It Ain't Where Ya' From, It's Where Ya' At

When San Jose native and hip-hop aficionado Peanut Butter Wolf first started Stones Throw Records in the late 1980s, it only took a few years for him to make a name for himself as a hip-hop producer and a motivated, independent businessman. Peanut Butter Wolf, along with others like Hieroglyphics and David Paul with his Bomb Hip-Hop label, also helped put the Bay Area on the map as far as hip-hop goes. The music and culture are still strong in the Bay, but the industry that helped establish the region's legendary status is now dwindling, with many of the game's players, including Peanut Butter Wolf and Stones Throw, having moved to Los Angeles.
"I moved for a little bit of both business and personal reasons," explains Peanut Butter Wolf, who is rolling around Los Angeles running some errands and chatting into his cell phone. "As far as the record label goes, I thought it would be cool to try something different. I mean, the Bay will always be my home - San Jose, specifically, 'cause that's where I grew up - but there's no real music industry there. I lived in San Francisco for a few years and I love that city to death, but with all the dot-com'ers and crazy bad parking situations and a messed up cost of living…you know. But beyond all that, most of the artists that I work with all live in LA, and it is important for me to be near them."
Things have changed for Peanut Butter Wolf since he picked up and moved south - obviously things change when relocation is a factor - but as a man who makes a living in the music industry, Peanut Butter Wolf and Stones Throw Records are a lot more susceptible to changes in the business climate than they are to changes in locale, and the label seems to find success regardless of where it's based.
"I think changes came in the music industry in general, things that no one could foresee, like the Internet pretty much wiping out singles sales, mostly CD singles, which are almost non-existent now, but even vinyl singles aren't what they used to be," laments the independent label owner and producer. However, despite the declining popularity of singles, Stones Throw found great success throughout the first two years of the new millennium by releasing 7-inch vinyl singles almost exclusively, from artists like instrumental hip-hop band Breakestra, neo-jazz outfit Yesterday's New Quintet and rappers like Charizma.
"With the 7-inches, it was almost something I did as kind of a joke. I didn't really take it too seriously at first, it was just something different, but it ended up giving me the freedom to put out whatever I wanted to. I felt like the audience for the 12-inch albums that Stones Throw put out kind of expect a certain type of record, and I didn't want them buying a 12-inch thinking they were going to get some straight-up hip-hop and then get something else like a funk record by Breakestra or something like Captain Funk-A-Ho." Captain Funk-A-Ho - whose track "My 2600" is Stones Throw's most eccentric recording - is actually PB Wolf's roommate, creates all the artwork for Stones Throw and did the Captain record as a joke. So even though it's cool, and Peanut Butter Wolf wanted to put it out, it's not exactly the kind of high quality stuff that the label is known for. "I knew that, if I put that on a 12-inch, people would be like, 'what the fuck?' So that was the first 7-inch I put out."
The fact that singles sales barely account for a drop in the proverbial bucket that is the music business' revenue didn't seem to have much of a negative effect on sales of the Stones Throw 7-inch series. In fact, says Peanut Butter Wolf, the biggest hurdle ended up being that the retail side of the industry had all but faded 7-inches out of stock.
"When I first started putting them out, no stores wanted to carry them because they didn't have any place to stock them," he chuckles. "They had racks built for 12-inch records, but not for 7-inches - even though for genres like punk rock 7-inches are pretty much the way to go. So I was worried at first that my stuff might get filed with punk rock, but now there are so many hip-hop 7-inches coming out that the record stores have no choice, and now have a little space for them."
With classic releases like Rob Swift's seminal DJ album Soulful Fruit plus revered releases by artists like Lootpack and producer extraordinaire Madlib, Stones Throw is known almost exclusively as a hip-hop label, though a lot of the music that Stones Throw has been releasing over the last two years, like Breakestra and Yesterday's New Quintet, is not necessarily straight up hip-hop.
"When I first started buying records, I was buying soul and funk, rap - Sugar Hill Gang, Curtis Blow and that kind of stuff. But when I started Stones Throw, I told myself it was going to be a hip-hop label, and hip-hop only. If you had asked me back then if I was going to release funk records or stuff like that, I would have never guessed that I would," explains Peanut Butter Wolf, who hesitates for just a second when asked what made him rethink the label's initial mission statement. "It might have happened the first time I saw Breakestra play live. Their music is very hip-hop-based, but it's a live band and I figured that the audience who liked the Stones Throw stuff would probably also like Breakestra. So I put that 7-inch out."
Breakestra, and much of the other music that Stones Throw has released over the last couple of years owe more to the roots of hip-hop music than to the current direction of the genre as seen in much of what now passes for hip-hop on MTV and urban radio. Peanut Butter Wolf's point with these releases wasn't to point out what's wrong with mainstream rap, but rather to serve as a subtle reminder of where it all started.
"Mainstream hip-hop culture has just gone in a different direction. I think a lot of it is still pretty creative, but if you're talking about it from a traditional standpoint, hip-hop was founded on people trying to find the good breaks, and it was founded by people who were sick of the straight up disco that was ruling the club scene. They wanted to take things further, but back to older music. Those were the days when DJs were covering the labels on their records, and you were known as a good DJ by how crazy your record collection was more than by your personality on the mic."
And that's the aesthetic and culture that first sparked Peanut Butter Wolf's interest in the music and culture of hip-hop. Not only the mastermind behind his own label, Peanut Butter Wolf is also a noted producer whose solo opus is a legendary nod to the past present and future of hip-hop called My Vinyl Weighs a Ton, the title of which is a reference to a Public Enemy song called, "My Uzi Weighs a Ton." Since the album's release in 1999, however, Peanut Butter Wolf has gotten away from making his own music.
"As a producer, I've really taken a break since I put out My Vinyl Weighs a Ton. I guess that, when I moved to LA, I just stopped making beats. It was something that I just felt like I'd proven myself with, and I was happy with what I had done, but it just wasn't me anymore. I guess I was also a little discouraged when my album came out, because I expected it do to better than it did. I mean, I got a lot of new fans out of it - a good quality of fans, but not a good quantity," he says with a bit of a sigh. "Sometimes I have to go to the message board on the Stones Throw site just to remind myself that there are still people who care about what we do."
Indeed. The fact that the Stones Throw 7-inch series did as well as it did is testament enough to the label's ability to appeal to fans of hip-hop and related music. Before the 7-inch series, though, Stones Throw built its reputation on releasing straight up hip-hop records, a reputation Peanut Butter Wolf plans to revive in 2003. To that end, Stones Throw has upcoming releases from Mablib and MF Doom (KMD), Madlib and Jay Dee (Slum Village), Wildchild (Lootpack) and many more.
"I'm really excited now because I haven't put out hip-hop in a while…not any full-length records, anyway," says Peanut Butter Wolf as his demeanor perks up. "Finally we're getting back into releasing rap albums, which is still the love of my life."

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