Paul Nice – The Unkut Interview

It’s been a tough week, with Mr. Cee, Patti Astor and Paul Nice all leaving us. I’ve revisited and re-transcribed the interview I did with Paul in January 2015 for my Ultimate Breaks and Beats feature for Cuepoint so that I can share his personal reflections on the series that changed everything, and the inspiration for the final mixtape he released in 2018.

Robbie: What’s your first memory of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats?

Paul Nice: There was a local DJ where I grew-up named Eddie On, or Eddie On-Time. In maybe ’84, ’85 he was at Catherine Street Center, which was a local community centre where all the local DJ’s would throw parties, and he was cutting up ‘Mary, Mary’ by The Monkees. I just thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t what I was used to hearing [laughs], straight-up rap records, at the time. I just loved it. I saw that it wasn’t a Monkees record, it was this compilation. My DJ partner – Disco T – we would alternate and go back and forth from Poughkeepsie to New York City, which is a little over an hour drive or an hour and a half on the train. We’d go to Music Factory, we’d alternate once every other week. My partner was the first to pick up copies of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats, and that first volume was the one with ‘Mary, Mary’ on it. But he only had one copy of it, which made no sense to me! [laughs] I ended up saving my money as a dishwater, I think it was the summer of ‘85 and going down and buying the volumes that were out at the time. I remember at the Music Factory the rack was off to the right from the counter, it was a display rack, and they weren’t listed as Ultimate Breaks and Beats. There was just a little white placard card in front of each record and it said, ‘Volume 1’, ‘Volume 2’ and so on. Among the local DJ’s from where I was from, where I grew-up in Poughkeepsie, we didn’t refer to them as Ultimate Breaks and Beats – we referred to them as ‘The Volumes’. ‘Did you get the latest Volume?’

The Octopus records, my friend and mentor DJ Joey T had…I forget which volume it was? Maybe 7, the one with ‘Midnight Theme’ on it. I think ‘Two Pigs and A Hog’ was one that was supposed to be on one of the volumes of Ultimate Breaks and Beats and it got discontinued [laughs]. The only reason I knew that – and I talked to Jorun Bombay about this, he had the same thing – is when I was buying a bunch of these, I was ringing them up in Music Factory and there was a sheet – an 8 x 10 piece of paper with the Street Beats letterhead on the top of it. Essentially it was a catalogue, a track listing of every song on every volume they had, in addition to the artists names, which as you know weren’t on the back of the records. That was very helpful. This was a way for me to keep track of what volumes that I wanted to buy next time that I went down. That was my start.

Did you notice that a lot of hip-hop records would sample the new volumes as they came out?

Definitely, especially towards the later volumes. I called them ‘foundation’ records – they really were the foundation for golden era hip-hop. I think Diamond D said, ‘Lazy producers? Sometimes you would hear three or four songs off the same volume.’ Some of the more refined tastemakers like Diamond D – those guys who would shine a little bit later and were a little bit more innovative with their production techniques – would try not to sample from there. At some point it was obvious that those were the go-to records.

It’s interesting that there’s almost nobody who’s willing to admit that they sampled off of them.

You never know. There was that Dismasters song called ‘Keisha’ which was off the ‘Keep Your Distance’, the Babe Ruth [song]. I think Salt ‘N Pepa used a different part of that same record. When that came out I was like, ‘Oh wow!’ In hindsight – and maybe this is just me being cynical – but maybe Hurby The Luvbug got it right from the Volumes, the Ultimate Breaks and Beats albums, and Chuck Chillout or one of these guys from Bronxwood Productions or whoever was behind the Dismasters actually had the original record. I don’t know, it’s a mystery.

Was it a valuable tool at the time for you, as a DJ, as far as providing records you couldn’t find otherwise?

Yeah. I lived close to New York but I was still out of the circle, so to speak. This was years before the internet, so unless you were within the circle of the Zulu Nation DJ’s or whatever, you weren’t gonna know what these records were. Music Factory had, for example, Bob James ‘Take Me To The Mardi Gras’. They had other records there – break records – in a small section near where the display rack was for Ultimate Breaks and Beats. So we knew some of those records. I look at it as a transitional period, from the time that those records first came out, it kind of fed on itself in terms of the creative of producers and trying to dig deeper. It was more of a digging renaissance where people, at some point, when the later volumes came out in the late eighties, early nineties when the volumes stopped coming out, most people were like, ‘Well, there’s no more Ultimate Breaks and Beats‘. I think people were forced to be more creative and dig deeper and sample records that people wouldn’t have sampled before. That was very helpful. My sister collected stuff from all genres and I remember digging through her crates and finding the Blackbyrds-era records and the soundtrack from Cornbread, Earl and Me and Flying High and Super Fly and finding stuff on my own. But having that list that I was telling you about was crucial because when I started to search for my own records I recognized the names of artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise have decided to pick out.

Later on there was also the issue with sample breaks compilations revealing the names of the records that had previously been sampled, which pissed a lot of people off.

Right, it was the other way around. There was Super Disco Brakes, which predates the Ultimates, but those were horrible. They were shitty, they were edited badly. ‘Take Me To The Mardi Gras’ was available on that but it was infamously missing the bells and and the drop, the fill from the beginning, that’s cut off!

Lou has said that the first nine volumes were all the foundation party classics and then after that they started introducing new stuff.

What was on Volume 10?

10’s got ‘Funky President’, ‘Theme from the Planets’, ‘S.W.A.T.’, Jackson 5, ‘Last Night Changed It All’.

At some point there was an older DJ from where I was from and I remember getting records from him. The labels were really washed-out, they were bootleg twelve inches, and I’m sure you know about some of these. He had ‘The Big Beat’ on one, ‘Funky President’ was on another one, in fact that might’ve been the flipside of ‘The Big Beat’. ‘Rocket In The Pocket’ was another one. So I know they were bootlegging records – at least on twelve inch – for certain breaks before that volume came out and before some of these Ultimate Breaks and Beats came out.

It’s interesting. I don’t know what they were thinking in terms of, ‘Oh, we ran out of the foundation records, let’s just put these out’. But if ‘Funky President’ was on Volume 10 – that was a foundation record too, people were cutting that up.

Yeah it seems like a mix still at that point. Volume 12 has ‘The Champ’ and ‘Funky Drummer’, ‘Walk This Way’ and ‘Johnny The Fox’, which had already been used.

Volume 12 was the one that had ‘Ashley’s Roachclip’ on it, right? I remember getting that when it came out and doing a demo with this local rapper, just cutting that break up. It was probably four or five months before ‘Paid In Full’ dropped, which used it. I remember being upset [laughs], but I also remember being like, ‘Well, damn…’ I remember that one in particular. I don’t picture that record being played at those early parties because it’s a lot slower, it seemed harder and it just seemed next level.

Listening back to the Ultimates now, there are some records you can listen to from start to finish and other ones where you’re just waiting for the break.

That’s a good point. I remember being in Music Factory and I would go down there specifically for those records. Me and my friend Joey would come back on this train with a stack of records on our laps. Not all of them Ultimate Breaks and Beats, but a good portion of my money was spent on those records. I remember going down there one time – I’d been there a few times already – and I went right to [the rack to] see if any new volumes came out, and there was this woman – I remember very clearly – she just looked like a casual shopper. She was kinda perusing the stack and she picked – it might’ve been Volume 2, the one with a spaceman on the cover – and she asked Stan or one of the other guys, ‘Are these like dance records? What are they?’ She was curious about it.’ I forgot who it was that was working, I don’t know if [Mr.] Walt was working there yet, whoever answered her was like, ‘Honey…some of them are! Some of them are dance records’. [laughs] The cool thing about those records is…they’re hip-hop – there’s really no other way to put it, it is the foundation for hip-hop – but other than that there’s really no continuity to some of those songs. That’s the inherent thing of what really appealed to me about hip-hop in general was that you could go from ‘Frisco Disco’ to ‘The Mexican’ – a straight-up disco record to some crazy Canadian rock record to James Brown to…there was no rules.

Was your own series of Drum Library records along the same lines?

When I started producing myself, years after Volume 25 came out – I mean I was producing then but as far as getting my MPC-60 was probably ’92 or so. I started really getting really into drums back then. I don’t know if there’s necessarily a connection because obviously the format’s completely different, I’m not playing the whole record, I’m just looping-up the drums. It just spawned from me wanting to have a collection, a way to compile my drums and try to keep them catalogued somehow. Not the drums that you would hear – not ‘Substitution’ or ‘Impeach The President’ – not the everyday stuff. It would just be stuff you had to kinda dig for.

Were these breaks you wanted to be able to play in sets or a tool for producers?

It was completely producers tools. The majority of those were too slow for me to play out anyway. The slower the drum break it lends itself more to production. Usually when it’s slower the drums are more spaced out and you can chop it.

Phil Most Chill told me that you’re working on a mix of UBB records?

Yes. ‘Lenny Roberts Changed My Life.’ He probably saved my life too. It’s like my Breaks For Days mix but just using the Ultimate Breaks and Beats. There’s a lot of multi-track stuff going on, I’m trying to make it sound like a supermix. One cohesive thing. I’m still half-way through it, so at this point it might be in two parts. That might be the only way I might be able to actually do it! [laughs]

What’s the lasting legacy of the UBB series?

The golden era. The golden era of hip-hop wouldn’t be what it was if it wasn’t for that series. You had Marley Marl break the barrier with ‘The Bridge’ as far as sampled drums, and people started sampling after that, really. If it wasn’t for that series being available, recorded rap might’ve died. It might have a much shorter history. At that point when he came out with that, the drum machine sound was kinda played-out. It was an invaluable resource for producers. It was pretty intense.