John Payne Interview (November 2009) | Interview By: Chad Kiser & Jonathan Hay

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Interview was done in November 2009

Questions Asked By: Chad Kiser

 

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Dubcnn Exclusive – John Payne of WIDEawake/Death Row
By: Chad Kiser & Jonathan Hay
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Dubcnn: We’ve got Dr. Dre’s The Chronics Re-Lit and Snoop Dog’s The Lost Sessions out, what’s the next few projects coming up for WIDEawake/Death Row Records?

What we just finished are the box sets, which are three discs and a DVD. Discs of a lot of the greatest hits from Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Dr. Dre, Lady of Rage; just re-mastered, no mixing or nothing like that. We re-mastered from the half-inch tape, so it’s a real fast, cool sound. On the other two discs we’ve got some Danny Boy, Jewell and OFTB. Pretty much, a lot of the people that contributed to a lot of the records, but didn’t get a chance to come out until now. It’s all unreleased stuff from the mid-90’s. There’s also a DVD with some videos.


Dubcnn: Speaking of the whole mixing from the half inch tape thing, that leads into my next inquiry. As you know, this interview is for DubCNN: The West Coast News Network and on our forums, people can start up little topics and leave comments and things of that nature. You’ve been taking a beating on our forums for the first couple of releases because of the mixing.

But you know what, it’s cool and I’ll explain. When we were putting out The Re-Lit project, my intent was to take it straight from the vault un-altered, the way the last person that worked on it left it. I don’t want to come in and remix something. Some of the mixes are not going to be perfect, but it’s still what that era was about. Again, if you read any of the other interviews that I did, I said, ‘I take full responsibility’. But the cut was taken straight from the vault un-mixed, only mastered.

You know there are a lot of people who don’t know what goes into this kind of process and there are some people that didn’t even listen, they were just following a trend. Personally, you know that is their opinion, but I did state we were coming straight from the vault. As things go on, there is probably going to be some mixing involved with some of the original people, but right now, we haven’t even had it a year and there is a time for certain things and we don’t want to step on any toes, and put stipulations where you can’t do certain things. We can put it out in it’s original form, so before we jump out and step on toes and start doing stuff that is going to cause big problems, the people can continue writing forums hating me, because I really don’t care. I was just trying to do the right thing by getting it out and not hurt the legacy. But when the time comes, we will address the people that were involved in the making; there are people that have said they had worked on certain things that may have not, but then again we will go through the right process to make sure the right people come in when it is time. Many people do not understand that for the amount of money that was spent, we still have to walk cautiously, but we do have to get things out so that we do start to return some money back that we spent on this. And everyone is entitled to their opinion and they can think what they want, but I do not really understand how you can hurt something if you didn’t touch it. You know, there are a lot of people, nobody was in there, nobody saw this, and there are some people who have opinions that are just basically out of hate for various reasons. Again they were not in the room, they didn’t go through lots of tapes to find what we could and we were legally able to use, that in itself limited the parameters’ to what we could do.


Dubcnn: When you say “legally able to use”, does that reference to why we aren’t able to hear a Dr. Dre song, vocally.

Just so you know, I can only speak so much. There were stipulations in his agreement when he left as to what could be done and what couldn’t be done. As we go on, we are going to try and address some of these things. There are some legal things going on back and forth right now, but again we did have the right to put out The Chronic and that’s why all we did was re-master, so it actually does sound better, I don’t care what they say. And then we added CPO and some other people that people forgot about. We could use some of his things, like his production, but we just couldn’t use his voice. Now, that could possibly change or it may never change, but we are going to address it to see if its possible. You see, a lot of times people are commenting and they are coming from the perspective of somebody that wants something badly, but they don’t know what we have to do to get it. Just because we bought the company, some of the material may or may not belong to us, or there may be restrictions. They can want it all they want, but we can’t give it to them and then piss off Dr. Dre and get the shit sued out of us. They have to understand that, too. It would have been my intent if I could have given them all of Dre’s songs; there were some songs there and they were better, including a lot of the titles people have heard of, too, and listening to them it was painful for the fact that I couldn’t put them on the record.


Dubcnn: What kind of returns are you seeing on The Chronic Re-Lit? Is it selling about what you thought it would sell?

Actually, coming out the gate it’s doing well. We are stepping up promotion on The Chronic Re-Lit. You know here’s the thing about The Chronic: it has never stopped selling, ever. When we put it out, it resumed where it was; the sales probably picked up about 7%, but again we have to do some promoting. At the same time, we still had to, at first, tread lightly to see what things we could do. We have clarity on things and we are going to really start to step things up tremendously. But again, I just wanted to make sure that we got things out of the way because the stuff that has been put out over the last 18 years have been copies of copies and things like that. My main thing was if we were just putting the same record back into the store, I wanted to improve the quality, the sonic quality of it. So, that’s why I did go to the vault and took the actual half-inch master that Dre took to “Big Bass” Bryant to master. I didn’t get a copy of CD’s or search the internet for MP3’s; I took the actual box that they used.


Dubcnn: That leads to my next question: What’s the process you’re using in re-mastering these songs?

The fact that the tape is over seventeen years old, I had to be very careful, I had to bake it so that we could get it back up and it wouldn’t disintegrate or anything like that. We now have that stored where it can never go bad; it is now digitized so there is no generation loss and we mastered from analog. It is the actual analog, half-inch sound which is much fatter than your digital sound. So if we would have copied digital it wouldn’t have been as full, but when you listen to it and you listen to the Snoop thing it’s full.

The facility where this material is stored at is actually a good place. I would say that 90% of the material is in perfect condition, but when you look at reels, at a certain point they are going to get a little dry. Then that takes a process where you bake the tape, as I mentioned before, but if they were disintegrating or ripping up then we would have a problem. What we have are normal procedures, and I have to say of the many reels that I have gone through, even just checking our catalog, less than one out of every twenty needed to be baked; so they had been stored correctly and are good quality, but also at the same time, when you are going through all this stuff, even though there’s a lot of hits, everything is not a hit either. There’s a lot of really good stuff, there’s some incomplete stuff, but we have enough complete good stuff that we can put out good records for awhile.



Dubcnn: So what’s the plan going forward, after the release of the box-set, for the Death Row catalog?

The plan is to get through the legal stuff, regain the trust of the audience and the artists, and to start doing more work with them. I, actually, as a matter of fact this week, not sure if you know Chris Taylor, who was with the group Po’, Broke and Lonely, who did a lot of production on The Chronic, he and I have been talking. As soon as we progress a little bit more, I will definitely be leaning on him for his ear as well. It’s not that I don’t trust mine, but I want to use a lot of the original ears; mine was an original ear, too, but the people that were there add the flavor and I am not going to make the record for me. I’m going to try and put the same ingredients back in so that we can give the people what they are used to and maintain that integrity of the legacy.


Dubcnn: I assume that some of the music wasn’t correctly cataloged because I noticed on the Lost Sessions, there are a few songs that have “unknown” producer credits.

Yes, there was a lot of stuff that was not cataloged, and there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t even titled correctly, but in that case I knew the voice and I could place the voice. But you can’t say who produced it because there could have been a multitude of people producing it and you can’t always say who wrote certain things, as opposed to putting someone’s name on there and pissing them off. We know once they see it and they hear it, they are going to call anyway because they want to get their money. And once we get all the parties together it’s not going to be a case that a certain person did something on the song; they are all going to have to agree that they did.


Dubcnn: With the song titles not having the producer names, or the titles being mis-labeled, the public perception is that maybe the old regime was a little bit sloppy, but is that pretty much typical or was there disorganization with the old Death Row staff?

I don’t want to say it’s a case of being sloppy. I think when Death Row started out a lot of the people were new to the business and new to the way things worked, so they didn’t necessarily do things the way I did coming in, or with the way you catalog things. You had a lot of people working on things, people working on tapes, so our paperwork got lost in the shuffle. You’re still looking at seventeen years of this where something is faded or that paper is no longer there, so I wouldn’t want to say something like they were sloppy or they didn’t know what they were doing; let’s just say because I wasn’t there to actual see that they did something wrong, let’s just say look, this is what we bought and what the time period has produced. Maybe stuff was lost, maybe stuff wasn’t done, but the bottom line is we still got the song. We might not know who wrote it or whatever, but believe me somebody does and they are going to stand up. So, sloppy or not, we might not be able to tell you who the producer was, but you still like the song. To hold it back and not give it to you because we don’t have the persons name on it, in fact in some cases some of the fans who seem to know it all can tell us who wrote it.


Dubcnn: Are you able to use any of the material you have for something like a Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, or any of the video games?

Actually, earlier in the year we put stuff in Madden 2010; the Hip-Hop version of Guitar Hero there is some stuff we put in. We started licensing a lot of stuff to games over the year, so it will be coming out starting August that just past. It’s actually for our advantage because this is stuff that was never done, so there is some Dre stuff and 2Pac stuff going into games, as well as we have created some custom ringtones and stuff like that.


Dubcnn: Let me ask you this, John. There has been a lot of talk surrounding your past relationships with the original Death Row/Solar Records imprint. When, exactly, did you come into the Death Row?

Regardless of what people have said, I came into when it was Future Shock, when the label belonged to Dr. Dre and D.O.C; Suge was the manager and the only artist on the label at the time was Jewell, alright? That’s when I walked in the door! A month later, we/they signed Snoop, Warren G was hanging out, we had Rage, which I think was about a month or so later. We had another group called Image and then Po’, Broke & Lonely were around, they weren’t on our label, but they were there all the time. Then, I think Kurupt and his manager probably came in a few months after Rage, and then we did the Deep Cover soundtrack. Shortly after that is when other people started to come around. You know, there’s multiple sides to every story, but quite honestly, mine is verifiable. I was the Chief Engineer for Solar Records; my name is on a lot of records, a lot of people know me. The ego doesn’t matter, I know what I did, and I have the money in the bank to prove it and I am happy because of it. People are entitled to their opinions, they can say what they want, that’s why you don’t necessarily get a response out of me. Here’s the other thing, too, that’s very important to me: even if it were true that none of this stuff existed, the bottom line is as long as we do the right thing by the catalog it doesn’t matter if you were there or not, fortunately I was.

When the Death Row movie came out nobody said anything; Suge has never said I wasn’t there, there’s been certain people that said I wasn’t there, but the quote didn’t come directly out of that persons mouth. Again, it’s really not that important to me whether people believe I was there or not, bottom line is I am here now and I am going to continue to try and do the right thing. There are a lot of people that want my job, but you know what? They should have got there first, I guess. They can hate, I really don’t care. I’m 51 years-old, I have been in this business along time, my name has been good up until these last few months, and I can tell you this: the records that we put out I’m happy with it, it sounds good to me and for the most part the reviews have been good. I am still going to put out records until the company tells me I can’t. I do commit to this; I do give my word that I am always going to make sure that we get the best we can and the best possible sound.


Dubcnn: When Future Shock was first coming to fruition, with Dr. Dre and D.O.C to do this Death Row thing, what were your thoughts at that time as far as Dre coming from NWA and the chaos surrounding that moment.

You know, being in this business as long as I have, I am really not a fan, I am usually a friend, and Dre and the D.O.C are extremely talented and we became good friends so I would not preconceive conceptions on anybody; we were having a good time and with the stuff that we were doing we were learning from each other. I came out of R&B, they came out of Rap, so there are some things that I learned from them and there are some things that they learned from me because one thing is I give credit when its due. I have been a really good engineer all my life, but Dre, and actually Glove too, are the only two people that I have ever seen that can out edit me with a razor. So, I learned a lot being around them, so preconceptions no, it was just cool. Everything flowed when we worked on the Deep Cover soundtrack. There were no egos, probably because people were pretty much broke at the time. Even when Michael Harris stepped in and started taking care of things for us in a really good way, the egos didn’t come out because his philosophy was he wasn’t trying to be out front either, so everything stayed at a real good place and we were able create correctly and people had a much better level of comfort


Dubcnn: Why was there a departure from you from the Death Row continuing on?

People that know me know that at a certain point in most ventures, one morning I’ll just wake up and go, ‘I’ve had it, that’s it’, and that’s really what happened; there was no animosity. I was talking to Jewell on a Monday or Tuesday and she said, ‘you know, I came into the office one day, your car was in the driveway, your pagers were on your desk and they said you left’. And that was pretty much what it was. I just walked in turned in my two pagers, my two cell phones, which were analog at that time and cost a lot of money monthly, but running Death Row you needed it, I was just done. They had the formula, it wasn’t like I didn’t feel like I was needed, it was just I felt like it was time to move on and I have done that consistently throughout my life. I don’t have to stay there to see what happens, I had a good idea what would happen and there are some things I wish didn’t happen, but it wasn’t to me personally. It was just time to move on, but the foundation we laid was good and I was real happy with the friends that I made.


Dubcnn: I know that you guys have a lot of material to sift through, but can you give us any information on some of the lost projects from like Lady of Rage, Sam Sneed and like CPO or any of those other ones?

On CPO, I personally put him on the Re-Lit because he is a friend of mine and I knew what he could do and, also, there was a lot of stuff he was working on at the time; there’s probably in the case of CPO as an album I would say if not an entire album, almost, but I’m thinking like maybe between nine and eleven tracks. I don’t want to upset the fans because I didn’t put the best songs on there. As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you why they are on there before I go into it. The songs that I put on there like “Poor Young Dave” that Snoop did, I put “Foo Nay Mic” on there because it’s almost the same story. One is the character that Snoop talks about, the character CPO talks about is the other guy, but it’s the same story so to speak told from different perspectives. That’s why I put it on there, and then the other song had Kurupt on it with CPO and I knew that would be cool, but the rest is straight, banging CPO.

Now, on Sam Sneed, there is an album that is currently missing, but we think we know where it is and that’s something that is up for negotiation. There is lots Lady of Rage material in there that we have to sift through. There is lots of material on a lot of people, we just have to sift through it and sort out it. When putting together a lot of the records, you find a lot of the titles, but some are incomplete and some are not that good, so it’s a whole lot of process. But we do have a lot of material on a lot of people, and on the box-set we have coming out you are going to get a good sampling of some of the people we have.


Dubcnn: Several months ago, maybe even a year ago before you guys even bought the catalog, there was a Death Row asset PDF floating around that listed some of the things in the catalog. It had some Dr. Dre “Helter Skelter” tracks, e.g. Natural Born Killaz, Can’t See Me, Endonesia and then apparently, an ADAT that was titled Dre/Sam/Cube. Do you know anything about that?

Just so you know this, I was actually working with the trustees during the bankruptcy verifying a lot of this stuff. Some of the titles that you mention are true. There were some ADAT’s, but the fact that at the time, while we were digging this up we couldn’t find a machine, so I don’t want to say that was necessarily what was on there. A lot of the titles you mentioned are ringing a loud bell in my head right now. And that PDF file, which was floating around didn’t really come from us, I’m saying with trustees, but a lot of the stuff was close to accurate. What’s happened is a lot of people that were doing the bids, they may have let that little file get out, so I would say that a good percentage of that was valid, but we still ended up finding more material that the list grew and ended up with good stuff that wouldn’t have been on the list. There may have been some titles that they had taken off because they did not exist.


Dubcnn: In your opinion, do you think we will see the unreleased Dr. Dre produced vocal songs coming from the WIDEawake/Death Row in the future?

All I can say in this situation is that I really hope so and I would love to, but I can’t speak for Dre and his people. Right now the contract itself says no and that’s the only answer I have right now. Who knows, but we are trying, we are asking, but there are other things that are involved right now that have to be addressed as well. But believe me if, or as soon as they say yes, it’s coming out. There is some good stuff. If we ever get the chance to put them out, it’s definitely banging and you’re going to feel it and your going to like it


Dubcnn: It seems a somewhat frustrating that the lack of coverage that both of these albums have received thus far. Why hasn’t The Chronic or the Snoop Lost Sessions received the attention that it deserves, because it is just as relevant and just as historical as the popular catalog/unreleased albums of say an AC/DC or Aerosmith, yet the coverage isn’t there.

There are two reasons for it I think. One, being totally honest, we may be partially to blame. We need to step up our coverage, which we are going to do, but another thing is the fact that before it came out there was a lot of people that were hating it saying it was going to be screwed up anyway, so you have a bump of negative press. To use Aerosmith as an example, it’s not Aerosmith, it’s Death Row, so there’s that negativity that comes with it; the press is not necessarily going to jump to it because for some reason they thought it was evil, but in essence what we are trying to do is, since there are no court cases, no murders, and no fights, people get to hear the music and really get a chance to listen to it and see what its really about. It’s not dead, its not over, we can still step it up and we are doing interviews like this and a lot of stuff that we have been talking about. We are getting bigger and better attention, people are more into following the negatives and rolling with that, rather than giving it a chance. It’s about the music and doing it right. When you look at The Chronic, at that time there were no court cases, no murders, there wasn’t anything going on but a good record. And Dre, for the most part, has not been in any trouble. When you are walking into a frequently negative situation as it is anyway, we just have to stand our ground; the hating is going to stand out, there’s always going to be somebody who just keep trying. This is why I am here, this is why I am on the phone right now, we have to keep trying one way or another. We are not going to please everybody, but in my mind and my heart I am doing the right thing.


Dubcnn: John, thank you for taking the time out to talk with us and share with us some incredible insight.

Thank you!