Matt Dike and Delicious Vinyl Helped Launch Hip-Hop Hits
Tone Loc stood trapped inside a giant prop bottle labeled Funky Cold Medina on August 13, 1989, as 18,000 fans packed the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood, California, for a stop on the Club MTV Live Tour.
Out in the crowd, two observers passed a flask of Jack Daniel’s and watched the staging malfunction. “Oh my god, this is so Spinal Tap!” the tall blond attendee said, as Rolling Stone reported. His companion stared in disbelief, asking whether the spectacle was supposed to happen.
The answer was no. Two years prior, Matt Dike and Michael Ross operated out of a grungy Hollywood apartment with a $5,000 loan to launch Delicious Vinyl. They pressed swap-meet twelve-inch records of Anthony Smith, known as Tone Loc, and sold nearly ten million records worldwide within eighteen months.
Jonathan Gold reviewed the concert for the Los Angeles Times, praising the headliner. “In only a few months, the good-natured rapper seems to have made the transition to headlining a sold-out Forum with astonishing ease,” Gold wrote in the morning paper.
Gold noted the audio quality of the performance. “The beats, kind of distorted with the other Club MTV performers, sounded richer and funkier played really loud, as if they were supposed to be that way,” Gold wrote. He added praise for the artist’s vocal delivery: “And that voice—whiskey-warm, rasping, insinuating, funny—is the best instrument in rap, cutting effortlessly through cranked guitar chords and bongo beats and cowbells.”
The set continued with tracks including Funky Cold Medina, I Got It Goin’ On, and Cheeba. Dike and Ross watched from the stage near the turntable riser manned by DJ M.Walk.
Wild Thing had been recorded using patched-together equipment in Dike’s apartment with samples from a Van Halen single, accompanied by a video produced for $400.
“The fact that those indelible hits—as well as Beastie Boys’ classic album ‘Paul’s Boutique’—were created in Matt Dike’s dusty, second floor apartment using patched-together equipment makes this one of the great DIY success stories in music history,” Peter Relic told Rolling Stone.
Relic investigated the elusive producer for the book Bust a Move: Matt Dike, Delicious Vinyl, and the Hip-Hop Hits that First Conquered Pop, published by Citadel Press. “I had no idea how truly extraordinary this story would be going into it, never mind how the mystery of Matt Dike would drive my entire investigation,” Relic told Rolling Stone.
Dike later received opportunities to work with Aerosmith and Brian Wilson but instead stepped away from the industry. “All I had was his phone number, and the knowledge that Matt had not given an in-person interview to the press since 1990,” Relic told Rolling Stone.
“The moment was momentous. It couldn’t get any better,” the book excerpt says.
Then, sensing the nature of the occasion, Matt Dike turned his back, bent over, and mooned the crowd.
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