Cut Up Or Shut Up: An Edited History Of Cut’n’Paste

Neil McMillan

Part One: It’s Nice to Splice

The original artform

In the beginning was cut’n’paste. And from the beginning, everyone’s been at it. Not only a vital part of hip hop, the cut-up has been essential to the development of disco, house and electronic music, and before that, film, literature and visual art. In fact, its principles reach so far back in time that to trace any kind of origin is both pointless and fruitless. Even before the invention of magnetic tape inspired radical advances in the development of audio collages, the concept of the ‘medley’, an arrangement of sections from different tunes, was as old as music itself.

But this is the space for focusing on the beats: the slick re-edit, the cheeky bootleg, the intense, ants-in-pants b-boy jam. Ultimately, the cut-up joint cares not where its building blocks came from, just as long as they sound good in the edit. So all theories about the relationship of cut’n’paste to the MTV generation, advanced consumer capitalism and other excuses for having a 30-second attention span are being left to one side here. The irresistible energy of cut’n’paste tracks, the dynamics and the tension created when contrasting elements are placed together, these alone are enough to justify this article. An average cut-up is only going to be as good as the records it samples (sometimes a lot worse), but a truly great one will either exceed the sum of its parts, making you respond differently to the breaks than if you heard them on their own, or simply pay respect to a great piece of music, extending it and contrasting it with other elements to make it shine all the brighter. As Steve Stein, aka Steinski, puts it, ‘many cut-ups are essentially compilations of peak moments - one burner after another – so that along with the tension of different elements side-by-side, there's also the energy distilled from the intense moments, making a sort of mega-peak’. In other words, the cut-up is the aural equivalent of a prolonged multiple orgasm.

But there’s an important story to be told too. What follows is not the whole truth, and much of it’s been heard before, but what’s being done here is maybe a bit like a cut’n’paste record itself. An attempt to splice together a sequence of events from a collection of histories, interviews, phone conversations, emails, websites and, most importantly, the records themselves. It’s all been prompted by an unconditional love of the genre and a personal need to know more about where it came from. Due to the

nature of the beast, a lot of things will remain shrouded in mystery, but what’s important is that the people this article features get credited for their contribution to the art.

Rewind

The story begins with magnetic tape, the means by which all the early edit masters constructed their cut-ups. The first working reel-to-reel machines were brought over to America from Germany by Jack Mullin in late 1944. Used by the Nazis for propaganda radio broadcasts, the tape’s audio signal was of a quality far superior to that produced by wire recording. Soon Mullin found himself employed on the Bing Crosby show, where he pre-recorded performances then edited them into a broadcastable format using a razor blade and adhesive tape. The producers and engineers worried that the sound might substantially deteriorate during this process, or even worse, the spliced tape might split. Miraculously, it did neither.

It wasn’t long before the possibilities of tape editing were being explored to the full. In 1948 – by which time reel-to-reels were being installed in studios around the world - the experimental European composer Pierre Schaeffer was using vari-speed machines to loop, chop and re-edit sounds taken from the everyday environment. Sections could be played at different tempos or even reversed, allowing backwards reverbs and attacks to be produced. Further effects could be created depending how the tape was sliced. Cutting at 90° produced a hard attack or abrupt finish, while softer angles allowed for less severe attacks and decays. Sounds could also be manipulated by stretching the tape in certain places, or by splicing together equally-sized segments of tape and leader tape to create artificial tremolo.

Later, in the ‘60s, Britain’s own Delia Derbyshire, who once claimed to have made the longest tape loop in London, employed similar effects to create her memorable recording of Ron Grainer’s original ‘Doctor Who Theme’. The Beatles, too, constructed several songs from re-edits, loops and sections played backwards, and from the ‘60s on, many of Miles Davis’s albums for Columbia were basically cut’n’paste edits of long studio jams, the editing and mixing being done by Teo Macero. The extended funky edits of the mid-to-late 1970s are familiar - ‘Sesso Matto’ being one example amongst many – but such practices were also being widely adopted in the recording of both popular and other forms of music the decade before.

‘We interrupt this record to bring you a special bulletin. The reports of a flying saucer hovering above the city have been confirmed …’

If Pierre Schaeffer and co. drew up the tricknological blueprint for what could be done with tape, it was to take a pair of comedians to produce the first recognisable cut-up

with it. Buchanan and Goodman’s 1956 novelty ‘break-in’ single, ‘Flying Saucer’ (a Luniverse 45 and 78), was the first commercially successful record to ‘sample’ and replay bits of other records. Imitating Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’, Dickie Goodman and Bill Buchanan pretended to interview witnesses to a Martian invasion (along with the Martians themselves), the answers being provided by song excerpts cut up on tape. Both funny and inventive, ‘Flying Saucer’ influenced not only Steinski but, consciously or not, everyone else who ever picked up a reel-to-reel or sampler. It didn’t so much break the mould as smash it beyond repair, selling over a million copies, spawning hundreds of imitators and causing copyright ruckus in the process.

Both together then separately, Buchanan and Goodman continued to produce records for a number of labels with varying degrees of success. Most interestingly for this story, Dickie Goodman made several ‘funky’ break-in 45s in the early ‘70s. However, he was not the first to do so. In the ‘60s, King records had released a couple of break-in singles, including Steve Soul’s ‘A Talk With The News (James Brown)’. Based on the Goodman blueprint, these featured a reporter emulating an interview with JB by using snatches of his vocals. It seems likely they were used as lighthearted promotional records. (According to the Record Collector JB discography, ‘Steve Soul’ was an alias for Brown himself.)

With that in mind, although Dickie Goodman was not the first to bite JB (if sampling yourself counts as biting), he was the first to do so on his own terms. Goodman’s ‘70s productions, often with an element of political satire to them, also use a greater variety of elements than the King break-ins. Titles like ‘Watergrate’, ‘Mr President’ and‘Energy Crisis ‘74’ all appeared on the Rainy Wednesday label, as did the Goodman-produced ‘Super Fly Meets Shaft’ and ‘Soul President #1’, both by John and Ernest. While none of these keep any kind of rhythm, and are therefore not funky cut-ups in the contemporary sense, they all sample R&B hits and in that way pre-empt the disco and hip hop jams. And despite occasional comic misfires, it’s easy to see how the humorous interplay between spoken word and sampled excerpt sets the blueprint for the satirical and narrative elements not only of Steinski’s cut-ups but, even if unconsciously, many a scratch DJ’s acapella routines.

From another perspective, the break-in records are still some way removed from what are considered funky cut-ups today. On the flip of ‘Super Fly Meets Shaft’ is a stuttering cut’n’paste of the single word ‘Superfly’ from the Curtis Mayfield theme, but it’s more suited to inducing epilepsy than making people dance. On another break-in of the period, Steel, Jake and Jeff’s ‘The Impeachment Story’ (a 1974 Peach-Mint 45), a continuous funky backing track runs under the dialogue, a feature not be heard on Goodman’s productions. Although the sampled punchlines occasionally come in on the beat, the results are pretty disjointed and you have to head for the flipside, Lou Toby and his Heavies’ ‘Heavy Steppin’, if you want anything with a serious groove.

But these were comedy records, after all. Even if Steel, Jake and Jeff’s record did have continuous music running through it, it was not their intention to chop everything to the beat. And even if they’d thought about it, the chances are they wouldn’t have had a reference point to work from. That kind of editing was already beginning to happen on tape, but it had been inspired by club DJ mixing methods still largely unheard of, and remained similarly shrouded in mystery.

A funky interlude

Before getting into the history of the disco edits, it’s worth remembering that those using reel-to-reel, turntable or sampling technology are not the only originators of cut’n’paste. The funk music of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, for example, not only provided the raw material of the funky cut-ups, but could be said to have pre-empted them stylistically. The intense repetition of a simple riff followed by an extended bridge or break, which characterises much funk, has essentially the same choppy structure as a mix pieced together from bits of other records. Certain highly segmented funk tracks – JB’s ‘Coldblooded’, ‘The Road’ by the Communicators and Black Experience Band and Dennis Coffey’s ‘Scorpio’, for example – amply demonstrate the spirit (if not the letter) of the splice.

There are also cut’n’paste parallels in the development of the Go-Go scene in Washington DC. Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, a covers band who didn’t stop between numbers during gigs, gradually began ‘editing’ the verses and bridges from their set while extending the long percussion jams in between. As Coldcut’s Jonathan More describes it, there would be ‘a humungous beat, then chorus after chorus after chorus, interspersed with call-and-response, “Are you alright everybody”, “Everybody in the house say Yo!” That’s a similar attitude to cut’n’paste in a way, remove all the bollocks and just have chorus after chorus with a humungous beat!’

As chance would have it, ‘chorus after chorus with a humungous beat’ isn’t too bad a description of another early ‘70s phenomenon – the mixed DJ sets being put together by the disco pioneers in downtown Manhattan. This article, however, is not the place to investigate the history of DJing – the topic is more than adequately covered by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton in Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. The first question to be posed is: who was the first to use a reel-to-reel to emulate the technically brilliant new skill of mixing and cutting records to the beat? In other words…

Who made the first mastermix?

Eh … dunno.

But neither does anyone else.

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life supplies some clues. By October 1974, John Addisonhad been making live reel-to-reel recordings of New York DJ sets for some time, selling them over the phone for a hefty $75 a pop. In the same month, just as Billboard magazine was alerting the industry to this illegal practice, Spring records released the Disco Par-r-rty LP as ‘the first non-stop dancing LP record’. No DJ or editor was credited for this segued mastermix.

Prior even to this, Tom Moulton claims to have made a 45 minute tape from segued edits of songs. Although not a DJ himself, Moulton had been disappointed by Fire Island jocks who couldn’t extend the most dancefloor-friendly parts of tracks. At that time, everything was played off 45, and the extended 12” remix – in which Moulton was to play a vital role – was yet to come. Seeking a solution in the splice, Moulton got to work, coming up with the finished reel some 80 hours later. It’s almost certainly one of the first mastermixes made.

For many, however, one Walter Gibbons was the definitive, if not the first, early mix editor. Resident at Galaxy 21 on 23rd Street between 1972 and ’76, Gibbons is widely credited as one of the most technically gifted and inventive DJs ever, and was a major influence on both Kool Herc and, through DJ Pete Jones, Grandmaster Flash. Famous for his mixing, phasing and quick, seamless cutting up of two copies of a record, extending the breaks without anyone noticing, Gibbons had another trick up his sleeve. He introduced his own specially prepared edits into the mix via his reel-to-reel.

Colin Gate, a Scot who spent some time in New York and got the chance to look through Gibbons’ record collection after his death in 1994, is unequivocal about his role in the history of the cut-up:

What I say is that the first 'cut-ups' were by Walter Gibbons - the first great 'mixing' DJ. These date from 1974/5 and use funky records like The Fatback Band [building] up to latin percussion jams, cut up on reel-to-reel tape … and used to provide a continuous mix (sometimes 20 minutes plus) in the clubs of New York. A good example of this would be the 'looped up' 'break' (remember, nobody knew these terms back then!) from the Cooley High soundtrack album [‘Two Pigs and a Hog’]. First he used two copies [of the record] to capture the break, then did it on tape to be cut onto an acetate, thus saving the hassle of doing it live all the time.

Here, then, are the first records that substantially resemble the cut’n’paste joint as it’s known today – Walter Gibbons’ acetates. Born partly out of experimentation, partly out of necessity (no doubt saving the wear on his 45s was also a consideration), Gibbons’ cut-ups weren’t technically overdone in comparison to the work of the Edit Kings in the

‘80s. However, opinions differ as to their complexity. For Danny Krivit, an early fan of Gibbons’ edits whose own story is to follow, they were all ‘about extension’. For Colin Gate, on the other hand, ’some of them were straight cut-ups. For example, [there would be] drums taken from the Fatback Band, James Brown horn stabs and cut up words/vocals over the top. This is in 1974/75 remember, so it was revolutionary at the time and was definitely the first time a DJ had put anything like this down on vinyl’.

At the time, Gibbons worked for Salsoul Records, becoming a pioneer of the remix in his treatment of Double Exposure’s 1976 track ‘Ten Percent’ (perhaps the definitive early 12” single). Gate continues:

[Gibbons also made] lots of unreleased dub mixes of popular Salsoul tracks which utilised the bass and drums and placed some reggae dub effects over the top. This, to my knowledge, must have been the beginnings of house music as it took the faster 4/4 disco beat and repeated it in a trance-like fashion, [a style] much copied by other DJs including Walter's 'prodigy' Larry Levan. Other tunes were edited in such a fashion as to repeat certain instrumental breakdowns so the mix could be extended for a bit to heighten the tension in the club, so that when the 'official' mix was dropped the people were screaming out for it. This formula eventually mutated into house music through better, quicker and cheaper editing equipment.

Danny Krivit recalls how Walter’s versions were made available to other DJs:

I used to go to a place in Manhattan called Sunshine Sounds. They didn’t really have bootlegs back then – what they had was acetates. You could buy a single copy of a record and they would make that record for you right there. And for some reason they weren’t considered a mass-produced thing like bootlegs were – so people weren’t chasing you down. You bought the mastermixes from different DJs – ‘Love is the Message’, or some other special mix. I still have a few of them today that are really fierce. But that was around 1976.

Krivit recognises that Gibbons was certainly not the only one to make such recordings. As the ‘70s wore on, many notable DJs were playing with tape: the legendary Larry Levan; François K, Walter Gibbons’ drummer at Gallery 21; and John Morales, a Bronx DJ whose ‘Deadly Medley’ acetates were hot sellers at Sunshine Sounds, and who went on to produce over 500 re-edits, multimixes and remixes. Krivit continues:

At that time, [for] a lot of people, if you wanted to do anything with tape, in any sort of quality, it was all about a reel-to-reel. So if you knew how to use a reel-to-reel at all, it wasn’t that far of a jump to know a little more

on how to splice one. So people would make their own versions – I remember Frankie Knuckles in the early ‘90s gave me a whole bunch of his old edits from back in the day, and I filled up a whole DAT tape just with edits he had done in the 70s! It just seemed that all the DJs who were somebody did it.

Alongside these early re-edits, more commercialised ‘disco mixers’, bootleg records segueing together up to 50 songs, began to appear around 1975. Bought to be played in the more populist clubs of New York, they were particularly sought after by DJs technically unable to mix or cut live. (Playing re-edits as a substitute for mixing was a practice which continued for years; Danny Krivit remembers Shep Pettibone, a gifted editor, being particularly guilty of it in the ‘80s.) As Colin Gate recalls, ‘The songs were generally disco hits of the day mixed with a few sound effects and maybe some funky percussion looped over and over to provide a backbeat. A popular trick at the time was to play one of these mixers on one turntable while constantly crossfading to the original song that it used on the other, thus prolonging it all night if need be’.

Patrick Lejeune, a long-time devotee of disco mixers, has compiled a list of them dating from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s (check http://home.wanadoo.nl/discopatrick/). Cataloguing both legitimate DJ-only labels such as Disconet (the American precursor of DMC on which the ‘Lessons’ series first appeared), the Sunshine Sounds acetates and shady bootleg merchants like Bits & Pieces and J&T (of which more later), Patrick’s is the most comprehensive archive available.

Most importantly for this story, it’s clear that new developments in the production of the disco mixer were beginning to happen around the early ‘80s. As Patrick notes in his descriptions, records started to become mixed, not merely segued, and strange new effects began to creep in. Finally catching on to the techniques of experimental tape manipulators like Pierre Schaeffer, or stumbling upon the methods themselves, the downtown editors were about to become Edit Kings.

The editor as star

Freddy Fresh, another life-long slave to the edit, describes just what made these new editors stand out from the crowd:

The Latin Rascals, Omar Santana and Charlie D did their mixes on reel-to-reel (usually Otari) tape decks, cut them into pieces with razor blades then re-taped them together. This formed what are called multi-editswhich is the song repeating machine-gun fashion. Extremely cool and extremely talented editors were popular at the time: Chep Nunez, Roger Pauletta (his brother-in law), Luis Flores, Dino Blade, Juan Kato, Joe

Barrion, Dini Bellafiore, Andre ‘Phoenix’ Estrada, Omar Santana, Carlos Berrios, Latin Rascals (Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran), Charlie Dee, Shep Pettibone etc.

As Fresh recalls, it was also radio that helped make these guys stars. ‘They would do radio mixes for stations like WNYU New York, WRKS ‘KISS’ FM, KTU-92, and WBLS 107.5 New York. It was a legendary thing to hear a Latin Rascals or Awesome 2mastermix. You'd know them by the incredible edits that could NOT be done live or on decks, but were made with surgical-like precision.’

By this time, then, the cut-up – at least in one of its manifestations – had moved beyond the club scene which gave it birth. This gave it the space to develop flashy new techniques, such as the machine-gun edit, which would have seemed intrusive and overdone in a dancefloor environment. At the same time, however, New York’s musical climate was changing rapidly. Before there was any club brave enough to merge disco, hip hop and the new latin-tinged freestyle genre, the radio editors were happily chopping up all three and more.

Among the most sought after bootlegs of these mixes are the Big Apple Productionsrecords which began to be released around 1982. Up to six volumes of these exist, in several different guises, the series kickstarting with Mikey d’Merola’s ‘Big Apple Mix’. D’Merola had been responsible for the first two volumes in the Bits & Pieces series and was a veteran of the WKTU mix shows, but the Big Apple record only emerged after one of his acetates was pressed up without his consent. Its considerable success inevitably led to re-releases on different labels, one of which, ‘Big Apple Productions vol 1’ on B&W, gave the name to the haphazard sequence to follow. (For more on Mikey d’Merola, go to http://www.discomusic.com/101/dj_dmerola_mikey.html.)

Arguably, the mixes in the series best known and loved by cut-up connoisseurs are the (Orig.) Big Apple Productions Volumes Two and Three on J&T records. Volume Three, made by Danish ex-pat DJ Duke and released in 1987 (although it sounds as if it was recorded much earlier), combines live mixing and cutting with tape editing to produce a classic b-boy jam, merging ‘The Mexican’, ‘Funky President’, ‘The Champ’ and ‘It’s Just Begun’ with a clutch of other hardy breaks. In terms of technique, however, it’s Volume Two which really takes the prize. Simply titled ‘Genius at Work’ (as were all of the (Orig.) Big Apple Productions records), and credited mysteriously to ‘Ser and Duff’, Volume Two is actually the work of The Latin Rascals’ Albert Cabrera and Tony Moran, in conjunction with a little-known duo called The Kids from Brazil. Beginning with a series of fast edits designed to imitate a TV changing channels, the mix launches into some classic electro-tinged hip hop before gradually moving into more uptempo territory, cleverly repeating certain parts and skillfully blending others together with gunshot edits and other effects linking it all up. On the evidence of this, Cabrera and Moran’s quick rise to the status of Edit Kings, called upon by all and sundry to

rearrange and spice up their tracks – including some stone-cold classic hip hop joints –was inevitable.

While Moran is now a bigshot producer for the likes of Whitney Houston, Martine McCutcheon and Celine Dion, Albert Cabrera is still involved in editing, albeit on computer, for long-time associates Masters at Work. He was kind enough to talk about the history of the Rascals and the J&T mix.

Albert Cabrera and the Latin Rascals

GS: When and how did you get into DJing?AC: I got inspired by Shep Pettibone. He was on Kiss, a New York radio station. I just liked the idea of using records differently. So right there I got two turntables, you know, extra cassette decks, and I started to get into mixing up records. But not from one record to another – I liked adding on extra stuff that was pretty technical, doing stuff that was impossible to do live and creating mastermixes. That’s how I got started. Then I was selling tapes, doing parties here and there. Then I visited a record store to play these tapes, and this guy Carlos DeJesus heard one of the mixes and asked if I would wanna hear it on the radio. And that’s how it started.

GS: What radio station was that?AC: That was WKTU.

GS: Right, it was later on you went to Kiss?AC: Exactly. But [the hook-up with WKTU] was also how I met Tony [Moran], ‘cos Tony worked at Downtown Records, and that was the record store I used to visit.

GS: Could you tell me more about the techniques you used to create those early mixes?AC: Well, what I did was I used to record the record onto a cassette deck, and then I used the pause button to make parts repeat. And I used to technically work out my records so I had a plan to have them all segue into each other. It was difficult because I didn’t know about splicing tape at that time, I was basically just using the pause button! It was all on-the-spot creativity. As I heard it, I went along with the flow of [things]. And, of course, [I tried to emulate] what was happening at the time, which was gunshot edits, which was the same part just repeat[ing] over and over before going back into the song then being mixed into another record. That’s what was happening at the time, and it’s basically what I did.

GS: Who were the guys that were pioneering the gunshot edits?AC: Shep Pettibone. He’s the only one I can think of that was doing it the way I liked it.

GS: But he’d have been doing it with razorblade edits …AC: Right, he was, but I had no idea that that was possible. I thought the tape’d be damaged if you touched it.

GS: So when did you start doing that yourself?AC: When I met Tony, I had to transfer my cassettes to his reel ‘cos WKTU wouldn’t play cassettes. Then I learned the concept of splicing. Tony turned me on to that whole part of it and I picked up on it, then I got a reel myself and started using that.

GS: So you met Tony when?AC: It was around 1979 or ‘80. It took us about three years before we really started getting with the flow ‘cos I started working with him at Downtown records for a while. Then we started actually working on records in '82, if I remember right. Or maybe we were already on the radio. I think it was around '82 that we were both on the air on Kiss, after being on WKTU for a while, and that’s basically what gave us a lot of exposure and popularity.

GS: The mixes that were broadcast by you and others became very popular, didn’t they? Lots of people would tape them and stuff …AC: Right, it was us, The Kids from Brazil, Aldo Marin from Cutting Records and The Dynamic Duo with Tommy Musto. These are the names I remember that were on that station at that time.

GS: How did these mixes reflect what was getting played in clubs at the time? Or were you being a little more adventurous?AC: I think I was being a little more radio! I wasn’t going to clubs much. Radio in my neighbourhood was very popular. I think that clubs were playing more disco or something like that but I’m not too sure. I wasn’t into going out so much, but I was really in tune to what was hot on the radio. Shep was pretty much doing mastermixes all the time and people were always at the beaches, tuning into stations, checking the mastermixes, and I really fancied going in that direction.

GS: Would you do a new mix every week?AC: I would do as many as I could. The whole idea was that every time a good record died out, I would bring it back to life by giving it a twist, you know, fancy it up and do all kinds of fun stuff so that the record becomes new again. So every time that happened I would do a mix. And then we did 25 minute mixes for the Paco show [which would play mixes every day]. We would prepare for them. Because ours were very technical, it took a long time.

GS: I can imagine! The mix I know you by is the [Orig.] Big Apple Productions Vol. 2, which was pressed up on J&T records. These were pretty much bootlegs. Did you have any knowledge that they were coming out?

AC: Umm … Yes, I did. These were records that we … I mean, we … that was before even entering the business! And everybody was doing all kinds of disco fusion records, stuff like that. So me, Tony and the Kids from Brazil got together and did it. Us four. We put it together and … someone … put it out.

GS: Can you remember who was involved with that label?AC: I was very new to the business, so I didn’t know how it worked. The only thing I remember is that me, Tony and two other guys worked on it, and then it came out, and I don’t know what happened after that. I didn’t know the label, we didn’t get paid for it, it was just one of those things that came out. When you’re brand new to the business like that, you do those things and you don’t really know what’s going on. We were basically excited that our stuff was actually printed, ‘cos it’s pretty amazing when you love music that much and then you can actually play your own!

GS: I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but some of the J&T releases, including yours, are now highly regarded and sought after. Your own mix is technically incredible, and a lot of people have had their ears opened by that.AC: Right? I love that, I love that! I know it was a long time ago – I mean that was the first thing we did … but it’s great to hear …

GS: My covert mission here is – find out more about J&T! But obviously it wasn’t strictly on the level so it’s difficult …AC: Exactly. It was just a make-up name – there was really no name to it. I think that was good because it basically explored what we were about, and opened up a lot of doors down the line for people that appreciated editing and music the way we turned it out.

GS: The intro you did for that mix is like someone changing the channel on a TV –had you heard anyone doing stuff like that before?AC: Then, I think it was pretty original. Yeah, we did that … wow, we did that in 1981 or something. That’s 20 years ago! It was '82 before we started workin on records, so it was really early then. It was kind of between 18 and 20 years ago. All those ideas were pretty fresh and new.

GS: What else I like about it is that you’re throwing in a lot of different styles. There’s hip-hop, disco, other odd things – were you just into all those kinds of music?AC: That’s what was happening – we were in a world where we played all of that music. We kinda went with the vibe of ‘climbing’ – starting off with a slower record [actually Davy DMX’s ‘One for the Treble’], following that up with Cheryl Lynn [‘Encore’, with Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks’ jammed inbetween], and then we started climbing and bringing up the tempo to bring up the energy. That’s what we did, we played hip hop, we played everything.

GS: Was that the mood in New York at the time?AC: Yeah, we loved that. Every time I played a set I would start off slow then built it up to get the crowd into the whole uptempo stuff, the peak, you know.

GS: The next thing you got into was production …AC: What happened was that on KTU, I loved all the Streetwise and the Tommy Boy records. Arthur Baker was the producer of a lot of the records I used to play. Without even knowing it was him – ‘cos I was just playing records ‘cos I liked em – I played almost all of his records in [a] 25 minute [set] – but really chopped them up, one record after the other. I had ‘IOU’, ‘Planet Rock’ – all the records he was involved in. He was listening to that set! And really, really liked it, and got in contact with us, and hired us to do our first editing gig for him. Our first gig was actually for Aldo Marin …

GS: … which was Hi-Fidelity 3, ‘B-Boys Breakdance’?AC: Exactly. That was our first editing gig. Right after that, Arthur Baker was already in the loop. He got us to do ‘Breaker’s Revenge’. And that was it! Once we started workin with Arthur he used us for all these jobs. It was amazing, we produced so many records with him and we became his guys!

GS: That must have been exciting, especially since you were fans already …AC: Yeah, it was really cool. The thing about it was that we came in on a really good entry level with Arthur, ‘cos he was already doing stuff on Atlantic, and after that it was the Cars, Diana Ross and all these big names. So between the radio popularity and Arthur Baker, forget about it, we were it!

GS: But those particular records, ‘B-Boys Breakdance’ and ‘Breaker’s Revenge’, are still classic, classic hip-hop records. Could you explain what you did when you went to work on those? What were they like before and after you got your hands on them?AC: They were basically plain and simple when we got ‘em. We put all the excitement around it, doing multiple edits. They would give us different variations of the same record, like a puzzle that’s incomplete. Maybe we would get an hour to two hours of the same record, with different mixes of it, and we’d make a 7-8 minute version of it out of ALL these parts! So we needed to listen down to every single take, ‘cos a lot of the mixes were live – and some of the mistakes were really good! So we would go in there and start taking all these bits and pieces and create our main version and a dub. With Arthur it took a long time because he did more mixes – he was giving us up to three hours of the same record! It was all on reel-to-reel, so physically it was a lot of work to take each reel, play it then record all the best pieces onto a fresh tape, take these pieces, cut ‘em together and make sense out of ‘em.

GS: You must have to be so accurate to do that …AC: Yeah. It would sometimes be hard to get started, ‘cos you’ve got all this stuff in front of you – [you’re asking] where do you wanna begin, do you wanna record the

whole song, how can you make it different – so getting started was always the hardest part. Once you’ve started getting the song together, then it can be a lot of fun.

GS: Was everything really planned, or was there room for spontaneity as you did those edits?AC: It was just about getting into it and getting it out of the way, ‘cos after a while it was about getting the record done. They wanted it in two days! We had to do it real fast.

GS: As the ‘80s progressed and new sampling technology became more available, do you think the editing skills were still necessary?AC: Absolutely, because samplers would only do what they did. There was something about editing that couldn’t be replaced by a sampler. We incorporated digital delays between two machines to create new effects, ‘cos of course the technology was advancing and people’s ears were going to the next step, so we had to get out of the gunshot edits. Then we started doing something called the ‘multiflow’, which was a multiple edit which was musical, musically put together. So that we had changes in records done by editing that if you didn’t know were edits, you’d think were part of the record. Editing is so choppy ‘cos you’re actually interrupting the music, you can actually feel the tension of what edits into a record, and that’s why they sounded so good. That was how we had to grow with what was going on. We would actually create instrumentation, using editing, that was different from the record! We changed basslines around with edits – pretty, pretty amazing! [We] inserted percussion from a record into a record that needed percussion. People would bug out – ‘how did you actually mix it in there?’ – but it was very, very precise editing that took hours. You gotta know the pattern that you’re doing for the entire record.

GS: That is pretty amazing …AC: It was amazing because there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do to fix the record. It became almost like magic. When someone had a record and the record needed all kinds of stuff, they would say ‘Give it to the Rascals!’ We were the doctors – it was like, ‘Don’t spend any money on remixes, just give it to the Rascals!’

GS: So, could you tell us a little more about the techniques and the equipment you used?AC: Basically, I used MCI, Studder and Otari ½ inch machines to edit . The tape ran at 30 ips. The type of tape mostly used was Ampex 456 . Two machines were used to copy pieces for multiple edits. There was a delay machine in between to add effects. I could also emulate delays, though, by copying the same part over and over then fading that part .

I also took bits and pieces of percussion from other records, recorded them and placed them onto songs that had no percussion. This type of editing I should have got additional production [credits] for. I also did this with basslines etc.

I would also play the tape backwards for effects. Pressing the stop button in the middle of the song would create the famous PSSHHHHHH effect . These were recorded then placed where needed.

Tricking out: Omar Santana

Back in mid-‘80s New York, with the Edit Kings exploding all over the radio and in the clubs, becoming an editor was THE dream for any kid with a passion for beats and access to a reel. In 1984, at the age of 15, one Omar Santana heard the Rascals on Kiss and knew straight away what he wanted to do. Getting his first reel a year later, ‘a little ¼ inch Tascam machine’, he progressed quickly and went on to produce some of the most intense edits and megamixes of the period. T La Rock’s ‘Breaking Bells’, Mantronix’s ‘Megamix’ (from Music Madness) and UTFO’s ‘Wanna Rock’, amongst many others, were all sliced by the hand of Santana. Now a hardcore rave and breaks producer, he was more than happy to reminisce about the old days.

GS: How long did it take between getting your reel and getting some edits out there?OS: At that time I was working at a record store, The Wiz, in Hollis, Queens. We had to play records all the time in the store, to show the new product that was coming out, so what I did was take them and produce my own megamixes. At the time we got a lot of record company people coming into the store and I met some kids from the college radio station [91. 7 FM]. They were like, ‘Who did this?’ I said ‘I did!’ So they put me on the station and people started hearing me right there, and started saying ‘Hey, can you edit records?’ The first record I did was Nova, ‘You Can Do It’, on Emergency Records. Curtis Urbina hooked me up with that. The funny thing was, we didn’t know how much I was supposed to get paid for it. They were like, ‘We’ll pay you per edit!’ I thought they were joking around, but I purposely did a lot of multis! I think I got about $250 for it! That’s basically what launched it. The style that I had, people were like ‘Woah’. I liked what the Rascals did but I wanted to push it over the top. They were very clever but very safe – I was a little more maverick in my editing style.

GS: Were you already DJing in clubs by this time?OS: No. I was DJing at block parties and for breakdance crews. I’d already started doing splicing and stuff like that, but I met this kid at a block party who showed me how to actually cut the tape. The rest of it I did on my own, but he showed me how to cut it properly. He went to the Centre for the Media Arts, the school for learning how to do production and stuff. He was like, ‘I can show you how to do all this if you do my homework’. Basically the homework was just commercials, correcting vocals, [taking out] coughing – just training your ear properly. That’s how I did it.

GS: That’s interesting – Douglas Di Franco (Double Dee) learned his trade in a similar way [see Part Two]. Did you do the block parties as part of the Dynamic Rockers Crew?OS: Yes, that’s how I met the guy. The [Crew] was just about having fun, that’s all it was.

GS: What do you think were the most important edits you did once you got started?OS: Well, obviously Nova [laughs]! Then I actually wrote and produced my own dance track. I edited that myself. That was my own baby. That was one of the important ones at the time.

GS: The classic stuff from our point of view is the stuff you did for Mantronix and T La Rock.OS: That was the next year or so. T La Rock called me ‘cos he’d heard my stuff, saying ‘I want you to cut tape on my track’. The funny thing was, I was just cutting the small ¼ inch tape, and they bring me into this big studio with a ½ inch machine, and I was like ‘Woah, I’ll never cut tape on this!’ But that’s when I started experimenting more, with the T La Rock stuff, because that’s when I started editing on ½ inch. Plus I wanted to show off! With ‘Breaking Bells’ I bugged out for a day straight. T was with me, we were poppin sugar cubes and going nuts!

GS: You can kinda tell on that edit because it’s so hectic!OS: Ha ha ha ha!

GS: Was that all planned out or …OS: It was all spontaneous. I’d do a skeleton of an idea, then I’d see where I thought I could do stuff. I’d play it back, just crank it with the lights out, going ‘You bet, this has gotta go right here!’

GS: Do you think there was a point when editing died as an artform, or is it still relevant?OS: I still mix up the old school and the new school. After I started getting out of doing editing work I got more into remixing, but incorporating a lot of the editing into it. I would do a multi-edit and dump it to my digital hard drive. But I would still do it on the ½ inch because nothing else sounds like that. You can do editing on the computer but it doesn’t have the sharpness that analogue does. The last editing thing I did was for a German record about three years ago. I didn’t want to do it – I was like, ‘No way, I don’t edit records any more, you gotta be kidding!’ So I just told them my price ….

GS: Were you still charging per edit??!OS: I was charging a LOT of money! But I knew it was gonna take me a long time to do it. And they were like OK! So I did it, and they just flipped out. And I flipped out too. I did a lot of multis on the ½ inch, dumped it on the computer and tricked it out even

more with flanging, filtering … it was old and new [techniques] together. That was wild. So yeah, it can still be done, and people still ask me, but … I don’t know …

GS: It’s too time-consuming, right? But the current music you make is still informed by the editing tradition, isn’t it?OS: Oh yeah. My ear is really, really trained to detail. Whenever I do breaks or hardcore or whatever, if you listen to it you can hear every little sound, you hear the little tricks that I do. It’s all based on the way my ear was trained as an editor. I can just hear the tiniest little things on a track, like a pop or something that just doesn’t feel right, and I’ll fix that in a second. But sometimes that can be bad, ‘cos I’m too close to the track and I have to let it go.

GS: Is there anything else you can say about the editing era?OS: I still have my ½ inch machine that I edited a lot of the Mantronix stuff on. The only thing I can say is that I think I’m still gonna be dumping tracks onto it. I will be doing that again, I just have to … plug it in! [laughs] I gotta get back into it though. We all dump things onto computer now, but nothing sounds as good as analogue.

You could say one thing … that the Chemical Brothers have sampled my edits a couple of times. I wish they would give me credit! They sampled ‘Breaking Bells’ a couple of times and put it on their records.

GS: Could be ‘Morning Lemon’, off the b-side of ‘Block Rockin Beats’. They are so influenced by your editing style though …OS: Oh totally, totally. I love their stuff. But that track … it’s not even a track, it’s bonus beats or something, all with my edits on.

GS: OK, calling the Chemical Brothers – you can afford to pay this man!OS: I do ask that! But they don’t have to pay me, just give me some credit. What’s wrong with that?

Testosterone

What’s striking about the golden age of editing as these guys describe it was the level of competitiveness going on at the time. According to Santana, all the editors ‘knew each other well … I knew the Rascals, and Chep [Nunez], and Charlie [D]’. Albert Cabrera concurs:

I loved them all! I actually got them all to do an all-star edit … at that time, we were all basically together. We were all just living in the music business, putting out records that were great. By that time, me and Tony were doing performances, we became artists, Chep Nunez and Carlos

Berrios were editing … I liked all of it, I was always well rounded when it comes to different remixers and producers at the time. A lot of the people we worked with I admired.

But when asked about Santana, Cabrera remembers that ‘He was a little bit on his own. Me and Chep and Berrios were on the same record company and Omar was on a whole other side. I would see Chep all the time, and Carlos was doing the same thing, but Omar was really the one where I thought we were in competition with each other.’

It’s pretty clear that that’s what Santana thought too. Feeling that the Rascals and Nunez were all pretty ‘safe’ as editors, Santana tried to up the stakes:

I was one of the first to really experiment with putting rewinds underneath edits, and transforming and all that stuff. After I started doing that, then Chep and everybody else started. When we were all editing, it was almost like we were battling each other on records. It was all about who could think of a new idea, or who could trick it out even more. It wasn’t even like we were doing it for the producers – we were doing it to battle each other! That’s how I saw it, because every time I ran into Chep, he was like ‘What?? Listen to this shit!’, you know, or he would show me stuff, and the same with Albert [Cabrera] – ‘Check this out, I got you on this record’! It started turning into that.

But it was all just friendly competition, apparently. ‘We were battling each other, but in good fun’, continues Santana. The only people who got pissed off were the DJs, ‘cos after a while it was like, [laughs] “How are we supposed to mix this?”’

Chep Nunez and Mantronix

The one editor who continually gets the praise of his peers is the late Jose ‘Chep’ Nunez, aka ‘The Baddest Latin in Manhattan’. Although Santana felt he was ‘safe’, he respected him for keeping everything ’clean and sharp’. For Danny Krivit, Nunez was ‘the person who put it together for me the best way. He was a friend. He passed, but I thought him one of the most superior editors. He made me like a lot of styles that I didn’t like before because his technique was so good.’

It’s Nunez’s work with Mantronix that he will probably be best remembered for. Aside from the peerless ‘King of the Beats’, one of the most perfectly exhilarating (and funky) cut-ups of the late eighties, Nunez must take a lot of the general responsibility for the incredibly tense, energetic, hyper-chopped style of the early Mantronix and Just-Icematerial. In researching this article, one of the priorities was to speak with Kurtis Mantronik and find out exactly what he and Nunez’s working relationship was.

Unfortunately, he rarely gives interviews these days, so the pieces had to be picked up elsewhere.

As well as editing for the Mantronik-produced T La Rock, Omar Santana worked directly with Kurtis on several tracks (including the aforementioned ‘Megamix’, one of the most memorable of all the master-edits). He obviously enjoyed the experience:

Kurtis was cool. After a while it’d be me, T, Kurtis, Greg Nice and Sam Sever all hanging around in the studio, just goofin around and shit like that. After a while I’d be like ‘I need this piece, print this piece’ – I was actually tellin them which pieces I needed [for the edits]. It was a lot of fun.

Mantronik, though, did not do any editing himself. ‘Not if he hired me!’ claims Santana. ‘He wanted me to do it a certain way, saying “Use that vocal if you can”, or whatever, but that was it’.

So what would the raw, pre-edited Mantronix tracks be like? Santana continues:

This was years ago, before all this automated stuff. He had this old MCI board or something like that. He would basically give you a radio mix, and once that was printed to ½ inch, we just printed off a couple of dubs basically. I’d have to figure out where it should be inserted without sounding like shit. So we’d have a radio mix and four other mixes of dubs. With some of the dubs I’d be in there muting in and out the pieces that I thought would sound dope. Which I used to do a lot, actually. I wouldn’t assist on any of the mixing or anything like that. Maybe when I was in the studio with the engineer I would say, ‘We need a little delay on this’, or whatever. It was just a total jam session, putting effects in, pulling them out, fading things here and there – just freestyling all the way. But I would not add any production to it. They never asked me. He was a dope producer – there was nothing much I could say to him!

Danny Krivit, too, knew Chep and Kurtis very well, and had some insight into their working relationship.

The cutting part was definitely Chep, but I think it was Kurtis who was very much into that sound. It was Kurtis that really appreciated that style, and he hooked up with Chep, and Chep really brought home what he liked – he did exactly what he wanted and more. So it became not just ‘Do this’, but he left it in Chep’s hands. Chep was doing things for other people at the same time, but he was really tightening his technique and really was an important part of the Mantronix sound.

What isn’t very well known is the extent to which Krivit’s own classic cut-ups – in particular ‘Rock the House’ and ‘Feelin James’ – were a huge influence on the developing Mantronix style. The story of those particular tracks follows shortly, but for now it’s important to state the effect they had on the young Kurtis. As Krivit recalls,

When I first made ‘Feelin James’ there weren’t that many people I could give it to. I brought it to a friend of mine, Freddy Bastone, who was DJing at Danceteria at the time. And I gave ‘Rock the House’ to Tony Smith who played at the Funhouse. This is way before they came out actually. They were really getting a huge response there – these guys would come back to me going ‘This is my biggest record!’ I remember that Kurtis came to me a year or two later when I was in the studio, and we were talkin about stuff, and I said I did ‘Feelin James’ and ‘Rock the House’, and he said ‘No, you’re lying! You didn’t do that!’ I was like, ‘What?’ Then I started naming every edit on the record and he’s like ‘Really? I always thought Freddy Bastone did that! He never told me that you did it.’ Apparently he was very influenced by not just those edits, but edits in that style that were being played at Danceteria. He was hangin out there every night, and that’s when he made his first record.

In this way, the two dominant strands in the history of cut’n’paste in New York in the ‘80s – edits for the dancefloor and edits for the radio – came together in the working relationship of Kurtis Mantronik and Chep Nunez. Perhaps what really went on in those studios will never be known, but the results speak for themselves. The early Mantronix material, whether touched up by Nunez or Santana, is one of the most perfectly balanced combinations of party hip hop and razor-sharp editing techniques yet to be produced. And like the Steinski blueprint, it’s a sound to which many subsequent cut-up artists are indebted.

The humble editor

As Part One of this history draws to a close, it’s worth remembering that not every editor in New York was attempting to out-chop the other in the development of flashy new techniques or styles. The tradition of edits as extensions of songs, paying respect to the original material and simply teasing it out for the enjoyment of the dancefloor, did not end with Walter Gibbons and his peers. Some of the most vital edits of the ‘80s revelled in such simplicity and in so doing pushed the music, not the editor, to the forefront. One example, Carlos Berrios’ ‘Doing it after Dark’, simply extends the tiny one-bar break from Babe Ruth’s ‘The Mexican’ (one of the few ‘Mexican’ edits around that dispenses entirely with the guitars) to devastating effect, dropping the ‘Doing it after Dark’ hook (from the Blackbyrds’ ‘Rock Creek Park’) every so often with pulsating

echo patterns. Perhaps because of its sparing use of transforming effects and multi-edits, ‘Doing it After Dark’ remains one of the classics of the genre.

Danny Krivit’s cut-ups, which so influenced the young Kurtis Mantronik, now enjoy similar status. ‘Feelin James’, an extra-fat mash-up of all the biggest JB breaks, ‘Love is the Message’, an intoxicatingly musical combination of the MFSB track with the Salsoul Orchestra’s ‘Love Break’, and ‘Rock the House’, a straight-up hip hop jam which mixes the B-Boys’ ‘Rock the House’ over Magic Disco Machine’s ‘Scratchin’ – all are now recognised as undisputed, genre-defying cut’n’paste gold. Until recently, however, it was not widely known who was responsible for them. It can now be said that ‘Mr K’ –the name which sometimes appeared on these tracks (all on the TD label) – is actually ‘Mr Krivit’.

What follows is an important story to close on because it leads nicely into the more strictly hip hop oriented cut-ups of Flash and Bambaataa. As shall be seen in Part Two, the Bronx’s particularly inventive response to the mixing and editing skills developed downtown in the ‘70s and ‘80s was partly motivated by restrictive economic realities. Although the Latin Rascals, Omar Santana, Chep Nunez and others played indispensable roles in the development of hip hop, at times it seems that they came from an essentially different place. Danny Krivit, on the other hand, was the person in whom the uptown and downtown scenes collided. Now a resident at Body and Soul, Manhattan’s famous house and disco mecca (where he’s joined by other early editors François K and Joe Clausell), Krivit still talks with enthusiasm about his early cut-ups and his involvement with the legendary Roxy club.

Meet Mr K.

GS: How did you get into editing?DK: I think it happened in ‘83. I had just done my first remix. A good friend of mine was the main editor for WBLS , his name was Jonathan Fearing, and I used to talk to him about music. I remember after doing my mix the engineer messed up the whole session. He’d said ‘We can fix that in editing’. I’d just gone over it but when we got to the end, he couldn’t edit! And he’d just spent the whole session doing this bad edit! I had a reel-to-reel at home but I didn’t know enough to step in and do it for him – I just knew what a bad edit was. And I was very frustrated, I left there and I told my friend Jonathan what had happened. And he goes, ‘Oh well, this is how you do it, it’s A-B-C, it’s nothing! Next time you should just be able to jump in there and do it’. And he showed me and the very next mix I got, the same thing happened! Y’know, these mixes were important to get somewhere in the future – I just was SO frustrated. And after the second one –again, I didn’t really feel confident enough to jump in and do it for him – but somehow I just went home thinking ‘God, I should just try this, because I can’t do any worse than he did’. And I went home and I put together ‘Feelin James’.

GS: So that was your first attempt at making a cut-up medley track?DK: Well actually, what I did was I made the ‘Funky Drummer’ edit, James Brown, and from that I tried to make a medley out of it, something that I could play off a reel. So I made ‘Feelin’ James’ from that.

GS: That’s become a great classic of the cut’n’paste genre, along with ‘Rock the House’ and your version of ‘Love is the Message’, all on TD. Can you recall the chronology?DK: The first one was ‘Feelin James’, then almost immediately after was ‘Rock the House’. ‘Love is the Message’ was, if not next, then almost the next one. I think around the same time I’d re-done ‘Touch and Go’ by Ecstacy, Passion and Pain. The person who worked at Sunnyview Records had the master and knew that I’d done the edit. He said, ‘Hey, how about just re-making it for us?’ Almost immediately, a lot of these edits were turning into legitimate jobs – they were just the blueprint. The guy at Polygram had heard my ‘Funky Drummer’ and the other side of ‘Love is the Message’, ‘My First Mistake’ [a re-edit of the Chi-Lites song]. He owned both of those, so he said ‘Hey, how about doing that for Polygram?’ He had me do Brenda and The Tabulations also. But when I did ‘Funky Drummer’ for Polygram – that was ’86 – I’d probably done a few in between! But that really changed everything. When that came out legitimately it was the main sampled track – it was the first of the heavily sampled beats.

GS: I’ve got it on an Urban 12” …DK: It was released a few times. I did it for an album – the first time – called In The Jungle Groove [Polygram]. I helped mix some other James Brown songs but that edit really changed the whole thing with sampling. I kept doing these edits, and every time I’d do one, something would happen so I’d get a job from it! But I was doin a lot of them and it seemed like they added up to, by the early ‘90s, over a hundred. I think even by the mid ‘80s I’d already started doing the ‘Acapella Anonymous’ tracks, and by the late ‘80s, I mean Italy was just turning out records based on [them]! Some of them were just edits of things that weren’t acapellas – just little bits of where the music dropped out, and I made an acapella from it. Mid ‘80s, there were a LOT of edits.

GS: Did ‘Rock the House’ or ‘Feelin James’ ever get any kind of official release?DK: Well, no … the thing that happened with ‘Rock the House’ was that Arthur Bakerhad heard it and he had Gail ‘Sky’ King mix it behind a drumbeat, and they called it ‘Put the Needle to the Record’ [by the Criminal Element Orchestra]. I remember I ran into him right after that and asked him ‘Hey, you know that track, the “Rock the House” thing I did?’, and I wasn’t really tryin to trap him, but [laughs], he was like ‘That was a bootleg’. And I was like ‘Uh, I like what you did, you know’, and actually we became friends after that. That was the only way that [‘Rock the House’] actually came out officially.

GS: TD was strictly a bootleg label. Could you fill me in a bit more about that? I mean, was it only your edits that came out on it?DK: Basically, that’s all I remember on that label. There were a bunch of little labels and different edits would just pop up on them. I remember distinctly though, ‘Rock the House’ and ‘Feelin James’ were definitely inspired by [Grandmixer] D.ST. Those were things that he did live, and here I had to do it with editing.

GS: There’s some live cutting on ‘Rock the House’ though isn’t there?DK: Eh, I was imitating what I was hearing them do. I was scratching, and they called me Danny Rock, you know, ‘cos scratching at the time wasn’t so widely done. But my technique was primitive compared to someone like [D.ST]. I was almost embarrassed when I did that …

GS: No, I still think that sounds good! I think that’s why those particular cut-ups have still got a lot of popularity with the hip hop guys (in the UK anyway). I only realised recently that it was you who put them together – someone from the disco scene as well. That’s a really interesting crossing point …DK: In the eighties and early nineties, there were places where I’d play almost exclusively hip hop.

GS: You played at the Roxy, right?DK: I opened the Roxy the first night and I was the main DJ there for the first four years. So when they started doing the hip hop nights I helped produce the night. After [Ruza]Blue [the Englishwoman responsible for the legendary ‘Wheels of Steel’ night] left, I pretty much helped to organise the DJs and the music.

GS: So you were right there alongside the Zulu DJs …DK: Yeah, those guys were my major influence, and D.ST especially.

GS: Do you think there could ever be another crossover between hip hop and the downtown music scenes such as the Roxy achieved in the ‘80s?DK: It’s not that there couldn’t, it’s just a shame that there isn’t. You know, I could have said [the Roxy] couldn’t have happened. Things come along, it’s really just someone’s got to have the insight to do things just right. It’s not about success. Somehow success finds it because it’s so good. Roxy, when it first started doing those hip hop parties, they were pretty depressing … I mean they would get 75 people – maybe 100 if they’re lucky. In Roxy that looks like ghost town. Then, within a year or two, you were talking about the place being just big enough for the crowd.

GS: Must have been incredible …DK: Yeah, it really was. It was very intense, a very extreme mix of people, of music. The variety of music … yeah, it was really great.

GS: Did you ever run into any copyright problems with the edits you did? I guess with the James Brown things, you knew him from way back …DK: Fortunately, everything’s always been a positive story. I very carefully chose things so that I was tryin not to step on people. Usually it was people I didn’t know, but it was things that were really forgotten and they were filling a void up, a need – as opposed to, ‘Oh, this’ll make some money, I’ll take some money out of their pockets’. Sometimes they reinstated the popularity of something that was forgotten.

GS: That’s something Albert Cabrera said, that an edit would put a new twist on a track that was played out, give it new life …DK: … and then that artist can make money again.

GS: By the early to mid ‘80s, the techniques of tape editing had advanced considerably …DK: You know what, I was certainly not known so much for that. I did a couple of rolls or a couple of things, but not many. That was someone like Latin Rascals’ genre. To tell you the truth, I thought they were impressive in technique, but I was after what I considered I enjoyed on the dancefloor. And that wasn’t part of it. Shep Pettibone used to do things like that – a little primitive, but like that – Albert took it to another level –but the person who put it together for me the best way was Chep Nunez … Walter Gibbons, when I first heard those edits, there was no technique like that, it was really about extension.

GS: Techniques were one thing, but certain people put rhythms together in a very creative way, making more of a collage than a mastermix. That’s what I get from your work …DK: I tell you, there’s been edits where I’ve felt the edit takes on a life of its own, and becomes a different piece of music. Someone like Pal Joey for instance. A lot of his productions are basically samples of things but he has a certain way of editing the piece so that it’s a different record now, you don’t feel like it’s just this thing stuttering. Most of the time I felt people like Walter and me were just very involved with just, ‘Hey, the reason I did this song is because I loved it in the first place’. That’s the way it is. So I really have to keep the integrity of the song and know where not to change it. Then in the ‘80s there were people doing things that would alter it in a way that’s like ‘Hey, that’s a different piece of music’.

GS: You say you edited to make songs like you wanted to hear on the dancefloor. Other editors were making mixes primarily for the radio. Is it true to say that those were the really technical ones? DK: They were more radio but they were also more heady – they were more about ‘Hey, the star of this record is the edit, not the record’. Certainly they worked on some good records, but they worked on a lot of things where they didn’t mind completely taking

apart the record. I sometimes would just do one or two edits. Depending on the record, I didn’t want to overdo anything. They were coming from a different place.

GS: Is ‘The Mix Max Style’ by Mr K one of your edits as well?DK: Uh, what’s in it?

GS: It begins with a big piano rock’n’roll disco loop [actually ‘You Don’t Know How Hard It Is (To Make It)’ by the Magic Disco Machine], then it breaks down into different beats edited together, then it bangs back in with the pianos …DK: No, I think that wasn’t mine! The guy who put mine out, when he put ‘Mr K.’ on the first one, I said ‘Don’t do that any more!’ I said, ‘You can put Mr B., or Mr Z. or whatever, but don’t put anything associated with me’.

GS: So there’s another Mr K! Who was Special G then, the character credited with mixing ‘Rock the House’?DK: For all I know he put another letter for another one of mine, so I don’t know about that one. I didn’t know a Special G.

GS: It’s maybe appropriate that these things should remain shrouded in mystery! When did you think that tape splicing started to become obsolete?DK: I was late. I remember that Gail ‘Sky’ King had sold me her reel-to-reel, which was early nineties, ‘93 or ‘4. I remember thinking ‘This is a nice reel-to-reel and this is what I’m doing’, but she was already computer editing and showing me why she could never touch a reel-to-reel again. It just doesn’t do what she wants to do. With me, I was still doing things on the reel-to-reel three years ago.

GS: So what about the edits that got released alongside the new album?DK: They were all done on computer.

GS: You can almost tell …DK: Well, the thing that I usually hear most is that I lose a bit of quality with the tape because there’s a lot more handling. Also, if you get into an edit that isn’t just one edit, where you’re doing beats or things that happen a little more often, you really hear that [the parts are] not that similar.

GS: What’s your take on the continuing cut’n’paste tradition within hip hop and other genres? Do you think it’s become played out?DK: I think as time goes on, your mind is saturated with what preceded it, so you just have a lot higher expectations of what you’re satisfied with hearing or doing. The first time around, they got away with a lot of things that they wouldn’t do now. I think there’s still very much room for it now, it just has to be that much more progressed.

© Neil McMillan 2003