Rakim's "My Melody" Jazz Demo with DJ Maniack & Stevie Blass Griffin

In the 2018 edition of Rakim Week, I shared a two-part documentary by James "Kraze" Billings called Check Out My Melody. If you haven't already watched this in full, do that. If you have, you should remember the clip of the pre-Eric B. jazz version of "My Melody" that played at the start of the second part. How could you forget it? 

For years since that documentary came out, I've been hoping the full track would surface. Sadly, that still hasn't happened. However, earlier this year, Kraze posted the entirety of his interview with Rakim's early DJ and producer, DJ Maniack, portions of which appeared in the documentary. Here, Maniack shares his recollections of several iterations of "My Melody" that were recorded before before Eric B. and Marley Marl entered the picture. These include the aforementioned jazz version.

As DJ Maniack (pictured on the left, above) recalls, "Me and Griff [Rakim’s older brother Stevie “Blass” Griffin] had already made this jazz tune. Griff had invented this jazz tune. He taught me how to play this melody while he played the bass line, and then he played some chords on top of that while I added some DJ stuff, and it was a jazz tune — it was really hot. And Rakim came and laid the 'Melody' lyrics over that jazz tune and we recorded that… That was the second 'Melody.'"

Below you can watch the full interview with DJ Maniack and stream or download the 41-second clip of Rakim's "My Melody" jazz demo with musical accompaniment by Blass (pictured below) and Maniack.

Butch Cassidy's Funk Bunch - "On a DJ's Birthday"

"Mad rappers were coming up there, doing the same old
Sugar Hill Gang thing, but I came out with a cowboy hat
on, saying 'I'm the Outlaw of Funk.' Chuck introduced
me and said, 'We got Butch Cassidy here — I had never
called myself that before — and I ripped the microphone."

The electro-funk roots of Long Island hip-hop, particularly as pioneered in Roosevelt, are further exposed in "On a DJ's Birthday," the 1984 single released by Aaron Allen aka Butch Cassidy on TNT Records. The record also provides some of the earliest writing credits for Riddenhour (a misspelling of Ridenhour aka Chuck D, later of Public Enemy) and Eric Sadler (later of the Bomb Squad). Side note: could that be Chuck D playing Butch's pops around the 2:30 mark?

Speaking about "On a DJ's Birthday," Allen once said, "I think I was one of the first ones to have a rap single out on Long Island." According to my limited records at least, he's right, as the only other singles I've written about that go that far back are Spectrum City's Lies/Check Out the the Radio and LL Cool J's "I Need a Beat." (Key-Matic's "Breakin In Space," which, like "DJ's Birthday," was written by Charles Casseus could also be considered an LI rap single from 1984 especially in that it featured the Wizard K-Jee aka Keith Shocklee on the turntables.)

Though Allen was still part of the Spectrum City crew at this time and appeared on their aforementioned single, he contends "'DJ's Birthday' had nothing to do with Spectrum." Instead, he says, "Charles Casseus said he had this idea so I wrote some lines to it, got a deal with TNT Records and put it out. I don't know how I even got that deal." Regardless of how it happened, it did. Some 35 years later, yours truly found this record sitting still shrinkwrapped in the singles section at Massapequa Park's Infinity Records (now carrying LIRR01, cough-cough), and it's a personal rip of that copy streaming below.

TRB2HH Presents: Check out My Melody A true story about Rakim

It's Sunday, January 28, 2018, which means today is the 50th birthday of the God, the Greatest Of All Time, Rakim. It also means that this is the start of Long Island Rap Blog's third annual Rakim Week. For the uninitiated, each year, the site dedicates one week in January to the music and living legacy of William Michael Griffin, Jr., better known as Rakim. We've dug through obscure Facebook and Blogspot posts to rediscover lost curios from the God's career ... but all that is light-work compared with what the folks at TRB2HH have accomplished with Check Out My Melody, a two-part documentary chronicling Rakim's early years coming up in Wyandanch, NY.

Produced, narrated, and edited by James "Kraze" Billings, the documentary features such familiar faces as DJ Maniack, EPMD, DJ Belal, Nate Tinsley, Eric B., DJ Stitches, Freddie Foxx, Grand Daddy I.U. and a host of others who provide insightful first- and second-hand accounts of Griffin's evolution from Kid Wizard to God MC.

The doc fills in more than few a holes from the "Oral History" post that ran on this site a few years back. Most impressive of all, however, is the original "Check Out My Melody" 1984 'jazz' version, produced by DJ Maniack, Stevie "Blast" Griffin, and Rakim, which plays at the beginning of part two and appears to have been provided directly to the filmmaker by Maniack. Elsewhere in the film, Eric B. claims to have a cassette copy of the 90-minute (!!!) demo Rakim recorded years before dropping his first single. That Holy Grail of Long Island Hip-Hop remains tucked away for now, but here we have a treasure trove of anecdotes, music, pictures and archived footage that together represent the most complete retrospective of Rakim's early years ever compiled. What Grammys? Watch this instead.

LL Cool J - Live in Philadelphia (1984/86)

Couldn't let this site go a full three years without a single LL Cool J post, so here go some oldies. You probably don't care but there are date discrepancies about both of these. The first recording streaming below, a live freestyle at the After Midnight club, which was played on Philadelphia radio in the mid-80s, has been dated 1985 (and that may in fact be when it was played), but thanks to an appearance by LL Cool J on the Philly TV show "Beats & Rhymes," hosted by Brian Dennis, we know that the freestyle was actually recorded in 1984 and later edited for radio. The second recording below is of LL and DJ Cut Creator performing "Rock the Bells" live in Philadelphia (possibly somewhere called Lan) in 1986. I'm saying it's 1986, even though the internet says 1987, because LL says in the recording that he's celebrating his 18th birthday that night. LL was born on January 14, 1968, so this would have to be January 14, 1986. If you're keeping score, that means he was only 16 during the first recording. What did you sound like at 16?

Spectrum City - Lies/Check Out The Radio VLS

Before there was Public Enemy, there was Spectrum City, a Long Island sound system founded by Hank Shocklee and featuring a rotating cast of MCs, most notably Carlton Douglas Ridenhour (Chuck D) and Aaron Allen (Butch Cassidy). As illustrated above, the two MCs teamed up on the 1984 single, "Lies," released on the Vanguard label.



The single's other track, "Check Out the Radio," might sound oddly familiar to some who've never heard it; that's because its chorus, "Got to check out the ra-di-o..." was interpolated by the Wu-Tang Clan for their song, "The W," from Iron Flag.*



Download both Spectrum City songs, along with the rest of the single, including a radio edit and two dub versions, here; learn more about the group by watching the documentary trailer below; and for the full story on Spectrum City's lesser known MC, Butch Cassidy, read this interview with Aaron Allen himself.

*EDIT 3/24/23: While it's possible that Wu-Tang members had been aware of Spectrum City, it's more likely that both songs interpolated Fat Larry's Band's "Down on the Avenue." (I'm posting this here solely on the off-chance that Chuck D or someone in his immediate orbit is aware this post exists. Got to give us an interview, got to ... an interview!)