_When I worked the front desk of Warp Records’ office in London, I was invited by Tom Brown, boss of hip-hop spin-off label Lex Records, to help promote his most ambitious producer Danger Mouse’s debut album. DM’s production on Ghetto Pop Life pulled “lost” Brooklyn rapper Jemini the Gifted One from obscurity and landed him onto radio playlists. A year later, I took a trip to Paris, and ended up on a hip-hop search mission of my own.

This was not a glamorous trip. My accommodation turned out to be a couch at the apartment of an eccentric stoner, alongside some graffiti-writer friends. The only other furniture was a gym workout bench as the centerpiece of the living room and a mini-hifi wedged into the fireplace, surrounded by stacks of sticky and stained CDs. As I reminisced about my record label days spent scouring postal bags full of bad demo submissions, we worked our way through this unlucky dip, most of which had been left by previous visitors. We laughed at bad French language hip-hop, frisbeeing many of the worst CDs across the room, before finally stumbling across an anomaly: a heavily scratched CD-R with the words DJ SPANISH FLY printed on the front in Impact font. No sleeve, no track list. Even our host had no idea how it had ended up in his apartment. We were immediately blown away. It sounded like something from a futuristic rap cargo cult. The ultra-confident, minimal production was obfuscated by tape-hiss and reminded me more of German electronic artist Skanfrom than any underground hip-hop production doing the rounds at that time. It immediately became the soundtrack of our trip.

I made it my mission to track down the CD’s creator once I returned to London. With very little to go on, I spent several late nights making stilted phone calls to confused Hispanic reggaeton producers who shared his name. Days later and deep in the search results, I finally found a Spanish Fly mentioned on a radio station’s website and made a call to Memphis in my posh-ish English accent, which must have sounded like a prank.

It has been two decades since that phone call, and I am glad to once again be in conversation with one of my favorite searches as we look through photos from his rise.

DJ Spanish Fly: I made my first tracks like “Gangsta Walk,” “Smokin’ Onion,” and “Rollin’ in my Cadillac” with very little equipment. I couldn’t afford a drum machine and it was years before digital samplers became available, so I had to get hands-on and creative to work around the technical limitations. I would dig through vinyl records to find a nice instrumental moment in a song, just a kick, snare, and hi-hat, nothing else. I’d then record this onto a metal tape cassette, quickly pressing pause and resetting the vinyl to record the same moment again, over and over, obsessively, hundreds of times until those few seconds of music became five minutes of instrumental beat. I’d play this through a mixer, adding additional parts—bassline, Juno synth, scratches, and my raps—on top, live, recorded back and forth between another cassette deck until I finally had a master copy.

My career started at Bob Newman’s Americana Country Club—a country music and disco venue for predominantly white audiences. As that genre’s popularity was waning, the club changed ownership and style, becoming Club No Name—playing disco and r&b, catering to Black people for the first time. Club No Name decided to host and sponsor a hip-hop contest, copying a format from NYC, made famous through popular movies like Breakin’ and Krush Groove. I entered and won in rapping and scratch DJing. There was a demand for more, and I was the only one doing what they’d only seen on TV and in magazines. I caught everyone’s attention. Their audiences wanted more, so the club booked me to DJ.

I was sixteen years old, being introduced to the job by their regular DJ, Sundown Kid; a really kind guy, he’d worked at a gospel radio station in Chicago before he came to Memphis. As the new kid, I really didn’t want to step on his toes, so I made sure to just play whatever he wasn’t playing. And he definitely sure as hell wasn’t playing any street rap shit. The crowd was into it. This was nothing like anything they’d heard before. Disco meant Shannon, the Bar-Kays, Egyptian Lover…and I just swept in with all this hardcore gangster rap. People went wild. Soon Sundown Kid was out, the venue was renamed to Club Expo, and I became the resident DJ. It was the beginning of a new era.

Club Expo was basically a concert hall with state-of-the-art equipment—a massive sound system, gigantic video screens where you could see yourself dancing, the latest lighting (alongside the giant disco ball left over from the old days). It was the only place for about 400 miles at this scale—a dance floor for 1,000 people. The only other spots that were even vaguely similar were in NYC and LA. Without that venue, the hip-hop scene wouldn’t have taken off in Memphis. It was a focal point. Our playground and I could play what I wanted.

Major artists from Salt-N-Pepa and Fat Boys to N.W.A and Ice-T would perform in Memphis on their U.S. tours and we’d always host their afterparty at Club Expo. One time Dr. Dre, LL Cool J, and the D.O.C. were all on the lineup for a big show at a venue called the Colosseum. They came to the club and really vibed. We even filmed LL Cool J and D.O.C. doing the “Gangsta Walk” dance, and it ended up in our club’s first local TV commercials.

To paraphrase N.W.A, I was, in those days, that teenager with “a little bit of gold and a pager.” I always had my beeper switched on as I was also wrapped up in some street shit alongside the DJing. Consequently, I had plenty of cash and used to take a Chevrolet Astro van on trips outta town with my whole crew. I couldn’t go too far, as I had to be back in the club DJing every week, but we’d go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. The others would go on up to NYC to buy jewelry—like that gold chain I’m wearing in the photos—and wherever we went, we’d leave some of my cassette tapes behind to spread the word.

I was never a “lost” hip-hop artist. I just stayed locally focused to create a vibe and build a scene to which I dedicated decades of my life, and I’m proud that the style I forged in Memphis back in 1986 is now the predominant sound of hip-hop worldwide today.

Back home, the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville has opened a music exhibit, including some of my old recording equipment and vintage clothing. I still DJ on Hot 107.1, but just for special old school “back-in-the-day mixes” and holiday takeovers, so I have more time to think beyond Memphis. I’ve got a global show on NTS Radio that really opened my mind to the scale of global enthusiasm and interest in what we’re doing in Memphis.

I still get shout-outs on new artists’ records for building the foundations of this sound, and my catalogue continues to get sampled today. Most recently really young producers of a new genre called phonk have looped up snippets of my first tracks. Many are the same age I was when I got started, and it’s great to hear they’re pushing the sound forward into new musical territories, getting plays, and getting paid.

DJ Spanish Fly’s previously unreleased 2024 Remake of “Cement Shoes” is Track 4 on the Memphis Music Issue LP. Click here for full song credits and liner notes.