While speaking to former Too Poetic DJ Freddie “Kaos” Cox recently, he let it slip that there was an unreleased album the group had submitted to Tommy Boy in 1989. Long story short, I’ve been sitting on the interview for the past month and a half waiting on the LP, called Droppin’ Signal, to reach my inbox. Here it is for the first time on the Internet or anywhere outside of Wyandanch and Tom Silverman’s file cabinet: stream all 14 tracks off the lost album, produced by Too Poetic and Nate Tinsley, below.

A word about Too Poetic: before founding the Gravediggaz with Prince Paul, Frukwan and Rza, rapper Anthony “Poetic” Berkeley, a.k.a. Grym Reaper, was a member of this Wyandanch trio, with dueling DJs Kaos and Woody Wood. The group’s lone release was the 1989 Tommy Boy single featuring the house-y “Poetical Terror” on the A-side, and the better known “God Makes Me Funky,” co-produced by the late Paul C., on the flip. In this interview, Fred/Kaos recalls the history of this short-lived but memorable group, and his late partner Poetic, who died of colon cancer in 2001.

JS: How did you hook up with Poetic?
Kaos: We lived around the corner from each other. Wyandanch used to be one big…everyone was interchanging, this one’s down with this one, that one’s down with that one. At one point we had a group where Rakim was in it.

JS: The Love Brothers?
K: The Love Brothers was a separate group he was a part of but before that there was this group with him and these guys G-Stro, Grandmaster Chas, Teddy Ted.

JS: What was the group called?
K: I think it was the Almighty Force? We had slight beef back in the day over a name. ‘Cause I was Wiz MC and Rakim used to be the Kid Wizard. I had all kinds of names. Grand Wizard D, King Poet, the Grand Wiz MC. Me and Ra used to beef a little. He wasn’t a biter but when he was with Love Brothers, he used to say, “The L baby the L,” and I’d say, “You got that from DLB in the Fearless Four.” I was always that one criticizing. If you did it wrong, I’m gonna tell you. I’ve been deejaying since I was seven. Before I came out here, I was in the Butler projects on Webster Avenue in the Bronx. Red Alert remembers me, surprisingly, to this day. There was a minute when Kool Herc was out here in Wyandanch. His brother, K One, lived here. Greg Ski, another old school pioneer from the Bronx who moved out here, lived on Washington Avenue in the Bronx, and so did Daryl “Chill” Mitchell. Me and Chill go that far back. Back then, families with two working parents said, “We gonna get a house on Long Island, we gotta get out of the Bronx.” Me and him ended up in the same place.

JS: So you rapped also in addition to being a DJ?
K: Originally, I was with two other guys named Spank and Scully. Spank and I rhymed, and Scully was the DJ. Scully got locked up. Me and Poetic always were friends so he said, “Why don’t we do something together.” His whole family was musical, and played instruments. His brother, Eddie Goalfingers, is a good producer now. When I got with Poetic, we decided that since I was into producing beats and deejaying, I’d let Poetic do the rhyming. And I watched him evolve from what I would call a corny MC to super-talented. He was ahead of his time. Poetic used to make beats like Timbaland made for Missy Elliott. What I mean is he’d make a mistake with the drum machine but he’d like how it sounded, so he’d keep it. And here I’d come, my mind in the park in the Bronx, and I’d be like, “Oh man, that sucks, you can’t put that out.” 15 years later Timbaland is putting out beats just like it. I tipped my own cup over I don’t know how many times.

JS: I never got the idea of a group with two DJs and one rapper…
K: That was the trick with us. I did both. If you ever saw one of our shows, it was like how the Disco Twins used to do routines and get on each others shoulders and all kind of tricks. That’s what me and Woody did. We’d rip it up at shows, doing routines. I had a thing where I was deejaying and rhyming at the same time, like somebody that plays the piano and sings. A lot of people out here knew me for that. A lot of DJs can’t catch these breaks fast enough. I would do the deejaying and rhyming at the same time, and then get out there with Poetic and do routines. We were called the Devastating Duo, just me and Poetic rhyming and Woody was the DJ. But I was like, “Woody, you aint deejaying right so I’m gonna be the DJ.” And then, “Poetic, you ain’t emceeing right so I’m gonna be the MC, too.” That’s why we were Too Poetic. There was two DJs, and Poetic.

JS: How did you end up with Tommy Boy?
K: DNA from the DNA and Hank Love [radio] show put out the [”God Made Me Funky/”Poetical Terror” 12″], and Tommy Boy was really like the distributor. I actually took the same demo to Tommy Boy and two weeks later we took it to the Hank Love and DNA radio show. They had this “Make it or Break It” segment, and it got a good response from phone calls. So DNA said, “I wanna sign you guys.” He takes the same demo to Tommy Boy and all the sudden we got a deal overnight. He called me two days later. That “who you know” syndrome was killing me.

JS: Did you have other songs that you recorded?
K: [The demo] was about five songs, and “God Made Me Funky” and “Poetical Terror” were the ones they picked. “Poetical Terror” went over well overseas. “God Made Me Funky” did okay. When I originally produced that beat, it was hard, the samples were raw. I liked it better [than the version that came out]. Nate Tinsley worked on it and cleaned it up and then we had a chance to work with Paul C., who was doing stuff for DNA at the time for Super Lover Cee & Casanova Rud. By the time it was all done, it went from raw hip-hop to chiseled down. I wasn’t feeling it but people liked it.

So who made the original beat for that? I thought it was a Paul C. production?
K: I made the original beat with “[Synthetic] Substitution,” played it to Poetic, we recorded it, took it to Nate’s house, Nate added his part. We didn’t have the Marvin Gaye sample in it. The A&R at Tommy Boy told us to put that in. We went to Studio 1212 in Jamaica, Queens, and Paul C. cleaned it up even more and added the Marvin. And then it sounded too clean to me. Some stuff sounds good the way it is. But Paul C., he did something to make it sound hard again. I was like alright you got that one, but on the album things is gonna be hard.

JS: The video you guys made—was that in Belmont Lake Park?
K: Everybody says that. We shot it at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. But everybody thinks it’s Belmont ’cause that was right over near Wyandanch.

JS: Did you make those outfits yourselves?
K: We got those from The Gap. [Laughs] We bought three different outfits but once we used that one it was the signature. We wanted to bring back when crews dressed the same, not some baggy jeans and turn your hat backwards and do a show. We were trying to bring back that crew stuff.

JS: So after the single, Tommy Boy greenlighted an album from you guys?
K: We went and did the album at Nate Tinsley’s house. Woody kind of quit the group before the album, so it was me, Poetic and Nate. We didn’t go to a big studio like they made us do the first time, but we got the same product because Nate is a genius when it comes to recording. He got clean sound in a basement. Nate should have been beyond the level of Dr. Dre. Not only Wyandanch, everybody around [Long Island] was talking about Nate’s was the place to record. You don’t know how much stuff Nate got stolen from him. “Make the Music With Your Mouth, Biz” was a Nate track. Nate can play you the original demo. That was Groove B Chill’s song first. Biz took it and slowed it down. Nate was freehearted. If you said, “I need a beat,” he’d make you a beat. It wasn’t about, “Pay me, and sign this.” Nate loved music.

JS: On “God Made Me Funky,” Poetic is very straightforward and nothing like Grym Reaper. Was he starting to do the dark stuff like he would do with Gravediggaz yet?
K: No, he wasn’t. It was all happy, party. When we split up after we got out of the contract, he kept going into the city and trying to get it and get it. He was homeless for a minute doing that. He went homeless and that really took a toll on him. He hit rock bottom and that opens your eyes to really go deep, and that’s when he got dark. I guess it makes you strong to want it that bad. Tommy Boy basically jerked a lot of people. A lot of people may not know that Poetic from Too Poetic, Prince Paul from De La, Frukwan from Stetsasonic and Rza, when he was Prince Rakeem, were all on Tommy Boy.

JS: I had a talk with Prince Paul one time about the symbolism. How the grave was their dead-end contracts with Tommy Boy and they were actually digging themselves out, figuratively speaking, with the new group.
K: If you listen to Poetic before, and then in Gravediggaz, if that’s not evolving I don’t know what is. He evolved into a monster on the mic. He was always an MC that could come off the top but he just evolved where you’d be amazed at the wordplay. It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it.

Frukwan and Poetic @ The Good Life, 1994

JS: I heard him and his brothers were making records that were like Gravediggaz before Gravediggaz, though.
K: They were. His brother Joel and my brother used to be together like me and Poetic was together. I watched Joel evolve and get off the hook. They did demo tapes with this guy Jack Pope and a DJ named Pedro, from Amityville, and they was supposed to be the ones on Gee Street. They were the Brothers Grymm. I’m not sure what the falling out was between him and Pedro and Jack Pope, but Poetic turned into a monster that said, “Whatever I need to do to get on I’m gonna do, at anybody’s cost.” I’m happy to say he didn’t do me like a lot of people. A lot of people that played a part in that Gravediggaz thing got left in the dust.

JS: What was the reason Tommy Boy gave for not releasing the Too Poetic album?
K: The single didn’t do what they thought it was gonna do. We were trying to let our shows speak for us. But Tommy Boy sat us down and said, “What is your image? You guys don’t have an image. What’s gonna make me buy your record? When you see Latifah and her logo, you see Queen Latifah, you can feel Latifah, we can sell Queen Latifah. How can we sell Too Poetic?”

JS: Ha. So what was your answer to that?
K: We said, “Just like you can sell Big Daddy Kane.” [Tom Silverman] said, “We’re gonna put you guys on the shelf for a year and then try it again.” But we were like, “Hell no, let us out of the contract.” I guess that’s what they wanted us to do. Dumb us, who didn’t know anything about the music business, signed out of the contract, which freed them from owing us anything. We probably threw $50,000 down the drain. We did our part—we turned in the album. We thought we were gonna go put it out ourselves. We thought if you let it sit for a year, it’s gonna get old. But I can play it now and it’s not old at all.

TOO POETIC-”DROPPIN’ SIGNAL”

TOO POETIC-”OUT THE POCKET”

TOO POETIC-”THE SPEECH KEEPS FLOWIN’”

TOO POETIC-”I WILL REMEMBER YOU”

TOO POETIC-”POETRY IN THE MIDST OF KAOS”

TOO POETIC-”DO FOR SELF”

TOO POETIC-”GOD MADE ME FUNKY (REMIX)”

TOO POETIC-”THE MELT DOWN”

TOO POETIC-”SOUL SURVIVOR”

TOO POETIC-”I AIN’T THE ONE”

TOO POETIC-”MOTIVATION”

TOO POETIC-”AWAAY WE GO”

TOO POETIC-”RUFF SON OF A GUN”

TOO POETIC-”THE RHYME IS CRITICAL”