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[soft jazz music]
♪
[soft jazz music continues]
♪
[record needle dropping]
[hip-hop music starts and stops]
[hip-hop music continues]
♪
KID KUT: Woo!
So, most of you guys know me as Kid Kut,
the voice of the vibe, the MC from the Baby Blue Soundcrew.
KID KUT: When I say "baby," y'all say "blue!"
Baby! CROWD: Blue!
KID KUT: Baby... CROWD: Blue!
KID KUT: But...
little do you know, I am a vinyl collector,
a producer, a DJ.
I love vinyl.
This record right here was one of the first records
I purchased.
Any time I bought a record or records in the past,
any time I bought records in the past,
I would purchase the record and put my name on the record
and I would put the year that I got the vinyl.
So, like, if I was playing a party and somehow
one of my records got, you know,
taken up by somebody else accidentally...
[laughs]
I could be like, "That's my record!"
The records that are in here actually mean something to me.
And when I purchased this home,
the whole thing was there's a spot under the stairs.
That's why the roof is only this high.
I made sure, I was like, "Yup, that's where I'm gonna
"put my vinyl, in this spot, and I can lock it up."
♪ Do it... Do it... ♪
KID KUT: There's one store that's very special to me.
Every time I go there, I'm always inspired,
whether it's a sample or a break.
Yo, let's go get some new vinyl.
♪ Do it!
♪ We make money money money.
♪ You take money money money.
♪ You make money money money.
♪ You take money money money.
♪ See, I'm like a soldier in a war ♪
♪ That makes my heart like tin. ♪
♪ A disciple of the street treating boys like men. ♪
♪ Enemies like friends, friends like kings. ♪
♪ A rap battle, stifle any weak rhymes y'all bring. ♪
♪ 'Cause I got the game-show-like strength. ♪
♪ What the cold life brings,
♪ Nowadays I only praise one king. ♪
♪ Kind of rap your [inaudible] to rap about one thing. ♪
♪ Out here, our [inaudible] live the life you're singing. ♪
♪ Every day, you make money money money. ♪
♪ And every night, you take money money money. ♪
♪ You make money money money.
♪ You take money money money.
♪ Every day, you make money money money. ♪
♪ And every night, you take money money money. ♪
♪ You make money money money.
♪ You take money money.
[plastic bag crinkling]
INTERVIEWER: You always say that you just
had the right people around you.
But, I mean, bigger than that, right?
I mean, this is about a love of music.
EUGENE: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: And this turned into what people
are calling a cultural artifact.
When you hear that, what does it make you think?
EUGENE: I know for people, they always talk about it
on the internet, when they come here, they tell--
because I've served, like, three generations.
Father, then the son; now the son has little kids,
and they're bringing them in.
I love to see those kids, you know?
And they tell their kids the stories,
"Oh, this is vinyl, so-and-so, that's a CD.
"Long time ago, Thursday, we'd come, we'd fight in records
"with other DJs," all this stuff, you know?
I mean, they tell them stories like that.
It was good.
It was like a meeting place every Thursday.
♪
JUG-E: Being immersed in that world was just...
It's hard to articulate sometimes some of the things
that I experienced.
Just seeing the unity of people,
DJs, people from all walks of life,
showing up on a Thursday.
AGILE: We created the soundtrack for this time.
This was the meeting place.
It was communal, and it was live, and...
It was alive.
♪
NICK: If you were a DJ in this city, like, everybody was there.
It was packed. You couldn't...
There was times you just couldn't even move in there.
It was just...
DJX: Everybody was going to him and he was the go-to guy,
and it kind of didn't matter who you were in the industry,
whether you're a promoter, whether you're a DJ,
whether you're an artist.
You needed Eugene.
♪
EUGENE: You know, I never thought about it,
but when we were doing this documentary,
and then I wrote stuff on paper,
and then I realized,
"Maybe we did."
I'm always so busy, I'm always doing something,
I'm always exercising,
I'm always with my mom and dad, trying to help them out,
doing something, or my family, right?
And so I never think about all these things.
And people would always tell me,
"Oh, your store is an institution, duh duh duh."
I was like, "Okay, alright, alright, okay, cool,
"no problem."
But it's only when we started doing this documentary, I...
"Oh, maybe we did have something to do with it."
You know what I mean? I never saw it.
Like, you know when you have to step back?
♪
Then you see the picture, right?
♪
♪ Yo, I represent the reason rappers'll write songs for ♪
♪ The legendary lyricism you line for ♪
♪ Controller of the crowd, the party people respond for ♪
♪ Receiver of encores, my peoples demand more ♪
♪ Rappers, yeah, tell it to the fate of rancour ♪
♪ To contemplate the fate that you're eternally damned for ♪
♪ Everyone I know seeking the answer ♪
♪ To what the super educated professor of rhymin' stand for ♪
♪ Original rhythm and rhyme, sure to enhance your
experience, therapeutic lyrics curing the cancer... ♪
SFS: Ah, you got me! Dah!
I'll get him back.
♪ The rhythm holdin' me, you pigeon holin' me ♪
♪ You classify my style of rap ♪
♪ My rappin' sound is the cap and the gown style of rap,
but where them dollars at? ♪
♪ It's time to pay homage to the style ♪
♪ So who you follow, black?
♪ Now if you're ready to rock steady,
considerin' that you've never experienced a veteran yet ♪
♪ Steadily sweat
♪ Skills reveal [inaudible] ♪
♪ Architects of style,
my professors they be super educated ♪
♪ To my people in the front, feelin' base that bumps ♪
♪ And just clap your hands to the beat y'all ♪
♪ To my people in the rear, put it high in the air and just ♪
♪ Rock, rock to this, y'all, huh ♪
♪ Well, well, well, well, you know it's me ♪
♪ Hey y'all, I'm a superstar ♪
♪ Check out what the heck I got to say ♪
♪ I'm super-educated, ready to get... ♪
RUSSELL: And I would buy bootleg records
of Lord Finesse and digging in the crates,
because they were just too expensive
and the records weren't that good to begin with so...
Oh, hey, Finesse! What's up?
♪
[record press machines humming]
EUGENE: Yeah, there's a lot of history from the old location
that we transferred across to this location.
Roy Ayers, well, he's-- so many people sampled this guy, right?
And he's so big.
They approached us and they wanted to do a signing
in the store and we said, "Okay, cool, no problem."
He came early.
He set up everything.
He would see people coming straight from the door
and be calling them, "Hey, come!"
You know, he doesn't even know if they're coming for him
or not, he's just calling them.
Maestro is like the first one that opened the doors
for everybody, too, right?
And then, he happened to be coming through here.
Like, all these guys used to come through
the store all the time, right?
I used to see them all the time, so it was no big deal.
But then, I said it would be cool for him to just sign it.
Actually, I think ABBA was one of my first records
that I bought, like actually go and paid money...
[laughs]
Instead of getting records from my dad.
ABBA. But this is not the right one,
but this is one.
ABBA, I remember, was hot at that time and-- pfft!
We were all dancing to it.
Dancing!
"Dancing Queen."
I have these 45s here, brought from back home.
Well, this is just some of it, but it was a lot of 45s.
Me and my brother, we bought 45s,
and this is what we used to listen to, man.
[hip-hop music]
EUGENE: We grew up in Trinidad in Port of Spain,
Belmont, Erthig Road.
My mom and dad had a business there selling groceries.
We had certain exclusive products
for the whole of Trinidad.
And that's how he made his living and, you know,
made some of his money, right?
I just remember when I was young,
just going down there right after school,
running around, playing there,
and maybe that's how I got my business sense or whatever.
I remember he had a friend.
She had all the jukeboxes.
She owned a lot of jukeboxes around Trinidad,
and she came to my dad and said, like,
"I have so many thousands of records.
"Do you want to take them?" And they negotiated a price.
Next day when we had the records, man, I was like...
[laughs]
Get into the music there.
I started getting records for free.
I came across to Canada to study,
and I guessed after I finished studying I would come back
and take over the business, right?
But then, my brother came and studied,
then my sister came,
and then my dad just came.
He took a two-day holiday. He never takes a holiday.
He took a two-day holiday, came down to Canada,
and he loved it and he said, "We're moving."
[laughs]
NARRATION: [archive] Years ago, Huron Indians named this city
their word for "meeting place," Toronto.
Today, a very big meeting place.
♪
DENISE: Ask any DJ or music lover
what they tend to do when they travel to new cities,
what's always on the agenda?
Record stores.
Tuning into a city's, not just club culture but music culture,
record stores have long been at the heart of that.
EUGENE: I stayed here for, like, about a month
and went record shopping.
[laughs]
EUGENE: Sam the Record Man, Cheapies, A&A Records.
Later on, I was buying at Star Sound
and Carnival Records.
AKI: Star Sound was actually therecord store to go to
in the '80s.
I remember seeing, you know, guys from Club Z, Twilight Zone;
all those guys were there buying records.
It was a social gathering too.
You got to meet and greet, you know?
"I never thought I'd meet this DJ; he's here,"
that kind of thing.
MAESTRO FRESH WES: When I had that experience
going to Star Sound, that was like one of my first
"Wow!" moments that, "Oh my god, this is real."
I didn't know that was gonna happen,
but they had my posters everywhere and it was like,
in my mind, "Wow, this is what LL Cool J must have felt like
"when he came out with, you know, Rock the Bells."
Definitely good for me in terms of giving me
that confidence to know that my city is behind me,
so enough respect to Star Sound for that.
RUSSELL: You know, you felt this loyalty to Star Sound
and Carnival, and then when Star Sound changed to Traxx,
my loyalty was at Carnival.
And because Kamal from Carnival let me work there
on Caribana weekend in 1990,
I felt a distinct loyalty to him.
Because he paid me in records!
[record scratching]
[car horn honks]
RUSSELL: And the horn! [laughter]
AKI: As the music scene and the record scene
became more commercialized, it just wasn't enough.
Star Sound just wasn't enough, you know?
And everything would get sold out.
There just wouldn't be enough for regular guys like me,
you know, buying records.
Play De Record came at the right time, I think.
KARLENE: He dabbled in different things,
and I think he wanted to do something retail,
and it was just a natural progression with music
that he loved, and I guess there was only a few
record stores on Yonge Street.
EUGENE: And then my dad had the property on Yonge Street.
The back was empty for two years.
DONNA: He may have told you,
because his dad owned the building,
and the back part was very hard to rent out at that time,
in 1990.
And there were other record stores.
Like, everyone shopped along Yonge Street.
He loved music and, you know, he wanted to use the back.
♪
EUGENE: You know, nobody wanted to rent behind a store.
Like, who would do that?
You know what I mean? Only me.
[laughs]
[hip-hop music]
♪
EUGENE: So I said, "Dad, look, this--
"nobody's gonna rent there.
"Let's just open a record store there, right?"
And my mom and him said, like,
"Okay, let's try it out."
DONNA: Record buyers,
they see any new place that's open,
they want to go check it out.
So, and we were on the correct, you know, in the right area,
so we got people shopping as soon as we opened.
EUGENE: Even when we opened the store,
we didn't even have a name really.
People would say, "What do you call your store?"
You know? And I just said, "Well...
"how about Play De Record, man?"
Right, like "Play De Record." And that was it.
♪
I mean, I didn't know how to open a record store or whatever,
I just knew the music that I know,
R&B, some jazz, Latin,
soca, and reggae, right?
So I opened up the store with only that kind of music.
One of the DJs that used to come and shop, his name is Deko.
He liked what we were doing and he said,
"Look, you need to get some house and techno
"and other types of music in here,
"and you'll do well."
He gave me a contact in Montreal,
so I called that guy up.
"Look, whatever you think is the hottest stuff,
"just send it to me," so he sent me some stuff.
People buying.
We were bringing drum and bass, and people were coming down
like, "Oh, wow... this is stuff that nobody has.
"You can only get it in the UK." He hooked me up good.
And, pssht!
That's how the store, like, we started getting, like,
the latest stuff and all the DJ stuff.
Club DJs were coming in
because we had stuff that nobody had.
♪
DENISE: It was this whole kind of mom-and-pop corner store
in the front, so you'd walk in, you're like,
"Am I at the right place?"
You hear there's this cool new record store,
and then you walk in and you're like, "What?!"
DJ MENSA: As soon as you walk into Play De Record
it immediately becomes this grimy,
kind of bodega experience where there's a convenience store
before you walk into Play De Record.
Play De Record was in the back half of 357.
There would be, like, brass knuckles and porno tapes and,
you know, all types of stuff that's completely unrelated
with records.
DJ MATT C: Eugene and Donna are very warm,
nice, cool, loving people.
And then, of course, there were Eugene's parents
that were there, both his mom and dad.
Dad was super tough and scary.
KARLENE: My dad was a bit of the security guard,
and my mom was just there to make sure
that things were running smoothly.
EUGENE: Maybe he thinks he's still in Trinidad.
You know what I mean?
Because of people stealing or whatever.
It doesn't matter who. You know what I mean?
He's always checking, oh, the bags.
Make sure people...
Because there was people stealing.
We caught a couple of people already.
DJ MATT C: The front of the store is selling everything
from, like, pornographic movies and, you know,
fake handguns and daggers and, like,
all kinds of crap that you would expect in a kind of sleazy
Yonge Street type of store.
EUGENE: You know what I mean?
And we know certain people are coming to steal, too.
I mean, now, it doesn't happen that often
because people don't care about music that much.
Like, you can get it for free.
But at that time, the only way you can get music
is you've got to come to the record store.
RUSSELL: The parents were the best and the meanest,
but then I eventually won his mother over.
[laughs]
I would be so nice to her all the time,
that she eventually would smile at me and I was like,
"Wow, I did it!
"I slayed the dragon!"
EUGENE: My mom, dad, Donna was there,
and my brother came and helped out sometimes,
and my sister came and helped out sometimes.
We were by ourselves.
And then I said, "Man, we'd better get somebody.
"We've gotta get some DJs
"or somebody that knows other people."
AKI: I was just hanging out at this local record shop
called Carnival, and there was a guy that was working there,
Eric Ling.
He said, "There's a new record shop that just opened
"down the street and they've got import house music."
I walked into Play De Record.
I still remember, they only had about 100 records in the store.
I met Eugene and, "Oh, you like music?"
And I said, "Yeah."
"And you like house music?" And I said, "Yeah."
"You want to work here?" And I said, "Sure!"
And he goes, "Start tomorrow?" And I said, "Okay!"
So that's how I got the job.
You know, Star Sound, Carnival, and Play De Record,
they were very different from shops like Sam's and A&A.
EUGENE: Sam the Record Man was more commercial.
They sell classical, jazz, rock, right?
I focused mostly on DJ, urban music, electronic music.
That was my thing.
DAVID: In the good old days,
and I say that sort of like in parenthesis,
all that music, let's call it Black music,
so disco, R&B, house,
hip-hop, that was all dance music.
DJ MATT C: Playing hip-hop, funk, R&B, reggae,
was how I started as a DJ.
And then over time, house music was invented.
I gravitated in that direction.
NICK: House was, like, slowly building and building
and building, and that was, like, the club thing.
That was the house thing.
And there was a girl in my class,
this girl named Sherry Assoon,
and her brother had owned the Twilight Zone nightclub.
Like, I didn't know nothing about, like,
clubs or anything, right?
So she goes, "Oh, yeah, I could bring you there one time."
And we go to this club and I was just like,
"Wow, this is crazy. Like, what is this?"
And just, like, you'd never seen anything like this ever,
and I was just like-- like, the sound's insane.
Everything's, like, music I never heard before.
I mean, I don't know how long I ended up staying there.
Of course, you're 13 and... [laughs]
You're 13 or whatever, sneaking out of the house
and so on, but yeah, I was like--
that's where the whole house thing started from,
the Twilight Zone.
[house music]
♪
DENISE: I grew up just outside of a town called Cobourg.
I grew up in a little town called Grafton.
I mean, I totally did not get it!
I walked in.
I mean, it was sparse, like very little lighting.
It was mostly strobes.
It was, you know, screens and lasers and things flashing.
And, like, what I didn't understand musically
at the time, ironically because it became so much
a part of my life.
♪ Feel the drums.
DENISE: It was definitely early, early, early
underground house and early underground techno
and the meeting of that.
The whole vibe of that and the fact that you could be
on a floor dancing beside somebody
you've never seen before and smiling your face off at them
all night because it was just new.
It was fresh. And it meant a lot.
It connected people. It still does.
MAN: Just the sound system, it's incredible here.
WOMAN: The people are friendly.
MAN: The atmosphere, the music, it's alright.
WOMAN: It's fun!
PETER: Well, Toronto was starting to grow.
The popularity for underground music
is starting to grow in the city,
and the clubbing was starting to grow,
which was amazing at that time.
DENISE: Dino & Terry, Deko, Jason Steele
was out there playing.
Kenny Glasgow was coming up.
He was young but he was definitely coming up.
Definitely Peter, Tyrone & Shams were names I heard early on.
DJ MATT C: Of course, Peter, Tyrone & Shams were, like,
the kings of the house music world.
EUGENE: Those guys, they lived for music.
They think music all day long.
They want to get the records early.
That's it with these guys.
AKI: Nightclubs started to open up
and DJs were getting jobs.
They started to come on a regular basis
because they had a gig.
PETER: At the time, he was using an amazing distributor
that nobody was using.
So with that, it just...
Just had good 12-inches coming in.
DAVID: By that time, I was getting all of my stuff
from Play De Record.
I had a great relationship with Play De Record.
Eugene was an amazing guy to work with,
so there was no reason for me to go anywhere else.
DENISE: They knew what they were doing in terms of how to
supply the city with all things kind of music.
And also, they stood out because they included and sold music
in so many genres right from the start.
EUGENE: I really tried to push new music
and push Canadian stuff,
and push, you know, local stuff, and good music,
good new music, underground, nothing that was commercial.
Interesting stuff.
You know, different languages, different beats.
It doesn't matter what.
REPORTER: Rap, talking to music in a hip style.
It started in the streets of New York,
crossed over into the pop charts,
and now rap is growing in Canada.
REPORTER 2: This past summer, people with the record chains
noticed an increasing demand for rap.
Customers came in looking for specific artists.
They also were looking for whatever was new
in the realm of rap.
[footsteps echo]
[hip-hop beat]
♪
[record scratching]
♪
MAN: All I can say about hip-hop is that hip-hop is me.
You know what I mean? I can't control it.
It's just taken control of me.
I'll just-- I'll leave it at that.
DJX: I got started probably around 1985.
Moved right into the breakdance era.
Tried different stuff.
I tried dancing, I tried like, you know, the fashion,
this and that, and I ended up being drawn to the music.
MELBOOGIE: My dad got us a pair of turntables,
not because they wanted us to DJ or anything,
but he just wanted us to keep our sticky paws off
of his prized possessions.
And that basically just developed my love for hip-hop,
and I started listening to Ron Nelson,
The Fantastic Voyage on CKLN.
FRANKENSTEIN: There was a kid that lived behind me.
His name was Henderson.
So I knock on Henderson's door and, you know,
Henderson's parents were from Jamaica,
and almost every time I'm walking in the door, like,
music's being played, like on big, loud speakers.
The first time I ever heard hip-hop
was in Henderson's home, right?
We're going to school together and I'm like, "What's that?"
He's like, "You don't know what that is?"
And he's breaking, so I would say the first introduction
to the art form is breakdancing, and to see somebody's body move
in ways that you've never seen it before.
So let's remember, like, this stuff is not on television.
There is no YouTube.
If you're not in person seeing somebody move this way,
you can't even explain it to anybody else.
And that was my first introduction to it,
and I've been hooked ever since.
And I think the first time you get introduced
to one of the art forms, it has a way of hooking you in.
It's an undeniable thing that draws you in.
And for me, that's what did it.
SWITCH B: I grew up on the four elements of hip-hop,
and the four elements of hip-hop,
to quite Crazy Legs: graffiti being the black sheep of hip-hop
because it's the least understood,
DJing being the loyal child of hip-hop
because it always does its job,
MCing being the spoiled child of hip-hop
because it's the youngest and it gets the most attention,
and then my element, breakdancing,
which is the bastard child of hip-hop
because there's no father to its style.
[hip-hop music]
♪ From the back to the front
♪ Left to the right
♪ Hold tight, Red1's on the mic ♪
♪ From the front to the back
♪ Left to the right
♪ Hold tight, Misfit about to rock the mic ♪
♪ It's just a soul obligation
♪ The crunch of my collection
♪ And poetry is my occupation
♪ I'm always eager, getting' through like a cleaver ♪
♪ With foresight to bring back minds that went astray ♪
♪ Rather than tackle lyrical lines, I can make the play ♪
♪ So now for crowd
♪ To compliment my supplementary angle ♪
♪ Tangled up Never ever had above minds ♪
♪ Precipitous justice it's always brought to my mic ♪
♪ If I was in the tease, so it's a must ♪
♪ I come full fledged and never flimsy ♪
♪ With all the power I possess ♪
♪ There's no need for exponents ♪
♪ Movin' the earth with my rhyme like plate tectonics ♪
♪ Oh, we shift
♪ Better make it skirt you will be get ♪
♪ Permanently eclipsed from Mars ♪
♪ Super entity and that means calamity
is destined to fall on thee. ♪
FRANKENSTEIN: If you're passionate about something,
your pursuit of knowledge or seeking it is there, okay?
Now, you can't find it in the libraries.
You can't find this anywhere.
JAZZY GANNON: Obviously there was no commercial radio.
College radio was a thing.
CIUT, CKLN.
You gotta give respect to Ron Nelson
because he was the pioneer to me.
Not only did he have the number one shows for hip-hop,
but he was a promoter of hip-hop.
RON: Roxanne Shanté is in the place!
And she's gonna tear it up in a minute, alright?
ROXANNE: ♪ Let you know that Shanté's the best. ♪
♪ Top MC, that's who I am.
♪ Let's get reggae, I don't give a damn. ♪
SPADE: Back then, to be a DJ,
you made your name breaking records.
"I'm the first one to drop this record,"
and that's how you made a name.
And Ron was the guy who was dropping new records
before anybody, right?
So anybody who went down to New York,
you came back with stuff;
you'd go right to Ron and he'd break it on air for you.
Like, he's a godfather in the sense that he's the one
with the vision that's seen us going on
and taking this to radio.
He's like our red alert. [laughs]
RON: [on radio] ...it's definitely live this year
more than any other year,
and it's good to see the Canadian artists
putting themselves on the map.
"Elements of Style," that's gonna be a hit.
I bet you any money it's gonna be a hit,
and that's on the compilation record
by Beat Factory Productions and Streetbeat.
Rumble & Strong's work are in there
as well as Street, uh--
Streetbeat's stuff's on the B side.
What's this? Toronto is on wax.
Yeah, we know it, and it's only gonna get better.
The new Kenny Crush[?] on its way down...
♪
RON: The landscape for Toronto urban radio
at the time was there really was no Canadian urban radio.
WBLK from Buffalo was our urban radio.
We loved it. We couldn't get enough of WBLK.
The only problem was it was American, not Canadian.
They didn't care about our identity, our artists,
you know, our movement.
It was kind of a nice thing
when a radio station came along.
As tiny a signal as it had, it didn't really matter,
but for the first time it created an umbrella
for people to meet, for people to connect.
MAESTRO FRESH WES: That was my very first place
where I had my interview, I never-- and he said, like,
"Yo, man, that's Melody MC," because that's my old rap name.
"Melody MC, man, he's 15 and damn, he's good."
And I never forgot that.
Up till now, I still remember that.
The real, true maestro,
orchestrating everything out of CKLN 88.1.
RON: I couldn't get enough of that urban music.
Didn't wait on distribution.
Didn't wait on the radio station.
At the radio station, you have a record library.
It's a big room full of records.
They had a few things from Run DMC and Whodini,
and a lot of the stuff was really weird that I didn't like.
If you wanted to really please the people,
you gotta go out and get your own shit.
FRANKENSTEIN: And now, you can't just go to a record store
in Toronto and pick up Rakim's record.
They don't have it.
They don't even know what you're talking about.
SPADE: Those top-notch record stores weren't thinking hip-hop.
The music industry, period, wasn't thinking hip-hop.
They thought it was a fad.
They thought, "Next year this is gonna be gone."
DJX: You'd have people going to Buffalo
because there were some record distributors in Buffalo.
You'd have people travelling to New York City.
RON: The whole thing about accessing music
that we heard on the radio in Canada
was a whole different level of difficulty
than it was for American record stores
to get those same pieces of vinyl.
So we had to go through a lot more trouble
and wait a lot more as DJs,
and travel a lot more to find those record stores.
DJ: How many records?
I guess about 2,500 to 3,000.
INTERVIEWER: And when you don't get records
from the record company, where do you go to get records?
DJ: Usually Play De.
They've got the best selection, best hip-hop selection.
EUGENE: The DJs in the store were into hip-hop.
They say, "This is good. We should bring so-and-so."
"Do it."
♪
AKI: That propelled him to another level.
Just word of mouth saying, "Hey, Play De Record has this,
"Play De Record has that."
DJ POWER: I remember it being a place where
I got all my records,
not only for the radio show but for clubs and DJ bookings.
I mean, that was the place where I went
to get everything for the week.
KARDINAL OFFISHALL: My mom was never the type
to give an allowance, but she used to give me like
$20 a week for me to go and buy records
because she knew how much that I loved hip-hop.
So I remember, you know, grabbing
The Beatnuts and Pharcyde and, you know,
all the other stuff that was out at that time.
Like, that was actually also something that inspired us
because we were like,
yo, that's who we wanted to be like.
DJ DOPEY: And bringing the stuff that every, you know,
popular DJ was playing, I think really had that role
in being able to shape Toronto's scene and strengthen it,
and actually place us on the map.
EUGENE: And that's how the hip-hop
and the electronic music
were going together, and it was all underground.
NICK: It became expensive to buy records because, you know,
you're buying house and you're buying hip-hop at the same time,
but it was just so much of both.
And everything was there.
Like, you can get everything there.
LINDO P: So, as a reggae selector,
you'd just go to the reggae record stores.
You know what I mean?
Try to get as much songs as you can.
But everybody's going there, so you miss out.
Now you miss out, you don't have the songs,
you need to mash up the place-- where is the record now?
"Just go to Play De Record, man!"
"Why?"
"Just go. They have reggae, too."
And you go there and, there and behold, bro,
there's a shop up, bro. You know what I'm saying?
It wasn't so much.
You know, that two little, small racks.
It was maybe like that of 45s.
You know what I mean?
And a sprinkle of 12-inches here and there.
But... they were there!
[laughs] Know what I mean?
DENISE: It had really good music that was well-curated,
and people who knew about that music and who could be like,
"Oh, you're into this? Check this out."
AKI: That was the difference between,
you know, going to just a regular record store
and Play De Record. And they had good stuff, right?
They had local DJs that knew what they're doing
working there.
EUGENE: One thing I looked for is, like,
young guys who's hungry, who love music,
and probably will do anything for music.
PETER: I went in a couple of times,
looked around and saw what he had.
I said, "I would love to work here."
And he said, "Yeah, sure."
MARCUS: Then I went over to Eugene's,
I played a record and asked him if I could do co-op.
And at the time, he was kind of like,
"I don't need anyone else," you know?
And I was like, "It's free," and he was like, "Okay!"
JUG-E: For class, they actually made us write out a proposal
for why we should be able to do it, you know,
why we think we're suitable to do co-op in your establishment.
And I walked in there with all this thing in my mind.
I said, "Excuse me, sir,
"can I please do my co-op in your store?"
And Eugene looked at me and he said,
"Okay." [laughs]
DAVE: Some people, they got their job there
because they were big, top DJs.
People would come follow them at parties
and come buy records off them.
Other people ended up coming as, like, co-op students,
and I just came out of being a customer.
SHAMS: They said, "Hey, why don't you come by?
"And, you know, Eugene wants to talk to you."
And so Eugene talked to me and said, "Hey, you know,
"it would be nice if you could, you know, work here."
♪
SHAMS: They all shop here, all the top DJs,
like Chris Sheppard, Hedley,
Wayne Williams, Mike Devine,
Dr. Know, Paul Lopez, DJX.
SHAMS: So, initially when I started working at
Play De Record, I had an in
to getting what was gonna be a hit
way before it even got to the store.
And then a lot of times, I knew a lot of producers
that would give me their songs on DAT, like a master,
and they would send it to me and they'd say, "Here, play it."
It was in their best interest,
so if they were to give it to me,
I would break it on radio, to the clubs,
so that when the record came out,
it would sell out within seconds.
JUG-E: Record bitch!
That was my original position.
Put away vinyl, label vinyl, price vinyl.
Write those little stupid signs that you guys used to steal,
just rip off and throw it-- that was my job, originally.
I began to see some of the best DJs in the city,
how they were shopping for vinyl,
how they were listening to vinyl,
what was making them buy a piece of vinyl,
and I started to really become a student of the game
and watch-- I mean, this is Toronto.
We have a million great DJs here.
Dave Cooper, Jason Palma, Medicine Muffin, everybody,
and these are the people that were just on staff alone.
Kenny Glasgow.
Like, people were there, like the best of the best.
JASON: By that time, I had been coming to Play De
for a few years and I had become really friendly with Eugene,
and Peter and Tyrone and Aki, and I was starting to DJ
and I was starting to make my name in the underground scene.
Aki went to bat for me and said, "You should get Jason.
"He's pretty knowledgeable."
So then Eugene asked me and he goes,
"We'll try you out.
A couple days."
INTERVIEWER: A couple days turned into...?
JASON: Twenty-something years, I guess, right?
Or longer. Yeah, it's a long time!
Twenty-something years, yeah.
♪
DAVID: And I've told him this,
and I've told lots of people this, that I think
he has the best ears in the city, even back then.
DJ GROUCH: He knows his stuff, man.
Like, that guy knows records.
NICK: He pulled stuff that was just like, he goes,
"Oh, just take this. You're gonna like it."
I said, "Okay," and then you got home and you're just like,
"Shit, this is like, yeah, crazy."
I mean, his taste in music was also, like,
"Don't even listen to it, just buy it."
EUGENE: That guy studies music every night.
He knows what's going on.
He DJs.
He really brought a lot to the table, and he's a good DJ.
JASON: And Eugene was smart.
He loved music but he didn't know everything.
He couldn't know everything. Nobody can know everything.
But he wanted to get the people in there
that he knew other people respected.
JASON: So when he hired Aki,
he knew Aki knew the young kids that wanted house.
When he hired Peter and Tyrone, he knew that.
When he hired Junior, he knew Junior knew the kids
who wanted hip-hop records.
And then, he saw that I knew what I was talking about,
he saw that I had a knack for showing kids records
and selling records.
Because Eugene had a thing... [laughs]
He's like, "Okay, you gotta push records.
"Push 'em!"
Because he wanted to sell records, right?
Like, Eugene loved the records, but he loved the business.
You know, he was trying to make money.
EUGENE: I was pushing-- "Hey, we gotta sell.
"We got 100 of this record and you're not selling, man!
"I can't pay you guys, man!
"Let's sell, man!" And then they would go.
JUG-E: Back then, the culture was a little bit different.
One record could literally make a difference
in your entire night as a DJ.
That's what my job was, is to find out what that record is.
SHAMS: Then you have to listen to somebody play the song
on their phone, and you'd hear, you know,
just by listening to it, whether it's good or not, right?
And that's how you'd order.
MARCUS: You know, on top of ordering,
you'd have to order smart because, you know,
if I was saying, "We're gonna move 30 of that,"
and it just sat in the shop,
well, then he's not gonna trust you anymore.
You had to guess.
"You know what? I can move 10 of that.
"I can move 20 of that."
DAVE: The people that worked in the store didn't just, like,
"I focus on this and anything else is like,
"If I like it, I'll know about it.
"If I don't, I don't care about it."
Regardless of what your speciality was,
you had to know music.
♪
EUGENE: But all of us working together,
especially these guys, you know, the young,
the youth and them, they were pushing me, man.
And I was going for it, too,
because I wanted to succeed, right?
MARCUS: Call it the Play De Record alumni.
Like, honestly, now, looking back on it,
so many amazing, talented people
came out of that school, in a sense.
AKI: You know, the knowledge that I gained
from working there, that was my pay, you know?
I mean, Eugene, I owe it all to Eugene, what I have now,
you know, as I learned everything
about the record store business and selling records from him.
So, you know, that was my pay.
♪
RON: There was also, though,
a whole movement going on in the urban areas,
like in Scarborough, where we had Mike's Music Shop,
and in Eglinton West, we had, like, Monica's Records and,
you know, a few others that pioneered the idea
of you sell more records
if you have a good sound system in the record store.
It's like you're seeing a DJ.
AKI: Play De Record had a similar concept
where I would be playing the records
and the DJs would be there and say,
"Yeah, that's pretty good." I had to really know the song,
the breaks, the best part of the song,
so that I can sell that music to them, right?
♪
JUG-E: You can hear it before you see it.
You know, that was the beauty about Play De Record.
You know, you can hear it from the street
and you don't really know where the music is coming from.
DAVE: Whoever was available and could handle the heat
would be behind the turntables at the deck and be like, boom,
album cut, boom, 12-inch, remix of a big song.
♪
EUGENE: They played loud,
and when you play it loud...
it sounds better!
[laughs] Right?
Because I know so many customers always tell me the same thing.
They say, "Man, this store played some songs
"and it was so good, man, but when I got home,
"the songs sound like shit."
[laughs]
But I don't know. You know what I mean?
[house music]
CHRIS: This is a place where everybody can come
and have an opportunity to listen to new beats.
EUGENE: Well, Star Sound was there at the time,
and Carnival Records, right?
So they were my competition at that time.
And then, I think Carnival closed,
and then Star Sound started...
I don't know what happened, you know?
And then they switched to--
George took it over and became Traxx.
SFS: There was Play De Record and Star Sound,
which later became us.
I never worked in Star Sound, but and I would just, you know,
like every kid, you go hop, hop, but I only had, really,
I was going downtown.
Going downtown in itself was an adventure, number one,
because I was never downtown.
And I would just literally go Carnival, Play De Record,
Star Sound, just bang bang bang bang bang.
And you're going into this record store that, like,
all these big dog DJs are there, and you're like,
"Oh, whoa. Whoa!
That's-- oh, wow, okay, this is what they do!"
And then you look at the price tag
and you're like, "Okay, $7," and I'm like,
"Ah, I need money to get home, I need to eat something...
"Okay, I can take away the eating.
"But I gotta get home still!"
And Play De just became my normal
because that's where all my age friends were going,
because they were cool.
You know, it was family-owned.
Big difference.
Even though Eugene's dad looked like he wants to
kill everybody in the store when you walk in,
when you get to know them, super cool.
You know what I mean? The mom is super cool.
Eugene and Donna, amazing.
But my relationship with Traxx was because of George,
who owned Traxx, was part-owner of Traxx and Shakedown,
because I'd been using Shakedown for so long at that point,
and I was very close with George.
PETER: He owned a rental company,
Shakedown Sound,
so a lot of people used to rent off him for all sorts of stuff,
whether it was turntables, mixers,
and he also used to DJ himself.
So anyway, I've known him for a long time.
TRICKY MOREIRA: On the right-hand side of me
is the legend, the owner of Traxx Records, George.
What's going on?
What influenced you to open up the shop?
GEORGE: Oh, well, we got an opportunity to mix
DJ equipment sales and records together,
and we all know every DJ needs equipment,
so I guess we, combined with me and Ahmed over there,
to open a store that, you know, we could have equipment,
where they can do all their buying in one place.
DJX: Yeah, so the difference between George and Eugene,
I think Eugene was kind of like your uncle
or like your older brother.
George is very, like, he's very business-oriented.
Both great guys, but both very, very different.
SFS: Biggest heart in the world.
Would do anything for you when you're on his side.
But also the guy that if he doesn't like what you do
will tell you you're an idiot, you're an asshole.
"What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out of my store."
But by the same token, he's that guy,
if he loves you, he'll give you the biggest hug
in the world and make sure you get that record.
So put that into a big ball
and roll it down the bowling alley,
and that's George.
♪
GEORGE: Star Sound was the only one around.
He should have never let Eugene come on board.
Honestly.
Like, I mean, it's just like any competition:
if you can bury them, bury them.
DAVID: Star Sound was having a hard time,
and he kind of convinced Star Sound
to sell them Star Sound.
GEORGE: He asked me if I was interested to get involved
with him in this record store and I thought, you know,
"Hand in hand, DJs, records, audio: perfect mix."
[techno music]
♪ Such a treat, such a treat... ♪
♪ Such a treat, such a treat!
♪
RADIO ANNOUNCER: DJs, get on the right track
with Traxx!
Traxx, Canada's largest dance music and DJ equipment emporium.
GEORGE: Well, we took Peter and Tyrone from Play De,
so that was a big thing for us at the beginning.
Getting Peter and Tyrone was big.
SHAMS: Overnight it happened.
We tell Eugene, you know, "We're going over.
"We're leaving.
"We gotta go to the store, Traxx, and we're going."
Obviously Eugene was sad.
EUGENE: When George came out, he took Peter
to his store, so, cool, alright.
PETER: You know, and it was nothing against Eugene
or anything.
I just needed to change.
GEORGE: But they were gonna basically run my store, right?
So they were gonna be like management.
So they had control of what they ordered,
and I think they liked that.
DJ MATT C: And this is where the politics
of the record stores got very interesting.
DJ MATT C: You had Shams down at Play De Record,
and then you had Peter and Tyrone up the street
doing the ordering at Traxx.
The three of them happened to be these incredible DJs
that had a DJ crew called Peter, Tyrone & Shams.
If they wanted, they could theoretically
bring in enough records for each of them
to have a copy and no one else in the city to have a copy.
This became a very frustrating situation for me,
though Eugene would, in many cases,
put his foot down to make sure that I was getting
what I wanted.
EUGENE: I wasn't a DJ.
I wanted to get the music out there.
I played no politics in it, you know?
If I get a few records, I will hold it for maybe Chris Sheppard
and Hedley for their radio shows, you know?
Because if those guys play it,
people like it; I'm gonna sell more.
CHRIS: [on radio] It's Chris Sheppard on your radio,
feeling alright!
SFS: They have to be taken care of first.
It would make no sense for 15 copies of an exclusive record
to come in and you're giving it to the "basement DJs,"
and then the record just sits and dies till the next week;
you gotta wait another week till it comes in, right?
So, we had to take care of the big dogs.
It's part of it.
That's the game.
EUGENE: But I don't know.
When I think back, if you had the record only,
you're probably, you know, the king, right?
PETER: You get to keep everything because you need
to see what to reorder.
You would only order one, to sample it,
to see if you need to reorder some of them
for the following week.
GEORGE: They were saying,
"Oh, we didn't know if the record was good."
But they knew the record was good.
They just didn't want anybody to have it.
They wanted to be the first guys to play it.
You know, we had little arguments here and there
with the staff with that shit.
JASON: Peter and Tyrone left and Traxx opened.
Traxx was Star Sound, turned into Traxx.
George bought it, and then there was a price war.
GEORGE: He was a tough guy, too. He was...
He was very competitive also.
EUGENE: We went down a little bit in price
because we're behind a store, man!
Who's gonna find us?
GEORGE: I guess if you own the building,
like he supposedly did, that's just I don't know for facts,
but you can get away with that.
But if you're giving 15% off, then a dollar off,
after a while all that shit adds up.
You're only making, like, 2 bucks a record.
JASON: Not only were the records $6.79,
but everybody wanted a discount.
Everybody thought they should get a discount.
And it goes to the point where Eugene is like,
"I can't because it's already $6.50 or $6.79."
Like, it was crazy.
There was loyal customers to both shops,
but at the end of the day,
everybody just wanted the damn records.
DJX: Play De Record and Traxx were very much neck-and-neck.
SFS: Keep in mind, you're talking about, you know,
a Starbucks being right next to a Tim Hortons.
They were literal walking distance from each other,
on the same street, on the same side of the street.
DJ Power: They were right up the street so, I mean,
you'd go to one, then you'd go to the other.
MELBOOGIE: I would go to Traxx first.
That was my first stop.
BASS LINE: I would make the trek up the street as well, too.
So, you know, you'd go to different places,
but Play De was definitely a staple for me
as far as the records that I buy.
There's plenty of red and white bags
around my parents' house still to this day!
DJ DOPEY: Eugene is obviously closer to, like,
the actual where I would get off on the subway.
DJ GROUCH: Exactly.
DJ DOPEY: So I would go to Play De first
and then walk up to Traxx. DJ GROUCH: Mm-hm.
DJ DOPEY: So it was always like something snarky to say,
you know? DJ GROUCH: Yeah, yeah.
You know, a grudge in the belly, you know?
"You don't know about me!"
DJ DOPEY: Yeah, yeah, straight up.
DJ GROUCH: "Back in my gino days," and all this stuff.
So you're like, "Okay, whatever, dude."
But I like George. Shoutout to George.
TRICKY MOREIRA: Respect to George and Ahmed
for opening up Traxx.
Another thing is they have a wide selection of DJ tapes.
Included in there is my tape, Tricky Moreira,
and it's a Dance Nation version. Pick it up at Traxx Records.
JASON: So, Play De is obviously known for records,
and for 12-inch singles, etc.
Funk, house, hip-hop.
But what people might not know about Play De Record
was the mixtape era.
♪
JUG-E: That was a huge part of our revenue.
After you get past the porn and everything,
the first thing you see is the mixtape wall.
DAVE: Those mixtapes were, like, the first time you heard stuff,
heard music, heard verses, heard of artists.
DENISE: They'd be a calling card.
DJs would create mixtapes to showcase the kind of sounds
they'd play and how they mixed them.
RUSSELL: I would buy Jason Palma cassettes, JoJo Flores.
I would buy drum and bass CDs and mixtapes from there.
DJ MENSA: Like, I had Neil Armstrong from New York.
He was like, "I need to go to Play De Record,"
because he needed to break off Eugene with some mixtapes.
If you don't have your mixtapes at Play De,
you're not hitting your target audience.
NICK: I did a mixtape and he goes,
"How many copies do you have?"
I said, "Oh, I got, I dunno, 30 copies."
"Okay, give me all 30." "Oh!" I said, "Okay!"
So it was like-- and I know some of the hip-hop guys,
they were just, like, selling out the door.
AGILE: I lent one of my tapes to a buddy at school
and he really liked it, and he's like, "Can you make me a tape?"
"I've got way too much homework. I've got too much going on.
"That's not happening." He used to cut hair,
so he always had money, and he's like, "I'll pay you."
"Pay me?" He's like, "Yeah, I'll give you 10 bucks."
Ten bucks? That's a new 12-inch!
So, a 12-inch and lunch!
You know, he loved it, and then his friends copied it
and it went around the school. This was in high school.
And you know, before I know it, I'm doing Sweet Sixteens
and high school dances, and I kind of just
stumbled into it as a fan.
KID KUT: I have all this vinyl, I want to make a mixtape.
So, I started trying to make mixtapes
for just my friends and myself.
It's like, "Yo, listen to my tape!
"Listen to my demo! Please listen to my demo."
You know what I mean? Got feedback from people.
The girls liked the R&B.
"Oh, do you have this song? Do you have this song?"
One tape turned into a whole empire,
but that's more for the story. [laughs]
KID KUT: When I say "baby," y'all say "blue!"
SPIN SUPREME: And I did it on a Victoria Day long weekend.
That was the weekend that you wanted to get mixtapes
in people's hands because it was like the official start
to the summer, and this is probably
what you're gonna bump.
If you like the mixtape and you got it on May 24 weekend,
it was gonna bump all summer.
I used to distribute to friends, and then I began,
like, selling them.
I knew that, okay, I needed to get into the spot
where the big DJs had their tapes.
EUGENE: A couple of DJs came in and approached me and said,
"Hey, can we sell some mixtapes?"
And I was like, "Okay, sure, why not?
"It will help boost sales for the mixtapes
"and also pay for the high property taxes."
And one of those DJs' names was Mastermind.
SPIN SUPREME: At the time, there is a group of DJs
who are already taste-makers in the city.
Mastermind is one of them.
DJX is the other one.
And if you're an aspiring DJ,
you want to be one of these two guys.
KID KUT: When it came to hip-hop,
there is no competition.
When it came to hip-hop, there was Mastermind.
♪ 21 years of my life-- 21 years of my lifetime... ♪
KID KUT: You know what I mean?
Mastermind laid the pavement down when it came to hip-hop.
♪ Choclair's in the house.
♪ 21 years of my lifetime.
♪
♪ Yeah, you need to recognize what you had is lies. ♪
♪ 21 years of pure bullshit
♪ It makes me wanna bang my head off the walls ♪
♪ And do some shit like all street swarms in the malls ♪
♪ Mentality, it's not where it should be ♪
♪ When you see red and white lights break the night skies ♪
♪ Reflection of a mad man in the tear ♪
♪ Now another brother dies, another in handcuffs ♪
♪ Mothers' knees start to buckle up and fall
when they see their child outlined in chalk. ♪
MAN: There you go.
The man.
That's the man.
MASTERMIND: I was introduced to hip-hop through breakdancing.
Saw it downtown at the Eaton's Centre at a young age.
I heard somebody blasting hip-hop,
breakdance music at the time I guess
is what it was known for,
on his radio, and I was like, "Yo, where do you get this?
"Where do you find this?"
And he told me about a radio show.
Saturday afternoons, 1 to 4, on 88.1.
RON: Mastermind was just a young kid.
He used to call into the radio show,
and I liked this guy because he was able to name songs.
Whenever I quizzed people,
he would be that guy that would get all the names of the songs.
Eventually we developed a friendship.
MASTERMIND: I was always making tapes for people,
who'd always say, "Hey, make me a tape.
"Make me a tape"; so my girlfriend would get a tape.
Some of my best friends would get tapes,
or they would get dubs of the tapes that I would make.
Too Black Guys clothing store, they were probably
the first place that I ever put any tapes for sale.
They're selling out so quick at Too Black Guys,
there's other places I can start selling them.
You know, there's barbershops, there's--
and then, there's a couple of record stores,
Play De Record and Traxx.
I went and saw Eugene one fateful day,
and it kind of blew up from there.
EUGENE: He came to our store and he liked what we were doing,
and became friends, and he kind of hooked me up
with some guys in New York.
You know, those guys kept me abreast with some of the music.
MASTERMIND: He literally was like, "Yo, sold out.
"Yo, I need more, I need more."
And the one advantage that I had,
and I think that might have been above and beyond
all the other guys, is I had a radio show.
ANNOUNCER: [on radio] The Mastermind Street Jam.
Str-Street Jam!
MASTERMIND: And so I used my radio show to promote
that I had tapes and where they were being sold.
They just started to fly out of Eugene's store.
And so, even in hindsight, the majority, like the most,
were being sold out of Play De Record.
MASTERMIND: We continue with the freestyles.
This is part of the Let's Make a Record Deal series
that's on the album representing Scar Town, Scar City,
Citizen Kane, y'all.
♪
AGILE: At that point, Play De was also a ticket spot.
Any type of event or party that was happening in the city,
"Tickets available at..."
The first place they would say on any roll,
any commercial you heard, the first name you'd always hear
is "Play De Record."
It was central. Everybody knew where it was.
RON: It didn't matter if I was doing a reggae show
or if I was doing a hip-hop show or if I was just doing a dance,
if I sold tickets and I put them on sale with Eugene,
I would have to go back to restock that store.
JONATHAN: It wasn't uncommon for me to take tickets
from other stores and give them to Eugene.
You know, I'm call Shanti Baba on Queen Street,
"How many tickets do you have left for Erykah Badu?"
"40, but don't-- people are coming!
"People are calling, dude!"
And I'm like, "I need, like, 30 of them."
He's like, "Let me guess, you're giving them to Eugene?"
I'm like, "Yeah."
CLICK: Eugene didn't just make money
and make a business out of selling records.
That's a good part of it, but the other big part of it
is selling tickets to parties.
You have, like, 20, 30, maybe even 50 promoters
that were doing parties all the way from Hamilton
to Pickering, to Ajax, to even Whitby, doing parties.
They're bringing everybody into this space,
and from that space they're buying records.
But what else are they doing
when they're coming in the store?
If they're not a DJ, they're buying mixtapes.
So now you've got all these regular masses
coming into a shop to buy tickets to the regular parties
they want to go to, but then while they're there
they're gonna see, "Oh, the same DJ
"that I'm gonna go to their party has a mixtape,
"Baby Blue Soundcrew." Like, that's how it's all
an ecosystem, and Play De Record is the hub of it,
which is crazy.
RUSSELL: The sounds and energy and all that
at Play De Record were,
it was a distinctly different energy on a Thursday
because that's when all the new records came in.
EUGENE: The other stores did Friday,
but I wanted to have a jump on them,
so I decided to try and get the music on Thursday
before those guys, then I have a day.
And I would go and rush down, go and pick it up,
bring it back, and then I have it before them.
Then everybody caught on
and they started doing it on Thursdays.
So, that's how Thursdays became well-known, right?
♪
AGILE: We learned that new records came out
on Thursdays.
♪
AGILE: Straight in my uniform-- I went to a Catholic school,
so straight downtown in my uniform,
straight to the record store, straight to Play De.
MELBOOGIE: When you get out downtown it's like,
"Ahh, I'm here!"
You walk in and, yeah, you see different faces you know.
You see people on the come-up.
You see people that you want to be.
SPIN SUPREME: And you knew what they were there for,
'cause Thursday was the day.
JUG-E: You guys are getting it wrong.
Thursday starts on Monday.
On Monday, you gotta get your orders in.
Monday, you know, all week you've been writing
song titles down on this little piece of paper,
collecting from your stratosphere of information.
And then Thursday comes-- the boxes arrive!
SFS: You know, my shift would at 3.
I'd make sure I'm there for 2.
[laughs]
George would come back from Buffalo--
and everybody knew this; the same with Eugene.
Everybody knows what time they're coming through
from the border.
DJ MATT C: Eugene would be picking up the records
in Buffalo.
He would pick them up at around 2 o'clock.
He'd arrive at the store at 4.
JASON: And it was a race.
It was a race to see who would get from Buffalo
to Toronto faster.
GEORGE: We'd be there looking at each other sometimes, you know?
At customs, and we would just give the stare down.
I used to never talk to him.
He used to never talk to me.
EUGENE: Hopefully, I'd come back early enough
so that there's no chaos, because those guys...
DJs, man...
They're hungry.
[sighs]
♪ Now, yeah, nowadays. Yeah, yeah... ♪
♪ Yeah, nowadays.
♪ Yeah, yeah, nowadays.
♪
EUGENE: But if I come back early,
then that's great, you know?
Everybody starts working, pricing records,
and then get everything ready and then bringing it out.
But if I come late, then it got chaotic because DJs come in,
"Hey, what's going on?"
And as soon as we pull out the record,
everybody grabbing records.
And, like, we didn't even price the records yet.
We didn't check it in. You know what I mean?
DJ MATT C: You kind of went in there,
you were a little bit nervous,
you would say hi to people.
But I was most concerned about getting the records
that I wanted to get.
MARCUS: If you had certain records--
like, you know, I participated in a DJ competition
for Psychosis, and this was like in 1992,
and I lost because of one record.
♪ Come on downtown, follow me, come on downtown, follow me. ♪
MARCUS: Ruffneck played this one
Suburban Base promo and it was the biggest record
that was out at the time.
He just literally played it and the place went crazy,
and I lost the competition.
So that's like how important having certain music was.
NICK: All the other DJs are there,
so you're meeting whoever and whatever,
and you're waiting for your pile of records to come out.
That's if you got a pile.
JASON: There's the ten main guys
that come in, the ten big DJs.
Make them bags so they don't have to fight for the records.
So if we had ten copies of a house record,
they went in ten bags.
SFS: Okay, there's tick, tick, tick, tick.
So now we got seven records left.
Okay, and I'd take my deep breath,
and I would look and peek around the wall like this,
see who's in there.
SPIN SUPREME: Nobody knows who you are?
Chances are you're just gonna get what's leftover
at the bottom of the barrel of, like, vinyl that came in.
AGILE: There's a pecking order.
You kind of move your way up and you get your standing.
You get some notoriety. People start seeing
your name on a flyer a lot and they're like, "Oh!"
Because the flyers are in the stores.
The posters are in the stores, and that's you!
They go to the parties and they're like, "Oh, that's you!"
DJ POWER: This is when you didn't have--
you weren't at the respect level.
I wasn't at the respect level yet
where he's just giving me a bag.
Eventually, I got to the respect level.
Okay, Power's got a bag!
So, but at first, you don't get that bag,
so you're fighting, fighting, fighting.
MELBOOGIE: Sometimes you got elbowed
as you were trying to fight for some new vinyl.
AGILE: It was like "Lord of the Flies."
They would come out of the back with the records,
and they're trying to put the records on the shelves.
And, like, if it was like a hot 12-inch like Souls of Mischief,
"93 'Til Infinity," people are grabbing the records
out of whoever's stocking the shelves' hands
before they can even get on the shelf.
JASON: Yeah, I saw fistfights.
They would come out with records
and people were grabbing like crazy.
So, it was intense
but beautiful at the same time,
if that makes sense.
Like, being there was--
you knew you were experiencing something, you know?
They use the word, this term, FOMO, right?
If you weren't at Play De Record on Thursday,
you feared that you missed something because
the vibe and the intensity was crazy.
EUGENE: Man, just for music, man!
♪
DJ GROUCH: I met everybody there.
People that I still consider friends to this day,
like DJs on the scene, aspiring DJs, DJs that were already,
you know, doing things,
and yeah, we all had that, and it was a community vibe.
JONATHAN: It's sort of like Cheers, right?
You walk in, you know somebody.
DJ GROUCH: It was the equivalent of Norm
walking in from Cheers, you know?
AGILE: You would see all the DJs once a week.
So, you know, Son of SOUL, rest in peace,
like we would see Son of SOUL there,
and he was such a great mentor to me
and so many other DJs.
He would put us on to so many other records because
he was OG and he would see us and be like,
"Wow, these guys are like taking this seriously.
"Let me help them."
I mean, he was very generous with his time and his knowledge.
But he wasn't the only one.
There was so many other DJs. Dale Evans.
MELBOOGIE: Starting From Scratch, Mastermind.
DJX: You know, Chris Sheppard was there.
You would see Hedley.
MASTERMIND: Whether it'd be Skimpy Boy
or whether it'd be the Baby Blue guys
or any number of the huge, significant house DJs.
JUG-E: The mixtape DJs, the radio DJs, the club DJs.
Like, the strip club DJs.
Like, everybody would find their way to Play De Record.
Guys were doing missions, driving from Buffalo,
from Detroit, from New York City,
just to come get their record fix in at Play De Record,
you know?
INTERVIEWER: [TV] So Chris, how often do you come down here?
CHRIS: Oh, you've gotta make sure you're here
at least every Thursday, and sometimes twice a week.
INTERVIEWER: So is Thursday the day that all the records
come in? CHRIS: Thursday's the day.
We're here a little bit early.
The records should be just coming in right now.
INTERVIEWER: So literally it's like waiting at the dock
for the fish to come in? CHRIS: Yeah, yeah.
That's it, that's it. It's wicked, you know?
INTERVIEWER: Wow.
CHRIS: Actually, I think the records have arrived.
We've beat the fish to the pond.
Oh, see?
This is it, this is it! The shipment has arrived!
Where are the DJs?!
Security!
There's the guy responsible.
[streetcar rumbling]
EUGENE: We used to do charts in the store.
Medicine Muffin used to run the drum and bass.
Jason Palma, hip-hop.
I did the reggae.
Ernest Adams from the Outlaws did soca,
and Elvis did the dance stuff.
I had a second location in Scarborough
and we used to do warehouse sales there.
I used to do some booby traps, right?
Like, I would put like a Puff Daddy album
or Notorious BIG on sale, it'd be like $2,
and people... "Two dollars?!"
I remember doing the next one and it was a big line-up,
like over 100 people around the block, going down,
what road was it?
Lawrence, Lawrence Avenue.
CLICK: Eugene opened up a store in Scarborough?!
And what's great is, like, I lived on Lawrence.
I lived at Morningside.
I lived around the corner from where we are right now actually.
To hear he opened up a spot in Scarborough down the street
from me, I was like, "Yo, this is amazing."
KARLENE: My brother asked me.
He said, "You know, we have an opportunity
"to build a business in Scarborough,"
and I said, "Sure. I'll try it out."
JESTER: It's a lot smaller, less hectic version of downtown.
The interactions were a little more calm, to say,
but it was a great experience.
And, like, being at the store kind of became my home
and people knew to check me there.
To me, it was ultimately the dream job.
♪
SKRATCH BASTID: The first time I came to Play De Record,
I believe, was when I came to Toronto for a DJ battle.
All we knew is, like,
"Let's get a hotel as close to Play De Record as we can."
So we stayed at the Marriott on Yonge that was, like,
you know, just above...
I don't know where it was.
It was crazy because when you're a kid from Halifax
coming to Toronto, everything seems so far away,
and now it's like it's next door.
Yeah, I remember the first time I walked into Play De Record.
At that time, they had a lot of illicit material in the front...
Or whatever.
I don't know if it was illicit. It looked like a porn shop
at the front! And I was like,
"What's going on here? Is this the right place?"
You know? "I feel a little shy."
Actually, I brought one record today
that I found there the first day I was there.
I found a copy of Lord Finesse, "The Awakening,"
and I'd been looking for this because there was a copy of this
that had the instrumentals in it as well.
And also, I later found out that's DJ Mastermind's tag,
so this is Mastermind's copy of this.
I remember I brought it to the cash, Eugene looked at it,
and he said, "Where'd you find that?" [laughs]
And I was like, "It was over there!"
I don't know.
I'm still, to this day-- "Eugene, do I owe you this?"
I don't know. But this was that--
I found that record the first time I was there,
and I was just amazed that I found that there.
I was super hyped, and I'll always remember
that first visit to Play De Record.
So, we know about Play De Record from watching MuchMusic.
I almost want to say, like, on Rap City they'd have,
like before commercials, they would roll something
like saying it's available, you know?
Or like on extended mix, D.C.'s Pics.
EUGENE: Well, Master T and Dave, his DJ, Dave Campbell,
they were looking for sponsors. They approached me.
They said, "Can you sponsor this show?"
And then, MuchMusic was all over extended mix rap CDs.
They go all over Canada.
M DAILEY: [TV] You're with Canada's first and only music
television network, MuchMusic,
the nation's music station!
SPADE: I developed a relationship with MuchMusic
from when I used to dance with Michie.
MICHIE: ♪ The feel is Jamaican funk! ♪
SPADE: And there was a girl there named Michele Geister.
If you're talking about Ron Nelson,
you have to talk about Michele Geister,
because she basically brought hip-hop to MuchMusic.
So, just think about the old Rap City and all that,
that's all Michele Geister.
As important as Ron Nelson is,
Michele Geister is just as important--
maybe, per se, might be even more important.
INTERVIEWER: I actually couldn't get her for this.
SPADE: She's in Jamaica.
I could get her on the phone for you if you need.
[hip-hop music]
♪
MAN: Where do you want me?
♪
MICHELE: I think my DJing days really started
with my first turntable, which was about 11 years old.
Even back as a preteen, I was a vinyl junkie.
When I babysat, that's what I got as rewards or gifts
from the people I babysat for, was vinyl.
My roommate, Karen Young, and myself
were asked by the infamous Tasmanian Ballroom
to play in their basement dancefloor.
DENISE: So, Pauly Lopez is somebody, for example,
who would tell me a lot about Michele,
and she really knew her music and she was out there
with her records, but she was also on the TV side of things.
MICHELE: Music television, MuchMusic was just starting,
and I knew that's where I wanted to be.
I moved to Toronto and I was just determined
I would get a job there.
One of my classmates did get a job and she called me
to say they were looking for someone, a technician position.
I had been making television since I was in high school.
MICHAEL: Welcome to another edition of Soul in the City.
Well, it's not just another edition of Soul in the City;
here we're going to endeavour to show you
some of the various forms of house music.
MICHELE: Soul in the City was a video version
of a radio program that the host and creator, Michael Williams,
had done previously when he lived in Montreal.
You know, my official title was associate producer, but I wrote,
I researched, I produced, I directed.
And Soul in the City was so exciting
and it was so well-received, but out of a music station
that was 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it was only one hour.
And at the time, hip-hop as starting to blow up.
INFINITE: Oh, no doubt, Maestro and Michie Mee,
Dream Warriors at that time, and Rumble,
they set the tone for Toronto, Canadian hip-hop.
DJ KEMO: Yeah, Maestro was a huge influence on Rascals.
Michie Mee, and Rumble,
all these records, they reached us.
Like, 100%.
And we were fully influenced by and we were watching like,
"Yeah, what's going on over there?" right?
MICHELE: Eventually, I was lucky enough to get the call
and hear that, "Yes, you can start working on a program."
And in September 1989,
we had our first half-hour edition of Rap City.
[Rap City theme song]
CARTOON DOG: Funky!
♪
INFINITE: Back then, people more watched TV.
There was no steaming online.
There was, like, more cable, so everybody paid attention
to Rap City at the time. That was a big deal back then.
MICHELE: Like a DJ wanted to have that exclusive vinyl,
I wanted to be the one to debut a video
that no one else had seen.
SPADE: As soon as you see your boy on it,
or as soon as you were on it, that was the superstar status.
That's when you felt like a star.
DAN-E-O: And I actually remember when it dropped,
and it came after a Shaquille O'Neal video.
And I remember that and I'm thinking,
"Here's this NBA superstar doing his hip-hop thing, and me,
"back-to-back," and I knew the rest of the country
was watching it with me, man. It was amazing.
It was literally a dream come true
because I had been dreaming about that happening,
like, since I was a little kid.
♪
MICHELE: We were promoting the music,
and they could go to Play De Record and find
everything they wanted there.
JESTER: Anything that was playing
or anything that was premiered, whether it was MTV or MuchMusic,
we had to have.
MICHELE: We did the promo, they did the sales!
I would say it would have been how things worked.
♪
MICHELE: And I really do give props to Eugene for,
you know, doing what he's done for so long.
Hip-hop music has had its challenges in Canada.
It's always been hard.
In more recent years, Drake, you know, the Weeknd,
have blown up into huge stars.
It wasn't always like that.
♪
REPORTER: The last 12 months have been good and bad
for Toronto rap group Ghetto Concept.
On Sunday, the group collected their second Juno in two years.
INFINITE: Last year, we won it without a video,
without major label support and all that,
and we surprised everybody. This year, we had a video.
We did a tour across Canada.
MR. ATTIC: We started driving down there,
and I want to say it was in Hamilton or something that year,
and we drove and we got there, and they had already won,
and we were at the top of the escalator or whatever it is,
and they were just actually coming from wherever it is
taking photos, and they're like, "Yo, we won!"
And we were, like, "What? Like, seriously?"
You know, if you equate that to like a Grammy, right?
If you're saying, "Okay, well, these two won back-to-back,"
you would think that a label or somebody would be coming
to you to say, "Hey, you know,
"let's work or let's do something," right?
So, it didn't really happen.
I mean, it happened, but it didn't really morph into
what you would think it would, right, so...
INFINITE: We're trying to get out there.
We're trying to be seen.
And at the same time, you know, we're at a status,
we're winning the same Junos that other people in there
are winning. K-NOTE: Exactly.
INFINITE: It's the same Juno.
So, I mean, why don't we get the same props?
K-NOTE: We had Maestro Fresh Wes.
He was probably one of the few outside of Dream Warriors
that made big tracks and trails for us.
But again, after their run...
DJ KEMO: So you'd think it'd kind of pick up from there,
but it didn't.
It was like there was this lull, and I think the Canadian
music industry just treated it like a fad.
SPADE: With my album done, complete,
I put it in front of them and they told me,
"How do you expect this to make any money?
"It's not geared towards white kids."
And I'm like, "Well, it's not meant to be geared
"towards white kids. It's hip-hop, right?
"It's geared towards ghetto kids, right?"
He goes, "Well, that doesn't sell records."
And I go, "Well, how much do you expect it to sell?"
And he goes,
"Well, you'll be lucky if you sold 5,000 records."
I go, "So if I put this album out myself
"and I sold 5,000 records, you'll sign me?"
He goes, "Well, if you sell 5,000 records of this,
"I'll sign you tomorrow."
I put it out and sold 20,000 records,
and I came back to him and he still didn't sign me.
♪
MARCIA: Black music wasn't really embraced
to that extent, you know?
It wasn't as equal as some of the other forms of music were.
So I don't think people really realized
the potential that hip-hop had.
MICHELE: It was underground to the mainstream,
but it wasn't underground to the youth.
It really was a fresh, new movement.
There was just this system
who had decided how much we could get.
DJX: It took a lot to put out a record.
It was expensive. It was a big process.
SPADE: To record a song,
you'd have to pay $100 an hour at a studio.
It would take you four hours to record a song,
and then that song had to be mastered.
To master that song takes four hours, right?
So that's $800, recording and mastering a song.
And then, you have to do an album with 12 songs.
KARDINAL OFFISHALL: We only became producers
out of necessity.
Like, we couldn't afford to buy other people's beats.
And it's not like we were like,
"Yo, let's be producer-rappers." We were like,
"Well, we can't afford to pay Scam or pay DJX,"
or anybody else that was producing at the time,
so we were like...
SPADE: Plus, you had to manufacture.
Guys don't have to do it now because they just download it.
KARDINAL OFFISHALL: We weren't doing it for the money.
Absolutely not.
'Cause to us, if you gave us $150 bucks, like,
we would have been ecstatic.
It wasn't for the money.
It wasn't for anything other than the pure love
of hip-hop and wanting to be MCs.
K-NOTE: Therefore, that's where you get the independent labels:
Steppin' Bigga, Groove-A-Lot.
We'd do our own stuff and then hopefully send it down
to New York and maybe one of those DJs will play it,
or maybe overseas, Japan, you know?
EUGENE: I saw people coming in bringing mixtapes
and then bringing their own cassettes of their own stuff.
The quality wasn't so hot, right?
Like, then I had an idea.
I was thinking, "Why don't I help out these guys?"
[hip-hop music]
MASTERMIND: Nobody even knew there was a basement
at Play De Record, let alone that they were
working on building a studio.
ALEX: It was just dark and the stairs were creaky
and it was like, "Wah!"
And the lightbulb was kind of flashing.
And, you know, there's just boxes of records everywhere.
DAN-E-O: There was so much shit back there.
Like, I don't know how they had space for it all.
ALEX: And then the studio, you'd walk into the studio and it was,
you know, nothing elaborate.
It was all, you know, built by everybody.
Steppin' Bigga as a business was three people:
Eugene, John Bronski,
and 2 Rude was kind of the in-house producer
who'd bring in these acts and stuff.
EUGENE: The first artist was Apple & Orange,
and he gave me a little sample and I was like,
"Well, maybe I can help you out."
And then Rude came with the beats,
and that's how we all met.
EUGENE: This is my second release, Freaks of Reality.
So then, he played me Saukrates
and, like, a bunch of stuff,
and Saukrates caught my, you know, my ear.
Oh, John Bronski brought it to me.
Yeah, and we listened and I was like,
"We need to do something with this guy."
MASTERMIND: Back then, we were like,
"If anybody is gonna make it, and really, you know,
"put Toronto on the map, it was gonna be him.
DJ KEMO: I really judged a record sonically.
How's that rapper's voice sound, right?
Like, does he have a cool voice?
That's why I think me and a lot of DJs were like,
"Yo, Saukrates is ill."
KARDINAL OFFISHALL: You know, we were all
gonna record this freestyle.
So, you know, Marvel went in, did his thing,
I went in, did my thing.
You know, Sauks went in
and we heard this guy on the mic.
We're like, "The f...
"Yo, who is that?!"
When his voice got on a real,
real microphone and they were able to pick up the sonics,
life was never the same after seeing him
go into the booth for the first time and coming out.
SAUKRATES: ♪ Hate runs deep in the hearts of many. ♪
♪ Hate runs deep in the guts of all. ♪
♪ 'Cause your hate can judge your fate. ♪
♪ When guns blaze at nighttime
'cause it's the right time for wrong. ♪
♪ Index fingers touch rewind as my aura propels your mindstate
leaving behind fake visions. ♪
♪ You're blind 'cause it's hard to find. ♪
♪ Lyrics flood the black market more than rock and steel. ♪
♪ My stock's hot 'cause it's realer than real
when caps peel. ♪
♪ Pay rent for cement, mothers' hearts gettin' bent
'cause nights is trife. ♪
♪ It's chillin' like a villain executin' his killin'
but there's no blood spillin'... ♪
[music fades out]
SAUKRATES: Just a taste! [laughter]
SAUKRATES: Every, I don't know if it was Tuesday or Thursday--
I can't remember-- we'd get on the train,
9th grade, and hit Yonge Street.
And we'd first stop at Play De Record,
then scour Traxx and the other two or three
that were up the block. Like, we were in it.
Plus, but we wouldn't know what it was because we had to listen
on that Saturday to the stations.
And once we knew what they were playing,
then we gotta go see Eugene to start to get those songs
in our own collection.
So, he had a studio.
He got a great engineer in Alex G,
and they wanted to do another one, John Bronski said.
KARDINAL OFFISHALL: Word?
Yo, we get to go to Play De Record?
Like, never mind, I have to be honest,
never mind the record deal part, we're like,
"Yo, we get to go to Play De Record?"
SAUKRATES: That's how I connected there,
but I'd been buying records from Play De Record
for two years prior to that,
so I was familiar with the building,
and I knew it was a Mecca.
So when I got invited to record in the studio of the Mecca...
♪
DJ: Yo, live on WKMA,
you've got yo nigga Kool-Aid.
You got [unintelligible] in the house too, G.
Yo, steppin' up we have that nigga from the East Side,
Saukrates.
Representing [inaudible] that's shit's from.
Yo, Saukrates, step up and show 'em what you can do, nigga.
SAUKRATES: ♪ They get caught in ill positions. ♪
♪ Famous quote from me, Saukrates. ♪
♪ Groupies rock my boat, I used to step lightly. ♪
SAUKRATES: Internationally known,
locally accepted.
You gotta do both.
If you do that, you're gone.
And Eugene gave me the opportunity
to be locally accepted.
And once it's pressed on the vinyl, you ship it,
then you're internationally known.
CLICK: For the independent artist to go into Play De Record
and say, "Hey, Eugene, I got a new record I want to put out,"
it was a lot more challenging with, like,
an HMV or a Sam the Record Man or whatnot.
NICK: You couldn't walk into Sam the Record Man and say,
"Oh, I put out a new record.
"Do you guys wanna give it a listen?"
"Take a seat in the back or something." [laughs]
I don't know, "Step outside.
"We'll call you when we're ready."
JONATHAN: So, I asked Eugene if I could do
a Rap Essentials display, and he was like,
"Oh, no, I'll put it in there for you."
I'm like, "No, no, no, I want the whole window."
"I don't know: Daddy would say no."
And I'm like, "Eugene, come on. Just let me do it one week."
I don't know how it happened, but he said yes.
TOUGH DUMPLIN: "Yo, when you get the posters, let me know.
"I'll post it up when you've got the shows.
"I'll put out the flyer."
He put it right in front so everybody could see it.
JD ERA: The money was always there.
My mixtapes were flying at that time,
but he always made sure the bread was straight
or, like, the count was good.
Or, you know, we always had a section to sell our tapes,
and it didn't matter if there was 50 other MCs, you know,
trying to sell their mixtapes or whatever.
Like, he always made sure we were good inside the spot.
TOUGH DUMPLIN: At the time, I remember, you know, my dad,
Delroy G, showcasing, bringing the dope,
real reggae music to Toronto for years now.
When I got my record up there, I was like,
"Oh, I want my record to be just like how when me and my dad
were rolling through, picking up all these vintage records."
SKRATCH BASTID: But yeah, when you do come in here
and you do see Saukrates on the wall,
you see Da Grassroots on the wall or something like that,
you would know that people were making
some of those records to get on this wall.
So, I think that that says something about even
being the outlet, being the goal for a lot of these people.
Mixtapes, too.
I want my mixtape to be right behind.
I want to have that hot spot.
Like, that environment
helped stimulate the art that comes from a city.
I think there's a direct connection.
ALEX: You know, me and Eugene, we were spending, like,
every night, like all day, all night.
You know, we slept in the studio some nights.
EUGENE: I remember even when I finished, I...
pssht! I was opening the store.
I didn't even sleep sometimes.
ALEX: Now, we didn't get too far because, I mean,
it was a financial strain for, you know,
the Tam Family to have this label that, you know, wasn't--
it was always in the red.
EUGENE: At that time, you promo DJ pools and stuff,
and they would play on the radio and push this stuff.
If they like it, whatever, right?
We promoed the stuff, and the next thing I know
it was all over on the internet,
people downloading, and nobody buying.
So, that kind of soured my, you know, soured me, and I said,
"You know what? I'm done with this."
That was a really rough time.
JASON: It was my day off with some friends, and I go,
"Let me pop into Play De." I needed to grab something
from the back or ask Eugene something; I couldn't remember.
I walk in and the gate's up.
I'm like, "What the hell's going on?"
Why is the gate up? It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
It shouldn't be closed. The lights are on.
I see Eugene in there. I see people in there.
PETER: I opened the shop, turned everything on,
got everything going in the store.
JASON: So I walk down and I start to open the gate,
and some guy I don't recognize,
some older white guy with a moustache, he's like,
"Excuse me, sir."
And then I see Eugene over and he just looks at me and he goes,
"Jason? No, no, no.
"Go, go."
I found out, obviously later,
that it was the RCMP that told me not to come in.
PETER: 25, 30 cops, and undercovers, said,
"Hold it right there,"
like to me and the other employee that was there.
And I can't remember who was there.
I think it was a co-op student actually, to be honest with you.
They said that they're coming for the mixtapes
because of copyright infringement.
GEORGE: And I remember Peter calling me on the phone
and going, "We just got busted.
"They're charging me."
I said, "Okay, Peter, I'm on my way,"
because I was on my way to work.
I told them, I said, "I'm the owner.
"You know, you need to charge me."
We went through the courts.
It got dropped.
DJ: I remember I was talking to Kid Kut, and he said,
"Baby Blue is putting out a new mixtape,"
and he goes, "We're gonna put it on CDs."
"Man, I don't know if you should do that,
"because now we're putting stuff up
"on the, like, top format."
KID KUT: It was a new thing, burning on CDs,
so we started burning onto CDs,
and then eventually we ended up pressing CDs.
MASTERMIND: And when they started making CDs,
they really started competing with the record labels,
and that's what made them take notice, right?
CLICK: You know, obviously, DJs are selling mixtapes
without having their approval, but that's all fucked up
because at the end of the day,
all those DJs that are doing mixtapes were getting free music
that the record companies were giving them to promote that.
AGILE: The record labels would service DJs and record pools,
and part of the service was you had to fill out response sheets
for the records they were servicing.
They wanted to know what you thought of these records.
One of the questions on those surveys,
on every record that you got,
"Would you put this song on your mixtape?"
SPIN SUPREME: At the time, there was a culture
that was made up of DJs and taste-makers,
independent labels, and record shops,
and the clothing store, and everybody was like
working together to build something here.
What it felt like to me was like the labels
were clearing the runway to do their thing.
JASON: You ask me how it affected Eugene,
he had to go to court.
He spent thousands upon thousands of dollars
to defend himself,
and it weighed heavy on him in those years.
I know that for sure.
EUGENE: Well, yeah, it was, like,
kind of disheartening because, like, everybody is doing it.
Everybody is selling.
Labels? Well, you know what?
I'm not too sure if I feel comfortable talking about it.
But everybody was doing it, and they picked us.
You know what I mean?
Why us?
JASON: His parents had a heavy dictation
on what was happening with the business.
It was their business as much as it was Eugene's business,
and they were there constantly, aware of everything
and watching over, like hawks, what was going on.
JASON: When the cops came in, that spooked Daddy and Mommy
as much as it spooked Eugene,
and I think that together eventually
is why Eugene asked if I wanted to buy the business.
♪
EUGENE: Sasha was born in 1992.
She is a leap year baby.
And my son was born in 1995.
I didn't get to see them much.
I used to be in the store here at 12 o'clock.
Sometimes I'd go and pick up stuff, do stuff.
SASHA: There used to be, like, a very small office
and a kitchen in the back,
and my brother and I would do homework there most days.
KEEGAN: Yeah, after school we would come back to the store
and just waited around until we went home,
so we would just eat dinner there,
do homework, play around.
EUGENE: I would only see them at 12 o'clock at night.
They're supposed to be sleeping,
but they're hiding when they hear me coming.
KEEGAN: I would hide at home before my dad came home
and then surprise him.
I guess it was just the way 'cause we didn't really
see him for a lot, right?
SASHA: And even if my parents were at the store,
I remember trying to stay up till, like,
11 or 12 when they came back home to, like, see them,
but it didn't always work out.
I just still think it was like my dad's other child almost,
because he was here the majority of the time.
EUGENE: You know, I was going every Thursday
to pick up records.
The records are still coming in
and they still gotta go out, right?
So, bringing those two guys in was-- you know, helped.
♪
NAV: I was working around the corner at Covenant House
and spent any free moment I had in the shop.
Got to know Eugene, of course, and Donna,
and then Eugene and Donna were now young parents.
I think both of them really wanted to be able to focus
on their family a bit more
and they were looking for an out.
So they mentioned it to Jason, and Jason mentioned it to me.
JASON: And one day Eugene came up to me and he goes,
"We're thinking about selling the business.
"Are you interested?" I said, "Yeah."
I didn't think I could do it on my own.
Nav was my very good friend.
NAV: We were just like, "Yeah! Let's do it!"
Effectively, at that point, we bought Play De Record.
The deal was Eugene and Donna stay on for six months.
You know, a consultancy period.
JASON: But when Nav and I brainstormed ideas
and talked to Eugene, Eugene got excited
and he got a new zest for it and said,
"You know what? I'm gonna stay."
NAV: Thankfully, we devised this schedule
that worked for Eugene and Donna to remain.
When I look back, I mean,
damn, if it had gone any other way,
it would have been a catastrophe.
DONNA: I could have walked away from the store, you know?
But he loves it, so he continues.
I think being here all day is not work for him.
He loves being here all day, listening to music.
♪
EUGENE: I was always going to motivational courses
and looking at other businesses, thinking, you know,
"How can I, you know,
"maybe diversify just in case something happens to the store?"
Which, you know, some of the stuff I learned, like,
you set a goal
and you do whatever it takes to get that goal.
So it doesn't matter if I didn't sleep or whatever,
I'd just go and I'd try to achieve that goal.
And even to this day, I still do the same thing,
where if somebody is looking for something,
I try my best to try and get it to them.
Sometimes the DJs would ask me,
"Bring me a record in the club."
I was like, "Oh, come on, man.
"Do you really need this record?"
But I know the DJ needs it because, you know,
one of my things also is the music can't stop.
I just kind of-- the music's gotta keep on going.
♪
SFS: I think a lot of how we've been able to maintain
and stay at such a high level for so long is
a lot of it is how we deal with people.
And I did learn a lot of that from him.
I got, you know, my asshole side from George,
how to not take shit from people,
and I got the camaraderie, community thing from Eugene.
If you ask me, like, a moment where one started to pull away
from the other, I couldn't tell you.
GEORGE: But Eugene outsold us. 100%, I know that for a fact.
That bothered me, but once I got out of it,
I was like, I don't know how old I was in 2000,
but it was over.
Like, I walked away from it. I was good with it.
No, it didn't bother me.
But during the competition, oh, he used to bother me!
He used to bother me.
Actually, funny you say that--
Eugene bought all my records.
Call up Eugene, he comes to my dad's house,
he went through my records,
started nickel and diming here and I said, "Look, Eugene,
"either you take the whole batch or you don't take it at all."
And I took that money
and I bought a dock at my cottage,
which I should call Play De Record,
which I still have up to now,
that I built a dock with the money he gave me.
True story.
I'm just shocked that he's still doing it.
Like, I mean, is the industry still there?
Are people buying records?
Like, why is he still just kicking the bucket doing that?
INTERVIEWER: How long did the Thursday thing last?
Like when did it-- EUGENE: Oh, forever.
Until, like, the 2010s.
You know what I mean?
That's when things started-- poof!
Digital, man.
Digital killed it.
MISTA JIGGZ: Serato is a program or a software
that basically allows DJs to use digital files
from their laptop or from a hard drive.
You can use it with CD turntables.
You can use it with regular turntables.
You can use it with a controller.
But you can also just connect to a mixer
and you can play your whole entire set
literally just off your computer.
When Serato came out in 2005,
a lot of guys already had a lot of digital files,
so they were kind of already ready to go there.
JESTER: Once I got to try it, oh my god, this is a game-changer.
I couldn't stop talking about it.
And I remember, I flew out to Vancouver with Kid Kut.
Because it was so much, my actual luggage,
my personal luggage of clothing and stuff like that,
as well as these two massive crates,
the airline charged me like $160, $170
to bring those crates back, and I was so pissed.
And as soon as I landed back in Toronto, I bought a laptop,
and I never looked back.
DJ KEMO: I could do the exact same job and bring ten times
the amount of records with me
with a frickin' laptop and two controllers?
Like, hell yeah, I'm with it.
MELBOOGIE: For me personally, it's just something that I--
you had to do.
You had to keep up with the times.
MARCUS: With everything being on a USB,
you could bring your whole collection on your laptop.
I don't see a full return to vinyl ever happening.
DENISE: But it wasn't like digital files came out
and then instantaneously killed the scene,
but definitely over time.
I mean, I can't remember the last time I bought
a 12-inch, frankly, you know?
Because you have access to it all the time,
anywhere, anytime now.
♪
JUG-E: As a young kid, as a teenager,
working in the record store, dictating what people buy,
I mean, that was kind of the attitude of it.
Once people had the freedom of MP3s,
it didn't matter anymore.
They can tell you what's hot now.
So, naturally, it slowed down.
Club DJs were the first to go.
JASON: Yeah, we noticed it.
We'd notice less things being pressed on vinyl.
We'd notice certain DJs dropping off
and not showing up anymore, DJs that would come regularly.
When Thursday was 100 or 150 people going crazy,
it started to be 60 people.
EUGENE: Everything went down a little bit.
When Scratch Live came, a little bit went down.
When Serato came in,
a lot went down.
So, we had to find other ways, you know?
[drum and bass music]
REPORTER: [TV] The beat's about to switch again
at Play De Record.
First vinyl, then DJ equipment, now the funky store on Yonge
is opening a learning centre in the back.
WOMAN: Honestly, it's really hard to find an environment
where you can sit down and learn.
You feel like it's impossible
to be able to do something like this.
MASTERMIND: And that was crazy because he had enough foresight
to be like, "Okay, how do I evolve or transition?"
Or, "Okay, maybe the record side of it is not bringing in
"as much income as it used to,
"so what can we do to supplement that?"
By setting up a DJ school in a store
that was infamous for the DJ world,
you're now bringing that potentially
to a new generation of people.
And again, you know, Eugene had the foresight to be like,
"Let's help keep this culture going."
EUGENE: But again, like, everybody learns on...
Get free lessons on YouTube,
just like how they get free music.
NAV: All that stuff, you know, to try and weather the storm,
we knew what was going on.
We knew that, you know, it was gonna be a challenge.
But at the end of the day, we kind of also trusted
there's always gonna be music lovers
and there's always gonna be people
who love the medium, you know, of vinyl.
DAN-E-O: I have a love for the music,
but the music product.
To this day, I'm still very meticulous about
how my album cover looks, the liner notes,
all of the credit information.
MISS KITTIE: DJ Jace, I did a remix for him this year.
He met me in the food court from my place of work,
and he handed me this record,
and I very excitedly started screaming
and scared a lot of the elderly people
that were in the food court.
I didn't actually think that I would see my name
on a record for a long time, and I almost cried,
which I really had to control myself
because of the number of people that were around.
SKRATCH BASTID: Now that it is a more limited thing,
it's a bit more special.
It's like the same way people like real photographs
and things like that.
It's like a physical piece of media.
But when Serato came 'round, it was like,
"Yeah, okay, cool, I still got it," you know?
Like, "I'm gonna beat the curve and I'm gonna find ways
"to get the record." But then, eventually,
people coming up to you at the club being like,
"Can you play this?" and I'm like,
"Ah, I'm still waiting for it to get pressed."
Then they're like,
"What are you? What's a press?"
You know what I mean? It doesn't make sense.
MISTA JIGGZ: If a record is scratched,
you may not be able to play it.
You're in close quarters and the audience is around you.
People could be, you know, knocking the table.
People could be knocking the needle,
and it could really affect your performance.
♪
JUG-E: Serato was like that thing,
it was the gift and the curse because it gave us everything
that we really wanted.
As DJs, me personally, I hated carrying crates.
But at the same time, it tore our hearts out
because we lost that sense of community.
NAV: As an entrepreneur, I got into, like,
bars and venues and opened a club of my own,
and it made sense for me to exit at that point.
It was emotional for years and years,
and still is a little emotional, you know?
Like, definitely a high point of my, you know,
my life and my career.
You know, it was a really fun place to work.
♪
JUG-E: As someone who essentially spent a lot of time,
years on Yonge Street, a lot of the smaller businesses
that had hung on for all those years
were now getting taken over by the major corporations.
EUGENE: Well, when that property tax went up $7,000, man,
I said, "We can't do this." It's...
We're not even making money, right?
And for that to happen, we said, "Look."
So, we were deciding if to continue or not, right?
Jason didn't want to continue, so it was just me alone.
JASON: We had talked about closing the shop, many times,
because it was hard.
You know, it's not the same business
as it was obviously in the '90s.
And then Eugene said, "Well, let's move it."
And I go, "Okay." I was open to the idea.
There was a spot on Spadina that Eugene showed me,
and I go, "It's cool, I like it."
But I really did some soul-searching myself
and I felt I needed to go another direction in my life.
So once the Yonge Street location closed down,
I decided to move on and let Eugene take it over.
♪
DJ DOPEY: We used to do scratchers together, like,
you know, the scene and get people together.
We did the last one that was in the actual Yonge Street,
the OG store.
Eugene let us do it.
A good send-off, I suppose, for the OG store.
♪
JESTER: Eugene, a couple other people who were
Play De Record loyalists,
we all took a picture in front of the sign.
And I remember after we took the picture, I was just like,
"This is part of Toronto culture."
DJ POWER: And that location on Yonge Street
is just a part of history.
I felt it when he had to move.
NICK: You know the Sam's sign?
They got the Sam's sign they have on top of that thing.
They should tear that down and put the Play De Record sign
there, on top of there. [laughs]
Because that's just as, like, well-known as,
and probably even bigger than, Sam the Record Man.
♪
SPIN SUPREME: I'm super nostalgic
when we talk about this stuff, man.
Like, going down memory lane and thinking about the places
and the sounds and the smells of, like,
being in this movement at this time.
There's institutions that were a part of the come-up
of this city, and they don't exist anymore,
or they've changed,
and, you know, I understand the evolution.
It means that what we see today won't ever be what it was,
but it's nice to think about it.
JUG-E: Well... all good things come to an end.
[quiet street traffic noise]
DAVID: I got a wire from Eugene that says,
"Oh, come check out the new store."
I walked in there and it was like
if nothing had ever changed.
I think it felt the same because Eugene was there,
and so he is the store.
Home is where Eugene is.
[quiet street traffic noise]
EUGENE: I just keep hoping.
I'm not sure yet what I'm gonna do yet.
But when you're so busy
and you're always involved with music
and you're ordering every day, and especially now where
mostly I'm alone, so I'm doing everything.
I'm picking out records, looking at records, digging,
sorting records, filling up the bins, checking stock,
cashing people, answering phone calls,
answering questions about equipment,
which I don't really-- it's not my forte.
So even doing this documentary has me thinking,
when I do all the pros and cons, "Alright, this is what we did,"
and then even now I'm thinking,
"This could be the end."
But I'm not sure yet.
Many times, I thought maybe we might have to close,
because really, it wasn't making any--
we don't make any money, really.
I'm just doing it for...
I don't even know what I'm doing it for!
DJX: And for me, I never could have done what I was doing
at the level I was doing it
without his contribution to my life,
my career as a DJ,
and everything that I was about back then.
He...
Yeah. I mean, I owe him so much.
♪
MASTERMIND: You know, I think one of the reasons
he's considered such a legend
and he's so revered in this city is because of how sweet he is,
how generous he is, and how, you know,
I don't think he's got a mean bone in his body.
NICK: Without Play De Record,
oh, my career probably would have went another path.
If you ask any DJ in Toronto that bought records
back in the '90s, it's like, if there was no Play De Record,
your DJ career might not have been where it is today.
♪
SAUKRATES: I'll call him more for help
than he'll call anybody for help.
Last winter, you know, my family,
we were trying to get things together.
I had to call him for some help. He's like...
[snaps finger] "Done!"
And we hadn't spoken for about ten years.
But Eugene never changed.
As long as I treat him with respect,
he'll treat me like family, like a nephew.
DENISE: The passion was clearly there at Play De Record.
Passionate about the music,
who wanted to deliver it to people to share it.
FRANKENSTEIN: The understanding that Toronto needed
to tell its story,
and Eugene and Play De Record being a part of that
was something that we all believed in.
JUG-E: I take my kids there.
They don't even know what the fuck a record is,
but I just take 'em there.
"You don't understand right now, son, but you need to stand here,
"like, right now."
♪
CLICK: The music, which is the soundscape to our lives,
would not be possible without a place to go buy those records
so people can hear them,
and that's a major community hub.
That's what this is all about.
Like, without Play De Record, you know,
would the culture be the same?
I don't know! Maybe not.
♪
AKI: I think it's...
It will still live on.
That passion that he had for a record store,
you know, I have never seen it anywhere else, right?
It's a family-owned business.
You know, there's not that many of that around.
It's not a corporation.
He doesn't have shares.
You know, he just does what he loves, you know?
So, I think that legacy will continue on forever.
♪
EUGENE: It's only when we started doing this documentary,
I-- "Oh, maybe we did have something to do with it."
I never saw it.
Like, you know, when you have to step back...
then you see the picture, right?
♪
♪ Turn it up, turn it up. ♪
♪ Lock down, see?
♪ Lock down.
♪ Yo, yo.
♪ Yo, dem outlaws was born to break laws and felonies ♪
♪ Deh got an empty gates in da town, deh run it steadily ♪
♪ To all my money makers cross town
dissemble funds and put the pieces back together ♪
♪ Tryin' to drunk one another
♪ Case thrown out, storm da courtroom ♪
♪ Uniforms and three-piece suits ♪
♪ From bail putting up houses and loot, he walkin' ♪
♪ I heard him talking to his partner Hawkins
about his way of livin' ♪
♪ Faces of death
♪ He's runnin' with this older kid
from around Mount Olive and Silverstone ♪
♪ Deh stack mad gats in da ceilin' at his baby mom's home ♪
♪ These narcs are watchin' us
♪ Undercovers on the rooftop
♪ Prepared and bullet proofed up
Jurassic blowin' cruisers up fatal ♪
♪ They got us trapped under this negative force ♪
♪ Some try to find a way out but no doubt some make it out ♪
♪ Some learnin' from their own mistakes ♪
♪ So take this negative and turn it into positive ♪
♪ Whether you what to listen, your prerogative. ♪
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [ENVY]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [JEALOUSY]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [LUST]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [HATE]
♪ Kick off da top lock and run up in dat ♪
♪ Get to the point
♪ Don't let him get the upper hand ♪
♪ He gamblin' with pare man
♪ Told everybody, drop their cards
and keep their hands up on the table ♪
♪ This kid thought he was quick, he drew first but shot last ♪
♪ Blood on my mask
♪ This other youth was tryin' to run for da door ♪
♪ And picked up one in his back and collapsed ♪
♪ Matter of fact my main concern was for somebody grab dis ♪
♪ I used my sleeve to wipe the money off the table
flood it all in one bag ♪
♪ Deh takin' rings to bracelets and found coke inside da bin ♪
♪ But now deh takin too long, deh inside and lavishin' ♪
♪ Come on, it's time we make a move ♪
♪ So let's bounce from this apartment ♪
♪ Fly down the staircase
♪ And now we tearin' down the place wisely ♪
♪ Don't want a bait-up situation therefore ♪
♪ So when we get to the west
we sharin' out mines, what's yours is yours ♪
♪ Beast boys come out at late night so don't speed ♪
♪ Ah yo, a cruiser cuts us off
to try ta make his way to the crime scene. ♪
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [ENVY]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [JEALOUSY]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [LUST]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [HATE]
♪ Now in closin' you done know he should never brag for real ♪
♪ Come on you know that
♪ Remember who can hear they must feel ♪
♪ But word up on the streets is that you robbin' mad peeps ♪
♪ And now it's getting bad to worse
because it's getting too far ♪
♪ From front page to stolen cars ♪
♪ Narcs, deh know who you are
♪ We gotta meet him then we tie him up and drive him real far ♪
♪ Then we separate his body, chop it up for the cause ♪
♪ Dem outlaws, breakin' in and out of gun stores ♪
♪ Only you can understand spottin' shells on the floor ♪
♪ Ay yo, it's far from a threat ♪
♪ Faces of death, there's nothin' left ♪
♪ Yo, it's far from a threat
♪ Faces of death, there's nothin' left. ♪
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [ENVY]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [JEALOUSY]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪
♪ [LUST]
♪ Take a look through my eyes and you'll see what I see ♪