808 Page #8

du dum, do do do do du dum boom.

I pulled the damn needle

off the sh*t.

Alright, let's do it.

I would just tinker around,

when I actually got one.

I actually take the 808 drum

machine into parties with me,

so, you know, you're playing a popular

record, you know what I mean,

and then you turn

the machine on.

It's a record that nobody knows, or

at least they think it's a record,

but they don't realize it's a drum machine

that's up there playing you know what I mean.

So, you know, then you're able to

solo your scratches and all of that,

and do your little thing to it.

That's what you would do live and

people would just think that,

"Man what is he doing up there,

he's ruining something,

or he's making something,

he's creating something."

It was all about the bass, it

was all about the bass.

To me the whole world

was about the bass.

So many kinds, where

can we start?

We like them dumb and

we like them smart

I like the ones with

the pretty eyes

Well I like all

kinds of guys

Stop. What happened, how about

the ones we especially like?

Which ones? You know the

ones with the cars that go

I hear you, hit it!

In Hollis rap music was big but it was

kinda more like Run DMC and LL Cool J.

You were fly when you had

gold chains and Adidas.

In Miami you were fly if your

speaker system rattled the windows,

if you annoyed the neighbors.

It was me and the

posse with Bunny D

We were cruising in the

Jags or the Lamborghinis

When low and behold there

appeared a mirage

He was hooking up a car

in his daddy's garage

It was full on culture shock, the music was

different, they talked with a funny accent,

they wore funny clothes, but, you know, it

kind of rocked my world. I just adapted.

Bass, I assume, but then he turned a

little button and the car went boom

You'd be driving any time in Miami back

in those days and a car would pass you,

and your car would literally

freeze in the road because that,

that 808 would just,

you know what I mean.

Do do do do boom

boom, boom boom.

You know, all bass music, and people

were like, they were building systems

bigger than any system I'd ever

seen in the back of a car.

They're always adding speakers when they

find the room, cuz they know we love

The inspiration came from these two

old Jewish dudes in the studio.

We had recorded the whole album

and they kept pushing,

"Write a song about the cars, you guys are

always cruising around with these big systems,

"write about that." And we were like,

"Don't nobody want to hear about that."

So we kind of postponed writing it and then at

the very last minute we needed an extra track

and we were like, "Oh,

it will be a B-Side."

I wrote it in like

fifteen minutes.

The lyrics and everything,

because we thought it was kind of silly,

and then, yea, and then it charted.

The cars that go boom

We had other songs that we thought

were going to be the smashes,

but we loved it, you know,

it was really playful.

It kind of like spoke to our generation

and our culture at least in Miami.

That's what we did

we cruised around

and we especially liked the guys

with the cars that went boom.

We coming from the reggae experience,

we know what the deep bass is.

But this is almost like a tone now,

it's not like the bass guitar it's that

resonance of that low end.

Dynamix II actually did a

record,

I want to say it was in '87

called 'Give The DJ a Break'.

And they were one of the first

groups to tune the 808 drum.

Just give the DJ a break

Just give the DJ a break

We just had an idea to take the 808 and

make it the bass line for the song.

So we took the 808 and married

it with a 909 and an emulator

and brought it into an SP-1200

and played it in multi tones.

As soon as that happened, we get, we sort of got

credit for being the first record to do that

down here, and it was a huge

record. Went gold for us.

Eric Griffin was the programmer

on that song

and he took the 808 kick drum

in its full decay and tuned it.

But he did something to it that

gave it a unique sound.

I don't know, I don't know exactly what he did.

I never got a chance to find that out.

Please stay tuned

Please stay tuned

But I was given that

sound by Dave Noller,

and I actually have

that sound there.

So it's got the punch and the decay,

but it's got almost like a...

you know, sign wave

or triangle wave,

and that just had everyone's

head spinning,

"Woah, how'd they do that?" You

know?

And that's where the SP-1200

drum machine came in,

which... It enabled us to

tune the sounds, you know,

even the snare drums we would be able to take

the original snare and we did things like...

You know, so it just, it

just hot-roded the 808.

In Italy, producer Tony Carrasco

was introduced to the 808,

and would produce a seminal record that influenced

everyone from New Order to the Pet Shop Boys.

One of my friends who has, he

had this whole

sound gear, all

of this analog stuff,

he brought it in and said, "I think

you would like this drum machine."

So he gave it to me and showed me a couple of the step

programs he was doing on this drum machine and I said,

"Wow, I've got to try to do something on this

drum machine, do sort of a record on it."

Carrasco used the 808 on a couple of recordings

before he began working with Mario Boncaldo

on what would become

Klein & MBO.

Mario Boncaldo came to me

with this demo and I said,

"Wow I like that. Let's

try to produce that."

The idea was something very

Human League, you know.

I knew it was going to be a big

record, because it's just,

it's just one of those things you feel

when the chemistry is right, you know.

When we finished the mix I took it back

to the club I was playing in Milan,

people on the dance floor just

responded tremendously and I said,

"Wow this is going to be big." Two months

later some fashion model came into the club

and he said, "This record... They're

playing this record in New York."

I said, "Really?" He goes.

"Yea it's just blowing up."

Thanks to Jellybean, of course,

my best friend, you know.

'Dirty Talk' was really

interesting because it

used the 808 but it also had

this like

Italian thing to it. Tony

Carrasco

who was the writer and

the artist and producer of it

was a New York DJ for a long

time and moved to Italy,

so he sort of fused like sort of the

Italian disco thing but it also kept

sort of the underground thing

that was happening in New York,

and was a very, very big record.

They really rocked the

percussion and the hi-hats

so now you found another element

of the 808 that was really

interesting, it wasn't all about

just the kick and the snare no more,

now you had the do do do do do do do do. And you

had all that type of stuff making you dance.

That's one thing about the sound of the

808 it had the ultimate dance feel to it.

Klein & MBO wasn't even a

record it was like ok

what are they saying, nobody

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