DJ Shadow talks ‘Endtroducing…..,’ radio career, and more with John Morrison

Released in fall 1996, the debut album from DJ Shadow, Endtroducing….., is rightfully considered a landmark in sample-based music. Constructed from a wide array of sounds spanning jazz, funk, metal, hip-hop, psychedelia, and beyond, the album is a sprawling, musically diverse patchwork. By painstakingly taking dozens of small sound bites and arranging them into new compositions, Shadow, real name Josh Davis, made beats that melded these genres, sonic textures, and eras into a gloriously unified whole. Pulling inspiration from legendary rap producers such as Pete Rock, Large Professor, and DJ Premier—as well as hip-hop radio mixing—Endtroducing….. wasn’t a diversion from hip-hop: it was a love letter to it. Ahead of his Oct. 9 Franklin Music Hall performance, we talked with Shadow about mixtapes, radio, and the art of record digging and sampling.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

John Morrison: You’ve thoroughly discussed Endtroducing….. over the last 30 years, but I wanted to start a few years prior. Talk about the tape you made, Hip Hop Reconstruction from the Ground Up, and walk me through the process—what you remember about putting that mix together?

Josh Davis: So let’s see. It was 1990. I graduated high school, and the town I grew up in—Davis, California—has a university. I didn’t have interest in going to college, but my mom was a teacher, and she basically was like, “It’s not an option for you; you have to get an education.” So you always read old stories about people like Rick Rubin doing all these things in the dorm room, starting a record company and all that, and it was a little bit similar for me. I have vivid memories of sending my tapes to The Source [Magazine] and record labels like Tommy Boy, Wild Pitch, Profile, and all the kind of big indies back in the day and getting responses and messages on the answering machine I shared with my roommate. 

So it was really then when things started to kick into place, and the tapes that I was sending out were more or less audio resumes.

The Source really gravitated towards this mega mix that started with Ice Cube’s “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.” It was a combination of that stuff and some of my little four-track beats where I was finding breaks and samples and making primitive tracks. Then I did a few remixes using acapellas from records, so I made a pretty cool one with [Eric B &] Rakim’s “Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em” that The Source mentioned in their write-up.

JM: Were you contacting these labels to offer what you can do for production, or were you hoping to get a record signed? Like a mega-mix kind of thing signed? What was your hope for sending this stuff out?

JD: Initially I wanted to get serviced. I wanted to get records mailed to me because I was broke. I was working a minimum-wage restaurant job, and it was hard to afford all the product coming out. So, I was hoping to get serviced, and that worked. But especially after I was featured in The Source, I touted that with one of the big radio stations in the Bay Area called KMEL. When all the labels found out I was doing mixes for KMEL, the floodgates opened. 

JM: Putting together mixes for KMEL, were you live mixing on the air or were you putting together a full mix at home that they would then play?

JD: Starting in late ‘84, I listened to [a Bay Area station] called KSOL. That was a long-standing soul music station going back to the ‘60s, and it was the first station that I was able to receive where I lived that was doing mixes on the air. But over time, I discovered those were all prepared on reel-to-reel tape in advance. Usually they were one take, but it was a little too risky to do some of the scratching and some of the stuff they were doing live on the air, so all the mixes on KMEL that I’m aware of were pre-prepared, and there were DJs doing some pretty labor-intensive, kind of off-the-wall stuff. You know, in the Baltimore area you had the Numarx guys [the ‘80s DJ crew who recorded the original version of Milli Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True”] doing incredible mixes circa ‘85, very much patterned in the kind of Latin Rascals-style of pause mixes and a lot of edits and stuff, so it’s something that was happening in a lot of different places.

JM: When putting together a mix like that, were you using reel-to-reels or was this like a four-track thing where you’re putting stuff together that way? 

JD: That’s a great question. Being super broke, I didn’t have a reel-to-reel deck, but one of my mentors was a guy named Alex Mejia. He was doing mixes on KMEL, and I liked his mixes.

They weren’t as frenetic as some of the other guys, but I thought he was just a dope, straight-up DJ, and he had good taste in records. When KMEL gave me a shot, they basically were like, “Call Alex Mejia, and he’ll help you figure it out.”

I would basically make the mixes on my four-track cassette recorder, then take my four-track recorder to his dad’s crib in Alameda. And we would bounce it down in real time,

I’d have to mix it in real time down to reel-to-reel.

JM: So fast-forwarding a little bit, you’re doing the radio mixes, and eventually you start doing the Hollywood BASIC stuff where you’re doing remixes. Were they sending you DAT tapes with acapellas? How are you putting together those remixes? 

JD: I did the Lifer’s Group remix [“Real Deal”] totally on spec, and I did it in the same way that I did mixes for the other labels, like the Rakim remix, and I did one for Latee [“No Tricks”] on Wild Pitch. Tommy Boy had a contest with a group they had called TKA, but anyway I just took the acapella off the 12-inch “Give Your Love To Me” like the promo single and just put it over my beats. Then I sent it to [journalist and record executive] David “Funken” Klein, who ran Hollywood BASIC, and at the beginning he had a very sort of middle-finger attitude towards the industry, and he was just like, “yeah, I like you because your shit’s all fucked up,” and you can tell it was stitched together in some crazy wizard’s basement. It doesn’t sound like everything else, and really what he meant was it sounds raw and crude and probably just like all ideas and no frills—like no sheen or cleanliness to it. I remember loving the group Poor Righteous Teachers, and I really wanted to do a remix of this record, “Shakiyla” and I did it. Funkmaster Flex was A&Ring at Profile at the time, and I remember he was definitely on the other side of the fence where it’s like, “We can’t put this out; it’s not clean enough. It’s not hitting; there’s no bottom.” That’s when I realized I’m never going to get where I want to go until I can get some real equipment. 

JM: So, at that point, was it just a matter of you just diving into the MPC, learning and kind of mastering it that way? What were you trying to do with this machine, and how did you go about working with it? 

JD: First and foremost, I was hanging out more and more with some of the guys from [Northern California hip-hop crew and label] Soulsides, Chief Xcel from Blackalicious, and Asia Born [now known as Lyrics Born]. We were really invested in [record] digging culture, trying to one-up each other. I really looked up to Premier, Large Professor, and Pete Rock because I always felt like they were going outside of Ultimate Beats and Breaks and the tried and true, known records. We wanted to add to that dialogue.

JM: Thinking about the singles that led up to Endtroducing….., like “In/flux” and “What Does Your Soul Look Like,” they were these longer songs, and the arrangements had elements that would drop in and out and all of that stuff. Where exactly did that come from? Were you pulling from some prog-rock stuff, or I think records like Isaac Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul with the long 10-minute tracks? What were you pulling from to make those arrangements real complex and dynamic like that?

JD: I would say one of my biggest influences was Art of Noise. If you look at all their 12 inches there’s probably like 15 different versions of the “Beat Box” 12-inch, different mixes. They put these three over here, and then they swap this out over here, and the same with “Moments in Love” and “Close (to the Edit).” Every time I turned on the radio and heard a DJ in the mix, there was some new version, and I just love that. It definitely was kind of part of the template for me. But then also you can even go back further to “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” You remember [The Beastie Boys’] “An Exciting Evening At Home With Shadrach, Meshach And Abednego?” It has all these crazy mixes on it, like remixes where they just throw the kitchen sink in and everything.

JM: “What Does Your Soul Look Like?” I stop short of even calling it a tune or a song, but it’s like a suite of music. There’s a lot for you to chew on as a listener, a DJ, whatever. 

JD: Yep. Well, there are also some other behind-the-scenes reasons for that—basically “What Does Your Soul Look Like?” is Endtroducing….. version 0.0, or however you want to say it. I thought I was making my album. And one of the guys at MoWax, you had James Lavelle, who was sort of the creative, and he had a guy named Steve Finan, who was the business side. He basically said, “We think you need another single before you drop the album.” And they were like, we want to put this out as a single. And I kind of thought, “You want to put out a 32 and a half minute single?” It did exactly what they wanted it to do in terms of taking me to the next level critically in the U.K. and sales-wise, but then, it was like, “Okay, start over and make the rest of it.”

JM: So once you have that single out and you’re making this record, you’re thinking, “How do I figure out how to make the rest of what would be Endtroducing…..?” Were you digging and collecting source material as you went along, or were you thinking you’d pull from what you already have?

JD: Like any collector or collection, it kind of takes on a life of its own. I went on a tour. My first tour of Australia was in late ‘95. That was something I couldn’t miss even though I was basically at the halfway point of the album. But I really wanted to experience that and kind of get out of my own head a little bit and just live. So, I did some digging out there, and there are a couple of samples that made it onto the album. At the same time—starting around ‘94, I guess—is when I started going in the basement of [Rare Records in Sacramento] on the cover of Endtroducing…... Anytime I hit a mental roadblock working on the album, I would grab my backpack and turntable and go to Rare Records. That’s where the main sample from “Stem/Long Stem” and the female vocal samples on “Midnight In A Perfect World” came from. So it was really just like seek, and you shall find. Whatever you’re looking for, the basement would provide. That’s how it felt.

JM: Once you made this record and it was out in the world, what did you feel?

JD: It was ups and downs and stages. I mean, initially, the person I wanted to love the record was James Lavelle because he bankrolled the record and introduced me to the U.K. He took me under his wing and put me on in the U.K. It was important to me that he liked it, and then when he did, that felt good. Then when the press liked it, that felt good. When I came back home to Davis—the same crappy apartment and the same problems and struggles—that was really weird and hard at the time because nobody back home knew who I was. The album wasn’t out in the U.S. yet, and that was the era when there might be three or four months between when it comes out in one territory and another. So it was kind of a head fuck, really, because you sort of go from feeling like you’re somebody and you’re part of a community, but you don’t live there. You got to go home at some point, and then when you go, you’re just sitting there going, “Well, is that all there is?”

I remember one of the coolest things. Actually, it may sound funny or kind of petty, but I remember being at a bookstore. I was on a road trip looking for records, and I happened to stop in a Barnes & Noble or something; I think it was to buy a Goldmine or one of those record-collecting newspapers, and I happened to see URB magazine. You remember URB magazine?

JM: Yes, a thousand percent.

JD: It was like 2003, and they had their readers pick the 100 best albums of all time or something. I remember being intrigued. And then I got to number one, and it was Endtroducing….. I remember just being, like, “Damn, that does feel good. That genuinely feels good.” Tastes change, and things go up and down, but 30 years is crazy. I’m just happy that it still continues to be a source of inspiration for people.