Andrew Kelly "12 RTD started as a Meth Album/ OUATIS started as a Priest album
http://watchloud.com/this-is-what-th...-has-heard-it/
This Is What The Mystery Wu-Tang Album Sounds Like From A Guy Who Has Heard It
Weeks ago, I got a call from a guy named Andrew Kelley who’s been working with Wu-Tang for years. As an A&R/creative director, Kelley began working with the Wu on the 2009 Chamber Music compilation. That led to a relationship with Ghostface Killah, and Kelley ended up being one of the main creative forces behind 12 Reasons To Die and 36 Seasons, as his team would come up with the fully-fleshed out plot lines and Ghostface would fill in as the main character.
Kelley and I met over beers, and while there were plenty of topics he couldn’t discuss, one thing he constantly brought up was the Wu-Tang album Moroccan producer Cilvaringz was working on, Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. Cilvaringz might not be an instantly recognizable name to Wu heads, but in the early 2000s RZA met Cilvaringz, who was running a Wu-Tang forum back then, and became impressed by the producer. Ringz was eventually inducted into the extended Wu family and in 2007 he released a solo album, I. More importantly, however, he was gathering forces and funds to put together a complete Wu-Tang album with every member – the type of LP hardcore Wu fans were hoping for.
That is the album we’ve now been hearing about in the press, of which only one copy exists. RZA has announced a plan for the album to be kept from being sold commercially for 88 years, while other Wu members like Method Man have expressed direct disappointment over the publicity.
There’s a very detailed breakdown of the mysterious breadcrumbs that Cilvaringz has left on the internet about the album throughout the years, and it includes a brief blog post from Kelley himself that’s two years old. But to get a better understanding of the project, I spoke with Kelley about what the album sounds like. Kelley is gearing up for his producer Rodney Hazard to drop his debut album on March 31st featuring AZ, Rome Fortune, and others, but here he opens up about Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, what it’s like working with the Wu, and why problems amongst members might never be solved.
WL: You started out working at Rawkus, correct?
Andrew Kelley: Yeah, that was my first job out of college. I went to Rhode Island School of Design and Rawkus put an ad out saying they were looking for a junior designer, so a friend of mine saw it and said I should do it, because I was DJing and had a radio show at the time but I was into design. So I reached out to them, they hit me back, said they liked my portfolio, and gave me an assignment. They were like, “We want you to design the back of a 12-inch single, and we want you to incorporate one of our artists.”
So for whatever reason in my head, because there were all these rumors that Jay Z was gonna sign Big L, and at the time they were working on Big L’s stuff at Rawkus. This was after he died, of course. So I decided to make a back cover that was Big L and Jay Z doing an album together and it was coming out on Roc-A-Fella. I put a Roc-A-Fella logo on it, I made the songs be like “Hell Up In Harlem,” the artwork was these dudes waiting to get into the Apollo, and I sent it in.
I get a phone call a week later from Black Shawn, the head A&R there, and he’s like,
“Hello? This Andrew Kelley? Yo what the fuck is this? They trying to steal our artists? Tell me what the fuck is going on right now!” I’m like, “Yo yo wait, they told me to make some shit up, I made the whole thing up!” They’re like, “What? We’ll call you right back.” Then they called me back and told me they wanted me to come in for a meeting, and that’s how I got the job. Apparently I mailed it in, and someone opened it and they saw it on someone’s desk and snatched it up like, “What the fuck?” They thought Roc-A-Fella had taken the deal.
How did you begin working with the Wu-Tang?
I was a designer for what was at the time Koch Records – they had put out Jim Jones and Unk. Now it’s E1, I’m still there. AZ had just come out with that album [The Format] and there’s a song on there featuring M.O.P. where Lil Fame has this line, “I’ll leave you burnin’ like hot grits on Al Green’s back.” I thought it’d be really dope if we remixed it with an Al Green sample, so I went to Bob [Perry] and Dan Green, the A&Rs, and said, “Give me the acapellas and lemme show you what I can do.” I’d always been DJing, so they gave me two albums worth of AZ acapellas, and I took those and remixed all of them with Al Green samples. I went out and bought like 30 Al Green records and sat there and chopped it all together, presented it to them, and they were like, “Yo, this shit is dope.” A lot of those records were records RZA had sampled for various Wu-Tang songs, so it had a very Wu sound.
I played it for AZ and he loved it, he hosted it. We put it out as The AZ Memphis Sessions. And Bob, seeing that, was like, “Yo, I’m gonna start working on this Wu-Tang Chamber Music album. You should come to the studio and provide some ideas and see what happens.” So that’s how it started, being in the studio with those guys, and then being like, “Hey, you know…we should add drums to this” and slowly working my way into it, to the point where it was just me and the engineer working on stuff. Then Lil Fame would come in and tell us to tighten the drums up and stuff. Chamber Music led to Legendary Weapons and it was one thing after the other.
How was working on Chamber Music?
My job was to bring in records that the band could replay and then we could sample and turn into beats, and at the end of the day RZA would come in and executive produce it. So we had made all these songs, he came in at the last minute, said “Do this to this one, do that to that one,” and then we’re working on one record and I’m like, “We should add this sample here,” and RZA’s like…”Yeah, let’s try his idea.” And it just started from that. I was in my mid-20s. It was crazy.
It got even crazier when I got flown out to California to work on [RZA’s] soundtrack [The Man With The Iron Fists]. I’m sitting there telling RZA we should do this and that. As RZA has gone through his career and become more popular and more successful, more doors open for him. So he’s not the type of guy to ignore that shit, he’s gonna explore all these different opportunities, and those opportunities have led him away from making the music and he hasn’t really had the time to put together these albums, but he still loves the music and still has a love for hip-hop in general, so he still wants to be involved with these things. So it’s like alright, you guys make the actual stuff, he’ll come in and orchestrate it and put it together, and that’ll be it.
RZA is an idol of mine and I think it’s admirable that while he’s the most successful member of the group, he continues to put the burden on himself to bring the Wu back.
Because I feel like he’s the only one who wants to.
Right, and it starts to feel like he’s just doing it for himself. Was there ever a time when you were working with the camp that the Wu was all together?
Yeah when we were working on the soundtrack, there’s a song called “Six Degrees of Boxing.” I had always done individual sessions with the guys, but that session was 9th Prince, Cappadonna, Masta Killa, GZA, Deck, and I think U-God, so it was a bunch of them together. And there was just an energy in the air. Just to see them all come in, everyone’s hugging each other up and excited to work. To get that energy, you gotta have ‘em all together, and if you’re not doing it that way, I just don’t think the music’s there. It’s not as strong. You can say that about 8 Diagrams and A Better Tomorrow. There’s definitely something that comes out that’s great when they’re together, instead of just emailing verses or coming in after everyone’s done their parts. It’s less of a connection.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Wu-Tang fan that liked A Better Tomorrow.
Yeah…I’d heard about half the beats a year ago when RZA was going around to all these studios, and I was just like man…that’s not what the fans want. And then at the same time, I’m talking to Cilvaringz and he’s playing me what he’s building out in Morocco, and that is exactly what the fans want. When Ringz made that album [Once Upon A Time In Shaolin] he went into it like, “I’m gonna make the best Wu album for the fans.” He really went above and beyond to do that, and it’s incredible.
Is it a Cilvaringz album or a Wu-Tang album?
Originally he was building a Killah Priest album, and that’s when – I don’t know if it was an inspiration or an investor or whatever you wanna call it – someone came in and said, “Let’s do a Wu-Tang album.” So he spent six years getting verses from all the guys and putting together this huge record. Really, RZA didn’t have anything to do with it. It was just [Cilvaringz] spending all this time, and I would be in the studio with the guys like, “Have you guys heard what Ringz is working on?” And they’d be like, “Yeah, that’s never coming out,” because he’d been working on it for years and years. Changing the beats up, constructing all these crazy interludes…it shows. The music is fucking incredible. It takes you back to Wu-Tang Forever. It sounds like a lost album. It’s really fucking good.
Are all the Wu-Tang members on there?
All of them are on it. Ol’ Dirty Bastard is on there. I don’t know how [Cilvaringz] got the verses, but they’re unreleased verses. Then he went and got all of Dirty’s crew, Buddha Monk and all those dudes, and they’re all on a song together. Everyone from Shabazz Disciple to Killa Sin, all the guys who were affiliated with the Wu and were dope, they’re on there. Raekwon’s on there like 12 times, Ghost has a verse rapping about the origins of the mask and why he started wearing it. Just crazy records. Cilvaringz called me up one day and was like, “I’m gonna play you a couple songs on Skype” and I was just blown away, so he kept playing me stuff and it’s like two CDs worth.
I asked him when it was coming out because I needed the album and he said he needed to finish it. At that point he hadn’t come across this idea of the album as art yet, so we talked again and he told me the idea and I said, ‘It’s bold, it’s genius, but as a fan I’m kind of pissed because I want to listen to this in my car. I don’t want to pay $20 to go to a museum and sit next to some sweaty dude with headphones.’
So what’s the status of the album?
I think it’ll go to this auction house. It’ll be a tragedy if the fans don’t ever get to hear it. Because it’s really some of the best stuff I’ve heard from them in years. [Cilvaringz] would go to them like, “That’s not enough energy. I want you to rap like this,” or “I need you to rap about this on this verse.” That’s how we connected because I was doing the same thing on 12 Reasons To Die and 36 Seasons.
On 12 Reasons To Die, Adrian Younge is in California, Ghostface is in Staten Island, and I’m here in Brooklyn. So Adrian is sending in the music and we’re hitting it off to Ghost like, “Here’s what you’ve got to say.” I remember he did like half the album and just did like a verse and sometimes a verse and a hook on each beat, so then I gotta sit there and be like, “Alright, you said this, this and this on the first verse, so on the second verse you should do this.” Perfect example is “Rise Of The Black Suits,” where he’s explaining the situation coming up in Italy as a young don taking over the game, and I was like you know what? This is Italy in the 1960s. A black man selling cocaine is taboo at the time, so I told him you should get into that. And then on the next verse, he’s like “Selling drugs is taboo.” So Ghost would do his pieces, we’d do the arrangements, send them to Adrian and Adrian would be like, “That’s dope. That’s what I was thinking.”
The main difference between 36 Seasons and 12 Reasons To Die was on 36 Seasons, we had this freedom. Any ideas we came with, we could do ‘em. Whereas with 12 Reasons, Adrian was like, “I’m gonna do it, I’ll do it,” and he just never got around to it. But we wanted to add skits and shootouts to make it real cinematic, which we were able to do on 36 Seasons.
The backstory with 36 Seasons is we wanted to do another Ghostface album, but we didn’t have any music. We were supposed to do a Method Man album before 12 Reasons and for various reasons, it didn’t happen. But at the time I was meeting with producers and getting hit off with beats, and my goal was to make the best-produced Method Man album ever. I was getting beats from everybody and I was ready to sit down with Meth with a hundred beats I had narrowed down from 400.
So we came up with the storyline about how Ghost has been gone for nine years, he comes back, his girl is with a crooked cop. What’s gonna happen? So this comic book writer broke it down into 10 sentences, each of which constituted a song, and Bob was like alright, go to that huge batch of beats you’ve got and pick the ones that you think matches each sentence. So I picked the beats and Ghost starts recording his verses, and while I’m on vacation I’m listening to what he’s recording and sending extensive emails about what he should say. Then once Ghost finished his parts, we had all these holes to fill, so we were like shit, let’s get AZ and Kool G Rap and Pharoahe Monch to fill in the gaps.
How did Ghostface feel about A Better Tomorrow?
I can’t really talk about that. [Long pause] Let’s just say RZA, from my experience, his recording process for a lot of these songs is he makes a skeleton of a beat, and then the guys come in for various things. Some of the beats he thinks you should get on this and some of the beats you should get on that, so he’s got these skeletons with like five of the guys on it, then he’s gotta go in and trim it down to have only three guys on it. So he builds these songs but they’re not there, they’re just coming in, laying verses and leaving. That may have worked back then with Enter The 36 Chambers or Cuban Linx, but when the musical core isn’t as strong, it doesn’t strike, it doesn’t hit right.
You can say this – there’s a lot of stuff that was never resolved from the beginning, and I think a lot of it has to do with RZA doing all the music and then coming in and doing smaller pieces. The producer gets 50% of every song, but back then you had like six, seven guys on a song, so however that stuff gets resolved…I don’t know. I don’t know if it’ll ever be resolved.
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Originally Posted by JEM
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