Mannie Fresh (Madrid, 2011)

Noz

Sitting with me on the couch right now, I’m very proud to present one of the greatest hip-hop producers of all time, I think.

Mannie Fresh

Wow. (laughs)

Noz

A New Orleans legend, an outstanding DJ, as some of people witnessed last night. Give it up for Mr. Mannie Fresh. (applause)

Mannie Fresh

Yo.

Noz

So, just getting into it, obviously New Orleans is one of the great musical cities. Can you tell us a bit about growing up there, even before hip-hop hit?

Mannie Fresh

I guess New Orleans is crazy because you can find a musician on every corner, every spot. If you need horns, you need guitar, you need anything. And the unique thing about New Orleans is 90% of the musicians don’t read music, they just got their own little thing. They got their own little twist on what makes music great. If you fit in that melting pot, that gumbo, you’re one of those ingredients, then you can’t be nothing but great. It’s an all-around good time. Besides the crime, New Orleans is a great city to grow up in, that’s all I can say. Music is everywhere. The culture’s nuts.

Noz

At what point did you find yourself drawn into the music world?

Mannie Fresh

Man, my Christmas gifts used to be instruments. Never got it. My friend got a bike – why did I get a turntable? (laughs) Or somebody got an Atari game, I got a trumpet. This stuff started to just stack up. (laughs) My dad seen something in me. Around about when I was 12 is when I started to take an interest in it. I thought I’m just gonna go through my pile of what I thought was junk at the time – my keyboards, my little drum machines, the horns and all that – and start fiddling around with it, see what becomes of it.

Noz

Now, your father was a DJ too, right?

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, my dad was a street DJ.

Noz

Can you tell us a little bit about what his parties were like?

Mannie Fresh

Phew! My dad used to let me help him move equipment when I got to about 13 and I’d go to some of these hole-in-the-wall spots where he DJed at. It’s crazy to say it, but I’m gonna say it – these women used to go crazy when my dad played. I was like, “You know what? I wanna do this. This is what I wanna do. Now I see why my mom is always fussing.” (laughs)

But just the energy and the crazy things. Even then they had battle of the DJs and I remember my dad winning trophies from battling, just going to spots. My real introduction to music was when “Planet Rock” came out. My dad had the song and we were sitting around and he played it – I remember this just like yesterday – I said, “Oh shit!” And he said, “What did you say?” I thought, “This is hip-hop right here.” My dad grew up on breakbeats and Marvin Gaye, more soul music, but when “Planet Rock” came along it was, “This is where I fit in, right here.”

Noz

“Planet Rock” is a good record to start with because the South was immediately drawn to the 808 sound. What do you think was the reasoning behind that?

Mannie Fresh

I just think the South is more into what we define as energy. We like faster BPMs and energy. And just the boom of the 808 is incredible. There were songs before that that we took a liking to, like Marvin Gaye – some of his songs had 808 beats to them. Nobody knew what the 808 was, we just liked that sound. So when “Planet Rock” came along, it was just great.

I remember the first songs I had two copies of – it was Chic’s “Good Times.” My dad gave me two of them and I remember scarring those records up, like they’d never be repaired again. (laughs) That was the songs I started out with. I wasn’t really in love with them, I was just, “This song’s got a good breakbeat, good bassline.” When “Planet Rock” came along it made me want to discover everything you could do as a DJ.

Noz

When did you discover that it was an 808 that was propelling those records?

Mannie Fresh

Everybody found that if you heard “Planet Rock” for the very first time, the second time you found yourself doing the beat with your hand. (imitates the beat) Incredible programming. You were like, “Damn.” Whoever programmed that shit got to be an alien or something. (laughs) It was just incredible. What really drove that song and drove the sound was the programming, the rhythmic patterns of how it went, because nobody was doing that at the time. No one dared do something where the kick is right here, you feel it in your heart.

Noz

At what point did New Orleans start developing its own hip-hop scene?

Mannie Fresh

I think New Orleans always had its own hip-hop scene. Believe it or not, there were so many New York hip-hop records that hit in New Orleans that didn’t hit in New York, that we appreciated. So I think we were way ahead of our time. I’m kind of jumping the gun, but bounce really started on call-and-response, just a DJ and an MC. We were doing that before we titled it bounce. New Orleans had a sound, maybe like in the early ’80s. When hip-hop was jumping off, New Orleans was jumping off as well. I remember when “Sucker MCs/It’s Like That” came out – you couldn’t anywhere in New Orleans without hearing that song.

Then when DJs got it and put their twist on it, it was crazy. When I first started DJing there were a couple of DJ crews that had drum machines and Moog keyboards. This was big in New Orleans. You had to do your set where you had your drum machine and you had some dude who was crazy with basslines. That would go on for two hours at a party, just some crazy beat playing and a dude playing keys. I always felt like New Orleans always had its unique sound, because it wasn’t just about the DJ in the early ’80s, it was about musicianship as well. If you had an 808, you was God!

Noz

What has happened in hip-hop, because you don’t ever see that vintage equipment? I talk to a lot of people in other electronic music fields and they’re, “I just copped an ’80s Moog and I’m psyched and I’m building my sound around that.” But in hip-hop, everybody’s on Pro Tools and the computer.

Mannie Fresh

I can say this in all honesty. First, let’s start by saying, if there’s a program – Reason, or whatever – if that works for you, fine. But a lot of shit has been made way too easy. Everybody is growing up not learning nothing! When you had a Moog, you had to figure out a hundred buttons, what do they all do? You’ve got to sit there and figure out what they all do.

Now you’ve got a program that does everything for you. You have GarageBand, which has smart instruments that play chords for you. There’s no way you can think now. There’s no creativity in instruments no more. Some of the earlier Cash Money songs, we didn’t program those songs, we played them. If you had to hear it on tape, you’d hear somebody going, “One, two, ready, go!” We played those songs all the way down. I think that’s what made them good songs. Now you can sequence something and walk away from it. And I think the way, the format of music, is cheap to a certain degree. You’ve got a lot of equipment that’ll do it for you.

Noz

Do you keep that old-school equipment in your studio?

Mannie Fresh

Oh, yeah. I mean, you can say you can imitate something digital, but you really can’t. Some of them are great, don’t get me wrong. There are some cool programs that will cut studio time down to I don’t even know. But there’s a lot of things you can’t imitate. If you had a Juno or whatever, you can’t imitate those sounds. You can come close to it, but you can’t.

Noz

Jumping back into your timeline. You’re DJing in the ’80s, you eventually link up with a man called Gregory D. Tell us about how that came to be.

Mannie Fresh

I was interning on a local radio company and they asked me if I knew any rappers. I was like, “Yes, there is this guy Gregory D.” He had a song out in the early ’80s but it didn’t do that good and he got dropped from the label. But he was the only one I could think of and it was, “Can you get in touch with him?” So I wind up getting in touch with Greg. “I got a deal for you, man. There’s some guys that want to make a record and they’re just trying to get into hip-hop.”

He comes to the studio and he raps a song for them, does it freestyle, and they’re like, “We like it, but we don’t have anyone to do the music.” Because it was new to them. Of course, I looked at it as my opportunity. I’m going to put down the garbage can and say something. “You know what? I can program drums, I can play a little bit.” And they were, “So come up with a song.”

And the song we came up with was the Freddy Krueger theme song, “Freddie’s Back”. I programmed the song, put some crazy keys in there, and the guy Greg turns to me, “Dude, let’s just form a group.” Even at that time, by our standards, the studio was hella high! You’ve got two hours to come up with something. We put the song together probably in three hours and it was done. He was impressed with what I did, the record company was impressed with what I did and that started me and Gregory D as a group.

Noz

Shall we maybe play “Freddie’s Back”?

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, you can play it. I don’t know if many of you grew up on Freddy Krueger, but I think this was the original Freddy Krueger song.

(music: Gregory D & DJ Mannie Fresh – “Freddie’s Back” / applause)

As you can see I was amped about sampling. (laughs)

Noz

So I guess there’s kind of a Miami bass sound.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, I would say the early ’80s in New Orleans was all Miami bass. But the crazy thing is we’d been on those tempos. It took that name because there were so many songs coming out of Miami that had that tempo, Roland 808 songs. The first drum machine I was in love with was the Roland 808. This whole song was an 808 and a keyboard. We realy didn’t have nothing that was sequenced at the time, you had to play. But to this day I know there’s a lot of reverb on the vocals but the drum machine sounds awesome.

Noz

Now, at what point did the music start to become distinctively New Orleans hip-hop, separate from the Miami thing and “Planet Rock”?

Mannie Fresh

When New Orleans bounce music came along it defined us as having our own thing. Miami bass belonged to Miami, but most of the artists that were coming out, the few artists that were in New Orleans at that time, it was right around the same sound as Miami bass. So we still didn’t have anything that defined us.

Noz

Now do you think you could explain what bounce is to someone who’s never heard it?

Mannie Fresh

New Orleans bounce is like the essence of hip-hop. If you’ve heard all the Cold Crush Brothers, Grandmaster Flash or whatever, and did your homework, it’s just based on MCs and the DJ. What can I do to rock the crowd, to keep your attention? What can I do with call-and-response? Basically, bounce is 808 breakbeats. It’s always been that to this day. You might find your 808 breakbeats somewhere on a song that’s a cool song and your MC is pretty much amping the crowd up.

I’m saying, “Where you from? Where your mama from? Where your grandma from? Where your daddy from?” – and it’s the energy, the call-and-response. And there’s a little storytelling element to it as well, repping your hood, where you’re from, certain little keynotes about the neighborhood you grew up in. It was strictly New Orleans at one time and what made bounce cool and creative was, for instance, I’m from a neighborhood called the 7th Ward. So my bounce record would just be about the 7th Ward. And it was up to somebody else from maybe the 8th Ward to challenge me on that and make a better song. Same beat, just come with a better song.

Noz

With that in mind maybe we should play “Buck Jump Time,” which I think was one of the first records which had you shouting out your ward.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, and “Buck Jump Time” – let me explain it before you play it. It’s an 808 song that’s uptempo, but it’s really more of a New Orleans jazz thing. It was just my twist on it. It’s got a cheesy synth in it, but it was based on New Orleans jazz music. How can we get away from this jazz scene and make our own little 808 statement?

(music: Gregory D & DJ Mannie Fresh – “Buck Jump Time” / applause)

Let me explain buck jump to ya’ll. It’s a dance in New Orleans that I guess is more related to second-line music, to jazz music. We were trying to make a twist on it that was at the time for young people. New Orleans was based on this big jazz movement and the guys who did jazz were like, “We don’t have room for hip-hop. We’re not letting y’all in.” It was our way of being rebellious, of saying, “You know what? Y’all gonna let us in.” I remember when this song came out, it was crazy. Anywhere we played this song the city went crazy, people went nuts with energy. Anywhere you played this song, it gave New Orleans their sense of pride. “Oh wow, we’re on the map.”

Noz

Did that record help you to win over some of the jazz purists?

Mannie Fresh

Oh yeah, because everybody thought it was creative that you’d do a beat in that manner, take an 808 and it’s in double time. It gives you that whole dance thing or whatever. So a lot of jazz musicians were, “Wow! That’s kind of crazy.” I remember when I did this song I had an SP12 and the disc drive to the SP12 was an old Commodore disc drive, probably as big as this table. (laughs) It was a floppy disk that looked like a loaf of bread. To save it, it was just just five seconds of sample time, so you really had to cram whatever you had in there.

I remember the horn sound, it was just me taking the song on a turntable and spinning it as fast as I could and trying to catch the horn. Eventually, I wound up with it. But that’s what’s so unique about some of these songs; you remember what you did to put them together, even the little synth sound – it was actually sequenced in a drum machine. We just found a little bass clip and put in there and made it into notes. It was that stuff we were speaking on earlier about that drum machine, it was, “OK, I really don’t have anything that’ll fix my notes.” You’ve just got to sit there until you figure it out yourself.

And on this song, I remember this was the introduction to a 24-track. I was just like, “Wow, I got 24 tracks? I could go nuts, spread the whole song out.” That was an incredible song for me.

Noz

Gregory D has a line on this song about “brothers jumping out of trees.” What does that mean exactly?

Mannie Fresh

It’s a reference to high school dances. If you went to certain high school dances, someone was like, “You know what? Don’t go down that way. Don’t go down that street, stay on this street.” If you went down that street, somebody would probably jump out of a tree and rob you, and that just got popular. (laughs) I don’t know why. But you’d hear all these stories, “Oh man, I went down such-and-such street, somebody jumped out of a tree on me.” It was always in the news at the time so he just put it in the record.

Noz

Moving forward a little bit, the label that you’re best known for is obviously your ’90s work with Cash Money.

Mannie Fresh

Yessir.

Noz

How did you make that transition from making records with Gregory D to being the in-house producer?

Mannie Fresh

Greg and I had a couple of deals that we went through, but we had creative differences. I stopped doing songs with Greg, he was still signed to these labels and we’d sit in these meetings with people. It was kind of older heads and they would give us all these crazy ideas. I remember him actually doing “Buck Jump Time” over and someone was like, “Why don’t you say cities instead of saying all these wards?” I was like, “Dude, that’s not the way the song is designed.” So he got the track and he did the song over and he was, “Chicago, buck jump time/New Zealand, buck jump time.” I was just like, dude. It took away from the whole song. I kind of let that one go by because I was like, OK, maybe I’m not seeing the big picture.

But next time when we went to record it was some record heads telling us what they thought would be a good idea. They were like, “Man, you ought to do this and just leave your New Orleans roots alone.” I think at the time they had a song called “Crack Slinger” or something. I was like, “Dude, that’s not what we represent, you know what I’m saying?” I remember the album cover, we had on these black beanies and all that, and I just didn’t feel good about it. It was, “Music is going into this gangster era and if you don’t jump into that, y’all gonna be forgot about.” I guess he went headfirst with it. I was like, “That’s not really what I represent, that’s not where I’m from.”

So that was my departure with Greg. Me and him are still cool to this day. But that’s what introduced me to Cash Money. What I did before I got with them, I went back to my DJ roots again, doing house parties and clubs all over New Orleans to spark their attention. At the time, Cash Money’s first artist was a rapper called Kilo G. He was a gangster rapper, but no one was really paying attention to him from New Orleans. It was still about the creativity of doing call-and-response music.

When Cash Money approached me, they were just like, “What could you do to change the whole scene or our format of how we’re doing music?” I was like, “Well, there’s this hot thing called bounce right now, it’s blowing up all over the place.” I remember the first group that Cash Money signed was a bounce group called U.N.L.V. I’ll tell you what that stood for. It’s crazy as shit, but put your seatbelts on. U.N.L.V. stood for “Uptown Niggas Living Violent.” (laughs) But that was the first group they signed that was a bounce group.

We did this song called “Eddie Bow.” It was a dance song that really was a rip off of Eddie Bauer. At that time there was a truck that came out called Eddie Bauer and if you had that truck, you were the hot dude. (laughs) So they made up this dance called the “Eddie Bow” and when they did it at clubs, they used to do it off of breakbeats. No one recorded the song, but it was the hot thing going on in New Orleans. So I was like, “OK, we’ll put a beat behind it and do something creative with it.” And when we did that, that started the whole craze of the bounce movement, as well as recording it. But Cash Money, the first generation were bounce artists.

It was Magnolia Shorty, this girl Ms. Tee, B.G. even was a bounce artist, Lil Wayne was a bounce artist at that time. Hmm, let me think, this could go on and on. PMW – I’ll tell you what that meant, PMW was “Pussy Money Weed.” (laughs) Everybody at that time had some kind of funny initials that meant something, that was the hot thing to do. That was the early ’90s when I was= stepped to by Cash Money. They was like, “Let’s do something.” The first songs I did were more like bounce music. Then it gradually got into rap.

Noz

What did you think of Cash Money organizationally when you came to them? Did they have offices? Were they a label?

Mannie Fresh

No, it grew into an office. At the time it was selling records out of the trunk. It was, “If we press these records up and go to clubs and spots...” I already pretty much had my section of New Orleans on lock from me doing house parties and DJing at clubs. At that time DJs weren’t afraid to break a record – if it was a hot song, you played it. I look at it like this: I had a good position because not only do you produce these songs, but you go and DJ, play these songs.

It was like, “Wow! This is a super-win situation. You pretty much do all the house parties in New Orleans, you’ve already got the clubs on lock.” So it was just us going around, out the trunk. It started in New Orleans and then we’d go to smaller towns, places like Baton Rouge – Baton Rouge is 45 minutes outside of New Orleans – and aggravate everybody until they started paying attention to what we were doing.

At the time I remember we shared the same car. We’d put our money together, get one car and go from city to city, meet other DJs and just aggravate people. If I start by saying I’ve got a cassette single and I want $2 for it, if you didn’t have $2 I was going down. “Give me $1.50 for it, give me $1 for it, 75 cents, but you’re not leaving without having it.” It was just an old-fashioned way of promoting. That’s what brought Cash Money into the limelight.

Noz

Should we play something from that era?

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, let me see what you’ve got. (searches laptop) You’ve got Lil Slim, I didn’t even mention him. Give me a second, I’m just looking at this. Maybe Magnolia Shorty.

Noz

You want to introduce that?

Mannie Fresh

This is funny, these songs have got some of the craziest titles in the world. Magnolia Shorty was one of the earlier bounce artists that was on Cash Money. The crazy thing is she yells out the date when the record came out. I wanna say it’s ’96, or ’95, something like that. But the title of the song is “Monkey on that Dick.” She just came in the studio and was, “I’ve got the craziest song.”

(music: Magnolia Shorty – “Monkey on the Dick” / applause)

I’m gonna give you some of the elements of bounce and the songs that it came from. The crazy thing is the song called “Drag Rap” by the Showboys and they came out of New York. The record was on Profile and that was the label [Run-D.M.C.] were on at the time. But they got dropped from the label. I remember talking to the label head and he said, “We didn’t understand, nobody in New York loved this song. The only place that was selling this song was New Orleans. We couldn’t keep it in the stores in New Orleans for nothing. We did a whole bunch of numbers in New Orleans but nowhere else.” One of the main elements I guess of bounce music to this day, there’s an 808 break on it, and everybody uses this 808 break still, man, I don’t even know what to say. I never thought it would be going on ‘till this day.

(music: The Showboys – “Drag Rap”)

(music: Cameron Paul – “Brown Beat”)

(music: unknown)

(music: Adele – “Rolling in the Deep (New Orleans Bounce mix)”)

Even from the past to the present, it’s still the same elements. To me, it’s just energy. It’s New Orleans’ own way of remixing anybody’s song and nothing is off limits.

Noz

To give people some perspective, you were saying this is always local music and never really crossed over in its purest form.

Mannie Fresh

The way it really started it was just local music. It was really just drums. It never really got to us sampling other people’s music and then putting things on top of it. The DJs discovered if they put other mixes on top, like early soul songs, then it’s like OK, we’ve got a bounce beat. I started putting Marvin Gaye songs over it, Deniece Williams songs, and it became popular at parties. Then cats started rapping to it and that elevated it to something else.

Noz

Cash Money played a big part in elevating it further.

Mannie Fresh

Oh yeah, Cash Money was one of the premier bounce labels. If you did bounce music in the early ’90s, you were definitely on Cash Money, because that’s what it was based on. It was a bounce label.

Noz

Tell us a little bit about finding talent for the label, because I think the roster was one of the greatest southern rap labels.

Mannie Fresh

The crazy thing is, the early artists that were on Cash Money as far as bounce, it was just going to clubs, hole-in-the-wall spots, spots you’d probably never go to. But you knew there was somebody in there who was a street sensation, whoever this kid would go, people would follow him. I remember seeing Juvenile. He didn’t have that raspy voice, that New Orleans drawl like he’s got now, but it was all on the streets, this kid named Juvenile, every block party he went to he was rocking.

So I remember going to a spot – he was probably like 15 at the time, he had no business being there, it was a hole- in-the-wall bar, but he was rocking with the DJ and everybody knew the song. How do you know the song? It was just word of mouth, him going from spot to spot doing these songs. One of them was “Back That Azz Up.” At the time I wanna say he was performing it to the “Paid In Full” loop. It was just a DJ spinning the loop back and forth, and he was doing that song to that.

Everybody in the city already knew the song. They knew the verses, the hook, it was just phenomenal. Then his first song he put out was “Bounce for the Juvenile.” It was one of those songs as well, the city already knew because he was going from spot to spot, whoever would listen to him, bars to schools, whatever… Ku Klux Klan rallies, he was there. (laughs)

Noz

So tell us about another rapper who has grown into probably the most popular rapper alive today.

Mannie Fresh

Lil Wayne, at the time he was fascinated with rap. He really didn’t grow up in I guess everything that we were doing. He grew up on another side of New Orleans. But his dad was killed young and he just took a liking to rap. And as advice, his mom was like, “You know what. He likes what’s going on, everything that you’re doing. Just give him a shot at it.” What impressed me the most about Lil Wayne was his wordplay and how fast he could write songs or whatever. Honestly, I thought it wasn’t going to work, because it was like taking somebody from another element.

I’m like, “You’re an A student. OK, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re on another path to what we’re doing.” He was, “But I can do this, just check it out.” I remember my first encounter with Wayne, he had a tablet, all scribbly notes, but he knew every song in there. I was like, “What’s the purpose of even having the tablet?” “I just need to know the titles of the songs. I know all the songs. I just gotta go through my tablet to know the title.”

What blew me away was, I’m testing him. We were on the street corner or whatever. I’d be like, “OK, give me your tablet. What’s ‘The Bad Guy’?” And he would say the whole song. “Damn. OK, I’m gonna go to the back of the tablet.” There’s a song called “Baby Baby.” “OK, what’s ‘Baby Baby’?” He just did the whole song. I was like, “Dude, this kid is phenomenal.” Way ahead of time, I was thinking he is going to be something from what he’s doing.

What was super-creative about it, he made a promise to his mom that he would not curse. I said to myself, “I don’t know how on God’s green earth you’re gonna do that.” (laughs) “You’ve got to be something different not to curse.” Bounce was so raunchy and in-your-face at the time, I’m like, this is incredible, I don’t know how you’re gonna do this. But the first songs we did with Lil Wayne he just fell in love with the whole bounce scene. He went crazy nuts rebellious so his mom took him out of the group. She was like, “He’s not doing his homework, not doing everything he’s supposed to do.” The dude was heartbroken, he cried, his mom let him come back.

Before I say anything, let me give you some history. Lil Wayne was actually in a group called the B.G.’z – it was B.G. and him. The original name of the group was the Bee Gees, that was some early Cash Money music. I remember, before we were even signed to a major label, the Bee Gees got in touch with us and were like, “Nah, you’re not going on.” (laughs) B.G. is a reference in the hood to baby gangsters, but they said, “Nah, you’re not gonna use the Bee Gee like that.” So what could we do? It was spelled like the Bee Gees, so we dropped it to alphabet speech, B.G. Nobody expected it to be as big as it was gonna be.

So the way B.G. became just singular is when Wayne got put out of the group for bad grades and losing his mind in the bounce culture. So that started B.G.’s career, but Wayne’s mom eventually let him back in and, like I said, his career is phenomenal. The rest is history.

Noz

Now, how old were Wayne and B.G.?

Mannie Fresh

At the time, I’d say like 13, 14. If you hear one of Wayne’s first songs on Cash Money, it sounds like, wow, that’s not Wayne! It sounds like a baby. (laughs)

Noz

You mentioned the major deal, which was a big turning point in everyone’s career. And also kind of a landmark deal.

Mannie Fresh

By the time Universal approached Cash Money, we had Juvenile, the Big Tymers, the Hot Boys. Those were the three major groups on Cash Money. The Big Tymers put an album out on Cash Money and we did I wanna say 30,000, and for an independent that was crazy. We had major labels going, “Wow! Who are these people?” Then when you got the album, it was, “These aren’t really rappers. They’re just saying what they’re feeling over hot beats.” With the help of Bun B from UGK, that spawned the Big Tymers.

Originally, Bun B was supposed to be in the Big Tymers. A lot of people don’t know that, but that was our homeboy and that was our elevation to sell the Big Tymers, but the deal was really based on what the Big Tymers were putting out. We did somewhere around 30,000 units real, real quick and it got the attention of a whole lot of people. Universal came along and the guy Dino, who did our deal at the time, the crazy thing was he was in our corner. He informed us, “They want you this bad, you can keep your publishing, you can have most of your ownership if not all, and you can do a deal nobody has ever done ever in a record company.”

Noz

Going back a little bit, how did you guys hook up with Bun B?

Mannie Fresh

Bun used to always come to New Orleans and he was a fan of what we were doing at the time. He used to always say, “I wanna do a bounce song but I don’t wanna get away from my core audience. But if you put out something that’s rap, I’m in.” So, of course, I said, “Bun, we’re doing the Big Tymers and it’s gonna be kind of based on rap, but it’s not gonna be bounce beats, it’s gonna be something that you can get on.”

And when we did that and he heard some of the hooks I came up with, he was just like, “Yeah, I’m in.” So that took something crazy. Like I said, Bun always hung around New Orleans. He was intrigued with New Orleans culture and everything that was going on.

Noz

We should probably mention that you were rhyming on the Big Tymers. Was that you on the rap debut?

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, I said a few rhymes. I don’t even know what I’d call it – game spit. (laughs) That’s what I’d call it.

Noz

Now, when you guys signed to the label, it seemed like the initial push went to Juvenile from the Big Tymers.

Mannie Fresh

By the time we actually did the deal with Universal, the Big Tymers was somewhere near 300,000 before everything was already done. The first album they put out was the Big Tymers, they decided to put it out again. By that time we’d already done another 200. So they looked at it like, “This wasn’t what we’re trying to do. Let’s move onto something else.” We was like, “But that’s gold. Y’all got the last end of it. We already did what we had to do, we moved 300,000 units before y’all even got all the paperwork done. When you put it back out we did 200.”

So when Universal did the deal, maybe they looked at it like this isn’t what they thought it was, so they moved onto something else. I was like, “OK, well the coolest thing we’ve got in the arsenal is Juvenile. I know for a fact this is gonna set it off for us.” What made it so cool with Juvenile, some of the songs he knew before he even did the deal, they were hot on the streets of Louisiana. Universal didn’t know it, but a lot of those songs were already hot.

The thing about it, when we got into the studio, he knew all those songs, so that made it so much better. When I started putting beats to them... “I’m gonna strip these songs, we’re gonna take the bounce element out of a lot of these songs and make it mainstream in our own New Orleans way.” But a lot of those songs were already hits where we was from. When “Ha” came out, everyone was like, “This is so nuts,” the way his rhyme schemes were going, everything he’s saying.

It took on a face to itself. Everyone was, “Never heard nobody rap like that.” Simple as it was, but it was already a key song in New Orleans, it was already jumping off, it was already hot. But I knew that Juvenile was gonna be that thing because the way his voice sounded, his delivery, the way the beats were, it was just a different thing from what hip-hop had heard at that time.

Noz

Shall we go into “Ha”?

Mannie Fresh

Yeah.

(music: Juvenile – “Ha”)

I remember when we were doing this record Juvenile was like, “You’re gonna leave the beat the way it was, the way I do it.” He wanted a bounce beat behind it. I was, “Nah, man, I’m gonna change the drums and put a little music or something behind it.” To them it was a sad day for Roland 808. “You’re gonna change the beat? Oh my goodness!” “Trust me, it’s gonna all work out. I’m gonna change it to something I know will go mainstream. Let me do what I do.” He was trying these songs out in different spots, the worst of the worst places you could find. I’m like, “If you can rock that crowd, I know the world is gonna accept it.” When Jay-Z called – “I wanna get on the remix to ‘Ha’” – I knew I’d arrived. (applause)

Noz

It’s funny to hear you say it so matter of factly – “When it goes mainstream” – because that’s a really out-there record. At least on a national level, we weren’t hearing that music anywhere else at that time. Juvenile is kicking like a real conversational, kinda almost offbeat flow.

Mannie Fresh

The crazy thing is if you know Juvenile, that song fits him perfectly because there’s like five people living inside of him. (laughs) That song fits his personality and everything, so why not kick it off with that? That’s him, to the core. That is him. When I was programming this song, it was one of those songs that made you smile. I was just like, “Damn, this is coming together so so cool.” I was saying the rhyme inside my head while I was doing it, because I knew the song from him doing it and when I played the beat for him, he was like, “I don’t know dude, I kind of like the beat the way...” “Just try it, when it breaks down and the drums change on the hook, this is gonna be so crazy.”

But “Ha” was the last song we added to his album. We went out to eat and came back and were like, “It’s one more song, do the “Ha” song.” When I programmed it – and he already had the rap – it was one of those songs that’s a godsend, it came together in like 30 minutes. It was, “Hurry up, do this, this is flowing so good. This is the one, damn, this is the one.” When he did the raps, the first take he did wasn’t very energetic because he wasn’t really feeling it. Our first argument ever. I was, “Dude, come on, put some energy to the song.” He came back and did it again and I was, “That’s the single, that’s the one.” “You really think so?” “That’s the single, I think so.”

Noz

Can you tell us a bit more about the Jay-Z remix? Today we’re used to New York rappers jumping on southern rap records, but that was one of the first of its era.

Mannie Fresh

I remember Baby called me at home. He was like, “Jay-Z wants to get on the remix to ‘Ha.’” I was, “Man, stop playing me, you’re lying.” “No, they already sent him the track. They should get it.” At that time there was no emailing anybody. “They should get it two weeks from now in the mail.” They already sent him the track. “So when we get it back check it out, see what you think.”

We get the song back and it was all of us sitting around. We must have played that song back 15 times. We were like, “That’s him. Play it again.” And he had this line in the song where he’s, “Jay-Z and Cash Money.” So I was, “I’m gonna sample that and move it to the front.” “Do you think we should call him?” “No! Just take that and move it to the front of the song.” (laughs) It was like, “He might not like it.” “That’s a chance we gonna take.” We really felt, “Wow, this is it. Jay jumped on this.”

And, like he said, that was unheard of at the time. For anybody from New York to even pay attention to what we were doing down south, they were, “They’re alright, they’ve got their little thing going but we ain’t really paying attention. To get respect, y’all gonna earn it.” That catapulted Cash Money even further, when that song hit the airwaves. People were like, “Damn, Jay-Z is on that song and he’s doing the ‘Ha’ thing.”

Noz

And I guess that opened the floodgates for a long string of Cash Money hits.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, after “Ha,” of course, “Back That Azz Up.” It was just phenomenal. If you listen to the drums, it’s everything that’s bounce music. I was thinking along the lines of, how do I get bounce music to everybody? How do I get it to old white ladies where they’re gonna be like, “Oh shit, I love this song”? I know how to get in the club, but how do I stretch it across everywhere?

At the time, I think I was listening to Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, and I’m just like, “Shit, classical music.” (laughs) “If I put some classical music on top of it, I can’t lose.” And I remember we’re sitting in the studio and (sings) and somebody would walk in there. This was before I’d played the drum loop, I was just on a keyboard, coming up with something. Everybody came in the studio, “Oh shit, he’s tripping. This is it, this is the end.” I remember Juvenile going, “Dude. What are you doing?” I’m like, “This is gonna work. We really can’t sell this song as just drums, it’s not gonna work.”

The crazy thing is, the string line came from a UGK song, “The Policeman Is Your Friend” or some shit like that. It’s… (sings). And I’m, “Bun, call Pimp, ask him if I can use just that line in the song. I’m gonna put some other stuff around.” He was, “Cool, cool.” “That’s the line that’s gotta go through the song, that’s the driving force of the song.” He was, “Yeah, of course.” He had no idea it was gonna be that big, but I was already thinking this is gonna be a huge song. As long as we leave the energy part of it, the drums, a couple of “hoos” from Triggerman or whatever, some breaks that are just mad nuts right now in the club and put some classical music on it.”

It was just phenomenal. I remember Sharon Stone saying that “Back That Azz Up” was one of her favorite songs. I was just, “Oh shit!” (laughs) Around that era everyone was like, “Sharon Stone is bad ass!” The chick who showed her…

Noz

You want to play it real quick?

Mannie Fresh

Yeah.

(music: Juvenile feat. Mannie Fresh – “Back That Azz Up” / applause)

The thing about this song, around this time I probably had 12 jobs at Cash Money. It was, “You’re gonna put the song together, you’re gonna write hooks, you’re gonna mix, play keys, do everything.” All of these songs were done on 2-inch at the time. Earlier, when I first started recording I thought 24 tracks was the greatest thing in the world. The more you progress, it’s like, “24 tracks – that’s it?”

It challenged you to come up with something creative, because you’re like, “I’ve got 24 tracks.” One was the sync track, so you really didn’t have 24 tracks. Some songs, even “Back That Azz Up,” I chose to say, “You know what? I don’t want the sync track. I need that track to record on.” We’re just gonna run it on the drum machine. The sequence, we played it all the way down and it was tight. I felt rather than sequence it, we’re just gonna play it because I need every track I can get for this song.

It’s funny to me that songs now sound like this again. The hi-hats are way up and they’re tripled. You have snare rolls, you’ve got breaks and all that stuff. I never thought it would be 100 Mannie Fresh producers that sound like that right now, but it seems like, hey, that’s a cool song. In my DJ set, if all else fails, I can play this record. Play “Back That Azz Up” and I’m alright. I can leave on that note on some real Hollywood shit, drop the mic and... (holds arm in the air, laughs / applause)

Noz

We also had the world’s introduction to a young Lil Wayne at the end of that song.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, that was Wayne at the end of it doing his part. That was one of the things I said was cool about Wayne. He was, “There’s no way in the world this song’s going down without me getting a piece of it.” Now that you say that, I remember a couple of other things about Wayne. If we were doing a video shoot and somebody missed it for whatever reason – that’s what happens with groups, they get Hollywood.

If somebody missed the video shoot, Wayne was always the one who was, “Oh, I’ve got a rewrite, don’t worry about it.” If Juvenile was like, “I’m not showing up that day, I’ve got something going on,” we would go in the studio and just change the song. It was always Wayne who said, “You know what? I’ve got the part. If somebody doesn’t show up, I got a part for it.” The crazy thing was he always had them written down already. I was, “How’d you know someone wasn’t gonna show up?” “Dude, I just knew.”

Noz

I think we’re gonna talk about Wayne a little more in a bit. But let’s continue rolling with the Cash Money hits. You wanna go to “Bling Bling”?

Mannie Fresh

“Bling Bling” was originally a Big Tymers song. Big Tymers was anything that was out of this world, that’s what we were based on. That was our whole sales pitch on the Big Tymers. We’d say lines like, “You know what? I got a spaceship. I just bought some Lexus that NASA made.” That was our whole shit. But we were working on B.G.’z album and I was like, “There’s no way we’re gonna sell this album ‘cause all of the songs are so street. I’m not trying to take his street credibility away, but how do we get him to everybody? How do we get him to mainstream? To get everyone to pay attention to him?”

So we had our little football huddle and I was, “We’re gonna have to give ‘Bling Bling’ to B.G.” That was gonna have to be put on his album to help album sales, to get him to everybody’s living room, get everybody talking about him, make him a household name. We shot the video and everything, and I ain’t gonna lie, me and Baby were both, “Damn, we shouldn’t have given him this song.”

There’s this Jonzun Crew song called “Space is the Place” and the bassline is like… {sings) I was, “If I just change that shit a little bit and put some of my drums behind it...” I’d made the beat up and I was just sitting in my house. Prior to that I remember a line that Wayne said, and he said, “Tell me, what kinda / Niggas got diamond that’ll bling blind ya.” The word “bling” stood out. It wasn’t used right at that time because it was one of our B-side songs.

I always wanted to use it so I came up with the hook like, “Bling bling/Every time you come around your city bling bling.” Then when I came in the studio and everybody said the hook and everybody was like, “Ah shit, that’s it. This is the one for the Big Tymers, we’re on our way.” Like I said, we decided collectively to give the song to B.G., but it made us understand the significance of us being together. I’m like, “I tell you what, if we’ve got to give him the song, why not give everybody a piece of the song? That way it’ll make everybody something.”

Because I felt like it was a special song so if Juve got a verse, I got a verse, Turk got a verse, Wayne got a verse, just a little bit, anything, it’s gonna make all of us stand out. But we’ll still say it’s your song, we’ll give it to you. On top of that, none of us knew that “Bling Bling” would be the craziest catchphrase ever, be on planes, Martha Stewart said it, so it got to be corny. But when it jumped off, oh shit, this is the new standard for anything that’s shiny, anything that’s flashy. You heard everybody saying “bling bling.” I kinda was like, “Damn, if I trademarked that? I wouldn’t be here with you right now.” (laughs)

Noz

On that note let’s go into “Bling Bling.”

(music: B.G. – “Bling Bling”)

Mannie Fresh

The crazy thing is when we did the original, I think Baby starts it off, Turk starts it off, but the video was shot completely different from the way the original song was. It was one of those songs where somebody didn’t show up. It was one of those things where Wayne took the lead. I grew up on old songs, like first-generation hip-hop, and I used to listen to those cool songs, what drives them forward.

(music: Jonzun Crew – “Space Is the Place”)

I just remember always hearing those hits and that song and thinking this is a cool-ass song. I came up with something like... (sings bassline) I just changed the notes to something different, but the beat, the inspiration came from listening to this song. And something hit me. “Oh shit!” And “Bling Bling” came from it.

Noz

You better hope Jonzun Crew doesn’t see this video.

Mannie Fresh

Well, honestly, the notes are different from what this did or whatever. But come on, a lot of people will say their songs are just, “I was sitting there and it came to me.” A lot of my songs are inspired from different songs, different places and things that I’ve seen. That’s where they came from. My approach to producing was more the DJ thing. As a DJ I knew what would make people dance. There’s a different format for what this song is, but I’d say the inspiration came from this song.

Noz

How did you know where the song was going, to which project? Because it seemed like a lot of them would have, like, three or four rappers. How often did you know this is for Juvenile’s record, this is for B.G.’s?

Mannie Fresh

The cool thing about earlier Cash Money sessions was that’s all we did – record. It became whoever had first dibs on the song, or called it, that’s where it went. We would be in the studio almost every day and we’d probably average like three or four songs. Before we started the song, Juvenile would be, “This is my song.” Whatever we started that day, “This is my song.” (laughs) “OK, that’s his song.” Though there’s gonna be three or four of us working on it. But you had times where Wayne would call and say, “What time you gonna be at the studio? You gonna be there at three, I’m gonna be there at two.”

So if I got there at three and he got there first, then it was, “OK, I’m gonna get some songs in before everybody else.” But like I said, whoever called dibs on a song, we wasn’t designing songs to say, “This is for, this is for you.” We were just working. Everybody was in love with music at the time. That was the cool thing to do. Like, “Let’s go to the studio and do as many songs as we can do.”

Noz

You say everybody was in love with the music at the time. What do you think changed?

Mannie Fresh

The evils of money. This is the second generation of Cash Money, believe it or not. The first generation was bounce. But when this came along with Juvenile and all that, it was just a genuine love of music. We all knew it would be successful, but we didn’tknow how successful it would be. Nobody thought this was a million dollar business. We were just doing what we loved doing, it was natural to us. “This is what I’ve been doing since forever. Really, I’m gonna get paid for it now?” No one looked around and saw this shit was generating millions and millions of dollars. When finally everyone was like, “OK, now I see what’s going on,” like I said, it was the evils of money that changed it.

All of a sudden, you had people you grew up with, you ate at their house, then you’d call and it’s, “Oh, you’ve gotta to talk to my man before you can talk to him.” “Who is this dude?” “Oh, you gotta talk to his manager.” “You mean I’ve gotta talk to his manager? The same dude I was with last week?” Money and people who love money came into the picture as well. When you get somebody who’ll point out things that you weren’t worried about and it was for their own well being, it created a problem. What I mean is, everybody started getting separate management, saying things like, “Well, if I’m gonna be featured on that song, how do we work that out?” “Damn, a second ago we were all good.” Nobody was worried about who featured on whose album.

What was the brainchild of Cash Money was everybody worked collectively to make one artist’s album a good album. If we were working on Wayne’s album it was everybody’s ideas: Juvenile’s ideas, B.G.’s ideas, it was me, it was Baby, his brother Slim. It wasn’t like at the end of that album, it was everybody going, “How’d we do the splits now?” Before, working on it someone was, “OK, I wanna work on it but I’m gonna need a suitcase filled with money and I’m gonna need…” When all of that stepped in, that was the demise of it.

Noz

One by one you started to see a lot of the talent kind of peel off Cash Money after that.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah. Juvenile was the first to leave Cash Money. Me and him had so many creative fusses over music that I never got a chance to ask him what his reasons for leaving were. I remember when he left Cash Money he didn’t give an explanation. It was more just, “I’m gonna leave in the middle of the night and I’m not gonna say anything.”

I remember reading the article in XXL and it was, “Juvenile goes AWOL.” I read the article and what made me not pay attention to it was some of the things he said. It was, “Mannie Fresh thinks he knows everything. He’s this militant producer and he wants to tell you everything and he don’t wanna hear your side of it.” So that made me a little bit bitter towards him. So I didn’t wanna hear him out, I just thought this is Juvenile being greedy or whatever. So I just kept on going on and on with it. At the time when he left, everybody thought Cash Money was over with, because it was like, “Juvenile, damn – that’s their star.”

But what made Cash Money cool was a collective effort to make those albums hot. We didn’t fall off at all. The Big Tymers rose up with the “Still Fly” song. When “Still Fly” came out, wow, nobody paid attention to him. But I was super in love with doing music; all this going on, I couldn’t care less if it made money or not. I was just into my whole little world. I get to create, I get to stay in these four walls that I love and I’m good with it. But at the end of it, I looked up and was, “Oh shit, everybody’s benefiting from this. Everybody’s got Bentleys, everybody’s partying and shit and I’m just crammed in here.”

So I started asking questions, of course. And my first question was, “Dude, since I’ve been here I haven’t really got a royalty. I’ve got a few charity checks – ‘OK here you go dude, this is for you.’ Well, it would be a nice time for you to really show your appreciation and break bread.” It was always kinda put on hold, “We’ll talk about it next week, talk about it next week, talk about it next week.”

As that was going on, B.G. left. I was closer to B.G. than Juvenile. Him leaving – he used to always reach out, “Man, I’ve got this other deal going on. I was wondering if you’d do some beats on it.” “Dude, I’m 100% with you regardless.” So we finally got to talking about why he left and what was going on and what raised my eyebrow was it was the same things I was asking. He was asking, like, “Wow, I haven’t got royalties, I haven’t got my publishing straight and ya’ll keep telling me next week, next week, next week.” And he said, “I see it that we’re the premier supergroup at the moment and the world is paying attention to us. And there’s no way in the world I’m supposed to just have a little apartment and a little cheesy ass truck here when the deal we struck was so phenomenal.”

We were doing tours that were nuts. We never got off the road. We had tour buses with studios on them. When you started paying attention and you’re counting stuff, then it’s, “Well, there’s money generated, but who’s getting all this money?” So I started pressing more and more about, like, “Hey dude, some way I need something to happen, I need some money.” And to me it was the Jedi mind trick. “You know what? We’ll let you do your own album.” I was like, “Shit, I’m happy. I forgot for a second that ya’ll owe me money.” “Go and do your own album, go in and go nuts, whatever you wanna do.”

So at the time, I did my album and “Real Big” came out and all of a sudden it was, “You can go on tour on your own, do whatever you want.” They thought that would be enough to satisfy me. But the crazy thing that came of it, some evils that came from me touring. I’d get calls from promoters. They’d say, “I want you to do a Big Tymers show. I’m gonna send you a deposit or something.” And they’d send a deposit and I’m just like, “I think you sent me Baby’s money as well.” They were, “No, that’s your half of it.” “I was kinda like, huh?” “No that’s your half of it, we sent him his.” “Well, this is what I’ve been doing shows for, half of this.”

I started asking questions to the guys that were booking. I’m like, “How much are you booking the Big Tymers for?” Somebody would say, “Oh, 60 grand.” I’m, “Well shit, I thought we were getting 30 grand and I was splitting half of 30 grand.” “Nah, we’re booking you for 60.” So I took it as not only are you getting 60 grand, but you’ve got me under the impression that we’re getting 30 grand and I’m splitting that 30 grand with you. Wow, really? These are the guys you grew up with, you’ve known them forever. But like I said, money does that to some people. We talked about that and we were, “Dude, we’ve gotta fix it.”

And then here comes Hurricane Katrina around that time. When Katrina hit, it changed everything. At the time I remember having the government on my back, saying I owed taxes on money that I never got. How do I owe you money for something I never got? They were like, “Well, here it is, this money was spent in your name.” And on top of that, it was one of those points where it couldn’t get any lower for me. I was about to lose my house and everything. This is the point where I have to grow up, get my business straight and go and do what I have to do. Like I said, it was the evils of money. I think success happened so quick, it was bringing so much in, it changed a lot of people. I don’t have no hate for anybody, it’s just not in me, it’s too much energy to put that away.

I think I’m blessed because when Hurricane Katrina hit, all that was going on, it made me a dangerous person. Not dangerous to other people; it made me back, it made me hungry again. I was just like, “You know what? If I did it here I can do it somewhere else.” My first song right around that was Young Jeezy, “And Then What,” and when that came out, that solidified to me that, “Wow, your sound is so not Cash Money. It’s something good, there’s something about it.” Then after that it was T.I. and T.I. was, “Dude, you’re my go-to dude.” It put me in a good place, a good space, showed me that I could do this.

When I left Cash Money I left with some tennis shoes and a drum machine. I felt like I could do this. It’s not that hard. This is what I do, this is what I’m good at, this is what I’m destined to do. But like I said, I talked to them prior to this and said, “I’m not angry, I’m not mad at you.” But I guess that’s just some people, it happens to them. But I’ll say this, and the only reason why I’m staying on the subject so long, is that if it’s your dream to do music, make sure you’re paying attention to your business. Sometimes homeboy business is a horrible thing. You think that’s your dude, he’s got your back. But it’s really never that. You never know what’s gonna happen to that person once the money’s coming in. When money starts changing hands and business gets serious and you start selling vitamin water and all that stuff, make sure you cover your ass. (applause)

Noz

So I guess coming out of the Cash Money thing, the industry had changed a lot.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah. Shit, everybody wanted the Cash Money sound. To a lot of people that was the coolest thing that had happened. “Shit, the brainchild, the producer, he’s over here. You can get beats from him.” The nuts thing that happened, I remember right after Hurricane Katrina, I had so many people trying to get with me. I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe it.” All of that was masked from me before. Nobody told me people were calling, nobody told me, “Oh, the Game called for you.” That list goes on and on, anybody that was in hip-hop. Nobody told me these people wanted to do records with me.

Right after Hurricane Katrina, I left with my tennis shoes and a drum machine and I just met the right people. It was just like, “I’ve got work for you, I’ve got work for you.” All over the place. I just remember, God damn. Within two months I made a million dollars. Somebody’s been holding me back from all of this shit.

The crazy thing was I had so much debt from being in trouble with my taxes, about to leave my house. My only goal was to pay off everything. I’m just happy to be alive. If I wake up every day, I’m good. My kids are in good health. If everybody’s good, I’m good. I got to the point where I paid off everything that was going on with me. But it still showed me the ugliness of what was going on. I was signed to Cash Money prior to leaving Cash Money and they wouldn’t release me. So that made it even crazier for me because I still wanted to do my artist thing. The only thing I could do was do beats. I had all these beats with all these people or whatever.

What’s nuts is I got this deal with Def Jam through Jay-Z. Jay-Z reached out and said, “I’ll do a deal with you. You come to Def Jam and do your thing.” I went over there and I spoke to Lil Wayne and said, “I’ve got this deal with Def Jam. They’re gonna give me my situation, let me do what I wanna do.” It was like, “Just deliver a big song.” So I go to Lil Wayne, he does the song with me and as soon as I get ready to put it out, Cash Money shut it down. “Nah, you didn’t get permission from us to do that.” “Wow, it’s really that serious? That’s kinda ugly for you to do that. Wayne agreed to do the song.” It was like, “Well, Wayne can’t speak for Wayne. We speak for Wayne.” That was a learning lesson for me.

And it gave Def Jam a salty taste too, because they was just like, “Every time we try to do something with you, if it gets shut down, then we don’t wanna do things with you.” And in the midst of that Jay-Z left Def Jam. He got an offer somewhere for something nuts. I was Jay-Z’s guy at the time and I was just over there with everybody that hates Jay-Z for leaving. So they’re just looking at me, “Well, we hate you too. You should have left with him.” (laughs) “I just got here! I just walked in Tuesday and he’s leaving Thursday!” So that just put a light on everything that was going on in hip-hop.

I just had fusses with Def Jam over and over and over again. Nobody on the label got along. It was nuts. I was like, the industry has changed. At the time Def Jam had Ludacris, Young Jeezy, Rick Ross, all the heavy hitters that’s out right now. But the crazy thing was none of these people never met. “How come none of these people don’t know each other?” That was my first thing. “No, that’s not what we’re gonna do. Stay in your office and shut up.” Shit! That was the turning point for me in the industry. I get it. This is different. Labels really got together and were like, “There will never be another label like Cash Money, nobody will ever own their own publishing and if somebody tries to get smart like you do, we will shut you down.”

So that really put me on a back burner for a little while. But just like I said, I was just happy to be alive. That’s my missing point of hip-hop, when people were, “Damn, what’s going on with Mannie Fresh?” The reason why I couldn’t do songs was because the deal with Def Jam also said that, “OK, you can put out as many acts as you want. But we don’t want you all over the place so you’re only allowed to produce three songs a year.” So I was like, “OK, cool, as long as I can put out as many acts as I want.” “OK, but on the production side, you’re only allowed to do three songs a year with three artists.”

So I was, “OK, you’re gonna allow me to put out music.” Every time I’d present something it would be three people, the label heads come in, I’d play the song. They were all on their computers, checking emails and they’d be, “No, we don’t like it.” “Damn, was anybody even paying attention?” Next week I’d come in with something else. “No, we don’t like it.” “Damn! Well, what can I do? How can I survive at this?” “Well, you did you three songs when you first got here.”

So you’ve got to pay attention to the ugliness that labels do. It was more so of I was being punished for something that Jay-Z had done. He had a deal where somebody offered him mad loot, but I had just got there. “That was your guy. Nobody here likes him because he left.” When you said the industry changed, to me the change was I just got with some people who said, “You know what? You’re not that important over here. We’re just gonna do it how we normally do it.”

Noz

Now, what do you think about the progression that Cash Money has made in your absence?

Mannie Fresh

I think some of it was taught. Wayne knows how to pick songs because he paid attention all the time. He knows what people want, he knows how to make a good song and he’s not afraid to go left a little bit and do something different. I look at it like this: A lot of it is DNA, it’s what comes from you. And I’m not gonna discredit Cash Money, but if you’re a label that’s got big money then you go after the big fish. You can get talented artists or whatever. You’re halfway there. Impressive as it is to me to see somebody take nothing and make it into something, you’re that label that everybody wants. And you’ve got to look at it.

Think about this for a second. You (points at a participant), if you’re a hardworking manager and you’re gonna work from the bottom to the top, you haven’t made it yet, but you’re hard-working. Then he comes along (points at another participant), he’s the dude that’s been on the scene for a while. He’s got the Rolls-Royce, he’s got the Phantom, but everybody knows he’s a snake. Not discrediting you (laughter), but he’s got the right shit. And to me, people flock to that. They don’t care about what you’ve done in the past. You’re being sued every week, but you look good, so we’re gonna go with you. Nobody wants to go the long way. Most people in life want the short cut. You know what I’m saying? “It’s popping over here, so we’re gonna go with y’all.”

What’s interesting to me is maybe five, ten years down the line, to see if something is different about Cash Money. Whether they’ve learned their lessons. Hopefully they’re not the same Cash Money. They’ve got some great artists and it’s all good right now. Five years down the line it might be the same Cash Money, it might be something different. That’s the interesting thing to me.

Noz

What have you been working on lately?

Mannie Fresh

Juvenile. He’s putting a new album out called Rejuvenated. Mystikal. I mean, I still do tracks for everybody. Rick Ross. Some of my songs. What’s interesting that happened is Drake used “Back That Azz Up” on his new album. What was cool was he called me on his own, he did his own business of course because he knew the relationship with Cash Money. I threw a publishing number at him and he was like, “I think you deserve that dude, that’s cool.” It’s a cool place and a cool space for me to be right now.

When things happen to me, I go back to what I know. I’ve been DJing all over the world, doing my thing, and it’s been making me fall in love with hip-hop again and everything that’s going on. I love that, that’s what I do. To make me understand everything that’s going on you’ve got to back to your roots, rediscover what made me cool and what’s going on right now. The crazy thing is I never really considered myself a producer. I never did. All my music came from my DJ background and it just developed into that. So if I had to call myself a title I’d still say DJ. I just get crazy ideas every now and then and I just know how to make them work. But I never consider myself a producer. But I’m like, hey, I’m glad for the term and I’m glad you appreciate me for what I do.

(applause)

Noz

You mentioned the Mystikal collaboration, which is a big deal for fans of New Orleans hip-hop.

Mannie Fresh

Yeah, at one time we were on different labels. Just to explain why it’s a big deal: Mystikal was signed to No Limit and I was signed to Cash Money and that was some nuts-ass rivalry and I’ll tell you what sparked it. When Master P came along with No Limit, his first song was “Bout It Bout It”. The group U.N.L.V. on Cash Money had a song called “Bout It” and it was the hot, hot song at the time. Master P, of course he is from New Orleans but at the time he was living in Richmond, California or something. He came down one summer and visited and heard this song, and the next thing you know there’s this song “Bout It Bout It” out. We were pissed off to the highest. “Who is this dude? Nobody knows him. He says he’s from the Calio Project.” “Oh, he moved a long, long time ago.”

But he came and visited one summer and at the time the song that Cash Money had out, called “Bout It,” was out and was the hottest saying at the time. So he took the saying, made a song out of it, didn’t say thank you, just ran off. We were, “Man!” That’s what started the whole rivalry. But he returned to New Orleans and started signing acts. That was competition to Cash Money. But Master P was the first to go mainstream before Cash Money. That added fuel to our fire to make us work even harder. We was like, if he could do it, we could do it. But it made the city divided. Either you were with Cash Money or you were with No Limit.

I knew Mystikal from floating around, but he decided to sign with No Limit. When he signed with No Limit – enemy. Instantly! I was like, “Can’t talk to you. Might talk to you in church, but I’m not gonna talk to you on the street. Other than that I can’t talk to you.” Everybody in New Orleans knows this rivalry. If you’re with Cash Money, you’re with Cash Money. If you’re with No Limit, you’re with No Limit. They just don’t mix.

But U.N.L.V. had this song that came out dissing Mystikal and it was one of the hottest songs in the world. It was called “Drag ‘Em From That River.” Juve even did the track over. So that solidified the beef. So Mystikal came back and dissed them. So that was, “OK, it’s official. Now we’re making songs about each other.” It was talked about at first, but now we’re making songs about each other. So, now on this side you’ve got No Limit and on this side you’ve got Cash Money. It divided the city and everything.

But the older we got, the artists, everybody on No Limit and Cash Money that were artists were like, “This is kinda stupid. Why are we beefing? We all grew up in the same arena, we all knew everybody from doing music.” So the beef was squashed. W all started talking to each other. I started talking to Mystikal, I started talking to KL or whatever. But then it became the heads of the label, Baby and Master P, they just could not let it go.

Now we’ve got two crazy, crazy dudes where you’re like, “Come on, this just does not make sense. Y’all don’t really understand music, y’all just understand money.” None of these guys was ever really in the music scene, they were more business heads and the only reason they want to keep this beef going is a money thing. But the artists, even people that were on No Limit like Mia X. Mia X was in a group with me in the early ’80s when I was DJing. So everybody on Cash Money and No Limit in some way knew each other from our whole little hip-hop scene that was going on. We just couldn’t speak.

After we squashed the beef, now it became Baby and Master P, them two doing everything they could do. It would be childish shit. Like I remember somebody saying, “Man, you heard what P said about you? He was saying this and he was saying that.” “Well, I didn’t hear that.” And he would do the same thing to his people. Then you’d have people call you and say, “Damn dude, did you say something about me at a concert?” “Nah, who said that?” “Master P said that.” I remember the word “whodi.” We came out with “Whodi,” Master P had a couple of songs using the same phrase. That was his way of saying, “That’s our word, they didn’t come up with that.” So that started the whole little beef again.

But everybody on No Limit truly knew, “Nah, that’s something Cash Money came up with, that’s not ya’lls.” We came up with the group Hot Boys. All of a sudden No Limit has a Hot Boyz. Everybody was, “Dude, this is a crazy beef because it’s not coming from us, it’s coming from the heads of the labels.” They’re really on some divide and conquer. “We’re gonna keep you all beefing.” But the city really thought we were still beefing; you all hate each other. So when Mystikal came home from jail, it was more me reaching out, going, “Hey dude, the only way we can prove all these stereotypes and stupidness wrong is we’ve got to get together and do some stuff just to show people.”

The crazy thing was, people was like, “We were afraid to say this, but we’ve been waiting for this. I wanted you to collaborate with him and do something nuts.” The first thing we did was on YouTube and I was driving my car going through some beats and he’s rapping to them. Somebody posted it on YouTube and all of a sudden we got over 300,000 hits. I’m like, “Dude, the world is paying attention to this. This is nuts.”

The next thing we do, we’re all sitting in the studio and it’s me, Juvenile, Mystikal, one of Juvenile’s guys Skip and a young guy I know, the Show. Mystikal has this idea of like, “I’m gonna do a cipher. People are scared to do it, nobody does this shit no more. I’m just gon’ rap.” I’m, “Get the camera, dude.” So the cameraman comes along and we’re filming it and put this on YouTube and it has 40,000 hits within a week. I’m like, “Dude, this is nuts. People really wanna see this happen.”

This is funny, and I’m gonna say it because Mystikal had been in jail for six or seven years. He never knew YouTube existed. He never knew what email was and all that. I remember when he first came home he was, “Man, I wanna do some music.” I said, “Gimme your email address.” He gave me his home address. He came back after one of his guys told him he was like, “Look dude, don’t laugh at me but what the fuck is email?” (laughs) I was like, “Wow dude!” It’s crazy that you can go somewhere and people just keep you from everything that’s going on.

The YouTube thing, like I said, he was like, “There’s something, I forgot what it’s called.” He went through some alphabet – B-Tube, C-Tube, D-Tube – “but we on something and people looking at it like it’s crazy and leaving comments.” I was, “Damn dude, you have been gone for some quite some time and they kept you away from some shit.” But it showed him the power of what the internet can do with everything that’s going on.

Until this day our biggest power… he still has this old format of songs, he really don’t believe in, “I’ve got to give this away? I’ve got to put these songs out. I’ve got to set this up, figure out how to promote it. I’ve got to get a bus from city to city to shake hands and kiss babies and all that.” I’m like, “Dude, it don’t happen like that no more. Just put it out there, let’s see what happens.” But he genuinely has a fear of doing it that way because he didn’t grow up that way. Even for me, I had to adjust to the internet. I thought the internet was the devil. Man, they can find out everything about you! But it was a collaboration that needed to happen.

Noz

Have you got any of that stuff with you today?

Mannie Fresh

Wow, let me see if I have anything...

Audience Member

I was wondering if there any vocalists, MCs or singers, past or present that you’re dying to work with? Anyone you think would really go with your sound?

Mannie Fresh

Man, I think they’re all dead. All the greats are gone. Nah, I’m playing, but there’s a lot of people I grew up on I wish I would’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with. Presently, I would say Kanye. I had the pleasure of meeting Kanye when he was just being discovered, one of his first spots was Cash Money. I remember him coming over with some beats and I was, “This guy’s got something.” But they passed on him. I was, “Damn, this dude’s really got something, he’s gonna be something.” At the time his friend was this guy Mickey, and Mickey wound up staying with Cash Money for a while. That was one of his best friends and a lot of the beats that were on the Jay-Z album at the time, they were for Mickey. What he was doing at the time, I was like, “Dude, he’s got something.” Just to see him growing, where he’s at right now, that’s definitely one of them. Musically, that could go on forever.

I could do a song with Rick Springfield to Rush, it could go on and on. I just love music. Guns N’ Roses – I met them in California and just the knowledge to have them come over to you and be like, “Dude, I love your music, we’ve been listening to it forever.” I’m like, “Dude, shit!”

Some of the earlier pioneers, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five – The Hot Boys were based on Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, just putting four MCs together to see what they came up with. Tons and tons of people, I could go on and on.

Trevor Horn, all of us just met him yesterday and he gave us all a stab at “Relax”. To me, that’s the highlight, that’s what all this is based on. That feels good to do something like that and to meet. I never knew what he looked like, I knew his music. I don’t even think he even knows the way he contributed to hip-hop, some of the things he’s done. I could’ve sat in here all day and asked him questions, “You know what? You’re the disgusting dude. Stop, just stop!” (laughter) That could go on and on.

Audience Member

There must be lots of rappers and producers who pass you their demos wanting you to check them out. Are you really gonna listen to them? What do you do with them?

Mannie Fresh

(sighs) I’m not gonna lie to you, I’ve got a lot of CDs that’s coasters. It depends what’s the approach, how do you come at me? A lot of people will say, “You can hook me up, just take this and you can hook me up.” “Well, I’m trying to do the same thing you do – sell music.” It’s almost like saying, “Why give me your CD? If you’re good at what you do my opinion shouldn’t matter to you. Just keep on pushing at what you do.”

You can catch me on a good day and sometimes I will listen to some things. But most of the time I’m not. I’m human just like anybody else. Most of the people who approach me are producers and they’ll be like, “Hook me up!” “Well, why wouldn’t I sell my beat first? I’ve got a meeting with Universal but I’m gonna present your beats instead of mine?” So you’ve got to think about what you’re asking people sometimes to do. From the rap aspect, if a rapper gives me a CD, a lot of the time I listen to it, but, it’s what’s behind it.

Most people will go, “You can hook me up, you’re about to go in the studio with Nelly. Give it to Nelly.” Well, that’s not really what he hired me for. I’ll probably never get hired again if every time I go in the studio I’m like, “Dude, check out all these CDs somebody gave me.” (laughter)

Audience Member

First of all, I just want to say thank you for contributing to my party life for middle school and high school. Yes, yes. I really appreciate it. (applause) I’m from Miami, Florida, so you had a really big influence on my upbringing as far as hip-hop goes. Looking back on your whole career, as far as the business thing goes, something similar happened to me in my career early on. What are the three main things that, beside your love for music, kept you on your path, as far as creating?

Mannie Fresh

Wow! Balance, family. I’d definitely say balance first. Sometimes you can get caught up in so much. I know from looking around here that there’s a real love for music. You can get caught up where it’s just music, music, music all day long until you forget everything else around you. Some things are important, like family, eating. (laughs) There’s a world outside of it.

Listening. Be open to everything. Listen to everything. Don’t just think just because I represent hip-hop all I listen to is hip-hop. Try rock, classical, everything you can put inside your brain and it can process, listen to it. You never know where your next great idea will come from.

And good people – definitely have good people around you. I had my dad constantly tell me through good and bad days, “It’s gonna be OK, just do what you do.” If you’re in this just for the money, the get rich quick scheme, then shit, you better quit and sell drugs. Everybody in the world wants to make music, it’s saturated, it’s nuts right now. You have to be passionate about it and you have to have patience. Sometimes it might happen for you really quickly, but most of the stories I know, it was people who had patience. They were patient and passionate about it.

And I know you said three, but last but not least, you have to learn – learn, learn, learn – to believe in yourself. Everybody who does music has somebody telling them, “You’re wasting your time, turn that off. Get a regular job, I don’t know what you’re gonna do, but get a regular job.” Soon as you start believing in yourself that’s the beginning of success. When someone can tell you something ugly and it means nothing to you and you’re like, “I don’t even hear you right now,” that to me is so important. Nobody looks at this as a real gig, as a real job. They think you like what you do and everybody hates that you go to work and you like what you do. Most people hate what they do, so of course, they hate what you’re doing. So definitely believe in yourself. (applause)

Audience Member

I’m just wondering about your workflow. Do you usually put drums down first or do you come up with basslines?

Mannie Fresh

I’ve got a crazy way of working. I’ll get up in the middle of the night if I’m thinking about something, record it in my iPhone or write the hook down in my notes. I really don’t have a process for how the song happens. I’m the dude who’ll go to Guitar Center and play with everything until they put me out the store. “Dude, stop, just stop touching everything.”

People put titles on you, you make music of a certain caliber so you’re not supposed to be in Guitar Center with your discs saving songs. I’m in there creating stuff, saving songs and walking away. (laughs) I’ll go in there and be like, “What’s new? What’s the format? Let me take one of them.” And when I’ve finished I save it and go home. (laughs) So I really don’t have a format, it’s whenever it hits me.

Even right now, I DJ from my iPad. A lot of people are like, “You don’t use turntables?” “Yeah, I use turntables, but I’m sick of carrying all that shit.” I’ve got some cool things I can do with this. I’m not one of those people who hates technology; I think it benefits you some ways. But I really don’t have a format.

But I do do my drums before a lot of things. I’d say I do start off mainly with drums. A lot of mine are based on hits. I’ll find some hits and turn them into notes or whatever. Put some chords around them. But most of the songs are driven by the drums first. (applause)

Noz

Anybody else? OK, give it up for Mr Mannie Fresh.

(applause)

Mannie Fresh

Thank y’all, thank y’all, thank y’all.