“Wyandanch Week” (Really a once-a-week series of installments) continues with producer/engineer/studio head James Nathaniel “Nate” Tinsley. Eric B. & Rakim, Groove B Chill, Too Poetic, Sid & B-Tonn—if they’re rappers from out of Wyandanch, they did their first studio recordings in Nate’s basement studio. Moving into house music in the early ’90s, he founded the label, Island Noyze, releasing records under the name Nathaniel X and as part of the group Vil-N-X (pictured above). After releasing a single by rapper Brotha Life, “The Wreck’a b/w Show Taker” on the label, he picked up the mic for 1995’s The Brotha Life and X Man 12″ on another Long Island label, Undercover, and a virtually unknown LP by the late ’90s crew, Ghetto Dawgz. Nate recently relocated to Medford, but continues to work with local Wyandanch talent at his home studio.

JS: Everyone I talk to from Wyandanch says that any record or artist that came out from the area came through your studio at one point.
Nate Tinsley: Damn near everyone on Long Island, if we wanna go there. [Laughs].

JS: So how did you become the guy with the studio in his basement everybody came to?
NT: Well first, when I was a kid my whole family was in a band called Brown Sugar Incorporated. My mother played bass, my aunt played guitar, my uncle played drums. They were like a family funk band. So my background was with them, and playing jazz. There was no keyboard player in the family until me. I started playing in the high school band as the drum major, and at talent shows.

JS: How and when did you get the studio set up?
NT: At 13, I got my first drum machine and keyboard and a reel-to-reel four track. I used to hang out with DJ Maniack from Wyandanch and Stevie Blast, Rakim’s brother. I was more around Rakim’s brothers than him. One day at Maniack’s garage, Stevie had his saxophone and keyboard and Maniack had the turntables, a drum machine and a small beatbox. It was kind of like a small band playing. I deejayed from like 10 years old, but that was the first time I saw anyone put the keyboard with the turntables. I haven’t been the same since.

I was always hearing this music inside of my head, and I realized that day that’s what I need to get to these sounds that’s inside of me. I bought a keyboard, drum machine and a four-track from DJ Belal’s father. And I started doing favors. My aunt had a few friends who found out I had a setup and would give me a few bucks to put something down. A couple cats up the block heard I got something and they’d throw me $50 here and there. I stumbled into having my own little business. I never advertised.

JS: So you were running a commercial studio out of your basement in high school?
NT: Well, right at the end of high school.

JS: What did your parents think of people coming around all the time?
NT: My grandfather was the manager of my mother’s band and bought their equipment so when they gave up, that really heated him up. When it was my time, my grandfather made sure I kept doing it. [The studio] was at my grandmother’s house, not my mother’s. They gave me their basement. At first they were a little leery ’cause you’d get some thug-looking cats. But they were helping my grandmother with groceries, taking their hats off. They always respected the studio. Nobody tried to stick me up. And people started coming to me that got me in the industry. People always talk about shopping records but every deal I got came to me while I was sitting at home, and some guys said we need this or that. Poetic’s record [”God Made Me Funky”] with Tommy Boy was recorded in my basement in the four-track days with an eight channel board with tubes in it. It still sounded good.

JS: Was Rakim the first rapper that came to you to hook up a beat?
NT: Me and Rakim never happened the way the streets think it happened. He came to the studio one time to do a demo. Everybody around knew he recorded with me so they were like, “Why didn’t he stick with Nate?” It really wasn’t like that.

JS: I was told you did the original “Eric B. is President.”
NT: Just the roots of it. We did a demo and the beat was the “Funky President” beat. It was nothing extravagant. He disappeared for a while, he left school and he came back with the record and [schoolmates] were like, “That’s like the beat you did with him.” That’s how they felt. I never felt like that. He said, I want to use “Funky President.” Him and Eric B. came to the house, I laid [the beat] down, put it on cassette and that was the last I heard from him.

I worked with all of these cats from Wyandanch like S.I.D. and Poetic first. It seems like once they get in [the record industry] they never come back and see me. I’m a lay that out honest and clear. I did every demo Sid ever did before he got on. But when he did, I heard nothing from him until something happened up in Flavor Unit, and he couldn’t get anything going. That’s when I heard from him. Same with Poetic.

JS: You brought Groove B Chill into their situation with Uptown?
NT: Absolutely. I was working with these guys in Queens, Tony and Ulysses Sankitts. They had a company called OT Fresh Productions, and they already had the deal with Andre Harrell where they did most of the production on Uptown Is Kickin’ It. Tony passed away on me a few years ago. They needed one more group for their deal with Uptown, and I happened to be working with [Groove B Chill] at the time. I put a blue Maxell tape on of songs we worked on at my studio, and they loved it. In two weeks these guys went from the hood to basically a million dollar deal. They were supposed to have four consecutive $250,000 budgets. [The label] liked everything the way it was when we did it at my home studio. They just figured we’d go clean it up. But we ended up doing it over and blowing a quarter mil.

JS: I heard you worked with Biz, too, before he came out on Cold Chillin’?
NT: I don’t know where that one came from [Laughs]. We hung before he became Biz, but I never did anything in the studio with him. I remember one night he rocked this party at Belal’s house, but he was stuck in Wyandanch. And nobody gave a crap. So I took him to my crib, gave him some food, and made sure he got home.

JS: So who were some of the other rappers that came to your studio and did demos?
NT: Sid & B-Tonn, Poetic, De La Soul.

JS: This was before 3 Feet High and Rising?
NT: No, after they was established. They had their own studio, too.

JS: Why did they come to you then?
NT: Word of mouth. All the sounds these guys went to go get at big studios like Power Play, I was able to get from the basement. They’d spend all their budgets in these places. Groove B Chill would spend $175 an hour for the studio and then $100 for the engineer and you got cats coming late, with an entourage. I walked out of Chung King Studio on Groove B Chill one day. That’s the first time I ever heard Puff Daddy’s voice on the phone. I didn’t care about the money. I care about my spirit. That’s the kind of person I am.

JS: So tell me about this Too Poetic album you worked on that never came out…
NT: There’s stuff which almost sounds like it could play today. Some timeless material. [Poetic] was going through a lot of problems at that time. A lot challenged us, to not do that album. His family was moving away and he didn’t have a place to stay. Reggie Mays, who has the computer store in Wyandanch, looked out and let Poetic stay with him. Reg did a lot for Poetic. When we first went into the label, we’d talk to Tom Silverman and Monica Lynch. They asked that typical record label question: “What’s your image?” There’s gotta be a scheme or a gimmick. When you can’t answer that question, you’re in trouble. You can’t say, “I’m just a guy…” We got sent home to do sessions with nobody coming to guide us, and we came back to the second meeting and impressed them. Monica loved every cut. I don’t know what political thing went down but when we finished with the album they dropped them guys.

JS: You made a lot of house records after that…
NT: At that time, if you were doing house and you wanted to do hip-hop, you couldn’t get in. Todd Terry was the hottest house cat for a minute. He tried to do hip-hop, and it was like, “You better get back on that 120 BPMs.” I got in one way. My name was always Nate Tinsley or Nato on the hip-hop stuff but once I got into the house scene, I was processing at the Nation of Islam. So I was using Nathaniel X—that’s what they know me as on the house scene. Me and these guys, Karl Gray and Hans Vil, did our own label called Island Noyze based right out of Wyandanch. We put out about 15 releases. People said, “Oh, you a house head now?” I wasn’t ashamed. I’m a musician. I just finished three jazz albums. That was my first love. I’m like, “Why am I doing that last?”

Vil-N-X: Hans Vil, Karl Gray and Nathaniel X

JS: It’s live instrumentation?
NT: It’s all sequenced computer work but I give it a live feeling. I want you to have the effect of, “This is not a band?”

JS:Where did Ghetto Dawgz come from?
NT: That was something I worked on from ‘95 to about ‘97, with five other guys. We did this whole album, put together like a mixtape. I had a mixture of everything in there—reggae, R&B, hip-hop. We took this show on the road, and we’d do the whole album live with the skits and all. As if you played the album all the way through. This guy Martin Mitchell and Michael Walker, who sang “I Found Lovin” for the Fatback Band, had a label called Now & Forever out of Jamaica, Queens, and they had a situation with Warlock. I always would write rhymes and give them to other people but people said, “Why don’t you spit some of this stuff? You got the voice for it.” That was the project where I said, “I guess I’ll do it.”

JS: Who were the other guys in the group? Were they all from Wyandanch?
NT: There was Troy Dargan who went by Brotha Life. He passed away about three years ago. Everyone was from the ‘Danch except one guy we called Dollar Bill, from Bay Shore.

The late Troy “Brotha Life” Dargan

JS: Are any of those guys still doing music?
NT: The only one I know of is Metropolis. I set him up his studio he has now and we actually formed another [production] group called CPU.

JS: How many incarnations of the studio was there, I’m sure you moved out of your grandparents’ basement after a while, right?
NT: I went from my bedroom, using that as the studio with the closet as the vocal booth, first to my grandmother’s house and that’s when I started getting a lot of folks coming. And then I moved into a commercial building in Hicksville, from ‘94 to ‘98. But [the studio] wasn’t putting anything in my pocket. I had two kids so I said I gotta do something and went into the regular workorce for a minute. I managed Sam Ash Music in Huntington. I eventually built the studio back up at my grandmother’s basement. Now I’m doing it here in my own spot [in Medford]. I lost some people who’d just stop by like “I need a couple hours, can I just get this verse for a mixtape.” Some cats I see more now. It’s remote over here, so it feels like somewhere you can get something done. They like the drive out here.

JS: Are you still making hip-hop beats?
NT: I’m still doing my thing. I got some young guys coming out, like Rakim’s nephew. His sister’s son. He goes by J Readi, but I call him “The NepheRa.” I like how that sounds. His whole group is called Fly Guy Fam. They’re doing the legwork I like to see. I’m like Cus D’Amato with these cats. I got them into the old school way of doing things. You know, please be on time, be systematic.

Nate (R.) with J Readi

I talk to Sid more than ever now. I sent him tracks of mine that he’s shopping. Me and Belal are trying to get stuff going on with Chill. Chill actually called me, which shocked the shit out of me because he’s the biggest one that got away, and didn’t look back. If me, Ra and Sid would have done a Dip Set or a G-Unit, do you know where all of us would be? We all from the same thing but ended up going these separate ways. None of them got anywhere without seeing me first. But somebody [from Wyandanch] gets somewhere, they’re not looking back. I heard years ago Ra was gonna start a production team, called the Last Platoon. I’m always hearing everything everybody wants to do, but it’s always no response. They know I’m ready. I was the most ready cat out here.

I forgot to mention Freddie Foxxx, can’t leave him out. I knew Bumpy since I was a kid. He’s the one who hooked me up with Tony and Uly Sankitts, and then the Andre Harrell projects came. He was one of the first ones up in my studio when I had a booth in the closet. This was when he was with the Supreme Force, and he was going by Freddy Krueger.

BROTHA LIFE-”THE WRECKA”

BROTHA LIFE-”SHOW TAKER”