I did not think that pop radio would play that record, but I knew in my gut that rock radio would play it, and clubs would play it. Did I make “Rise” with that in mind? No, I made it more with funk in mind. So I was very much aware of black records, and the hip-hop scene in New York. I’m a white Jewish kid, but for some reason, when my friends were listening to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, I was listening to Con Funk Shun. In the studio, it was, “WOAH!” So that became the hook for the Notorious B.I.G. So I had him do it two more times, and each time I did it, I changed a little bit of the delay on the Echoplex, and I changed the pitch a little bit - when all three of those were going, it sounded great. When we played back the original basic tracks, I thought, “Boy, we need something going into that breakdown section.” I went home and I fooled around on my mini-Moog synth, and I had an Echoplex at the time - so the next morning, when Chris came in, I said “Can you play a G-Major chord going into the break section?” So we did that and we ran it into my Echoplex, and it sounded really cool, but it wasn’t cool enough. Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, that slow Memphis funk type of thing. And when you sit in the studio, sometimes when something’s magical, it’s like, “Holy shit! This motherf–ker…” A bell rings, y’know? And at that tempo, even before the trumpet came in, it just sounded like deep, dirty, funky… like the records I liked listening to. And I sat in that control room, and Herb came in and went, “What if we slowed this thing down?” And I said, “Well, let’s try it.” I think we slowed it down to about close to 100 beats per minute. And we started to run it down, and it sounded really good. So we got this groove going up in the studio, and it was originally fast - about 125 beats per minute. So we worked up those songs, and at the same time, I said to Andy, “What if we came up with a song?” And Andy and I came up with the song “Rise.” So I think we worked up ‘A Taste of Honey,’ maybe ‘Spanish Flea,’ and ‘The Lonely Bull.’ And my writing partner at the time, Andy Armer and I had a little four-track studio in my apartment. So I called Chip Cohen the next morning, and I said “OK, what do you need?” He said “Do me a favor, work up a few Tijuana Brass songs, and do them the way you want to do them. Your uncle touches people with his trumpet.” He said, “Just do your thing - change the frame around the picture. George Harrison, Paul McCartney touched people. He said “Look man, there’s very few people in the world who can touch millions of people… as a kid, I worked and traveled with Ray Charles, and he touches people. And Billy said something to me in that hallway that really turned me around. A friend of mine was out in the hallway - Billy Preston, the keyboard player. That night I was at the old Record Plant studios on third street. So I was doing demos, and the A&R guy at A&M Records at the time said, “Would you want to do disco songs of Tijuana Brass things for your uncle?” And I said, “You know Chip, I don’t feel great about working with Herb.” And when I started to do it seriously, like I said, I changed my name, and I got my first job - which was to do demos for Columbia Records, for a group called Con Funk Shun.
Back then I was 11, in ‘66, packing records in the shipping room, and I loved being around there. Herb and I were always close, family-wise, and as a kid, I always worked at A&M Records.
I hated as a kid how everywhere I went, I’d tell them my name, and they’d go, “Oh, are you related to Herb?” So at that time, I was going into doing funk music, and I randomly picked the name - some girl was like, “Oh, you’re pretty badass.” And at that time, I was about 17, and I went “Boy, maybe I should call myself Randy Badazz.” And I did.
But when I was about 18, I really wanted to be a musician, and at that time, Herb and A&M were giants. His words have been condensed and edited for clarity. Here, Randy tells Billboard about his memories of composing and recording “Rise,” why “Hypnotize” was the first sample request that he actually cleared, and how Biggie’s song has helped his own song live on through the generations.
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