In Dec —- I graduated from college. My plan was to move straight to New York or Atlanta. My boy Leon was staying in Atlanta at the time. He told me not to come because he knew a couple of accountant graduates who weren’t having great luck finding that, just so right, accounting job. Now I don’t know, but maybe he was hatin’, and didn’t want to see me prosper because I think I could have found the right job. But then again, when I first graduated from school, I was sending a resume in to anything that had to do with accounting: accounting clerk, payroll accounting clerk, staff accountant. Maybe the people he knew were doing the same thing and getting into jobs that were not so accountant like. So after he told me that, I started focusing my attention on New York, going to the library and searching the N.Y. Times and sending out resumes. I was getting no responses, but I kept trying.
Like in January my girlfriend of three months was pregnant. After that I dropped the New York idea and started concentrating on Akron and Cleveland and Youngstown/Boardman. Even though I graduated from Youngstown State University, I pretty much figured the only way I was going to get a job in Boardman was to have excellent grades; have played on the football team, or to be white. I graduated with a 2.6, didn’t play football and I wasn’t white.
I took a part time job at a record store called NRM in our local mall. I worked there for like two month and then decided that I needed to quit to focus more on finding me a job in my field of accounting. So the search was on and I was getting interviews from out of the Cleveland area, but no offers. After about five months, in June I got a job offer from Dairy Mart Corp, a well-known convenience store chain. My starting salary was $25,000. First thing I did was pay off my credit card bill which was small, only about $3,500, compared to most people I knew at the time. I would pay like $700 a month.
When I graduated from college, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a Hip Hop producer. I started telling my friends and whoever would listen that was what I wanted to do with my life, not accounting. After I finished paying off my credit card bill, I started saving for my ASR 10 keyboard, which I purchased in March of 1998. Me and some friends of mine had also made plans to purchase a sampler. We all paid $15 a month and got an ASR X which was mainly kept by Burton and Billy. Our plan was to make a CD with about six songs on it. I wasn’t supposed to purchase my own sampler, we were all just supposed to purchase one together and have it from house to house to make beats together, but I couldn’t see myself working like that.
We started off rolling. Nelson and I were writing songs to the beats Billy and Burton had done, and it seemed as if we got off to a great start. We had some pretty good songs too. But then Billy decides that he wants to rhyme, which I’m not too impressed by his rhyme skill. We changed the plans and basically threw out like six songs we planned to record and started over, and this would be the cycle.
We went to one garbage studio and recorded two songs and we were on our way. We went the next week, and the engineer guy didn’t show up. We had two more songs ready to go. Nelson and I could get together like a crew is supposed to and write a song in 30 mins to an hour. After we couldn’t get in touch with the engineer, we had to find another studio which we did like four months later.
So here I was rapping again. I started out as a solo MC, and now here I was rapping with the guy Nelson, who was once my DJ. After we broke up TWC, about six months to a year later, he started writing rhymes. If that was what he really wanted to do back when we were together, he could have said so, and we could have found another DJ. I was in group mode now; me and Nelson as the main MCs, and Billy and Burton and me on the production team. But yeah while I was in group mode, I think Billy was in some other mode. He could never write with us, and he seemed to be hard pressed to do songs with him and Nelson on the vocals because they were a group after Nelson and I broke up. Billy would always change his mind on songs that we were to go into the studio and do. Scrap the old and pick up the new, which I thought was flaky. We couldn’t decide how many songs we would all produce each. I came with the idea that we split production, but Burton and Billy disagreed.
By the time we were ready to start going to the new studio and record, I was moving to New York to work and pursue my dream to get into Hip Hop production for real. I would come back to Ohio every two weeks in order to maintain a relationship with my daughter and my girlfriend Sausha. So now that I was gone, we would go to the studio every time I came home. I had no money for studio time because the initial move to New York kilt my finances, and I just couldn’t afford it. I was barely living. Well, I was living, but I had no money for extra-curricular activity. I told them I would pay them when I got my income tax return. We recorded the two songs that we did in the garbage studio over and they sounded good. We recorded about seven or eight songs in all.
The songs we recorded, I wasn’t too excited about them. The songs that Billy and Nelson did by themselves, I could see Billy’s enthusiasm like on Fresh MC, and Holy War. In our songs there wasn’t enough interchanging between us like most groups do. Billy would always say, “let’s do one 16 bar verse each and that would be it.” We never could write a song with subject matter because we never got together to write songs. If you listen to groups like The Flip Mode Squad, Wu-Tang, Slum Village, those groups interchange rhymes like they all in it together and write it together and were all feeling it. I tried to express this to Billy and Burton but I never got heard. On a song that I produced called “We don’t dance”, Billy says he didn’t like the song. He wrote a wack verse to it. Nelson ripped the song down with his lyrics, and my verse was alright. I just got the feeling from Billy that he wasn’t into the total group thing with me included. Now him and Nelson, yeah, but him, Nelson and me, no! To this date, we still need to complete one more song. It probably will not get completed. Personally I have no money for this project. When I was in town, I made the suggestion that we put like $75 each in a pot for studio time. They x-ed that idea.
I feel Burton and Billy think they know too damn much about Hip Hop to let anybody have some input without disagreement. I’ve kind of proven this to myself when I was working on songs with Priest and The Sewer Rats. Me and Priest completed a track in like an hour. The Sewer Rats recorded one of my songs in the studio; put some lyrics over my beat and it came out dope. This happened because they let me do my thing and I let them do their thing. The beat me and Priest produced, I layed down a piano track, he layed down a bass line and a beat. I did the beat over and added some other stuff and it was complete. I could never do that with Burton or Billy. So who knows what will become of us. I want to be in a rap group. I feel group albums more than solo albums, and the group albums usually sell more. I was thinking of getting two females and starting a group.
The Only Child 1988 