Well I just got my first DMCA post removal today. I figured, for a blog that featured unreleased music, that I wouldn't be dealing with such issues, but I guess I was wrong. For those wondering which post was removed, it was the Jaylib one. I understand why artists want to protect their content and it's not like I asked permission to post the collection, but I would have gladly removed it if I had been asked to. What kills me is I would have liked to leave the post up and just remove the link, but they didn't give me the chance. I don't blame Stones Throw or anyone from the label, especially as I'm assuming there was no direct involvement from them, but I do wish I would have been given the chance to alter the post myself. Guess I can't have everything.
Now, for the post at hand! This post is one of the main reasons I started this blog. This is going to be partly a very personal post as well as an informational one.
I've always bought a lot of records ever since I was a young child. When I got into my teens and got my first car I started making trips to my local record stores looking for new stuff I'd never heard. I made trips into the Cleveland suburbs to strange and special shops looking for anything that looked different and/or interesting, and it was fun. I used to go to Chris' Warped Records in Lakewood all the time and surf their bizarre collection of promo cds and tapes. I first heard Meat Beat Manifesto's "Storm The Studio" there when I bought an original, sealed Wax Trax cassette. I got Hrvatski's "Ouiseax 96-98" at Bent Crayon which, despite my disdain for it's owner, was and still is an incredible place to find electronic and indie stuff. I hit My Generation in Westlake for new releases at great prices and old releases at even better prices. I leared all about X and The Germs there and got lots of incredible imports that I've never seen elsewhere. But one of the albums that stuck in my head the hardest was found at of all places a Best Buy. I was still buying a lot of cassettes because my '77 Le Sabre had a barely functional tape deck and I drove a lot for work, so I liked to check the used and cut-out bins for anything that looked good. It was at this Best Buy that I saw a copy of the Jungle Brothers' "J Beez Wit The Remedy" and at only $3.99 knew I had to bite. It fit all the necessary criteria: It wasn't too old (3 years old at the time if I remember correctly), it was a group I liked and wanted to learn more about, and it had a parental advisory sticker which for some reason always attracts my attention. So I grabbed it and found myself playing it constantly in the car. I loved the album and some of my favorite tracks were "Book Of Rhyme Pages" and "Good Lookin Out", but I was simply blown away by the more experimental tracks like "For The Headz At Company Z" and "JBs Comin Through/Spittin Wicked Randomness". "Man Made Materials" and "Blahbludify" were also favorites and baffled me how this incredible and incredibly different record got released on a major label! Well, soon after I found out a little about how it almost didn't and heard rumblings of the infamous "Crazy Wisdom Masters", but that's all I heard for a long time.
For the uninformed, the story of "Crazy Wisdom Masters" and "J Beez Wit The Remedy" starts when the JBs and their pal and new member Torture, who is now known as Sensational, met Bill Laswell and started hanging out with him and some of his musical contemporaries. After adding vocals to a track for Laswell's Material, the JBs started working on a new record with Laswell as the producer. Eventually Bill had to return to his own duties and left the JBs in the hands of his engineers Bob Musso and David Williams. Unfortunately, all was not well as the JBs found themselves frustrated with Musso and Williams as they wanted to take their sound further and felt they were being held back. After a dispute, Musso and Williams were fired and Matt Stein, who was helping out in the studio, stepped into the engineer and producer role to help the JBs take it to the next level, which they wasted no time doing.
Matt Stein entered at a point where the JBs had recorded more than an album's worth of material but felt that they hadn't taken their sound nearly as far as they could have. Influenced by Torture's wild attitude toward music, the group decided to experiment with more fractured rhythms and abstract beats. Much has been said about Torture's influence, most often in two stories about his antics. The first involved he and the JBs at Bill Laswell's apartment. Bill would let them hang out there and listen to his records. One night, upon returning home, he entered to find Torture scratching a Stockhausen record and rhyming overtop it. Needless to say, Bill was intrigued. The other story involves Afrika and Mike G's growing relationship with Torture. It's been said that much of the reason Torture briefly became an official JB had to do with the fact that they thought he represented what the youth wanted to hear in hip-hop. What they didn't understand was that their 17 year old friend was not your average youth. He made his own lo-fi 4-track recordings in his bedroom that sounded nothing like standard hip-hop. He may also have been an influence in the group's use of "extracurricular substances" for inspiration. There are stories of the consumption of ridiculous amounts of marijuana among other things, but there were no permanent casualties of this experimentation, although Torture did spend years homeless where he spent most of his income on such substances. Torture has since recovered though, as did the rest of the group, although the album wasn't so lucky.
With Matt Stein behind the boards and continued assistance from Bill Laswell, the JBs completed their album which they christened "Crazy Wisdom Masters". CWM was nothing like then modern hip-hop as it featured noisy tape collages, live instrumentation from funk and avant-garde luminaries such as John Zorn, Gary "Mudbone" Cooper and Bernie Worrell, constantly changing rhythms and truly inspired rhymes. The group, Stein and Laswell felt they had upped the ante in the world of hip-hop. Warner Brothers, the JBs then label, didn't feel the same way though. In their opinion, CWM was too far out for the current climate and didn't have any commercial potential. This may have been related to issues the JBs were having with their then manager, Tony Meilandt, who was rumored to be no longer welcomed at Warner Brothers' offices. Regardless, the worst happened when the JBs with Stein and Laswell went to get the album mastered. Upon arrival at the studio they were presented with a FedEx from Warner Brothers informing them to remove the title track from the album. It's been said that this may have been related to comments taken as negative towards their then A&R in the song, although this has never been confirmed. It only got worse from there though, as Warners then decided to remix the album and attempt to make it more commercial. Bob Power was brought in to do the remix which was very significant when compared to the original version. Matt Stein himself said it was as different as day to night, which is clearly evident in the few tracks that have leaked over the years. At this point, it's unclear whether Afrika and Mike G were involved in the Power sessions, but Matt Stein and Bill Laswell were most certainly not. Tracks were removed and replaced with those from the pre-Stein sessions and most of the unique details of the finished CWM tracks were removed. Bob Power's version was named "J Beez Wit The Remedy" and Warners released it to mediocre reviews and lackluster sales. Most of the reviews complained about how the album was supposed to be such an advancement but didn't sound all that different from the rest of the then current hip-hop landscape. Even stranger, despite the commercialization of the album by Powers, some of the odder tracks from CWM like "For The Headz At Company Z" and "Spittin' Wicked Randomness" were left almost intact. The reviews didn't miss the opportunity to mentioned how mismatched these tracks were with the more commercial ones.
Despite their severe disappointment over the end of CWM, the JBs had to go on tour to support the Remedy album. Needless to say, their hearts weren't necessarily in it. On top of that, Matt Stein and Bill Laswell received no production or engineering credits whatsoever, getting only thank-yous in the credits. The production credits were given to the Jungle Brothers with additional production on selected tracks credited to Bob Power. Warners released "40 Below Trooper" and a remix by Q-Tip of "My Jimmy Weighs A Ton" renamed "On The Road Again" as singles, but neither did much and disappeared from radio and television quickly. That's pretty much where the story of "Crazy Wisdom Masters" would end, apart from the fact that Warner Brothers then released the track "Troopin' On The Down Lo" on a promotional compilation called "Trademark Of Quality". All of the promise of CWM could be heard in the nearly seven minute track as the beats constantly changed, speeding up and slowing down, with the JBs changing their flows just as often. It was a stunning track which, while it showed the album's promise, also showed the incredible loss.
Since the non-release of CWM, not much has happened for the crew. The JBs, for the time, went on hiatus or disbanded depending on who you ask. Torture left the group and was seen again a few years later as Sensational when he released his debut "Loaded With Power" on WordSound. This came about because of a CWM connection as well. Skiz Fernando, aka Spectre, is the owner of WordSound records and wrote a detailed article about the JBs label troubles for Vibe. The article, like CWM, got chopped up and barely saw publishing, but Skiz got to hear a track from a compilation Bill Laswell was working on that Torture did on his own during the CWM period. Fascinated with the track, Skiz got Bill to give him contact info for Torture and a long-lasting friendly and professional relationship was born. As for the JBs though, they did reunite a few years later to record "Raw Deluxe" for Gee Street which was more-or-less a return to form within the standards of the Native Tongue sound. De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest all made guest appearances on the album but it didn't really go anywhere. A few years later they released another record with Gee Street and V2 called "VIP". It was far more dance based with production from the Propellerheads and it yielded a few club hits, but not much else. They also released an album with Todd Terry shortly thereafter as well as a greatest hits compilation (suspiciously missing any content from the CWM/Remedy era) and a Japan-only album, but no big hits were to be found. Afrika has went on to start his own label, Baby Bam Records, and he can be found on his MySpace page where he appears to be returning to his freaky ways, which is exactly how we want him! Mike G is still recording with Matt Stein and members of the X-ecutioners but the status of that material is currently unknown, at least to me. The JBs, at this point, may exist only on paper and in memory, but the music lives on and I'm sure they'd rip it if they got back together. Who knows, there may be more JBs music in the future, but as they haven't updated their official site in some years we probably shouldn't be expecting anything anytime soon.
I want to give a HUMONGOUS THANK YOU to Dan Leroy, Skiz Fernando and Matt Stein for their time, patience and for bestowing their memories of "Crazy Wisdom Masters" upon me. Dan Leroy is the author of "The Greatest Music Never Sold" where he dedicated a chapter to the story of CWM. He has been fantastically patient and informative and it is greatly appreciated. The same can be said for Skiz Fernando, owner of WordSound and author of said unpublished article for Vibe, who also provided me with great stories and additional contact information for others associated with the group. You are awesome man! All the same goes for Matt Stein who provided me with even more stories and discussed the differences between Remedy and CWM. To all three of you, I want to thank you very much! I also did attempt to contact Mike G but was unable to do so. I was advised that Afrika would most likely not discuss the album due to bad vibes about it's final result and I would be better off not attempting to contact him, so for the time being I have not done so. If the opportunity arises I would love to talk with Mike G, Afrika, Sensational and Bill Laswell about the album, but time will tell.
To date, the full album has not leaked. In 1999, a limited, pseudo-bootleg 10" pressing of four songs from CWM appeared. It's not difficult to figure out who was responsible for it's release, but as copyright concerns have been expressed I'm not going to mention the source responsible, at least not right now. Since then, a few other tracks have found their way into the wild. What is assumed to be the original Bill Laswell mix of "Simple As That" surfaced as part of an unreleased compilation Laswell assembled. Another track, an instrumental labeled "Peace Akhi", was released on the Laswell curated "Valis I" compilation. This track appears to be connected to "Ra Ra Kid" which appears on the aforementioned 10" release. Another track on the "Valis I" comp labeled "Play To Win" has often been placed alongside the other CWM tracks, but Skiz confirmed to me that this was a Torture solo track, most likely recorded around the time of the CWM sessions, but definitely not part of the album. This in fact was the track that introduced Skiz to Torture's works. Despite it's non-relation to the album, I'm including it with some of the tracks featured below for those interested in hearing it. Apart from these mentioned, there is also "Troopin' On The Down Lo" which received a pseudo-official release as part of Warner Brothers' "Trademark Of Quality" compilation. From what I understand, those compilations were produced exclusively for music industry gatherings and don't exist in terribly large numbers, but they are out there and I'm sure those looking will find one. Lastly, "J Beez Wit The Remedy" is sadly out of print. This is most likely due to it's poor sales performance but, in the digital era, it's pretty shameless when labels can't make their back catalogue available online. There very well could be other reasons it's no longer available officially anywhere, but it's most likely Warner's apathy towards a non-selling product, which also stemmed from their apathy from the original version of the album.
It's worth noting that I have not heard the complete "Crazy Wisdom Masters", but I can hope, can't I? When you wish upon a star, or exploding sun, or whatever...
Jungle Brothers - Crazy Wisdom Masters Extracts
Crazy Wisdom Masters: The Payback EP
01 Battle Show
02 Ra Ra Kid
03 Spittin' Wicked Randomness
04 Hedz At Kompany Z
Additional Tracks
Troopin' On The Down Lo
Simple As That (Original Mix)
Peace Akhi
From The Jungle Approach: Play To Win
Jungle Brothers - J Beez Wit The Remedy
01 40 Below Trooper
02 Book Of Rhyme Pages
03 My Jimmy Weighs A Ton
04 Good Ole Hype Shit
05 Blahbludify
06 Spark A New Flame
07 I'm In Love With Indica
08 Simple As That
09 All I Think About Is You
10 Good Lookin Out
11 JB's Comin Through
12 Spittin Wicked Randomness
13 For The Headz At Company Z
14 Man Made Material
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