First Placement is a Viewfinder series on producers and how they landed their first major placement, told as a first-person narrative, with the producer’s name revealed at the end.
I was in Go-go bands. Go-go was my hustle. That’s me playing congas with Chuck Brown at the Capitol Center back in ‘86.
Hip hop was starting to evolve by this time, and I wanted to figure out production. When Teddy Riley hit the scene, that’s what did it for me. Teddy, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, and Dr. Dre were the ones who inspired me to take the time and understand what production was by looking at hit records.
I looked up the top ten records on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts and broke down their song structures. Studying the number of bars in the intro, the number of bars on the verses. Then I started structuring my songs based on that.
I didn’t realize I had the formula to make hits. I did, but I didn’t. All of the songs and ideas that I was coming up with, I would structure them that way. When I started sending stuff out, they had the construction of hits.
Because I was trying to learn how to produce, I didn't charge anything wild to record rappers. The first three hours were $60. I wound up meeting Norman "Notch" Howell and Horace "Edley Shine" Payne. The name of their group is the Born Jamericans.
I produced their first single, "Boom Shak-a-Tack." That record started it all. That song played across New York when I signed my management deal with Puffy and Bad Boy Records.
When I first met Puff, I was with a group of friends who wanted to meet with him one day when he was over at B.E.T. It was quick. Right after that, we had a mutual friend who started sending him some stuff of mine. His situation at Uptown Records had just ended, but Mary J. Blige’s What's the 411? album was already out.
When I heard What's the 411? I was making songs, creating stuff for myself. That album proved what I had may fall right in line with what her next sound could be.
As I sought management, it was between Diddy or Hiriam Hicks. Hiriam Hicks could get me TLC, but Puff had Mary and The Notorious B.I.G. Biggie’s “Party and Bullshit” record was out around this time.
I had no idea of all the things that would happen, I didn’t know what could be, but Puffy having those two artists solidified me going with him and Bad Boy.
My contract for Mary’s My Life was originally a song and an interlude. “Be With You” was the record she picked. We met as she was at odds with all of the people who made What's the 411? They were coming in and sending invoices for $100,000 a track after 411 sold three million copies―crazy stuff like that.
Mary didn’t know who I was but after our first meeting and the “Be With You” record, she had an idea of what I could do and the kind of person I was. She went to Puff and said, “Would you two do my whole album?”
He comes back to me doing backflips. “She just said we can do her whole album.”
A whole lot of that My Life album was already done because, before I met Puff, I was already incorporating live instrumentation and those kinds of melodies over hip hop beats. A prime example of what I was doing as far as mixing hip hop and R&B is Usher’s “Think of You.”
I had all the beats, so I was sending them songs. It made Puffy’s job easy to go to Mary and say, we got this, and we got this. Honestly, what made that album what it is was just good trust. They trusted me. We had just met, but they trusted me. That trust became the glue that held it all together.