Go-Go sound of Spoonie Gee’s ‘Take It Off’ was a big deal at the time. What was your involvement with making that happen?

That Go-Go sound paralleled the rise of Teddy Riley’s swing beat, and my A&R chops for hip-hop were as sharp as they ever were and were ever going to be. I was breathing it. I had this deal with Marley where I would pay him part cash and part vinyl, because I had a deeper command of vintage funk and crate digging stuff. He was a brilliant guy but he wasn’t really a crate digger.

I always saw him as more of technical guy, which is why he called himself ‘The Engineer All-Star.’

But not to the exclusion of having serious ears. I don’t know when the Queensbridge projects were built, but it didn’t have the ‘old bones’ of some of the other black neighborhoods in metro New York – Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem. I was schooling him as far as the deeper crate digging, funk type things. And tho I got some good productions from him for a low price we had a reasonably fair exchange, he was a sponge and quickly integrated what I gave him into his on-air set pieces. If I gave him the Ohio Players‘ ‘Funky Worm’? Boom, Marley had a ‘Granny’ persona like Junie Morrison‘s. I gave him ‘Impeach The President’ and boom! It became MC Shan‘s ‘The Bridge.’ The opening, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got MC Shan in the house!’ It’s a take-off of The Honeydrippers’ ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got the Honeydrippers in the house!’ It was unforgettable hanging with Marley. In those days there were fewer beat makers – guys with studio chops – than there were rappers, and what I saw first with Pumpkin and then with Marly was artist after artist would come around them. starting first with just grabbing who ever he could in Queensbridge, then evolving to people seeking him out from all over metro New York.

The PHD album was a favorite of mine. There was no shortage of heavy artillery on the back cover.

We had a video that was directed by Demian Lichtenstein, who went on to make movies. He made that Kurt Russell movie about the ten guys in Elvis outfits who robbed Vegas [3000 Miles To Graceland]. It was very good, but we had to edit it and edit it and edit it until we met MTV’s standards. But you could never go wrong working out of Queensbridge, it was a real hotbed of talent. The reason I was working in Queensbridge was I was living in Long Island City. Which was just on the other side of the Queensboro bridge. Even though it was the sticks, I was near a studio – Power Play, I was near a pressing plant and I was near the Tri-Borough bridge. You could go into the studio on Tuesday, have your records pressed by Friday and hit the street. Just run around New York on payday, when there were record stores in every borough. It was like being in the baked good business! You’d come into the pressing plant in the morning and the smell of vinyl would just fill your nostrils. Everything about the hiphop business was smaller then and it increased your chances of just making something happen.

How did some of those early Hot Day singles come about? They sounded like they were recorded live.

That ‘Hot Day Mastermix’ record was pretty lo-fi. On the flip he recorded Tragedy over my ‘Take It Off’ track. I was like, ‘Dude, that record is now mine.’ We ended up working together though on a bunch of records.

That record really captured that live park jam feeling. What are some of the more vivid memories from back then?

The instances that rock your world tend to happen to you when you’re younger. When I was taken to the Apollo theatre by the black caretaker of my father’s synagogue in ’64 and saw Jackie Wilson – that just rocked my world. What really surprised me is that the same thing happened so much later in life when Bambaataa invited me to the T-Connection in 1980. The electricity was so palpable, the vibe was so ferocious. Just to see Bambaataa arrive, to see the his procession of posse members coming to the club,carrying crates of records ,and setting up, was very post-gang. When Bambaataa came to the gig, there were four men carrying crates behind him. It had that quality of gang member coming to rumble. Being at a time in life when you’re in your thirties already and you believe you’re past the point of having something so exciting happen to you – to have that still happen was wonderful.

What can you tell me about working with the Cold Crush Brothers?

I had the good fortune to work with Grandmaster Caz, and because his style was so literate it would pass muster with your English professor. But the early records by the Cold Crush, like ‘Fresh,Fly, Wild and Bold’ and ‘Punk Rock Rap’ were styles unto themselves. They say video killed the radio star and film killed vaudeville – I believe that I have precious examples of hip-hop’s vaudevillian phase, something that was forged thru live performance, even though it was still in the studio. Something whose form had yet to be codified. The Bronx and Harlem were worlds apart culturally by the time the 70’s happened, because Harlem’s a long-standing community and the Bronx was burnt-out, but they were geographically very close to each other. You had hip-hop evolve like a weed, like topsy, like Marlboro country, and bang! The Harlem record guys take over because its spatially a short trip.

You had Spoonie Gee, who was really an R&B guy who was rapping instead of singing. You had this formalizing of what hip-hop was into the constraints of the Harlem record business. These couple of [Cold Crush Brother] records actually reflect what hip-hop was before it was a record business. This crazy, formless, sprawling kind of music. You wonder sometimes would would have happened to hip-hop had the Bronx had not been so close to Harlem and was so quickly engulfed by the vastly deeper traditions of Harlem. In the Bronx It was something that was being invented as it was going along, and that’s what opened the door to that younger generation. Sugar Hill had its reign ended because it reflected the imposition of an older sensibility, it was run by record people of an earlier generation.

Did that give you an edge?

What was specific to me was that I had nothing to lose. Around the turn of the 70’s into the 80’s New York was tanking, it was in its nadir. I had lost a series of jobs as a journalist, first with Cashbox – they were close to folding – I caught on with Soho News, they folded. Did some freelance for The Daily News, even they were rumoured to be folding. Hip-hop was exciting to me, it was an absolute leap into a cosmic moshpit for me. I completely invested in it. When I was able to work with the tremendous, iconic early beat maker Pumpkin he was extremely frustrated by the A&R demands that Corey Robins of Profile had put on him. So for me it was, ‘Great! Do whatever you want for me.’ Later I developed very firm notions, and sometime in the mid 80’s I went through my auteurist phase for about a year, in which I believe that I reflected a certain noir sensibility that dovetailed what was going on in hip-hop. Making these real dark records that had almost no commercial [appeal]. ‘Street Girl’ by Spoonie Gee and ‘You Need Stitches’ by Grandmaster Caz. But in the beginning there was almost an anti-A&R sensibility that helped me through.

How did you meet Ced-Gee?

I was keeping myself open to possibility. I had heard that Ced-Gee was the uncredited producer of the Boogie Down Productions album and his work with Ultramagnetic spoke for itself. While there were some artists and producers that I discovered from scratch, you didn’t have to be prescient to know that you wanted to get Teddy Riley or Ced-Gee for a gig, or Marley or Pumpkin or Master OC. It was the mix of respecting existing reputations with be able to make A&R calls on unknowns that I hope is how Ill be judged. Hip-hop has not developed the best possible A&R-driven biographers or historians. I believe that I’m one Truffaut away from being deemed an auteur and it just hasn’t happened yet. [laughs]

There have already been a hundred books written about Def Jam.

You make a very good point, because back then you couldn’t describe what you were doing as competing with them – you were left in the dust by them! You survived the assault of everything that surrounded them. You hope that once 25 years have passed, as with the French deeming something to be ‘noir,’ the British deeming certain types of soul to be ‘Northern,’ you say, ‘OK, I didn’t get my propers the first time around cos I didn’t want to pay Mr. Magic payola.’ I could have tripled my chances of getting records played. I did what I could. And I left a top notch, distinctive body of work.

Part Two

Note: This is part of the full transcription of a video interview previously seen here.