“If you was really fucking with Jay, it wasn’t always a bed of roses,” said Shoes.4 “We’d be in the studio and there’d be like some hoe-ass business shit going on that he’d be upset about, and then somebody completely unrelated to that would call and he would just go in on a motherfucker.”
Even Ma Dukes could acknowledge her son was not without his moments: “He got stronger, I guess from the knocks of coming along in [the music industry], and he became just outright belligerent at times. He never backed down … we would get neck and neck sometimes.”5
With Egon and Wolf not looking to press their luck, there was one person left on the label side to act as liaison and guide the project.
“I never had my chance to get on his bad side, so I became the exec[utive] producer,” said Jank. “The process from [there] was, which other music to include to make it longer—without changing what we loved about the original—and a process of editing, mastering, and whatnot. This happened entirely when Dilla was at Cedars.”6
There were business concerns as well. Stones Throw was a small label, but they wanted to figure out a means to ensure Dilla was properly compensated. So, in the sort of move that could only fly somewhere like Stones Throw, they worked out a deal where the label would retain the product of Donuts the album as an asset, but Dilla was still free to take the beats contained therein and shop them to other artists.
“It was a very open-ended deal, you know,” said Egon, “it was meant to say … you’re a working musician, we will market a beat tape for you. You can sell the beats, you can do whatever you want, and we’re just going to put this out, because we believe in you.”
If anything, Donuts emerged as a sort of unanticipated side project. The primary focus was The Shining, his follow-up to Welcome 2 Detroit on BBE, most of which was completed in 2004. Trying to chart an accurate chronology for the music of that time is difficult at best; when a man is known for building beats in 15 minutes, and is consistently ahead of the curve, keeping it all straight becomes nigh impossible. Jank remembered going to meet Dilla once and having him hand over a disc with seven new beats on it that would end up comprising the last half of Donuts. Whether they were newly created, or older works he thought fit the mood of the album, is unclear.
“He was always concerned with getting out the beats he’d made in 2002 and 2003 which still seemed new. Like that MED beat [2005’s ‘Push’], he probably made that beat in 2001,” said Egon.7
Even though they weren’t working on anything official, the spiritual connection between Dilla and Madlib continued as well. During one hospital visit, Jank brought Dilla a copy of The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, by Madlib’s helium-voiced alter ego Quasimoto.
“He asked me on the spot if I’d do the cover for The Shining, ‘with some of this Quasimoto type shit.’ So I originally planned to have those two albums linked in some way. I put Dilla on the cover of Further Adventures and drew a foldout that would match a foldout for The Shining. But that ended up going into Donuts.”8 Indeed, when placed together, the interior art of both albums line up to form two blocks of a slightly surreal Los Angeles, from the crowds flowing out of “Dilla’s Donuts,” down the street from the chain-smoking aardvark, Quasimoto himself, checking out the Blaxploitation flicks being shown at the Pussycat Theatre.
Jank recalled, “It’s incredible to think about now, but he had this crazy full-face mask at the hospital for some procedure, and he wanted a photo of that on his album cover [for The Shining]. I took a picture of it!”9
It was a difficult time. Dilla’s kidney function had dropped significantly; dialysis became a regular part of his life, three times a week. Long periods spent sedentary in a hospital bed weakened his legs; he would get around with a walker or cane, sometimes a wheelchair. The diagnosis of lupus came just before his thirty-first birthday in 2005. But he refused to be limited by his condition. Dr. Aron Bick, Dilla’s hematologist in L.A., told the Detroit Free Press, “He didn’t want to be a professional patient. The treatment was difficult because he would not want to go to the hospital. He was very intelligent. He said, ‘I hear you, doc. But here are my decisions about my own life.’
“I admired that on a human level. He got the medical care he needed. He really did not let his medical situation handicap his life. To him, life came first. He made peace with himself before we even knew it.”10
When Madlib and photographer/filmmaker Brian “B+” Cross offered him an invitation to tag along on their trip to a film festival in Brazil, Dilla enthusiastically accepted, even if it quickly became apparent his body wasn’t up for it.
“[H]e was just hype, ‘Hell yeah, I wanna do it.’ But we didn’t realize how sick he was,” said Cross. “So we picked him up from the house and I noticed when we took him out to the car he looked kind of bent over a bit and he looked very weak … [We realized] he was far too weak to be traveling. He shouldn’t have been traveling. Put his life in danger basically.”11
Dilla made it through three days on the trip, seeing the sights and digging for records before he had to be flown back to L.A. on an ambulance flight to Cedars-Sinai. “His hand swelled up like—Madlib called it the ‘Hulk hand’—His hand just swelled the fuck up. Like he was really in pain and … he locked himself in the hotel room,” said Egon.
His sudden and unexpected return to L.A. derailed another reason for the trip: Stones Thrown had asked B+ to snap some photos for the cover of Donuts. Back in the hospital, and in his current condition, taking new photos wasn’t an option, and the label already went through what photos they had promoting Jaylib. So Jank reached out to Andrew Gura, a Los Angeles-based video director who had done the clip for MED’s Dilla-produced song “Push.” In the long tradition of hip-hop videos but a rare move for him, Dilla made a cameo appearance, so Jank asked Gura if there were any stills from the shoot that could be used. He sent back three, including one of Dilla with his head in a downward tilt, laughing at a joke he and MED cracked moments before, his face half-covered by a Detroit Tigers fitted cap. It was a compromise to circumstance, now considered by many to be an iconic image.12
Stones Throw’s mandate for the album is clear in the rest of the cover’s design: remind the public of who he was. It uses both the “J Dilla” and “Jay Dee” monikers, and (on early pressings) included a one-sentence rundown of his notable collaborations, as well as quotes extolling his greatness from the biggest hit makers of the time, Pharrell Williams and Kanye West.
By October 2005, Donuts was ready for release, but Stones Throw hit a roadblock in their supply chain. Their distributor, EMI, didn’t think a weird, difficult instrumental album by an underground producer would move the projected 10,000 copies.
“That wasn’t just some loser at EMI, that was like people that we respected, that believed in Stones Throw … and they were like, ‘It ain’t gonna happen,’” said Egon. “You know to be fair to them, Champion Sound had flopped … it had just absolutely and utterly flopped. For a company like Stones Throw, that was next to disastrous.” Coming to an agreement with the distributor pushed the album’s release back to early 2006.
With the album finished, Dilla was already looking to his next move, one few could have predicted. In early December 2005 he boarded a plane and flew overseas for a short series of European dates with Frank-n-Dank and Phat Kat. His health had deteriorated so much he had to travel confined to a wheelchair, but he refused to allow a silly thing like standing prevent him from rocking a crowd, performing songs from Welcome 2 Detroit and Champion Sound while in the chair. As reports and photos began to circulate, the public received a rare glimpse at the effects his illness had wrought.
“For somebody who was so concerned with keeping his health kind of to himself, or keeping it a secret, I was really surprised that he did that. It showed so much character,” said Wolf.13
For Dilla, the trip to Europe was a chance, in some ways, to close a circle, to see the world with friends old and new (Ma Dukes, Rhettmatic of the Beat Junkies
, and Dave NewYork accompanied him on the trip) and perform for crowds that had always supported him.
“It was like his farewell tour. It was postponed like twice, and he was the one who wanted to do it,” said Phat Kat. “We did that because that’s what Dilla wanted to do … and in between, you know, days we had off, he’d go on dialysis. I mean, this nigga was a fucking soldier. Still up there every motherfuckin night, spittin. There wasn’t no night where he was like, ‘Yo, I can’t do this,’ and even if he had done that, motherfuckas would have understood that. But this dude rocked every night. He was making beats in the hotel room while we were over there.”14
Frank-n-Dank filmed footage during that tour, released on the Frank-n-Dank European Vacation DVD in 2007. Dilla is a supporting player in the film, passing through the background of shots, appearing fully onstage at the shows or in one lengthy segment filmed at an airport. His face is thin and gaunt, angular. His clothing seems extra baggy, almost to the point of absurdity, possibly to disguise how slight his frame had become. When he swings his arms during another telling of the Pharcyde fistfight story, he does so slowly, feebly. But there’s a light in his eyes, it’s obvious his spirit is energized by the experience, there’s an optimism there, of the sort that makes it easy to understand why anyone who knew him then didn’t acknowledge the possibility of him not recovering. He also nails every one of his verses.
Having come to an understanding with their distributor, Donuts was set for release in early February, 2006. Stones Throw also pressed up a bonus for some retailers, a seven-inch single of “Signs,” a beat made at the same time as the Donuts batches but never intended for inclusion on the album. There was excitement to finally see the project through to completion, but it was tinged with melancholy.
“When I went to deliver finished copies of the Donuts LP, CD, and the [seven-inch], it was one of these days that was not a good time. He’d undergone dialysis, he looked like he was in serious pain, not a good time for visitors,” said Jank, “I said my hello and gave him the records because I knew he was looking forward to them. That was maybe Feb 1st. I had to fly to N.Y. right after that, and that was the last I saw him.”15
Questlove swung through to visit in January 2006, during Grammy week. Even he wasn’t fully aware of just how sharply Dilla’s health had declined. “When I stepped into his house in California, I was totally unprepared for what I saw. It was just Dilla and his mother, and it really wasn’t Dilla at all. In his place was a frail, eighty-pound man in a wheelchair. He couldn’t communicate at all. He was mumbling and gesturing weakly … all I knew at the time was what I saw, which was that he was dying.”16
Donuts was released on Dilla’s thirty-second birthday, February 7, 2006. The Stones Throw crew planned a small party at Common’s house to celebrate: Madlib, Wolf, J. Rocc, and Egon, who arrived late after picking up a donut-shaped cake.
“I pull up to the house with the fucking cake, and I see Madlib and he’s looking at me shaking his head. And I’m like, ‘What are you doing outside?’ And [Wolf] looks at me and he was just like, ‘You can’t go in,’ … and I was like, ‘What do you mean I can’t go in?’ He’s like, ‘Yo, really. This is really, really fucking bad.’”
“At that point I really felt like something was wrong, more so than ever,” said Wolf. “Even a few weeks before that he was in a wheelchair, but he was energetic and showing me music and showing me his equipment and talked about moving all of his equipment that’s still in Detroit to L.A.”17
Egon recalled, “I felt like I was having a heart attack. Like it was the worst thing I’d ever felt in my life and I was like, ‘I gotta go right now,’ … [and Wolf is] like ‘Fine, then I’m coming with you.’ And I went straight to the hospital and checked myself into the emergency room. I was just having an anxiety attack or something you know, or whatever. But my chest caved in.”
James Yancey died three days later on February 10, 2006.
Two Can Win
Forget about dying for a minute. Forget about hospital beds and dialysis machines and wheelchairs. It almost seems unfair to do so, that’s how intrinsically linked they’ve become with the album. But put them aside. Imagine finding the album in a record store during that three-day window between its release and the day he died. How is one meant to listen to Donuts? How does it process?
[T]he album’s credited to Dilla, but what does that even really mean, given how he builds his house from other people’s bricks while at the same time decoupling the snippets of song, the bits of music, the loops, from their original source … in traditional music, you see (or at least imagine) the source of the sound. If it’s Aretha Franklin, you see her holding the microphone at the Fillmore or sitting at the piano pounding out “Spirit in the Dark,” and even if you don’t see her, you see her …1
But what does one “see” as the source of the sounds on Donuts? They flicker across the mind as a collage of images, colors, and mood. It’s hip-hop as musique concrète. Even knowing all the sample sources doesn’t make the sounds any more discernible in one’s mind, it only turns the experience of listening to it into an absurdist horror movie: Galt McDermott is peacefully tinkling away on his piano when the Jacksons fall on top of him as though dropped from a flatbed truck in the sky. Michael and his brothers twitch and jerk like androids with faulty wiring, garbling out unintelligible vocal spurts. They bring the tempo down as Lou Rawls pulls himself from the muck of a blackwater swamp to the side of stage left, dragging his wheezing carcass into view before being obliterated by the horns of Gene and Jerry, fired with the intensity of a laser shot from a satellite. The assault is over quickly, but it’ll take more than that to finish Lou, who continues his trembling crawl across the stage, commenting on the entire affair: sure, it’s strange … No, Donuts is a game of resonant emotion, a mind meld between its maker and the listener.
It starts as though in mid-thought, like dropping the needle in the middle of the record; with no previous knowledge the CD might seem faulty. Pianos jingle, his name stutters repeatedly, announcing his arrival. Thirteen seconds to settle in before the accelerating rumble of “Workinonit” explodes like a muscle car roaring across the pavement, heralded by the shriek of a siren.
First heard on Ruff Draft, the siren had grown into a sonic signature, a way for him to identify his beats for MCs sorting through piles of unmarked tracks: If you heard it, you knew it was a Dilla beat. It’s pulled from a song by New York electro-hop duo Mantronix, a mix of classic breaks and loops not unlike Donuts itself: “Amen, Brother.” “Funky Penguin.” “Take Me to the Mardi Gras.” It’s startling and unsettling, conjuring images of air raids, ambulances, and emergencies. The siren appears on nine of the album’s 31 beats, one of the few unifying elements to be found.
The first time Donuts is heard, it may seem curious what the big deal is. Like his work on “Little Brother,” it’s easy to mistake it for a series of minimalist loops with a few scratches on top and the occasional flourish of virtuosic chopping. Overrated, all hype. Something like “Lightworks,” when compared to the Raymond Scott original, seems like little more than a re-edit with a cleaner mix. But the beat running in the background, nowhere on the original, is a wonder of programming, it’s so low in the mix it’s easy to miss just how hard it swings; when J. Rocc plays the track in his sets, he often strips away everything else but the drums, letting them ride out for minutes, demonstrating to the audience just how much is going on there.
If you know what he’s working with, these moments of stupefying brilliance happen more than once. Did he really lift the drums for “The Twister” from that Stevie Wonder live track? How the hell did he snag clean vocals from James Brown’s introduction on “My Thing” to use on “Light My Fire?” How did he turn Luther Ingram’s “To the Other Man” into two beats that sound so distinctly different from each other? How does a person’s brain listen to the Chicago soul of LV Johnson and decide, “Oh, I’ll make ‘Airworks’ with that”? It makes no sense. If he’d do
ne one of these things, it would have been an inspired achievement but the fact that he does them all, again and again? Stunning.
The album features a cast of recurring characters in addition to the siren. Ad Rock of the Beastie Boys makes cameo appearances on “Workinonit,” and “The New.” Joeski Love, a rapper who scored a novelty hit in 1986 with “Pee-Wee’s Dance” shows up on “Workinonit,” “The Twister,” and “Anti-American Graffitti.” He’s the audience stand-in, the Greek Chorus of the album, taking in the pandemonium around him with a confused, “Huh? What?” Introductions play a recurring role as well: Numerous tracks feature the sound of someone being welcomed onto the stage, invited to perform, reminding the audience of the performer’s accomplishments, just as Dilla was trying to do on this album. But the supporting character with the largest role, however, is error. Mistakes. They happen again and again, tiny glitches that get stuck in the ear: A pinched piano note on “Mash,” the start/stop of “Airworks,” the microphone feedback on “Dilla Says Go,” or the multiple time variations throughout.
J Dilla: “I used to listen to records and actually, I wouldn’t say look for mistakes, but when I heard mistakes in records it was exciting for me. Like, ‘Damn, the drummer missed the beat in that shit. The guitar went off key for a second.’ I try to do that in my music a little bit, try to have that live feel a little bit to it.”2
Jeff Jank: “[Something] which really seemed much more true with Dilla once I became immersed in this record while it was being edited, is how you don’t feel like he’s necessarily working with machines. There’s a lot of hip-hop and electronic music—even the really good stuff—where you constantly hear the machines. But he uses these source records and the machines as naturally as one would use a bass and drums.”
Jay Hodgson, a recording engineer and professor at the University of Western Ontario: “One of the hardest things is that, if you have training, at some point you sound trained. You do what you’re supposed to do … but hip-hop made a virtue of [not knowing], and it’s just so fantastically creative … Here are the tools, no one’s really told me what I’m supposed to do with this, but I’m going to use this thing to make music.” As an unidentified sample says on “Don’t Cry,” I’ll show you how my voice has made an unbelievable thing good.
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