This is a downbeat on ninety seven to one The Freak. So if you
well, let me do this first. Almo Draft House Cinema brings us this
segment five locations in the Metroplex ninety seven one The Freak dot Com your tickets
for Demolition Man next Tuesday at the Albumo Draft House Cinema in Irving. Something
we've done in the past, like a freaky Friday thing where we kind of
switched things around. We did a master's mix up. Yeah, I'd like
to bring it back. I don't know if we'll do it or not.
I just checked no no kid turns out No. But where we mixed it
up and I did it for me A word was me Skin and Danny both
times, and a segment that we did both of those times was anatomy of
a song and they were really I kind of almost like an hour long segment,
kind of a big, powerful thing and a lot of listeners like liked
it, yeah a lot both times and it was both we're you know,
projects from the Bastards of Soul, the band that Danny was in, and
Skin was a producer of their second and third record and helped get them going
and released on his record label. So joining us now live in studio is
Jeff skin Wade, Wow front, Jeff a star. I did ask earlier
when he teased we're gonna have a guest if it was gonna be a star.
But it's Jeff skin Wade. Yeah, you're joining us now? Is
it Jimmy the Cricket or Jimminy Cricket? Yes, Jimmy the Cricket Christopher okay,
because he was always wishing upon a star like you were. And then
I walked in and you were disappointed. You've had some health scares and some
stuff going on recent but the closest you've come to dying in the last four
years is your final call to Ron Gilligan yesterday. There's that moment where you're
like, so, at first I thought it was Ron Gilligan's wife, and
then when I realized it was Ron Gilligan's sweet mom, I was like,
we're probably crossing a boundary we should not cross. But we're here and it's
fun, so let's see how far we can. Let's keep going. You're
probably not listening, but I got a text from Ron gill again. It
was right about two o'clock. Did you hear this I did. Hey,
Mike, do me a favorite and tell the guys at the radio station that's
enough for today. What about my response to you yesterday? Oh yeah,
what was it? It was no problem. We'll pick it up first thing
in the morning, wait till tomorrow. Yeah, and I think you responded
with twelve oh one looks good. Yeah, twelve oh one is clear.
Yeah, I've ripped you guys in my text are on Gilliga. I'm like,
they're stupid. Over kills a bit. Really sorry. We enjoyed having
you this part. And he was fine, He said, no problem,
but my mom was on the radio. Yeah, so, which is always
a sick cut down. Your mom's on the radio hours after he'd said I'm
off the grid anymore? Man that run. He wasn't a star of the
station yesterday. Huge and I know you guys all saw he did dig up
and find the actual pit past, which I didn't know had my name written
on it. Crazy more valuable. In nineteen ninety three, we found out
was the year ninety ninety three, Dale Jarrett won and Dale Earnhardt didn't even
crash. He got beat by two one hundreds of a second. So I
had some of the story wrong. Let me ask you this real quick.
Sorry, I don't think he's listening, and I don't I've never you idiots
said I wanted the thing back, which is I didn't want at all.
But now that has my name on it and it's just been sitting in a
drawer for twenty five years. Don't you think the right thing is for him
to send that thing back to me? I thought? Emotionally drunk, Ben
suggested that he would pay an excessive amount of money to get that back in
your hands. I was like, Ben, I don't know, you're talking
to an auctioneer. He's gonna take us to thee. He's gonna win this.
Ben's bidding against himself again. It's so hypnotic. Then what's been nice?
Ben has a little paddle in both hands and he's on a pristine landline,
just sounding great on the air. So we saw that, well,
we have a chance to our listeners have a chance to hang out with this
this weekend. Skin. Can you what do you guy has given away this
weekend on your show? For this weekend? Oh yeah, so we have
been giving away tickets to the Friday night concert at the Kessler Theater. If
you don't win tickets, go to Duck Kessler dot org. You've probably heard
the spots running on the station. But there's a project that Danny and I
worked on. It's been over a year now and we're finally letting the world
hear it called Silver Skylarks, and we had a bunch of different guests on
the record, and one of the guests on the record is a legendary hip
hop figure, Large Professor. He's the guy that introduced NAS to the world.
He worked with a tribe call Quest, you know, did tons of
remixes for huge R and B artists in the nineties, and he is coming
to town to help us celebrate the release of our first single. He's going
to perform Friday night at the Kessler, and then he's doing a DJ set
Saturday night at Lady Love with Adrian Quesada of the Black Pumas who was also
on the record and Uh and then Friday night on the bill opening for Large
Professor. The house ban is brand New Funk, which we had at our
free anniversary party. They're incredible. And then also there's a DFW hip hop
group from mine and Ben's past called Schabasthi. They have not performed in well
over a decade. Uh. My record label reissued their record for Record Store
Day this year, did a small run and sold out of it. I
have a copy fing phenomenon. It's you're a fan of old school, like
nineties, eighties nineties hip hop. Yeah, wow, Yeah, dude,
it's great, it's trippy. It's kind of tribe in a way a little
bit. Would you say absolutely, yeah, it's so good that it's so
pro One of the guys in the band, Ty Macklin, went to booker
t Washington with Erica, and he did some work on Erica's first I say
Erica Erica Badhu's first record, Bad is probably more like late nineties, right,
yeah, late late nineties. Yeah, that record was I think released
in two thousand and one. And uh. And so anyways, they haven't
performed in over a decade, and they were never going to perform again because
one of the members of Shabbaz three passed away last year while we were getting
ready to reissue the record, and they're like, will never perform again,
And I was like, but would you do it? If you're celebrating the
release of Silver Skylarks and we're doing this because of the label and they were
like, that's compelling. We're in and we're actually bringing in a guy they
used to work with from Houston that doesn't live here anymore. And so Friday
night's going to be a really special night that ties everything all together. And
the main reason we're doing it is because on Friday, we're releasing the first
single off of Danny and Mine's project, and it's called Power Moves. Okay,
So people that are planning on or thinking about coming out Friday, like
even my kid, my oldest no No, texted me last night and was
like, Hey, should I come in town for this? And I go,
Man, you can come in town whenever you want, Yeah, and
I go. Just to be clear, I'm not performing now. This is
it's not a band that is playing live as of now. Maybe it would
in the future, I don't know, but that there's no immediate plans for
this to be an actual live performing product. This is an album that you
and I produced and recorded together over the last year year and a half and
we're releasing the first single of it and we're pressing it to actual vinyl Little
forty five and it'll be available. The first cut from this record, which
we'll have a remix on the other side. We'll get to that in a
moment. But it's kind of explain to people what this is, what their
expectations should be, how this came together, Just give a little bit of
backstory on what all this means and how it kind of came to be.
Yeah, so there's two parts that work concurrently here. There's the project Danny
and I did, the Silver Skylarks, and then there's the record label that
we're releasing it on, which is Mine and Luke's and Works label. And
we actually changed what we were doing after Bastards of Soul because you know,
there's two really great articles you can go out there and read. Zach Crane
from d Magazine wrote one yesterday and Samanth Over at Dallas Observer wrote one,
and they both did a great job and articulating what this project exceptional music journalism.
It's very very well done and very thoughtful and mindful. Yeah, and
so what happened was with Bastard's Soul, you know, they released their first
record and then the pandemic hit and then we decided, well, we're not
going to tour because we're going to send these boys out on the road,
we can't tour. So we're like, well, because the music we're doing
is more vintage or timeless, we can do a backlog of material. So
we started this plan of working on two records. And in that band there's
several different songwriters. Chris Holt's a great songwriter. He's a way different songwriter
than Danny, who's an excellent songwriter, who's a different songwriter than Stockslager.
And so as they were doing all these demos and working independently of one other
because of the pandemic, the stuff Danny was sending me was super funky and
kind of was going to be a departure from the previous Bastards of Soul records,
and so in my mind, I was like, all right, the
third Bastards of Soul record might lean more in this direction of this great stuff
Danny's doing. And then, before we got a chance to really get to
some of that stuff, we've talked about this on the station, the lead
singer, Chadwick died unexpectedly and tragically right after his son, his first son,
was born. It was really just a horrible time for all of us.
And so when that happened, we didn't do anything musically for like another
seven or eight months, and we went in there and finished up some lingering
songs. That third Bastards of Soul record was not supposed to sound like that.
That ended up being a compilation record because we had to finish it after
Chadwick died. But there was still all these demos that Danny had been working
on that I Efin loved and wanted to do something with, and so I
was sending him some feedback like, hey, what do you think about this?
And what do you think about this? And he was very receptive to
it. And so a year after Chadwick passed, we went into the studio,
just me and Danny and a drummer named Amber Amber Baker, she goes
by Lunar Ray and she's in town this week and is going to be at
the event, and just started laying down the rhythm tracks. And then Jordan
ash Grant, who works with Abraham Alexander and had done so with Bastards of
Soul, he started laying down keyboard parts and we started fleshing out Danny's demos
and it was sounding way different than Bastards of Soul and very funky, and
it reminded me of the records I used to go shop for and dig for
records from the seventies when I was looking for stuff as a hip hop producer
to sample, Like, we wanted to make a record that simultaneously sounded new
and old, if that makes sense, And that's just what I was hearing
with Danny's demos. And I can't thank Danny enough for being like, dude,
when someone writes a song, they want to control their song. Like
that's even like in Bastards of Soul there's three guys writing songs and everyone's you
know, kind of territorial. But this is what I heard, and Danny
was like, dude, go with it. And I think the record that
we came up with is a really nice representation of where Danny's head was with
the music he was writing. And then whatever it is the hell that I
do kind of coming together. We have a lot of incredible guests. We
have Adrian kse Ouda, the Black Pumas, We have large Professor who's going
to be in town. There's one rap verse on the record. It's not
even a rap song. In the middle of the song, suddenly a rap
verse drops out of nowhere and it's truly like one of the most influential people
in my life. Large Professor is an extraordinary producer, has worked with so
many legendary guys. And the irony too is this first single we released,
Friday, Power Moves. We did a remix with another legendary rapper, Cool
g Rap, who Large Professor used to produce tracks for back in the early
nineties. So it all comes full circle. It's hip hop, it's funk,
it's West African funk, it's R and B. It's all those things
mixed together in a jambalaya. You can read the like Skin mentioned, there's
a couple of articles that you just dropped yesterday on D Magazine and the Dallas
Observer and one in D Magazine. It pretty much is its focuses on an
interview that Zach Crane did with Skin, and it's very long form and it's
great and he gives you wonderful insight into Skin's mindset on this. The Observer
article, I think has some quotes from Jeff and myself which kind of gives
maybe a little bit more palatable understanding of it. What you talked about is
is pretty nerdy. It's it's very hip hop centric, and you're dropping names
and references that if you're not from that world or at least adjacent to that
world, that might be might not understand, much like myself when I got
into this project, when Jeff and I started working together on this project,
because like he said, and that's what I want to make sure doesn't happen.
And that's for Jeff to undervalue his influence, his ideas, and his
vision for what this project ended up being. Because what I had was a
collection of probably about twenty three songs that I'd written basically from the when the
when the lockdown happened, through my time away from not working at all,
when I when I left the ticket and turning my resignation there and just kind
of sitting around the house doing nothing for a good while until this opportunity came
up. I had a lot of time, and I was spending it in
a home recording studio, just kind of churning out these ideas, some of
them completely realized, fleshed out with horn arrangements, with string arrangements, with
guitar parts in mind, grooves, drum beats, keys, all of that
stuff that I was doing myself. Some of it were just bits and pieces,
and I would always Jeff was kind of my I don't know, if
not my muse, but kind of my my springboard or or sound sounding board.
Yeah yeah, thank you sounding board to like, dude, is this
any good? You know? And and the stuff that I knew that he
liked it would be immediate. It's like, dude, this is dope.
So I'd kind of like doggier those things, like okay, all right,
put that one aside, and we ended up narrowing it down and when we
had this kind of a collective idea, why don't we do something with this
stuff with some people that we choose that are, you know, kind of
independent of what we've been doing before. And getting into the studio with him
from it took me about one or two sessions because, like he said,
you get a little proprietary about what your material and I'm like, these are
He's got some ideas that I never even thought of. And once I heard
the results of just a couple of those ideas, I was like, Okay,
I'm done. I am no longer the major producer of these songs.
This is a collective, and probably more than a collective, its skin running
holding the reins on driving this bus. And it's not just I mean,
it's ideas. It's more than it's more than just what if we did this.
It's like specific things. I want to bring in a French horn,
I want to bring in a clarinet and a flute, and I want those
instruments playing together because I know what that's going to sound like. The Son
of a Bitch is right every time. We never disagreed on one choice that
was made for this record, and more often than not, if I had
an idea, he was like, it was either I was thinking the exact
same thing, or I love that, let's try it, which is very
different from working in a band, very different because there's a lot of egos
in a band. Even if you think the idea is good and you're in
a band, you're still gonna say, but what if I did this?
Because you want to put your stamp on it too. Otherwise you're just backing
up a solo artist. And I get that dynamic. But I really really
enjoyed this, and dude as good as Skin is on the air as a
talk show host and as great as he is at court side reporting and interviewing
dudes after MAVs games. He's a better music producer than both of those things.
And I'm not kidding, because I've worked with him and seen those things
as close as any human being can. I would say he is at his
best and excels the most as a music producer. And I don't say that
lightly, and I don't say that just because he's in the room. I
say it because it is my truth. I absolutely believe that he's incredible.
This is incredibly uncomfortable. I'll never live up to that reaction, but but
I do. I do believe this. If the material is already there,
producing it is easy. And the material was already there. One of the
things it's cool. One of the things it's super cool about, Like even
the first single when Danny sent it to me, it was just a bassline
and a drum loop and this one little guitar part, and what I heard
out of it that I don't think because we have different backgrounds, I immediately
go, dude, this is a breakdance track. Oh, this is this
is this is the this is the foundation for the kind of record that in
the seventies dudes would break dance on cardboard in the streets too. And so
let's take your idea and make it a breakdance track, and it ended up
not only being the first single, but it now has a remix with f
and Cool g rap on it, one of my favorite rappers, Let's do
it. Yeah. Yeah, So this is the debut of the album cut,
the album edit of of a song called power Moves. Yep, Jeff
and I produced this music together and it's coming out on a record called the
Number One Set and Sound, which will drop in early May, I believe.
Yeah. And let's just say on this is aduring case out of the
Black Pumas Jordan ash Grant who works with Abraham Alexander. The singing duo is
us that works with Sir Woman and Abraham Alexander, and it's it's a hell
of a lot of fun. It's go get your cardboard out and break dance
during this Comama called that's as taking a mus taking not Now, we should
probably tell people that a power move is a specific move in break dancing.
That's a real aggressive move. That's just that's like a finishing move and wrestling,
yeah and so, and it's also power move is when someone puts their
flag down like the Mavericks did in twenty eleven. So yeah, that's kind
of what that's about. That we want that to speak to people that want
to hit the dance floor. Dude, that's how funky as hell. That's
badass is cool. I thought was like Jurassic Five when started, I felt
that, but then it's just kind of like a driving beat, and then
the scene felt like I don't know, like you said, African beats or
something, I don't know, it's here. It's yeah, it's polyrhythmic.
Yeah, yeah, and uh and then along those same lines, like that's
the kind of thing that hip hoppers would sample in the eighties and one of
the guys who used to murder fast beats like that is cool g rap,
and so to have cool g rap on the flip side. Uh, you
got to hear the remix too, because you guys, are you guys gonna
play the remix later today on your show? Yeah, and we're giving away
tickets. Yeah, we want everybody to go to both Friday and Saturday night,
especially Friday at the Kessler. Go to the Kessler dot org to get
tickets. But we are giving away tickets on the Bend and Skin show.
So uh, listening some point today and we'll give away tickets to that.
And what's going on Saturday night. Saturday Night at Lady Love is Adrian Quesada,
Grammy winning, Grammy nominated producer and guitarist for The Black Pumas is DJing
with large producer at Lady Love. You've been to Lady Love, I mean
Lady Love on any night is If you haven't been, just go because it's
just the vibe is amazing and it's just as cool as it can be in
Dallas, and it's in Bishop Art's ray Bomb. I'm I'm be at both
nights. I'll be at Yes and we are gonna get wasted. And that's
what we want to invite. We want to invite everybody to do because it's
gonna be a fun night. There's gonna be killer music all night long,
and we're gonna be drinking and hanging with you. Like Danny said, we're
not a touring band, but we want everybody to know about the record,
and so we wanted to throw parties to celebrate the release of it. And
of course we always want to kick it with freaks and gleans. Hell yeah,
I said I could see that score do an episode of The Bear.
Oh hell, and I'm like, right when I read that, I kind
of pictured like a Chicago I don't know whatever. Keep in mind that sick
ass drumming that's done by like a twenty eight year old lady. Really she's
incredible. Yeah. Yeah, And by the way, Amber was you know,
she's moved to La but she was a big listener of the Freak.
That's how we got looped in in the first place. I knew people that
knew her, and she's like, oh, I listened to They'll show.
We're like, well, you're a badass drummer. Meet Danny. Let's go.
That's easy. Fifty year old wife. Man, he wrote some songs
that's easy to like on one listen and the complexity of it, like I
don't even hear it all. But man, just dance baby, Just dance
baby. We will dance Friday night at Kessler and please join us. We
got Cash and Mary coming. I'll be There's gonna be there forget little crew.
But yeah, man, anyone wants to just have a good ass time
do it with with these boys at the Kessler on Friday. Come drink with
us. You know. One dere Lively on the Benskin shoes as well,
and more, and