Places and Spaces: Making Beats on the Road - ‘Gravamen’
For several years I was making beats while living out of my van. The circumstances that put me on the road were unexpected, and it wasn’t my first choice for a lifestyle, but the experiences I had were irreplaceable and the music that came out of this time came to define where I am now. Where am I now? Before I answer that, it might help to explore where I’ve been.
While listening for samples, I would write post cards. I remember Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes - “I Miss You” was on that day.
Missoula, MT:
I didn’t do a good job keeping track of dates and locations throughout my travels and memory is imperfect, sometimes for good reason, but the days in Missoula stand out for their relative peace and for the digging discoveries I made that led to the making of ‘Gravamen’; the second single from ‘Actus Reus’.
First stop was the laundromat. Having a bag full of smelly clothes in a van you call home every night is a bad look. I felt like flossing that day so I paid a little extra for ‘fluff and fold’ so I could go dig at a few spots in town. I cracked the windows to let the lingering miasma dissolve and set out to Rockin’ Rudy’s.
A classic record store with a stately gentleman-rocker behind the counter, analog gear stacked in every nook and cranny, and a ton of used records. I found two key records in this shop. One contained the drums and another contained the interview sample you hear on ‘Gravamen’, although at this point I’m not even sure if me and Guilty were working together yet.
After scooping my fresh clothes, it was time to indulge in my favorite road ritual of dragging all my gear into a coffee shop, listening to my haul, and writing postcards. Kulture Kava was my lair for the next 4-6 hours. When you’re living in your van, coffee shops are a great recharge station as it’s pretty common for people to hang out for long periods of time, so you don’t get hassled or hastened out the door, especially with freshly laundered garments.
On the road, I made a habit of grabbing kitschy postcards from every location I could and, on slow days where I could decompress, there was no better feeling than to write to people and share some portion of my inner-life with them in that moment, in that location, in that mood. I hope some of my post cards are still out there, and I plan to write many more in the future. It’s better than social media and texting.
Writing had the secondary benefit of allowing me to absorb the music rather than scrutinize it. Sometimes I find myself listening to music with too critical an ear or, even worse, a strict sample seeking ear. It’s hard to simply enjoy the music and sometimes you miss details even though you’re “looking” for them. I find my best samples when I’m letting records play rather than jumping the needle around searching for something. It takes longer, but its better for the soul-humors.
To make a long story short, I took time to meditate on my friendships, enjoy good music, drink coffee, and I just happened to stumble on some hard fucking drums and compelling interlude fodder. The drums all came from one record and it’s actually a really common break, I just chopped it a bit to get some swing out of it. The whole beat was made a few days after I left Missoula, in a cabin settled away in Lake of the Woods, Minnesota.
Sometime Later…
From Montana to France. The joint was heard and felt. I couldn’t believe it.
Fast forward some portion of time, and Guilty Simpson turns the song into an emotional, thoughtful, and raw diatribe against police brutality. The interlude record was an education piece done for teenagers in the midwest back in the 70’s, it was full of interviews with kids, cops, and judges talking about the law and what-not. The intro to ‘Gravamen’ and the closing sample of the entire ‘Actus Reus’ album came from this LP.
Guilty had provided perfect context for this random education record I found so long ago in a sleepy town in Montana. If you listen closely to ‘Gravamen’ you can hear that the interview sample in the beginning is happening in a bowling alley. Don’t ask me why they chose that venue for the interview, but it sounds like somebody was throwin’ rocks in the background, mark it dude. The interview was added after Guilty dropped his verse, of course.
Sometimes I grab a record with the hope that it will eventually be useful, most spoken word records fall into this category. It was a no-brainer to use this record, along with the samples I had compiled from analyzing 100s of hours of courtroom audio to complete ‘Actus Reus’. The song ‘Gravamen’ was easily one of my favorites when we first started putting the tracklist together, but I had no idea that it would take on a life of its own, it was humbling and bittersweet. A French dance crew called ‘The Fam’ put their stamp on the record by creating a visual for it, continuing the chain of creativity that started in a coffee shop tucked away in the Great Plains. We will cover more of what happened in part 2 of this post, some other time.
