There was a dude that lived behind me,
kind of catty-corner to my house,
and he was a couple years older than me.
And whenever the first UTFO album came out,
again I'm bad with dates,
but I remember him playing that cassette on a boombox
and being utterly floored. I felt like I was on Mars.
It was like, so many realizations hit you at once.
You're like, "That's not a drum. What is that?
"I don't know, but that's not a drummer!
"Oh, people can like, rhythmically talk over a beat
"and it rhymes and it's cool and it's funny and
"they tell funny stories about, you know, whatever,
"getting thrown in a trash can and blah blah blah blah blah?"
That was my, one of those sort of galvanizing memories
that is just seared into my memory and kind of built my,
that's where I caught the bug for rap music.
And I really think, to a larger degree,
anything that was esoteric
or outside of my comprehension or understanding of music.
Hey, hey! This is RJD2
and you're checking out Cratediggers.
♪ ♪
Here's an example of something, I see it, I gotta have it.
If you got a dude playing Arp 2500 on it,
this is like, sort of experimental electronic music
from I think the mid-70's.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that's like,
no, how can you not buy that record when you see it?
There was a guy named Joe
who ran this store called Goldline Records,
and I would go in there a lot
'cause they had a lot of records on the floor
in these big long cardboard boxes, and you'd kinda,
it's all unorganized and you'd have to step over stuff
and it was really, nobody would really dig there
because it was physically uncomfortable,
and this was a great thing for me because I don't care.
I'll climb on top of a record to look at a record.
That's not a problem.
And I vividly remember being in there one day
and flipping through records and I could feel him,
he's like over my shoulder, and he's like "Hmm."
[loud breathing]
He's like, choking back his disapproval for minutes on end.
And I can tell he's there and he's not saying anything,
and I'm not saying anything, like "Get out of my face, dude!"
And then finally, he's like,
"You're not even looking at the sleeves! What are you doing?"
And I don't even remember what I said,
but it was one of those things that was like,
I remember in my head just thinking
"This makes perfect sense to me, but I can't put it in words,
"so I'm not gonna bother replying to this guy."
And I just- I just went on.
But it was one of those things that I realized,
yeah, what I'm looking for is familiarity.
I'm looking for records that I haven't seen before.
Again, keeping with my general ethos
about finding records that hadn't been used,
that no one had tapped as sample fodder,
my first and foremost thing when I was young and digging was,
I was just looking for a record that I'd never seen before.
Sort of academic ways to put it,
but I do believe if you do this long enough,
you just get a sense of intuition.
There's a component to this
that can't be put into words, honestly.
You just, you know. If you do this,
you know when a record intrigues you
and you know when it doesn't.
I don't know if I can verbalize it.
It's almost like,
looking through these records on occasion,
it makes me relive the experience
of having a realization about a record.
And I remember this, I remember I got this record in Canada,
it's on the Attic label.
And I was on tour opening for Shadow,
and I remember asking him about this record
because there was a drumbreak on it.
[off camera] I'm sorry, would you mind holding it up?
So you can see the label?
[off camera] I mean, if you don't want to.
I'm actually purposely doing this kind of thing
because I don't want to. [laughs]
[off camera] Okay we'll only use that camera.
So anyhow, I was opening for Shadow
and I remember asking about this record
and if he was aware that this record, you know,
those guys are like...
the drumbreak, like, whatever- Illuminati, if you will.
If it exists, they're gonna know about it.
So I remember asking him and he was like,
"Yeah, I know the label but I don't know that record."
So this is just a weird thing, pulling out this record
and seeing it for the first time in many, many years,
brought back that experience.
Right around the end of high school,
I didn't pick up an instrument for maybe 4, 5 or 6 years,
until the point that Deadringer came out.
The run up to my first album, all I had been doing
for the previous 5 years? 6 years? Maybe more,
was just, I was just in the zone as a producer.
I was just digging for records, MPC, that's it.
And I'm not exaggerating, that was an eleven hour a day,
11/12-hour, 13/14-hour day thing,
that I did seven days a week.
I'd wake up, I'd eat breakfast, I'd make some coffee,
and I'd clock a couple hours on the sampler.
I'd tune out, I'd leave the house,
go digging, do my rounds, come back at maybe 4,
then 4 to maybe 11pm, same deal.
I'd be on the sampler, going through records
trying to find source material, or on the sampler.
But I was hitting it pretty heavy duty
and my social life, at a point, suffered.
I remember there were a lot of nights
when my friends would be like,
"Yeah we're gonna go out,
"let's go drinking, let's go to the club!"
and I'd be like "Nah, oh it's 11? I'm gonna stay home,
"I gotta work on the MPC, I'll seeya tomorrow."
So, I grew up in Columbus, Ohio,
and then moved to Philadelphia in 2002,
so I see myself as having two homes.
So anything that's related to either Columbus or Philadelphia,
if I see something like this,
Philadelphia's Hometown Album,
I'm gonna have to buy it.
It might not be that promising, but that's the kind of thing-
oh, here's another one.
Traditional Music of Central Ohio.
Again, when I saw this, I had to buy this.
There's not much identifiers as to what this is,
and when I pull out the sleeve,
"Philadelphia isn't as bad as Philadelphians say it is."
And one thing I've learned living here
is that people in Philadelphia like nothing more
than to talk about what it's like living in Philadelphia.
I pulled this out because I think it's just,
probably historically significant.
This might be the only time in history
that an artist was featured on his own record,
and I don't think it's been done since.
This is Jibbs featuring Jibbs.
So I'd consider this a historically relevant record.
♪ ♪
A buddy of mine, Eric,
we were hip to this place called Robert's.
They were going out of business,
and all the LPs were a dollar
and all of the 45s were a quarter.
And he pulled this Pleasure Web record,
that a certain rap group had used,
and that was a valuable record and he got it for a quarter,
and that was a thing that kind of, in my small circle,
made the rounds, and everyone perked up.
They were like, "You pulled that out of there for a quarter?
"Okay, we gotta hit this!"
So I started making regular trips to Robert's.
They had this little room,
that was about the size of this room let's say.
Six feet wide, twelve feet deep, something like that.
45s, boxes of 45s, this is like a standard box of 45s.
And basically on every wall,
they're piled on top of each other
all the way up to the ceiling.
Totally unorganized, nobody's in there.
I go in there, and I start pulling out,
and remember, this is a quarter apiece for the 45s.
I start pulling out like, Ultimate Beats & Breaks
caliber funk records.
The Meters, Lowell Fulson, Eddie Bow. Stuff like that.
I'm doing, there's so much there
that I did maybe three or four days of straight eight hours,
I'd get there at 10,
I'd hit it til they'd have to kick me out of the store at 5.
And I'm out there, and I think I'm just like, destroying it.
In my head I'm like "I found the goldmine! I'm doing it!
"Living the dream!"
and I don't know how I had this,
one day I walk into the store, and you walk past the counter,
and you have to walk into the LP room
to get to this little 45 room that I was doing,
and I walk to the counter and I look to my right
and I'm like "What's in there?"
And they're like "Oh, that's just the other 45 room."
"Oh. Um."
So I walk in there, and there are metal shelves,
same height, alphabetized, a row.
And I go to the Bs.
It's a shelf this wide, six feet high, 45, full 45
box box box box box, box box box box box,
box box box box box.
The Bs is maybe five shelves long,
and I'm just looking at the James Brown section
of the 45s that are a quarter.
♪ ♪
♪ Uh ♪
♪ ♪
There's a bit of a slight organization here.
This stuff own here is all compilation stuff,
ultimate breaks and beats, these are sort of like,
ABCs for guys like me.
This is probably all stuff that I have yet to go through.
Or, actually, you know what?
This probably isn't stuff, I've gone through all of this stuff.
This is stuff that probably didn't' have a sample on it
but I didn't want to get rid of it for some reason.
Mostly jazz here, miscellaneous.
The twelve inches, party DJ type of stuff.
Rap LPs, these are rock records, listening as you can see.
Same deal here, soul records, just for listening.
When I first started making sample-based music,
or making beats, or whatever you wanna call it,
having my records organized in terms of knowing stuff,
where stuff was, was a challenge.
And my initial wave of organization was
to categorize things by their source material.
So this section here was strings,
these were piano samples.
These were acoustic guitar samples.
This is spoken word samples.
This is drunk breaks, electric guitar samples.
Organ samples.
I found, shortly after doing this,
that a much better way is to jam everything together
and then I use post-it notes to write on them.
So this was my new, so this is what I moved to later.
So you do a post-it note,
and then you write the location and what there is.
And then you can do multiple things.
What'll happen is you'll have a record with strings on side one,
track three, and maybe there's a drum break on side two,
track five, where do I put that?
In here, drum breaks back here.
Funk records in here.
This is stuff that was either gonna trade or give away.
This is all jazz.
Or sorry, this is jazz up here,
this is soul down here.
This is one of my favorite groups of all time,
Weather Report.
These records, this group totally rewrote how I see music,
and what can be done with music, in terms of it being
an intersection of jazz and something else.
They've been a hugely inspirational group for me.
I had a crisis moment in the mid to late 00s
at some point in time,
and I had gotten to a point where
this utilitarian thinking about records had gone so far
that I was not buying music to listen to at all.
And it got very, it was bad.
Not very impacting psychological experience,
but it really was,
it was kind of a dark time for me, musically.
And so I had to sort of rediscover
how to just buy records and enjoy, you know
I'd gone so far off the deep end
of not buying records for the sake of listening
and enjoying music, that I had to kind of recalibrate that.
And it also let me,
it opened up the world to a bunch of records
that I would've overlooked before.
I mean like, Weather Report records
are things that you'd see a dime a dozen, for,
I probably spent seven or eight or maybe ten years
just passing right by those kinds of records,
because I wasn't concerned with finding good music,
I was concerned with finding music I could sample.
And now I've radically sort of rewritten that part of my brain
so there's this whole world of records
that are easy to find stuff that is just great music,
and so that's been a sort of exciting time for me,
as a listener I would say.
Two great records I just happened to pull out.
I would consider classics in the music soundtrack world.
I don't know, have you ever seen Sorceror?
This scene, for listeners,
this scene that is documented on the cover of this,
is to me one of the most mindblowing visual images
I've ever seen recorded to film.
Because it was gone at a time when there was no CGI,
this couldn't be duplicated.
♪ ♪
So I have these kind of particular
wants and desires and intents
when it comes to buying records,
and it's all centered around making music,
so the other part of that is that
40% of the records I've ever owned, I've already given away.
I've already gotten rid of.
And that's because my bread and butter has always been:
buy 30 records.
Five of those will be useful, the other 25 will not be useful,
and they are not valuable to keep
because they are not collectible records.
So the other 25 goes back to the store.
Repeat process.
Once a day, for X amount of years, basically.
So I don't even know, I've never cared to count
because I'm not much of a collector,
and I've also never really cared to try and count
how much I've gotten rid of.
So before there was Serato, and all that,
and you could play things out of your computer,
there was a period where
there would be records on 45 that never got pressed on LP
and never got put on a compilation,
so your only option was to play the 45.
So I went through this phase-
I'm pulling this out because it's so ridiculous
that I did this at one point in time,
but this is all doubles.
These are 45 doubles of things
that I literally did back to backs,
like at a club, on 45s.
This is Nite-Liters, "Tanga Boo Gonk".
Lynn Collins, "Think About It".
George McCrae, "I Get Lifted".
Photos in College, "Tramp".
You know, classic break.
Pigmeat Markham, "Here Comes the Judge".
One on chess, one on "Goldie's 45".
So...
Gwen McCrae, "Rockin' Chair"-
this actually happens to be one of son's favorite songs.
I pulled them out because I just thought it was amusing,
like, I'm too old to be going back-to-back on a 45-
on two 45s in a club, you know what I mean?
You can make the argument that anybody's too old to do that.
[Laughing]
In between, you know, I'll get lazy
and I'll just, um, you know, I'll write "808",
you know what I mean?
I was like, "This record can't be worth anything."
"I don't know and I don't wanna know.
Let's not explore that.
All I know is it's got 808s on the B-side.
♪ ♪
If a 15-year-old kid
that's just grown up on iTunes and Spotify asked,
"Why is vinyl important?"
My response would be, "It isn't," you know,
"It's not, to you. This isn't of your generation.
"You didn't grow up in this." And that's perfectly fine.
I don't think that, you know, everybody should be-
you know, young producer kids, they'll- you know,
if they're looking up to Skrillex and Deadmau5,
why would they care?
And I don't think that they should.
It's part of the reason
that I actually wanted to be a part of this series is that
what I experienced in my generation isn't repeatable.
And that's fine, that's okay,
but it should be documented, I think.
I think as many of the different perspectives
that are had of people that do what I do
and came out of my graduating class, so to speak,
to some degree, our stories will die with us.
Also I don't wanna be that old dude that's like,
[Grunts]
"Whippersnappers on my lawn with their iTunes and their Spotify,"
you know? That's not appealing.
I don't feel a need to run with the bulls,
but I don't... at the same time I'm not...
[Chuckles] you know, I don't have such a myopic viewpoint
that I think everybody should do what I do.
♪ ♪