I’ve been bumping a bunch of Tony D favorites this morning and remembering Tone and his musical legacy.
In case you didn’t catch it the first time around, here’s the first track from a new project that Shawn Lov, G, and others from the NJ underground are putting together. It’s dedicated to Tony and features a bunch of Trenton legends:
Miss you, Tone.
Starting with this posting, all Club Krush and Raw Deal postings will be uploaded as WAV files to the Internet Archive. This helps ensure that the files will be safe for years to come (and not suffer the fate of the files that had been uploaded to Megaupload) as well as offloading bandwidth and storage costs to the kind folks at the IA. This also means that files will be available in a variety of formats, both lossless and lossy, and will be easily streamable. In time, I’ll be moving all old episodes of the show over to the IA.
Please consider donating to the Internet Archive to help support the amazing work they do archive web sites, audio, video, and more.
This episode of Club Krush came from one of those colorful Memorex tapes that were everywhere in the late-80s and early-90s. While they were on the lower end in terms of tape quality, they occasionally made things even worse by tacking on an extra 20 minutes of blank tape as a bonus. Unfortunately, tapes over 90 minutes are more prone to breakage. Thankfully, this particular 110-minute tape hadn’t yet snapped, so I wanted to make sure it was archived early on.
I place this show in August 1990, though it’s possible it came from as early as July 1990. Three clues:
The tape quality’s not great and the show’s not terribly remarkable, but it is a solid one with some guests in the studio, discussing and debuting new music. Guests include the Suicide Posse, whose EP had just been pressed, 360 Degrees, whose very underrated EP had just hit stores, and Cut Master B and DJ Juice, who talked up an upcoming North Side Production$ 12″.
There’s a nice blend of an instrumental of EPMD’s “The Big Payback” with the vocals Eric B. & Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul.”
(Raw notes, including a track list, are available on the IA archive page. So are additional file formats.)
When I first met Jay-Ski online over 20 years ago, I had no idea what a big deal the guy would become. Of course, it totally makes sense, as he was one of the most talented DJs and turntablists in the New Jersey/Philadelphia area (still).
Today, I’ve got one of the early entries in Jay-Ski’s mixtape series. Volume 9 comes from 1995 and has plenty of patented Jay-Ski cuts, remixes, and a slew of local MCs you’ve probably never heard before (except maybe for WPRB regular Zulu–now Zxulu–The One Man Gang).
My copy is a dub (oops, sorry, Jay), but the rip is still pretty decent quality. My favorite cut on here is the super-long Jersey-centric posse cut, “Session Numba Nine.” Maybe Jay can chime in with the full MC line-up.
And, get this: Jay-Ski even spits a verse. Not something you hear every day!
Side One
Side Two
During my senior year of college, my radio show was a three-hour show titled “Return to the Attic,” which referred back to my first radio show as well as the attic space the radio station was housed in at the time. This show was my second-to-last episode of my college tenure. Rather than go freeform, I decided to do an all-reggae show. I titled it “Level the Vibes,” which was the reggae show I hosted a few years previous (the title itself an obvious reference to Half Pint).
I run through sets of roots and lovers rock, dub, dancehall, and hip-hop reggae and am joined in studio by my then-girlfriend (now-wife) Huyen, Chevy, Donny, and Thuy. At one point late in the show, I drop a few radio ads over dub tracks to spice things up a bit.
This is one of my favorite shows to go back and listen to because I spun strictly music I loved (rather than trying to focus on new releases, etc.), had friends in the studio with me for much of the show, and was clearly having fun. Good times, good times.
(Ripped at a completely inappropriate 320k.)
It’s been two years since Tone died. I’m going to try and get together some new PRB stuff to share shortly. In the meantime, here’s a track I hadn’t heard before that that Tone did with Shawn Lov back in ’98 called “Wack Emcees Get Murdered Day” (shouts to Shawn for posting it):
RIP, Tone.
(More…)
Normal Bias is a music blog dedicated to preserving the radio shows, demos, and out-of-print music living on cassette in my basement.
