I think I became aware of the concept of “sampling” well before I was a teenager. Two of my uncles had gone from wearing KISS makeup on Halloween and outfitting their vans with full size beds and working B&W television sets, to wearing sweatbands on their heads and camping overnight outside Ticketron booths to score Jackson 5 “Victory Tour” tickets. I grew up in the late 70’s/early 80’s in Englewood, NJ (home of Sugar Hill Records), right on the other side of the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, not far from where hip-hop had been birthed in the Bronx (apologies to MC Shan). My earliest memory of “rap” was either the Fat Boys or Run DMC, and the first cassette I ever owned with an “Explicit Lyrics” sticker on the cover was the latter’s “Raising Hell” LP (the offending “m*th*rf*ck*r” on “Hit It Run”). I was already a fan when that album came out and their collaboration with Aerosmith, a remake of their hit “Walk This Way”, thrust Run D.M.C. into the mainstream spotlight and the video into regular rotation on MTV, which by that point still hadn’t fully integrated black artists (let alone rappers) into their prime time programming. I loved the song and video and never tired of it but to me, it was just a Run D.M.C. song they made with their “friends”, a band my dad and uncles liked. I don’t think I was even aware “Walk This Way” existed as an Aerosmith song before being remade. It wasn’t until a few years later when Run D.M.C. released their LP “Tougher Than Leather” and I heard the single “Mary Mary” that my mind melted as I realized that Run D.M.C. had somehow remade a song by (of ALL bands!) THE MONKEES, a band that only existed to me on a TV show my dad had watched as a kid and was now shown along with a bunch of other weird old TV shows on Nickelodeon’s post-8pm programming, “Nick At Night”. According to my dad, the Monkees weren’t even a “real band”! How the fuck did this happen? The Monkees weren’t even in the video like Aerosmith! This is when someone explained to me what “sampling” was and I then got further explanations from MTV as their coverage of hip-hop expanded and they too seemed to be amused by these “musicians” abilities to “borrow” sounds from their parents’ soul and jazz records to replace the “real” instruments they ::ahem:: “couldn’t afford”.
Fast forward a few years: I’m 21 and for the first time in my life I have a full-time job and a steady income that affords me the luxury to begin amassing the vinyl collection I would break my back moving from home to home for the next 20+ years. The 1995 film “Dead Presidents” was a favorite of mine and I had begun to collect LPs and 45s by a lot of the artists on the two separate soundtracks they had released. I remember being very excited to hear “It’s A Shame” by the Spinners for the first time and immediately recognize it as the source for the 1990 Monie Love single of the same name. Around this time a fellow collector I befriended helped to turn my fascination with hip-hop samples and their original sources into an obsession. This quickly turned into a small money-making opportunity as I realized that this knowledge coupled with the availability of US soul and jazz records was worth a lot to European and Asian collectors on the fairly nascent eBay vinyl market. Pretty soon, I was buying dollar bin copies of records by Little Feat, Bob James, Ramsey Lewis, Boz Scaggs, etc and listing them on eBay with descriptions like “OG SAMPLE GANG STARR BREAK OPEN DRUMS PRIMO” and before I knew it I was selling records no one in the US wanted for 10-20 times their value, sometimes more. I only had a few German and Japanese customers message me complaining that they felt ripped off but I stood my ground and said, “Nuh-uh I listed this as the record with the break from that Brand Nubian song, and that’s what it is. Take it up with eBay, sucker.” I’m not proud to have done this, but it’s always hard to feel sorry for record collectors, especially ones who are paying $15 to have 3 seconds of a Biz Markie song shipped to them across the globe. I eventually got tired and bored of the racket and stopped. Or the market dried up. I can’t remember which. Had I known websites like whosampled.com and digital sampling software were right around the corner I might have cashed in more while I had the chance.
After all was said and done I had built up a fairly large collection of soul/funk/jazz that I guess I didn’t quite value as much as my punk, indie, psych, experimental, rock music, and when it came time to purge, whether it was to make money or free up space, a lot of the soul and jazz records were the first to go as they often commanded the highest prices and, for whatever reason, I just didn’t spin them as much as I used to. I held on to plenty though, some for specific reasons that I couldn’t even remember. I definitely still had a soft spot for tracks that had been sampled and I would often still hear something new and think “Premier would use that” or “that sounds like a Havoc loop.” A few years ago my wife asked me to play her some jazz and soul as she was never exposed to much growing up and wanted to hear more and it was a great opportunity to revisit some favorites. Her enthusiasm was contagious and before I knew it I was diggin’ again and coming home with gems that were new to me too. It was like a relapse…but in a good way.
One record that my wife particularly liked was the 1969 LP by Barbara Acklin, “Seven Days of Night”. It’s a great LP, she’s a fantastic vocalist, but I wasn’t sure what had made me hold on to it for all those years considering I couldn’t remember one song on it. I certainly didn’t recognize any samples on it. Then, one day at work, I overheard two mid-20’s women sharing memories of recent college “Spring break” experiences. One mentioned being disappointed upon arriving in Cancun, Mexico that what awaited her was nothing like the “MTV Spring Break” coverage she grew up watching as a teenager. Suddenly, I found myself humming a song from a commercial that for some god forsaken reason was apparently buried in the back of my mind and had now come leaking into my consciousness like blood from my ears: “That was a moment! That was a Spring Break moment! That’s all there is!”. It was an MTV Spring Break commercial that played over and over again years ago when I still watched. I could hear brass horns playing the melody as I sang the song to myself and I couldn’t help but think I had heard it recently. Google was not helping. Then it suddenly hit me: Young Holt Unlimited. I had recognized this song when digging for records years ago. It was called “Soulful Strut”. I could even picture the cover of the LP. But I hadn’t listened to that record in YEARS and I didn’t think I even owned it anymore. Why is it so fresh in my mind? After looking through a stack of records we had recently listened to at home I suddenly realized that the Acklin song “Am I the Same Girl” was the exact same song as “Soulful Strut”. I had never noticed the similarity before but it was the exact same song, one with Acklin’s vocals and the other instrumental. My knowledge had betrayed me. How could I have missed this? I can name hundreds of samples and loops and drum breaks in songs but I never realized a song I had listened to dozens and dozens of times was the exact same song as another song I had listened to dozens and dozens of times. Nope, what I actually remembered was an annoying repurposing of the song for a fucking MTV Spring Break commercial with sarcastic kitschy lyrics. Not Barbara Acklin, not Young Holt Unlimited, just “The MTV Beach House”, frat girls and guys, Pauly Shore, tequila sponsors and crane cameras. Don’t tell my wife. She still thinks I have great taste in music.
Here’s the story behind the song and how it came to be recorded by both artists, and here’s a version from 1992 by Swing Out Sister that’s actually pretty good!
But not quite as good as “Breakout” which is a masterpiece.
