So good. "If I ever get a dollar/ I'm gonna squeeze until it holler/ Hard times/ Hard times got me now/ But ol' Confucius say: every dog got his day." Rest in peace.
It's triple coverage this Saturday at Grand Groove as I'm joined on the set by not one, but two fellow covers fanatics on the wheels: the grand imperial DJ Muro (otherwise known as the "King of Diggin'") str8 outta Tokyo, and my mellow my man DJ O-Dub (otherwise known to readers of fine music journalism as Oliver Wang of soul-sides.com) in town from the Left Coast. We'll be celebrating the unofficial domestic release of myself and Muro's Run For Cover II (BBP) mix - which should be in the shops any day now - by playing nuthin' but cover versions all night. I'm super excited to have all three of us together to do this party (somehow the stars aligned themselves). And if all goes according to plan there should be many drunken "oh shit!"-moments (the good kind, of course) when certain joints get played.
In commemoration of the event my Spine Magazine radio show, "Spine Blowing Decisions," this month is a special all-covers edition. A couple of the tracks may be familiar to those who've heard the Run For Cover mixes, but there's a whole lot of other sh*t on there that folks should hopefully also enjoy. (I've got a few in the chamber for Vol. 3.) Stream or DL here.
It's honestly kind of ass-backwards that everyone celebrates B.I.G.'s life on the day he was killed rather than on his born day. I guess it's because his passing was so shocking, the date is forever etched in our collective conscience. (You could also blame it on the only memorable thing Canibus' pen ever produced but that seems like giving that guy way too much credit.)
Anyways, I'll nonetheless fall in line with rap tradition by posting one of my favorite Biggie tracks of all-time. Which, naturally, isn't even technically a Biggie track:
Yeah, I know - you've heard this a million times already. If you're any kind of self-respecting fan of quality raps you've never gotten tired of it. Christopher Wallace, R.I.P.
For years, it seemed, whenever I would talk to Fine Wine after he'd just come back from visiting his hometown of Detroit I'd ask him, how was Detroit? To which he'd answer, good. Then he'd usually pause and look a little misty-eyed and say something like, "Man, you can always get great records there," or "Man, I'm tempted to move back home just for the records." Then Matt would inevitably mention his friend Brad Hales who ran his own store, People's Records, and how the locals would flock to his shop and sell him all this great sh*t. How all these amazing records would just walk in off the street all day everyday.
Well, in March of '05 I finally made it out to Detroit to peep People's for myself. (Lord SHR and I actually got flown out there by a big-time magazine to conduct a Q&A with a coupla big-time rappers. We even had a whole day of down time to ourselves to putz around town. And we didn't even have to transcribe the friggin' interview tape afterwards. F*ck, gift assignments like that might as well be from The Land That Time Forgot what with music magazines on life support and whatnot nowadays. But I digress...) And though no four-figure northern soul 45s walked in off the street on the afternoon I was there I did get to meet Brad. And I quickly understood why he was the sort of person regular folks would entrust to give them a fair deal on their old records: he was extremely passionate about the music yet extremely chill. And honest.
And hospitable. Besides turning me on to a bunch of cool 45s in the shop, he burned me copies of a few of his mixes, including the first volume of his ever popular "In the Modern Room." (As the co-resident at both Detroit's infamous after-hours all-nighter, "Funk Night", and the more northern, crossover and modern oriented Ann Arbor Soul Club, the scope of his record knowledge is, as you might expect, pretty wide.) When it was quitting time we wound up going back to his crib to check out more records that hadn't yet made it over to the store, and meet up with a few of his friends, including his boy Aaron.
Look, like I said, I'm the last person to not knock getting flown outta town and paid a decent wage by a national publication to Q&A it with a couple of famous rap dudes and all that. But typically the best part of these sort of gigs was what you were able to do with your time away from anyone related to the music industry. Along with dinner with some other friends the next night at once locally beloved, then-controversial, now-defunct Middle Eastern eatery La Shish in Dearborn (the only restaurant that I've ever dined at that was actually adjoined to a strip club - yo, does tabouli come with that shake?), building with Brad was the best part of my first real visit to tha D.
So, of course, I along with everyone else familiar with People's was deeply saddened when the news came down just over a year ago that Brad's store had suffered a devastating flood - the result of firefighters' attempts to extinguish a massive blaze at the Detroit's Forest Arms apartment building which housed it. (A century-old structure, it was also famous for being the place where Derrick May recorded "Strings of Life" and other Detroit techno classics.)
That was the sh*tty news. The more heartwarming news was the reaction from the soul, funk, and record collecting community - an outpouring of support in the form of hat-passing, and benefits and fundraisers to help People's relocate and get back on its feet (including two in NYC when Brad was in town just a few weeks after the fire: one at Bumpshop - which was just a great night - lots of love in the room; the other a more intimate affair at Matt's night at Botanica). The even better news was that by last fall Brad had gotten the store back up and running at a new location.
I have yet to make it out to Detroit to check out the new People's. (Which some might consider surprising since - as you can probably tell - I pretty much openly jock Detroit like it's nobody's business.) But apparently Martin Freeman has:
Gotta love youtube. How else would we non-BBC-watching folks experience the unique pleasure of seeing Brad Hales introduce "Tim" from the original UK production of The Office to the undeniable awesome-ness that is Dee Edwards' "Why Can't There Be Love" as the man who wrote the song, Hermon Weems, looks on?
If you're in the NYC area this Saturday you can catch Brad (and Aaron - a crazy deep soul and funk collecting and DJ-ing motherf*cker himself!) on the wheels at Bumpshop. Maybe at the end of the night one of them will play this:
"A rare peek inside my lair" was the subject of the email I got about a week ago with a link to this cool photo essay and interview with my longtime cohort Mr. Fine Wine. (The others in this blog's series - with the likes of Greg Caz and the homie Cosmo Baker are also great.) What, no pictures of records stacked in the kitchen like I'd heard all these years?!? "That was the old place," says Matt. Yo, Fine Wine fell off, yo!
