The Unreleased Dust Brothers Album
The Dust Brothers are John King and Michael “Mike” Simpson, two California-based producers who initially made their name with the label Delicious Vinyl.
The duo had first got together hosting a radio show called The Big Beat Showcase in 1985 at Claremont Colleges, and were creating their own megamixes where they took instrumentals from different songs and combined them using a 4-track recorder. After John King bought an 8-track recorder they began making even more advanced mixes, and were soon introduced to Tone Loc, a Californian rapper who had just released his 7" Cheeba Cheeba on a new record label called Delicious Vinyl. Loc liked the instrumentals the duo had created for their radio show and said he’d like to rap over them.
After being introduced to Delicious Vinyl founders Matt Dyke and Mike Ross, The Dust Brothers were given free use of the labels studio and began to produce records for Tone Loc, Young MC, and Deff Jeff into the late 1980s. Spending every day in the studio, The Dust Brothers were constantly making new music and began to create their own album, as Mike Simpson later explained.
“We would create these tracks and artists from Delicious Vinyl would take a crack at laying rap vocals over them. Whoever did the best rap would get to use the track on their album. And in the process of doing this, there were several tracks that had too much going on and didn’t seem to work for any of the Delicious Vinyl artists. Whenever we came across one of those tracks, we would set it aside and earmark it for the Dust Brothers album.”
As they worked on their own album, one day the Beastie Boys visited the studio and were impressed with what they heard, and what would have been a Dust Brothers album to be released in 1987, became the Beastie Boys’ album Paul’s Boutique.
Released in 1989, this sample-heavy album became infamous for getting hardly any promotion by the Beastie Boys’ record label, but both John King and Mike Simpson have said this was what the Beastie Boys wanted. According to them, the Beastie Boys didn’t want any hit songs or promotion, and wanted it to be an album discovered through word of mouth and crate digging. Although Paul’s Boutique did eventually find its audience, The Dust Brothers were disappointed it wasn’t the immediate hit they thought it should have been.
Fast forward to 1996 and The Dust Brothers had produced another sample-heavy album with the release of Beck’s Odelay. This album was well reviewed and well promoted, pushing it high into the charts around the world, and earning its producers the acclaim they deserved.
As The Dust Brothers production skills became increasingly in-demand, rumours began circulating about a possible album of their own, and that the duo had signed with Mo’ Wax Records to release it. But in 1996 they told The Fly otherwise:
“We haven’t signed with Mo’ Wax, but we have every intention to. We like complete creative freedom and that’s what James [Lavelle at Mo’ Wax] is all about. As for the album, I guess we’ll know when we’re done with it.”
Spin wrote in November 1996, about the planned Dust Brothers album and said to expect “Beck, the Beasties, Lou Barlow, and other cameos”. Fans were even given a taste of what to expect when Mo’ Wax featured two Dust Brothers songs on the compilations Headz 2A and 2B, released at the end of that year. The songs Searchin’ and The Groomsman were instrumental hip hop, and had eager fans looking forward to an album even more.
Part of the problem with getting the album finished was The Dust Brothers were busy with other projects like producing the band Sukia and starting their own label Nickelbag Records. Sukia’s debut album Contacto Espacial Con El Tercer Sexo became the first release on the new label in 1996, and was later released on Mo’ Wax in 1997.
The Dust Brothers were also busy remixing for friends like Money Mark, with their remixes of his singles Cry and Maybe I’m Dead released on Mo’ Wax. They were also recording with Mark in the studio, as they explained in Straight No Chaser magazine #35 in 1996:
The coolest thing is like how we work with Mark Nishita (Money Mark). He’ll come in and play keyboards for about ten minutes over a track we’ve done and then we’ll start throwing away everything that isn’t absolutely great. So from that ten min-utes, we can get a song-length track of really incredible music.
Invariably it’s the accidents that are the coolest stuff and the technology just helps us to capture that. Something that you could never play again, even if you wanted to. That sounds so funky..
The Dust Brothers further teased fans by announcing the title of their unreleased album, Marshall High, with artwork included on their website alongside the claim that the album would be released sometime in 1997.
In 1998 their website was updated slightly, altering the due to date to that year, and then later announced an album called “Dust Brothers Greatest Hits” was coming first. It was described as follows:
An album as sexy as a stone cold fox sipping a Colt 45 at an Atwater bus stop. An album as long-awaited as the second coming of Christ on a bicycle. A family album for all ages. A sonic monument to the iron will of two regular guys — John and Mike — struggling to make sense of a dust-eat-dust world.
This was scheduled for release on their label Nickelabag in Summer 1998, with the Marshall High album to follow in Spring 1999. Instead, in 1999 The Dust Brothers released their soundtrack to the movie Fight Club. The Greatest Hits album was initially pushed back to Fall 2000, but was never released.
Perhaps the closest thing to a Dust Brothers album was a compilation titled The Dusted Years (The Complete Dust Brothers) released in 2003 by Pinto Recordings, the record label run by Money Mark. That album compiled several remixes from The Dust Brothers, and one song from Fight Club.
The Dust Brothers have been producing separately the last few years, and the likelihood of Marshall High or The Dust Brothers Greatest Hit ever releasing seems low. For anyone wondering what happened to all of those songs meant for these albums, in 2005 John King had this to say:
“We’ve been working on a Dust Brothers album since 1987, but songs continually get given to artists we work with. And now we’re both so busy with things we’re working on, and we both have families, and there’s life, that it’s hard to get round to doing your own thing…”
