By Lisa Hix — When Dave “Davey D” Cook got into hip-hop in the late '70s, he didn’t see himself as an archivist. A teen growing up in the Bronx, New York City, he was digging through his mom’s records looking for a great funky beat to rap over. At the time, hip-hop was only five years old. Cook was inspired by Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican immigrant who is widely credited with starting the genre as a Bronx party deejay in 1973. Herc revolutionized music with...

Secrets of the Blue Note Vault: Rediscovering Monk, Blakey, and Hancock

By Dean Schaffer — When I was a jazz DJ in Philadelphia, Blue Note was always my favorite label. Naturally I had a lot of jazz-musician friends, and many of them told me that they’d played in a lot of Blue Note sessions that were never released. I started to keep a list of these sessions in a little notebook, and in 1973 I started banging on the door of Blue Note to find someone to show it to. My inquiries fell on deaf ears until 1975, when I met a guy named Charlie Lourie, who had just joined Blue Note. He...

Your Turntable Is Not Dead: Inside Jack White’s Vinyl Record Empire

By Dean Schaffer — When the White Stripes got signed, Jack White created Third Man Records as an insurance policy. With the White Stripes and, later on, Whirlwind Heat and the Raconteurs, the bands only licensed their music to record companies—the labels didn’t really own it. So in case things went sour, Third Man was a way for Jack and the bands to be able to maintain ownership of their masters and their records. You hear so many stories about that damning phrase, “in perpetuity,” on contracts. Jack was...

Stephen M. H. Braitman on the British Invasion, from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols

By Dean Schaffer — I was a Hollywood kid. My father was a TV and radio editor in the San Fernando Valley, and he allowed me to do my first writing to review concerts and shows for the newspaper. But as a younger kid, I really hated rock ’n’ roll music and pop music, and I disliked the Beatles and all that. I have a younger sister who was a total Beatlemaniac. She started getting into the ’60s scene, but I was more influenced at that time by my father’s interest in classical music. I was, however,...