![]() ![]() Soon after, a man came to the Roadium Swap Meet asking who did the tape. “Steve would tell me later on that that tape actually went gold on the streets,” he shared. He really found his groove on a song called “I’m Not Your Puppet” on a mixtape named after Hi-C so that he could get his name bubbling. “He had a rap called ‘I’m Hard’ and I’ll be honest with you I didn’t think it was that hard,” he laughed.īut Hi-C won him over with a live show at Centennial High School in Compton, so Tony A worked with him, having him rap over all sorts of beats in order to find his personal style. At first, Tony A wasn’t impressed with Hi-C’s rap style. He met a then-17-year-old Hi-C at the Swap Meet through Yano. When N.W.A was gearing up to go on tour, Tony A needed to tap new talent to keep the mixtapes going. He kept the business running with the same crew and actually ended up making more tapes than Dr. ![]() “Hell yeah to have a guy like that pass the baton to me and say pretty much you wanna take over the mixtapes?” “I’ll be honest with you I was honored,” Tony A said. At one point, it got to be too much work for Dre to handle on his own, so he asked Tony A if he wanted to help out. Dre made several mixtapes that Yano sold, including 85 Live and 86 in the Mix. A record stand owned by Steve Yano served as the headquarters for the local music scene and Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and Sir Jinx at the Roadium Swap Meet. He met many of his collaborators, including Dr. “I didn’t know from ’87 to ’88 that my name would be out there in the street, that I would be considered ghetto fabulous, that people would tell me, ‘Man, you’re the guy on the mixtape?’ Even to this day, at 50 years old, I go to Arizona, I go to Albuquerque, I go to Colorado, go to New York and people say, ‘You’re that mixtape guy.’ And I’m still shocked, even to this day.” ![]() “I didn’t know it was going to be a business,” he shared. From there, he created a legacy that is acknowledged by hip-hop heads across the country. In an episode of Unique Access, Tony A tells Soren Baker how he fell in love with the artform of deejaying at the age of 11 after seeing his brother spin at a Crip club in Long Beach. DJ Tony A made his name by making mixtapes with the stars of the early West Coast rap game. ![]()
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