history of the disc jockey (anecdote related)

novocaine132

it's a square book,
good details though.

Each DJ worked to keep their exclusives exclusive, and so took up, probably from Herc, the practice of soaking off or obscuring labels to evade tune detection. Charlie Chase, DJ for the Cold Crush Brothers, perhaps the biggest rap group of hip hop's pre commercial days, has many a tale of such happy competition.

"One time I did a party and Flash turned up, and I played this beat that he never heard. So what I did, on one record I wrote 'For the name of this record go to turntable two,' and you see this on the label and it's spinning. So Flash went over to the other turntable to look and the other record said 'Get off my dick!' He was laughing, man. Those were the days."

The record (Do I Love You?) became nothing less than legendary. People wanted to see it, touch it, even have their photo taken with it. "I used to go to gigs and people used to ask me to get this record out of my box so they could take a photograph of it," laughs (Jonathan) Woodcliffe.

Woodcliffe sold it to Kev Roberts, who held on to it for the next ten years, until Tim Brown, one of Roberts' partners in the Goldmine reissue label, paid him ??5,000 for it in 1991. However, the plot thickened when another collector, Martin Koppel, somehow unearthed another copy in 1993. This one sold to a collector in Scotland in the summer of 1998 for an amazing ??15,000. The track was reissued by Tamla Motown UK in 1980, and even copies of the reissue now fetch upwards of ??40.