Royal Family

Paul Huston has always been something of a trailblazer. “I was born in Flushing, Queens,” he explained over the phone from his home in Amityville, New York. “I ended up in Amityville not long after, probably when I was three or four years old. That’s definitely where my roots are.” Though only an hour’s ride from the heart of the City, 1970’s Amityville was a far cry from the Big Apple-proper. “When I moved in, it wasn’t as populated as later on. On my block, we were one of four or five houses, and the rest was woods. We had traffic lights and paved streets—it was just that the developers hadn’t really gotten to it yet.” Unlike most of his peers, Paul spent a good deal of his adolescence in the City, often visiting his grandmother in Brownsville.

Hip-hop was a relatively new artform at that time, with the core of the culture still located in New York City. “Shuttling back and forth from Amityville and Brooklyn gave me a different exposure than most of the kids who lived [in Amityville]. I think when you went out west—meaning the Five Boroughs—they were more aggressive. They took it a step further. Making records was actually a reality for those guys. For us, in Long Island, it was like, being the best around your neighborhood.” But Paul felt deserving of a title with a little more authority. “My ego was, ‘I’m the best DJ that ever walked this earth.’ My whole thing was battling—under the leg, with the mouth...and scratchin’. I guess now you call it turntablism.”

All of Paul’s practice paid off the summer after his sophomore year of high school. “It was summer, I was on my Schwinn, I had a pair of green Nikes on, a green BVD, some Lees, and my name belt, riding my bike up and down the street. I had some friends who lived next door to me who were DJs, and they had to do a block party, and they were like, ‘Do you wanna come?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll come.’ It turned out there was other DJs, so I took it as a battle, ’cause that was my thing.” Unofficially, Paul won that battle. His award was the attention of an up-and-coming Brooklyn-based rap group. “That’s when Stet[sasonic] introduced themselves to me, like, ‘Yo! We got this group Stetsasonic! We just won the Mr. Magic Rap Attack! This is Wise, the Human Mix Machine! He just joined like a week ago! And we got this deal we’re working on with Sugarhill! We need a DJ! Yo! With your showmanship, we think you’re the one!’ I was like, ‘Really?’ And that’s how it all began.” Stetsasonic was a new act, and rap artists weren’t signing multimillion-dollar contracts back in those days, so Paul stayed in high school while he worked with the group.

The 1987 Amityville High yearbook looks like a press kit for a Saturday-morning teen sitcom. The student body is diverse, the pages are brimming with a wide variety of extracurricular-club photos, and the teachers appear excited about teaching. “It was such a highlight,” Paul reminisces. “I talk about high school more than I talk about my music career.” It was there that Paul first met Dave Jolicoeur, Kelvin Mercer (Pos), and Vincent Mason (Maseo). “I was Class of ’85, Dave was ’86, Pos was ’87, and Mase would be ’88.” Paul befriended Maseo first, despite their age difference. “He was just one of those kids that everybody seemed to know.”

Maseo and Paul first collaborated under their high-school music teacher, Everett Collins. “His claim to fame at the time was he played for the Isley Brothers. He was the drummer. He was starting a record label, and one of the artists that he started with his label was Gangster B, and he got Mase to DJ. Since I already knew Gangster B, [Everett] asked me to make a beat for him.” Paul made the beat, but decided it sounded too much like the Beastie Boys’ “Paul Revere.” “Me and Mase were sitting there like, ‘This is horrible. This is horrible!’ Not necessarily Gangster B’s rhyming, but just the concept of biting, ’cause biting was a crime back then. That’s when Mase said, ‘I got a group, we’re called De La Soul. I’m gonna come by your house today and bring you a tape. I want you to check it out,’ and that was a rough of ‘Plug Tunin’.'”

Paul didn’t see music as a feasible career at that point in his life, as much as he participated in it, enjoyed it, and excelled at it. “Making a living? The examples in my family: you might go to school, maybe take the Civil Service Test, you get a job, get an apartment. Everything was minimal for me. My expectations were minimal.” Even attending college would be a family first. “I remember the guys in Stet were telling me, ‘You gonna have to drop out! Stetsasonic about to blow up!’ I was like, ‘Yeah right. I’m staying my butt in school. This is the reality of it. You guys with the fantasy thing.’”

Paul studied Audio Engineering and Business Management at Five Towns in Seaford, New York. He hated it. “The realities of what I was living and dealing with at the time were far from what they were trying to teach in the school—especially the music business. I was like, ‘This doesn’t apply,’ and I would bump heads with the teachers. It was a horrible experience for me.” Five Towns proceeded to use Paul’s image in their recruitment brochures. “Kids would come up to me like, ‘Yo, I went to that school because I saw your picture.’ I was like, ‘I don’t endorse that school!’”

With Stetsasonic, Paul’s status as the youngest and least experienced member of the group often left him feeling stifled. “In De La Soul, I was heard because I was the guy who had already made a record. So they listened to me and they listened to everything I said in awe. That’s a good feeling.” It appeared Paul had found a partnership that would allow him to take more creative control. “There are a lot of dudes that make beats and they go, ‘Do the rhymes,’ and that’s it. Me, I was in the mix, like, ‘No, do it over.’ I used to give them homework sheets every session, like, ‘Next session we’re coming in on Tuesday. Mase, make sure you bring the records such and such. We need verses for this, this, and this.’”

With all his hard work and input, Paul did not consider himself a member of De La Soul until the group told him otherwise. “It was one of those touching moments, like, ‘Yeah, you’re one of us.’ ‘I am? I’m one of you? I guess I’m Plug 4—Mentor.’” Still, Paul remains humble about his role in De La Soul’s success. “You’ll never hear me in any interview or anything take credit for De La Soul. Even with them, I don’t sit and go, ‘Me...Me...Me.’” Instead, Paul credits a special chemistry. “I think it’s a God-given, weird situation. I couldn’t see any other producer with them at the time, or me producing any other group.”

Though Paul no longer works as closely with De La Soul, he speaks fondly of his time as Plug 4. “I think a big key for us recording then, that I truly miss, is we had so much fun. When you’re creative and you make those thoughts come out and onto wax, you just sit back, you laugh, and you’re like, ‘Yo, this is so much fun.’ There’s nothing but good thoughts about recording those first albums.”