J Dilla's Donuts (33 1/3)

by Jordan Ferguson

In 2002 Peanut Butter Wolf was working on a mixtape compilation and decided to include “The Message” as an exclusive. Wanting to be able to play it when he DJ’d, and digital software not yet being the standard, Wolf pressed up a couple hundred copies as a white-label vinyl release.

  “We didn’t even tell Dilla, actually, when we did it, and Dilla called me up afterwards like, ‘Yo, what’s up with the bootleg, man?!’ And I wasn’t sure if he was like, ‘What’s up?’ like, ‘I’m pissed off at you,’” recalled Wolf, “And he was like, ‘Yo, man, let’s do some shit like that but official.’ So we came up with the idea of Madlib rapping over Dilla beats for half the album and Dilla rapping over Madlib beats for the other.”27

  Jeff Jank remembered the discussion being a little more tense. “So when Dilla heard about it he calls up Wolf and chews him out. ‘That ain’t how you do it, if you want to do something, do it the right way.’ The plan to do a Jaylib record was sparked right then and there … If Dilla didn’t have the balls to call Wolf and chew him out, there would have been no collab. I always had a lot of respect for Dilla from that, I mean, he was totally right. We all learned from it.”

  Even though Madlib and Dilla worked on what would become 2003’s Champion Sound separately, sending CDs from their respective cities, the mutual impact they were having on each other gave the album a surprisingly unified feel.

  Said Egon, “Dilla and Madlib had this energy that they shared and it was obvious when they were doing the Jaylib project that the music they were sending back and forth was influencing the music that they were making. A lot of that was vocal performances but subtly you could hear it in the beats that Dilla would send through and the beats Madlib would send to Dilla.”28

  For the crew at Stones Throw, unfamiliar with the stylistic shift Dilla started working through on Ruff Draft, the selections he made from the beats offered to him were surprising but thrilling.

  “[T]he way that he would pick Madlib’s tracks, you would think he would go through three hundred Madlib beats and would be picking some of the more slick … commercial sounding beats,” said Egon. “He went for the grimiest of the grimy Madlib beats and flipped em. And now all of a sudden you find a lot of people trying to record music like that but at the time he was saying this is relevant on a commercial scale.”29

  While Champion Sound was well received in the press it ended up being overshadowed by another of Madlib’s projects: Madvillain, his collaboration with the enigmatic, metal-masked rapper MF Doom. Their album Madvillainy quickly became one of Stones Throw’s highest-selling albums and most critically acclaimed.

  “This whole [Jaylib] thing was happening while Madvillain was being created. But for Madvillain there was a huge buzz, we were about to have our first hit,” said Jeff Jank. “Jaylib was cool, but no hit … I mean, it got around, people know it and love it, but more on an underground level.”

  Sales notwithstanding, the project allowed Dilla to fully commit to a style that would inform where he later went on Donuts: a return to straight loops and samples with both feet planted firmly in the underground.

  “You know, I think with the Jaylib record he was able to do something totally off the fucking cuff, like you know, it gets released as an album in short order with no one telling him, ‘You need to change this, oh you need to change that.’ I think he felt like, ‘Oh wow there’s something here,’ ” said Egon. “I think he got a cool vibe from [us]. I think he thought we were a little bit tighter of a family than we were, you know we were a very dysfunctional family that even then was on the verge of splitting up.”

  “No one was fucking with Jay at that time,” J. Rocc recalled. “There was Busta Rhymes and Common, and De La, but from the end of 2002 through 2003, if you look at his discography, there’s nothing but independent shit. He went back to his roots, basically. He went 360.”30

  ***

  Dilla’s collaborations with Madlib may have brought a renewed sense of focus to his musical output after his experience at MCA, but there were distractions of a personal nature he couldn’t ignore.

  After a European tour to promote the release of Ruff Draft, Dilla stepped off the plane feeling like he had the flu. He drove to his parents’ house, complaining of nausea and chills. When he didn’t improve, Ma Dukes took him to the emergency room in neighboring Grosse Pointe, Michigan. According to the Detroit Free Press, Dilla’s blood platelet31 count was below 10, when it should have been between 140 and 180. He shouldn’t have been able to even stand. A specialist later delivered the diagnosis of TTP. Dilla stayed at the hospital for a month and a half, only to return a few weeks later with the same complaints. He would occasionally rally enough to travel to L.A. and shoot a Jaylib video (looking heavy from the medications he was on) or to do a short tour through North America with other Stones Throw artists, but he would always get sick again. Despite the frequent hospital stays, when Common offered him the chance to move out to Los Angeles with him, he took the invitation.

  “I thought Southern California would be good for his spirits,” said Common, “the sun, the warmth, the beautiful women.”32

  To some on the West Coast, it seemed a sudden and surprising decision for someone who held down his city as fiercely as he did.

  “Dilla was synonymous with Detroit for all of us,” said Egon. “[A]ll of us kind of regarded him as a mythic figure … He would pop into these different cities but he was clearly Detroit.”33

  But the love Dilla had for his city sometimes felt like a one-sided relationship, telling journalists he considered the city’s hip-hop scene to be at “zero percent,” as far back as 1999.34 He started to notice differences in reception when he took a rare moment away from his studio to travel, telling a reporter in Toronto, “It’s weird, in Detroit I’m just a regular joe. But you go to New York or Cali or London, even coming to Toronto now; it’s a whole different thing. I get the love for what I do in that basement, it’s like appreciated so I go back and do more shit. But it’s hard in the D ’cause you gotta come with a commercial-ass single to get played or get noticed, or you gotta be hard as hell and talk about killing somebody.”35

  “You know, when you get older, you look for a certain type of vibe to do what you do … and maybe Detroit just didn’t have it for him anymore. He’d used it up,” said Frank.36

  House Shoes, a Detroit-to-L.A. transplant himself, has never been one to mince words regarding how he feels his hometown treats its artists.

  “I’ve said this shit to people around the world and nobody can wrap their head around it, and that is the fact that nobody in Detroit gives a fuck about Detroit hip-hop. Nobody. Nobody in Detroit knows who Dilla is … it’s pretty much a dumb-ass city … having to fucking fight for the respect of your city, it beats you up … Nobody knew who the fuck Dilla was in the city. Dilla could be at the mall, don’t nobody know who the fuck he is. He’s out [in L.A.], he’s signing autographs at the fucking gas station.”37

  Leaving behind the snow and sleet of harsh Michigan winters was its own reward, but a move to California may have allowed Dilla’s surroundings to catch up to his creative convictions.

  “Detroit’s home, but it’s good to go out there and feel a different environment and just get an understanding that there’s a different way of life than the Midwest,” said Ronnie Reese. “Waajeed told me, and I knew this, Detroit’s a black city. It’s rich in African-American history and African-American culture. I think that’s contributed to the greatness of the music that’s come out of that area. But you go to L.A. and you see the diversity out there and it just gives you whole new perspectives on creativity because you’re being fed things from a number of different cultures … Coming from where Dilla was … making the type of beats that he was making with Boz Skaggs records and Tomita and shit like that, mentally in a sense, he was already there.”

  The move would also allow Dilla the chance to continue exploring a creative relationship that had already proven to be extremely rewarding.

  “I hones
tly think Madlb was a big reason why he moved here,” said Wolf. “I never talked to him about it, and there’s no way to confirm or deny that, but that’s just how I felt about it.”38

  Ronnie Reese added, “Dilla really had no peers other than Madlib. Even outside of music, you have two cats who love to smoke weed, love to go to strip clubs. They bonded in a number of different ways.”

  “When he moved to L.A., we hung out all the time. We talked all the time. That’s the only dude I talked to; I don’t pick my phone up,” said Madlib.39

  That camaraderie extended to the rest of the Stones Throw team, as well as others like J. Rocc, who DJ’d and toured with Jaylib, his Beat Junkies crewmate Rhettmatic, and Dave NewYork, a luxury car rental agent who built a strong reputation in the hip-hop community.

  “Everybody loved him,” said J. Rocc, “We were like his second family, more or less, in addition to the family he’s got in the D, like House Shoes and those cats. Out here, it was like, bam! You’re down. You’re Dilla—if you’re down, we’re rolling with you.”40

  Ma Dukes also noticed how readily the Golden State embraced her son: “Detroit will look at you and let you go—they don’t embrace you. In Los Angeles, it’s totally different. The love there is like you were born and raised there … Maybe it’s because we have so many people here that are talented, that we take them for granted, and it takes something like people leaving here for us to look.”41

  Thrilled as they were to have him out in L.A., nobody at the time knew the reason for the move, or how bad his condition could get.

  Jeff Jank recalled, “There was a time in late 2004, Egon and I were over at Madlib’s studio in Echo Park, not too long after he moved from the house where the four of us lived. Madlib says Dilla had driven over to see him, they probably smoked, went through a bunch of records … So Dilla leaves, and Madlib stayed in the studio a few more hours before leaving himself. But when he goes outside, Dilla is still in the front seat of his car. You see, there was something wrong with him. We had no idea what was going on, and hadn’t thought much of it at the time because we’d seen him looking good and enjoying life in L.A. But soon after that he started one of his lengthy stays at [Cedars Sinai].” Not long after, Dilla called his mother requesting she go to Los Angeles to help him out. She stayed with him until he passed.

  Dilla started 2005 at Cedars, prompting some websites to erroneously report he’d been rushed to the emergency room and was in a coma. With most of his people back in Detroit, Ma Dukes reached out to the crew in L.A.

  According to Egon, “One day … she said, ‘Look, there’s going to be times where he’s good and there’s going to be times when’s he’s bad,’— and this was before anyone knew how serious things were—she was like, ‘If he’s in a good way, you can just come by.’

  “And I think to myself, well that’s kind of weird, you know? I run this record company, we put out his records, I’m not trying to be that dude. She’s like, ‘You need to come by. Somebody needs to come by, his friends need to come by.’ And so I just said, you know what, I’m just going to take this at face value, I’m not going to be a fucking weirdo about it I’m just going to go in there and do whatever it is that you do, sitting in a hospital room. So I started going.”

  The Stones Throw circle soon began visiting Dilla on a regular basis during his hospital stays. They celebrated his birthday there in February 2005, sneaking a cake into his room. They brought him video games, copies of whatever they were working on, portable samplers, and turntables. They watched Napoleon Dynamite with him. Most importantly, they brought music, the one thing he couldn’t do without. This crew of exceptional oddballs rallied around Dilla, not out of obligation to some professional working relationship, but because they respected the man as the greatest producer of his generation and felt he didn’t deserve to be alone.

  “He was in the hospital for about eight months to a year. Not moving. Couldn’t leave the room, ain’t no get up and go for a walk, ain’t none of that shit,” said J. Rocc, “It was like, you show up, Ma Dukes was already there chilling—‘Aw, you’re here, I’m going to go take a break, all right, I’ll see you later.’ And it was just him in the bed. With a sampler right here, and a stack of 45s. And whatever we would bring him. We would show up, aw man Madlib, let’s go bring him some records, or Egon, or yo, Wolf, what you got for him? … [E]veryone was coming out for him.”42

  “I think you know, in some weird way … he probably thought we were all sort of misfits in one way or another, but then again he didn’t necessarily fit in where he was. And he loved Los Angeles, he loved hanging out in the sunshine, and he loved kicking it with Madlib,” said Egon. “You know it was just like, one of those things, man. We were just fucking there at the right time, and it was very unfortunate because it was the wrong time, too.”

  Workinonit

  From the outside looking in, it might have seemed as though Dilla’s musical output had slowed down much more considerably than it had. Aside from a pair of tracks he contributed to Be, Common’s quote–unquote comeback album in 2005, what little material released publicly was with independent or underground acts like Talib Kweli or other Stones Throw artists like MED and Madlib’s brother Oh No. But he continued working on beats whenever his health would permit. He’d worked out a deal to do another album for BBE, and spent most of his time working on the project, a true follow-up to Welcome 2 Detroit where he would produce all of the music and share rhyming duties with collaborators. And he still “practiced,” filling CDs with beats, working his way through yet another shift in style.

  While the music he was making during the L.A. years continued to feature the dusty drums and lower fidelity first found on Ruff Draft, he replaced the synths and electronic sounds with acoustic instruments and soulful vocal samples. Soul samples had seen a revival since Kanye West and Just Blaze used them throughout Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint in 2001, but Dilla came at them from an entirely different angle.

  An early indication of where he was at musically can be found on “Dollar,” by British electronic artist Steve Spacek. Built around a 12-second sample of “Let the Dollar Circulate” by Philadelphia soul singer Billy Paul, Dilla snags a moment of Paul’s vibrato delivery of the word “circulate,” and stretches it through the length of an entire verse, turning his voice into an hypnotic, indecipherable drone. Unlike the way in which they were used by his contemporaries, Dilla’s use of soul vocals accented the melodies of the composition, he never looped them: Instead, he stripped them down into their most basic elements, slicing, stretching, and bending them into bizarre and compelling new forms.

  “It was a more mature version of that Kanye West school of production, with the chipmunk voices and using vocals as part of the melody,” said Rich Medina, a DJ and member of New York’s legendary Rocksteady Crew. “Like, ‘Nah B, hold on. Y’all niggas some Toyotas. Here’s the Mercedes.’ Even if he didn’t mean it that way, that’s what it sounded like to me.”1

  The shift in sound during his time in L.A. may have had practical reasons as well: “He only came to L.A. with the [MPC] and that was basically it. And then whatever Otis would buy him and whatever else he would buy at Guitar Center,” said J. Rocc.2 Having left a sophisticated studio setup back in Detroit, if Dilla was going to keep making music, he’d have to do it on what he could take with him. And since the days of Camp Amp and Davis Aerospace, hardware limitations were just problems to be solved, so it wasn’t long before new beat batches started circulating through the city.

  “He was always giving us beat tapes and he was making kind of jokey names for them, one of them was called Pizza Man, one was Donuts, and it was always this unhealthy food,” said Wolf. “I just remember it was me, Madlib and him in the car, and he was like, ‘here’s my new stuff.’ … He played it and I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a beat tape for rappers or what it was supposed to be, but to me it sounded like the songs were full, finished songs, and I said we should put this out as it is.�
�3

  Everyone at Stones Throw agreed the music that would end up on Donuts was exceptional (Jank remembered thinking it was the best beat tape he’d ever heard), but Egon had some reservations; he was more interested in pursuing a follow-up to Champion Sound.

  “If it wasn’t for Chris, Donuts wouldn’t [have] happened because Chris said, ‘We’re making an instrumental record around Jay Dee because that’s all he can do.’ I was the first person to say ‘That’s ridiculous, you need to get the next Jaylib record done because the Jaylib record is the one that made him healthy during his first bout with lupus.’ And Chris is like, ‘No, we’re going to do an instrumental record because it’s all he can do, that’s what we’re going to do.’ Period, full stop.”

  There was one problem: Because it had originated as a “beat tape,” short sketches of the kind producers would use to shop their work to rappers and labels, the CD Dilla had given them was only 22 minutes long.

  “[S]o the Donuts beat CD comes around and I really remember it as being a mutual understanding that we wanted to release this as a record … It’s a little out of the ordinary for a label to put out a whole record of beats, some of which could potentially be profitable for the producer later on, but we decide to wing it,” said Jank.

  “The only question is, how is this 22-minute CD with some rugged transitions going to become a record? Dilla wasn’t saying he was going to turn it into an album overnight, and Wolf and Egon weren’t going to work on it, I think because they were both a little afraid of making a wrong turn and getting on Dilla’s bad side.”

  Dilla’s temper was no secret to those who knew him. While not quick to anger, he didn’t hesitate to voice his opinion if he thought he’d been slighted: he let Wolf have it over the Jaylib bootleg; he chewed Egon out for inadvertently letting it slip to someone outside the circle that he was hospitalized; he almost came to blows with House Shoes over a crate of records, prompting him to slide a diss into his verse on the Jaylib song “Strapped.”