Crazy thing since writing last week’s post is that I remembered a few more record deals that almost went down before signing with URBnet for Career Crooks’ “Good Luck With That” and then POW Records for “Future Former Rapper” (shouts to Jeff Weiss and the crew!).
My first brush with a potential deal was around 2001-2002. I was only rapping for maybe 4-5 years. My dream was to drop out of college and become a full-time rapper much to the delight of my parents! I was dating a girl in college who had a production deal with Atlantic Records so it felt very attainable.
Was I even remotely good enough as an artist, writer, MC, etc? Of course not. I don’t think I spent more than a few hours even in a recording studio. But my childhood best friend and rap partner Dom aka Knowledge Don aka Nico the Beast was rapping on corners for Beanie Sigel’s brother News in South Philly while I was angling for free studio time at Temple University. Dom was 6’0’’, white Italian dude, with huge shoulders and hands. Only ever wore a giant white tee, basketball shorts, and Jordans with a Red Sox fitted.
He came across some dude from West Philly on those corners that was an A&R for A&M Records. He was always namedropping The Spooks, who just dropped “SIOSIS” album which stood for ‘Spooks Is On Some Other Shit’. They had mild rotation for the video “Things I’ve Seen”. They allegedly were huge overseas, and realizing the trip hop trojan horse with the female singer was a genius move in retrospect.
He would also talk about The Deadly Venoms, the all-female Wu-Tang affiliate group. They had the one chick who reminded me of Rah Digga. Their video for “Bomb Threat” would get burn, but their A&M album never dropped. Shaq and Kurupt did have albums on A&M - randomly just remembered this song Deadly Venoms had on the Shaq album “Respect”, which has possibly the worst album art ever.
My guess now is that he was a guy looking for talent, then wanting a finder’s fee when bigger fish came along for the bait. He brought me and Dom to his man’s spot in West Philly who had a studio in his basement. We were 20 years old and this guy was at least 35 with dreads and a requirement to take off your shoes before entering his lab. He had a mic setup near his washer and dryer with a desktop. This is the early days of Pro Tools, Audacity, etc and he was playing us beats. Their vision was to find an all-white group in the vein of City High, who were popping with that Wyclef song about kids starving at home.
So then we had to find a white female singer, which Dom just so happened to know of. He brought around this younger chick named Angela into the fold, and I brought around my homie John aka Johnnie Darko. John worked with me at the record store and was obsessed with anime, “The Matrix”, pop locking, trip hop, pulling white girls, and spending 3 hours to get ready to go anywhere. He was from Yeadon, a suburb of West Philly. So now there were 4 of us, and the A&R dude christened us “The Merx” cause we were about to “MERK THE WHOLE INDUSTRY”.
Well we needed some actual songs first. We were given “assignments” by the producer dude. He was trying to run his ship like how Diddy ended up doing later with The Band (no Diddy) - just a power trip in a time of extreme scarcity to 1) get beats 2) find a place to record and 3) get a record deal.
Naturally, our songs needed to be generic club bullshit. I wish I had a tape or CD-R of those demos. I can’t remember anything about them except dude would basically put us on “time out” until we “took this opportunity seriously”, so we couldn’t come to the studio. How do you get more comfortable and confident to make major label songs…if you can’t be in the studio?
The last thing I remember about this time was that the producer’s big idea for The Merx to get a big look was to flip “Under the Boardwalk” over the drums from Al Green’s “Love Stay Together”…but do it about “what cats is REALLY doing NOW under the boardwalk…smokin WEED, pullin CHICKS, all types of WILD SHIT!”.
Pathetic.
Stay tuned for part 3 next week!
-ZR