We never had any intention of making records. John was destined to become a genius computer programmer, and I was going to enrol in law school. It was just something we did for fun while we were in college.
Did the duo actually set out to change the music industry, or did they just stumble into prominence? The latter, claims Simpson, with estimable modesty. Then they hit upon a project that became the landmark Paul's Boutique. They applied their sampling skills with considerable success on Tone Loc's Loc'd After Dark (1989) and Young MC's Stone Cold Rhymin' (1989). Angel dust was just an additional whacked-out reference that also fitted with what we were doing." Boutique Soundsĭuring these first years in the recording studio, the Dust Brothers were predominantly engaged in dusting down, or perhaps dusting up, old favourite records, and giving them new leases of life. The state of hip-hop was pretty minimal at the time, and we were doing these very textural, tripped-out, almost hallucinogenic remixes of things. While we were working for Delicious Vinyl, many people had been describing our music as 'dusted,' and that's where we took the name from. At the time we were bringing back music that no-one was listening to any more, so we wanted the name to be an anachronistic reference to things of the past. "King and Simpson are pretty common names," explains the latter, "and we decided that we'd better come up with a cool name. Reputedly it's a reference to angel dust, the drug, but this turns out to be only an aspect of the truth. When their name was about to appear on a record sleeve for the first time, on a single by Young MC, the duo decided on the name the Dust Brothers. Tone-Loc and Delicious Vinyl invited Simpson and King to help out producing records and setting up the company's studio. He had just signed to the newly formed record company Delicious Vinyl, who in turn were busy setting up their own studio.
King and Simpson's hip-hop radio show caught the ear of rapper Tone-Loc. I met John in 1985, and he joined me in putting on the show and putting together tapes." I'd been doing a college radio show since 1983, during which I played hip-hop music, and I began playing the music I was putting together in class on the radio show. That was my first opportunity to really do computer sequencing and work seriously with samplers. In 1986 I enrolled in a local community college, where I did a class in electronic music. When I moved out to California in 1978 there was no hip-hop or rapping culture here, so I lived on cassettes sent to me by friends.
I grew up in New York listening to black music, and I was there for that famous summer in the mid-1970s when hip-hop started. "My musical background came from collecting records," recalls Mike Simpson, "and sort of studying the sounds and arrangements and the way they were recorded.
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The Boat was opened for commercial use in 2003 based around a vintage Neve 8028 desk from 1969 and a Pro Tools HD3 system, it has become one of Los Angeles's most happening studios (see boxes). Meanwhile, the Brothers have also been developing a state-of-the-art recording studio. Simpson and King later contributed to the same artist's Midnite Vultures (1999), and their relationship continues to this day with the brand-new Guero, which appears to set them on course for another round of limelight-hogging in 2005. Perhaps the most influential and artistically successful of all, however, was Beck's 1996 album Odelay. As a staff producer for Dreamworks, Simpson also produced Eels' Beautiful Freak (1996). Since then, Mike Simpson and John King's career has taken in a diverse succession of projects including Technotronic's Trip On This (1990), the Rolling Stones' Bridges To Babylon (1997), Hanson's Middle Of Nowhere (1997), Santana's Supernatural (1999), Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory (2000) and Tenacious D's eponymous album (2002). Paul's Boutique was awash with innovation - it reputedly featured the first recorded instance of intentionally added vinyl crackling noises - and it turned the Dust Brothers into the Godfathers of sampling. The musical masterminds behind the album were the Dust Brothers, two hitherto unknown college whiz kids who had created the musical backings from collages of their favourite recordings. In 1989, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique single-handedly redefined a whole musical generation's approach to sampling. In their first ever in-depth technical interview, John King and Mike Simpson explain their unique way of making records and open the doors of their remarkable LA studio, The Boat. The Dust Brothers changed the course of record production with a new approach to sampling. The Dust Brothers: John King (left) and Mike Simpson.
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