Digging In The DJ Mister Cee Acetate Crates

Come On, Kick It!

Last week a portion of the late, great DJ Mister Cee’s record collection went under the hammer on eBay, featuring a veritable bounty of test-pressings and rarities, courtesy of a seller named paperstax. Luckily for the rest of us mere mortals, they provided audio snippets of some of the more exclusive items so that aging rap maniacs can ‘check the techniques’ (and see if we can follow it).

First off the bat, Mister Cee had dub/TV track acetates of just about every song from the first five Big Daddy Kane albums (that hadn’t been released as singles), which makes sense since he was Kane’s DJ and BDK needed these to rap over on stage. In the early nineties, record labels would press-up small runs of instrumental ‘Show Vinyl’ for groups to use, but I guess that wasn’t on the radar for Cold Chillin’/WB, so Mister Cee had to press-up his own.

Highlights include the ‘Wrath of Kane’ dub, ‘It’s a Big Daddy Thing’ dub (produced by Prince Paul, who later revealed that Kane used the demo mix of the beat!) and the instrumental for ‘Something’ Funky’, the b-side of Kane’s first single which is also used on ‘Just Rhymin With Biz’.

Keeping with the live show theme, there were also a couple of intro routines that served to hype the crowd before the ‘Prince of Darkness’ aka ‘Dark Gable’ hit the stage.

Next up is Mister Cee’s exclusive version of Nas’ ‘Street Dreams’, titled the ‘Etchasketch Remix’. I assume he played this on his radio show or when he was playing clubs at some point, but who knows.

Since Cee helped put Biggie on, it’s no surprise that there was ‘material from the Black Frank White in the stash. This 10” acetate, listed as ‘unreleased Hot ’97 radio freestyle feat. Funkmaster Flex w/ Mister Cee’, was previously uploaded to the internets as the ‘Another Rough One’ demo, since that’s how he opens the verse. Turns out this is actually Biggie doing the ‘Microphone Murderer’ rhymes (from the tape that Matty C covered in the Unsigned Hype column in March of 1992) over a new Mister Cee beat and re-packaged as a ‘Flex exclusive’ after the Bad Boy signing. It’s not clear if Flex ever played this on air though.

The crown jewel of this batch, which sold for an eye-watering seven and a half grand, were two exclusive Big Daddy Kane songs produced by Mister Cee. I nearly lost my mind when I saw ‘The Wrath (Part II)’ listed – could this be the legendary song where Kane took direct shots at Rakim but then decided to vault it? Turns out it’s not quite that earth-shattering – from what we can hear in this two minute snippet, this is the original version of ‘Put Your Weight On It’, only a lot more hyped-up and with 100% more ‘Amen Brother’! The flip, ‘You Can’t Hide Love’ is a reggae-tinged love rap before Kane went the full-Barry White. Either way, both are worthy of a proper release if the original masters still exist.

 

This incredible batch of auctions was a timely reminder that eBay > Discogs Marketplace when it comes to grabbing one-offs and bargains, and also makes me wonder why whoever has the rights to Kane’s catalogue isn’t putting some of this stuff out for Record Store Day instead of just re-packing Ice-T remixes that we already own.