Author: Calvin R. Evans
Published: November 7, 2005
Tool: [ email ]
As a journalist, I get to conduct interviews with lots of people and they are always fun and entertaining. Yet sometimes, on those rare occasions, you get to do an interview that does not feel like an interview. Instead, it is more like a conversation among old friends. Check out the interview I had the pleasure of doing with the Persaud Brothers.
Manhunt: What’s up everybody. Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Today we’ve got Michael and Irwin Persaud of Persaud Brothers, Inc., Ozzie Gibson who is also with Persaud Brothers, Inc. and their long time friend, as well as my cousin, Shawn Stiebel. What’s up fam? (Everybody says what’s up)
Manhunt: I’ve got questions for the whole round table. I’ve got questions for you Michael, and for you Irwin and some for Ozzie as well. I’m gonna start off with you Irwin, I wanted to ask you to tell us about the early days when you guys were getting started in the industry. You started off doing parties correct?
Irwin: Yeah we started, kind of like you know, our first party was like a house party.
Manhunt: Ok.
Irwin: It was kind of like a fluke that we got into doing the events. It was in ‘90 or ’91 Michael?
Michael: ’90.
Irwin: It was one of those years. We had just recently graduated college and we were living in Brooklyn, me, Michael and another friend of ours. And we decided to have this New Years Eve party, and it was kind of like a spur of the moment. New Years Eve was coming up maybe three days from when we decided to do the party. Just between the three of us and my other brother Mark, we just invited people we knew and lo and behold we had like, several hundred people who showed up to our apartment. We were like “wow”, and a lot of the people we didn’t really know personally all that well. So that was kind of like the initial spark. Not so much as a spark to say we’re going to start a company, but a spark to say, “wow, we can do something. Maybe we can do this as a little side thing to make a little extra change.” ‘Cause we knew some other people who at the time were promoting pretty big parties. So we felt like, if we could do that in just a matter of days at our own apartment, we could rent a spot and really go all out and try to promote it and make some money at that. A little extra rent money if you will. You know?
Manhunt: No doubt, no doubt. I hear that. There’s nothing wrong with havin’ that (laughs).
Irwin: So basically that’s how we started doing events and it kind of grew and grew and, you know, Ozzie can tell you, he was there when we first started doing parties and he was doing stuff too. Remember you and Rohan Thompson was doing stuff on your on right Oz?
Ozzie: Yeah we had a little management joint, Wylde Chylde.
Manhunt: Wylde Chylde. I remember Wylde Chylde (laughs)
Shawn: I still got the t-shirt (laughs)
Ozzie: You still got that?
Shawn: I still got it.
(Ozzie Laughs)
Ozzie: It was me, Al Gary and Rohan Thompson when we started that. So when Mike and them was doing the parties I was like yo this is all right because most of the girls at the parties had jocks. So they were the chicks that had some money. So I was like if I can get in with them chicks I’m with it. So when they was doing that, and then me and Rohan, we was working with Mark Persaud. He was working with a record label, at RCA and he said yo I need to get some acts in here, and plus at the time he was also working with the sub label deal. It was crazy. So he said he needed somebody to come in and listen to all the demos. So me and Rohan would come in there on a Thursday, Friday and Saturday and listen to like five, six crates of demos. It was crazy.
Manhunt: I remember back when you all were doing Wild Chyle and you Rohan were working with Lavabre right.
Ozzie: Yeah Lavabre. (Everybody starts asking “who?”) That’s Al’s cousin. Yeah we were doing stuff with Lavabre and we were hooked up with Bryce from Groove Theory at that time. We were trying to do some stuff with Bryce.
Manhunt: OK.
Ozzie: ‘Cause at the same time, the first party we did for Wild Chyle was the one at the Sound Factory.
Michael: When KRS-ONE beat up PM Dawn.
Manhunt: (Laughs) Oh yeah, that was ya’ll!
Michael: Yeah that was our party. That was our first joint. That was our first party. It was on MTV. We never got our wreck for it, but that was our party. Hip Hop history joint.
Manhunt: (Laughs) I ran with Kris for a minute back in the day. Kris is a real funny dude.
Ozzie: Who KRS?
Manhunt: Yeah.
Ozzie: Yeah, he’s gangsta with it yo. He’s a good brother.
Manhunt: Yeah. He’s a good brother though.
Ozzie: I got respect for his MC’ing skills and what he was talking about, but we didn’t know what was going down that night until after. It was mad funny though. I don’t care.
Manhunt: Yeah I can’t front. It was kind of comical.
Ozzie: That goes down in hip-hop history. But anyway, that’s how that whole thing started with us. When I was in junior high and Mark was in high school we were at a party in Leveritt’s…I think it was Leveritt’s house…
Shawn: It was Leveritt’s house.
Ozzie: Ok Leveritt had a party at his house. That night Mark said, “I don’t care what any of us do, I want all of us, I don’t care if you’re a garbage man, mailman, whatever. I wasn’t all of us to come together to form a big company.” And he said “if ya’ll don’t do it, I’m gonna start it. “ And he did it. That was the start of Persaud Brothers.
Manhunt: Wow.
Michael: I don’t remember that, but it’s a good thing you remember that type of stuff.
Ozzie: I remind him of it. I always remind him on that.
Manhunt: Now Mark also spent some time with, he was the President of Qwest Records right?
Ozzie: Yeah Mike can tell you about that journey.
Michael: That journey! That was a nightmare. A detour.
Manhunt: (Laughs)
Shawn: (laughs) He said it was a detour?!
Michael: It was a disaster.
Manhunt: What happened?
Ozzie: What didn’t happen.
Michael: Exactly, what did not happen. So just to give you a background with Mark and then how I got involved more directly with him at Qwest. Mark kind of led the charge and then Irwin and I jumped in and said we needed to form a company, a business. And it kind of launched in its inception from just the parties. We said to Mark that we needed to jump into this music game, because we felt there was just not enough brothers in the business aspects if this industry. That was the one the we said we needed somebody to do, and Mark was the dude to do it. He ended up getting that position at RCA at the same time that started to build our marketing company, which essentially was an outgrowth of all the parties and promotions we were doing with the events. So this was somewhere around 1994, 1995. Somewhere in the mid 90’s, right?
Ozzie: It was really around ’93, ’94.
Michael: Yeah, I guess around ’93, ’94, ’95. At around that time I was working at Vibe Magazine where I helped with the launch of that publication. So all this stuff is going on, but we’re trying to feel our way around what we are trying to do and how we’re trying to set our stuff off. It kind of lead into working Mark’s relationships in the business, at the same time me, Irwin, cats like Ozzie, Rohan, our company was almost as big then as it is now because we had a coalition of people helping us build the business from the beginning. And some of these people had jobs and some didn’t but we used to hold meeting every Wednesday night up at RCA in this conference room where they did all the listening called the Dog House. And after hours, like 8 pm when the office was quiet we would work in with our crew like fifteen deep. (Ozzie agrees). We would have a meeting about what we were trying to do and how we were going to set up our company. And that went on for almost a good year right?
Ozzie: Yeah, because I think the first marketing promotion thing we ever did was for Vibe magazine with the launch of the magazine, because I remember we had the posters.
Michael: No it was the Freaknic.
Ozzie: The Freaknic, and we had a van and we had one of those big posters of Snoop and one of Treach. And we were going around giving those out and letting people know Vibe was coming. (Michael agrees) That was the first joint we did. That’s when all the arguments about what was going to be the next thing in video, the next hottest thing in movies, the next hottest thing in magazine to jump off.
Michael: So to kind of move forward, Mark is at the same time progressing forward in his career, which is music. And it was a key component to what we are trying to do as well. So he started moving up in the ranks and RCA. He helped structure a deal with Rifkin for Loud Records. Then he started doing strategy in new business deals, like structuring those label deals. But Mark intentionally told them at RCA that even though he was a lawyer and he had a business degree, he wanted to do A&R. He wanted to do the creative stuff. And they were like “huh? What are you talking about?” It surprised them because he wasn’t really on that track, but he forced the issue and the President of the label at that time…Joe Gallante said he would give him a position doing A&R. And he started overseeing projects like SWV, in fact his intern at the time Rob Walker brought in the Neptunes with some of the first stuff they ever got put on. If you look back at SWV’s first album you’ll see a bunch of tracks that the Nep’s did, and they’ll give him credit that he was one of the first people to put them on, but it was Mark’s assistant Rob Walker who really discovered these dudes.
Manhunt: Wow.
Michael: And Irwin wrote the contract for him to manage them dudes. Irwin was in law school at the time, so he wrote up the contract and the whole nine. So Mark started progressing and he got tapped by Quincy, really Rifkin was the one who hooked up the relationship with Quincy, but Quincy basically said “Look I need a cat to come out to LA and run my whole entire A&R department. And that was in like ’96. So we were always thinking ahead, so we said well as Persaud Brothers we were steadily building our company and by ’96 we were still in the early stages, but we did want to have a presence in LA because our intentions are to mix it up, not just in music, but in film as well. So we figured let’s get out to LA, and uncle Q was providing the ticket. Mark was going to move out anyway so we said two of us needed to go with him, just to be there to watch his back and also work with him on the label, so me and Kelly went with Mark. And he brought us in with Qwest, at first as consultants and then eventually we started running the marketing for the label for about a year and a half. Mark went in there as the head of the A&R, I forgot his exact title, like Executive Director of A&R, but within a month or two months there was a woman, I forget her name, who was appointed as President of the label and clearly wasn’t qualified to be in that position. She got lucky because Quincy was restructuring the label and the guy who was President before got bounced or broke out I can’t remember the circumstances, and all of a sudden this woman just popped up. And I could just tell she could not do it. I told Mark to just watch and wait, I knew it. I said she is going to get bounced, I am guaranteed that they are going to pull you up. I went down to Mexico for a conference and came back Mark said, “Yup, I am President of the label.” And this happened within about a month or two from when Mark moved out to LA. So then he ran the label for about three years and then he put Kelly Hiliare and me as his marketing people. And the reason why I said it was a nightmare was because it was a messed up situation basically. The kind of situation where you’ve got a parent company, which was Warner Brothers, because Qwest was a boutique label and was a joint venture between Quincy Jones and Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers was going through a shakeup. A couple of years before that they had gotten rid of all of their rap stuff basically, they just blew out the whole Death Row/Interscope thing, remember (Manhunt affirms). All the stuff that came out, Ice-T’s craziness and they didn’t want to deal with anything that had to do with gangsta rap. So that was a mess, which I think was a mistake obviously looking back on it. And then you’ve got this major label that, back in the ’80’s and early ‘90’s had all the biggest acts in the world. The Madonna’s, the Van Halens’, at this point in 1996 they weren’t saying nothing. They had no big acts. They were struggling. You could tell when you walked in the office it was like “Yo, ya’ll are like, scrambling to try to get some stuff out up in here.” Meanwhile, we were the boutique label depending on Warner Brothers to promote and market our stuff. They ain’t paying us no mind. So from a marketing perspective we’re forced to build relationships with not just Warner Brothers, but also with the distribution and the retail teams, and they’re not really checking for us because they are scrambling trying to find their own hit. They were like; forget a boutique label, you know? So that was a challenge. And plus, I always felt like Mark was never given the full authority to do what he needed to do. So I know, if this were done all over again, its messed up but just like any other cat that comes into a music situation and he’s in control they get rid of everybody. Its messed up, but now I know its done for a reason. Just blow everybody out and bring in your whole entire team. And I think Mark couldn’t do that because there was a lot of politics in play, Quincy relationships, and a lot of things that prevented him from doing that. Inevitably, these people weren’t Mark’s people; they never really had his back. So anyway, the biggest thing we thought we had, which was the Tamia project failed. Why? If you go back and listen to that album, I think it was a very good album that was produced, but as far as the execution of the marketing and getting out there it never went down. People dropped the ball. And really, I can’t blame it all on the whole situation, I blame some of it on us for not knowing about the whole situation we were dealing with. But the reality is, I think the whole thing was a nightmare. Mark stayed there for about three years and had some successes. In reality, I think we were ahead of the curve in terms of doing some of the things that you see the music business doing now like bringing in co-sponsored deals and bringing in corporate clients to do things in conjunction with the label which you see going on right now like crazy. We did a deal with Tommy Hilfiger, which nobody had seen done before. A branded label deal with a big fashion manufacturer. We did all kinds of different things that people did not understand. Like for instance, I put together that big party at the Peterson Automotive Museum. Unfortunately it was the one where Biggie got shot.
Manhunt: Right.
Michael: I produced that. It really started with Qwest Records doing a party for the Soul Train Music Awards, and Mark was like “I don’t have enough money to do this thing.” So I pulled in Tommy Hilfiger. I pulled in Tanguray. I pulled in Vibe. And all of them kicked in loot. So we did this whole big crazy production of an event, which ended up being one of the hottest joints of the year, which unfortunately like I said, ended up the way it did. But nobody was doing that type of stuff. And we did it a couple of times over. When we were promoting our soundtracks, I always wrapped in corporate sponsors. There were no labels doing that stuff. And it was only because of our marketing company background that I knew what to do because we had already started doing that with other labels. So I figured why not just bring it all in house at Qwest. To an extent, people did really understand, because I heard some little behind the back talking internally at Warner Brothers and Quest. It was like they were saying I was trying to build a company out of this situation. And I was like, “build a company out of this situation? I’m helping this situation.” You understand what I’m saying?
