The Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame Podcast
The Long Island Music & Entertainment Podcast features in-depth interviews with musicians, filmmakers, authors and entertainers from Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens.
The show is hosted by Tom Needham, LIMEHOF Vice Chairman and the host of The Sounds of Film, America's longest running film, music and ideas themed radio show.
Previous guests include Stephen Schwartz, Gary U.S. Bonds, Liberty DeVitto, Taylor Dayne, Carmine Appice, Carter Burwell, EPMD, The Illusion, The Fat Boys' Kool Rock Ski, Elliott Murphy, Wayne Robins, and Jimmy Webb.
The show is produced by the Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame who is dedicated to the recognition, honor and preservation of Long Island's music and entertainment heritage.
The Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame is located at:
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Stony Brook, NY 11790
The Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame Podcast
Strong Island Legends: JVC Force’s AJ Rok & B-Luv on LIMEHOF Podcast
In this special episode of the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame Podcast, host Tom Needham sits down with Long Island hip hop pioneers AJ Rok and B-Luv of the legendary group JVC Force.
Hailing from Central Islip, JVC Force helped define the golden era of hip hop with their unmistakable sound and lyrical prowess.
The duo reflects on their groundbreaking 1987 hit “Strong Island,” a powerful anthem that put Long Island on the hip hop map, as well as fan favorites like “Take It Away,” “Do That Dance,” and “Stylin’ Lyrics.”
They discuss the group’s early days, the influence of Long Island’s music scene, their rise to fame, and the lasting impact of their music.
Join us as we celebrate the legacy of JVC Force—true architects of the Strong Island sound.
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The Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame is located at:
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Hi, this is Tom Needham, and you are listening to the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame podcast. Today, we're proud to welcome two legends of hip-hop, B-Love and AJ Rock, from the iconic Long Island group JVC Force. Known for their classic tracks like Strong Island and Doing Damage, JVC Force helped put Long Island on the hip-hop map with their powerful rhymes, infectious beats, and undeniable Stay tuned as we dive into their incredible story and lasting impact on music history. Hey guys, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
SPEAKER_03:Hey, thank you for having us. Thank you for having us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, oh man, I'm so excited about this. Strong Island, JVC Force. Let's go to the beginning. Tell me when each of you first came to Long Island or where you grew up on Long Island. What's each of your stories?
SPEAKER_03:All right. Well, we came to Long Island. I came to Long Island back in 1973. I was five years old, going on six years old. I met AJ shortly after moving to Long Island. I believe I was five. He was seven. I was going on six, and he was becoming eight. But needless to say... you know, from living in the neighborhood at that time, um, Long Island was a place to where there were only around three houses on each street. So there's a lot of dirt roads and different things like that. So I met AJ, um, as one of the first people that I, you know, coming out there, he was one of the first people that I met. Um, he lived right around the corner. Naturally, you know, we gravitated, became, um, neighborhood friends, eventually became like brothers. So, um, Growing up, he's always been there. I know he's gone back and forth to Mount Vernon throughout the years while I was on Long Island, spent some time in Brooklyn also, where I was originally from. But like I said, again, throughout the years, you know, going to school and stuff like that, you know, but we've seen A.J. and again, we slowly began developing a brotherhood.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, for me, I was born in Mount Vernon, New York. My parents decided they wanted to get a house. They ended up moving to Central Islip, Long Island. It was a new community called the American Estates. They call it the New D and Central Islip. And it was a cool community. They were building it, as B-Love said. So it was like a lot of the streets still had dirt roads and they were still building it. I was seven. It was 72 when I moved there. My whole back and forth. So my parents ended up getting divorced when I'm like about 11 or 12. I become a rebel without a pause or a cause. And my mother sent me back to Mount Vernon to my dad's house. So I went to high school in Mount Vernon. And then I was back and forth, back and forth. While I was gone, B. Love and Kurt Gazelle was starting to make noise in the neighborhood. You know, they're both a couple of years younger than me. And we had a friend, my next door neighbor, Rodney Norman, and a good friend of ours, Mike Walls. They saw me on the block. They were bragging about how, you know, all the things B. Love and Kurt were doing. And they were going to do, they were having a party, like a little house party. doing some girl's house party that night. So Mike Walls, like, you know, I just got back in time. I feel like going nowhere. I didn't want to go out. Mike was like, nah, you're going, you're going. So they basically dragged me to the party. And then, so this is around, probably around, this is probably around 87, early 87 or over the summer or whatever. So I go to the party and, I guess they were saying something along the lines of, let AJ get on the mic, let AJ get on the mic. I said a couple of lines. I said a couple of rhymes I had. And B-Love, you know, it was his set. So, you know, he said a couple of rhymes. And then we were going back and forth, not really in a battle, but just going back and forth and back and forth. At the end of the night, everyone was talking about how great we sounded together. And we decided to meet up at Kurt's garage like the next day or so. And then I ended up joining the group and we start working on routines and we start, um, you know, uh, the idea of trying to make a demo and shopping the demo to labels and stuff.
SPEAKER_00:I want to hear about this famous garage. But can you give us just a little sense of the scene at that time? You said mid eighties, um, who, uh, was big in hip-hop at that time? Who were you guys listening to? And were there other artists on Long Island who you guys were in connection with who eventually went on to do things in the industry?
SPEAKER_02:So there were early groups like Everybody, we all credit the Bronx as the birthplace of hip hop, but they had groups like Cold Crush and stuff like that, that were doing it pre-recorded hip hop. And we had groups like that in Central Islet, Unlimited Power, Midnight Express, and Double Exposure. And Double Exposure, I was kind of like the unofficial little brother. I was younger than them, but I would try to hang out with them a lot. And that was a big influence of ours. And they were doing, you know, they were doing block parties and park parties and, you know, big backyard parties. And they would just, you know, They were doing everything the groups in the city were doing, the infamous groups in the city. We had that in Central Islip. And we had that all across Long Island, but we were living in Central Islip. I'm talking about Central Islip now. And I talked about them all at the panel that you had me speak on for the 50th anniversary. I named all of those groups. And they were doing it while... Chuck and him, while Keith was talking about all the groups that were doing what they were doing in Hempstead and in Nassau, you know, hip hop was always around. But for people I was listening to, I was going back and forth to Mount Vernon. So I would hear Mount Vernon's on the borderline in the Bronx. I would hear stuff like, I would get tapes like Cold Crush Brothers and, you know, Tape from the T-Connection and all of these spots were all the big groups, Treacherous 3, Funky 4, Crash Crew, all of them. So I was listening to a lot of that in high school. That was my influence. My three emcees that made me want to pick up a mic and do it more, you know, Melly Mel, early Kumo Dean when he did the battle with Busy B, and Grandmaster Kaz from Cold Crush. Those are my three. Those are kind of like my Mount Rushmore emcees for me, and that's who influenced me. And even a lot of stuff me and B did in the beginning, we were doing the routines, like Cold Crush is known for their routines, Churches 3, a lot of those groups before us, they had routines, and that's the stuff we start working on, routines, going back and forth, back and forth, and, you know, And that's how we kind of formed the group, formed our sound, for me anyway.
SPEAKER_03:What about you, B-Love? I think for us, I think what influenced us through the mid-'80s, hip-hop-wise, was a lot of stuff that was coming out of the city. You know, Long Island early days, you know, I guess about a year later came Biz. He hooked up with a city group, the Juice Crew. He started getting radio play. We all admired that. We were like, we want to be on the radio too. You had Eric B. and Rakim come out. Rakim was from Long Island. That was around like 86 or so. And then, you know, like again, you know, you had great influence of ours, Public Enemy, who came out around 86 also, that we would see them every time we do interviews, I believe. What was that at
SPEAKER_02:WBAU? WBAU, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:In Hempstead, Long Island. At
SPEAKER_02:Delphi University.
SPEAKER_03:Big ups to Wildman Steve, Dr. Dre, Jeff Foss. We'd even see them when we go to Hofstra. So I think the influence for us was from coming from the city. But it didn't only start in like 1986. It started back around like 1973. Because again, growing up, the first time any young kid heard hip hop, they were possessed. They fell in love with it. started writing rhymes, started trying to sound like the Cold Crush. They're also one of my favorite groups. When I met AJ, one of our ideas was like, hey, it's two of us, but we got to harmonize a lot like the Cold Crush does. So throughout the years, you know, we started to develop more based on that influence. And that's about how it went for just about everyone. And we took it and we took it. And by the time we got to high school, were presented with an opportunity at that time. It was graduation time, and our graduation class always went to Six Flags in New Jersey. So they had a mic booth there, and I went into the mic booth with another friend of mine that does the human beatbox. And we went in there, and we basically did almost like a three-minute song, like a rap freestyle. Got out of high school, graduated. sent it out to about 17 rap labels, heard from B-Boy Records first, and ended up signing a deal with them for that song. Strong Island was not the song that we initially got signed for. We got signed for the new school. which was a, again, a solo song that I did on a senior class trip at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.
SPEAKER_00:That's amazing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's because it was, you know, going through the files when you go into those music booths back then, you know, they had a lot of pop and they had a couple of hip hop songs and stuff. But my partner, his name at the time, Rob, he was a beatbox that he hung around with the group a lot. So, We were pretty prepared to go in there and do that. So I went in there and spit one of my probably most sophisticated rhyme styles, which was the new school. And like I said, we grabbed that little tape, came back to Long Island. We duplicated it. That was the only official demo that we had. And we put them in like packages. All of the Def Jams passed on it. All of the Tommy Boys, the Warner Brothers. Because again, at that time, no one knew how to really market a group from Long Island. A lot of groups were from Long Island, but only pretty much Public Enemy in those early days. And, you know, they were the only ones saying that they were from Long Island and stuff. You know, Rakim mentioned again Rough
SPEAKER_02:Enough to Break. Yeah, they both mentioned it. And I think that's the point. Nobody... And I said this when I spoke at the Hall of Fame. Rakim said Rough Enough to Break, New York from Long Island. Chuck D said Strong Island where I got them wilding. Right. For... People who didn't know, they didn't know that Rakim, because Eric B was from Queens and Brooklyn, so they didn't know Rakim was from Long Island. They didn't really know Public Enemy was from Long Island. They had a sound that resonated through the city and you had to kind of be from one of the five boroughs to be respected. People didn't know they were from Long Island. And then when we did Strong Island, which again, the continued B story, B-Boy signed us for B's solo record, New School. But they wanted a song for the B-side and asked us to go do another song. So B-Love went home and pinned Strong Island and then came around the corner to my house and ran it down for me. And we broke it up and we went in the studio and did that song. That song, they heard that and they were blown away and decided to make that the A-side. And most labels that we talked to later said if that's the song they heard, they would have signed us. Like Strong Island would have gotten us anywhere. But, you know, Strong Island didn't exist when we first started. And we did what everybody else did. You know, you take all your favorite 12 inches and albums and you see the record label address at the bottom. And we went and put the tape in the envelope and wrote out the envelopes and mailed them off to all the labels. And B-Boy is the one that called us which to us wasn't a bad thing because instead of being the 10th artist on Def Jam or the 8th artist on Tommy Boy, the only thing they really had was BDP at the time, KRS to South Bronx, that album, Criminal Minded album. So we knew we would be like the number two group. And then Scott dies six months later. KRS leaves and goes to Jive. And now we are literally the number one group. And B-Boy had that anthem with South Bronx. And then they were kind of excited because now they had this other anthem for another region. Strong
SPEAKER_03:Allen. We were excited because getting the call from B-Boy Records, it really minimalized the other labels in our opinion. The first person that called us was the first person. We were young at the time and we just wanted to be on the radio. We knew we had a couple of things that we wanted the world to hear, but we pretty much just wanted to be on the radio. So when B-Boy called us, Strong Island got penned in about three hours. Um, it didn't take long back then for me to write records. Um, it didn't take Kurt long in the studio to do beats. Um, but we, we wanted to be on the radio so bad that we, we went ahead and we took that deal and, um, we went with it and just going through it. Like AJ said, like we, we went on to do the doom when he heard Strong Island, um, It led them to send us back to the studio without any guidance or administration. They said, just go up there and do whatever y'all are doing and bring us an album. I think that sampling and looping by the great Charlie Marotta on Long Island was one of the precedents of things in hip hop. Charlie Marotta was one of the few engineers that knew how to loop a record. So it gave Long Island artists the ability to really loop funk songs, hip hop songs, break beats, et cetera, et cetera. And it's original form. So they pretty much, they didn't come up there with us throughout the whole album. About two weeks later, we delivered them to doing damage album.
SPEAKER_01:Oh my goodness. They began
SPEAKER_03:to, yeah. And they began to, yep. And they began to put it out. We used to get dressed up as a group. We would like to put on like, you know, our clothes and stuff and go places. And, you know, we would say, yeah, we're going to do a photo shoot. We didn't have nobody taking pictures of us or anything. We had a little 24 millimeter box camera. And that would be our photo shoot with one of our friends taking pictures of us. That's how the Doing Damage album arrived. That car was located on Spur Drive North in
SPEAKER_02:Long Island. It was a broke down car on the side of the road. We did a little more damage to it and then stood all over it. And that became the Doing Damage cover. Like literally... That literally became a doing damage cover. The other thing that I wanted to add to what B was saying, the amazing thing was this was a time B-Boy record wasn't giving album deals. They were giving single deals. You put out a single, and then you put out another single, and if that made enough noise, you got an album deal. So a lot of people that was on there just had single deals. We had an album deal out the box. Wow. And also at the time, DJs weren't signed to labels, to the contracts. Like Mr. C wasn't signed, Big Daddy Kane was. I don't know if Terminator X was signed when Public Enemy was. Only DJs that were signed, their name was in the group. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, DJ Polo and Coogee Rat, like their name was literally in the group. Other than that, most DJs wasn't signed. We were a three-man crew. the DJ was a member of the crew. You know what I'm saying? So that was another thing that was different about us, because a lot of people's DJs were not signed. And a lot of people went through DJs. EPMD went through a couple of DJs. Their DJ wasn't signed.
SPEAKER_03:Our DJ was signed because we looked at ourself as a three-man band, which later on I started to realize that other groups started to develop that concept. The reason why we were considered to be a three-man band and the reason why we signed our contracts like that was so that we would never get separated as a group. Of course, when you're younger, you realize, hey, you know what? My vision of the future is probably a little bit off. Because back then, what labels were doing, what labels were going for, the big artists out the group and grabbing them and signing them as solo artists, which pretty much broke up a lot of dope hip hop groups in Long Island. Um, but you know, one thing we were determined to do, we knew that we were on a label with KRS one. We knew that he was in the midst of a big battle with MC Shan. We knew that people were saying Brooklyn's in the house and we knew that Shan was saying, Hey, the bridge, um, um, KRS one was saying the bridge is over. Um, um, not the bridge is over. Um, MSG was saying the bridge is over. KRS-One was saying the South Bronx. What could we do to put Long Island on the map? Because again, now, mind you, Long Island was a place to where no one knew how to market Long Island. We were going out to the city and we were taking our demos out to the city, to Manhattan, to management labels and stuff. And they were saying, you guys are so dope. I just don't know how to manage you guys because There's no urban experience in Long Island.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we didn't
SPEAKER_03:fit that narrative. We had no projects, no trains.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we didn't fit that narrative from the hood. And somebody wrote an article on us. It actually was supposed to be a diss article. of us and it said these guys are not your regular rappers they come from two family households they cut the grass on saturday you know like like that you know where everybody else's story was there from the projects all right the father wasn't in the house they they had to sell drugs or something to get by or they end up getting in the gang you know what we didn't have none of that kind of story and it was even even the reporter didn't even know how to write about us they was like yeah these guys got they come from good houses with two two parents and they cut the grass. That's what they wrote about us.
SPEAKER_03:Once upon a time, but once upon a time, we did come from urban America. We did come from Brooklyn and Mount Vernon. We spent so much time going back and stuff, but we lived in Long Island and where we found our fame was Long Island. Strong Island. And one thing, again, that we knew was that competition in Long Island was getting really, really stiff. There were some really great artists coming out in the golden age of hip hop back then. Yeah. But what we needed was we needed something very, very defining. And, you know, I believe in the beginning, Strong Island was supposed to be called Strong Long Island. And then we took off the long. So we just said, hey, we're going to call it Strong Island. We heard Chuck saying, yeah. Strong Island, Way I Got Him Wild. You know what? That needs to be the name of the song. And seeking out beats for that song, I would say AJ. I was in college at the time. And AJ and Kurt, they went over to my dad's house. And they were going through records with him. He's a very big music collector. His origins started in England. He shipped his whole collection over from England. But he had a lot, a lot of records. So pretty much anything soulful or classic that you can ask for, he can pull it out. And A began inquiring, I believe, about a Frida Payne song. Yeah, I'm
SPEAKER_02:going to ask you. I'm asking him about, because he got free to pain. So he pulls out a 45 and plays the band of gold. And I'm like, that's not it. He's saying it has to be because that was the hit. And I'm like, that's not it. I knew the record because the DJ from Double Exposure actually traded me the 45 for my good times. And, you know, because he was doing a party that night. And he amped me up about this was a hot joint. And I was so upset that I gave up my good times. I don't know where I threw that record at. But I remembered the record. So I was asking his father if he had Free the Pain. So he's telling me Band of Gold was the hit song. So I asked, is there anything on the other side? And when the needle dropped, and that was it. And then we were going through. We played it. We called B-Love at college. He was going to college at the time. He was away. So we called him and played it for him over the phone. And then Um, somehow we ended up using the, uh, the, uh, the guitar part, the unhooked generation from, from another song on her album that be love's father also had the album. So that, that, that was, and Kurt took it in the studio and did what he did.
SPEAKER_03:Not after, not after, not, not, not
SPEAKER_02:originally because he wanted to do some other stuff.
SPEAKER_03:Not before a whole bunch of argument because initially Kurt wanted to take the, And he wanted to put under the boardwalk. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's what he wanted to use over it.
SPEAKER_02:And that was the original. Right.
SPEAKER_03:This needs to be way more fusion and fresh. And. We used the double Frida Payne samples. We demanded, you know, he had to element like... And again, back then, I want to say the reason we were a three-man group is because if you look at a lot of the structure of the JVC songs, we were one of the only groups at that time that was giving the DJ like a whole 16 lines to scratch.
SPEAKER_00:That's what I was going to ask you about because your sound is... is really unique that way he's scratching like throughout every song like a lot like he has a voice the second
SPEAKER_03:like the second dj to ever do the transformer scratch we went and we listened to um jazzy jeff live at union square one year uh jazzy jeff and fresh prince live at union square jazzy jeff introduced the transformer scratch went to kurt the following morning and was like it sounded like this next thing you know he's doing it it's on our album too He's scratching through several songs. He's scratching choruses. He had his own scratch record. And it was all a means of being a third of the group. So we would say, you know what, we'll highlight the songs with our lyrics. We'll make sure we go off with our lyrics. You make sure that your hands also element the songs very heavy. We were never one to say, hey, you know what? We wanted some smooth little radio hits and stuff like that. We were like, you know what? We want it hard as it could be. And hey, if the radio takes it, the radio will take it. And if the radio doesn't take it, the radio doesn't take it. But this is how we want to sound. And as a result of it, you know what I mean? He had several songs. Strong Island was one of them. He scratched a lot at the end of Take It Away. He
SPEAKER_02:scratched on Doing Damage. There were
SPEAKER_03:several.
SPEAKER_02:That was his own song, just scratching and putting things together. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So we, you know, we, like I say, you know, as a three man group, this is what we established. And it was like, you know, a label would never come in. And as we thought back then, you know, a label would never come in and, you know, fascinate us so much to want to leave each other. We have spent so much time again, growing up in Long Island. We all used to hang out together. We used to go to parties together. We used to go to the movies together. I mean, we used to go through the South Shore Mall together.
SPEAKER_02:We used to
SPEAKER_03:shop at Chess King together. We used to shop at– we used to eat in the food court. We used to buy clothes together. We used to go to the city all of the
SPEAKER_02:time together. We ran. We were self-contained. I used an example. I was– See, T-Money from MTV and from Original Concept interviewed me recently. And I used an example. Ed and Dre Lover, when they first did Yo MTV Raps, MTV just gave them cameras and said, do a show. Then once the show became big, then you had all these people wanting to come in and the credits and wanting to have parts and say in the show. when we first got started they just said go do a record we was in the studio by ourselves and we did all that then it was like later on like in the second and the third unreleased album you know now we got A&Rs and people wanted producers wanted to give us different producers and it was just like but in the beginning when we did this when we did that first album they just said go in the studio and bring me something and that's what we did they was always saying
SPEAKER_03:They was always saying, like, just come somewhere, go somewhere, do this, do that. Because, again, at that time, B-Boy Records had no, they had no idea of the concept of how we were making our music. How were you doing
SPEAKER_00:it? Where were you going? Where were you going to record your music and mix
SPEAKER_02:it?
SPEAKER_00:Charlie Murata.
SPEAKER_02:Charlie
SPEAKER_03:Murata. Charlie Murata.
SPEAKER_02:The same studio, so EPMD used that studio. K-Solo ended up coming out of that. EPMD did the first few DOS FX records out of that. Keith Murray worked out of that. Craig Mack worked out of that. So it was a studio, the local studio that we all used. It was heavily used in Suffolk
SPEAKER_03:County. When we had to do some bigger records throughout the years, we went over to folks like David Greenberg, who at the time, he had a bigger studio than Charlie, but Charlie's studio was just... way more unique for hip hop sound.
SPEAKER_02:It was local. It was a local. It was a local. It wasn't like a big studio you would find in the city. It was like the attic of his mother's house. You know what I'm saying? It was just like, it was a home studio, but he had everything in there. And it was comfortable for us. It was 15 minutes from the house. We just go there and spend time. And we never wasted time. Most of the songs, Kurt did the beats a lot of times before we got there. Sometimes he worked on them when we got there. But a lot of times we were in and out the studio in like four hours. Yeah. With a done song.
SPEAKER_03:I think one of the things that people never really realized was that how much we didn't like to be in the studio while the production was being made. Why? Yeah, you know, we had our chemistry. You know, Kurt ended up working at Charlie's studio. So he was the main engineer with them. And I think he was the first engineer that Charlie ever... you know, trained and worked there. So, you know, we had advantages when it came to getting studio time and doing what we had to do. But even when we started recording, like, our second album or, you know, we recorded songs for the third, which was the Big Tracks album, we... never really particularly it used to it used to itch me sitting in the studio listening to the same thing over and over and over and over i would come in and i would say hey what are we eating tonight where's the menus you know things like that the lyrics would always be ready but um you know going back tom to what you were talking about with um what we were talking about in regards to like b-boy records they would just send us here they would just send us here That is how the concept of, there's a video that's out of us performing Strong Island at a Red Alert variety show.
SPEAKER_02:It's a public access show that Red Alert hosts. I've seen
SPEAKER_03:that. I love that video. That was never the actual
SPEAKER_02:Strong Island video. We didn't
SPEAKER_03:do a Strong Island video. What it was, again, at that time, was the label turned around and called to Long Island, told us, hey, put on your nice clothes and meet us in the city. next thing you know we're walking across the stage and someone's handing us mics and that's why in a sense when you're looking at the video it looks so unrehearsed and i'm kind of looking i'm kind of looking a little stiff and nervous and i'm like so what are we doing here what are we doing there what are we doing here and at the time we kind of knew who red alert was but not fully fully fully on that video he's so young
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he knew us. I knew who Red Alert was. He broke the record. We
SPEAKER_03:didn't know him personally,
SPEAKER_02:though. No, we didn't know him personally.
SPEAKER_03:No, and when we met him on that Variety show, it almost like it... Because when he heard Strong Island, what he did was 1988, midnight, on New Year's Eve night, going into midnight, at midnight on the nose, he broke that record. Played it a couple of times, and that record was... In the beginning, it was like people was listening to that record and they were like, man, what the heck is this? The cadence of this record is kind of like it can change the game. But people didn't know what Central Islet was. A lot of people, when we said living in Seattle, they thought we were talking about Coney Island. They thought we were a Brooklyn group. Because again, Long Island wasn't known to do things like that. That's so interesting.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I'd
SPEAKER_02:be in the city and they'd be like, yo, you not living in Seattle? Yeah. What part of Coney Island you at? And I'm like, there's like 15 Brooklyn dudes in me. And I'm like, uh, by the amusement park. And then I would bounce. Cause I was like, I didn't want to tell him I wasn't from Brooklyn. Cause I was like, I'm by myself. Like, you know what I'm saying? I ain't know nothing about Coney Island. I was, I
SPEAKER_03:was born
SPEAKER_02:in.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I was born in Brooklyn and I moved to Long Island when I was really young. Now, for anybody that knows me, knows I'm a real arrogant son of a gun. And when we made that record, one thing I will pridefully say is that I've been waving a flag for Long Island ever since. I've been waving a flag for Central Light Slip. I've been waving a flag for Long Island. I've been waving a flag through the boroughs for Long Island all the way until we Even went to Europe and realized that we had a big follower in the United States. Never not turned around and told somebody, hey, where are you from? From Central Island, Long Island, Suffolk County.
SPEAKER_02:No, I did that that day. I was by myself. I was by myself and a bunch of Brooklyn dudes. So that day I didn't feel like I wanted to tell them. I was like,
SPEAKER_00:yo. Let me ask you one thing. You mentioned before playing parties and parks and stuff like that. And AJ, I think I've spoken to you about this once before, but for our listeners, a lot of people know the Long Island music scene, and they think of all these different clubs that existed throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But a lot of them were not featuring hip-hop artists, even though some of the biggest names in music... History have been from Long Island. Were there any places other than parties and parks where there was hip-hop being performed during your time? I
SPEAKER_02:think our first home show was not too far from the Hall of Fame with Stony Brook University.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, you guys played there?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that was like our first. Yeah, we played there for.
SPEAKER_03:That
SPEAKER_02:was our first. Yeah, that was our first Long Island
SPEAKER_03:show. That was our first home show. We were coming off of tour. We were coming off of tour in Germany. And they were having a big Sigma blue and white weekend.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_03:And they booked us. And they booked Vaughn Mason of Rays. And they booked, I believe it was another group also. But we came off of the road from Germany. And that was our first home show. Now. We had shows that we did in the city and stuff like that throughout the course of the years and stuff like that. But again, being up in Long Island, Stony Brook was definitely a staple. It was a lot of preparation for that show. A serious crowd because, you know, the Sigma organization is very heavy, fraternities and stuff. So we came off the road and that was one of our very few shows that we came through and did in Long Island. I believe we did probably about one or two throughout the course of time, but... That was the main, main show.
SPEAKER_02:Right, there was a spot we did. We did something like, around the 4th of July, we did this spot. It wasn't a club. It was more like, I don't know. It was like, not a community center, but it was like some building that really wasn't like a club that they just had a show there that night. You know what I'm
SPEAKER_01:saying? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And so it was stuff like that. So we did stuff like that. And like you said, most of the stuff was out of state, the Delawares and all those different places. And we were traveling. And we were doing stuff like that. But it was just like, that was our homecoming show. Like, so, you know, the record Strong Island, Long Island hadn't seen us live yet, you know, and everybody came to see us. But that's why I said when I was there for the 50th, I was telling, I think Wild Man Steve was interviewing me and I was saying, you know, this is coming full circle because just right around here is where we did our first show at Stony Brook University.
SPEAKER_00:That's pretty cool. Let me ask you, what was it like? You guys were young. You just made all this music practically by yourself. And then all of a sudden, the record gets picked up and it's a hit. It's getting played. You're even being played in Europe. You go on tour. That must have been pretty exciting. Must have changed your life to some extent.
SPEAKER_03:So let me say
SPEAKER_00:this.
SPEAKER_03:It did. It did, Tom. And the funny part about it is, performing, having the song Strong Island out, I was in college upstate. I managed to get out of that college and stuff like that and have my degree and stuff like that. When I went over to, I became a, after going to that college, I became a active student at Stony Brook University. And now, mind you, I'm getting ready to go on tour as a student at Stony Brook University. And then I'm getting ready to come home and perform at Stony Brook University. And one thing I can say that I remember back then that was kind of crazy was the popularity of it all did not allow me to stay at Stony Brook. Really?
SPEAKER_00:I was going to ask
SPEAKER_03:you. There was going to be no way that I could be a student there, have a career with such a With such a record, there was no way that that was going to go ahead and happen. Why? You were
SPEAKER_00:just getting mobbed
SPEAKER_03:too
SPEAKER_00:much?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the popularity back then of the song, anywhere we went, it was like a primary focus for folks. They didn't look at me like, okay, this is B-Love, freshman student, You know, they looked at me, this is B-Love. They made that song Strong Island. Right. They did this, they did that, da-da-da-da. And that was just the main focus. There was always people in my dorm room. There was always girls at my dorm room. You know, one of those things to where, like, you know, if I thought I was going to turn around and even pull off a 2.5, it wasn't going
SPEAKER_02:to happen. Right. But talking about the experience overseas, one of the most amazing thing. So we perform some places and then we would walk around. They were like big clubs. They weren't, you know, and we would walk around sometimes the club afterwards. And, you know, when we were on the stage and we were, ask people like what they want to hear. They would name songs or you could see them singing the lyrics word for word. And then when we went to talk to them, I was amazed that they didn't know English, but knew our words, our songs word for word. That blew me away that people in another country that are not fluent in English, but know your lyrics word for word. I think that was one of the biggest things. And then we got to see things like, you know, If I had money and was going on vacation, that area of Germany wouldn't have never been where I picked. But we got to see things like history, like we got to see the wall a year before it came down. A year or two before the wall, you know, that Berlin Wall came
SPEAKER_03:down. It wasn't even a great impressive wall either. It looked like a white wall with some chicken wire and graffiti on
SPEAKER_02:it. But the amazing thing was... So we did perform in East Berlin, and at that point, that was the communist side, I guess, or whatever. And when we coming out of it, you had military-looking people with automatic weapons looking under the train, and people were trying to escape. People were trying to escape. They had the
SPEAKER_03:machine. They had the... They had the long rifle guns back then.
SPEAKER_02:And I had never seen anything like that in person. They were walking through the crane like that. Poking
SPEAKER_03:people with the knife on the gun to move along. I'm
SPEAKER_02:like... Those things like that. And then the most interesting thing is, you know, we went to a McDonald's and they sell beer and they sell the B-E-I-R or something like that, or B-I-E-R or something. That was like amazing, like that they serve beer at McDonald's. So it was this big culture shock, like coming from where we were from and these people showing us so much love. There's another story. So we did, we were doing like four or five songs and that's what we got paid for. So we did our, in one city, we did the songs and then we finished and the crowd was banging on the stage and stuff for us to come back out. So we told the promoter, you want us to go back and you'll pay for another show, you know, so they wouldn't do it. So, you know, the people start banging. They say, you've got to go back out. They go rip up my club. We go out there and, And when I go to grab the mic, the mic is missing. The people in the crowd stole the mic. I said, I can't perform without the mic. The person who stole the mic handed the mic back up.
SPEAKER_00:Oh,
SPEAKER_02:wow. So I could perform. And it was a really nice mic. And then they stole it again. I was mad. I was like, if I knew that, I would have took the mic because it was a really, really nice mic. But that was like an amazing experience. They were calling for us to come back out. And Someone stole the mic and turned back in the mic so I could perform and then stole it again. Like, those are the crazy things that we're, you know, we're young and we're experiencing all this stuff for the first time in a new country, new countries, new places we've never been before. And that was just the whole experience was amazing.
SPEAKER_00:Let me ask you. You know, the crowd would.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. I was saying the crowd back then was so... They looked at New York artists like they're idols. So even when you would surf the crowd or something or you would jump into the crowd and they would carry you through, there were people that were so fascinated out there. It was like... wow, what are those on your feet? You know, we had on like the new Jordans at the time, you know, the retro Jordans at the time was out. They weren't retro yet. They would try to take it off your feet. You know, they wanted
SPEAKER_02:a piece of the group. Somebody actually brought one of my Jordans. I had two pairs. Someone brought my Jordan. We paid$75 for them in a mall near Rochelle. And I sold them for$200. And I was looking for somebody to buy the other pair
SPEAKER_00:too. So at this point, You're achieving a certain level of success. And as you mentioned, there were other artists who only had singles deals. You guys were doing albums and you're touring. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. only the start of things, or did you have a sense? I can
SPEAKER_02:speak for myself, but I can speak for myself as far as what I felt. I never thought when we first started making money, you couldn't tell me that it wasn't going to always come in. So that was one thing, misunderstanding of that situation. But it was you couldn't also tell me that I would have this conversation with you or people overseas would still be going crazy over something over lyrics we did in the studio in 87 people are still singing it saying that that's my favorite song still making a big deal i you had me come through to do a panel and two days before you was like yo can you perform that song because i wasn't performing and be love was in atlanta and i never performed that song by myself and and and it was like johnny juice helped me put something together but it was just like You couldn't tell me that these things would still be going on where people don't want to always hear something that was made six months ago. People are still singing our lyrics from that we went in the studio from 87. That you couldn't tell me. You couldn't also tell me. I knew hip hop was here to stay, but there's no way that I actually knew it would be this billion dollar entity. And this is just me speaking. I don't know what everybody else felt. There's no way. I think that
SPEAKER_03:we were.
SPEAKER_02:I knew that this would be what it is now. There's no way I knew
SPEAKER_03:that. I think through the influence of our parents, we stayed somewhat grounded. When it came to hip hop, hip hop made everybody kind of rebel-ish. You want to get on. You want to put your songs out. You want to rap about the things you see. You want to rap about your hood. You want to rap about the streets in your hood. Our parents were always pretty grounded when it came to us in regards to what we would do. They pretty much demanded that we had something else going on. For instance, we had Strong Island now. Strong Island was playing all over the radio, but my mom was always saying something like, well, what's going to happen when that's all over? What's going to be your career? What will you do? As a result of it today, what many people don't realize and understand is that I have a 40 year career that I do. I've been doing the same thing for 40 years. And I think that that grounding. And
SPEAKER_00:what is that? What have you been doing?
SPEAKER_03:Um, I actually, I have my own company, which is called the get down lounge. And then I also, I work for another major, major company. Um, and I do a lot of finance work and stuff like that. So I've been doing finance for like 40 years. Um, And again, if we were going to make records under our parents' roof, we also had to turn around and show them that we were doing something else. We couldn't just lay around in our parents' house during the day, writing lyrics and stuff. Most of us went to work. Back then, I went into the banking industry, which later on, like I said, I switched over to the finance industry. But AJ was also doing architectural drafting. And a lot of times that we would go to the studio, we would go and pick AJ up from the architectural draft
SPEAKER_02:house. I was working for this company. this place that did toilet partitions for major buildings. And I used to do the, I used to draft them up. I used to have to draw them for the place. But I actually went to an architectural, I went to Amityville Drafting and Architectural Drafting and Technical Institute. I was in there with Dave from De La. And it's funny because neither one of us ended up doing that for a career. I do want to interject though, i was a rebel for no reason at all i really was not the nine to five guy ever i've always had some kind of side business making flyers or doing something and you know always doing something non-traditional I didn't have the structure like B-Love has a pension and a retirement, the 401k. I was never that dude. I was always doing something. After JVC, I was writing for magazines. I was a freelance writer. And then I did promotions and publicity, you know, independent for independent labels and underground radio. I was always like hustling, like legal hustling. I've had a lot of day jobs. I can't say I had any of them. I think I worked one place three years and I was looking for a gold watch because that was like forever for me. Like I never, I never really. So I actually differ a little bit. I didn't listen as I was supposed to. My parents were also telling me the same thing, but I was always trying to do my own thing. And so I just be real about that. Like I just, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't. AJ
SPEAKER_03:wasn't, AJ wasn't, AJ wasn't the conforming teen. I
SPEAKER_02:was a graffiti artist. I used to, I used to like the defaced property. I was a graffiti artist first. I used to, I just was into all kinds of crazy stuff. And, and, and, you know, so it just was like, um, that's the, I mean, even now I have my own, I have a publication or something. I've had, I've had jobs that I've had to have, you know, when things were slow, but you know, they were never long-term jobs. And even when I moved to Atlanta for a while, I was working for a big temp agency that kept me working. I worked three months here, a couple weeks here. It was just enough in between writing the articles and waiting for them checks from the source and whoever else. You know what I'm saying? So that's just been my life. I've always been that.
SPEAKER_00:So the two of you have done a lot of different things, but as you said a little while ago, it's amazing that people are still listening to your music. And if we can just go back to the music for a minute, um, you know, um, Man, one of the things that we were talking about also a little bit earlier was just your unique sound, whether it's the scratches throughout the records. You were also making music at a time when all the samples did not have to be cleared. The fact that a lot of artists today are solo artists, you were a group, which is something that I miss in hip-hop. I love music groups. Tell me a little bit about A little bit more about that first album and how you went about making the second album.
SPEAKER_02:I want
SPEAKER_00:to
SPEAKER_02:add one thing. We didn't know it at the time, but Public Enemy had this sound and it was loud with sirens and all these things. The guitar riff in Strong Island was like this distinct sound. different sound. And I think that was, that's what made everybody, that's what drove it crazy. Cause that, like, you know, there was a few groups that had this, that a louder set, like Public Enemy was loud in their production. The sirens, there was a lot of things going on in there. That's, that, that, that, that guitar, that, that riff, That's what everybody knows that. They remember that.
SPEAKER_03:I think Public Enemy, I think what Public Enemy for us, when we first heard, they had made a couple of records. And then when they came out and they put out Rebel Without a Pause, we were like, yo, this right here, it's ridiculous. And I think the benefits of living in Long Island versus living in the city is I would go out to the city and I would hear the DJs cutting up a lot of the breakbeats that was used throughout the first or second generation of hip-hop. But in Long Island, we listened to soft rock music. We listened to rock and roll. We listened to everything. So when times came about, it wasn't very uncommon for us to take a song by, let's say, Hall& Oates or something and try to... loop that and do some kind of rhymes to it and i think that's what brought on like the unique sound of long island because most of the artists at that time most of the big artists they did record at charlie murata's studio
SPEAKER_02:in suffolk county so
SPEAKER_03:right so all of the songs that at times people would put out they would be original songs and they would have the loop on it so we were we were pretty close to what the original narrative of the song was when we rapped on it. We weren't remaking it. We weren't playing it with the drum tracks. You know, we would sample, and then we would put a drum track underneath to highlight it and stuff. But the original sample was sitting on there. But I think, again, the ability to use so many songs that we came up on. Like, you know, face it, in the city, you weren't going to go to the city and hear somebody rapping over... You heard mostly breakbeats. Billy Joel or Pat Benatar song or something like
SPEAKER_02:that. Other than Run DMC, who did incorporate some rock, most of the music at that time was like breakbeats, like, you know, breakbeats, the traditional breakbeats parts and, you know, the James Brown loop and the samples. And it was a lot of that music. Um, you did have a few people that were doing something different, um, incorporating other stuff. And like I said, Run DMC, you know, did the incorporated the rock thanks to, uh, to, uh, Rick Rubin, um, influence. But, um, yeah, you had, um, a lot more break beats and we had a lot more music and even with, and even credit the EPMD, uh, they had more of the funk sound of the West Coast. The West Coast was using funk more. They were incorporating that funk. So even that was different. The difference also was in that era, you're talking about in that time, every group. So you heard Rakim, you knew it was Rakim. You heard Public Enemy, you knew it was Public Enemy. You heard Biz, you knew it was Biz. And even the ones that came after, you know, when Keith Murray came, you knew it was Keith Murray when you heard us. But it was like everybody had their own sound. Craig Mack, when he did MC Easy and Troop and then did Craig Mack, everybody had their own sound. You could identify them. Now you listen to the radio. I remember coming back from Atlanta for the summer, one time in the summer, and I I was like, oh, man, that must be that new Lox song. And it wasn't the Lox. And I heard like 10 songs that I thought was the Lox, and it wasn't the Lox. There was like 10 songs in a row that sounded like the Lox. None of them was the Lox. You didn't have that in that era. You didn't mix Big Daddy Kane and KRS-Up. You knew X-Klan. Everybody had a distinct sound. You could hear something and be like, oh, that's so-and-so. you could automatically, you knew who it was if you knew the artist, you know. And I want to say. It's different than the music at the time.
SPEAKER_03:And I want to quickly say, I want to quickly say a big shout, big respect to Craig Mack. Rest in peace. Craig Mack has always, rest in peace, definitely. Craig Mack has been around us. Yes. He was coming around when he was a kid on a yellow 10 speed. Craig Mack would comb the neighborhood and he would crash everybody's window where they had a studio. And I want to say big shouts out to him because he's definitely one of the most dedicated artists that I've ever seen in the game. I've sat in the studio with him many a time. him and Lenny Ace Morrow when they were working on Project Funk the World initially. And for a lot of people that don't know, the introduction to Project Funk the World is actually JVC Force's Deja Vu from our second album. You know, he was very dedicated, you know, night after night being in the studio perfecting the sound, which he called like, you know, the funk sound. You know, Craig Mack's style was so... different than when he started when he started rapping in the beginning you really couldn't understand what he was saying
SPEAKER_02:yeah futuristic form yeah he was
SPEAKER_03:i don't think it was until he got up with easy mo b and easy mo b calmed it down a little and they came with flavor in the air and then you could kind of understand like what he was saying but prior to that you wouldn't have known what craig mack was saying on his records because he was kind of like more like a flame flame It was his style, but don't get me wrong, it was funky. I've also got an opportunity to sit in the studio with him when he did Get Retarded. It was at Diamond J's house. And I remember that
SPEAKER_02:day they were
SPEAKER_03:recording that song and they picked up the, um, the, the break beat of a one man band plays on and on. And I remember the day that diamond J said, you know, this needs something on it. Like, you know, like a zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. And then the whole room starts zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. And then that became a part of it. Now record came out, but again, just want to give some really, really big shout outs to Craig Mack. Not only is he one of my favorite rap artists, but also was a good friend to all of us and one of the most genuine guys that we could ever
SPEAKER_02:meet. He used to come by the house. My mother be like, he was like that friend that came by in the morning and never left. Come take a shower. When that boy going home, that was Craig Mack at my house. But, you know, so going from the first album to the second album. So B-Boy... We're having issues with B-Boy. We're not getting the money. They did great in the promotion. They promoted the hell of us, got us lots of shows and stuff. But, you know, when it came to like our sales and stuff, we wasn't really seeing it. We were starting to see differences. Like, you know, we were pushing for a video and it wasn't doing that and other things. So we ended up getting out of the contract. We meet the guys from Island Warlock and they... they turn us on to their lawyer to help us get out of the contract. And Michael Turok, and credit to Michael Turok because we didn't have the money to pay him for the hours he put in. But he was so, like he was so moved by, how messed up this contract was and how dirty they were. Like, he took it as a personal vendetta. Like, he was going after them to get us off. Funny thing is, so then he negotiates our new contract and negotiates our fee and the upfront money and stuff. The label, Adler's Warlock, Adler's, he ends up representing us. We end up stealing it from him. So he ended up being our lawyer. So we get in there, and they were based in Coney Island, ironically, Coney Island, CI. And we're going there, and that was a different experience, working on the second album, because they had a hit with the Jungle Brothers' Girl, Our House, with a hip-hop track.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And they had big success with that. They also had MC Surge and they had some other people. Not only
SPEAKER_03:that, they wanted all creative control for the first time.
SPEAKER_02:Well, yeah, they wanted creative control. So we did this one song that was a hip hop record in line with what we do. And they wanted us to make, oh, you got to have a hip house record because they had success with that. So they were looking for that next big hip house record. So we ended up changing the song from a hip hop record to a hip house record, changing the title of it to fit the thing. And it just- We had songs- B-Love and Kurt, B-Love and Kurt, because they were DJs at the time and house music was big and they started playing more house at parties. I wasn't really, I was like a real hip hop head. And while I love Girl, I House You, I really wasn't a house head like that. So we did the record, for me, reluctantly. But it was them trying to change us from what we were. And again, when we would just go in the studio before and come out with what we did, that was a whole different experience for us. And it was an adjustment. It was a little bit of
SPEAKER_03:an adjustment. 50% of that album wasn't R-True Sound. Songs like JVC is in the house, Smooth and Mellow. Smooth
SPEAKER_02:and Mellow, I love. Smooth and Mellow, I love. JVC in the house is a house record. It's a forced thing, which was we got our own thing. We got our own thing beat, but they wanted to change it. It's a forced thing. It made it a house record, a hip house kind of record. Those records wasn't really... us, well, it definitely wasn't me.
SPEAKER_00:And how did your fans respond to the change in your sound?
SPEAKER_02:Well, the hip house was good, and people liked the hip house stuff, and it didn't... Now, we didn't get... We didn't get the recognition that we got from the first album. Ratings when people were going for mics in the source, I think our first album was rated a lot higher than the second album, as far as that's concerned.
SPEAKER_03:But there's many people out there that
SPEAKER_02:when they
SPEAKER_03:listen to Doing Damage and they listen to Forcefield, they say, you know, both of those are really, really dope albums. Like, they love them both. You know what the song says? Some of the songs that was on Force Field that was kind of like us, like Intro to Dance, Keep a Handle, Stop and Listen.
SPEAKER_02:Tear to Show Up is going to be one of my favorites.
SPEAKER_03:Tear to Show Up. Those are songs that you can hear. It goes with the same cadence as what was going on in the Doing Damage album. But then there's a couple of other songs that it's like, okay, you know what? Well, we're still going through the force field album we're still a group that's like you know what like how do we get played on a daytime radio yeah so you know we went along with um you know making some songs that you know again they would have the house music in it i would have the r b i believe hip-hop was coming through a time also that it was almost like every third artist was putting out a song in the background was almost like the don't make me over sybil beat uh in the background uh You know, the... And we tried that also. And I believe we did one song like that, which was called Envy for Another. But again, you know, people loved that album too. And I think what helped it all was... People took a genuine liking to JVC Force after Strong Island. So it was almost like for our true fans, which are not the normal fans, me and A, you know, we love to say like, you know, hey, you know, we got a cult following.
SPEAKER_02:It is almost like a cult following. They loved everything that we
SPEAKER_03:did. They allowed us to do everything we were doing. They allowed us to do everything.
SPEAKER_02:Some fans won't allow an artist to grow.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And they want to hear the same thing over and over. Our fans did allow us to experiment and rocked with us with the experiments and allowed us to try other things. And still, it wasn't like, oh, man, I'm not feeling them. They're not doing Strong Alley. But, you know, they allowed us You know, they grew with us. They allowed us to
SPEAKER_03:take our chances.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And they grew with us. So that was a great thing with the fans that we had. And I also always want to say, and Beat Love always says this too, yo, I have to give mad love to all our fans because the fact that we're having this conversation right now is only due to our fans. It's our great international. We have a large international following. Which are?
SPEAKER_03:Which are no longer fans to us. They're fans of fanatics and fam.
SPEAKER_02:Fam, yeah. Because a lot of times I'll interact with people on social media and they'll be like, oh my God, I can't believe I met you. And you know, some people that have been some of the coolest relationships I've had in the industry started off with somebody who was a fan and we started hanging out and we actually became friends. And there's like some DJs on the West Coast and some people, you know, all over the place. Those are people that were, they started out, we met because they were a fan of our music. And that's a telling story. I have long relationships with a lot of people because they started out as a fan of our music.
SPEAKER_00:So let me ask you, you have all those people out there who still love your music. And we just had, not too long ago, the 50th anniversary. I'm sure there were all kinds of offers coming in for JVC forced to reunite and to do more music. There
SPEAKER_02:was a story. There was a guy. So there was an offer. The person contacted B-Love. I'm not going to say Nick. The person contacted B-Love about performing in the Bronx for the 50th anniversary. But I guess they didn't understand that he was in Georgia. So he was like, yo, my man AJ, my partner AJ lives in Mount Vernon. So maybe he could do it. So first off, this is the Bronx. I got away with what I did at your place because it was Long Island, and Long Island wanted to hear the song. That's the only reason I got away with that, the way I did. But we're talking about the Bronx. So they wouldn't let me. And they had one DJ. They had one DJ who was DJing for all the groups. Right. With the exception of Johnny Juice DJ for Public Enemy and also for Melly Mel and whoever was up there with Melly Mel. And he talked to Chuck about Chuck actually performing and actually coming out. When Chuck performed, I do Strong Island and I go back out and Chuck finished. They wouldn't let me do that. But they wanted me to go on after Chuck Public Enemy and Melly Mel and whoever in the Bronx. I was not doing that with a DJ that I did not know. I was not doing that by myself. If you love me, I'm down for anywhere, any day. But I was not doing that. I was not playing myself in the Bronx. And I live in close proximity to the Bronx, the street I used to live on. The yellow line down the middle of the street across the street was the Bronx and my side was Mount Vernon. So I lived too close and I never would have lived that. I just wasn't putting myself. So I didn't go to that because they didn't want to fly B up here. And other people had talked to us, but because B-Love is in Georgia and I'm in New York, It was like they wasn't trying to pay for us to come. They didn't
SPEAKER_03:have the budget at the time to fly me in. I believe the show was being sponsored by a company that later on cut a check so everybody could get a little bit of money at the time. But in those days, I should say in most days, I'm in New York a lot, but I had just come back. And one of the things that I've learned through the game is, hey, you know, A certain amount of this, I'm not always supposed to come out of the pocket. You know, if you're constantly coming out of the pocket, you know what I'm saying? Zero plus zero equals zero. Right. You know, so my whole thing was like, you know, hey, you know what? I love my fan base. I'll come out there. I'll do the show. Hey, fly me out there.
SPEAKER_00:Well, isn't there any financial situation that could develop? I mean, if you guys were to make it official that you guys were going to Reunite. I mean, every group does it at some point. Let me take this.
SPEAKER_02:To answer your question, if there is a promoter who is serious and wants to talk to us, we are ready to perform.
SPEAKER_03:Well, here's the situation also. Since that time, Bob, we've gone ahead and we've created that situation on our own. Really, when I say that, I mean, I'm always in New York. Sometimes AJ's in Atlanta. You know, we plan to come like, for instance, I'm coming to New York in a couple of weeks so that me and him can get together because we do get together and we do do things. But we learned how to go ahead and make those means happen on our own. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So we do a lot of things. We're still doing rehearsals. Um, sometimes it has to be over zoom, like, uh, lyrically, you know, to make sure we lyrically are in tune and still lyrically together. Um, and like you said, when he comes in 2021, we, um, We performed, it was just like a small little performance for like family and friends. We did a little, we did Strong Island. We did, you know, we did Strong Island. So we've done and we've gotten together other times than we've done live. We'll just be live and we'll just be sitting down and we'll be working on, we'll be doing routines or whatever, you know what I'm saying? And interacting with the fans and friends and stuff, family and friends. We've done
SPEAKER_03:lives, we've done lives, we've done lives on a couple of different occasions and most of the time that we will do a passionate live that's going over two hours is it's been the times that our fathers has passed away. Right. Mr. Woodson, rest in peace to my dad. The last podcast that we did was, you know, it was about two and a half hours long. We performed almost 15 songs on that podcast for the folks. Oh, wow. That was when
SPEAKER_02:my dad passed away. It was like, even if it was just the verse or two, but yeah, we went through, we went through songs. A couple of freestyles.
SPEAKER_03:That was on Long Island. That was on Long Island. We had friends coming through the podcast all day.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And it was in B-Love's, and it was in this garage where we used to be and rehearse. Where it all began. And where it all began. Um, and we were together and that literally was my first time in centralized up in decades because I had moved to Mount Vernon. And then, um, I had, even when I lived in Long Island, I had moved to Bayshore and Brentwood and, and, and, and, and, um, uh, but then I was in Atlanta for 12 years. So, you know, That was my first time actually going through Central Islip in like decades.
SPEAKER_00:Tell me about this garage. Like people talk about garage bands and they credit the suburbs to being a place where young kids can play their instruments in the garage and then go on to bigger things. But you guys were making music too.
SPEAKER_02:We had two garages and Kurt was a traditional garage, like a garage that the garage door opened and the car could go inside like a garage. Dee loves how his father turned the garage into a room. That was like his room where his equipment was. It didn't have the garage door. It had a wall. It was like he converted that garage into a
SPEAKER_03:room. Bricks on the front.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So it was a room. It was an extra room. It was the garage, but it was like where his equipment was, where his collection of records was. We would go in there and we would play around and experiment and all that. So those are two different garage And then there was my basement at my mother's house where we would always get together and work on stuff together, too. But the two garages were different dynamics. Like Kurt's garage, like literally the garage door was open. You could drive by and walk by and see us and hear us. And people would come by. Sometimes B would be at college. And, you know, we had times where... Craig Mack and Keith Solo and Keith Murray before they were making records would be there and other things and other people would come by. So that was a different dynamic. B's Garage, like I said, was a room. It was made more into a room and it was more private. So that's where we were. So it was two different dynamics. But those are the places we rehearsed. Those are the places we performed and worked on routines. Like you said, my house, we mostly worked and writing and stuff and had meetings and stuff.
SPEAKER_03:Let me say this. Let me say this. So when you say the dynamics of a garage, going back into the 80s before we even started making records, you know, and let me go back even a little further than that. You know, for every kid that has gotten into hip-hop, they've come about when their parents weren't home and pretty much attacked their set in some kind of way.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:These men back then had a nice set, you know, two turntables, a mixer, amp, nice speakers, record collection. You know, when our parents weren't home, that's when we took advantage of jumping all over their set. Our parents in the beginning, like, for instance, my father, he couldn't understand, well, why are you pulling the record back and forth? You're supposed to, like, just play it and put it back in a label and... put it back in the plastic and pack it away. So he didn't understand all of that. So we had to sneak and do a lot of that stuff when he wasn't home. In my garage, as opposed to Kurt's garage, Kurt's garage is where But we practiced routines a lot. And we made a lot of cassettes and different things like that. My garage was actually the place in the neighborhood to where we were throwing house parties. We'd have the whole neighborhood there. We'd have the blocks lined up with people that couldn't... A house in the new development at the time couldn't even fit the amount of blocks of people we had getting... better to come into these parties. So, and my parents were more liberal back then, you know, they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted to do growing up from a young age. So we throw these parties, but how many people are you expecting here tonight? Oh, no more than 30. Next thing you know, there's like 400 people on the block. There's beer bottles all over the block, everything. So it's, it's, it's, that's the difference. And I think for when we talk about like, you know, the difference between, um, Kurt's garage and my garage, my garage, a lot more has occurred in that garage when it came to learning the game. Cause even before hip hop was, it's like, I live in the South. And I say, when I first got down here to the South in 1996, uh, Even when I was coming down here around 1990 for the Freakniks and things like that. When you went into the clubs, the clubs didn't have a lot of down south music. 90% of the music that they were playing in the clubs was East Coast music because they weren't making a lot of down south music like that no more. It was even like at a time in New York where hip hop was getting bigger. But R&B and let's say like the Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam kind of songs, they were big songs too. And you had to play them in a party. So the party was 50-50 split. So doing those parties through the years and having that many people dancing in your house, it allowed us an opportunity to see these are the songs that people are going to dance to forever. It was almost like we had a a foresight of what was going to come. Like, yo, we've been dancing off of this song for the last 10 years, 12 years. It still ain't went out. When it comes to, that's the songs that we picked up and that's the songs that we took the chances on and we sampled. And like I said, at that point in time, you know, migrating to AJ's house to write, going to Kurt's house to make the cassette. Because Kurt wasn't always living in his house that had the garage. He moved to his aunt's house or something sometime later. So it began going down into his aunt's basement to where his room was and doing stuff over there. But again, the house party dynamic is something else that helped us out tremendously when it came to what songs will be sampled, what songs will be looped. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You used so many... really well-known songs, especially on that first album. Tell me about some of the samples that you guys were proud of that you used, and that even later on, other groups would sample. I'm thinking of He Got Game and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02:Well, in a second, I know Puff used a DeBarge sample for Biggie. That was on the third.
SPEAKER_03:That was on big tracks.
SPEAKER_02:That was on
SPEAKER_03:big tracks.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_03:Moving forward a little to that.
SPEAKER_02:I was going to say the sample, the answer, other than the Free the Pain, I love that Louie Louie doing damage. I love that sample. I love rhyming over Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll. I mean, that's something we used to rock in the parks and stuff before we was making records. I love that. But the Louie Louie sample was like a big sample, another big song for us, the title song for Doing Damage. That sample for me was a dope sample. Tear to Show Up. Tear to Show Up also. Well, that was one of the first albums. Tear to Show Up is my favorite album. song. Keep a handle. That Dennis Edwards song, I love that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:I can almost... I love that sample, yes.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I can almost hear us rapping on that song, and then I can hear Biggie coming on years later with his Get Money. And the concept of JVC, as we start that song, we say, click the cameras, pop the cassettes, AJ is on the mic, and you could bet I'll be the P-O-E-T. That's the same again, that's the same case that Biggie started that get money song. You know, like that's the style that they were rapping in. So to me, I felt like, and I never take anything away from another artist because I love hip hop way too much. And I understand that we've had the opportunity to sample. So other people will sample and use ideas, but it allowed us to understand at times that we had some influence, even though we weren't as big as like some of the other groups in this, you know, doing shows wise, I should say, but it, We had influence on some of the biggest hip hop artists of all times and the countless people that use Strong Island. The
SPEAKER_02:countless
SPEAKER_00:people that use Strong Island. But it's really just the whole production and the echo and the reverb. And it just loops. And I could just listen to it on repeat over and over again. And I never tire of it for some reason. It's just a great record.
SPEAKER_02:Since this is long on, I always want to give credit. Red Alert is the person who broke the record. Second to that, the only person, I mean, the next person who played Strong Island the most and still plays it to this day is Wildman Steve. Wildman Steve has shown JBC Force probably the most love outside of Red Alert. And I always want to give him credit because he even, and his show is even called like the Strong Island Sound or something. He rides the banner of Strong Island to this day, and he still bigs us up and still plays the song. I've watched the show, the little pocket, the show that, you know, the online thing, and he still plays it now to this day. So shout out to wild man, Steve, who has shown us the most love. Shout out wild man. Yeah. Yeah. And shout out. And again, you know, rest in peace. Yeah. Got to give him. Cause we've spent. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I remember when we used to go up there and we used to do the shows and there was a group that was always... asking to take the mic in between our shows. They were called the P5. And they later on became leaders of the new school.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I would go with the Wildman and Steve show the most. And Buster and them, see, Buster and Charlie, when they would get on the mic, they would stay on the mic and they would never want to get off. So Steve wouldn't let them freestyle sometimes. So they would be like, hey, you got to kick off the freestyle. He'll let you freestyle. And then they would take over. Like, they just, you know, I remember them sitting there working on it. to hearing them working on little things, like in the hallway and stuff. Because I was always, I loved radio stations. So I would hang out up
SPEAKER_03:there. There was always a, they were super dope, man. There was always like an online passion when it came to hip hop from certain groups from Long Island. And it was also, the
SPEAKER_02:first time I seen somebody, so, you know, they would have the marathon thing where they would raise money like once a year. And they would have like, and I'm, people would call up and give shout outs and Charlie Brown would answer the phone and then he would write it all down. And then he would wrap the shout outs. And that was like, that was like really, really dope. Like he would just make him, he would wrap, he would go through the list of the shout outs and what they did, but he would wrap it though. And it was dope. And that was like, yo, this dude's dope. Yeah. Well, I
SPEAKER_03:used to go to, I used to go to, I used to go to, In the early days, I used to go to, when AJ mentioned early in the podcast that he went to drafting school with Dave, I actually worked back then with Mace's mom from De La Soul. So I got a good opportunity to meet Mace. And then again, we knew, one of our friends knew a guy in Amityville, named Paul Carey who and that was our friend Mike Walsh he knew a guy named Paul Carey who I guess was going to the military and he was giving Prince Paul Paul Houston his DJ equipment and I got the opportunity at the time to listen to I got the opportunity at the time to listen to De La Soul It was a long, like, it was almost like an hour. They were standing up there just going, plug one, plug two, start the record over. And they were, they were perfectionists. Now I say that to say, I've also had the opportunity of being at Macy's house a lot of times and watching them realizing the dynamics of their group, realizing how much of a role Pasta Noose, Mercer played in the production of, Because I got to see them rehearsing certain things also. A third time with them is the organization that they had as a group when it came to making decisions. They would never make a decision in the same room as the group. They would go into another room, close the door, have their conversation, come out, tell you what they thought. They were very, very organized. The whole... They were very organized when it came to a Long Island group. I've seen that same discipline sitting there sometimes when I went to see... brown charlie brown and i went to his house and his mom would be like you know going upstairs they all upstairs and they were up there writing writing writing writing i've seen the dynamics of some of these groups and like i said when most people would want to hang out on a saturday or go to the city or drink beer with their friends and stuff these guys were writing so there was no mystery to me how de la soul became like one of the most working most powerful groups in the music game in my opinion um They had that. And we tried to have that also throughout the years as JVC. We did pay dues. We did, you know, the dues back in the days, we'll go ahead and like make sure it pays for our outfits when we got to do things and things like that or buy records and things like that. But those groups had way more discipline than we ever had. And I just want to give them big shouts.
SPEAKER_02:And leaders benefited from the bomb squad, public enemy boot camp. You know what I'm saying? They had to be there every day at certain times. They had to do certain things. He really liked that making a band type thing. They really got under the mentorship of the whole bomb squad and the public enemy. So they had that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:One of those members of Leader School told me about two years ago, three years ago, they said, you know, do y'all realize like if it wasn't for y'all, excuse me, if it wasn't for y'all, Electra would have never came up to Long Island looking for us because nobody believed in Long Island groups at the time. They said, because of y'all single, they came out there and they signed us and they realized like long Island had great groups and stuff like that. And, um, that's cool.
SPEAKER_02:I think that was a great thing about the song. It was, you know, like what Queens bridge did for that Shands record did for that region was South Bronx did for that region. Like KRS gave them an anthem that they didn't have before. like the songs about Brooklyn, like even the song Puerto Rico, like those all were anthems for the regions. And we gave Strong Island an anthem it didn't have. And many people were like, yeah, we from Strong Island. And it was just like, you know, like Hev did with Money on the Mount. It was a
SPEAKER_03:different sense of pride. It was a different sense of pride now. Like, you weren't afraid anymore to go out to the city and say you were from Long Island. It gave you a different kind of recognition. When you went to the city now and you said, yeah, I'm from Long Island, most people wouldn't say anymore, like, oh, y'all are some... This, that, and the third. Y'all ain't hip-hop. This, that, and the third. People would just generally hate because they're like, oh, y'all got houses. Y'all got this. Y'all got that. But they never realized that most of the people that lived in the city moved their bad kids out to Long Island. So Long Island has its bad parts. You know, like I tell people all the time, I've seen a lot more crime happen in Long Island than I've seen happening in the boroughs. And it's because Long Island is known to do things when it's ready. If
SPEAKER_02:you don't change your mentality... Changing your location does not change who you are. So if you do it all the time. I'll do nothing for you. Yeah, if you're doing stuff in the Bronx, if you live in a certain way in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Queens or wherever, and you move to Long Island, if your mind state hasn't changed, you're still the same individual that is now in Long Island. And now you got a different area where people don't know you. So you're kind of a little worse than you was when you were where you were before. So yeah, we had the area, but it gave, it gave, it gave us, it gave the area of the region. It gave the region, uh, anthem. Like I said, the way you have put. Yeah. Right. The way heavy D put Mount Vernon on the rap map. Like people were, People, when I first, funny thing, when I first moved, that was the second grade, and they usually do that thing, where are you from? And I said, Mount Vernon. And my teacher said, oh, where George Washington's from? Mount Vernon, Virginia.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:She didn't, like, David, I don't even know if she knew there was a Mount Vernon. And then a bunch of our friends went to college and they all met a friend from Mount Vernon and they all came back. Yo, buddy, you're in Mount Vernon. I said, yeah, I've been telling you about Mount Vernon. Like it was just like after I had made the record, like, you know, so like Long, Strong Island did that for Long Island as well. And I'm glad to have taken part in something that, that, you know, is an anthem for the region and,
SPEAKER_01:In
SPEAKER_02:rap circles, it will be forever known. It's like Wu-Tang forever made Staten Island Shaolin. And all these other people will always refer to Long Island as Strong Island.
SPEAKER_00:You did it. So let me ask you, this is the unfortunate part. Eventually, the group disbanded. Can you tell me about whatever happened with that record that didn't come out? Why the group eventually broke up when it did? Let me... Let me say this.
SPEAKER_03:Before we even go there, because I'll go right into that. But before we even go there, before the group broke up, when we talk about people like just loving your music and just being a fan, one of the DJs that were big in the city at the time told me, he said, you know, you guys are my favorite group. Every time I would go into the city, because we traveled back then on the Long Island Railroad down to the city, or driving into the city, just about every night of the week going to different clubs and stuff. He used to tell me like, wait till I put your record on, watch this, watch this. And the crowd would just always go wild. He told me, he said, you're my favorite group. We had a relationship, we were good. And that relationship later on led to him being at Big Beat Records with Craig Kelman. And we did the song Big Tracks. And the executive producer and the person who I'm talking about is DJ Skinny Bones, Stretch Armstrong, Adrian Bartos, whatever you want to call him.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he's going to hate you because he hates that anybody remembers that he was originally called DJ Skinny Bones. Well,
SPEAKER_03:maybe he should call me. Maybe he should call me then. I do it all the time, too. He hates that, though. Needless to say. He said, you guys are one of my favorite groups and I got a situation right now. And he said, I want to bring you guys over. He was instrumental in bringing us over to Big Beat. And as a result of it, Stretch Armstrong is the executive producer of Big Tracks. He's the executive producer of Big Tracks. And going into the last album, as you were stating, Big Tracks was an indication of where we were going hip-hop-wise because it was one of our best put-together records that we had ever made. It contained a lot of elements. It contained a lot of everything. And that's the direction that we were going in regards to the third album. The third album, we recorded and we have it. What we eventually turned around and did was put it on Chop Herring Records in two different EP compilations. Releasing the 1992. Not the whole thing, but 12 tracks on two different EPs, six and six. We put it out on Chop Herring Records because, again, as the years went on and more than 20 something, 28 years later went by, the conversation was simply like, oh, yeah, the masters got burnt up in the studio. They got lost in the studio. But we've always retained copies of what it is that we did. So we were able to put those EPs out. There was some pretty good songs on the EP, on both of the EPs. I think for the first time, we were, I want to say, interested in working with other groups. Because for us, it's been a long road. It's been a long road of staying relevant without a video. It's been staying relevant without feature appearances on our songs. We had to hold our own on our own. For the first time, we were working with other artists. We had them on songs. And we were given others' opportunity to go ahead and show their skill set on wax. And we were going to put it out. I think that around the time that the last album came out, what was going to come out, we had went to Big Beat at this time. And more than any other time before prior, we were... kind of under lock and key with folks like, okay, well, you go record this song and then you bring it back down and we'll listen to it and we'll let the A&R hear it. And if the A&R likes it or whatever, we'll put it out or whatever. And we were at that time facing a lot of adversity in regards to the kind of songs, again, that we would make because we were like, we're never going to stop making hard hip hop songs. We were making this for our fans. We were doing this because this was in our heart. We were sent to work with other producers that wanted us to go ahead. And they were big name producers, but they wanted us to do songs that were more in the signature of the hits they had made. Back then, each producer had like their own sound. And it's like chasing a hit when you first do some drugs or something like that. You continue to buy drugs throughout the rest of your life because you're still chasing the feeling of that first hit. And that's what they were doing with us. us as a group they were trying to recreate like another success which was taking us away from who we were and i think around like um 90 what was it like 91 92 91 92 finally all of us just kind of i think finally all of us just kind of like looked at each other and was like you know what like this is just not it um a had left the group um kurt was doing more of his own thing with the group i was more focusing in on the music that I would want to do and how I would want to sound on my own and stuff like that. But it was just, again, conforming to, to where music was going and working with a certain producers. We, we, we felt like we delivered a lot of really, really good records. Cause that was like, you know, almost, you know, similar to big tracks going in that style, but nothing was ever good enough for like an A&R in the city. As they would say, A&Rs have like probably like, There's only a few A&Rs out there that created a lot, a lot, a lot of hits. A lot of them messed up a lot of situations. But that's how it ended up happening. And we just one day looked at each other and was like, you know what? We could remain friends, but making this music and running back and forth to do this, that, and the third, I have different opportunities. I went on to work with... a reggae artist at the time in New York that was really, really big called Yankee B. And I ended up getting him signed for a deal with G Street V2 based on a single that I had did with himself and K-Mani Marley, a remix of Bob Marley's War. He ended up getting an album deal on that label and stuff. So we were all just going on our own separate ways. But I don't think that we did not come out again because, you know, we couldn't come out we we didn't come out because of choice because again someone changing you up and
SPEAKER_02:so i want to add so the first thing i want to say is so we had a certain feel with the first album we would try to change into something else on the second album but when we recorded big tracks and i can speak for myself it was the first time since we recorded Strong Island that I had that feeling when I left the studio. When we finished doing big tracks, I had the same feeling that I had when we heard Strong Island after we did it. And we had the same vibe. We were back to our same vibe of the essence of who we were, but the A&R vibe. like you said, was trying to change us and give us different producers and all that. But Big Tracks was that song for me that reinvigorated me with the group. Like, this is us again. So that was that. And like you said, there was multiple things. Kurt started getting offers to work with other groups, to produce other groups. So he started doing outside production. B had some opportunities. I eventually got into... to writing for some magazines, some underground magazines. And I started taking that aspect of things. And we just went like different ways. And I also want to say, so we didn't release the full album on Chop Heron. Chop Heron, what they did is they did this limited edition vinyl. Each of the two pieces of vinyl only had like maybe two songs from the album. And then we had like remixes or something of, previous release stuff that we put on there in the instrumental or something to make up the sixth joint. But only like, there's only like maybe four, possibly five of the songs from the album that came out through that. There's still a lot of material that was never heard. B. Love is like the JVC Force historian. He has every story. taped from every studio session. He has every tape from every freestyle practice. He has every picture we've ever taken, every flyer we've ever been on. There was a flood in my mother's basement, so I lost a lot of stuff. Like, I moved around a lot, so I kept stuff at my mom's house, and then there was a flood in her basement, so I lost a lot of stuff that you can't replace. But B-Love, and I don't know what Kurt still has, but B-Love has everything, every do, done, and I call him a historian. So he's like the historian for JBC. So he actually has some of that material laying around his house. I don't. And maybe the right situation will come about that it'll come out. But we did the thing with Chop Heron. It was like this limited edition. They only released a couple of... It
SPEAKER_03:was two different albums.
SPEAKER_02:Right, but it was like... But it was a
SPEAKER_03:limited edition. It was six on each album.
SPEAKER_02:Six songs, yeah, but all six songs wasn't from the album. That's the point I was making. There were previous release songs on there and an instrumental or two, too. But... But it was a limited edition, so only so many copies were pressed of those. And like the first few were like on colored vinyl, like gold or platinum or whatever. And there's not a lot of those. So, you know, we did that deal just to do it. And, you know, and they had the rights for like a couple of years, which is over now. But yeah. Who knows what can happen? And I'm saying this because you never know who's listening to stuff and who still has love for us. You never know what can happen if the right situation comes about. And the same thing which you were asking about performance is, again, you never know what can happen if the right situation and the people are real serious. Most, we haven't, to answer your question about that, we've got a lot of offers, but they weren't serious offers.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Or serious,
SPEAKER_02:serious, serious. come through and show up. And, you know, that's impossible for B to just fly up from, from, from, from Georgia. And we're not even getting, you know, we're not getting paid or we get paid chump change. It's not even, that's not even covering his flight going back and, you know, and all that. So, you know, and then, you know, we, so we've had people who have called us and talked to us, but we haven't had serious offers. We had serious offers. You, you, you, you'd see some stuff. Cause like I said, we are,
SPEAKER_03:we've
SPEAKER_02:had, we've had,
SPEAKER_03:And we've had offers, like you said. It's just, you know, what comes with it. It's like, okay, come to Europe and we'll pay you this much. Or, you know, hey, well, what's incorporated in us coming to Europe? Like, how are we going to get to Europe? Or, hey, if you can get to Europe, I'll pay you to go on to this show. This is how the hip hop... industry was going at a certain point in time also. Everybody was out to capitalize or trick someone else. So it would be like, you know, hey, if you guys would happen to be in North Carolina or whatever, I can have you perform in here. It's going to be a pretty
SPEAKER_02:big deal. Yeah, there's a lot of that. If we happen to be in time, let them know. You know what I'm saying? It was too risky. You're not talking about bringing us there. You're not talking about putting us up while we're there. But if we're there, and we're going to be in town this weekend, let us know. You know what I'm saying? That's why I said, for me, those are not serious offers. We haven't had serious offers. And that's why many people haven't seen us. And that's why, for our fans, like I said, when we did the little live performance of Strong Island, we recorded it and shared it And when we do, and when we did a couple of lives and it was like, you know, with the lives where we might do some verses and then we talk and then we interact with the people and then they'll say certain things and we'll be going back and forth with them. And then, you know, I might start off another song and B comes in with me or might start a freestyle. So it was just like, an intimate thing, like nothing planned, nothing structured. It was just like a fun thing. And we've done that for our fans. And that was just for the fans because the fans have been keeping us going and the fans have been keeping the name alive. And we like interacting with the fans. So, you know, I interact a lot on social media.
SPEAKER_03:I think as a business, I think as a business person, I think that as the years went on, we grew. And I think that we realized that, you know what I'm saying? A big part of like, you know, your strength as a businessman is the ability to say no. Yeah. You can't say yes to everything, you know? And again, you say yes to everything, you know what I'm saying? You end up taking losses. Like it makes no sense for me to leave Atlanta. And again, I'm already paying for the airline ticket going, coming, renting the car when I get there, spending money when I get there. I'm already starting off at a negative. And I think what a lot of people don't realize through financial literacy is that, again, it has to make sense. You can't just go to do something and by the time you realize you got back, you came back with no money and pretty much everything you did, you not only did it for free, but now you owe for an airline ticket or you owe this or you have to pay this or you have to pay that. It just has to make sense. And business-wise, you just have to sometimes just have the ability, which a lot of people does not have, to
SPEAKER_00:say no. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you guys being real about the business aspect of this. Because a lot of artists don't even talk about that stuff. But that is the reality. But they don't know. Yeah, they don't know. But while I appreciate hearing it, I mean, like the fans you were talking about, people out there... Love you guys. Um, they want to hear from you. And, uh, I hope that there's some kind of situation moving forward where, um, it does make sense for you guys, um, to make it happen. But, but even if it doesn't happen, um, you've already produced a lot of great music. You've made your mark. You, you put strong Island on the map and we really appreciate everything that you've done. Um, I mean, if you did nothing else ever again, you guys have contributed so much. And
SPEAKER_02:even when I came out there, you had already invited me to be on the panel. And I already had a relationship with Johnny Juice. So even though that wasn't a financial situation, I was by myself, it made sense. And it was for the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame, which we hope to be inducted in one day. So it made sense. You know what I'm saying? Some of these situations don't even make sense. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, there was a benefit. And it was Long Island. And this song was about Long Island. So Long Island, Keith Murray and his boys from Central Islip came to see me perform that. Like, they were there. Like, they was like, yo, I think they missed me. And they were mad they missed it. But he brought a couple of people from Central Islip to come see that. You know, he was like, yo, we came. You know.
SPEAKER_03:So I want to say this real quick, and I know you're probably going to kill me, but I'm not going to let it all out or whatever. There's been some talks with us over the last couple of months, probably what, the last half a year, in regards to doing some things. I will say that you will see us again. The announcement is not out quite yet because a lot is still being finalized. But you
SPEAKER_02:will see us again. Let's put it this way. Anything can happen. Stay tuned. Follow us on social media. I just started a brand new YouTube channel where you can follow all of us. JVC Force 2025. And they got all our clips. Clips of us performing. Clips of different things. And we got a Facebook page, an Instagram page. Follow because make sure you follow that. That's where you're going to find out whatever is coming up and things are coming up. When we can talk about it, that's where we're going to talk about it first. And then we'll probably do a live. Yeah. So, so that's all, that's all that can be said right now. That's what he said. I'm a killer. That's all that can be said right now. Cause until certain things, that's as much as we can say, but,
SPEAKER_03:But please do know that there are some very serious promoters talking to us
SPEAKER_02:about
SPEAKER_03:doing some things after all these years, and it's making some sense. Yes, stay tuned. It makes good sense how they're talking.
SPEAKER_02:Stay tuned. And that's all I'm going to say. Stay tuned.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, we will stay tuned. And I think everyone listening will too. Guys, thank you so much, man. What a pleasure. It
SPEAKER_03:won't be long.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. JBC Force, everyone. Check out all their social media. Do you guys want to give your social media and website and everything beyond?
SPEAKER_02:The main thing, the website's not up anymore. It's been years. But the... The YouTube is JVC Force 2025. Instagram is just JVC Force. Their Facebook page is just JVC Force. My personal is, everything for me is Mr. A.J. Woodson, M-R-A-J Woodson, to stay up on the things I'm doing with books and all that. We'll talk about that another time. But that's my personal. And B got his personal too, if you want to share.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So, you know what I'm saying? You can pretty much reach me on. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. You can pretty much reach me on every platform. Be love of JVC force. And, you know, I do, you know, for the purpose of all of this, you know, I have I do have personal pages and stuff like that. But, you know, entertainment wise, if you want to reach me, you can reach me on JVC force.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, guys, this was fantastic. And hopefully I'll get to see the two of you one day at the Hall of Fame. But I wish you the best with all the things that you're hinting at. And thank you for many years of great music.
