DJ Toomp
By Greg “Gate$” Davenport
From Murder Dog volume 14 #1
A lot of people think of you as the guy who produced a lot of T.I.’s biggest hits, but your history goes way back farther than that.
I started DJing in ’82. I was a little seventh grader. Brought a lot of Hip-Hop shit to the “A” when a lot of people didn’t understand what DJing was. I had got a cassette from my cousin in Brooklyn and I just heard a DJ just start some stuff over; the minute I heard it I already knew how it went.
I never saw nobody
do it before, but I just knew what it was. I didn’t have the proper equipment,
so I started doing a lot of tricks with songs with the pause button on the tape
deck. That was in ’82. I used to lie to people and tell them I had a studio and
everything. You were going by DJ Toomp back then?
Toomp always been my neighborhood name. My sister named me that. Everybody found out I could DJ [so] they started calling me DJ Toomp. Next thing you know I started doing parties. I started getting famous from that. Just from DJing and playing music I learned how to actually create it. The first artist I produced was Raheem The Dream. That was in ’85. We was in high school. I toured around the Southeast. We’d do shows and I’d come home early the next day or come home the same night, but never really been on the road for real. I was DJing at a step show at the civic center, MC Shy D stepped to me. He was like “Yo, I heard about ya.” When I got with Shy D and Luke the rest was history. That’s when I started seeing the world. The first show I did with Shy D, that was in Nassau, Bahamas. That was just the beginning. I did a lot of stuff with Clay D, Luke, 2 Live Crew. I did the New Jack City soundtrack, the song “Dick in the Dirt”. The song “Shake It”, which was the biggest song I did by Shy D. Me and my man Mike Fresh did that. Toured with NWA. Toured with Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Steady B. Everybody you could think of that was happening in ’87, ’88 we was on the road with them. Rob Base, Too Short, everybody.
How did you really get head on into this production thing? I remember reading an interview where you said you kind of had to turn down a lot of production because people just thought you were a Bass producer?
From the Miami scene I did a lot of Bass music. After a while things started slacking up down there. I started hearing stories about LA (Reid) and Babyface done moved to Atlanta and started a label and whoopty whoop. After selling a lot of beats, some for $1,500, some for $2,500, I might’ve got on the plane with about $13,000 in cash. … I got back up here it was a lot of equipment I was using from other people so I had to buy my own equipment when I got back to the A. My whole goal was to get with what I heard about – Organized Noise, JD, Dallas. They really ain’t let me in. They respected me for what I had done, but I really had to prove myself. They must’ve forgot too. Back in ’85, the stuff I did for Raheem The Dream, that wasn’t Bass music. That was just Hip-Hop music. We was really mimicking what New York was doing at that time. It took a minute. I really didn’t get too much work until I ran into Lil’ Jon. That’s when he had Who U Wit. I hadn’t had nothing on the radio for a while. When I did that Lil’ Jon “Shawty Freak a Lil Sumtin’” and like two or three more songs on that album, that’s when my name started getting back into the system again. Then all of a sudden Jon get a deal. I decided then that every quarter I wanted to have something on the radio. I ran into T.I. My homeboy from the neighborhood introduced us.
Then you started working with T.I.?
That was in ’97. I booked some studio time. I think me and T.I. might of cut about four songs. Next thing you know, I meet a guy named Jason Geter who was working at Patchwerk [Studios] at the time. He was just an intern down there. I was coming through there, but I noticed every time I come I see Jason Geter reading. I’m like ‘Damn, must be a smart kid. Yo man, where you from?’ [He said] “I’m from Jersey. I just moved here.” I’m like ‘What side of town you on?’ [He said] “I’m in Ben Hill.” I’m like ‘Damn, I’m stayin in Ben Hill too.’ So I say ‘Do you rap? Do you do beats?’ He said, “Nah, I just want to get into management.” I was like ‘I got somebody who’s going to be your first client.’ So I told T.I. ‘Yo, I got this dude Jason I want you to meet. He might want to be your manager.’ I introduced them to each other and it went from there. What I saw in T.I. is something that every producer, especially a good producer, is dreaming of. An artist who’s got the swagger, who can rap his ass off, the look, already getting hoes. That’s when you know you got a star. Next thing you know we got a deal on LaFace. So, I did accomplish my mission. After blowing up all the T.I. stuff, I decided to crank up my publishing company,Toompstone/Zone Boy Productions. I got my man Kino on the team. He’s a beast. It’s getting deeper. I got a few R&B producers on the way too.
What’s going on with that Zone Boy Productions and N-Zone Entertainment?
I figured since I’m swimming in the pool I might as well go in the deep water, especially when you know how the pool is built. I can fund my own situation, but of course I would love to have some type of distribution deal situation that I would know that would really help or benefit my situation. The game ain’t like it use to be. You use to be able to have four distributors in each region that you can deal with. The industry – they changed that. Luke, Pretty Tony, Rip It Records, Magic Mike, a long list, man everybody got so rich and the majors had to get in and grab it by the throat. They really couldn’t change the rules or the laws, all they did was diminish our distribution. Luke and them was going gold and platinum without major distribution. They never put that on TV. They’ll show all this other shit on VH1 and all them stations, but they’ll never go into our real roots. I hate to see when they do something in the South and deep as they go is Jermaine Dupri or Outkast. You got Atlanta, but you got a whole other movement that was going on in ’86 in Miami. All this Bass music, all this stuff you hearing Ciara do, it’s a dude named Pretty Tony, Tony Butler, who produced a lot of that shit. He was an independent label also – selling a gang of records. Like Egyptian Lover in the West Coast. They don’t want us to know that story because all those guys were getting rich back then. Getting money without the majors period. When they diminished those independent distributors they killed the game.
Who are some of the artists you’ve been working with lately?
I can definitely cover N-Zone. We got Suga Suga, Jovan Dais, we got my boy SS on the squad. On the production team we got Kino. Outside of that, I got five on Jeezy so far. Got his first single “I Luv It”. Got “White House” on Rick Ross’ album. That’s the next banga. I hope they do a video to that. “Mouths To Feed” on Ludacris’ new album. Hopefully, we’ll be starting on the next T.I. joint. This time I’m hoping to get more than two songs on the album. Thank you. Come on nigga, let’s go to work. Stop playing man. How ya’ll gonna keep getting two songs from a nigga?
Ha, ha, ha! Maybe you’re getting too expensive?
Nah man. It’s all good. Let me tell you straight up and I definitely want you to put this in the magazine and this for everybody, every artist I fuck with and I love and everything. Come on man, when niggas give you a budget that’s your chance right there to take care of everybody with that budget. Like a month after this album coming out, you as an artist is getting thirty to fifty thousand to sixty, sometimes seventy thousand a show. How the fuck can you trip because a nigga trying to get – the budget need to be wiped the fuck out anyway. Niggas be trying to have shit left. Like why would you try to have something left out this? You getting ready to get rich on the road. If we keep getting that kind of treatment, me and about five other top producers are going to put our heads together and come up with a union to the point where when you start performing our songs on stage, we gonna get at least a hundred dollars a song for each show that you do. All you got to do is start a union. That way you got somebody in every city. Come on, you get fifty thousand dollars a show, why when you do “You Don’t Know Me” or “Let’s Get Away” Jazze Pha can’t get $100 off that night? Instead of us waiting on this royalty check, holding our breath, that they still ain’t really gonna send on time. Damn, ya’ll niggas get paid way before us off shit we produce. So, why would you complain if these songs are the reason you’re getting $60,000 for being on stage for 45 minutes. Why the fuck would you complain about this million dollars these folks giving you to chunk off of to get this album done. “Man it’s gonna come back on my statement!” Nigga, you gonna make $4 million on the road!
