Toney Rome [Large Professor associate] – The Unkut Interview

Toney Rome and Large Professor go way back, and share a lot more history than simply a production credit on the b-side of ‘Mad Scientist.’ Toney talks about growing up in Flushing, Queens, facing music industry hurdles and memories of having the hottest tape in school.

Robbie: How did you first get involved in hip-hop?

I grew-up in New York in the 70s and the 80s, when hip-hop was just getting started. I can remember before there were records, used to be chasing tapes, trying to find the hottest tapes and also trying to get to the Bronx to hear the music.

You were in Flushing at the time?

From Flushing, Queens. It was a really organic thing. I was hearing the music out here on the streets, then they started doing jams out here and eventually I started deejaying.

Where were you getting your records? From the city or locally?

It was the era where DJ’s was really secretive about the breaks that they had. Some of the stuff you would know, but you would have to be a sleuth like Sherlock Holmes to figure out what breaks. First you raided your father’s record collection, and you found the old funk and soul records from there. Of course I didn’t have a lotta money back then, so I used to go to stores in Jamaica, Queens and places that I knew out there that had record shops.

How were you getting your hands on the live tapes?

It wasn’t for sale, your friend or distant acquaintance might have a tape from a jam, and everyone’s carrying around radios, so you would hear it. But obtaining it yourself? That’s another thing, because people held them things close. You had to be really good friends or give them something better to get a copy of that tape. When I first started getting into hip-hop, they didn’t play hip-hop on the radio. They [only] played it on WHBI that Mr. Magic was on. Mr. Magic’s show was on from two am to four am on Saturday nights. That was the only time you could hear hip-hop on the radio. I used to religiously stay up and record his shows. Then you make tapes of it and you play these tapes and then you were the man because you had these songs that nobody ever heard before. You had the most valuable tape but you wouldn’t give them a copy. They would have to stay up and record it themselves. [laughs]

Where were you doing your thing when you started deejaying?

I never did a party. We had DJ’s out here that were known in Flushing that actually used to put on jams. Flushing and Jamaica were as far out as I was going at the time. DJ’s wouldn’t let you get on their turntables – you had to have a rep in order to DJ. I didn’t get on like that, most of the deejaying was in my house, the ultimate story of ‘trying to get on.’

What were some of your favorite breaks to cut up?

‘Mardi Gras’ is one of my favorites of all time. ‘Funky Drummer.’ There used to be a song called ‘Super Sperm,’ ‘Love Is The Message,’ ‘Groove To Get Down,’ those classic breaks. Also I would mix hip-hop records that were out at the time and even music songs. One song I use dot cut-up all the time was ‘I Can’t Wait’ by Nu-Shooz.

What can you tell me about the Bland?

The Bland is a housing project in Flushing, so they used to jams out there. There were also jams on Colden Street where I lived out at junior high school, IS237. They would have jams in the park there. But we were also the adventurous type, so even though we were twelve or thirteen, we would also try to get out to the clubs and see who we’re hearing on these tapes. That’s when The Pavillion, Roxy Roller Skating Rink, the Funhouse – try to sneak into those clubs to see the people with [big] names perform.

Was this around when Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick had ‘The Show’?

It was Divine Force, Whodini, Force MC’s. At that time, you still wanted to see [Grandmaster] Flash spin, if you could.

Did you manage to get in?

I was in junior high, so not Large [with me], but I used to get in with some older people I used to hang with. Breakers used to be there, so you got to see breakdancers. Not just people from your crew that you know, and not necessarily Rock Steady either, but other people from around the boroughs. That’s how we grew up. Paulie rhymes, he does beats, but Paulie is a graffiti artist too. Guys I ran with in the neighborhood were breakers, they were pretty popular out here in Queens.

Were you recording your friends rhyming over beats at that stage?

It was mixing. To get DJ equipment was kind of a feat. Not everybody had the money to be able to afford equipment, so when someone did have equipment, people gravitated towards you. That wasn’t the only way to do music – you had drum machines and other ways to produce music – but that was even more out of reach of people. The average Joe couldn’t afford a drum machine or a keyboard or recording equipment. I used to DJ, have people over – they would DJ – make tapes and then we would rhymes over the tapes in the park. That’s when I started rhyming. We would have tapes of me catching a break and rhyme over that, or make tapes of us rhyming.

What were you calling yourself then?

My name has always been Toney Rome. That’s my real name.

Were you just rhyming with friends from the neighborhood at that stage?

I grew up with Large Professor, Neek The Exotic, my boy Cee Lo and people around the neighborhood, but those guys lived in the same buildings that I lived in. We would get together and rhyme, try to make songs, try to come up with concepts, the whole nine.

Was Large always a studious character growing up?

Large was quiet, I would say studious though. He used to be friends with people that he liked something what they do and he wanted to understand that for himself. He’s always been that type of cat – a thinker type of guy.

Were you ever in a crew?

It was really loose. Me, Large Professor and my man J.Y. – he used to manage the Lost Boyz – we actually started rhyming together and we were trying to come up with a name and songs and all of that stuff. That’s when we would go to Power Play Studios out in Astoria to try to record our ideas together, but nothing really came of that. We never got a deal from it. But we gave it a shot.

Plus studio time wasn’t cheap.

It was dope, around that time I was really trying to do it. At that time a lotta the hip-hop record labels – Tuff City and Sleeping Bag Records and things like that – they were all in my reach, they were all based in Manhattan or Queens somewhere. I used to get the [phone] numbers off the records or just show up there and wanna try and get an audition with ’em. There were many times me, J and Large Professor would just go up there and rhyme and try to get on that way. From going around meeting people that way, I met a man named Tony Arfi. He was the owner of Power Play at that time. I guess he saw the spark that we had and he gave us session time when the studio wasn’t booked, so we were able to get in there and record some things.

Do those tapes still exist?

I wish I had those tapes, but I don’t. I had a song that I did with a label – I don’t even know if I want to bring this up, cos the song was so wack – but it was with a label I was trying to get a commitment with, London Records. It never really got off the ground.

Why were you so unhappy with the song you did for London?

It’s what every artist goes through when they have to deal with a third party when making their music. You have what you were doing in the streets and you know how you want it to sound, you know what your inspiration was, and then the person you’re dealing with has another vision. It came to be known as ‘creative control,’ and nowadays most artists have it, but back then they were really trying to force us to do certain things. At the time Run-DMC was big, so they wanted us to do a Run-DMC sounding song. Even though I loved Run-DMC, it wasn’t what we did. Then there was the whole matter of sampling. We wanted to use the records, and from Tony Arfi’s point of view you couldn’t even do that, you had to replay everything. Of course when you replay something it doesn’t have that same feel. It was that kinda struggle going on.

Were London Records not happy with song you submitted?

I don’t know what happened with it, because at the time I left New York, I moved to California. I left a lotta shit behind, but I had to continue on with my life. Large kept pursuing it – he met up with Paul C., he started doing beats, he got really nice and he released the Main Source record and blew up. Large Professor’s my boy, we were tight all our lives, I was like, ‘Wow, my man is blowing up!’ A few years later I moved back to New York. Main Source had moved their separate ways when I came back.

Was Large working on the Geffen LP at this point?

That was a jump. He was looking for his next thing to do – at the time he was just a hot producer out here – so he was producing songs, he was doing remixes, so for a good minute he wasn’t even trying to do a project because he was so in-demand as a producer. At that time it was me, it was Large, it was my man Len X’s 10, it was Cee Lo, it was my brother Yusef Lateef, Vandemator. Paulie had the crib in the same building we grew-up in and we used to always go there and rock beats, rhyme, my man Len used to sing. It was some real live shit. We didn’t say, ‘We have this idea for a song, let’s make the song like this.’ It would hearing the beat that you love, somebody freestyling and then somebody joining in. My man Cee Lo had a knack, he could just freestyle a hook. We would just be hanging out, vibing with each other, and coming up with hot shit. That was what the Queens Lounge was all about. because of who Large was, people started hearing about it and wanted to be involved in some kinda way, so people like Q-Tip and Pete Rock would come through. It was a dope time, man,

Was Queens Lounge the name of the studio?

That was like a movement, man! It was like an affiliation. The way it came about was really organic, it wasn’t like it was forced or nothing. People used to come through and we were doing good things. I’m not sure who came up with the name Queens Lounge – it might have been Large, it might have been Cee Lo – but the name kind of stuck.

What happened next?

Even when I had went to Cali I was still into the music. I had went from deejaying to rhyming to doing beats, I really had stopped rhyming. I’m doing beats, I’m bouncing stuff off Large, and I come up with this one beat and Large is loving the beat. By this point, Large’s production skills were better than mine. He used to always say, ‘You’ve gotta tighten that shit up.’ I went back and reworked the beat and we put it down.

This was ‘Spacey’?

That was the ‘Spacey’ joint. Originally, the last verse was Royal Flush. I don’t know if the labels couldn’t get stuff together or what happened with it, but it eventually changed to Large, Van and Cee Lo.

How did you put that beat together?

The main part of it is Hubert Laws, a song called ‘Modadji.’ When I went to California it was hard to find the record spots out there, so I used to buy cassettes. I found this cassette, it was a live concert of Hubert Laws. It was a real jazz set, in that you can hear the audience in the background, and there was this one song that was eight or nine minutes long. I was listening to it, not like, ‘I’m gonna sample this,’ I was just getting into it because it had that real live feeling. In the middle of the song the musicians just start vamping, so those parts that I sampled are the apex of the song, where they started getting busy – in three separate places. It just had this real action-packed feeling.

That must have been exciting when it came out on the b-side of ‘Mad Scientist’?

It was definitely dope, I still have the vinyl. But it was bittersweet, because the deal with Geffen with Large didn’t go quite the way it shoulda went and the album ended up not being released until much, much later – officially released, anyway.

That must have been frustrating for everyone involved.

That was a creative control thing too. They were trying to push Large to go in a certain direction and Large is Large, man! Conceptually, he has a vision of what hip-hop is, and that’s the type of music he does. He’s not gonna change up and do something just because someone says that’s what he should be doing.

What happened next for you?

After that I was working with a lotta different MC’s out here, trying to get my stuff on. You know how that goes if you don’t really have the name – ‘Spacey’ was out, but it wasn’t really out the way it was supposed to be. I kept with the music and stuff, I actually did a joint a few years ago with my man J-Sands from the Lone Catalysts. That was called ‘Please.’

Did Vandemator record any other stuff?

Van could actually rhyme, but I never saw him actually ‘go for it.’ Doing ‘Spacey’ was typical ‘Queens Lounge’ stuff, ‘Yo, we got this beat,’ they rhymed to the beat, but I never heard another song from Van. Me and Cee Lo used to do a lotta stuff, and Neek. To this day I’m still in the studio, working with artists locally. I’m still doing my thing.

Large Pro really credits you as the guy who ‘put the battery in his back’ when he first started out. Is that fair to say?

I think it is fair to say. We all loved the music, and we were pretty good. I used to go out there and talk to the labels and talk to the studio owners and things like that, so I think where Large is coming from is that I might have helped him to see that we didn’t have to just do this in the park. We could get out there and network with people and do it for real. I used to buy equipment all the time, the newest things. I used to be always trying to push it as far as I could push it. Paul’s a little younger than me, and he mighta saw that and said, ‘I can talk to people like that.’ I don’t wanna take too much [credit], but I think that’s what he could be talking about.

What kind of equipment did you used to work with?

I’ve never went with whatever was popular at the time. At one time, the SP-1200, the Akai S950 and [S]1000 and so on – and even the MPC – were what everybody considered the ‘tools of the trade’ in order to do beats. But I’ve never used none of those. I read up for myself and find things that are gonna work best for me. I had a Yamaha keyboard and I had an Ensoniq 16+. I was doing all the beats on that, matter of fact I did ‘Spacey’ on that.

Any good digging stories?

I remember in the 90s I wanted the movie soundtrack of the Hair soundtrack, just to have it in my collection, but because Pete Rock had used it the record was selling for $500 at Bleaker Bob’s. I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ I was on Northern Boulevard in Queens at a thrift store, I wasn’t even looking for records. I went in and they had a mint copy of Hair for a dollar. [laughs]

Whats sets Queens apart from everyone else?

Queens is a huge borough, first of all. Everybody says, ‘I’m from Brooklyn.’ Even though it’s split up into certain spots, they like to say ‘Brooklyn.’ But Queens is like, ‘I’m from Flushing,’ ‘I’m from Jamaica,’ ‘I’m from The Bridge.’ Even though it’s grouped under that title of Queens, each of those neighborhoods is competitive with each other. It wasn’t necessarily, ‘We’re Queens, it’s a beautiful thing.’ We’re competitive with each other. When you have that kind of competition, that brings the battle. It’s not so much that different neighborhoods are going up and actually battling, but it’s like, ‘Yo, we heard what these dudes in Flushing is doing. We’re gonna make something that’s liver than that.’ It was a competition with Queens people. Incredible MC’s came from that, it never ceases to amaze me.

Any plans to release new music?

I’m working with a couple of people, if I get something that’s really good I’ll look at ways to try to release it and promote it in a way that it can get some traction out there. Me and my brother Yusef Lateef got a studio at College Point in Queens and we got a lotta people coming through. We’re still working with the community out here.

Shout out to The Funkologist for helping this interview happen.