Side A
Side B

Kind of an odd classics mix, not one of his best, makes me wonder how happy he was working for Hot 97 (I’m not sure how many shows he did for them). I’d forgotten the date but the R&B records mentioned during the ad break were released in 1996; this was the point at which disco and house were about to almost completely disappear from NYC radio. Can’t recall hearing Tony playing “The Message” on any other mix show I’ve heard.

When I first moved to NYC in 92, radio was great: weekends would have Red Alert followed by Tony Humphries on Kiss, and the late John Robinson did a weekday midday mix on WBLS (which I would wake up to, during a long pathetically lazy period of unemployment that year). My favorite Tony tape is posted on the main site (side A, side B); although the file is titled differently, I’d scrawled, “Tony Humphries Pumping it to Fuckery” on the cassette case. Have very fond memories of listening to it on a Sunday back then, lived on West 93rd and we’d leave Sound Factory late Sunday morning wacked out of our gourds, have an amazing cab ride up the West Side Highway staring twinkly-eyed at our new home, then get back to the apartment and rock out to the tape, smoking joints and drinking tea until we were no longer capable of speech. Even the bit where the announcer comes on and says “it’s definitely snuggle weather, that’s for sure” ends up being part of the ride, and I just love the moment where he cuts out from “If I can’t have you” (which, I found out much later, is Kim Wilde) into this amazing long dubby track (if any passers by happen to know the name of it, please post it!). His mix of First Choice’s Pressure Point also makes an appearance, along with many other great tracks (Beats International - Change Your Mind, Ronny Jordan - So What, Sure is Pure - Is this Love Really Real? Eve Gallagher - Love is a Master of Disguise).

Finn Johannsen’s blog has an interesting recent interview with Tony Humphries (”house music genres have broken in so many fragments it looks like a subway map”).

My favorite online record store: http://www.downtown304.com/index.cfm

Co-owned by Judy Russell, who I’ll always be grateful to for releasing some tracks I did on NuGroove back in 92 (I only feel bad that they weren’t very good and probably sold about ten copies). I was paid 500 bucks upfront, which meant a lot at the time.

Good to hear (from a post on DHP by Shawn Christopher) that Charlie Grappone from the legendary and lamented Vinylmania store is now selling records at Downtown 304 on Wednesdays:

Vinylmania @ Downtown every Wedneseday 3 til 9 with Charlie Grappone. All the latest and greatest.

304 Hudson Street NYC
5th Floor

Realized a little while ago that one of the Sound Factory tapes on deephousepage dated 93 and credited to Frankie Knuckles was actually Junior Vasquez (someone sent me the full tape on two CDs, labeled as Junior). It has a lot of his signature tracks from back then, including this crazy percussion workout he used to play. The tape is posted on the main site (side A, side B). Occurred to me the other day that maybe there are other mislabeled Factory tapes on DHP and found one more from 93, this time credited to David Morales.

http://www.deephousepage.com/media/dave2.ram

Again, sounds to me like this is Junior, Juliet Roberts “Caught in the Middle” was a huge favorite back then and he would torture us with that heartbeat breakdown. I’m guessing that maybe the tapes were passed on to DHP labeled as Sound Factory and someone took a guess as to who the DJ was. May be wrong, but it’s a nice selection of tracks from the era, anyway. Second track is The Adventures of Daniel Lite - I Want Your Love (Clonk Dub), also a big Factory track at the time.