Three years ago, my good friends Jimmy 2 Times and Plain Ole Bill started up a new monthly party in First Avenue's Record Room, then known as The VIP Room. Sick of the confines of the downtown club scene and not being able to play the kind of music they wanted for the crowd who wanted to hear it, these two veteran hip hop and club DJs started up Get Cryphy as their own home, their own monthly party to spin Miami Bass, Southern bounce, Baltimore club, Bay Area rap, and other fringe hip hop subgenres shunned by the mainstream clubs who wanted only Top 40 pop rap hits.
From the very get-go, Get Cryphy was a smash hit, proving to the rest of the city that a club night can deliver real music to real people and can last longer than most actual nightclubs. Jimmy and Bill have brought in guest DJs such as Emynd, Low-B (Hollertronix), DJ Sega, Prince Klassen, and Scott Matelic, as well as showcasing local DJs like Wezz Winship, Bitch Ass Darius, as well as Last Word and Fundo, who are now part of the Cryphy family. I've had the honor of spinning at Get Cryphy about 5 or 6 times since its inception and it's always an incredibly fun and satisfying DJ experience.
To celebrate their third birthday, the Cryphy family is taking over the First Avenue mainroom on Friday February 11, 2011. They'll be spinning and featuring guest rap performances throughout the night. As this is going on, the party will continue in the Record Room where I'll be hosting EXTRA LARGE, focusing more on classic hip hop, funk, and other party music.
Stay tuned for exclusive mixes and more as we get closer to the big day.
Plain Ole Bill is one of my favorite DJs and I have the honor of DJing with him at tonight's EXTRA LARGE. Some of you might only know of his antics behind the turntables as 1/4 of the Get Cryphy family and as P.O.S' live DJ, so I thought I'd delve into the mind of Special Young Bill to give you some insight into this brilliant gentleman.
I've noticed you really excel at Twitter when it's late at night. I mean, you're always a funny dude, but from like midnight to 3am, you're just on a whole different level. KRS and I both wanna know: WHY IS THAT? The tweets come out at night.
Talk about Get Cryphy. How did it start and how has it grown over the years? Cryphy started as a way that Jimmy and I could cure the boredom of the downtown nightclub djing that we were experiencing at the time. The idea was to play more aggressive and left-field music that we weren't hearing too much in the clubs around here. Foundation, the club that hosted our previous residency, "Party and Bullshit," had closed. We wanted to continue to work together in an environment where we had free reign on all aspects of our party. Luckily, First Avenue had an opening in the VIP Room (now the Record Room) that we were able to take. When we started Cryphy, we brought over some of the audience from Party and Bullshit and it took us several months to ease the crowd into the type of music that we were really trying to play. As time has passed, it's been cool to see people expect the aggressive shit that our initial crowd frowned upon.
Remember when we saw that stupid Transformers movie and then made our own even stupider Transformers movie at like 4am? Yeah. Both of those movies sucked. It's all about the cartoon with Orson Welles.
Favorite DJs? Too many to name. I'm gonna go with DJ Nikoless & DJ Abilities.
I remember one of the first times I heard / saw you DJ, I was blown away at how many classic records you were dropping at such a young age. Like you were 21 or 22 and rockin' doubles of Bar-Kays album cuts. Pretty sophisticated stuff I thought. What are some of your favorite records from that mid to late 1970s era? Fatback "Hot Box" Pleasure "Get to the Feeling" Bar-Kays "Money Talks" Nothing too crazy or rare. I like those albums with dance floor bangers.
Top three scenes from Goonies? 1. "Hey Mikey! Gotta go to the bathroom?!" into Ma Fratelli "AND STAY TO THE RIGHT!!!!" 2. The basement scene before they go down the fireplace is Chunk at his finest. "Hope it's not a deposit bottle." 3. The escape from Brand scene with "The Goonies R Good Enough" in the background and the 376 lawn mower jobs line has always been one of my favorites too.
Hard question Mike!
You've really been stylin' on the rest of us with your hairdo lately. Like you went from shaved head to Bill & Ted levelz in less than a year. Will the world ever get to experience Plain Ole Bill with a ponytail? 7. Yikes! No plans for a ponytail.
OK so the world might not know this, but you are technically one of the world's top Donkey Kong players. What is your highest score and how does that rank you up there with the guys from the "King Of Kong" movie? 314,500 is my high score. Last I checked, that put me in the top 25. Although I'm up there, I'm light years away from Billy Mitchell's 1,000,000+ record high score. I've got everyone beat on Back to the Future on NES though!
Don't even think of missing tonight's EXTRA LARGE at First Avenue's Record Room!
Here is the third installment of the series of mixes for EXTRA LARGE. Tomorrow's EXTRA LARGE with Plain Ole Bill is just one day away, so here's some music to get you in the mood to get busy.
Tracklisting: James Brown "Talking Loud & Saying Nothing" Ernie Hines "Our Generation" Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth "Straighten It Out" Joe Quarterman "I'm A Young Man" T La Rock "It's Yours (acapella)" Rufus Thomas "Do The Funky Penguin" Grand Wizard Theodore "Rapper's Convention Pt. 1" Eli Escobar "Heavenly Break" The Dap Kings "Nervous Like Me" The Alkaholiks "Daaaamn (acapella)" The Blackbyrds "The Baby" Christian Bruhn "Wetten Dass…?" Panache "Every Brother Ain't A Brother" Pure Essence "3rd Rock" Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five "Flash It To The Beat" Jimmy Castor Bunch "Supersound" The Peacemakers "Don't Push Your Luck" Sugar Billy Garner "Keep Movin' On" John Cameron "Afro Metropolis" Vicki Anderson & Lyn Collins "Message From The Soul Sisters" James Brown "Untitled Instrumental" West Coast All Stars "We're All In The Same Gang"
Come party with me & Plain Ole Bill on Friday the 14th!
This weekend, Enjoy Records founder Bobby Robinson passed away at the age of 93. Enjoy Records released some of my favorite rap singles from the 1979-1982 disco rap era. They seemed to capture the raw essence of live hip hop parties more thoroughly and consistently than any other label at the time. Here are a few of my favorites from the label:
He doesn't have Twitter or Facebook, so I'm gonna brag about this for him. My friend Andrew Broder's latest venture (one of his latest ventures - more on that in a moment) is a series of live mixes created using a turntable, mixer, drum machine, keyboard, and a looping pedal. Using live loops, he layers different clips of records on top of each other, creating new songs on the fly.
I first met Andrew at Paint Louis '98, a graffiti get-together I helped organize in St. Louis. Then a lanky, record-collecting graffiti and music weirdo, Andrew has since grown up to be a ... lanky, record-collecting graffiti and music weirdo. I followed him from his skratch-heavy underground rap mixtapes to his mind-blowing DMC DJ battle routines to his "rap mixtape with guitar solos" project which eventually became his one-man-band The Fog. The first Fog album was a huge leap from his Company Flow and Three Six Mafia mixtapes - a collection of depressing, engaging, and paranoid songs created using records, guitars, drums, bass, trumpets, and any other instrument Andrew could get his hands on. Fog developed into a full steam ahead rock group, closing out their long and winding career with "Ditherer," one of my favorite rock albums of the last decade.
I'm really excited about Andrew's return to more hip hop-based music, but I'm also super excited for his new band The Cloak Ox. Picking up where "Ditherer" left off, Andrew's new group features Fog collaborator Mark Erickson on bass and Fog / Andrew Bird group members Martin Dosh (drums) and Jeremy Ylvisaker (guitar). Cloax Ox will be making their live debut at The Turf Club on Thursday January 13th, just one night before EXTRA LARGE!
