The B Side: How a Record Store Hunt Changed Everything

There are moments that split your life into before and after. For me, one of them happened in a record store on Blanding Boulevard.

But let me back up.

It started in a classroom. A friend named Benjamin brought in a copy of Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force for show and tell. He was doing this move, a kind of pop and lock that none of us had really seen up close before. The precursor to breakdancing. And that song was playing.

I was already familiar with Scorpio by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I loved that record for reasons I could not fully articulate at the time. There was a voice on it that sounded like a robot singing and I was completely obsessed with it. I did not know the word vocoder yet. I just knew that sound made something happen in my chest.

Planet Rock did the same thing but bigger. Harder. More futuristic. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard and everything I had been waiting for at the same time.

I had to have it.

The Hunt

My mom was that kind of parent. The kind who understood that when her kid was passionate about something it was worth taking seriously. So she gave up an entire Saturday and we drove all over Jacksonville hunting for that record.

This was not a quick search. We hit record stores across the city and out toward Jacksonville Beach. Nobody had it. We kept moving, kept asking, and nobody could help us. We finally ended up on the west side of town at a little place called the Cedar Hill Shopping Center on Blanding Boulevard. There was a record store there and when I explained what I was looking for, the woman working understood exactly what I meant. She disappeared into the back and came out with a 12 inch.

She put it on over the in-house speakers.

It was Planet Rock. Definitely Planet Rock. But it had all these singers and rappers on it and it sounded different from what Benjamin had been playing in class. I kept telling her I did not recognize all of this, that this was not quite it. She was confused but she was thorough. When I kept insisting something was off she looked at me, flipped the record over, and dropped the needle on the other side.

That was the moment I learned what a B side was.

The instrumental version of Planet Rock came through those speakers and I lost it. That was it. That was the song. My mom bought it and we drove home and I played it until I had memorized every single sound on that record.

What I Did Not Know

I had no idea what I was holding. I did not know about Tommy Boy Records. I did not know about Arthur Baker or how that record was made or what it would eventually mean to music history. I just knew I loved it.

What I did not realize until much later was that Planet Rock was built on a synthesizer and a drum machine. No live band. No samples in the traditional sense. Just technology arranged by people who understood that machines could make you feel something if you knew how to talk to them.

That idea never left me.

The Domino Effect

Once I had Planet Rock I started finding everything connected to it. The Jonzun Crew. Newcleus. Hashim. Pack Jam. Space is the Place. This whole universe of music that lived at the intersection of Hip-Hop and electronic sound.

My mom never complained about any of it. She had grown up on the piano and passed that love of music to me without ever trying to control what form it took. She would listen to Queen and Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rolling Stones and then sit with me while I played electro records and just appreciate that her kid had found something that lit him up.

That is a gift I did not fully understand until I was older.

Why It Matters

Every producer has a moment when they stop being a passive listener and become someone who needs to understand how the music is made. Planet Rock was that moment for me. The B side of a 12 inch in a record store at the Cedar Hill Shopping Center on Blanding Boulevard.

Arthur Baker and Tommy Boy had no idea they were handing a blueprint to a kid in Jacksonville, Florida who would spend the next several decades trying to build something worthy of that first feeling.

I am still trying.

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