Mark Ronson

And Large Professor, a very popular producer of the time, had grabbed the record and decided maybe listen to it quickly.

It wasn't for him and handed it to Pete Rock while he was leaving.

Like, hey, there's nothing for me on here.

Like, you might dig this.

And then the fact that it's an obscure... Tom Scott was this incredible session saxophone player who played with Joni Mitchell and on countless...

film soundtracks and so celebrated now but back then he was just making an obscure jazz instrumentalist record where he was covering also like not obscure but a lesser known song by the Jefferson Airplane and like how do all these things come together to then provide the music for one of the most sort of

iconic hip-hop songs of its era was just such a wonderful sort of patchwork of all these coincidences.

It was so emblematic of that time.

Oh my God.

Well, this record was an obscure record, like most things, and probably a $5 record until that sample happened, and then suddenly it was a $100 record, because now it's part of an iconic, it's part of history, and everyone wants to also check what other gold might be on that album.

So that record was out of the question for me to have at that point, because it was a $100 record, but...

i would you know there was no streaming there was nothing there so i there was one guy at my college this uh dj record collector named ben velez who i knew who had that record and i would just go to his room like sometimes he would come back to his dorm room he's a senior and i was a freshman and i'd be like sitting outside his dorm room waiting for him to like open the door so i could come and listen to some of these records again because that's

And I had to spend, like, the first month at college, like, proving my worth and, like, trustworthiness to him so he would even let me listen to records.

So, like, it was such an interesting time that if there's something that you love, like, the access to it was so slim and you had to kind of, like, befriend people who had the records and then prove yourself as, you know, whatever, like, a genuine musician.

Music appreciator.

Of course, I love it because it made everything so sacred, but it's ridiculous now to think you could just go to Who Sampled and you would find out what the thing was and you would immediately go to Spotify or YouTube.

Oh, my God.

I mean, all of it.

I mean, so the standard that I would take on any given night was probably three crates with 100 records each and maybe like a giant bursting bag because you're taking old school disco and classics, old school hip hop, new school hip hop, R&B, reggae, a little bit of house music.

So if you're doing a four or five-hour set, which is what we're doing most nights, that's what you're bringing.