Posted in Blog Entries, Maaan The First Time I Heard.This is based on the music I played on my radio shows this year, so there's probably some things I left out. This should be fun as well as a test in how effective this daily dose of gingko biloba is that I ingest with my ‘bruffus’…
“Maaan, the first time I heard…” is a series of blog entires I’ll be putting together where, you guessed it… I recall the first time I placed my ears on specific songs or albums. Who would have known that I would be in the Barak Studios working with these kats less than three years later. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but the elements that made up this excellence of a song and almost ended up in somebody’s ditch….Thank you, SV for damn near raising my car insurance in 2000. With all of those contributing factors coming together at once, I tell NO lie… I almost ran myself off of the road……. I heard that piece and I LOST it, literally. The WILD shit was, underneath her vocals they scratched in the “Space Intro” joint by Steve Miller Band, which at the time I had recently picked that same SMB album up in a dollar bin at a store in Nashville. ….beeeein’ witchu all alone, is like a dreeeam COME true, true, true….”īut that wasn’t the wild shit…. “I want you right heeeeere in my worrrrrld…… Tina Marie Glover a/k/a Airasoul came in with…. The first two notes of that thick bassline pushed through my subwoofers and my mind was absolutely blown and all I could manage to get out was, “YOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” …And JUST when I didn’t think it couldn’t get any better after Dilla’s verse…… The hook came in. The beat dropped in with this eerie, yet pretty atmospheric filtered out chords while the first clap hit on the “know”….By this time I was already completely captivated by the first half of the beat… And then it happened…. After the intro, “Conant Gardens” hit me over the head with a stand out bass riff that was perfectly complimented by those signature hard ass Jay Dee drums that SNAPPED, followed by “I Don’t Know” and “Jealousy”…… and then after a brief phone skit starring Jay Dee and a young lady, the phone convo broke away very quickly right into into Dilla saying, I arrived at the spot, ran in, found and purchased the Slum CD, got back into the car and tore away the wrapping with my trusty “EZ-CD opener” they used to give us at the beginning of each college year and popped the album in the player.
Now, let’s also keep in mind that I had a couple of 12″ subs in the trunk of my car as well (I had them put in because of yet ANOTHER DIlla-produced track… A Tribe Called Quest’s “Find A Way”).
It was nice outside because I can remember driving over to Sam Goody with all of my windows down. The date finally came… Tuesday, June 13, 2000. I’m sure I probably looked through the latest issue of The Source magazine for an official release date, marked it down and made sure that when that Tuesday arrived, I was at the nearest music store, front and center at the cash register with a copy in my hand ready to purchase…Īlready a huge SV fan off of tracks like “I Don’t Know”, “2U4U”, “Fantastic”, “The Look Of Love” and “Players” (later on, I’ll have to share that story as well), I was MORE THAN ready for a full-length album of theirs to be released. 2 album was at the TOP of my to-do list at the time. I was back home in Michigan for part of the summer and buying SV’s Fantastic Vol. 2. So, let’s rewind back to the summer of 2000… My 12-year baseball career had just come to an end and I only had two classes remaining in order to graduate from Western Kentucky University.
I have PLENTY of musical Dilla memories, but the one that probably sticks out the most is when I first heard Slum Village’s “Climax” from their album, Fantastic Vol.