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Paul Nice – The Unkut Interview
Posted on April 13, 2024 by Robbie
It’s been a tough week, with Mr. Cee, Patti Astor and Paul Nice all leaving us. I’ve revisited and re-transcribed the interview I did with Paul in January 2015 for my Ultimate Breaks and Beats feature for Cuepoint so that I can share his personal reflections on the series that changed everything, and the inspiration for the final mixtape he released in 2018.
Robbie: What’s your first memory of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats?
Paul Nice: There was a local DJ where I grew-up named Eddie On, or Eddie On-Time. In maybe ’84, ’85 he was at Catherine Street Center, which was a local community centre where all the local DJ’s would throw parties, and he was cutting up ‘Mary, Mary’ by The Monkees. I just thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t what I was used to hearing [laughs], straight-up rap records, at the time. I just loved it. I saw that it wasn’t a Monkees record, it was this compilation. My DJ partner – Disco T – we would alternate and go back and forth from Poughkeepsie to New York City, which is a little over an hour drive or an hour and a half on the train. We’d go to Music Factory, we’d alternate once every other week. My partner was the first to pick up copies of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats, and that first volume was the one with ‘Mary, Mary’ on it. But he only had one copy of it, which made no sense to me! [laughs] I ended up saving my money as a dishwater, I think it was the summer of ‘85 and going down and buying the volumes that were out at the time. I remember at the Music Factory the rack was off to the right from the counter, it was a display rack, and they weren’t listed as Ultimate Breaks and Beats. There was just a little white placard card in front of each record and it said, ‘Volume 1’, ‘Volume 2’ and so on. Among the local DJ’s from where I was from, where I grew-up in Poughkeepsie, we didn’t refer to them as Ultimate Breaks and Beats – we referred to them as ‘The Volumes’. ‘Did you get the latest Volume?’
The Octopus records, my friend and mentor DJ Joey T had…I forget which volume it was? Maybe 7, the one with ‘Midnight Theme’ on it. I think ‘Two Pigs and A Hog’ was one that was supposed to be on one of the volumes of Ultimate Breaks and Beats and it got discontinued [laughs]. The only reason I knew that – and I talked to Jorun Bombay about this, he had the same thing – is when I was buying a bunch of these, I was ringing them up in Music Factory and there was a sheet – an 8 x 10 piece of paper with the Street Beats letterhead on the top of it. Essentially it was a catalogue, a track listing of every song on every volume they had, in addition to the artists names, which as you know weren’t on the back of the records. That was very helpful. This was a way for me to keep track of what volumes that I wanted to buy next time that I went down. That was my start.
Did you notice that a lot of hip-hop records would sample the new volumes as they came out?
Definitely, especially towards the later volumes. I called them ‘foundation’ records – they really were the foundation for golden era hip-hop. I think Diamond D said, ‘Lazy producers? Sometimes you would hear three or four songs off the same volume.’ Some of the more refined tastemakers like Diamond D – those guys who would shine a little bit later and were a little bit more innovative with their production techniques – would try not to sample from there. At some point it was obvious that those were the go-to records.
It’s interesting that there’s almost nobody who’s willing to admit that they sampled off of them.
You never know. There was that Dismasters song called ‘Keisha’ which was off the ‘Keep Your Distance’, the Babe Ruth [song]. I think Salt ‘N Pepa used a different part of that same record. When that came out I was like, ‘Oh wow!’ In hindsight – and maybe this is just me being cynical – but maybe Hurby The Luvbug got it right from the Volumes, the Ultimate Breaks and Beats albums, and Chuck Chillout or one of these guys from Bronxwood Productions or whoever was behind the Dismasters actually had the original record. I don’t know, it’s a mystery.
Was it a valuable tool at the time for you, as a DJ, as far as providing records you couldn’t find otherwise?
Yeah. I lived close to New York but I was still out of the circle, so to speak. This was years before the internet, so unless you were within the circle of the Zulu Nation DJ’s or whatever, you weren’t gonna know what these records were. Music Factory had, for example, Bob James ‘Take Me To The Mardi Gras’. They had other records there – break records – in a small section near where the display rack was for Ultimate Breaks and Beats. So we knew some of those records. I look at it as a transitional period, from the time that those records first came out, it kind of fed on itself in terms of the creative of producers and trying to dig deeper. It was more of a digging renaissance where people, at some point, when the later volumes came out in the late eighties, early nineties when the volumes stopped coming out, most people were like, ‘Well, there’s no more Ultimate Breaks and Beats‘. I think people were forced to be more creative and dig deeper and sample records that people wouldn’t have sampled before. That was very helpful. My sister collected stuff from all genres and I remember digging through her crates and finding the Blackbyrds-era records and the soundtrack from Cornbread, Earl and Me and Flying High and Super Fly and finding stuff on my own. But having that list that I was telling you about was crucial because when I started to search for my own records I recognized the names of artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise have decided to pick out.
Later on there was also the issue with sample breaks compilations revealing the names of the records that had previously been sampled, which pissed a lot of people off.
Posted on April 13, 2024 by Robbie
It’s been a tough week, with Mr. Cee, Patti Astor and Paul Nice all leaving us. I’ve revisited and re-transcribed the interview I did with Paul in January 2015 for my Ultimate Breaks and Beats feature for Cuepoint so that I can share his personal reflections on the series that changed everything, and the inspiration for the final mixtape he released in 2018.
Robbie: What’s your first memory of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats?
Paul Nice: There was a local DJ where I grew-up named Eddie On, or Eddie On-Time. In maybe ’84, ’85 he was at Catherine Street Center, which was a local community centre where all the local DJ’s would throw parties, and he was cutting up ‘Mary, Mary’ by The Monkees. I just thought that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t what I was used to hearing [laughs], straight-up rap records, at the time. I just loved it. I saw that it wasn’t a Monkees record, it was this compilation. My DJ partner – Disco T – we would alternate and go back and forth from Poughkeepsie to New York City, which is a little over an hour drive or an hour and a half on the train. We’d go to Music Factory, we’d alternate once every other week. My partner was the first to pick up copies of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats, and that first volume was the one with ‘Mary, Mary’ on it. But he only had one copy of it, which made no sense to me! [laughs] I ended up saving my money as a dishwater, I think it was the summer of ‘85 and going down and buying the volumes that were out at the time. I remember at the Music Factory the rack was off to the right from the counter, it was a display rack, and they weren’t listed as Ultimate Breaks and Beats. There was just a little white placard card in front of each record and it said, ‘Volume 1’, ‘Volume 2’ and so on. Among the local DJ’s from where I was from, where I grew-up in Poughkeepsie, we didn’t refer to them as Ultimate Breaks and Beats – we referred to them as ‘The Volumes’. ‘Did you get the latest Volume?’
The Octopus records, my friend and mentor DJ Joey T had…I forget which volume it was? Maybe 7, the one with ‘Midnight Theme’ on it. I think ‘Two Pigs and A Hog’ was one that was supposed to be on one of the volumes of Ultimate Breaks and Beats and it got discontinued [laughs]. The only reason I knew that – and I talked to Jorun Bombay about this, he had the same thing – is when I was buying a bunch of these, I was ringing them up in Music Factory and there was a sheet – an 8 x 10 piece of paper with the Street Beats letterhead on the top of it. Essentially it was a catalogue, a track listing of every song on every volume they had, in addition to the artists names, which as you know weren’t on the back of the records. That was very helpful. This was a way for me to keep track of what volumes that I wanted to buy next time that I went down. That was my start.
Did you notice that a lot of hip-hop records would sample the new volumes as they came out?
Definitely, especially towards the later volumes. I called them ‘foundation’ records – they really were the foundation for golden era hip-hop. I think Diamond D said, ‘Lazy producers? Sometimes you would hear three or four songs off the same volume.’ Some of the more refined tastemakers like Diamond D – those guys who would shine a little bit later and were a little bit more innovative with their production techniques – would try not to sample from there. At some point it was obvious that those were the go-to records.
It’s interesting that there’s almost nobody who’s willing to admit that they sampled off of them.
You never know. There was that Dismasters song called ‘Keisha’ which was off the ‘Keep Your Distance’, the Babe Ruth [song]. I think Salt ‘N Pepa used a different part of that same record. When that came out I was like, ‘Oh wow!’ In hindsight – and maybe this is just me being cynical – but maybe Hurby The Luvbug got it right from the Volumes, the Ultimate Breaks and Beats albums, and Chuck Chillout or one of these guys from Bronxwood Productions or whoever was behind the Dismasters actually had the original record. I don’t know, it’s a mystery.
Was it a valuable tool at the time for you, as a DJ, as far as providing records you couldn’t find otherwise?
Yeah. I lived close to New York but I was still out of the circle, so to speak. This was years before the internet, so unless you were within the circle of the Zulu Nation DJ’s or whatever, you weren’t gonna know what these records were. Music Factory had, for example, Bob James ‘Take Me To The Mardi Gras’. They had other records there – break records – in a small section near where the display rack was for Ultimate Breaks and Beats. So we knew some of those records. I look at it as a transitional period, from the time that those records first came out, it kind of fed on itself in terms of the creative of producers and trying to dig deeper. It was more of a digging renaissance where people, at some point, when the later volumes came out in the late eighties, early nineties when the volumes stopped coming out, most people were like, ‘Well, there’s no more Ultimate Breaks and Beats‘. I think people were forced to be more creative and dig deeper and sample records that people wouldn’t have sampled before. That was very helpful. My sister collected stuff from all genres and I remember digging through her crates and finding the Blackbyrds-era records and the soundtrack from Cornbread, Earl and Me and Flying High and Super Fly and finding stuff on my own. But having that list that I was telling you about was crucial because when I started to search for my own records I recognized the names of artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise have decided to pick out.
Later on there was also the issue with sample breaks compilations revealing the names of the records that had previously been sampled, which pissed a lot of people off.
