Summertime is prime vacation time. So as we continue on with that golden era mixtape ish, today we’ve got a 50 TAPES travel bonus for you. Yes, we’re taking you overseas with The Diaz Brothers—Doo Wop and Tony Touch.
Inside the pages of Do Remember!, Wop and Toca tell the story of how The Diaz Brothers formed and began putting out mixtapes, which happened after the two DJs traded competitive shots on their own tapes.
Eventually, the duo took their talents across the globe. And as Doo Wop explains in this unpublished clip from our interview with him, one of their international gigs was recorded in high-quality, thus spawning this Live In Japan tape. Here’s the breakdown:
Doo Wop: We got booked to do a show out there, just one party. And I remember they gave us $2,500 a piece to DJ the same night at Club Harlem, which was the biggest hip-hop club in Tokyo. The party was poppin’, it was packed, and right before we were about to get on the set, our translator said, “The promoter said they have a DAT machine up top where they can digitally record the whole sound. They have mics wired around so that we’ll even get the house when they react. They don’t want to tape it without our permission. Can they give us $1,500 a piece to tape it?” Not knowing that if they just asked if they could tape it we would’ve said “yeah” because we knew what we could do with the tape when we got back home. But they gave us $1,500 on top of that, so that was beautiful.
They made the tape, cut it up to the way they wanted, which was 45 minutes of Tony and 45 minutes of me. And a week later they sent us a copy, and we just ran with it out here. It was crazy because the crowd couldn’t speak to us in English, but they recited every word to every record that we played.
Speaking of The Diaz Brothers live, check out the video clip below from the 2000 Puerto Rican Day Parade in NYC…
Stay tuned for a new 50 TAPES post coming soon, celebrating the release of Do Remember! The Golden Era of NYC Hip-Hop Mixtapes, out now via Rizzoli. This is just some extra fire for y’all we had in the stash.
Doo Wop & Tony Touch - Live In Japan (SIDE A)
Doo Wop & Tony Touch - Live In Japan (SIDE B)