Godfather Don – The Unkut Interview

It took me exactly twenty years to get Godfather Don on the phone, which makes sense now that I know that by the time I started this site he had already changed his focus to playing jazz. This being my first phone interview since the ill-fated Just-Ice session in 2016, I had no idea how it would go and wondered if I could keep him engaged in the conversation long enough to hear his whole story. Turns out he was happy to kick it, and we discussed everything from creating his first album (recorded at Power Play studio while Mob Style and Organized Konfusion were creating their own classic debuts in the other rooms!), the Hydra Entertainment era and why he decided to return to rap at long last.

Robbie: Were you interested in music from back when you were a little kid or did it start when you were a teenager?

Godfather Don: I was always interested in music. My older brother played guitar and he practised with his band in the house. Before that, my father played music as well – he played guitar. So I was always around it. My father had really cool records that he left me when he passed on, so I got started with a dope crate right from the giddy-up. [laughs] There was always instruments laying around the house and good records…there was always sounds, so it was just a matter of picking something up at some point.

So you weren’t concerned about what style of music you wanted to make?

No, I never think about style in terms of genre. That limits the direction of free expression. The ability to freely express is greatly diminished the moment you try to formulate a type, a style or a genre. Because then that means you’re using a prior reference, and that means you have to copy that reference, or at least simulate it to a point where you can say, ‘Hey! I’m doing this style!’ I never really thought about it like that. I just had a lot of ideas I wanted to express – a creative impulse just to make something out of nothing.

Were you a Brooklyn kid?

Yeah, in Brownsville, in the beginning when my brother and father were doing live instruments. Sneak a drumstick and bang on the cymbals – ‘Hey Oscar! Your little brother is…’ ‘Ah, leave him alone, let him be’. I’m thinking I’m in the band, hitting the stick against the sink. Bushwick is when I started being introduced to rap, but I still didn’t rap. At that point I was already starting to pick-up live instruments and the guitar, from my brother. He started getting more hip with dating girls and doing stuff, so he would leave his beautiful Fender Stratocaster just laying around in the house. I didn’t realise it was a Fender Stratocaster back then, I just used to play around with it and put it right back in the case before my brother got home from work. It was funny, I did that for a few years but I’m pretty sure he knew about it. My brother is super cool. He knew I was digging through his records – he knew!

When I moved to Flatbush is when my childhood friend, Sir Chic, had exposed me to the basics, cos he was already in a rap crew. At that time it was still the choreographed MC routines and I couldn’t do that well – when I tried, it always sounded like a Temptations revue, Sha Na Na Doo Wop, or a barbershop quartet! [laughs] Not to say that style wasn’t dope, but it was the dawn of KRS-One, Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. and Rakim – and it moved me!

It made Run-DMC sound like dinosaurs.

They were valiant. They took that style and made it look good, they gave it a beautiful face, but I never really liked that style. My friend was into that style, he was into rapping since King Tim III, and he said, ‘Man, you should try to produce my demo for me’. That’s how I got exposed to it. I won’t say ‘produced’, cos I have it and it sucks! My part of it sucks, his rhyming is great. I guess it’s worthy as an oddity – ‘Can you believe this is what Godfather Don sounded like in 86, as a producer? Can you imagine this crap?’

Was that a drum machine thing?

It was a drum machine that was broken, that couldn’t be sequenced, so I had to tap out all of the beats while he rhymed…on a broken four-track! And I played guitar on it because he liked Run-DMC, ‘King of Rock’. I said, ‘I don’t wanna play guitar on no rap, man. I don’t like the way it sounds.’ I’m into Progressive Metal and all kinds of weird Neo-Classical, all that lush, epic stuff. I don’t want to hear no drum machine, ‘Now play some guitar on it!’ I wasn’t really into it, but I did it for him, my childhood friend. It was weird, man. All of this stuff I got out of a pawn shop and in the garbage. He sent me the demo recently and I tried to – believe it or not – let somebody hear it to put it out. I don’t know why I would wanna do that, but I guess the fans would be like, ‘Oh my god! If he can come from this…’

I started making little demos for myself at that point. I said, ‘Since I did it for him I might as well try it myself’. My first rap was about a girl that I had a crush on in my building. I still have it. I didn’t have sequencers or nothing back then, I don’t even want to explain how cruddy and primitive the set-up was back then, but I found a way to do it. I never seen anybody’s set-up or anything, I just did what I thought should be done in order to get the results I wanted.

Things were moving so quickly at that point. Run-DMC took two years to follow Raising Hell and by then it was like ‘Why would I want to listen to Tougher Than Leather when I could listen to Rakim, Schoolly-D and Big Daddy Kane?’

It was a very challenging time for those type of rappers, man. It was a beautiful time for anybody who was trying to do something else. It was a golden age where almost anything that you did that was different from that style was cool. Everybody was different – Rakim was different from Kane, Kane was different from Doug E. Fresh, Doug E. Fresh was different from Biz, Biz was different from Three Times Dope. So when I decided to take a stab at it, the field was so diverse you had to do your own thing by default. You couldn’t copy just one style, which I loved about it the most. You could try anything – [Kool] Keith proved that.

My thing was technical, esoteric, occult references – you could call it avant-garde, Free Jazz Rap. That’s what I would call it now, listening back to it. People tell me, ‘Listen to this, man. You said this!’ I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I’m sorry [laughs]. I was referencing all the weird obscure books, metaphysical writings, mystical pamphlets, theosophical literature I was studying at the time. I had made a song about the psychological aspect, inclinations and possible motives of the most well known serial killers and attempted to superimpose those ‘imagined’ perspectives into a lyrically abstract treatise set in an alternate universe type of script, where anything’s possible! It’s a very weird record.

When did Select Records come into the picture?

I was working with Chubb [Rock] about 89, maybe 90. This is when I was still easing into it. I still wanted to be a rock guitar god – that’s why on Hazardous I insisted that the album open up with a guitar solo – to transition out of that era for myself. That’s why the first record’s called ‘Just Begun’.

Chubb should have gotten you on ‘Rock and Roll Dude’, but I guess this was after that?

Once I got confident and [made] a couple of demos people started talking about me in the neighbourhood. My name was Nitro back then. They said, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta check out Nitro, man! He’s really good. He’s not just painting and drawing and playing guitar – he raps now!’ I did a few block parties and this and that. Chubb Rock used to play basketball in the park across the street from the building where I lived. People used to always say, ‘Hey! Chubb’s in the park again!’ I didn’t know what he looked like, so I would always look around for him. Finally, a mutual friend of ours introduced me. I went over his house, I rapped for him and played some of my tapes. That was the beginning.

I’m guessing Chubb introduced you to Select Records?

Right, he took me up. I was hoping to meet Roxanne too! [laughs]

The Real Roxanne! Gotcha.

I never got to meet her though. So Fred [Munao, President of Select Records] sent me to work with Chubb at Queststar’s [engineer and producer Questar Welsh] house. Chubb did all the original music first, and then after a while I said, ‘You know? I got some ideas of how I want this thing to sound.’ He said, ‘Well alright, do whatever you want to do’. We didn’t work together anymore. He went to do his second album with ‘Treat ‘Em Right’ and I just laid in the cut and did a lot of shedding, a lot of going through records, to come up with Hazardous. I did all of that without a drum machine.

Were you looping onto tape reels?

Yeah. The guy that I used – coincidentally enough – was a rock engineer, rest his soul. Greg Gordan, a real cool dude, man. He was willing to try anything I wanted to try, I guess because he wasn’t a hip-hop based engineer. I hated the way the album sounded, but it wasn’t his fault. They explained to me later that you shouldn’t make a record over three-and-a-half minutes on vinyl, and I said, ‘Damn!’ Cos I was just rhyming like a jazz player would just blow bars, as John Coltrane said, ‘Until you’ve finished saying what you had to say’. That’s why on some of those records you might hear four verses or three long verses. Every record on Hazardous is over four minutes! [laughs]

So that made the vinyl sound too quiet?

Right. I remember coming home and all the crew was in my living room. I put it on the record player and I said, ‘What the fuck?’ I turned everything up and I was so angry I started throwing ’em against the wall. I wish I woulda kept the motherfuckers now, I woulda got a hundred dollars a piece! I was throwing ’em against the wall, just CRACK! BASH! BASH! BASH! ‘I hate the way it sounds!’ BASH! ‘It’s too low!’ BASH! That day I was so depressed, but turns out some people say it’s one of their classics.

What inspired you to take on different personas on the title track?

I didn’t have a particular direction that I was concentrating on, so I would just get up one day and feel like I wanna do this. Not something alien to what I did before but just another facet. It was the end of all the sessions and my friend Chris said, ‘Ay man, why don’t you do one with three different rhyme styles? That’s different’. I wanted to do one with four or five. I didn’t like subject matters too much, I just liked battle rhymes. I don’t think I had that talent to captivate an audience with stories. I was more dart throwing, spear throwing and axe swinging! Vlad the Impaler – every verse, try to kill as many as you can. [laughs]

How did you prepare for the studio sessions?

For Hazardous, I would gather everything at home – a stack of records, written down for each song on the album. ‘These five records are for this song’. That’s how I would go to the studio, every other day or every week. I didn’t have a set-up at home. I really like some of the production on it, because it was really all natural. One of the last albums to be completely all samples and no drum machine at all. But EPMD with that Linn drum? That was a beautiful thing!. But I wasn’t really into the drum machine scene at that time.

Did you do any shows to promote Hazardous?

One thing I went to, but I didn’t want to perform it because I still felt depressed about the quality of the engineering on the album, how it was mastered. It just messed my head up, so whenever I would do some live stuff I just used to make my own beats – which is counter-intuitive as far as marketing – but as an artist and a performer, I couldn’t see any other way. I would rather say the Hazardous rhymes over something cool that I did at home. After Hazardous, and before Cenobites, is when I got some help and got some understanding about a few things, engineering-wise, from guys like Boostin’ Kev. You ever heard of the legendary Boostin’ Kev?

Yeah, he had that record ‘That Be Boostin’.

I did a demo with him, his Fostex eight-track, two turntables, and some of the dopest top-shelf records you could ever hope to find in one place! He used to hit all the rare record conventions [laughs].

That sounds amazing. Do you still have a copy?

I could wish! He later got the Alesis 16-bit drum machine and I got one after messing around with it a few times.

MPC’s must have cost around four to five thousand dollars back then.

Man, forget it. My first sampler was a guitar stomp box – DigiTech eight-second sampler. I would use that in conjunction with my Alesis, that beautiful grey drum machine [HR-16]. Howie Tee used to use it too. The Alesis had some nice sounds on it that didn’t sound like the old 808 drum machines, or even Linn Drum, they were trying something different. They were cheap, and I used to hook that up to my Akai big keyboard sampler as well. It was a weird set-up, just a lot of second-hand stuff I found. I had a Vestax six track tape recorder. Not eight and not four – six track! Then somebody gave me a little Tascam mixing board, those are pretty good. I used to use that to beef-up some of the demos and then I would mix it down to a Sony tape deck to metal cassette, like a TDK.

The TDK MA-X!

Right! Good as DAT, man. [laughs] Not really…

What lead you to working with Kool Keith?

I was a bit discouraged about the record biz when I was introduced to him. Artistically? We were on the same page, willing to experiment with beats and rhyme styles. When he discovered I was doing stuff at the crib, he was like, ‘We should make a track sometime’. He knew Bobbito already, and things happened fast in this chapter. There were a lot of fun times with everybody who came through to participate in what would become my Cenobites-era.

Was this before or after you worked on Ultramagenetic’s The Four Horsemen album?

At that time I was doing a lotta promos and demos. Some of those recordings I made at my apartment formed a chunk of The Four Horsemen album.

Did you work with Ced Gee and the others?

Ced did his stuff at home. I went to check out what he was up to, maybe once or twice, going uptown. He was already established and doing his thing, he had his lane that he was in. He was cool. I was experimenting with what I was trying to do and I think he dug it.

I would do mad demos. Have an idea, wake-up, go do the idea, put it on tape, stash it away. Repeat the same thing maybe five or six times a day. I would carry these demos around and play ’em for certain people. I wish I had these damn demos I left at Profile Records, Loud Records…all of these places. I can’t find my copies of some of them. A couple of people gave me back demos that I handed out a long time ago. Even my brother had an old demo that he used to play in his car. It was a few of those things that I found that came up on The Nineties Sessions album.

How did you start working with Hydra Entertainment?

Keith picked me up from work and we were walking up 8th Ave, like we used to do before we would go back to the crib and make some music. We ran into Tim Dog doing promotion, he was out making the rounds. He gave me a couple of those cassettes, ‘Eff Compton’. At the same time, this guy Mike Heron rolls up and he’s like, ‘Ay Keith, you gotta give me a call. Yo Don, what’s up? Give me a call!’ I talked to Heron and he said, ‘Yo, come up to Hydra.’ This is when they were at their first office, right by the train station. I started working at home, making a lot of demos. He would put me in the studio, he would put me in Power Play sometimes, then he built his own studio. They allowed me to do some of things I was interested in doing at that time, coming off of the Cenobites and going into possibly a solo record, after Hazardous. So I was a little excited about it.

The record from that period that had a big impact on me was ‘Piece of the Action’/’Seeds of Hate’.

Those are two of my favourite records, man. That’s in the book as one of the dope records with a voice sample on it. I used to try and bring out unused samples, I was really into that at that point. A very good friend of mine gave me that record – Godfrey Arthur. He’s a guitar player and he helped me build my first guitar and taught me about playing live instruments. He had a really extensive knowledge of funk records, because he was much older than me. He played live music and grew-up in that era, so he was around all of those bands. He said, ‘Man, you gotta get this! You gotta listen to this if you wanna sample!’ He put me up on plenty of records. A lot of the records on Hazardous were the result of things he turned me on to.

Around this time people were selling a lot of twelve inches again.

That was the thing, just making these singles – one after another. I don’t think I wanted to do it like that but the indie thing was kinda cool, I guess. It looked nice in Fat Beats, all these twelve inches up there.

Were you just working on an album and then they would ask if they could put stuff out along the way?

Right, I was working on an album. I never thought about, ‘This is a single!’ I would just do material. I never really thought about that kind of stuff.

When the Diabolique album was released it sounded different from your earlier stuff. It was still a Don record but the way you were rapping seemed more focused.

I was trying some different kits, as I like to call them – rhyme kits – like you have beat drum kits. I didn’t have any allegiance to any particular style, so I felt free to try anything. The influences changed once again. The mainstream stuff was jiggy now! [laughs] It was like a wave, man. It hit almost everybody.

But it felt like you put your own spin on that rather than just trying to sound like them.

It was like Bebop. A jazz musician in a certain era, he’s gonna make a be-bop album. Charlie Parker was the king of Bebop, so another horn player making a record after Charlie Parker, while he was still alive, he’s gonna try it! [laughs] Why wouldn’t you try it? It’s insatiable. I’d done a lot of stuff with different rhyme techniques – very complicated, esoteric, very hard to deciph[er] – I was into that, like Apocrypha scriptures. That’s how I like my raps to be. ‘What did he say? Oh! That’s what he meant!’ On Diabolique, I kind of stripped-it down to make the shapes a little bit slicker – not so bludgeoning.

Did you get a good response to that album?

When somebody’s known for something it’s hard for people to let ’em try something else. At the time I think people thought I was gonna make the official Cenobites record and Hydra wasn’t about that kinda stuff.

Were you going to the sessions with Screwball and Royal Flush during that period?

I was always up there, playing stuff. Just hang out with Jerry, we’d talk, eat some good food, play a whole bunch of beats. ‘Hey, I’m thinking about using this. I like this beat’. Jerry, realising now he had more than just me as an artist, he would always end up saying, ‘Hey, can I hold onto this beat for a second? I would like somebody to hear it’. Next thing you know, it was Royal Flush or it was Screwball.

You did that Mobb Deep remix too.

I loved all of those guys. I always wanted to do records with those people but I realised that I was doing something else and it was ‘not ready for Prime Time’. I was OK just doing music for a lot of those guys.

I got to speak to V.I.C. years ago and he was impressed by the way you would use the MPC like you were conducting an orchestra.

I wanted to use that machine and make it sound like a seamless orchestra of sound. I didn’t want it to sound like a ‘seq-uenc-er’. I wanted my lines indiscernible as far as where things were edited and where the ‘one’ was. What I liked about Vic was Vic was so organised, that’s what he shared with me. I used to come over his house a lot because he had better equipment than I had. I was like, ‘This is great!’, ‘Yeah man, you should get one’, and I got one from a great producer who was doing Debbie Gibson at the time, a friend of Vic’s. He had an MPC he was getting rid of, and Vic said, ‘You need to get some money together and come and grab this’. That was the beginning – that was the first MPC I had. Once I became fascinated with that machine? That was it, man. You couldn’t get me off that machine.

Was this around the same period you did the Hydra Beats stuff?

That was all MPC stuff by that point. Mixing it down myself, almost going full blast with my own set-up in the basement. A lot of The Nineties Sessions stuff, the record I did with me and Mike L – Refirmations, that EPMD-style thing – we did that a little bit before Diabolique. I had my beautiful Mackie sixteen-track mixer – I loved that mixer – a few rack things, Alesis monitors and a DAT machine. That was it, I was off to the races.

I’d just fallen into rap. I was still playing guitar almost every night. During the day I would hardly listen to rap, I would listen to a lot of progressive rock and progressive metal. Melanik would tell you, ‘What are you listening to?’, ‘I’m listening to Darkthrone’. ‘What the hell kinda music is that?’, ‘That’s Norwegian Black Metal, man. You’ve never heard of it?’

How did you meet Sir Melanik?

Keith had brought him over one day when we were doing a promo. That’s around the time the one I did with Melanik came out – ‘MC’s Out to Murder the World’.

You also had the Group War Commission?

Melanik was really about it, he was a self-starter. Before you know it, he had his own record deal. He was movin’ and groovin’!

He put out four or five albums in a short span of time. He was very-

…prolific, right? He was like, ‘Don, you got anything for this? We’re going in the studio today’. I was like, ‘Nice! More independents need to operate like this. Smooth.’

Were you involved with the Donnie Brasco album or was that left-overs from the Diabolique sessions?

Exactly. I wasn’t involved in that at all, I’ve never heard it. People told me it was out. ‘Donnie Brasco’ was a little name I was flying around, I didn’t mean for it to be a thing like that. I did it as a couple of characters on Diabolique. The joke was that I was infiltrating the rap game – as not really being a rapper, more like being just a guitar player or a musician – undercover Donnie Brasco. But BIG took the reference to its heights.

On that topic, you might have the record for having the most demos re-released by different labels. People have been going crazy.

I may have that record, man! The Guinness Book of Records for the only artist to have more demos re-released than anybody! That’s crazy. We’ve gotta look that up, that’s funny. The Europeans are like, ‘Hey! We love this stuff, man’. I couldn’t figure it out at first, but I got hip after a while.

‘Slave to New York’ was my favourite from those demos.

That was a funny loop from the Mahavishnu [Orchestra] because of the way it cycles. It’s a weird loop, the way the drums fit on it. It was just strange doing that record, but that’s one of my favourites. On the ‘b’ section of that – when the Mahavishnu loop is changed – it’s a sample I used from Raising Cain, a movie soundtrack. I really loved movie music, I had a huge collection of movie soundtracks.

Have you got video footage from that era?

There’s a lot of footage of me playing a beautiful blue Fender Stratocastor over a lot of the tracks – the guitar was taken off the tracks at the end. I just wanted an excuse to bring my guitar to the studio and play it on some good amps, use their equipment and record it, see how it sounds.

Can we talk about how your production style?

I brought the obscure jazz thing to the table. The most weirdest places you could get samples from, that’s what I liked to get everybody into. ‘Look Vic, right in there…’ ‘Oh, shit! That’s where you took that from?!’ I didn’t like those records that had the loops right there in the beginning, with the bass and the guitar and it’s open for the first measure! I always took my own spot to loop and then added my own drums. Hazardous had those records cos I didn’t have a drum machine, but once I started chopping drums? It wasn’t rocket science – you could put great drums under almost anything and it would sound good, as long as the drums are beautiful.

I used the Ralfi Pagan record, which is a cool record to have now. I made a song with that called ‘Memories’ and through the whole record, at the end of the loop, he’s saying, ‘I never thought’. It’s a Salsa record, but good Salsa from the seventies, so it had groove, bass. Thank god my beautiful girl, who’s Puerto Rican, turned me on to some very lovely, wonderful music from that era and before. I got on a thing with obscure Spanish records from these little labels in the villages and stuff – everybody knows about ’em now. I give Vic credit on that, and JuJu. They were one of the first, ‘Se Abaco’ and all of that stuff, bringing out all of those records.

The last thing I was to ask is about the period when you took a break from rapping.

The game was changing to the independent model. I wasn’t ready to jump into it on that level at that time – owning a label, running it day-to-day you had to be out there at the parties and events and all the promotional stuff. Also I started playing live jazz music more and more, studying the music and the saxophone. I didn’t know anything! [laughs] I barely know anything now! It got very hard to give my full time to developing something further in both hip-hop and jazz – with performance at the same time – with all the other responsibilities. I couldn’t even get much painting done any more!

Can you tell me about the jazz band you started?

Around the time I was doing the Hydra Beats I was listening to a Wayne Shorter album, Speak No Evil, listening for some samples, and for some reason I just let the record play and then I heard something remarkable. I said, ‘Hey! Every bar of this music is different than the bar before! It’s improvised!’ I didn’t see music the same after that. I said, ‘I’ve gotta play live.’ Rap just felt a little bit boxy to me at that point. I started studying live instruments a little bit more and that’s where the jazz came in. I started playing more guitar, I got in an African band and a jazz drummer came in and sat with the African band and said, ‘Hey, I like the way you play, man. Do you know John Coltrane?’ I said, ‘Who? I don’t know who he is?’ That was that.

What was the name of the band?

It was a band called Africa Connection. They liked that I played guitar wildly, or by their standards, different. African bands – their guitarists were the stars of the band. The leader of Africa Connection – rest his soul, Alex Suma – he said, ‘Man, I got a real shredder! I got a killer here, man! Take solo!’ That was so much fun. He had an old alto [saxophone] in the garbage and I said, ‘Can I fool around with this?’ He said, ‘Get it to work? Whatever’. I didn’t know nothing about the horn, I just thought it looked cool and it worked different than the guitar and I wanted to try it. It took me a little while to get a sound outta there, but I eventually got some sound of it and started working with it and annoying the hell outta my girlfriend for years and years.

And then you formed your own group?

My own band was called The Open Mind. I played guitar in the first five or six Open Mind shows and the guys said, ‘Just concentrate on the sax, man. You’re playing something weird on it’.

Have you released any music under that name?

I used to post some of the early shows on my YouTube channel, and there’s a SoundCloud. These are the very early incarnations of the band, it’s probably only good for historical purposes now. A friend of mine – me and him started a label called Dark Fyre Records – he’s always telling me, ‘You’ve gotta put out some of our Open Mind demos,’ he plays piano. I still can’t bring myself to do it. I have recordings with great musicians but I don’t like the way I sound on it. Then the Sun-Ra people recruited me and that’s how I got more serious about it. Ahmed Abdullah, the trumpet player for Sun-Ra, he took me under his wing when he started his own band – Ahmed Abdullah’s Diaspora. I made an album with them. I’ve been in his band for five or six years, I cut my teeth there. That’s how I met a lot of legends and a lot of great people who gave me advice, gave me a lot of breaks.

Who were some of your favourite players?

Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Allan Holdsworth, Keith Jarrett…it never ends with learning jazz and playing an instrument well.

I enjoyed the stuff you just did with Debonair [The Ill Tone Generator].

Definitely. The stuff I did with Parental, I had fun. I did so many features after that, [like] with Czarface. I said, ‘You know what? I might just start making a bunch of songs’. My girl is having a ball laughing at it, just watching me making these tunes. She said, ‘Hey, that don’t sound that bad!’ Then I got a couple of dudes to listen to it and said, ‘Would you be interested in putting this out if I do it?’ They said, ‘Yeah!’ ‘Let me finish it and see what happens’.

Is this a self-produced album?

Yeah, back to the beats. It’s meat and potatoes, not reinventing the wheel. Just some ol’ nineties hijinks, just having fun with it. I don’t know what I will call my new album that’s being mixed now. I was thinking of calling it Promo Style, as a little joke, but I’m not so sure. I might stick with my one-word titles.

That’s how I got to do some of the things I was able to do in the jazz world, ‘Is this rapper really going to try a saxophone?’ It was a lot of that curiosity at first. And now I’m back to rap again, can you believe that?

There you go, the full circle.

There it is. That’s a cut on my first album, right?